The Best and the Brightest (86 page)

Yet for all this change and embryonic change, there was little of it reflected in the political processes. The attitudes of the existing parties were much as before. If anything, the government seemed determined to take fears and attitudes which had grown about the Soviet Union in the Cold War and now imperially export them to the underdeveloped world, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Vietnam. This would in turn heighten the alienation among many who thought the enemy was now the government, the bureaucracy, the military. What had happened was that reality and public attitudes had outstripped Washington political attitudes, and the country needed serious reform and changes. Perhaps it was a problem between a society where the cultural and intellectual attitudes were shaped by new modern media, whereas political attitudes, and particularly American congressional attitudes—of which Lyndon Johnson was a prime student—were still locked in the feelings of small-town America of twenty and thirty years earlier. To Lyndon Johnson, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic party was like a gnat to be squashed on his way to the convention, a tiny irritant in a time of great joy, but it would be a symbol of other forces which would have dire consequences. Even later, as Johnson made his decision to have both the Great Society and the war, the war for the conservatives, the Great Society for the liberals, he would be giving the latter something that much of the American liberal intellectual community was no longer interested in; indeed, as Gene McCarthy noted in 1968 after he made his challenge against Johnson, “he keeps going to them with the list of bills he’s passed—the laundry list, and he doesn’t know that they aren’t interested any more.”

Chapter Twenty

He was the elemental man, a man of endless, restless ambition. Nothing was ever completed, each accomplishment was a challenge to reach for more. He was a politician the like of which we shall not see again in this country, a man who bridged very different Americas, his early days and attitudes forged by earthy, frontier attitudes, and whose final acts as President took us to the very edge of the moon. He was a man of stunning force, drive and intelligence, and of equally stunning insecurity. The enormity of his accomplishments never dimmed the hidden fears which had propelled him in the first place; he was, in that sense, the most human of politicians. There was about Lyndon Johnson something compelling; the more he tried to hide his warts, the more he revealed them. His force and power were such that when he entered the White House, the intellectual architects of his own party believed firmly that the greatest political benefits in America were produced by a strong, activist President; it was a negative testimony to him that when he left many of these same people talked of limiting the role of the Chief Executive, of strengthening the powers of the legislature and of local governments. Perhaps there was something of the inherent contradiction of democratic pluralistic America in the contradiction of Lyndon Johnson as President; the country had become so large, so powerful, yet so diffuse and disharmonious that only a man of his raging, towering strengths and energies could harness the nation’s potential. That energy, when properly harnessed by him, was marvelous, but given his powers, his drives, his instinct to go forward, it was disastrous if he was harnessed to the wrong policies. America then seemed faced with the dilemma of being overgoverned or undergoverned, and no one would ever accuse Lyndon Johnson as President of being content to undergovern. He would never let the history books say of him that he had been content to sit on the sidelines, to be a gentle, leisurely President, letting events take their course. He would control and dominate events, and the history books would tell of the good that he had done. Everything was on a larger scale for him, the highs were higher, the lows lower. He did not dream small dreams. Nor did he pursue small challenges. He pursued History itself, a place, perhaps, on Mount Rushmore, though there were those who knew him who felt that Rushmore was too small, that it was Westminster Abbey, the history of the West. His speech writers were enjoined to read everything about Churchill, to help give Johnson a Churchillian twist.

Greatness beckoned him. Even as Vice-President he got to meet some elder statesmen when Kennedy dispatched him to Europe. He liked Adenauer, who was warm and pleasant, but he did not like De Gaulle, who was aloof and arrogant. However, he was impressed by De Gaulle, with his sense of grandeur and sense of history, De Gaulle who had greeted him with these words: “What have you come to learn?” That was greatness and that was history.

