John Shattuck: Good evening and welcome. I’m John Shattuck, CEO of the Kennedy Library Foundation. On behalf of Deborah Leff, Director of the Kennedy Library, and our sponsors, WBUR, Boston.com, The Boston Globe, the Lowell Institute, Boston Capital, and The Boston Foundation, I’m delighted to welcome you this evening.
We at the Kennedy Library like to think of ourselves as all about, and that is about history, about what this remarkable collection of materials about the presidency of John F. Kennedy reflects: the 34,000,000 pages of documents that we have here, 8,000,000 feet of film, 300,000 photographs, 9,000 hours of recordings, 20,000 artifacts from the presidency and all that surrounded it. So it’s, as you can imagine, a rich lore.
You are viewing: What Is Michael Beschloss Religion
And not surprisingly, because of that we love presidential historians and history that they have to tell us about and all they can do to bring that history to life. And tonight we are extremely grateful that we have with us our nation’s foremost- I think I will go ahead and say that because others have-presidential historian. Michael Beschloss has been most recently given that title by Newsweek, which calls him “America’s leading presidential historian.”
His books include Taking Charge: The Johnson White House Tapes, 1963 to ’64, The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev, 1960 to ’63, Kennedy and Roosevelt: The Uneasy Alliance, and his most recent book, Reaching for Glory: The Johnson White House Tapes, 1964 to 1965, which he will be speaking about this evening.
And in this work he interprets the secretly recorded conversations of LBJ’s presidency during the crucial years in which Johnson wrestled with great issues of our time: the civil rights legislation, promotion of The Great Society, and of course, the escalation of the war in Vietnam.
Michael Beschloss not only writes history and about presidents, but he talks about them in ways that have inspired millions of people, through his appearances on television- and he’s a frequent, and I’m sure you know, regular commentator on the “News Hour” with Jim Lehrer, and he appeared in the PBS documentary, The Kennedys. And he holds degrees from Williams College and Harvard University. So he is a home-grown product of Massachusetts, even though he comes from Illinois.
He has had appointments in history at the Smithsonian Institution, at St. Anthony’s College, Oxford, and at Harvard University at the Russian Research Center.
Well, having told you about his background, I’d like to tell you a very short story about Michael Beschloss, in introducing him finally here, before asking him to come to the podium. And that is, I have on good authority that when he was eight years old and a fourth grader in Illinois, he wrote a letter to President Johnson, and the letter was written one month after the assassination of President Kennedy.
And in his letter Michael suggested that President Johnson hire, as he put it, “a large carving firm” to carve JFK into Mt. Rushmore. A wonderful tribute from someone who is to go on to become our nation’s finest presidential historian.
And here’s my good authority: it’s not Michael Beschloss himself. I told him earlier that this was a matter of public record and I was going to tell this story, and if he objected to my telling it, I was going to tell it anyway. The public record is that the letter that I’ve referred to has been retrieved by the Johnson Library and is on exhibit at the Johnson Library, and reflects the beginning of this extraordinary career of this extraordinary historian, Michael Beschloss.
We will be entertaining your purchases of his book, Reaching for Glory, in our bookstore after this session, and he has graciously agreed to sign the books afterwards. And after he’s given his remarks he will entertain comments and questions and discussion from the audience. So please join me in welcoming Michael Beschloss to our podium. [Audience applause.]
MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: John, that was so nice. Thank you. And thank you for everything that you’re doing for all of us. And all I can say is, this many years later, I still think JFK’s head should be carved in Mt. Rushmore. So maybe we can all get on that.
John was much too kind in what he said. He referred to “The News Hour” with Jim Lehrer, which I think he’s using the polite exact version of the title of the show. But I think even Mrs. Lehrer still calls it “The McNeil-Lehrer News Hour.” And it reminds me of the guy who said that “PBS is in five parts, which are”- I hope I’m going to get this right- “animals talking, English people talking, animals mating, English people mating, and “The News Hour” with Jim Lehrer.” [Audience laughter and applause.]
So I could have saved John a lot of time by just coming up and saying, “I’m the one from Category five.” And I guess this kind of talk probably comes from listening to these Johnson tapes so much, because when you listen to someone that many hours of the day- and I had to transcribe these tapes as well as listen to them very closely- you really are in great risk of becoming like the person that you’re writing about; we were talking about this at lunch.
There was one case I came across where Johnson had asked a speechwriter to write a draft of a speech, brought it in and he liked the draft. But he said, “Well, it begins, as Aristotle said, with this great quote.” And he said, “Keep the quote, but no one is going to know who the hell Aristotle was. Just keep the quote and change it to “As my daddy said” [audience laughter]- which would probably work well for Johnson as President.
It might not serve me terribly well as an historian if I took on methods like this. And this is true whatever president you write about or whatever figure; you do take on various characteristics of the person that you’re thinking about many hours of the day. And I’d even say it’s even more the case when you’re listening to tapes, because it’s not just like reading letters and diaries and memos and the kind of things that an historian or a biographer usually uses.
But when you hear that voice and it just goes on and on in your brain, I really was in grave danger of becoming a replica of Lyndon Johnson, which in certain ways would have been a good thing, and probably in other ways would not. And when I began this project of listening to these tapes and transcribing them, I thought for due diligence I should go to the two people who would be most affected if I turned into an exact replica of Lyndon Johnson, which would be my assistant and my wife.
And you know, to be really fair to my assistant, I let her listen to a tape recording of LBJ screaming at one of his assistants- and there were about 800 to choose from. And so she put the headphones on and listened, and took them off and said, “You know, I don’t really know if this is the best project for you to be doing at this point of your career, at least as long as I’m working for you.” [Audience laughter.]
But then I went to my wife. And one of the biggest revelations of these tapes is how in what a lovely way LBJ talked to Lady Bird. And I had my wife put on the headphones and listen to one of these conversations in which Lyndon says to Lady Bird, “My darling, I long to see you.” My wife took one listen to this, and she said, “This is exactly the book you should be writing.” [Audience laughter.] She said, “You could use to talk a lot more the way that he did.”
