Reaching for Glory: Lyndon Johnson's Secret White House Tapes, 1964-65. . - Listening to Lyndon: the private agony of a president no way out - book review

Washington Monthly, March, 2002 by David J. Garrow

REACHING FOR GLORY Lyndon Johnson's Secret White House Tapes, 1964-65. By Michael Beschloss Simon & Schuster, $30.00

FOUR YEARS AGO, MICHAEL BESCHLOSS published his first volume of President Lyndon B. Johnson's secretly-recorded telephone conversations that covered the period from November 1963 through August 1964. This second volume of edited transcripts advances the project through July 1965. Though phenomenally rich and valuable as historical documents, only dedicated political junkies will wish to plow through all of these dense--though often fascinating--conversations. Scholars of America's involvement in Vietnam will draw the greatest benefit from Reaching for Glory, though many other subjects, from the Dominican Republic to Johnson's own tormented psyche, are substantially illuminated.

None is so deeply fascinating as Johnson's intensely contradictory feelings about surreptitious wiretaps. Beschloss notes that the White House recordings rarely, if ever, reveal Johnson preening for the tape recorder or even speaking in a way that suggests he was conscious of it. But so thorough and purposeful was his taping that the recordings manage to capture both Johnson's fervent denunciations of wiretaps and his explicit pleasure in their results, particularly the FBI's electronic surveillance of Martin Luther King, Jr.

In late March 1965, Johnson instructed Attorney General Nicholas deB. Katzenbach that the number of wiretaps be "brought to an irreducible minimum. And only in the gravest cases. I want you to authorize them, and then, by God, I want to know about them. I'm against wiretapping, period." But Johnson's conviction had one remarkable exception: "I assume that in one of our friends' cases"--he was speaking of King--"from what I have seen, that must be where the evidence comes from. I mean, on [his] Hawaii jaunts ... California, and with some of the women ... You know who I'm talking about?" "Yes," Katzenbach replied. Johnson added, "Nobody's ever told me that's where it comes from. And I don't want to know."

The contradiction was dramatic. "I'm a red-hot one-million-two percent civil liberties man, and I'm just against them," Johnson told Katzenbach a moment later. "I don't want any wiretapping around." Katzenbach noted that his predecessor, Robert F. Kennedy, had authorized King's wiretap, and Johnson did not order it removed.

But the president who so opposed tapping loved to tape his own conversations with people who were unaware that their words were being memorialized for the ages. During 1964 and 1965, Johnson's most constant subject of conversation was Vietnam, and his two most frequent interlocutors were Secretary of Richard Russell. Reaching for Glory ought to significantly enhance Russell's historical reputation, for the transcripts repeatedly reveal the hawkish senator's grave doubts about American military involvement in Vietnam from the outset. "I wish we could figure out some way to get out of that, Mr. President," Russell told Johnson in November 1964.

But rather than accept the impregnable political coverage that a conservative like Russell could provide for a decision to downscale American intervention in Vietnam, Johnson couldn't bring himself to consider abandoning America's military commitment. "I don't believe I can walk out," he told the political columnist Drew Pearson in March 1965. "If I did, they'd take Thailand ... They'd take Cambodia ... They'd take Burma ... They'd take Indonesia ... They'd take India... They'd come right back and take the Philippines ... I'd be another [Neville] Chamberlain."

Yet Johnson's attitude, which was shared by McNamara, resulted in doing little more than seemed necessary to avoid outright defeat. Instead, their professed hope was that, in time, the North Vietnamese would decide to negotiate a peaceful settlement. But majority leader Mike Mansfield that "we think they are winning. Now, if WE think they're winning, can you imagine what THEY think?"

While McNamara warned the president that "we've got to slow down here and try to halt, at some point, the ground troop commitment," Johnson's steadfast refusal to do so left him no exit strategy, save the unlikely possibility of negotiations with Hanoi. Johnson recognized his dilemma. "They're winning," he confessed to Indiana senator Birch Bayh. "Why would they want to talk?" And Johnson was equally pessimistic with McNamara: "I don't believe they're ever going to quit. And I don't see ... that we have any ... plan for victory--militarily or diplomatically."

Publicly, Johnson professed optimism, especially in the supposed prospect of meaningful negotiations, but privately his pessimism manifested itself in conversation after conversation. He told Russell he would like to "find a way to get out without saying so." Russell heartily agreed. Yet Johnson's fear of appearing to "tuck tail and run" ultimately outweighed his (and Russell's) better judgment. "I'm doing my best to hold this thing in balance just as long as I can," Johnson told Mansfield. "I can't run out. I'm not going to run in. I can't just sit there and let them be murdered. So I've got to put enough there to hold them and protect them."