The insights into the workings of the White House that readers will find in this enthralling collection — a transcript, with commentary, of covertly recorded conversations with Lyndon B. Johnson during his first nine months as president — are typified by the disclosure of LBJ’s intervention in a proposed bank merger, apparently in violation of federal guidelines.
The principals in the merger were Gus Wortham, a Houston insurance tycoon and longtime Johnson booster, and John Jones, president of the Houston Chronicle — who definitely was not in the LBJ inner circle, his uncle being the famous Jesse Jones, a right-wing Texas Democrat and member of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s cabinet who had opposed Johnson’s long battle to become a senator. Now, Johnson, in the presidency for scarcely six weeks, saw a way to capture both Jones and the Chronicle.
He spelled it out at mid-day on January 2, 1964, talking to industrialist George Brown, his financial supporter and intimate friend. He wanted a letter from the Chronicle’s owner saying, “So far as I’m personally concerned and the paper’s concerned, it’s going to support your administration as long as you’re there. Sincerely, your friend, John Jones.”
Brown didn’t like that much and argued that John E Kennedy had said in Dallas on that last fatal trip that he would approve the merger. LBJ retorted: “No, he hadn’t said he was going to approve it. He told me that he was going to get that Chronicle right in his hip pocket the rest of his life or he wasn’t going to give them the time of day” — the phrasing more LBJ’s than JFK’s. Brown suggested that “it was too much of a cash-and-carry thing . . . too much of a trade,” but Johnson insisted the bank merger was dead unless ” they tell me that they’re my friends in writing.” Jones did sign the letter, and on January 8 the president phoned Jones to inform him that the merger was approved. “From here on out, we’re partners,” said Johnson. “Sure are,” the compelled Jones agreed.
Nearly every page of Taking Charge contains such glimpses behind Johnson’s facade. Michael Beschloss, a fine presidential historian, has performed an invaluable service by transcribing the antique recordings of a system surreptitiously installed by Johnson and supplementing it with insightful commentary. This is one book whose explanatory and analytical footnotes are must-reading.
Johnson was anxious to put John Jones and the Chronicle on his side because, behind his protestations of grief, he was obsessed from the moment of John Kennedy’s death by his own chances for election in 1964. The two dominant themes of these nine months — what to do about Vietnam and Robert F. Kennedy — are both forced into the narrow focus of electoral politics.
From the start, Johnson had few illusions about Vietnam. “Anytime you got that many people against you that far from your home base, it’s bad,” he told publisher John Knight on February 3, 1964. “We’re losing,” he added to Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara on April 30. But his conversations about Vietnam were short on substance and long on politics. When it was suggested that the Kennedy-appointed Republican Henry Cabot Lodge be relieved as ambassador in Saigon, Johnson worried: “He’d be back home campaigning on us on this issue.” He told national security aide McGeorge Bundy: “You ought to tell [columnist Walter] Lippmann to knock the tail off [Richard Nixon] because he’s trying to start another war with China” — the “wily Johnson,” as Beschloss comments in an explanatory note, pushing Bundy “to provoke the dovish Lippmann to attack Nixon for excessive hawkishness.”
Johnson’s Vietnam dilemma comes clear in long talks with his mentor, Senator Richard Brevard Russell of Georgia. Suffering from emphysema and embittered in a Democratic party where he increasingly felt out of place, the segregationist conservative Russell had his foreign policy advice sought by Johnson even while the two men were engaged in a bitter struggle over civil rights. Known as a super-hawk during his long tenure as chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Russell on May 27, 1964, told Johnson that bombing did not interdict supply lines in Korea and “you ain’t gonna stop these people [in Vietnam] either.” Johnson protested that “they’d impeach a president, though, that would run out, wouldn’t they?” And on June 11, Russell told the president (in a prophecy Beschloss calls “hauntingly right”) that military intervention in Vietnam would “take a half million men . . . bogged down in there for 10 years.” When Russell added that he shared some of dovish Senator Mike Mansfield’s fears about Vietnam, LBJ replied, “I do too, but the fear the other way” — the fear of being accused of cowardly quitting — “is more.”
In truth, at this moment, Bobby Kennedy was even more in his thoughts than Vietnam. Johnson was obsessed by the fear that the Kennedy heir would force his way onto the ticket as vice president or, worse yet, challenge him for the presidency. The two mews conversations printed here, though clearly uncomfortable, are civil enough. “You’re a great guy,” the president told Bobby on June 11. But behind Kennedy’s back, Johnson brooded about the dead president’s brother. On August 17, he complained to Secretary of State Dean Rusk that Kennedy is “a very, very ambitious young man. It’s unbelievable how ambitious he is.” (Rusk, reflecting the switch of loyalty to LBJ by many of JFK’s appointees, responded by citing a “ruthlessness” in Kennedy “that just scares the hell out of me.”) For his part, Kennedy was then confiding to a historian that Johnson was “mean, bitter, vicious — an animal in many ways.”
“This is Bobby’s trap,” Johnson said when a civil rights challenge to the all-white Mississippi delegation to the 1964 Democratic Convention threatened a massive Southern walkout. The mostly black Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, LBJ mused, was “born in the Justice Department.” Indeed, Johnson threatened to drop out of the presidential race if the dispute at the convention was not settled. Was he serious? Would he really have taken the step that would have surrendered power to Kennedy, his arch-enemy? “Aw, you ain’t gonna do that,” Johnson’s old friend John B. Connally is recorded as telling him over the telephone. But nobody can be sure, and this footnote to history is not resolved by these taped conversations.