And you really do begin to get a sense of the M.O. of a president, in this case. For instance, I was down to the Johnson ranch this summer before last. And Lady Bird, I’m happy to report, is 89 years old; she’s still in very good health, and she stays at the ranch on weekends and then goes into Austin, has a house there during the weeks. And she was kind enough to have me down, and said, you know, “Look around,” because it’s still her house. And I walked around, and I walked behind the house.
And behind the house is a little car which, if you didn’t know what it was, you’d think it was probably maybe a convertible Studebaker of the early 1960’s- little small car. But there are some benefits to being a presidential historian. From my research I knew exactly what it really was. And what it really was was something called the amphicar.
And for those of you who don’t know, the amphicar was the first amphibious car that you could buy. I don’t know where you got it, but you could buy one as a private citizen in the early 1960’s. And the thing about Johnson was that any new gadget, anything that was the latest in technology, he always had to have, whether it was a car, an electric toothbrush.
Once, for instance, in about 1967, he’d get a car every year, I think for a dollar, from the Ford Motor Company. They’d send him their latest Lincoln Continental, which he’d drive around the ranch at very high speed. And he got this new car in 1967 and the dashboard was padded, and the controls were really hard for him to work- he wasn’t used to them. He said, “Well, who is the S.O.B. that redesigned this car?”
And a brave aide told him, “These were in accordance with the Transportation Act you put through Congress last year.” [Audience laughter.] The guy kept his job, I’m happy to report.
But with the amphicar-he always wanted something that was new-and I’ve got these visions-I don’t know whether this is literally true-of LBJ seeing one of the early James Bond films-maybe Dr. No or From Russia with Love, and seeing James in the driver’s seat and a babe in the passenger’s seat of an amphicar speeding across, perhaps, the Mediterranean, and Johnson saw that and said, “I’ve got to get me one of those.”
But in any case, he got this thing. And the thing about Johnson is that’s like many political leaders- but I think more than most- everything had about five objectives at any one moment.
And this was not just a frivolous thing to sort of drive around in the amphicar. One thing he used it for was this. If you were a Johnson aide, he’d say “Come down to the ranch.” If you were a new Johnson aide, he’d say, “Come down and let’s get acquainted.” And then before long he’d say, “Let’s go for a ride in my car.”
And so you’d get into what you thought was probably this convertible Studebaker. And Johnson would gun the engine- it would be going about 100 miles an hour- and he would drain his cup of Pearl beer and stop- and this is classic Johnson- to get the empty cup refilled he would simply hold the empty cup out like this, and the Secret Service agents would have to hustle at high speed to refill it, probably on pain of losing their jobs. And once it was refilled, he’d gun the engine again.
And the object of the exercise was he’d be going at high speed with the aide in the passenger seat. And suddenly, if you were the aide, you’d find that you were going at a very high rate of speed straight into Lake Lyndon B. Johnson. And I’ll have a quiz at the end of this lecture: “Guess who named Lake Lyndon B. Johnson?” [Audience laughter.] But anyway, as the car was speeding in, Johnson would say, “The brakes are failing. We’re all going to die.” So the car would begin to sink.
And the purpose of all of this was, in Johnson’s mind, when the car begins to sink, does the aide try to save his blank or does he try to save his president? [Audience laughter.] And I can report that 100 percent of the aides always tried to save their blanks. [Audience laughter.] And you’d have this scene where the car is sinking, and then finally Johnson would push a button and the gills would inflate as he’s shooting the aide a disgusted look, and it would skid across Lake Lyndon B. Johnson back to dry land.
And the point of this was not only to take the guy’s measure, but so that once he was on the White House staff, if Johnson thought he was pretending more loyalty than he thought he really was, he’d say “There’s old Joe. Pretends to be loyal to me. But when the crunch came, guess who’s blank he was trying to save?” Sort of the Lyndon Johnson School of Executive Management.
And another thing about it is that when you’re listening to Johnson on these tapes, he doesn’t say anything in anything less than a scintillating way- not language oftentimes that my mother would want me to use, especially on an occasion like this. But everything he says, you remember. For instance, he doesn’t say, “John Smith is nervous.” He’ll always say something like, “John Smith is nervous as a whore in church.” [Audience laughter.] Forgive the language, but, you know, presidential history.
Or he spent about two days with a slightly dim-witted Scandinavian king and finally got the guy into the helicopter, which took off from the South Grounds. And he throws his arm around a young aide and says, “Boy, I knew they made dumb kings. I just never knew they made kings that dumb.” [Audience laughter.]
And the biggest case was- we were talking about it earlier- some of these Texas expressions are just lost on me, coming from Illinois, and I had some Texan friends whom I would consult from time to time on various expressions. But the one that stumped all of us was, he’s telling Hubert Humphrey in the spring of 1965: “That Medicare Bill is going to go to Congress like a dose of salt through a widow-woman.” And I was completely stumped by this, as my friends were.
And finally, I was at a gathering like this in Texas, I should add, saying, “You know, Johnson says this on one of these tapes.” Anyone here who can decode this for me?” And a lady came up and said, “Don’t you realize that during Johnson’s youth, elderly ladies in Texas oftentimes used Epsom salts as laxatives?” [Audience laughter.]
So the point is that as you’re going through Johnson’s language, it’s sometimes a little bit baffling. Sometimes not exactly the most eloquent on earth, but it always does have its internal logic.
The way I started this project was in 1994 I was having dinner in Washington with Harry Middleton, who’s now just retired as Director of the Johnson Library, but was the Director at the time. And he was telling me about the fact that the Johnson Library had decided to open these tapes that LBJ had made of his private conversations. And I had known, I think, dimly about this, that Johnson had some kind of taping system.
But I think I thought that perhaps there were a few conversations that Johnson taped, but not terribly many. And I said to Harry, “Well, how many could he have taped?” And he said, “Well, as it turns out, there are 10,000 conversations that he taped from the beginning of the presidency until the end.” And I said, “Well, if that’s the case, this is going to give us a view of LBJ of a kind that we’ve never had before.”
