TAKING CHARGE:
The Johnson White House Tapes, 1963-1964
Edited and with commentary by Michael R. Beschloss
Simon & Schuster, 591 pages, $30
Everyone-well, maybe not everyone-has at one time or another wished to be a fly on the wall in the corridors of power at some pivotal historical moment. Imagine yourself listening in as Napoleon plots strategy at Waterloo, as Jefferson and the Founding Fathers debate the wording of the Declaration of Independence, or as Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin divide up the postwar world at Yalta. Thanks to Lyndon Johnson’s decision to tape-record his White House conversations during his five-year presidency, and thanks to this superbly edited collection of those tapes by historian and PBS commentator Michael Beschloss, we can now eavesdrop on the Oval Office at one of the most critical junctures in American history.
This book, the first of a multivolume anthology, covers the period from Nov. 22, 1963, when Vice President Johnson was sworn in as president after the Kennedy assassination, to his fateful decision to begin bombing North Vietnam after the Tonkin Gulf incident in August 1964. But “Taking Charge” is no mere dry compilation of transcripts. Johnson’s conversations, with everyone from Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara to a hairdresser hired to style his wife’s and daughters’ hair, have been shaped by Beschloss’ deft editorial hand and illuminated by his cogent and economical historical commentaries. I found this book mesmerizing and the meticulousness of Beschloss’ research nothing short of awesome. The background he provides helped me put Johnson’s conversations in context; more importantly, it enhanced what I believe is the main virtue of this book, which is to shed an entirely new light on one of the most complex and misunderstood presidents ever to have held the office. In “Taking Charge,” a new and more attractive picture of LBJ emerges.
The tapes reveal a wide disparity between the private Johnson and the public Johnson we saw on our TV screens during the 1960s. The latter came off as humorless, awkward, remote, crude, suspicious and a little shady-a Texas backwoodsman who combined cornpone with menace. The former, we discover, was a much warmer, compassionate and perceptive man. At times, he seems like a force of nature as raw and unstoppable as a blue Texas norther, and never more so than when he has decided he needs someone to serve on a committee, or in an ambassadorship, or to support him in getting a fractious and reluctant Congress to pass civil rights and anti-poverty legislation.
The essence of LBJ pours forth in the transcripts of his conversations with his political “father,” Richard Russell, the Democratic senator from Georgia. Reading the tapes of Johnson’s (successful) attempts to persuade an ailing and unwilling Russell to serve on the Warren Commission investigating the Kennedy assassination, it’s difficult to believe Johnson is the “son.” He wheedles, cajoles, flatters, bullies and verbally pummels Russell into agreeing:
“LBJ: You’ve never turned your country down. This is not me. This is your country. . . . You’re my man on that commission and you’re going to do it! And don’t tell me what you can do and what you can’t because I can’t arrest you and I’m not going to put the FBI on you. But you’re . . . sure going to serve–I’ll tell you that!”
In another tape, he calls Sargent Shriver, then head of the Peace Corps, and tells him he’s now going to be the field marshal of LBJ’s War on Poverty. Shriver demurs, but the moment we hear Johnson say, “You’ve got to do it. You just can’t let me down,” we know that Shriver might as well order his uniform now. The Johnson full-court press wasn’t confined to the high and mighty. When LBJ, to underscore his commitment to civil rights, decided to hire a black secretary, he phoned Geraldine Whittington (employed in Special White House Assistant Ralph Dungan’s office) at her home in Washington at 9:50 p.m. At first, the tapes show, she thought someone was playing a prank, but within a minute she gave Johnson her address so a driver could pick her up and whisk her to the White House for reassignment.
Johnson had a reputation as a master political horse trader, and that reputation will be burnished by the record of his conversations with Sen. Everett Dirksen (R-Ill.), Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley and George Brown, an old LBJ crony and chairman of Brown and Root Co. But nowhere is Johnson’s skill as a wheeler-dealer more clearly seen, and put to better effect, than when he maneuvers Russell, a true son of the old segregationist South, onto his side on civil rights issues.
The passion and authenticity of LBJ’s commitment to civil rights and to alleviating the plight of the poor is confirmed time and again in these pages. You cannot help but love him when he tells Helen Douglas, former Democratic congresswoman from California, “I’m cutting down the military bases . . . and I’m taking that money and putting it into poverty.” You can’t help but love him when he personally integrates the all-white faculty club at the University of Texas at Austin by escorting Whittington to a New Year’s Eve party there, and when he tells her, after she has asked him if he knows what he’s doing, “Half of them are going to think you’re my wife, and that’s just fine with me” (according to Merle Miller’s 1980 book “Lyndon,” which Beschloss quotes in a footnote). All of his political and personal virtues–his powers of persuasion, his shrewdness, his courage, perseverance and populist beliefs–went into extending the promise of America to blacks, minorities, women and the poor. Had it not been for Vietnam, LBJ would now stand on his domestic achievements head and shoulders above the much more glamorous but far less effective JFK.
