HISTORICAL NOTES: L.B.J.: Naked to His Enemies

More than anything, Lyndon Baines Johnson wanted to be loved—by his family, his friends, his staff, the nation, everybody. He liked to envision himself as a benevolent dictator of the world, supplying every living soul with housing, clothing, a job and eternal peace. Fate could not have been more cruel, then, in denying him the love he craved, in making him so hated during the latter part of his presidency that he dared not venture outside the White House. In his bewilderment and despair, he ruefully asked: “How is it possible that people could be so ungrateful to me after I have given them so much?”

Doris Kearns, 33, associate professor of government at Harvard, describes that last bitter period of L.B.J.’s presidency in Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream, a biography to be published by Harper & Row in June. It is a sad, dispiriting account of ebbing power and influence, of vast ego and appetites deflated, of a world collapsed.

Psychic Distance. Johnson first met Kearns at a party for White House Fellows in the spring of 1967. A Ph.D. candidate at Harvard, she had been selected for the program even though she had written a magazine article entitled “How to Remove L.B.J. in 1968.” When it was Kearns’ turn to dance with the President, he boasted that Harvard men “can’t dance like I’m dancing now.” She obviously waltzed her way into his affections, because after working for several months in the Labor Department, Johnson had her transferred to the White House. As he prepared to leave office, he asked her to come to Texas to help with his memoirs. She replied that she wanted to continue working with the poor in Cambridge, Mass. Never mind, said L.B.J.; he would find her bigger and better poor in Texas. She finally succumbed and spent much of the next four years at the Texas ranch.

Johnson doubtless expected love at least from his biographer, but in this, too, he was to be disappointed. He told Kearns that she reminded him of his mother, and so he unburdened himself of dreams, ambitions and regrets that he had confided, apparently, to no one else. He hoped that she would salvage his reputation at Harvard, citadel of real and imagined enemies. But Kearns was too well trained on alien terrain and kept her psychic distance from her overwhelming subject. Imbued with some of the 1960s suspicions of practical politics, she is fair to L.B.J. but unfailingly cool. To her, Johnson is a monstrous amalgam of political good and evil, worthy of meticulous dissection. Her scalpel is cutting, and the wounds inflicted will not be easily healed by later biographers. In her book, Johnson is naked to his enemies as he never was when alive.

The book provides no confirmation of rumors that author and subject were lovers. Kearns insists that the relationship was strictly literary. She was bemused but scarcely impressed by the gifts he lavished on her. She received no less than a dozen electric toothbrushes, a gift L.B.J. favored for friends, “for then I know that from now until the end of their days, they will think of me the first thing in the morning and the last at night.”

Bolstering her narrative with a rather cumbersome psychohistory, Kearns tries to explain Johnson’s massive drive to power. She makes much of the fact that his father, a small farmer and real estate trader, insisted on displays of manliness from him, while his mother emphasized gentility. Lavish with her love at times, his mother withheld it when he displeased her. Out of these inner conflicts, Kearns traces the development of a tormented, driven politician. But Johnson may also have been shaped as much by Texas and national political traditions. His political education began amid rural poverty and the

Depression; he was schooled in governmental activism by the New Deal. As he scaled the political ladder in the years following World War II, Americans expected increasing benefits from Government, and L.B.J. was happy to provide them. He subscribed to what could be called a politics of plenty: more of everything for everybody. He was the ideal President for the insatiable 1960s.

Formidable Seduction. Johnson’s brains were inferior to very few—his genes and his drives were second to none. He lacked only a sense of proportion and restraint. Early in life, he demonstrated a formidable gift of persuasion. He had an uncanny knack for attaching himself to men of power—in school, in the New Deal bureaucracy, in Congress, in the Senate. He was miffed that his talent was dismissed as “arm-twisting”; he considered it soul-catching of a very high order. Intellectuals, he complained to Kearns, “never take time to think about what goes on in these one-to-one sessions because they have never been involved in persuading anyone to do anything. They’re just like a pack of nuns who’ve convinced themselves that sex is dirty and ugly and low-down because they can never have it. They see it as rape instead of seduction and they miss the elaborate preparation before the act is finally done.”

Johnson practiced this seduction on everyone. He told Kearns: “You learn that Stewart Alsop cares a lot about appearing to be an intellectual and a historian, so whenever you talk to him, play down the gold cufflinks which you play up with TIME magazine, and to him, emphasize your relationship with F.D.R. and your roots in Texas. You learn that Mary McGrory likes dominant personalities and Doris Fleeson cares only about issues, so with McGrory, you come on strong and with Fleeson you make yourself sound like some impractical red-hot liberal.”

