FLAWED GIANT: Lyndon Johnson and His Times 1961-1973
By Robert Dallek
Oxford University Press, 754 pages, $35
Robert Dellick, a presidential historian of prodigious energy, has now completed his Johnsonian ordeal.
Seven years ago, with the appearance of the first volume of his political biography of Lyndon Johnson, he confirmed his magisterial rank in American historical scholarship. “Lone Star Rising” took Johnson from the hard times of his Texas rearing through his provincial education, his almost forced entry into Congress and on to his highly visible and skillfully manipulative career in the Senate. It culminated with a close study of Johnson the perfected politician during his time of dominance as majority leader there.
In this second volume, which takes Johnson through his vice presidential, presidential and post-presidential years, Dallek’s tone shifts from major to minor key. We enter here into the realm of tragedy; not merely the tragedy of an individual life confounded and defeated by its omnipresent flaws, but also the tragedy of a ruinous foreign policy that became, in some incalculable measure, hostage to those flaws after Johnson’s sudden ascent to the presidency on Nov. 22, 1963.
Yet, in the first months following John Kennedy’s assassination, his successor-who, according to Dallek, had felt caged and often humiliated as vice president-performed superbly in bringing the nation through a dark and despairing time. What gave us heart was, at first, Johnson’s dignified and forward-looking speech to a joint session of Congress only five days after the murder in Dallas. Dallek evokes the scene vividly, with Johnson asking the help of all Americans as he takes up ” ‘the awesome burden of the Presidency’ “:
“Johnson described Kennedy’s dreams of a better America and a more peaceful world and reminded the country of JFK’s words, ‘ “let us begin.” Today, in this moment of new resolve, I would say to all my fellow Americans, let us continue.’ Thirty-four bursts of prolonged applause interrupted Johnson’s twenty-five minute speech. The enthusiasm for his words in Congress reflected the national response.”
One of the many merits of this important book is that Dallek gives us an almost day-by-day account (indeed, an arm-twist-by-arm-twist record) of how Johnson then rushed forward all the domestic legislation that, taken together, constituted his program for a Great Society.
One reads elsewhere of Johnson’s irresistible wheeler-dealer skills; of how he pressed his will upon reluctant legislators in search of their votes or, with others, in search of their administrative assistance or their public endorsements. Such accounts of Johnson’s powers of influence have come from his White House associates George Reedy, Richard Goodwin and Bill Moyers, and we have similar descriptions from Doris Kearns Goodwin, Robert Caro and even from Johnson’s most hostile biographer, Ronnie Dugger.
From Dallek we now receive, in welcome anecdotal specificity, a much more complete portrait of Johnson at work exerting influence and control. Sometimes he flattered and cajoled; often he threatened, raged, intimidated and humiliated; he lied easily and inventively. And always he was the master of detail and knew more than any of his targets about the bills he was pushing or the plots he was hatching and the problems they were intended to re-dress. Thus, from Lyndon Johnson’s hands, the nation received the putative gifts of the Economic Opportun-ity Act, Medicare, the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, and many other measures of reform.
Dallek, as a scholar of realpolitik, does of course admire and even relish Johnson’s manipulative skills. He also credits Johnson with sincere social concern and with the conviction that these new programs were necessary to redeem the nation from poverty, inequality and racism. He believed, as well, that they were essential to building his own historical reputation. But, in Dallek’s view, one of the many flaws of this “giant” was his great impatience and distractibility. Thus Johnson and the confused men around him-often off-balace as they strived to please their irascible patron-rarely knew how to follow through. The considerable powers they had persuaded Congress to give them were usually put to only partial, and often self-defeating, use.
A tragic-comic instance may have been the War on Poverty, for which neither Johnson nor Sargent Shriver -reluctantly persuaded to jump in as director without any preparation -was able to develop a proper, graft-free, implementation model.
A commonplace of modern political history is the judgment that but for the escalation of the Vietnam War, Johnson would have left a record as one of our greatest presidents. The failure to achieve the Great Society is seen by liberals as due to the waste of our resources, lives and energies in Vietnam. For conservatives, it was doomed by the social law that economic systems cannot be improved, but only worsened, by legislative and bureaucratic intervention.
Dallek, whom one discerns to be of the moderate liberal persuasion, is tempted toward the view that Vietnam derailed the Great Society by derailing the president who was trying to bring it into existence. But he is too good a historian to settle for so simple a tale.
The greater significance of the war escalated by Johnson-and McNamara, Rusk, Rostow, Taylor and the Bundy brothers-lay not in its effects upon the domestic economy but rather in these bitter facts: It was a conflict that killed 55,000 Americans and uncounted millions of Southeast Asians (especially if one includes such secondary effects as the Cambodian genocide), and apparently had little influence upon the future of communist power in the world. Yet another arguably harmful long-range consequence was the culture of rage and cynicism that grew from the domestic protest against the war and that, in derivative but disruptive form, still persists.
Dallek has given us a great narrative history, superbly researched, richly detailed, sensitively nuanced and compellingly told. But the narrative method works against the clear assignment of responsibility, the precise location of cause. The persisting question from that time is: Who led the forced march into the quagmire? Was it Johnson or his inherited cabal of “the best and the brightest”? Or was it, as some would have it, yet another instance of the inexorable unreeling-through the force of situation and circumstance-of historical inevitability itself?
There is much to suggest that Robert McNamara, McGeorge Bundy and the others knew, by 1966, that the prudent course would be to get out of an unwinnable war. But, to their shame, they hid or modified these views when counseling the increasingly desperate and evermore emotionally distraught president. McNamara’s memoir of two years ago virtually confesses as much while seeking cover behind the lame excuse that the White House elite lacked proper information from the field. If McNamara cannot acknowledge his portion of the guilt, perhaps Bundy was getting ready to do so. James Thompson, who was Bundy’s assistant on the National Security Council, has recently revealed that, at the time of his death in 1996, his former boss was “working on a book about the war whose major message was that the Vietnam war was a terrible mistake.”
From Dallek’s study one reader comes away with this tragic conclusion: Johnson was, or became, too deranged to be able to judge reasonably; he became the prisoner of his courtiers who, in turn, were caught in the dilemma of not being able to tell their chief that they had been mistaken and that extrication from Vietnam-even if it would exact a serious domestic political cost-was the only reasonable and moral expedient.
Johnson was simply too submissive to his aides, the “Harvards” whom he grudgingly thought superior to himself even as he went on intimidating them. He was, finally, too impulsive and depressive, too preoccupied with misconceived political exigencies and with the contemptuous judgments that others might form if he failed “to bring home the coonskin on the wall.” As Dallek says of him in a prefatory note that signals the conclusions to come:
“(T)his is a biography about a brilliant, highly effective, but deeply troubled man. At times, Johnson came frighteningly close to clinical paranoia. His presidency raises questions about executive incapacity that can neither be ignored nor easily addressed.”
That these same questions might be raised about two of Johnson’s successors is a cautionary consideration not easily dismissed.