Because, you know, I’d read all the books, and even people who knew LBJ very well would say “You know, he was unbelievable in dealing with Congress, but you really had to be there.” Or, “He told these wonderful stories, but somehow the stories just do not have the kind of impact in the retelling that they did when he told them.”
So my view was that if the tapes were legitimate, and if they were not just tapes of someone who is posturing for the microphone, saying, you know, “I’m bombing North Vietnam because of the nobility of my ideals,” or saying things that were obviously geared to future historians, this would really give you a view of Johnson that was probably essential. Because unlike other presidents, there was a huge difference between Johnson in public and Johnson in private. Especially here, I remember something that John Kennedy said during the 1960 campaign, which was, he was talking about Richard Nixon. And he said, “You know, the problem with Nixon is that every time he’s in a different setting, he has to think of which of his selves he is today.” You know, he was always sort of shading it for the audience. And in private, we know from Nixon’s tapes, he spoke very differently from the way he did in public.
One reason why JFK was almost relaxed and composed and in command was, you know, allowing for the fact that you always have to do some of this in politics, there was probably less difference between his public self and private self than you find in most political leaders. That’s one reason why John Kennedy, as a human being, was so arresting.
In Johnson’s case, this was not so.
In public, when he was at a formal occasion or when he was on television, he basically thought that the success of what he was doing would be measured by how little he resembled the way he talked and seemed in private. He thought that if people knew these vulgar stories he told and these turns of expression like some of the ones I mentioned, or some of the other things he did, they wouldn’t think that he was presidential, although that was not a word that was used in those days.
So the result of that was that when you saw Johnson on television- as John was mentioning, I was just about eight years old when he became President- you thought this almost wooden figure who looked a lot more like Grover Cleveland than like a political figure of our own period. And it probably didn’t serve him very well, because I think that if people had had more of a sense of this human being that was very much on display in the tapes, I think they would have liked him more.
I think they would have been more bound to him, and I think it would probably have been better for him politically, although he didn’t understand that at the time. So my feeling was, if you got to these tapes, you’d see what the guy was really like. And I went down to Texas and began listening to them in the Johnson Library and was absolutely hooked, and decided to do these three volumes that are excerpts from the tapes, which I’ve transcribed, with some commentary by myself explaining what’s going on.
And the problem with all this is that Harry Middleton had given me to believe that many or most of these tapes had been transcribed by Johnson’s secretary, so it would be just a matter of, you know, looking through them and deciding which ones I wanted to publish; it wouldn’t be a great deal of work. And the problem was that Johnson made these tapes not only to impress future historians with the importance of what he was doing, but also for daily business.
When Johnson was in the Senate, he had a guy listen in on a dead key extension to his telephone and make stenographic notes of his talks with Senators. And the reason for that was- I know this doesn’t happen nowadays or during the period that Paul Kirk was in Washington- but in the 1950’s occasionally a Senator would double-cross another, and Johnson had this experience once or twice.
And the result was that he wanted a transcript of the conversation so that if he was double- crossed he could call up “Bill” the next day and say “Bill, you double-crossed me yesterday. You told me, and I quote…” and Bill would wonder how he had such a perfect photographic memory. The wags in my profession refer to these transcripts which are down at the Johnson Library that were made on this dead key extension as “The Dead Key Scrolls.” [Audience laughter.] You see why historians do not earn their living at humor.
But anyway, Johnson’s idea was that the tape recorder would do the same thing, so that he would have that kind of a record that would help him as President. And these transcripts were made by these secretaries. Johnson wanted the transcripts made at night because he did not want anyone on his staff or even in his family to know that he was taping people on his telephone line, in the Oval Office, upstairs in the White House, down at the ranch, without their knowledge.
And so these poor tired secretaries at the end of the day were trying to transcribe these tapes. And it’s really tough- I can tell you- because there are background noises. In the early days there are a lot of glasses with ice cubes rattling around. But even beyond that, you hear Walter Cronkite on the television in the background. Even at one point I heard the theme song from “Rawhide,” which he was watching on the television in the Oval Office- a perfect image for Johnson.
And so they were under pressure, and these transcripts were really not very good. And the moment of truth for me in realizing that I’d have to transcribe the things myself was about 10 days into the Johnson presidency, he’s talking to John McCormack- another son of Massachusetts- who was, of course, Speaker of the House at the time. And according to the transcript, Johnson says, “John, I can’t talk to you alone because I’ve got waiting for me in my waiting room a pack of bastards.”
I figured, well, that’s what he says; goes in the book. But I listened closely and I looked at the records that he had of that day. And what he had actually said was, “John, I can’t talk to you long because I have waiting for me in my waiting room the Pakistan ambassador.” [Audience laughter.] Gives you an idea of just how hard this work is.
And, you know, as I meditated on this, I sort of thought, you know, it’s not irrational, because, you know, these secretaries had worked for him for about 30 years; they knew the way the guy talked. And the other thing is that probably among his daily visitors before he became President were much more commonly “packs of bastards” than Pakistan ambassadors. So the point is that you have to sometimes substitute your own judgment.
But one thing I was very much on guard for was that this would be a set of tapes where Johnson was painfully conscious of the fact that he was talking to a microphone and trying to sort of establish a phony record that would take in some future historian who would think that the tapes were actually legitimate. So I was listening very hard for cases in which there was something that Johnson had said on the tape that he obviously would not have wanted a future historian or future American readers to see or hear.
And I found those fairly early in the game, to my great relief. But the best example of this came- it’s in my first volume. About August of 1964 Johnson was down at the ranch and he wanted a new pair of trousers. And he, as usual, always went to the head man- it was a man in those days. So the trousers he liked were Haggar slacks.
So you hear him calling up the head of the Haggar Slacks Company in Dallas- this is in-between very important stately conversations on civil rights and Vietnam- says, “You know, I got a pair of your slacks, store-bought. And I like them, but I don’t like the way they fit.” And he goes on in extreme anatomical detail to describe why these trousers are uncomfortable. [Audience laughter.]
