A Cooler Look at LBJ
GRAFF, HENRY F.
A Cooler Look at LBJ Lone Star Rising: Lyndon Johnson and His Times, 1908-1960 By Robert Dallek Oxford. 721 pp. $30.00. The Triumph and Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson: The White House...
...Johnson had a laundry list of socioeconomic goals for a better America, and he constantly feared running out of programs to propose...
...In part the fading is a function of time's passage after all...
...Johnson preferred scotch, and he normally matched Dirksen drink for drink...
...Nevertheless, Johnson left especially enduring fingerprints on the nation...
...author, "The Tuesday Cabinet: Deliberation and Decision on Peace and War under Lyndon B. Johnson" Lyndon B. Johnson's era in the White House is hardly ancient history, but the memory of it is dimming fast...
...It was also his phenomenal hard work and readiness to combine the new with the old, the reliance on modern technology to communicate with traditional smalltown Texans about their current concerns...
...Everyone who seeks to understand the way a single Presidency set the stage for the distinctiveness of the last two decades will await that book with lively anticipation...
...The very two-sidedness of Johnson's service in the White House will forever make him a lodestone for historians...
...Dirksen enjoyed drinking Jack Daniel's bourbon, and the President would see that his glass was promptly refilled...
...Clearly," he said, "we tried to do too much...
...The author's details are graphic, intimate, sometimes scatological...
...The reader is carried along so smoothly from Johnson's beginnings in the Pedernales Valley to his mastery of the Senate on the eve of the Vice Presidency, that despite its length the book is not encumbering...
...Indeed, the angularities of his personality were an ever present handicap in the pursuit of his ends, domestic no less than foreign...
...A less than saintly manner and method, alas, may be the sine qua non of successful democratic leadership today, whether the public is exalted by that fact or not...
...To me, the President spoke of "the cost of my program toll states and 22 men...
...Nothing that the documentary and manuscript record of the Johnson Administrations contains can substitute for having been there and experienced the ways of politics at the feet of this master...
...Califano surely had Goldman's work in mind when he added the word "Triumph" to his own book's title...
...Prominent figures are constantly dropping out and becoming names without faces, as every teacher of history knows...
...To many of these critics he was a usurper, somehow wrongfully sitting in John F. Kennedy's seat...
...Almost forgotten in the rush to accept Caro's interpretation is Jack Valenti's warm portrait, tellingly entitled A Very Human President, published in 1975...
...And the dismaying course of the Vietnam War exacerbated his difficulties, which included especially his strange uncomfortableness in addressing the people on television...
...Joseph Califano's The Triumph and Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson is a personal report, maybe the best that has appeared to date, by an LBJ staff member...
...But the President's drinks had only half an ounce of liquor in them...
...We will never know the real Lyndon Johnson...
...the faithful New Frontiersmen who had quickly made Robert F. Kennedy their substitute liege lord and dreamed of a comeback to power...
...Insiders knew that during the 1968 campaign he jealously, and small-mindedly, refused to give his "idea folder" to Hubert H. Humphrey, his Vice President and the Democratic candidate hoping to succeed him...
...This Johnson is so unflattering (Caro has said he will be more complimentary in volume three) that the reader wonders how an author could stay married year after year to such an obnoxious subject...
...Anyone who wishes to feel what it was really like to be in the trenches with Johnson must read his account...
...We see that a modern political genius can be wily, crusty, feisty, and at the same time imbued with a belief that he could do good in the world with the power he would attain...
...As for the failed struggle in Vietnam, he preferred not to talk about it: The subject was obviously too painful...
...In consequence, Johnson's Presidency became disfigured and distorted, and his blemishes turned into a surrogate for the whole man...
...like a black sheep member of the family...
...Robert Dallek's Lone Star Rising takes Johnson to 1960...
...Rather, it is a triumph of the historical art, for Dallek has dug deeply in the archives and manuscript collections and yet avoids giving us the sense that he has felt obliged to show all his note cards...
...The Johnson that Dallek constructs is no "model American...
...In a word, we relive at Dallek's hands the making of Senator Johnson...
...whatever the course the crusade for civil rights takes in the future, its foundation was laid during LBJ's day...
...Reviewed by Henry F. Graff Senior Fellow, Freedom Forum Media Studies Center, Columbia University...
...That four ex-Presidents are now still alive, and Presidential libraries are dotting the landscape from one end of the country to the other, is somehow extinguishing the uniqueness of individual White House occupants Americans were once accustomed to...
...Now we have two new examinations of the Texan President that deserve a high place in the mounting commentary on him...
