A Texas-Sized Tragedy

...But Bernstein misses a shining opportunity to comment on the seamless web of history...

...Meanwhile, he was caught in its toils, and kept there in part by military advisers who believed that a decade earlier in Korea they had learned enough about winning a war in Asia to guarantee victory this time...

...This homespun wisdom to a large extent shaped the vision of the Great Society and, in the end, the disaster of Vietnam...

...McNamara "hid and falsified the costs [of the war] from the Council of Economic Advisers, the Treasury, the Congress, and the public...

...It could just as reasonably be assumed that the Chief Executive under whom the Bay of Pigs invasion was planned, and the one under whom it was executed, would not have turned tail and run from Vietnam...

...LBJ himself believed the agenda of New Deal liberalism was unfinished in the absence of civil rights for blacks, and felt that he, a Southerner, was destined to complete it...

...Johnson simply ignored the clear warnings that the country could not have both guns and butter...

...He ordered the Defense Department controller...

...There is, after all, a remarkable continuity in the way the Marshall Plan, while allowing Europeans to refit and reclothe themselves, raised the price of cotton and enabled planters in the American South to afford mechanical cotton-pickers...

...Despite his denouncing the "devil theory of history," Bernstein does hold the President and his Secretary of Defense responsible for a disastrous 17-year rise in prices...

...Johnson's Great Society was built on the breakthrough in civil rights, and on the premise that American prosperity could be converted—both economically and socially—into American generosity...

...Nothing less than his own hubris following his overwhelming defeat of Barry Goldwater in the 1964 election made LBJ decide he could bring down North Vietnam ("a piss-ant sixth-rate" country) and simultaneously wipe out poverty...

...Americans could now show the way to a more loving society...

...Born in the hardscrabble hill country of Texas' Pedernales Valley, he grew up considering himself a deprived youngster...

...Indeed, when LBJ returned to Texas in 1969 after five years in office, most of what was contained in the roughly 2,500 five-drawer filing cabinets he took with him had already consumed the energy of an army of historians...

...Bernstein's description of how Johnson, champing at the bit in what he regarded as the purgatory of the Vice Presidency, was set free by the awful event in Dallas on November 22, 1963, is scintillating...

...As he pressed his programs forward, LBJ did not recognize that Amer-icans were suffering a kind of mental overload, and would not have appreciated the significance of his private boast that he had "out-Roosevelted Roosevelt...

...LBJ was bent on wiping out poverty in his time, and his Herculean labors toward that end are unmatched in Presidential annals...

...Of course, McNamara did not have a clue to whether the war was going to get larger or smaller, let alone what the eventual cost would be...

...No previous Chief Executive had his ambitions frustrated so fully...

...He pursued a policy of containment that had been the standard Cold War modus operandi for almost a generation...

...Do you know what it means to be black...

...Johnson's uncannily sensitive antennae, however, somehow did not reveal to him that the wider American public was no longer in a mood to salute such efforts: The people's general well-being had dulled the sense of urgency to do for others that had driven the New Deal and become the essence of Democratic Party allegiance...

...Bernstein's central point is bluntly announced in his title: Although the economy was booming and the nation could afford the entitlements Johnson sanctioned and Congress authorized, the margin was thin, particularly following the tax cut mandated by the Revenue Act of 1964...

...The rising star became a Congressman in 1936, a Senator in 1948 and Majority Leader in 1955: The White House alone remained to be conquered...

...A study of the imbalance in our society between the policy makers and the policy critics would be a valuable companion to Bernstein's on the whole resplendent book...

...It affected not only the military and civilian beltway savants, but also the assertive editorial writers around the country who initially backed the Tonkin Gulf resolution that Johnson would repeatedly hold up to justify his Vietnam strategy...

...Sinking ever-deeper into the morass, LBJ was unable to extract himself or the nation, for political reasons and for reasons well-rooted in American traditions—among them, that this country never loses a war, that the President's word is his bond, and that for the U.S...

...It began the budgeting dilemmas that to this moment roil the Federal government, and will do so for the foreseeable future...

...editor, "The Presidents: A Reference Histoiy "; author, "Tlie Tuesday Cabinet: Deliberation and Decision on Peace and War under Lyndon B. Johnson " WHY A NEW account of Lyndon B. Johnson's Presidency...

...In a superb spinning together of observations by people at the highest level in Johnson's Administration, he documents his conclusion that, "as with Pericles at Athens," the President's downfall had all the elements of a Greek tragedy...

...he sometimes screamed at resistant politicians...

...World War II had fixed attention on the evils of racism as manifested in Nazism and Fascism...

...The ensuing spiral of inflation nevertheless wounded the economy hideously and to the quick...

...Armed Forces "the impossible only takes a little longer...

...There was never an overall strategy for victory, and if there was "light at the end of the tunnel," no one ever admitted that the tunnel had no end...

...Bernstein is splendid in outlining the elements of the War on Poverty...

