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Reaching for Glory: Lyndon Johnson's Secret White House Tapes, 1964-1965 Edited and with Commentary |
When last we eavesdropped on the White House conversations secretly recorded by Lyndon Johnson, it was August 1964, and the accidental president was about to accept the nomination that would keep him in the Oval Office in his own unequivocal right. But even in those nine preceding post-assassination months, the major themes that, in all their variations, would define the Johnson presidency — Vietnam, civil rights, the obsession with Bobby — were already clear, his relations with the press already a familiar leitmotif. ("Hey, Hey, LBJ: How Many Journalists Did You Tape Today?" CJR, May/June 1998.)
Now, in the second volume of the historian Michael Beschloss's beautifully edited and annotated transcripts of the mesmerizing tapes, that leitmotif resounds again as the president picks up the tempo in his race against Barry Goldwater. To the receptive columnist William S. White, Johnson proposes a piece that would "take the high line" while raising the specter of a return to McCarthyism. "Oh, I'd just be shocked. I would say that . . . you hope Goldwater doesn't stoop to . . . guilt by association. We cannot have character assassination. We had that in the McCarthy days," Johnson offers helpfully. To the muckraking Drew Pearson, he promises leaks for an exposé about a payoff made by Goldwater running-mate William Miller, then plants more: "Now I'll give you one thing . . . . Some of these [riots] in some of these Northern cities — the evidence looks pretty close to Mr. Lamar Hunt of Dallas, Texas . . . . Some of the folding money — to finance that . . . .You better just . . . say, 'I want to send a warning to some of these oil millionaires that are putting their dough in some of this rioting . . . . They're going to get themselves into deep trouble and they're going to hurt their country. Are you listening, Mr. Lamar Hunt?'" To C. Richard West, the conservative editorial page editor of The Dallas Morning News, he indicates that his Republican opponent is unstable. "Goldwater is a nervous man. An impulsive man. A childish man . . . . You want the real questions answered, don't you? Goldwater has had two serious nervous breakdowns. Had to be taken off, taken out of the country . . . "
And so it goes, standard moves by the Great Orchestrator. Then, in mid-October, only a few weeks before Election Day, Abe Fortas and Clark Clifford, Johnson's personal lawyers, phone with a bombshell that could, as Johnson himself puts it, "destroy the Presidency": after leaving Katharine Graham's party celebrating the opening of Newsweek's new offices, Walter Jenkins, the president's closest aide, keeper of damaging files and stasher-away of funny money, has been arrested for performing oral sex on a pickup in the men's room of the local YMCA. What will the Washington press do? Fortas and Clifford report that together they've paid visits to the Evening Star and the Daily News, and have come away confident that the story will be killed; their visit with Russ Wiggins, editor of the Post, has given them similar hope, as has their talk with Walter Trohan, Washington bureau chief of the Chicago Tribune, who has told them "he's not going to write it, and he won't let anybody on his staff write it . . . . He said that he can't bring himself to write a story like this about a man who has got six children." All these upbeat expectations come to a crashing halt when UPI puts the Jenkins story on the wires, complete with the facts of an earlier episode in 1959. Damage control becomes the order of the day. Jenkins, now hospitalized, has got to resign; his wife has got to stop giving out interviews; Lady Bird has got to keep her distance from the Jenkinses, and her compassionate notion to give their old friend "the number-two job at KTBC" — the family station in Austin at which Jenkins used to work — has got to be, regrettably, rejected ("I don't think that you'd have a license five minutes with a station being operated by someone like that," LBJ, equally sad about Jenkins's plight but ever so much more practical, explains). In short, whatever it takes has got to be done to keep the press from accomplishing what Johnson perceives as its mission, the thing he fears most — that it will make him, in the words of his oft-repeated refrain, "into a Warren Harding."
Luckily, as a campaign issue, White House morality falls flat. The sweetness of Johnson's landslide victory, however, is spoiled by the sour note struck by some in the press who interpret the sweep as a choice between the lesser of two evils. Hurt and embittered, LBJ taps Edwin Weisl, Sr., a longtime confidante in New York, to marshal his powerful media contacts for some counter moves that will "create an image" of affectionate public support. "Here's Newhouse and here's Dick Berlin [of Hearst] and here's Roy Howard [of Scripps-Howard] and here's The Washington Post and Star — they're our friends," Johnson declares. "We've got all these folks. 'Now damn it, let's give this guy a chance. Let's give him a chance to try to hold the country together' . . . . Call up the head of that agency and tell him . . . . you want him to plan a campaign . . . . Then you talk to Berlin and say, 'Now God damn it, these little old half-assed editorials that you-all wrote saying "We are for Johnson,"' but then treating them all equally . . . . It looked like to me Goldwater got better news than we did." Weisl agrees. "l'll get busy," he assures LBJ. "I'm meeting Mr. Newhouse for dinner tonight." The president continues, "You just tell Newhouse . . . . that I want you-all to say that this man is loved, that this man has the affection of the country, that this man won the hearts of the people, that there's nothing like it ever happened, and let's give him a chance, and let's help him. And tell him, by God, I'll stand by his side in all of his ventures and help him." "I will do everything I can," Weisl promises.