The only thing I can repeat- it’s in the book- but the only thing I’ll repeat here is, he says, “They’re like riding a wire fence.” [Audience laughter.] So in any case, that was that.
And about two weeks after the first volume came out, Lady Bird Johnson was kind enough to give a dinner for my wife and me down in Texas. I said, “Well, were you happy with the way that the book was received?” And she said, “Well, to be honest, Michael, I probably could have lived without hearing the Haggar slacks conversation played on television.” But she said, “You should also know it’s my grandchildren’s favorite.” So go figure.
And about a month after that I got a letter from the head of the Haggar Slacks Company- by then retired, in his early 90’s- offering me a free pair of custom-made Haggar slacks. [Audience laughter.] So who says there are no perks for historians? But the point of all of this is that the tapes provide us with- as I was saying earlier- a record and an inside, especially, into Lyndon Johnson, but to any president who made tapes of a kind that you really don’t just get from other sources.
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Because people in my line of work rely on memos and letters, declassified documents, diaries- you know, all the usual stuff, but in a way that just cannot give you some of the information you get from actually listening to a tape, hearing what a voice sounded like, hearing what the background noise was, getting a sense of the tension in the room.
And when I first began listening to these, it occurred to me so much how much I would have loved to have a tape of Abraham Lincoln on the day of Fort Sumter or FDR getting the news of Pearl Harbor. Or more recently, George W. Bush on the eleventh of September. Can you imagine what it would be like if you had a tape recorder on that plane recording the calls that he got as he was getting out the first commands on how to deal with that horrible attack?
And there’s a tape that makes this point extremely well, and poignantly and tragically. And that is that the first Johnson tape I heard was a tape from November 22nd, 1963. And what this was was when Air Force One took off from Dallas after the death of President Kennedy with the new President Johnson aboard, and Lady Bird and Jacqueline Kennedy and the President’s coffin, there was a history-minded officer, I think it was, at Andrews Air Force Base, because communications in those days from Air Force One to the ground were quite primitive. And he knew that this was going to be an historic flight. He switched on the tape recorder. And the result is that you have a tape of the communications between the plane on the ground for that whole horrible almost three hour flight from Dallas to Washington.
And I put on the tape- and I think I was the first one to hear it in about 30 years, because it had been lost. And it’s absolutely horrible. The first thing you hear is the aircraft engines screaming, and you hear people crying in the background, and the voices of nervous aides. Then you hear Johnson making his first telephone call as President. He says to the operator, “Get me Mrs. Kennedy.” And by this he means Rose Kennedy, who was in Hyannisport, who had just heard the horrible news.”
She comes on the line. Of course she’s devastated. And the operator is about to say to her, “President Johnson is on the line,” and he catches himself, knowing that for her to hear the words “President Johnson” is going to be much too much. So he says, “We have Mr. Johnson for you on the line, Mrs. Kennedy.” And she comes on. And Johnson says, “I wish to God there was something to do.”
And Lady Bird gets on and says “We’re grieving with you, and we’re just lucky that the country had your son as long as it did.” Mrs. Kennedy at that point just has to get off the telephone, quite understandably.
And the point I’m making is that for those of you or anyone who was not alive in November, 1963- an increasing number of people- or for those of us who were not on that plane, there was nothing that takes you more to the center of the historical moment of what it was like to be an American on that day or particularly on that horrible sobbing plane, than to actually hear those sounds and to hear the actual voices. That’s what a tape can do that a letter or document or diary just can’t.
And the poignant thing is that we probably won’t ever have sources like this again, because first of all, John is an eminent civil libertarian and I am, too, and I think we both agree that by the standards and sensitivities that we now have, it’s a bad thing to tape people without their knowledge. But at the same time, Presidents Kennedy and Johnson and Nixon in the 1960’s, that was a time when the technology was new and they were not as sensitive to these things as we are nowadays.
And I’m sort of of two minds. I think it’s an absolutely horrible thing to entrap people, as they did. But at the same time- that’s my overwhelming view- but at the same time, I can’t say that, you know, I don’t regret as an historian or just as an American, the fact that we will never again be able to have a window on these important historical moments of the kind that we get from the tapes of LBJ and John Kennedy and Richard Nixon.
So in any case, as I began to listen to these, and many hours a day in transcribing them, the personality does begin to take you over. I haven’t bought an amphicar and my language is probably fairly clear- I hope I’ve been okay so far. But you really do feel as if you’re living through a presidency at the side of a president. That’s just an experience I can’t compare to almost anything else. And more than that, it shows you important things about a president that we can’t get from other sources.
For instance, these tapes began being open in the early 1990’s, and we probably thought that we knew almost everything there was to know about Lyndon Johnson, because an awful lot had been written about him journalistically and historically, a lot of books.
But the point is that when you have a tape of someone’s private telephone conversations, which these mainly are- they’re occasionally a conversation in a room- you hear, in this case, Johnson talking to intimate friends like Richard Russell, the Senator from Georgia, or to his own wife, and you get a sense of these relationships between two people that we historians normally don’t get.
Because, you know, they don’t oftentimes talk about it or write about it, and there usually aren’t tapes. So you’re left to guess what the two people are saying to each other. And in the case of Johnson, it tells us things that we couldn’t get anywhere else, for instance, on Vietnam.
In the spring of 1964 Johnson begins to talk about Vietnam. And I had been under the impression from what I had read that Johnson essentially felt that this was a war that was very important to win, and he never strayed from that. But you listen to him in early 1964 saying, “What does Vietnam mean to me? What does it mean to this country? I’ve got an Army Sergeant that comes in every morning, lays out my clothes. He’s got six little old kids. He might die in Vietnam. Is it worth it?”
There was a degree of agonizing, even that early, that we didn’t know about before. And then you get a year later, which is in my second volume on Vietnam. It’s after the Inauguration in 1965, and Johnson has to make the biggest, most brutal decisions of all, which are do we escalate in Vietnam beyond the 16,000 troops there were at the time, or do we withdraw? And of course Johnson famously made the decision to escalate and go the distance to keep what he thought was the American commitment.
