LBJ Sounds Off
The president of the United
States had a problem: His pants didn't quite fit. That was by no means his only
problem. It was, after all, the summer of 1964. Lyndon Baines Johnson had been
president for nine months. Already, he had signed the Civil Rights Act,
accelerated the war in Vietnam, and watched entire neighborhoods in Harlem go
up in smoke. Now, on Aug. 11, Johnson telephoned Joe Haggar, president of a
clothing company, from the Oval Office. "If you don't want me running around
the White House naked," Johnson told Haggar, "you better get me some
clothes."
Then
Johnson described in detail how he wanted Haggar to make six new pairs of
pants. "Now, another thing, the crotch, down where your nuts hang, it's always
a little too tight," said Johnson. "So when you make them up, give me an inch
where I can let it out there, because they cut me. They're just like riding a
wire fence." The image of Johnson in the White House naked--or, as he
pronounced it, "nekkid"--is not one I am anxious to ponder. (Do your own
pondering; click for an audio excerpt.) Yet it floats up from the sea of
recently released recordings of conversations that Johnson taped secretly in
July and August 1964. Most of us who were alive back then remember what the
public LBJ sounded like--ponderous, faux-sincere, amazingly awkward for a man
reputed to be one of the most persuasive politicians of the age. The private
LBJ revealed on the tapes may be no more lovable, but he is, at least, more
understandable.
As I pursue my research on the Johnson family in my
cagelike cubbyhole in the LBJ library in Austin, Texas, I listen to his voice
and remember how it sounded when I was a kid growing up in a forlorn little
timber town in Texas. Then Johnson seemed all-powerful, Jehovahlike in the
execution of his swift and terrible authority. Everything about him--his body,
his ranch, his Lincolns, his bear hugs, but most of all, his voice--seemed
ridiculously out of proportion. Even at 13, I understood that when the rest of
the country heard Johnson's voice, it thought immediately and bitterly of
Texas, where John F. Kennedy, the president with the graceful voice, was
murdered. God, I used to think every time Johnson grabbed another microphone,
why does he have to sound like such a hick?
His was the unapologetic
voice of those who used to be called "yellow-dog Democrats," country people who
bragged that they would rather vote for old yellow dogs than Republicans. Texas
is mostly urban now and the yellow-dog Democrats are all gone, doomed to
extinction--as Johnson knew they would be--by the passage of the Civil Rights
Act in 1964. Texas has a Republican governor, and it has two Republicans in the
U.S. Senate, and for the most part, all its people talk as if they grew up in
California and are auditioning for the latest Coca-Cola commercial. We aren't
hicks anymore.
Johnson
was the last of the really big hicks. Yet, as you eavesdrop on him in
recordings he left for posterity, like Dorothy peeking behind the screen at the
Wizard, you find not a giant but a fearful and uncertain man with a very big
voice.
In a conversation with Bill Moyers July 7, the
president sounds like a tyrant one moment, a confused child the next. "Don't
just lope off," says an exasperated Johnson, speaking to Moyers as if he were a
horse. "I want to know where I can reach you on a minute's notice." Then his
voice drops an octave or two, and he becomes more subdued. He warns Moyers not
to let the War on Poverty go too far, and to keep it out of the hands of
Kennedy's men. Eventually Johnson would go on to surpass the early New Deal,
but at this moment, he didn't know how to proceed.
What he
wanted, he told Moyers, was a poverty program that would hire high-school
students who were about to drop out, and put them to work picking rocks off
highways or sweeping the floors of government buildings. "Now I never heard of
any liberal outfits where you could subsidize anybody," Johnson tells Moyers.
"I'm against all that. If you want to do it in the Peace Corps, then that's
your private thing and it's the Kennedys'; but my Johnson program, I'm against
subsidizing any private organization." Beneath the bellow (click ), you can
tell how baffled he is by the enormity of what he had earlier promised the
nation--"an end to poverty and racial injustice in our time"--and picture the
deep furrows of anxiety on his brow.
Or listen to him talk with Robert Kennedy, whose family
still holds the nation in thrall. The conversation took place July 4, 1964. It
was a courtesy call, but tensions between Kennedy and Johnson were at an
all-time high. Kennedy was still attorney general but was pressing to be named
Johnson's running mate in that year. Johnson, however, wanted nothing more than
to dump Bobby. He placed the call from his ranch in Johnson City.