Later, when he had become President, he never took his eye off history. When an expert on documents warned him against using the auto pen (an automatic pen which reproduces the signature of the busy executive) and said that Jack Kennedy had used it too frequently and promiscuously, and that there were too many Kennedy letters which were not true Kennedy letters in the exact historical sense (including, the historian knew but did not have the heart to say, one from President John F. Kennedy to Vice-President Lyndon B. Johnson), Johnson took the admonition seriously. He signed all letters himself; history was history, one did not cheat it, a Johnson letter was a piece of history. Everything was a piece of history, and it was to be treated with proper respect; on board the presidential jet, he often doodled as he spoke with reporters, and if he left to talk with someone else and noted a reporter moving to pick up a scrap of presidential doodle, he did not find it beneath himself to walk back and snatch it away. Thus no unauthorized bits of Johnsonian history. He kept everything—letters, photographs, furniture—and it was not surprising that when he left office he speeded his own monument along. The Lyndon Johnson Library rose quickly and massively (while the Kennedy Library was still housed in a warehouse in Boston), and the real curator of the Lyndon Johnson Library would be Lyndon Johnson.

His appetite for achievement was never tempered. Not a contemplative man himself, he was not surrounded by many contemplative men. He preferred men who said yes, it could be done, and they would do it: cut the budget, dam a river, pass the bill, write the speech. He was a doer himself, and one of the most striking parts of the Johnson memorabilia of those vice-presidential years are his letters from Jackie Kennedy asking Lyndon to please do this, and please take care of that; whenever Jackie wanted something done, accomplished, a job found for a friend, she had turned to Lyndon. And he liked doers around him: McNamara was a man after his own heart; he did not want ideology, he wanted action and energy. Looking at McNamara’s fabled excellence at Defense, Johnson decided that one reason for it was the brilliance and drive of one of McNamara’s deputies, Joseph Califano, and he set out to bring him to the White House. Eventually Califano joined the White House staff, where he began to submit endless numbers of memos. Sometimes, it was even alleged, he put his name over the work of subordinates, and there was some grumbling about this. When Johnson picked it up, when he heard another trusted staff man imply that Califano was not perfect, he reacted almost fiercely:
Don’t you criticize Califano. There’s never been a man around me who wrote so many memos.

He was a man with an extraordinary attention to detail, which was very important to him; larger conceptions might not mean that much, but if he knew the details he could control the action, he could control subordinates. So he always knew details about everyone, more about them than they knew of him. Early in 1969, after the election, after it was all over, his attention to detail still lived. An aide wanted to go to New York to look for a job, but Johnson was unhappy about the trip. He did not want any job hunting until after the inauguration; it was, after all, one more reminder that he was leaving office. So having given his reluctant approval, he remembered later that day to call the White House booking office to make sure that the aide had paid for his own ticket. Always the search for a weakness in another man, always the hunt for something that might be used against him later.

Always that attention to detail, details not just of big things, but little things as well. Nothing was too small for Lyndon Johnson to master and manipulate. Even as Senate Leader, when he was about to go back to Texas for the weekend and time was of the essence, a fellow Texas congressman had some constituents in tow who had a problem on soil irrigation. Did Johnson have time for them? Of course he did, come right in the office, this soil irrigation is a serious problem. In the middle of the conversation, as he listened to them, nodding his head, exchanging views, without changing stride he switched from irrigation to the subject of his aide George Reedy’s shirts. “You know, that boy Reedy never packs enough white shirts.” He picked up the phone and dialed a number. “Hello, Mrs. Reedy, this is Lyndon Johnson. What size shirt does George wear? . . . No, no, no, he’s a bigger man than that. George takes a bigger size.” Briefly he argued Mrs. Reedy down, got her to accept
his size
Reedy. He put down the phone, continued talking about water irrigation, picked up the phone again, called a large department store, demanding the manager. “This is Lyndon Johnson and I need four white shirts sent over to my office right away . . . No, no, I need them right away . . . Yes, you can do it, I know you can, you’re a can-do fellow. I know you and I won’t forget it.” He hung up the phone and went right back to irrigation again, without a break in his trend of thought, having done George Reedy’s work for him, having assured Mrs. Reedy that she did not know what size shirt her husband wore, and having convinced the manager of a major department store that he was a real can-do man.

