Books: Two Tragic Presidencies

JFK AND LBJ: THE INFLUENCE OF PERSONALITY UPON POLITICS by Tom Wicker. 297 pages. Morrow. $5.

John Kennedy promised to “get this country moving again”; yet he did not remotely reach his legislative goals in Congress. Lyndon Johnson salvaged much of Kennedy’s program; yet he sacrificed his grand consensus in the unpopular Viet Nam war. What defeats great presidential expectations?

Tom Wicker, chief of the New York Times’s Washington bureau, suggests that the answer is a fatal euphoria. What Kennedy overlooked was the fact that Congress had no intention of carrying out his campaign promises unless forced to by public pressure. To be sure, Kennedy soon won a crucial fight for what realists call “the third house” —the Southern-dominated House Rules Committee, which can stop almost any bill from reaching a floor vote. But as Author Wicker tells it, Kennedy thus learned too well that Government is a matter of “men, not measures.” Seeking more support, he wooed Southern segregationists, and lost Northern-liberal respect in the process—most notably after he had succumbed to Roman Catholic pressure groups by offering federal aid to parochial schools in his education legislation. When the bills died in 1961, amid the Bay of Pigs disaster, says Wicker, Kennedy lost Congress—and at his death in 1963, was widely regarded as close to presidential failure.

Red Green Light. Wicker argues that Lyndon Johnson was even more victimized by the “ebullience of power.” As a firm believer in “the domino theory” of Communist aggression, Johnson privately vowed two days after Kennedy’s death: “I am not going to lose Viet Nam.” But as a Southerner who was avid to rise above sectionalism, Johnson had a passion for reflecting the broadest possible national consensus, which lured him into running as a peace candidate and stating publicly in 1964: “We don’t want our American boys to do the fighting for Asian boys.” According to Wicker, this “green light” so encouraged the Communists that by early 1965, South Viet Nam was virtually defeated.

Newly armed with history’s biggest plurality, writes Wicker, Johnson at that moment was politically free to liquidate a war he had not started. By the 1968 election, Viet Nam might have become a dead issue, long overshadowed by Great Society triumphs. (Of course it might also have become a very live issue, had it been followed by other conflicts in Asia.) Instead, banking on his mandate, Johnson chose escalation, convinced that he could avoid a big land war by using “cheap” airpower to bomb the North. But the result, Wicker argues, was that Johnson simply created in the South big airbases that invited guerrilla attack and required all the more U.S. troops for their protection. Not only did the Northern bombing prove relatively ineffective against the Southern enemy; it was also difficult to halt, for fear of handing Hanoi a psychological victory.

Selected Facts. What flaws this analysis of the Viet Nam tragedy is the fact that it was written before Johnson’s recent abdication—an event that might have balanced some of Wicker’s more emotional judgments. That is not the only omission in what Wicker candidly calls an “imaginative reconstruction” of two tragic presidencies. Author of six published novels, Wicker is too prone to select the facts that intensify his drama. He scarcely mentions Kennedy’s exciting effect on the national mood and his great coup in the Cuban missile crisis. Wicker almost totally overlooks at least the possibility that Johnson’s war policy may be ultimately vindicated. The result is a persuasive book—but one that ignores the fact that history has a way of redeeming the actions of Presidents whose contemporaries were too quick to call them failures.