But from everything I had seen and read, what my assumption was that Johnson knew it would be tough, but at least got us into this war with the expectation that was a war that we could win, in perhaps two or three years time, perhaps sooner. And I began to listen to these tapes, and the tapes tell a very different story.
What you hear instead is about a week before he begins sending Marines in a big way to Vietnam, in February, 1965, he says about the Vietnam War that’s about to begin: “I can’t think of anything worse than losing, and I don’t see any way we can win.” And that’s February of 1965.
And I heard that. I mean, I was almost knocked out of my chair. Because the meaning of the President sending men and women into harm’s way into a war that privately he thinks is unwinnable, although publicly he’s saying, “Nail the coonskin on the wall and we’ll have victory in one year or two.” I mean, it was something that was really almost horrible to listen to. And what I hoped was that this was Johnson just in sort of a momentary moment of pessimism, or maybe trying to get someone to come up with a plan to win.
As you listen to him week after week, the theme grows all the more deep. He says, “I feel trapped. I feel that there’s nothing I can do,” he says to Lady Bird. And Lady Bird was kind enough to give me her tape diaries, which are also in the book. He says to her about Vietnam, “I feel as if I’m in a plane that’s crashing, and I don’t have a parachute.” It’s 1965. It’s not 1968. And so the result is that you understand Johnson and Vietnam in a very different way, I think, from what we had known before.
A president who felt he had no alternative but to escalate the war, but from the very beginning of 1965, not only was sending men and women into harm’s way without telling them into a war that he thought was a loser, but at the same time doing this knowing- and he says it more and more as the time goes on- that this was going to destroy his presidency, it was going to destroy him, and possibly do a lot to destroy this country.
And it certainly did a lot to hurt his psyche, because you listen to him in the spring and summer of 1965. He’s getting overwhelmed. He’s exhausted every night. He says to the people in the Situation Room in the White House: “I want to be woken up when the men come back from their bombing mission over North Vietnam. I want to make sure they’re safe.” He’s sleepless, he’s tortured.
He who had planned to be a Franklin Roosevelt or an Abraham Lincoln by the summer of 1965 knew inside himself that this war was going to destroy him and the country, but that there was absolutely nothing he felt he could do about it; it was something he felt was beyond his control. And for a control freak like Lyndon Johnson the worst thing would have been to be involved in an exercise like that that he felt that there was almost nothing that he could influence.
So that’s internal drama that was going on at that point. And at the same time, this is the president who on a completely different track- and you hear it all through these tapes- was doing these wonderful things that I think should have made him another Abraham Lincoln or Franklin Roosevelt.
This is someone who in 1964 pushed through Congress a very difficult Civil Rights Act to integrate public accommodations, in 1965 brought us voting rights for everyone, Medicare, the other elements of the Great Society that we know about. If that had been allowed to go on without the weight of Vietnam, what a great president this could have been.
And so you get to the end of the summer of 1965, which is where my second volume ends, and it’s a personal tragedy, because the book ends just after Johnson has succeeded in this great dream of passing a voting rights bill, and then he goes down to the LBJ Ranch and falls into a deep depression because he knows that just at the point he’s finished that summer of enormous legislative accomplish, the Great Society, he knows this war is about to consume, and he is just about the only one who knows.
And oftentimes, if you have a dark secret you keep to yourself, it’s worse than if it’s information that everyone has got. And so here he is on the ranch feeling that now his presidency is going to be forever clouded and about to be destroyed by Vietnam, but at least he might be vindicated by civil rights.
And it’s only a week after this voting rights bill is passed that he gets news from Watts that there are riots in Watts, mainly African-Americans. The National Guard is demanded to be called in, and he begins to hear around the country there is a white backlash, that there are white Americans who are against civil rights, saying, “See, this is exactly what happens when you give voting rights to blacks.”
The chief of the L.A. police, William Parker, said at the time, “What’s happening in Watts is a direct result of Johnson’s Voting Rights Act. That’s what happens when you let the genie out of the bottle.” Police chief of Los Angeles. They have since somewhat redeemed themselves.
But the point is for Johnson, he saw everything crashing down, because not only was the war going, now he knew that with a national white backlash there wouldn’t even be a chance to do the kind of things that he wanted to do in civil rights. And you hear him on these tapes. He says, “It’s going to be just like Reconstruction. You know, after the Civil War we had the chance to bring racial healing to this country and fix things for a century and we blew it. And now we’re blowing it again.”
It’s the kind of thing that we’ve not had a record of any other kind from other books, but you only get this kind of thing when you hear Johnson talking to the people who are closest to him, like Lady Bird and confidantes like, as I mentioned, Senator Russell of Georgia and some friends of LBJ in Texas.
So the portrait that really comes out from all of this is of a man who tried to do the right thing- as most presidents do- felt trapped, and in a way, did a lot of things that wound up to some extent destroying himself. And in a way, that’s oftentimes the largest tragedy of all, because Johnson knew this.
And so by the end of the period that I’ve covered so far, it just drives you crazy. Because so much would I’ve loved to go back in time to, say, the spring of 1965, and say to Johnson, “You know, you’re telling your friends this war is a loser. If you think the war is going to be so unpopular that you can’t even tell the American people what’s going to happen because if you do they’re going to demand that you shut it down. You know, why don’t you listen to yourself? Your political instincts are so good.” And it’s a very good example of what happens when, in a way, the democratic system is to some extent short circuited, because the whole American idea is that if a president wants us to do something unpopular, the best thing is for him to come before us and say, “Look, there’s a war I want you to fight. It may be long, it may be very costly in lives and treasure. But as your President, you should know this and you should make the decision. This is my recommendation.”
That’s exactly what Johnson did not do. It’s the mirror image of what George W. Bush did in September.
He said, “Look, this War on Terrorism could take many years, and we might not win, and it could be very costly. But I think, and I’m telling you, the American people, that I feel it is so important to relieve us of this Sword of Damocles that I think that this is something that we should attempt.”
