MEMO FROM THE EDITOR

...They wrote, "Faced with the internal struggle for ethical autonomy and the external pressure to conform, good, honest men bend themselves into pretzel-like configurations to stay on speaking terms both with their consciences and with the power Establishment...

...I did hear Johnson, on more than one occasion, rage vehemently against his critics in the press and Congress, and I knew—and reported—that he had set the FBI to work investigating them...

...In The New Yorker," they wrote, "Goodwin tried to dissociate himself from Johnson's Vietnam policy without attacking his former boss—for whom he continued to be a freelance speech writer...

...In other words, the President of the United States, wielding immense power and capable of deciding whether millions of human beings would live or die, was desperately out of touch with reality...

...But accusing the President of emotional instability is serious business, and the editors who employed me then would allow no such speculation in print...

...Now, more than twenty years later, in articles, press interviews, and a book (Remembering America: A Voice from the Sixties), Goodwin is telling us some things we had a right to know a long time ago...

...But at the time, he says, he was sure he would not be believed...

...At no time during this century," Weisband and Franck wrote with a considerable degree of understatement, "has there been anything like a flourishing of ethical autonomy among top officials in the U.S...

...liberals, intellectuals, communists," all out to get him...

...In 1965 he resigned, and soon thereafter he began voicing his reservations about the Vietnam war...

...If Vietnam were to turn into the apocalypse, he wrote, 'there will be no act of madness, no single villain on whom to discharge guilt...

...official between 1900 and the mid-1970s, is so lamentably short...

...Around midsummer 1965," Goodwin wrote in the late summer of 1988 in The New York Times Magazine, "about the time the decision was made to increase by more than 100,000 the number of American troops in Vietnam—a decision that transformed Vietnam into an American war—I became convinced that President Johnson's always large eccentricities had taken a huge leap into unreason...

...As it happens, Weisband and Franck chose to illustrate the point by citing the example of Richard N. Goodwin...

...Wait till next year...

...Federal Government...

...We ought to be grateful to Goodwin, I suppose, for breaking his silence at last...

...By scores of 15-to-14 and 14-to-8...

...The sixth of these epic encounters took place on August 28, and it's my sad duty to report that for the first time ever, The Progressive lost...

...That's probably why their book, dealing with every known instance of a resignation in protest on a matter of principle by a high U.S...

...Johnson, Goodwin went on to say, "experienced certain episodes of what I believe to have been paranoid behavior"— episodes that reflected the President's conclusion that the growing ranks of critics of the war at home and abroad were full of "enemies and conspirators...

...Johnson "began to hint privately that he was the target of a gigantic communist conspiracy...

...just the flow of history.' It is relatively safe to attack 'the flow of history,' which neither has temper tantrums nor tries to destroy your academic career by telephone calls to the Ford Foundation...

...Today, he admits that his secrecy "may have been a very large mistake of judgment or of timidity...

...I was a White House correspondent in the period Goodwin describes, and his account of Johnson's state of mind confirms my own impressions at the time, though I never had opportunity to observe the President as closely as Goodwin did...

...Each summer, the staff of The Progressive engages the staff of the Chicago-based weekly, In These Times, in a competition that has become known (especially on this page) as the Annual Softball Grudge Match and Solidarity Celebration...

...But where was he twenty-three years ago, when his disclosures might have made a difference...

...That goes a long way toward explaining why we have learned so late not only about Lyndon Johnson's irrational suspicions but about the malfeasance and misfeasance of so many of our Presidents...

...Both games...

...A somewhat different explanation was offered by Edward Weisband and Thomas M. Franck in their excellent book, Resignation in Protest, published in 1975...

...Those of us who tried to get an "insider" to confirm our worst suspicions ran into a stone wall of vigorous denial...