It doesn't work; like the situation in Vietnam, Johnson's treatment
by the press goes from bad to worse. Still, the degree to which
that treatment occupies White House attention may strike some
readers as extreme. As the political players — Eisenhower and
Truman, Daley and Dirksen, Mansfield and McLellan and Fulbright
and Ford, Connally, the Kennedys, Wallace and King — come and
go, talking of Medicare, education, voting rights, and poverty;
as the White House inner circle — Rusk and McNamara and Bundy,
Katzenbach and Vance, Reedy and Moyers and Hoover — wrestles
with one crisis after another; as Lady Bird confides, in her own
recorded diaries, her helpless sympathy for the president's agony
and pain, the matter of the media — from Goldenson and Stanton
and Kintner to, in LBJ's envious words, "the Lippmanns and
the Restons and the Alsops and the Rowland Evanses . . . the Joe
Krafts, and the rest" of the Bobby crowd that gave JFK such
an easy time, appearing in various forms, individually and collectively,
directly and indirectly — is never far away.
Curiously, that matter of the media has been pretty far away when
it comes to the scores of reviews, articles, interviews, and editorials
that have appeared around the country about the Beschloss book;
most focus, understandably, on the look it affords into the hearts
and minds of those conducting the war in Vietnam. Only rarely,
for example, does a review touch upon the conversation between
Louisiana's Senator Russell Long, literally begging that the Shreveport
post office not be closed, and LBJ, refusing to help until they
"get those damn Birchites out of that newspaper [the ultraconservative
Shreveport Times] that called me a dirty, low-down, thieving,
son of a bitch every day" for signing the civil rights bill.
Though Long pleads that "we've got some good people who own
that Times-Picayune who are hoping to buy that paper," Johnson
will not be moved. "It hurts me not to do anything you want
to do," he tells Long. "But God Almighty, don't you
pick out the cross-eyed, stuttering, bowlegged girl and bring
her up and say, 'Now, listen, this ought to be the beauty queen,
and you name her, by God, and it's a favor to me!'"
Ignored altogether is LBJ's reaction to network coverage by, for instance, NBC, notably Robert Goralski's report that the new bombings of North Vietnam are aimed at forcing the North Vietnamese to negotiate. '"Goralski is a very naïve reporter and runs awful hard for a headline," Bundy observes to LBJ . . . . "But he's got it all turned around." "Why don't you talk to Bob Kintner [president of NBC News]" Johnson suggests. "I think I would say this — that we don't want to complain, and this is entirely a matter for them, but . . . that we're trying our best to go far enough [in Vietnam] without going too far. Ron Nelson [NBC reporter Nessen, later press secretary to Gerald Ford] spent all of his time talking about the big black Cadillacs coming up here and the 'great day of crisis' — when there hadn't been a meeting all day . . . . Goralski was following the same practice last night. Special report, flashes. 'It has been heard that somebody might feel' that may belong to the Cabinet that this could happen . . . . If NBC wants to become that irresponsible, why they can, but he ought to know it . . . Tell him these . . . children need a little supervision. The Chancellors don't do anything like that, and this boy that used to be here at the White House . . . Sandy Vanocur and this Ray Scherer — they're all good. Particularly Chancellor . . . . [He] doesn't like to pick up this stuff. He's kind of reserved and he sits back and reads Pla-to."
Nor do any of the several reviews and articles in The New York Times, the paper that Johnson repeatedly complained "gives me hell all the time," offer even a hint of that close-to-home fact (talk about a credibility gap!) let alone the raw revelation that one of the motives behind the president's selection of Arthur Goldberg as a Supreme Court justice was that "this Jew thing" would gain him favor with the Times.
Perhaps the writers regarded these insights into the president-press relationship as inside baseball, of little interest to general readers. Perhaps they dismissed those insights, and that relationship, as a bit too peculiar to the Johnson years to hold any resonance for either the journalism or politics practiced since. Whatever the reason, to pass them by was a shame. The historic music of that antiphonal chorus needs to be heard, and remembered.
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