...Conditioned by the Munich syndrome (which taught that any yielding to dictators is akin to the appeasement of Hitler) and ever mindful of the "loss of China"(whose lesson was that the United States must never again yield a foot of territory to the Communists), Johnson was resolved to protect South Vietnam...

...LBJ's further orientation came in the Age of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whom he worshiped...

...And the final price paid for the foreign policy miscalculation was higher than could be imagined by contemporaries who witnessed the loss of confidence in Washington and the disruptions of public order by antiwar protesters: By 1966 the country was launched into what Bernstein calls the "Great Inflation...

...During the last month of his Presidency, he told me sadly that what he accomplished had been at the cost of 22 men—his old Senate colleagues from the 11 states of the former Confederacy...

...The failure to "nail the coonskin to the wall" (Johnson's phrase for winning), tore up the President physically and emotionally before it similarly lacerated the American people...

...The word of the United States, given in a supposed commitment when the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization was established, would against all odds be upheld and validated...

...Johnson read no history, but like others he was trapped by it...

...Yet the blacks, long the victims of white society, were at last visible to people who might help: social workers, intellectuals, educators, politicians seeking new constituents, and most important of all, the President...

...Like all influential leaders, Johnson rode the incoming tide of his day once in the Oval Office...

...The editors who had rallied public support for the Vietnam adventure by applauding Johnson's moves, in contrast, changed sides with perfect insouciance and unabashed impunity...

...Irving Bernstein, a professor emeritus of political science at the University of California at Los Angeles, begins his book with the assassination of John F. Kennedy...

...to assume that the war would end on June 30,1967...

...He was never as impoverished as he later liked to say he was, but he resented and envied the newly-rich moguls of the cattle ranches and oil fields around him...

...The "facts" have long been known...

...It was his fate that on his watch it lost first its effectiveness and then its popular appeal...

...If there had been no Vietnam War, Bernstein says, "The probability is that the economy would have continued to expand, but that inflation would have set in...

...Immense social and political forces were at work in the country for everyone to see...

...Every President is important in the continuum of history...

...Bernstein's chapter on Johnson's suppressing the grave misgivings he had from the very outset, and permitting the U. S. to slip into the Vietnam quagmire, is as vivid a telling of the story as has yet appeared...

...The inspiration to climb the ladder of power and, eventually, make those reviled tycoons his friends and even his servitors, was instilled by his doting parents...

...There was, in short, plenty of hubris to go around...

...involvement there...

...No brief review can do justice to the elegance of Bernstein's presentation...

...But Johnson is special because his dreams for America were Texas-sized, and were matched by the Texas-sized sinkhole into which his Presidency collapsed...

...the documentation is full...

...Johnson's ability to corral and retain the loyalty of his principal advisers—Dean Rusk, Robert S. McNamara, McGeorge Bundy and General Earle Wheeler, all holdovers from the Kennedy Administration—is testimony to his forcefulness and uncommon ability to intimidate aides, as well as to their own misuse of history and misreading of events...

...That would have meant abandonment of the monument Johnson had designed for himself: the Great Society...

...Since aid to ravaged nations abroad had been abundant, why not extend it to the needy at home...

...The author assumes that Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and Kennedy, who sent the first "advisers" to Vietnam, would not have expanded U.S...

...From his father, a one-time state legislator, he acquired an unbounded zest for politics?in particular, a fascination with its intrigues and a knowledge of how to deal with disappointments...

...That is his prerogative...

...Even now, few Americans are aware of the anguish the conflict created in LBJ's mind...

...He earned their respect, but to his undying dismay their affection eluded him...

...Signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, he declared, "Let us close the springs of racial poison...

...Still, it is too late to speculate, as Bernstein does, whether wiser heads would have produced a better national agenda than Johnson's in the 1960s...

...In addition, the author's recital of how the Great Society was conceived in the White House pool by Johnson and his then young aides Richard N. Goodwin and Bill Moyers, as they swam together in the buff, will arouse admiration for the simplicity with which public policy can be made?especially when the President has a compliant Congress...

...After the war got under way inflation was no longer probable, it was inevitable...

...He arrived in Washington in 1932, at age 23, to work as secretary to Representative Richard M. Kleberg...

...His mother taught him that big things can be achieved only if one views every obstacle as an alluring challenge to be met with determination and focused energy...

...He was a faithful lackey of the President, who was committed to fight a less than all-out war because full-scale mobilization would require higher taxes and a root-and-branch revamping of the economy...

...Rural poverty was thus transformed into urban poverty...

...Presidents are molded in their youth, though, and Johnson was fully formed when he entered the White House...

...In 1935 FDR appointed him Texas director of the National Youth Administration...

...The simple answer is that Johnson's gargantuan personality, and the massive grip he had on his era, continue to profoundly influence the course of the nation...

...That mechanization, in turn, forced the black field hands off the land and pushed them quickly on a trek northward into the desolate ghettos of the major cities...

...To boot, they were tantalized by the opportunity to show the world that the United States could do in Indochina what the French had not been able to bring off...