Americans heard him, and by 90 percent or more we all said this is the right thing to do, even if it’s going to take us through some very rough times.
But the thing I’ll close on, and then I’m going to play a couple of tapes before we have questions, is what people in my line of work always look for in presidents is do they really mean it? You know, when they give a speech, is it just a good speech, or when they go back into the back room, do they say the same thing, preferably even with more passion?
And one thing that’s great about Johnson that comes through on these tapes is that this is a president who really did have deep convictions about things like civil rights and poverty and education, and if anything, in private meant it more than he did in public. It’s very clear. Because Johnson, who was oftentimes radical when he was talking about things like poverty in private, was worried about scaring people in public by sounding too revolutionary.
But when you hear him talking to Martin Luther King on these tapes or to Walter Reuther, the head of the Auto Workers, you have absolutely no doubt that this was a president who not only had deep conviction about these things, but also who, if necessary, would have been willing to give up his job.
And the big example of that- and I’ll close with this- is civil rights. Because if you go back to the summer of 1963, that was when John Kennedy sent the Civil Rights Bill to Congress. And it’s sometimes forgotten now, but that was about as close to a profile on courage as anything I’ve ever seen.
Because here Kennedy was six months from an election year, sending a bill to Congress that immediately drove his poll ratings down about 25 points, to the point that if John Kennedy had lived, he would have been in danger of not getting re-elected, because Southern states that were an essential part of his coalition in 1960, had 303 electoral votes, they were flying away. They were irate about civil rights.
Kennedy might very well have been a one term president, and the reason would have been his courageous action in sending this bill to Capitol Hill.
So in Johnson’s case, Johnson becomes President November of 1963, comes back to Washington, went to his house in northwest Washington. And unlike 2002, in those days Vice- Presidents were so unimportant that they had no official residence. So Johnson is living in this house in Spring Valley, Washington and getting calls from his neighbors. In those days, the Vice- President’s telephone number was listed, too.
So he’s getting these calls from people who barely know him saying, “Gee, Lyndon, I want to wish you all kinds of good luck” and so on.
And Johnson takes his aides into his bedroom and says, “Well, what is the biggest thing I have to worry about immediately?” And they say, “Boss, it’s the Civil Rights Bill. Kennedy sent it to the Hill. It made him very unpopular. Could have cost him re-election. But you’ve got the perfect excuse. You’re a new President. You’ve got to consolidate. You can stall it for a year, set it aside, and then if you must do it in 1965, do it then.”
And Johnson replies with what I think are the immortal words that we should hear variations of from all presidents. He says, “What the hell is the Presidency for if you can’t use it for something like civil rights?” So elemental in retrospect, but I fear sometimes nowadays our political system not only doesn’t reward but oftentimes punishes political leaders who seem stupid enough to do something that seems to be against their smart political interests.
And the final thing that really captures this: In the spring of 1964 Johnson’s trying to get this bill passed, and he calls up Everett Dirksen, who was a Senator from my state of Illinois; he was the Republican leader. And I remember him as a child, because my brother and I used to see him on television. We thought he sounded just like Mr. Ed. [Audience laughter.] And listening to him on the tapes, he does sound exactly like Mr. Ed.
And Johnson knew him very well in the manner of those times. You know, even Senators across the aisle, they had gone drinking together and hunting together, and they had had an old relationship, knew each other inside and out, although they came from different parties. And Johnson knew that Dirksen was a bottomless well for flattery- I guess unlike the other 99 senators. [Audience laughter.]
And he says, you know, “Ev, I know you’ve got some doubts about the Civil Rights Bill, but look at it this way. I need Republican votes if it’s going to pass, because the Southern Democrats aren’t going to be for it. And the only way they’ll support the bill is if you’re for it.
“And if you support the bill and it passes, it’s going to change America and change history. And look at it this way, Ev. If you support me, 100 years from now the school children of America will know exactly two names: Abraham Lincoln and Everett Dirksen.” [Audience laughter.] And Dirksen took one listen and he liked what he heard, and the rest is history. And I’m afraid that not too many school kids in 2002 know the name of Everett Dirksen, but I can assure you that my two little boys will.
Thank you very much. [Audience applause.] And I’ll play the tapes. As I said, I thought I’d play a couple of tapes just to give you an idea of what I’m talking about, and then if we’ve got some time for questions, that would be great.
The first one I’ve got is a perfect example of the kind of tape that Lyndon Johnson would be horrified to have being played in public in the year 2002, or any time; and especially horrified to hear being played in the John F. Kennedy Library, which he would consider to be the height of elegance, and he’d be shown as this uncouth backwoodsman. But the point is, he tells one of his slightly raunchy stories, and it gives you a little bit of a sense of what the man was like behind closed doors.
This is a tape of LBJ talking to Clinton Anderson, who was a Senator from New Mexico. And they had quite a day. I hope you’ll be able to hear it. The one thing I never got for doing this is any- my technological training was not terrific. They did not give us that in historian school. This really shows you how dumb historians are. There’s a big yellow tape saying “Play.” [Audience laughter.] I won’t go into how many historians to screw in a light bulb. Maybe we’ll try it.
Lyndon is so upset by the idea of my playing this that he’s obviously from Heaven… [fiddling with tape and machine] I’ve told you about how adept Johnson was at using influence, even from Heaven. I’m going to play another, then I’m going to see if we can get this thing qued up at the end.
This one, if the former President will allow us, is a tape of LBJ talking to Russell Long, who was the Senator from Louisiana and an old friend of his. And as I think both John and Paul can attest, this is about 95 percent of what politics is really like. Long was a friend of Johnson’s, but he wanted $1,000,000 for the post office in Shreveport, Louisiana, and Johnson didn’t want to give it to him, because Shreveport had voted against him in a previous election by, I think it was, 87 percent. I think Johnson got 13 percent against Barry Goldwater.
