Periodicals

The new Atlantic Monthly, just out his week, contains a long excerpt from--hold on to your hats--Doris Kearns's book on Lyndon Johnson. As you may remember, it is Long Awaited and Controversial. It has Raised Eyebrows on the Cambridge-Washington Circuit, and in the High-Powered World of Publishing. And so forth. Leaving aside that long and tangled story, though, it remains that the Atlantic piece just isn't very good, as scholarship or journalism.

The basic problem seems to be one of methodology. The life and policies of Johnson are by now a familiar and oft-told tale, and Kearns, despite her experience working with Johnson in the White House, apparently didn't have much to add. She needed a new angle, something no one else had, and eventually settled on psychology. While not a professional psychologist, Kearns had had extensive conversations with Johnson in Texas, conservations in which he told all about his deepest inner feelings. In a series of heart-to-heart talks in which he would climb into her bed early in the morning (she had gotten out of bed before he got in, by the way), the old man revealed his innermost secret: he loved his mother.

That's well and good, and hats off to Kearns for finding it out. It is not, however, enough to sustain an entire book. It leads to an exceedingly curious, disjointed approach: one moment Kearns is describing in the first person her relationship with Johnson; next she goes into descriptions of his childhood and emotional development; and from there she discusses his political career, really quite conventionally. The thread that is supposed to run through it all is a focus on Johnson as a person, but the trail often grows faint.

I have other gripes too. Throughout the excerpt, Kearns quotes at great length from her bedside conversations with Johnson. Was she taking notes? Seems unlikely. Did she remember them with total accuracy? Given their blatant Freudianism, I doubt it. She has him saying, for instance, "I still believed my mother the most beautiful, sexy, intelligent woman I'd ever met, and I was determined to recapture her wonderful love, but not at the price of my daddy's respect." It sounds like something out of a textbook on the Oedipus Complex.

It's also unclear exactly how the psychological stuff fits in to Johnson's later career, which I gather it's supposed to do. There's a longish section on Johnson's first love affair that is no doubt new information, but leads nowhere and connects to nothing. At times, later on, Kearns tries very hard to fit her early findings into Johnson's adult life--his policies showing, a desire for love, and so on--but by then the connections seem forced and unimportant.

All in all, the excerpt reads like a political memoir, with all the characteristic flaws of that genre: first-person approach, great emphasis on the writer's own role, slightly wooden style, exaggeration of the bits of history the writer happens to know about first-hand. And even if a little positive revisionism on Johnson-particularly about his role in civil rights--might be a good thing, knowing that his Vietnam policy stemmed from his relationship with his mother seems, in the end, only to trivialize what happened there.