Fundamental Questions Remain
GRAFF, HENRY F.
Fundamental Questions Remain Taking Charge: The Johnson White House Tapes, 1963-1964 Edited by Michael R. Beschloss Simon and Schuster. 592 pp. $30.00. The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White...
...the recommendations to the President ultimately confusing...
...His hope of making sense of the assassination is complicated, as Beschloss points out in a valuable running commentary, by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover's zeal to seem efficient in getting to the bottom of things...
...The President, seemingly unaffected by the chatter, decides almost casually: "We don't declare war...
...35.00...
...They're tempted by neutralization in Vietnam, which doesn't make any sense at this time...
...It makes Walter Lippmann look like a warmonger...
...Here is a dismaying and offensive slip of National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy's tongue while talking with the President: Johnson: I'm meeting with the New York Times...
...If this letter is produced, says LBJ, he will arrange for the supplicants to "sit down with the Controller of the Currency and we '11 override the whole goddamned outfit [presumably the Justice Department's Antitrust Division...
...The plainly seatof-the-pants answer comes without apparent hesitation: "Very hard to estimate, Bobby...
...At times Johnson seems to be speaking without any consciousness of the taping machine whirring away...
...They end their book with a splendid account of both the denouement and of what transpired inside the Kremlin as the crisis deepened...
...The Kennedy Tapes, dealing with a specific situation, are of course different in scope...
...Michael R. Beschloss, a much-published historian, has superbly edited the tapes covering the first year of LB J's Administration...
...Two other fundamental questions remain, though, that do not yield to easy answers...
...The patent answer is Presidential selfprotection...
...Smooth-talking Robert F. Kennedy, whomhe wants to keepoff the 1964 Democratic ticket, he is duplicitous...
...How long would it take to take over the island...
...but we have to consult with our allies...
...In addition, when they come to write their self-immortalizing memoirs—the end-product of almost every Presidency in this century—they will have the raw materials for their work...
...It may not take long to place them there, to erect a fence...
...Reading the transcripts, you are quickly struck by the articulateness and predictability of the Kennedy advisers who ponder, argue and agonize over what to do to defend the country's honor, and, they hope, avoid a nuclear showdown...
...The hero is unquestionably President Kennedy, who, in the face of the stern warnings and detailed rationalizations of his uniformed advisers, White House aides and the Secretaries of State and Defense, took the nonmilitary route and carried the day...
...The Kennedy Tapes is an incontestable record of a President at his best as pathfinder and leader...
...LeMay's response was not unqualified: "Well, I think it would be guaranteed hitting...
...Johnson: No I don't...
...Then the talking starts, some of it timewasting and unhelpful...
...No less important, Presidents are history-minded: Having attained the pinnacle of power, they can only aspire to being remembered as historical figures...
...The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis Edited by Ernest R. May and Philip D. Zelikow Belknap...
...And how explain away this obvious violation of civil liberties—not to mention its acceptance by citizens eager for an eye-opening look at their national leadership in action...
...It prepares the reader admirably for the minute-byminute revivification of how the decision to meet one of the most fateful challenges in the history of the Presidency— the Cuban missile crisis of 1962—was made...
...sometimes it is the President trying to browbeat a member of Congress...
...We might then be in there for a month thereafter, cleaning that up...
...His performance amid the welter of words that flowed around him is his enduring monument...
...It is intriguing, for instance, to hear LBJ argue with George Brown, an early supporter and CEO of the Texas construction company Brown and Root, about a favor for two of Root's friends, Gus Wortham and John Jones...
...Occasionally he is obsequious, as when he calls up former President Harry S. Truman...
...What he wants from Jones, president of the Houston Chronicle, is a pledge—in writing—that the newspaper will support him editorially throughout his Presidency...
...Robert Kennedy wonders about an invasion of Cuba...
...When he speaks of blockading Cuba, he asks: "Do we have to declare war on Cuba...
...Anything coming from the White House is likely to be probed more cynically by a public convinced from reading these books—and Stanley I. Kutler'snewly published transcription of the Nixon tapes—that scheming or incompetence or impetuousness must surely mark most Chief Executives' doings...
...Sometimes it is the President teasing an assistant...
...What are the ethics of recording surreptitiously phone calls and faceto-face conversations in the Oval Office...
...President...
...But the President never loses control either of his temper or of his role as Commander-in-Chief...
...Constantly on the phone, he is by turns choleric, charming, funny, cunning, affectionate, troubled, overbearing, and insecure...
