LBJ: The White (House) album

Lyndon Johnson's secret tapes offer extraordinary insight into the sometimes ugly reality of running the USA -- and into a complex man's tortured soul.

By Douglas Cruickshank

Nov. 29, 2001 | I observed brain surgery once. For several hours I stood behind two surgeons as they successfully removed a tumor from a woman's brain, then put her back together. It was fascinating to watch, and surprising how much the procedure resembled carpentry -- fine cabinetwork, but carpentry nonetheless. Recently I discovered something equally surprising: Managing national and international affairs as practiced at the chief executive level is a lot like carpentry, too -- but not fine cabinetwork.

I've been reading and listening to Michael Beschloss' "Reaching for Glory: Lyndon Johnson's Secret White House Tapes, 1964-1965," the second volume in a trilogy, which also comes as a set of six CDs. (The first volume, "Taking Charge: The Johnson White House Tapes, 1963-1964," was published in 1997.) For anyone, but especially for those who lived through Johnson's presidency -- a time when the country was coming unglued domestically and what LBJ called "that bitch of a war" was exporting the American nightmare to Southeast Asia -- "Reaching for Glory" is not only compelling, it's an addictive lesson in how history is hammered together, often with little attention to craftsmanship. (The audio version is an essential complement to the print book; if you must choose one or the other, get the CDs.)

There are conversations between the president and J. Edgar Hoover, George Wallace, Robert McNamara, Robert Kennedy, Hubert Humphrey, Martin Luther King, Bill Moyers, McGeorge Bundy, Dean Rusk, John Connally, Gerald Ford, Dwight Eisenhower, Harry Truman and numerous other key figures from inside and outside the administration who governed the country during some of its most fractious, polarized years. All the wide brush strokes of U.S. history made from September 1964 through August 1965 are here -- the Johnson vs. Goldwater election ("We've got a bunch of goddamned thugs here taking us on"), Vietnam ("I don't think anything is going to be as bad as losing, and I don't see any way of winning"), civil rights ("If Alabama won't let a Nigra vote because of the poll tax and I can prove it, I'll go directly to the Supreme Court") -- but the undertones, the personal shadings as rendered in tangential conversations and Lady Bird Johnson's tape-recorded diary entries, which appear throughout the book, are often just as illuminating. (As Richard Reeves pointed out in a recent interview while discussing Pat Nixon's role: "What spouses do for you is tell you who you can trust.")

In the case of Lady Bird's diary, which she recorded virtually every day (it's convincingly read by Judith Ivey on the CDs), the first lady is the subtext that makes LBJ's hewing of the main plot points all the more intriguing -- or is he the subtext? For those more captivated by what happens on the periphery of history than the giant steps themselves, the side stories are the most revelatory: It's there where the players' personal constitutions appear in high relief, and as any novelist or screenwriter will tell you, the best tales are those where character drives plot. And it's in the president's personal discussions, with Lady Bird, his daughters and others, where you get the fullest sense of his nature. Emotional, almost fragile, LBJ was complicated and complex-ridden, a classic tortured soul wrapped in the armor of a charming and formidable operator.

The book begins with a prologue -- an eerie phone conversation between Jacqueline Kennedy and Johnson, which took place on the afternoon of Dec. 2, 1963, just 10 days after President Kennedy had been assassinated in Dallas. As with all the conversations in "Reaching for Glory," LBJ was the only one who knew it was being recorded.

Jacqueline: Mr. President?

LBJ: I just wanted you to know you were loved and by so many and so much and ...

Jacqueline: Oh, Mr. President!

LBJ: ... I'm one of them.

Their chat continues in that vein, with Jackie referring to a supportive note LBJ had sent her the day before and a response she'd sent to the president through JFK's appointments secretary. Johnson tells Jackie to call him anytime, he flatters her, reassures her, they joke a little. It probably didn't last more than a couple of minutes, if that. The eeriness comes from hearing Jackie's voice -- a pain-filled baby-doll whisper from far out on the ragged edge of misery: raw, exhausted, on the verge; it's a Betty Boop-like caricature of a female voice.

LBJ: Listen, sweetie. Now, the first thing you've got to learn -- you've got some things to learn, and one of them is that you don't bother me. You give me strength.

Jacqueline: But I wasn't going to send you in one more letter. I was so scared you'd answer.

They talk a bit longer, then it ends:

Jacqueline: Thank you for calling me, Mr. President. Goodbye.

LBJ: Bye, sweetie. Do come by.

Jacqueline: [warmly:] I will.

Throughout their conversation, her inflection hauntingly resembles the kittenish tones of Marilyn Monroe singing "Happy Birthday" to JFK, while LBJ sounds like a comforting uncle, perhaps a little too willing to lay on the comfort. (In another phone call, five days later, he closes by saying, "Give Caroline and John-John a hug for me . . . Tell them I want to be their daddy!") The Dec 2. conversation, with its novelistic foreshadowing, is the perfect opening scene -- a beautiful widow at the threshold of collapse talking with the man about to preside over a country going out of its collective mind both at home and abroad, and, ultimately, his own physical, emotional and political ruin.

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