Finest Hour. With her occasional bias of the 1960s, Kearns tends to belittle L.B. J.’s politics of consensus. But she understands that consensus was needed after John Kennedy’s assassination and that Johnson provided it in what was his finest hour. Reaching the presidency on that grim November day was no joy to Johnson, as he explained: “For millions of Americans, I was still illegitimate, a naked man with no presidential covering, a pretender to the throne. And then there was Texas, my home, the home of both the murder and the murder of the murderer. And then there were the bigots and the dividers and the Eastern intellectuals who were waiting to knock me down before I could even begin to stand up. The whole thing was almost unbearable.” But Johnson presided over the transition with such compassion and acumen that for a few months at least, he came close to achieving his lifelong ambition of getting everybody to love him.

His relations with the Kennedy family and their supporters remained ambivalent; they were too much identified with the enemy intellectuals. On the one hand, he was more than generous to Kennedy appointees; he kept many of them on and gave them a major role in Government. But he felt the need to humiliate others. For Johnson, love too often meant submission; and once a man submitted, Johnson despised him. Crudity was a favorite weapon. With great glee, L.B.J. described a “delicate Kennedyite” whom he dragged into the bathroom to continue a conversation. He “found it utterly impossible to look at me while I sat on the toilet.” L.B.J. badgered him to come closer so that they could talk. “Then began the most ludicrous scene I had ever witnessed. Instead of simply turning around and walking over to me, he kept his face away from me and walked backward, one rickety step at a time. It certainly made me wonder how that man had made it so far in the world.” Johnson was obsessed with Robert Kennedy, whom he considered as skilled and ruthless as himself in acquiring and exercising power. L.B.J. resisted all the Kennedy supporters who importuned him to put Bobby on the ticket in 1964. He felt that if Kennedy were his Vice President, he could not be his own man and could never prove his electability.

Johnson hoped that his Great Society would win him lasting fame and appreciation. In the most discerning part of her book, Kearns describes how the Great Society failed because of Johnson’s lack of follow-through. All his energies were devoted to getting his programs passed by Congress; when that was done, he lost interest or his attention was diverted by the growing agony of Viet Nam. Johnson, writes Kearns, was surprisingly unaware of the implications of his Great Society. He simply assumed that it would appeal to rich and poor, black and white alike. It came as a shock when the programs sharpened rivalry and hostility among various ethnic groups who were battling for their share of the pie. Johnson seemed similarly oblivious to the most innovative feature of the Great Society program: the community action groups established as part of the antipoverty program. He had no intention, he told Kearns, of putting his programs in the hands of amateurs, who often wasted money and warred against elected officials. He assumed that the programs would be run by some ideal administrator, like Chicago Mayor Richard Daley. In the case of the Great Society, Johnson was a father who did not know his own child.

The riots in Watts, coming the same week in 1965 that Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, were the beginning of his disillusionment. At first, he refused to take calls from generals urging him to send in the National Guard. “We needed decisions from him,” said White House Aide Joseph Califano. “But he simply wouldn’t respond.” Events had confounded him. “How is it possible after all we’ve accomplished?” he kept asking. “How could it be? Is the world topsy-turvy?”

Tall Tale. Riots at home were followed by the growing Viet Nam War instead of the eternal peace Johnson had envisioned. As the attacks on him mounted, according to Kearns, he gradually drifted from reality. Not always scrupulous about separating fact -from fiction, he began to treat politics as a tall tale with villains lurking everywhere. “Two or three intellectuals started it all,” he explained. “They produced all the doubt, they and the columnists in the Washington Post, the New York Times, Newsweek and LIFE.” Then Bobby Kennedy joined the conspiracy, then Martin Luther King, then the Communists who “control the three networks and the 40 major outlets of communication.” “And isn’t it funny that you could always find Soviet Ambassador Dobrynin’s car in front of Reston’s house the night before [New York Times Columnist James] Reston delivered a blast on Viet Nam?”

Kearns says that L.B.J. might have been putting her on a bit, but his words carried conviction.

“This continual concentration on conspiracy,” she writes, “squandered a large amount of energy.”

In the last weeks of his presidency, Johnson was consumed with his failure. “Hating the days, Johnson hated the nights even more,” writes Kearns. He had recurring nightmares of paralysis; he dreamed that while he lay in bed immobilized, his staff divided up his power. In his youth, he had dreamed that he was driving a herd of cattle out of a swamp; now he fantasized that he was mired in the swamp unable to save himself. Finally, he would get out of bed and prowl the White House corridors with a flashlight until he reached the portrait of Wood-row Wilson, who was paralyzed by a stroke during his presidency. The picture was strangely soothing to Johnson, who seemed reassured by the fact that Wilson was dead and he, Johnson, was still alive. “He could not rid himself of the suspicion that a mean God had set out to torture him in the cruelest manner possible,” writes Kearns. “His suffering no longer consisted of his usual melancholy; it was an acute, throbbing pain, and he craved relief. More than anything, he wanted peace and quiet. An end to the pain.”