And also, there was a newspaper in Shreveport that kept on publishing articles saying that Johnson was a crook and a rapist. And so what you’ll hear is Russell Long saying, “Gee, I sure do want to help you on your Great Society Program. But if I have to spend all my time fighting for the million dollars, I won’t have any time to do it.”
I hope this is going to work. [BEGIN AUDIO TAPE]
RUSSELL LONG: “One of our bright boys … (inaudible) taken that Shreveport Post Office out of that … (inaudible) for this year. Now if they do that, that’s going to hurt me badly and I’ll have to get it back the hard way if … (inaudible).
But all the time it takes me to get a few dollars for that Shreveport Post Office is good time I could be spending working on your Program. And I think that that’s the only thing you hope to … (inaudible) that way, and I would hope that they’d let us have the thing … (inaudible) or so to get started on that post office.
LYNDON JOHNSON: Ah, Russell, you don’t want to reward Shreveport. And I believe I’d be run out of the whole United States if somebody puts Shreveport in there. Till they behave, then, my God almighty, what they said and did this time, if we did that, we’d be laughingstock, Russell.
RUSSELL LONG: That’s not how you got everybody for you in Texas. You’ve got them for you in Texas by just going ahead and wooing and pursuing those people till they finally voted for you, and you wound up getting them all. And have carried that … (inaudible)
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LYNDON JOHNSON: Russell, please, my friend, I want to do anything in the world you want done. But don’t ever ask me- no Long with a name ever asked you to reward people that cut their throat. Those are the meanest, most vicious people in the United States. God Almighty! What they did and what they said, I’ve got letters here that’s the worst that I ever saw. Called me a crook, called me a rapist, called me everything under the sun. And right out of Shreveport and right out of that paper.
RUSSELL LONG: You told me to go tell those people that you weren’t going to hurt them, that we’re going to treat them right, we’re going to hurt them.
LYNDON JOHNSON: We are, we are.
RUSSELL LONG: (inaudible) and hope to carry it. And you will carry it next time.
LYNDON JOHNSON: We’re going to. We’re going to treat them right. But we can’t put Shreveport in this year. I’d look like- hell, I’d be ashamed to come down to the Congress. They’d ridicule me out of that state and every other one, and ridicule you. That’s the last thing you want to do.
RUSSELL LONG: They can ridicule you, but they’ve got to run me out.
LYNDON JOHNSON: They ain’t going to run you out this year. They can’t do it this year because there ain’t no election in ’64.
RUSSELL LONG: Well, Mr. President, I need that the worst kind of way to ….(inaudible)Russell Long … (inaudible).
LYNDON JOHNSON: I’d do anything in to …(inaudible) Russell Long. I’ve shown you I’m Russell Long’s friend. I know your daddy would turn over in his grave, and every other Long. He didn’t reward his people that way. He didn’t tell old … (inaudible) “By God, here’s what I’ll tell you.” And you haven’t either. And you haven’t either, and you just can’t-
RUSSELL LONG: He built that big- He built that big red brick right across the Red River in Shreveport. You can go take a look at it. That’s got his name on it.
LYNDON JOHNSON: That’s right. And he had to- And they voted for him solid, too. But they don’t do Johnson that way. You tell them the first thing they’ve got to do is apologize for calling me a thief. That’s the first thing. And the second thing they’ve got to do is get those damn…(inaudible) out of that newspaper that call me a dirty, low-down, thieving son of a bitch every day. Because I’m telling you that Shreveport is right at the bottom of the ladder.
And if I had to give up my job I just couldn’t conscientiously do that, and I don’t think you could. God, it might even-
RUSSELL LONG: We’re hoping to buy that newspaper up there. We’ve got some good people who own that Times Picayune who are hoping to buy that paper.
LYNDON JOHNSON: I’ve talked to them. I know about that.
RUSSELL LONG: But meanwhile, that’s not going to help us, to have the image of trying to hurt Shreveport. Kennedy was playing it that way, and we’ve just got to work to- By the time you sign that Civil Rights Bill into law today. And there wasn’t anything we could do about it, but we could build back up now. By the time you get the colored folks registered you’ll carry the area.
LYNDON JOHNSON: …(inaudible)
RUSSELL LONG: But you can carry it when it’s … (inaudible) with anti-South trying to hurt Shreveport and all that.
LYNDON JOHNSON: …(inaudible) and I’m not trying to hurt Shreveport. I’m just not going to reward Shreveport. I’ve got a hundred places in my state.”
[Audience laughter and applause.] [END AUDIO TAPE]
MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: You got the general idea. And also, later in the conversation, you know, it shows you the way that people operate. And one of the things that Johnson did on civil rights was to get those bills through Congress, and at the same time to talk to Southern Senators and try to talk to them. He knew they weren’t going to support civil rights, but at least to not obstruct the bills and not obstruct their enforcement.
And one of the things that Johnson said later in this conversation which I’m not going to play… Long begins to complain about that Civil Rights Bill and Johnson says, “Well, that was Kennedy’s bill. It was just lying on the desk when I got there. There was nothing I could do about it.” [Audience laughter.]
I’m going to try again the offending Clinton Anderson tape, but the lightning bolts from Heaven may be too strong.
[Working with tape recording.]
I’ll play one more brief one. Then we’ll try it once more. This reminds me a little bit of- Debra knows the story- about two months ago the Director of the Johnson Library retired- this is Harry Middleton, who was very popular and beloved by Johnson- and everyone was saying that LBJ would never have allowed him to retire if Johnson were alive.
And they had a big farewell dinner for him in a tent in Austin, end of November. And I don’t know if you know this part of the story. But it was very unusual for Austin. It was 10 degrees. There was a lightning storm with high winds that almost blew the tent over, with a huge amount of thunder that went all through the dinner. So people said that Johnson was making his views known. [Audience laughter.] Not someone that you would have wanted on your bad side.
In any case, in case this one works, it should be a tape of LBJ talking to Richard Russell about his doubts about the Vietnam War.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: What year was that? MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: This should be early ’65. [BEGIN AUDIO TAPE]
RICHARD RUSSELL: “My doctors don’t seem to be too … (inaudible).