But they do reveal the many sides of Lyndon Johnson, better than any of the excellent biographies of the man. Just eavesdrop on a few of Johnson’s conversations two days before Christmas, 1963, when he had been president for only one month:
11:38 a.m. Johnson calls hairdresser Eddie Senz in New York, asking him to come down that day to work on his wife, his daughters, and his secretaries for the holidays. Protesting that “right now I’m a poor man,” the multi- millionaire president tells Senz he will take care of his plane flight to Washington “but we can’t pay you much else.”
11:45 a.m. Johnson, enraged that there are Pentagon protests over his plan to get rid of Kennedy-oriented military aides, informs Deputy Defense Secretary Roswell Gilpatric: “Tell the generals that if they’re little men like that, that believe they can pressure their commander-in-chief on what his strategy ought to be in war or what his decisions ought to be in peace, they don’t know the Commander-in-Chief.” Gilpatric, an inner-circle Kennedyite, fawningly laughs and says, “They’re gonna learn.”
2:21 p.m. With members of Congress coming into the White House for a Christmas reception even while resisting the passage of the president’s foreign aid bill, Johnson tells legislative liaison Lawrence O’Brien: “Smile and shake hands and thank everybody, and then just cut their peter off and put it in your pocket when they do us this way.”
8:45 p.m. Johnson instructs two personal aides he has brought into the White House, Walter Jenkins and Jack Valenti, about loyalty. In recruiting for appointive positions, “swear ’em to loyalty and devotion and do or die — very man that’s appointed.”
9:55 p.m. Worried that he may be implicated in a Senate Rules Committee investigation of former aide Bobby Baker, Johnson telephones a committee member, Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia (not yet a venerable guardian of Senate tradition, but a 46-year-old LBJ protege). Asked whether the probe threatens the presidency, Byrd replies, “Darned if I know.” Johnson snaps back: “Well, if you don’t know, what the hell you’re doing up there on that committee? I put you on so that you would know!”
When as a young Senate beat reporter I covered Majority Leader Johnson, I first encountered his disregard for the truth in things both large and small. But the duplicity that appears in the cold print of this new volume can still be a little startling. He just plain lied to Time correspondent Hugh Sidey when he denied that Kennedy aide Dick Goodwin had written his Great Society speech. He fibbed to Bobby Kennedy when he promised to pass on some advice to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover (who was not speaking to his attorney general). “I’ll do it right now,” Johnson told Kennedy. He never did.
Sometimes the duplicity is hard to fathom. From his first hours as president, Johnson angered old political allies back in Texas by blocking Democratic primary election opposition to his old enemy, Senator Ralph Yarborough, as a way of showing his new, liberal colors to the party’s national leaders. Yet, this book reveals — and it came as a surprise even to close friends — that on February 3, short hours before the filing deadline, LBJ called Representative Jim Wright to urge him to run against Yarborough. ” I can take care of you if you lost,” the president declares (“meaning,” notes Beschloss, “that Johnson . . . could give Wright a federal job”). Wright was clearly tempted, but said no and went on to become speaker of the House. The next day, Yarborough telephoned his thanks to the president for supporting him. Unabashed, Johnson gushed, “You serve humanity, and I want to help you in any way I can.” (Beschloss wryly observes, “This is how LBJ spoke to liberals.”)
This syrupy tone, often used in addressing political adversaries, contrasts with the harshness used toward his own staffers, particularly when berating his honorable, long-suffering press aide George Reedy: “You come in with those damned old wrinkled suits and you come up with a dirty shirt and you come in with your tie screwed up. . . . You look like a g– d–d reporter.”
Johnson did not care much for reporters. But in these days when print was still king, he spent a lot of time reading newspapers and magazines and haranguing the people who wrote for and, better still, owned them.
His attitude is exposed in conversations with a longtime ally, New York lawyer Edwin Weisl Sr., as when on January 25, Johnson grumbled: “I don’t understand . . . why the [New York] Times turns on me so” — to which Weisl responded by helpfully referring to the Times as the “Uptown Daily Worker.” Weisl was renowned as one of Johnson’s wisest counselors, but he comes over in these pages as no less of a yes-man than LBJ aides.
On March 9, Johnson was concerned about a Wall Street Journal investigation of how he made his fortune. More accustomed to dealing with the boardrooms of newspapers than with their city rooms, Johnson and Weisl briefly indulged the fantasy that they could get the publishers of the Wall Street Journal to suppress the story. Weisl: “Who owns that thing?” LBJ: “I have no idea.” Weisl: “I’ll find out.”
Apart from its allure for history buffs and political junkies, Taking Charge is a valuable corrective to the widely held notion that the hands-on, masterful politician provides the correct model for the presidency. A self- pitying, manipulative, and endlessly fascinating American original, Lyndon Johnson is seen in these pages as the masterful politician he was — moving toward his disastrous solution to the Vietnam dilemma, as future Beschloss volumes are sure to show.
Robert D. Novak is a veteran Washington reporter and columnist.
