LBJ, with Waits
Dugger, Ronnie
LBJ, with Waits THE POLITICIAN: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF LYNDONJOHNSON by Ronnie Dugger W.W. Norton. 514 pp. $18.95. George Christian, who was Captain Bligh's last press secretary, says his boss...
...There was the Alamo Syndrome that pointed the way to Vietnam...
...If anything could stop this process, it would be the Dugger and Brodie biographies...
...A vast inner story of America is in the faces of those five men...
...Since The Politician ends with Johnson's election as Senate Democratic leader, it is assumed and hoped that there will be a sequel...
...It will do no good because Johnson is long gone...
...Dominic's and prayed with the monks...
...After John Kennedy's death, his friends said of him: "Johnny, we hardly knew ye...
...They are to be restored to the American equivalent of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia...
...He was doing his Lincoln-in-the-lonely-watches-of-the-night routine...
...There was Johnson's relationship with the construction firm of Brown and Root...
...We knew that Johnson was fearful of Soviet intervention when he escalated the bombing of North Vietnam...
...It will do no good to ask, as you will ask while reading Dugger's account, how in the world this man became President...
...But that is not the way these things work...
...He has enlivened my reflective years with the Holy Ghost story...
...Johnson grinned at Dugger "with a vast inner enjoyment," but he would not answer any questions about the box: "Nothing, nothing, he would not say a word...
...Ronnie Dugger has been the editor of The Texas Observer since 1954...
...Dugger quotes a Texas lawyer as saying whenever Johnson's name came up in conversation, "Well now, let's get down to the Brown and Root of the matter...
...There was the boyhood that generated the unrelenting insecurity and the ferocious ambition...
...According to Dugger, who checked the story as closely as he could, Johnson told Lemberger that the Holy Ghost was visiting him in the White House at night, to assure him that everything would be all right...
...But we did not know what he told the Austrian ambassador, Ernst Lem-berger...
...So Ronnie Dugger has written a horribly fascinating book about a man who should not have been President—and how he got that way...
...If it had, John F. Kennedy might not have offered the Texan second place on the Democratic ticket...
...We are born not yesterday but this morning...
...Dominic's Church...
...Dugger knows a great deal about Johnson, and he has put what he knows into a book of horrible fascination...
...We knew that he and Luci then went to St...
...George Christian, who was Captain Bligh's last press secretary, says his boss was impressed by Ronnie Dugger's knowledge of his origins and his highly dubious rise to power...
...The preceding generation found someone bad...
...And because somehow books like Dugger's and Brodie's do not get written before people are considered for the Presidency...
...Louis Post-Dispatch for twenty-five years, from President Eisenhower through President Carter...
...Instead, two tormented souls occupied the White House, sequentially, for almost eleven years...
...In the United States, moreover, the young academics must write dissertations...
...Christian recalls that Lyndon Johnson would say to Dugger: " 'Where did you hear about that?' It became a matter of fascination with the President, a horrible fascination...
...It is a pity, then, that Dugger's tremendous book about Johnson, The Politician, did not appear in, say, 1960...
...But that also is not the way these things work...
...We knew all this because Johnson told us about it...
...He told his daughter Luci, "Your daddy may go down in history as having started World War III...
...Since I covered that Presidency, I thought nothing could surprise me...
...There was "Landslide Lyndon's" demagogic 1948 campaign against "communists" and labor unions...
...It would have been helpful if The Texas Observer had had the circulation of TV Guide...
...However, Dugger has done it...
...Profound suspicion resulted—a common experience of those who studied Johnson closely...
...And there was the Holy Ghost...
...In the meantime, Dugger jumps ahead to present illuminating episodes from the Johnson Presidency...
...Years later, when he was President, he showed Dugger a photograph of five Texans posing with this stuffed ballot box...
...All large nations behave alike...
...The same could be said of Fawn M. Brodie's equally monumental study of Johnson's successor (Richard Nixon: The Shaping of His Character, also published by Norton...
...James Deakin (James Deakin was the White House correspondent for the St...
...Dugger is nothing short of superb on the subject of Johnson's machismo and its sorrowful impact on American foreign policy...
...The photo is included in this book...
...The revisionists already are engaged in the rehabilitation of Johnson and Nixon...
...The story follows logically from Johnson's interest in "the little monks" of St...
...This episode, like certain aspects of the boyhood, is strongly reminiscent of Nixon...
...There was Johnson's tergiversation from New Deal liberal to military hawk as he forged his alliances with the oil barons, the right wingers, the Southern committee chairmen— anyone who could help him, any which way...
...There was the infamous "Box 13" that gave Johnson his eighty-seven-vote victory in that campaign...
...However humanitarian his long-run purposes, he had steeled himself to say and do almost anything to get more power," Dugger writes, thus nailing down the Nobel Prize for understatement...
...Suppose Brodie's book had appeared in, say, 1968...
...They will find him good...
...As the voice of Texas liberalism, surviving in in-arable soil, The Observer scrutinized Lyndon Johnson's career minutely and tenaciously...
...those of great stamina should read Dugger and Brodie as companion volumes...
...But Lyndon, we know ye...
...They must discern something new...
...At any rate, Dugger has spread it all before us now...
...We could all have gone to the seashore...
Vol. 46 • September 1982 • No. 9
