Paperback Plums
McCann, William
White House Throne The Twilight of the Presidency, by George E. Reedy. World. 205 pp. $6.95. Reviewed by Stuart H. Loory Remember how well Jack Valenti *¦ used to sleep because he knew Lyndon...
...Presidents are "sanctified," to use Reedy's term, in the manner of monarchs, and they are talked to similarly even by their closest associates...
...He ascribes the problems to the technical system—the fact that a quadrennially elected President is not responsive to the people...
...He says that a parliamentary system, though unattainable, would be better...
...How can anyone, confronted by that worrisome prospect, sleep easily at night...
...Similarly, staff members of the Nixon White House are unhappy...
...Clark Clifford was an old, close, and trusted friend of Lyndon Johnson's but yet, in the fateful month of March, 1968, he had to labor long and deviously to win the President's agreement to a change in Vietnam policy...
...Reedy is a frightened man who writes: "A highly irrational personality, who under other circumstances might be medically certifiable for treatment, could take over the White House and the event never be known with any degree of assurance...
...Reedy, they say, drawing on his particular experiences with Mr...
...What about the fall of Robert Ellsworth from favor and the rise of Murray Chotiner...
...Reedy goes on to discuss the President and Congress, the President and the press, the President and political parties...
...We count human life for little...
...It also left him sufficiently shattered to write an important book questioning the advisability of continuing with the Presidency at all in these troubled times...
...An occasional 'go soak your head' or 'that's stupid' would clear the murky, turgid atmosphere of the White House and let in some health-giving fresh air," Reedy writes...
...Intrigue is the key word for Reedy's point C. The White House is a prime place for intrigue...
...And in the Nixon Administration, there is the spectacle of Daniel P. Moynihan, hired to think grand thoughts, beginning a personal memo to the President with statements about what a wonderful orator and deep thinker he is...
...Let Reedy tell it: "For . . . White House assistants there is only one fixed goal in life...
...If anybody ever told Lyndon B. Johnson or Richard M. Nixon, the two Presidents with whom I am most familiar, to go soak their heads, the story has yet to reach the public prints...
...Reedy's point B is that the President—any President—is a prisoner in his own house, a victim of palace guard politics surrounded by men who keep him increasingly isolated from the real world and then proceed to tell him what they think he wants to know...
...No amount of finagling with the system will do the job...
...The battle-wise assistant develops to its highest degree the faculty of maintaining physical proximity coupled with the ability to disappear (by ducking down a hallway or stepping behind a post) at the right moments...
...As for the pursuit of happiness, that is something reserved for those Americans who can afford it—after the medical bills and the rent are paid, as long as the automobile installments are met...
...The "kids," as Reedy acknowledges, understand the implicit sham in all this...
...Johnson, too, and his experience left him, I suspect, an insomniac...
...What about the firing of John Sears and the furtive announcement of Clark Mollenhoff's appointment...
...But they overlook the danger of trading a Czar for a Party First Secretary...
...It is somehow to gain and maintain access to the President . . . Consequently, the President's psychology is studied minutely, and a working day in the White House is marked by innumerable probes to determine which routes to the Oval Room are open and which end in a blind alley...
...This book must be read in its entirety...
...And even in these extreme cases, action would be taken hesitantly indeed...
...They seek systemic changes out of the belief that only then can they restore humanity to government...
...President Nixon and his White House operation, they add, are simply not like that at all...
...Only more humanity among our leaders will...
...Reedy is at his best in describing the situation as it exists...
...What we need instead is a President who will rededicate the nation to the ideals of the Declaration of Independence...
...What about the manner in which the Nixonian palace guard has been shuffled and reshuffled to permit the emergence of John D. Ehrlich-man as the overseer Nixon said he never wanted to have for domestic affairs...
...The right to liberty has somehow got confused with the nation's security, property values, the right to bear arms, the maintenance of neighborhood schools, and the freedom to pollute rivers...
...The problem in this country is a sickness of the political soul, not of the physical body politic...
...So, point A, Reedy is afraid that one day events will make the levers of power in the White House available to some kind of nut...
...The life of the courtier is to be Sammy Glick or to fight Sammy Glick—and all of his sisters and his uncles and his cousins and his aunts...
...Identifying the rigidity of institutions as the problem is little more than an excuse leaders use when they refuse to admit to themselves that the fundamental ideals on which the nation was founded—the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—have been abandoned...
...Oh no...
...Johnson, maligns the institution of the Presidency generally and thus their man...
...Witness our involvement in Southeast Asia where we will be happy enough to see the killing go on as long as it is properly "Vietnamized...
...And given our present system, it will not be possible to dislodge him...
...Reviewed by Stuart H. Loory Remember how well Jack Valenti *¦ used to sleep because he knew Lyndon Johnson was in the White House...
...He is not so good in analyzing the whys and wherefores...
...Former President Johnson has told people he has not read the book, but apparently he is furious at Reedy for telling tales out of school...
...Well, George Reedy worked for Mr...
...Basically, the methodology is to be present either personally or by a proxy piece of paper when 'good news' arrives and to be certain that someone else is present when the news is bad...
...The White House is architecturally well adapted to such tactics, since there are plenty of hallways and a plethora of concealing pillars...
...I dd have some experience with the reaction of human beings to irrational behavior, and it is clear to me that where Presidents are concerned, the tolerance level for irrationality extends almost to the point of gibbering idiocy or delusions of identity...
...The White House assistant must learn early that his enemy is not towering evil but inanity...
...To put it more simply, no one is going to act to interfere with the Presidential exercise of authority unless the President drools in public or announces on television that he is Alexander the Great...
Vol. 34 • June 1970 • No. 6