But through some awful alchemy, Johnson’s virtues were transmuted into vices by Vietnam, which took his political life while it took the actual lives of 58,000 American soldiers and millions of Vietnamese. Alas, I found it impossible to love Johnson as I read the conversations between him and various Cabinet members, aides and advisers about what to do in Southeast Asia. I can’t say I loathed him, either, but rather I saw him as a truly tragic figure, overmastered by events and his own contradictions. Indeed, the tapes of LBJ speaking with McNamara, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy and others read like the raw material for a play written by an Aeschylus or Sophocles.
At the beginning of the book, Vietnam is mentioned infrequently, while other foreign-policy problems in Cuba and Panama take precedence. But we watch, almost in a kind of helpless awe, as the distant war takes up more and more pages and consumes more and more of the president’s time and energies.
If it does nothing else, “Taking Charge” should finally lay to rest the myth that a disloyal media, an unpatriotic anti-war movement and timid liberals caused us to lose in Vietnam. Conversations between Johnson and McNamara, and between Johnson and Russell, expose the president’s agonizing doubts about Vietnam. They also show that America’s top leaders knew from the beginning that our chances of winning a military victory were slim and that Vietnam was only marginal to our interests. The session with Russell is especially pointed in this regard–and chilling, for it discloses two men who are almost schizophrenic, first advancing arguments for deepening our involvement, then backing off with arguments opposing it.
LBJ asks Russell how important Vietnam is to the U.S. Russell replies that it “isn’t important a damn bit.” Later, making a bull’s-eye prophesy, Russell calls the whole situation tragic, adding: “It’s just one of those places where you can’t win. Anything that you do is wrong.” He and Johnson, after concluding that the U.S. will have to either get in or get out, then debate the uses of air power and conclude, once again with superb prognostication, that it won’t stop the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese. The conversation ends on a poignant note that reveals Johnson’s compassionate side as it sums up his–and Cold War America’s–dilemma. He tells Russell that every time he thinks about sending American troops to Vietnam, his mind turns to a certain Anny sergeant, a father of six, who works as a White House valet.
“And what the hell are we going to get out of his (going to Vietnam)?” Johnson asks. “And it just makes the chills run up my back. . . . I just haven’t got the nerve to do it, and I don’t see any other way out of it.”
Here Johnson becomes the incarnation of Leo Tolstoy’s theory in “War and Peace” that powerful men are more the prisoners than the authors of events. The conventional wisdom holds that LBJ acted against his own best instincts because he feared an assault from his political right flank, mounted by Republicans and conservative Democrats. They would say that he “lost” Vietnam just as President Harry Truman was accused of “losing” China. At the very least, they would block passage of the civil rights and anti-poverty legislation he so cherished. There is plenty in the tapes to document that view, but there also are hints that LBJ was driven by dark forces within his own personality. At one point, he tells a reporter that Andrew Jackson was among his boyhood heroes. You can hear him playing Old Hickory on April 30, 1964, when he urges McNamara to find an American general who can come up with a way to win the war:
“What I want is somebody that can lay up some plans to trap those guys and whup hell out of them, and kill some of them. That’s what I want to do.”
“Taking Charge” is not a story; its narrative doesn’t build toward climax. Yet a kind of high point is reached on Aug. 2, 1964, when LBJ learns that two American warships have been attacked by North Vietnamese patrol boats in the Gulf of Tonkin. And you can almost hear the ominous background music when McNamara, at 11:06 a.m. on Aug. 4, tells Johnson that one of the warships, the USS Maddox, has been fired at again: “Mr. President, we just had word by telephone . . . that the destroyer is under torpedo attack.”
This famed “second attack,” we now know from McNamara’s own memoirs, probably did not occur; yet it led Johnson to order retaliatory bomb raids on North Vietnam and to the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, by which Congress gave him virtual war powers without a declaration of war, and thus opened the road into the quagmire. While reading these chapters, I could not help but recall where and what I was on those dates: a 22-year-old second lieutenant in Marine Officer’s Basic School at Quantico, Va. Six months later I would be a rifle platoon commander in Vietnam. And I could not help but remember the faces of the 15 buddies whose names are now engraved on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington. It was fascinating and appalling to listen in, albeit with the auditory version of hindsight, as the titans decided our fates and the fates of millions of other mortals.