...Biographers of Johnson, uniquely among those who write lives of the Chief Executives, have to wrestle with the fact that his was a bifurcated Presidency...
...Califano teaches us afresh that his calculating man always knew the price he was paying for his political boldness...
...Although he was no more complex than most human beings, his unfamiliar style as a "cowboy President" who aimed to "out-Roosevelt Roosevelt" has made him more inexplicable than most of his predecessors...
...as well as simply learn from them...
...Califano, whose 1975 book, A Presidential Nation, foreshadowed this knowing study of Johnson-at-work, was LBJ's top domestic affairs assistant for four years...
...Moreover, even though Presidents are special, the roster of them is long...
...Whatever America does hereafter in the management of the homeless and the indigent will stand on the shoulders of LBJ's War on Poverty...
...The Triumph and Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson: The White House Years By Joseph A. Califano Jr...
...When the calamity of Vietnam began to dominate the public mind, the onus for the debacle fell on LBJ, who was determined not to be the first Commander in Chief to lose a war...
...however the enterprise to restore the natural environment to a semblance of health proceeds, the Johnson Administration will be remembered as its starting point...
...while the Kennedy supporters averred that JFK had plans to pull out of the quagmire...
...One evening in the last few weeks of his Administration, I flew with him on Air Force One and we talked about what he had done and what he had left undone...
...Yet his reach to the stars, his proposals, were a jumble instead of a coherent plan for a better world, and he could see as well as his fellow Americans that the results of some of his most cherished undertakings were, at best, mixed...
...398 pp...
...Furthermore, his characterological imperfections came to the fore when he grew increasingly beleaguered and baffled by the rising tide of opposition to his war...
...Reading Dallek and then Califano, it is clear that more than a title is involved here: The historical vindication that Lyndon Johnson did not live long enough to witness and enjoy is under way at last...
...How, with this preparation, Johnson conducted himself in the Kennedy Administration and then on his own will be the focus of Robert Dallek's second volume...
...On the contrary, in the boy Lyndon we see in ovo the traits that, in exaggerated form, became his signature as President: his inexhaustible energy, his need to be Number One, and his ability to use cynically the people around him...
...Dallek writes, forinstance, that in his 1948 Senate race Johnson conducted what has been called the "first modern mass media campaign...
...To offer a single example, here is Johnson laboring with unbounded passion to corral, almost one by one, the required votes in the Senate for civil rights legislation: "LBJ would sit for hours in the evening with his friend, Senate Minority Leader [Everett McKinley] Dirksen, trading political tall tales and seeking the Illinois Republican's support...
...They bring the Johnson manner alive and glowing...
...He triumphed in his major endeavors at home and failed in his endless war abroad...
...The night after the Civil Rights Bill became law in 1964, Johnson told young Bill Moyers, his Press Secretary, "I think we delivered the South to the Republican Party for your lifetime and mine...
...What Dallek has givenus is the evidence in the life of one man who entered the Presidency knowing more about the intricacies of government than any other Chief Executive...
...thestates and Senators, of course, ofthe old Confederacy...
...Dallek, a professor of history at the University of California at Los Angeles, writes with a golden pen...
...They will all agree, though, that there are a few certainties in his record...
...Millions of Americans probably believed Johnson was the first President in the century who did not speak with an accent, but other millions regarded him as an alien in the Oval Office...
...25.00...
...Simon and Schuster...
...No one can quite imitate the Johnson style, but nobody who loves our system of government should fail to turn to Califano for instruction and inspiration...
...Johnson himself felt he was always under the hostile scrutiny of the "government in exile...
...presumably, lest Humphrey look as clever and creative as the President himself...
...He was the last President whose primary interest was domestic affairs...
...In the two published installments of the multivolume biography Robert Caro has been working on for many y ears, the portrait limned thus far is of a man dominated from an early age by a lust for power that sometimes seemed uncontrollable...
...Dirksen's had an ounce-and-a-half...
...But it wasn't radio and advertising, a helicopter and opinion polling alone that made Johnson effective...
...Years ago Eric Goldman, the Princeton historian who served briefly as Johnson's intellectual-in-residence, wrote a harsh and sour book he called The Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson...
...But Johnson was an innovator, too...
...If his reputation once put him near the bottom of Presidents in the public estimation, it appears that a cooler appraisal from a longer perspective is about to do him the justice he earned and deserves and to brighten the remembrance of his contributions...
...and, yes, brilliance...
Vol. 74 • December 1991 • No. 14