...Forexample, Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, ever attentive to minutiae, says "it seems almost impossible to me that they [the Soviets] would be ready to fire with nuclear warheads on the site without even a fence around it...
...in the Oval Office has altered the Presidency forever...
...he asks General Maxwell Taylor, the new Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff...
...The debaters sound persuasive and are frequently persistent, but they cannot bulldoze Kennedy, who seems to know they are all guessing...
...Whatever follows in succeeding volumes, the complex Texan is fully revealed in these pages...
...The satisfactory outcome of the crisis is amply developed by May and Zelikow...
...728 pp...
...They're not Zionists, but they're influenced by Zionists...
...But I would say that in five or six days the main resistance ought to be overcome...
...They have been painstakingly recovered from poor recordings by two Harvard professors, historian Ernest R. May and political scientist Philip D. Zelikow, whose 43-page Introduction is a model of clarity and thoughtfulness...
...JFK opens the session in the Cabinet Room with a low-keyed "Okay...
...It makes it easier, and better...
...President...
...But what accounts for the guileful practice...
...Well, it makes it legal...
...Overshadowing everything during Johnson's first days was his natural paranoia, which fed his belief that John F. Kennedy was the victim of an international conspiracy...
...You know as well as I do what kind of a crowd they are...
...But here also is the man of whom former Rhode Island Senator Claiborne Pell, who watched him close up for years, once said to this reviewer, "Gosh, Johnson must have an 1Q of 200...
...The favor consists of getting Attorney General Kennedy to permit a merger of two banks that may violate the antitrust laws...
...The imponderables were immense...
...And they'll do it, to hold their ownjobs...
...On October 19—after three days of back and forth —the President asks Air Force Chief of Staff General Curtis E. LeMay: "How effective is an air strike at this point, against the missile bases...
...The interplay of personalities comes across on page after page...
...The whole Administration is on display in Taking Charge...
...And the Johnson we encounter fully conforms with the image the world had of him as a wheelerdealer, a riverboat gambler...
...So it goes—talk, talk, talk, over much of the next two weeks...
...But at least at the moment there is some reason to believe the warheads aren't present and hence they are not ready to fire...
...But he never lost sight of his goal—to try diplomacy first...
...The answers come in a chorus: "Yes, yes we do...
...sometimes he is seeking advice and even sympathy regarding Vietnam from an old friend like Senator Richard B. Russell of Georgia...
...Bundy: I would hold my fire very carefully, Mr...
...Bundy: Well, the Times editorial page is a soft page, Mr...
...McNamara chimes in: "Five or seven days of air, plus five days of invasion, plus....' The President finally cuts off the chitchat...
...His aides, too—if they knew they were being recorded—let down their guard...
...They're clever, but they don'thave a whole lot of judgment...
...After learning that upon taking office in 1963 Lyndon B. Johnson said in a private conversation that the Vietnam War was unwinnable, then let it drag on for five more years, how will the nation respond to a President's earnest call for support of a war he is masterminding...
...There is no doubt at all, though, that he is taking charge...
...In adamantly refusing the request Johnson is only horse-trading...
...After the quarantine around Cuba was established, JFK knew there were still only three ways to remove the missiles: negotiate them out, trade them out, or blast them out...
...Whatever is suspect about the notion of Camelot, JFK in this terrifying moment in world history proved himself a master in the Oval Office...
...But clearly the taping that went on (is going on...
...Always, it appears, the military option was last on his list...
...They're intelligent men...
...The book opens with a fascinating and unique picture of the way power is transferred in a crisis under our system of government...
...After President Nixon's recording system was revealed during the Watergate hearings, they learned that Franklin D. Roosevelt also used a taping machine and that General Dwight D. Eisenhower even taped conversations in his office at Columbia University when he was its president...
...Every reader will discover his or her own vein in this superrich mine of material...
...The firmness with which he controls the discussion is formidable...
...Again and again it is the President who is clearheaded and certain...
...Reviewed by Henry F. Graff Editor, "The Presidents: A Reference History" Whether letting Presidential ruminations and shenanigans all hang out will in the long run be good or bad for the country we cannot yet say...
...Americans are no longer shocked by the existence of White House tapes...
...There will be hardly anybody who gets excited because their ships are stopped under these conditions...
...It is a commonplace to make a declaration of war...
...Any double-dealing rival or mischief-making staff official must be on his guard because the President has a verbatim record of what was actually spoken in his presence...
...The process begins shortly before noon on October 16...
Vol. 80 • December 1997 • No. 19