He was a relentless man who pushed himself and all others with the same severity, and demanded, above all other qualities, total loyalty, not loyalty in the traditional sense, not positive loyalty as John Foster Dulles had demanded, but total loyalty, not just to office or party or concept, but loyalty first and foremost to Lyndon Johnson. Then Lyndon Johnson would become the arbiter of any larger loyalty. Those who passed the loyalty test could have what they wanted. And he always knew who violated that loyalty, who said one thing to him and another thing to a possible enemy. No one could run as good an intelligence network inside Washington as Lyndon Johnson; as President he always knew who had dined with Robert Kennedy. He knew when the loyalty of his followers was waning before they did. No one was more loyal than Lady Bird. Of Marvin Watson, his last political operator, a man of great rigidity and little political sensitivity, Johnson, fiercely protective, could say that there was only one person more loyal than Marvin Watson and that was Lady Bird. High praise indeed. One reason for the long and intimate friendship between Johnson and Abe Fortas was the fact that despite the Johnson inner circle’s doubts about the political acumen of Fortas, he was one of the few major Democratic doyens of Washington who was loyal to no other major Washington figure. He was Lyndon’s man. Lyndon of course liked to personalize things: his people, his staff, his boys, his bombers. To a young Air Force corporal trying to show him the presidential helicopter—“This is your helicopter, sir”—he answered, of course, “They’re all my helicopters, son.”

He was ill at ease with abstract loyalty, loyalty to issue, to concept, to cause, which might lead one to occasional dissent, a broader view, and might mean that a man was caught between loyalty to civil rights and loyalty to Lyndon Johnson. One reason that he was never at ease with the American military was his knowledge that their loyalty was very special, that it was first to uniform and to branch of service, and only then to civilians in the most secondary way. Loyalty was crucial: Washington, after all, was a city with enemies everywhere, with sharks swimming out there waiting for any sign of weakness. Thus the inner circle had to be secure, truly secure; particularly a man with as profound a sense of his own weaknesses and vulnerabilities as Lyndon Johnson wanted men around he could trust.

“How loyal is that man?” he asked a White House staffer about a potential hand.

“Well, he seems quite loyal, Mr. President,” said the staffer.

“I don’t want loyalty. I want
loyalty.
I want him to kiss my ass in Macy’s window at high noon and tell me it smells like roses. I want his pecker in my pocket.” When Neil Sheehan interviewed Johnson about McNamara in early 1967, before the break on the war, he was surprised to hear Johnson talk about McNamara in terms not of ability, but of loyalty. “If you asked those boys in the Cabinet to run through a buzz saw for their President, Bob McNamara would be the first to go through it. And I don’t have to worry about Rusk either. Rusk’s all right. I never have to worry about those two fellows quitting on me.” And even two years later, after he had parted from McNamara, after the pressure of the war had become too much for the Secretary of Defense, Johnson could talk with more compassion about McNamara than he could about McGeorge Bundy. In his opinion McNamara had folded, had come apart not just because the war was too much of a problem for his ethical composition but because he had been torn between two great, perhaps even subconscious loyalties: one to the Kennedy family, which had meant a commitment to Robert Kennedy, along with his ambitions and dovishness, and a second to Lyndon Johnson and his Presidency, and that was too much. The other loyalty, Johnson would say, was a prior one. But of Bundy he felt there was no real loyalty to the Kennedys (a judgment in which Robert Kennedy had concurred), nor to Johnson, but only toward self and sense of class. The Kennedys, of course, wanted comparable loyalty, but they were always more subtle about it, and more secure in themselves, and thus less paranoiac; they had a far better sense of touching people by seeming to appeal to higher instincts. The Kennedys were for civil rights, therefore people who were for civil rights should be for the Kennedys. The Kennedys demanded loyalty out of confidence, Johnson demanded it out of insecurity. The Kennedys were for the same things you were for, that was their message; they offered you the best chance of achieving it, and by turning to you, they demonstrated your own excellence. They never presented people of considerable self-esteem with such blatant either-or choice of loyalty as Johnson did, and they somehow managed to put it on a higher plane. They were plagued by fewer doubts about themselves and they had fewer fears that intimates might reveal their shortcomings to a threatening and hostile world at large.