"Hi,
general," Johnson says, straining to be polite. "How's Texas?" asks Kennedy,
his accent as thick as his barely concealed resentment toward Johnson. Briefly,
he tells Johnson that he believes the Chamber of Commerce in Jackson, Miss.,
had agreed to follow the law and desegregate schools; but he doesn't really
seem too interested in the problem. The following year, Kennedy would become
more committed to civil rights, but in 1964, he was still equivocal, partly
because he was worried about whether Communists had infiltrated the civil
rights movement. On this particular day, he just sounds tired, all worn out.
"Do you want to talk to one of your girlfriends?" he asks Johnson, trying to
get rid of him.
A few seconds later, Jackie Kennedy comes on
the line. As absurd as it may seem, she and Johnson sound like a couple of
suitors (click to listen in on the courtship). "Did you have a good day?"
Johnson asks the widow, who coos that her day was just fine. Johnson then tells
her he has been on his new ski boat all day and has become a little sunburned.
"You'll look marvelous with a sunburn," she tells him, sounding all airy and
breathless. It is a mesmerizing moment, one that shattered my childhood
illusions. Clearly the Kennedys loathed Johnson, but they were as hypocritical
as he was.
Twenty-five days after that conversation, Johnson invited Kennedy to the Oval
Office and told him face to face that he didn't want him as a running mate. In
late August, Kennedy announced for the U.S. Senate race in New York, but not
before he had had a conversation with Johnson in which he admitted his own
insecurities about making the race. "I think it's damn tough," Kennedy told
Johnson, sounding whiny. "I'd like to run. If I lose, then it's a reflection on
the whole family."
Johnson encouraged Kennedy to run and promised to do
whatever he could to help him. "I'm prepared to say what is desirable," he
tells him. "I have said that I highly regard you and that you have a bright
future, and that the things about our relationship were without foundation. You
know New York better than I do. It might be desirable for me to say nothing."
This was Johnson at his most evocative, trying to ease Kennedy out of his way
while sucking up to him. It is the side of Johnson that we are most familiar
with, Johnson as the brilliant conniver, trying so diligently and without
success to free himself from the spell of the Kennedys.
He
couldn't free himself, of course, not from the Kennedys, not from anyone. Here
was a man who whispered terrible, dark things about himself under his
breath.
On Aug. 25, after the Democratic convention had
opened in Atlantic City, N.J., Johnson, then 56 years old, threatened in three
recorded conversations to withdraw from the presidential race. Johnson actually
drafted a withdrawal statement and read it to his press secretary, George
Reedy. (To hear Johnson read a statement he never gave, click .)
The
president was overcome with doubts, which he expressed later that day to Walter
Jenkins, a quiet, gentle man who served in effect as his chief of staff. "I
don't think a white Southerner is the man to unite this nation in this hour,"
he told Jenkins. "I don't know who is, and I don't even want that
responsibility. ... I've had doubts about whether a man born where I was born,
raised like I was raised, could ever satisfy the Northern Jews, Catholics, and
union people." He worried that he might be going crazy, and fretted over
running against Barry Goldwater. "I really, I do not believe, Walter, that I
can physically and mentally ... Goldwater's had a couple of nervous breakdowns,
and I don't want to be in this place ... and I don't, I do not believe I can
physically and mentally carry the responsibilities of the bomb, and the world,
and the Nigras, and the South, and so on and so forth." (To hear Johnson whine,
click . To hear him whine some more, click .)
Johnson does not really mean what he is saying, of course.
If he had withdrawn from the race, Bobby Kennedy would have run, something
Johnson's pride could not have tolerated. What he wants from Jenkins is pity.
Five minutes later, in another conversation, Johnson can be heard giving
Jenkins instructions on how he wants Hubert Humphrey to work the floor of the
convention. Yet, in this conversation with Jenkins, it is possible to perceive
the depth of Johnson's despair.
"I don't see any reason I
ought to seek the right to endure the anguish of being here," said Johnson
tearfully. "They think I want great power. What I want is great solace and a
little love, that's all I want." He presses down hard on the word "love," too
hard, and it comes out in an apoplexy of twang. "Luv," he tells Jenkins, "a
little luv."
"You have a lot of that, Mr.
President," Jenkins tells him softly.
