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

But it was the dally burden of the Vietnam War that exacted the greatest emotional toll on the president. In early February 1965, Lady Bird expressed surprise that Johnson had told Vice President Hubert Humphrey "something that I had heard so often, but did not really expect to come out of his mouth in front of anyone else. `I'm not temperamentally equipped to be Commander-in-Chief,' he said ... `I'm too sentimental to give the orders.'"

The constancy of Johnson's fears led his wife to believe that "this heavy load of tension and this fog of depression" were having "an erosive effect on his personality" She worried that his lack of sleep and his nightly preoccupation with American bombing missions was simply too draining. "He said, `I want to be called every time somebody dies.' He can't separate himself from it."

By July 1965, Johnson had become, in the words of his second press secretary, Bill Moyers, "a tormented man." Lady Bird Johnson's fears about her husband's emotional health were so profound that she admitted in mid-1965 to buying a black silk dress, "having, in the back of my mind when I bought it, the grim, unacknowledged thought that I might need a black dress for a funeral."

Reaching for Glory demonstrates in powerful detail that the tragedy of Vietnam was also a personal tragedy for Johnson himself, practically from the outset of his second term. The war's impact made his family's White House life "pure hell," his wife told Beschloss. And she, like her husband, had accurately sensed very early on just how the story would end. `"Vietnam is getting worse every day,'" she quoted him as telling her in July of 1965. "`I have the choice to go in with great casualty lists or to get out with disgrace. It's like being in an airplane and I have to choose between crashing the plane or jumping out. I do not have a parachute.'" Unfortunately, Lyndon Johnson never jumped.

DAVID J. GARROW is Presidential Distinguished Professor at Emory University's School of Law.