LYNDON JOHNSON: Well, they got moisture in there, down there. It’s … (inaudible). It rains every afternoon.
RICHARD RUSSELL: It’s humid. No question about that.
LYNDON JOHNSON: Now let me ask you one or two other things. We’re going to send the Marines in to protect the HAWK battalion- the HAWK outfit at Da Nang, because they’re trying to come in and destroy them there, and they’re afraid their security provided by Vietnamese is not enough. And all the military and all the Joint Chiefs and everybody including McNamara and Rusk, I told them to clear it with everybody and they cleared it with everybody but Stennis, and they haven’t been able to reach Stennis.
Has anybody talked to you about it? I’m sure they haven’t because you’ve been sick. I guess we’ve got no choice, but it scares the death out of me. I think everybody’s going to think we’re landing the Marines, we’re off to battle. And of course if they come up there they’re going to get them in the back as sure as hell. They’re not going to run-
RICHARD RUSSELL: … (inaudible)
LYNDON JOHNSON: – and you’re tied down. And if they don’t, though, and you ruin those airplanes, everybody’s going to give me hell for not securing them, just like they did the last time they made a raid.
RICHARD RUSSELL: Sure.
LYNDON JOHNSON: So it’s a choice and it’s a hard one. But Westmoreland and Taylor come in every day saying, “Please send them on.” And the Joint Chiefs say, “Please send them on.” McNamara and Rusk say, “Send them on.” So I told them yesterday to go and clear it with the Congressmen. What do you think?
RICHARD RUSSELL: Well, I don’t know. If you don’t stand firm, this battle would scare the life out of me, but I don’t know how to back out now. I just- it looks to me like we just got in this thing and we never get out and we just push forward and forward and forward.
LYNDON JOHNSON: That is exactly- that’s right. And we’re losing more every day.
RICHARD RUSSELL: That’s right.
LYNDON JOHNSON: We’re getting in worse. We’re taking back-
RICHARD RUSSELL: … (inaudible) this thing here, these Marines, they’ll be killing a whole lot of… (inaudible) that branch.
LYNDON JOHNSON: And their airplanes aren’t worth a damn. … (inaudible)
RICHARD RUSSELL: They just scare the countries. They just scare their prime ministers. That’s all they ever do-
RICHARD RUSSELL: … (inaudible) trail like hunting … (inaudible)
LYNDON JOHNSON: Bombing anything. They did it in … (inaudible) and I guess they can do it in an industrial city, and I guess they can do it in New York.
[END AUDIO TAPE]
MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: Now you can see very much why I wished I could have just gone back and said to him, “Just listen to what you’re saying. It’s very good advice. Just take it from yourself.”
Anyway, I think in the absence of tape #3, if we can get it qued, maybe we can play it at the very end. But why don’t we go to questions in the meantime, if that’s all right with you people. If there’s anyone with a question or a comment-
AUDIENCE MEMBER: As a current fourth grade teacher, I’m interested in when you started writing. And I’m wondering what cultivated your interest in history, and I think there’s a message there for me.
MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: Well, I’m sure you’re doing great. It was around when I was about a fourth grader. When I was seven- we were talking a little bit about this at lunch- a couple of things happened. One was I think the first political event I remember, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and I would have been nearly seven, out in Illinois. And what I remember is seeing President Kennedy’s speech announcing the fact that there were missiles in Cuba.
And what it was like for me was, out in Illinois about four or five times a summer you have tornado warnings. And you go down to the basement, and you don’t know when you come up whether there will be a house there or not, and it’s a time of enormous tension, especially for a child. And that whole week reminded me of that, and it hit me in a very emotional way.
And I was aware even at that stage, not of the fine points of arms control and nuclear diplomacy, but the fact that John Kennedy had saved us all, and much of the Northern hemisphere from extinction. So I began to think, you know, presidents must be pretty powerful and interesting and important people, and I began reading about them.
And then the following spring my parents took me down to the Lincoln sites in Springfield and New Salem, Illinois. And I think in Illinois Lincoln is probably even more of a religion than he is elsewhere. And from that point on I really wanted to become a historian and to write about presidents.
And especially in that case, the next book I’m writing is a book on Lincoln’s assassination and the period at the end of his life, which is really what I’ve been fascinated about and wanted to write since the age of seven. And I went to my editor and told her about this, said I wanted to do this book. And she said, “It’s fine, but I hope you’re not going to insist on writing about everything you thought of when you were seven years old.” So I said, “That wouldn’t be much of a problem.”
But one thing I try to do with my boys who are five and seven is to take them to historical sites. You know, hopefully not in too pedantic a way, but just so that somehow it lodges in their memory in an emotional way so that maybe 20 years from now the seed will grow. I don’t want them to become necessarily historians, God forbid, but I would like them to love what I love.
And I think from my experience it’s between the ages of about seven and nine that kids are particularly permeable in an emotional way to things like this. I find that when they’re a little bit younger they don’t quite get it, and when they’re much older, you know, they take it in, but they don’t take it in as perhaps a primal way as they do at this age.
And I’ve taken my children on the Louis and Clark Trail during the summers and Monticello. And our seven year old does not remember the fine points of Jefferson’s philosophy, but, you know, I ask him, “What do you remember about Monticello?” and he’ll say “the bed that you can get out of into one room or the other” or “the machine that writes two letters at once.” Or in his case he remembers the chamber pots, which he had never seen before- we have indoor plumbing down in Washington. [Audience laughter.]
And I try to interest them in what I’m doing, and, you know, I’ve told them about the book on Lincoln. And it sort of worked halfway. The older boy says he likes Abraham Lincoln. Our younger son says that he likes John Wilkes Booth. [Audience laughter.] So if there’s anyone here who can advise me on how to fix this- I know there are a lot of parents in the room- I’d be extremely grateful.
Unfortunately I think we are out of time now. Let me just thank the Kennedy Library for this wonderful opportunity to be here and speak. Thank you all for coming.
[Audience applause.]
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