A Bedtime Story

NOT SINCE Doris Kearns taught Government 154, "The American Presidency" have there been so many LBJ anecdotes presented in one place at one time as in her treatise Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream. We get the complete story about Johnson's electric toothbrush fetish. There is the vivid description of LBJ's discussion with an embarrassed Kennedy-liberal while the president sat on the toilet. And, she includes an awesome account of the haggard man who tiptoed down to the situation room of the White House at 3 a.m. to see how his war was progressing. It's all interesting stuff; in fact, there's enough for Kearns to write an intriguing Book-of-the-Month-Club story about her life with LBJ.

But Lyndon Johnson is not supposed to be simply another insider's guide to the Johnson White House. The book has major pretensions. It is at once a future best-seller, a psycho-biography of President Johnson that seeks to explain his actions in and out of public life, and a work of social science--part of Kearns's tenure bid for a professorship in the Government Department. The book must be judged on all three levels.

Kearns's extensive interviews with Johnson, courtesy of her status as official LBJ biographer during and after her stay as a White House Fellow, easily carry you through the chapter by chapter chronology of Johnson's career. The description of his use of the Senate as majority leader is perhaps the most enlightening passage, painting a littleseen picture of the wheeler-dealer at his best. For the first time we are shown Johnson's pathological obsession with Bobby Kennedy, a man who Johnson believed lived only to reclaim the Kennedy throne. We find out Johnson feared that Bobby Kennedy would attack him for being "unmanly" and for betraying the John Kennedy tradition if he pulled out of Vietnam. And, in what is getting to be the classic test case of whether a president of the United States is "going bananas" we get this glimpse of Johnson under siege:

Lying in the dark he could find no peace until he got out of bed and by the light of a small flashlight, walked the halls of the White House to the place where Woodrow Wilson's portrait hung. He found something soothing in the act of touching Wilson's picture; he could sleep again.

Unfortunately, cliched writing and cluttered bureaucratic lingo mar even the most interesting depictions of Johnson's life. Some passages suffer from a bald style and a lack of editing:

The assumption of our underground papers, Dylan's lyricism and images of loneliness and alienation contrasted sharply with the optimistic idealism permeating Lyndon Johnson's America. Johnson's heroes were winners--"Lucky" Lindbergh, Andrew Jackson, Franklin Roosevelt--men who made it. The heroes of the sixties were losers who survived or martyrs. Malcolm X and Che Guevera became symbols of the age. Again and again, the words of these two figures could be found in pamphlets, in underground newspapers, in conversation. The young not only kept posters on their walls, but copied the hair, the beard, the beret and the style. The cult of failure spread.

However, most of the obstacles to readibility occur when Kearns haphazardly crowds the book with prevalent theories of political science. Machiavelli and de Tocqueville, those great legitimators of political science, are invoked and footnoted indiscriminately. Government professor Richard Neustadt's conjectures about presidential power, especially his discovery of the president's power to persuade, glut the book (the manuscript is dedicated to him). And in one oddly placed threepage section we get an introductory American government syllabus including statements on the growth of the imperial presidency, reduced prestige of the cabinet, decline of political parties, weakening of congressional leadership, and nosediving voter turnout. The jargon is stulifying; instead of simply writing that Johnson faced an uphill campaign battle in 1968, she states that "one of the constitutional checks on executive power remained intact: the requirement of periodic elections." Governmental terms, distributed sloppily throughout the book seem thrown in to make the manuscript suitable for tenure purposes. Nevertheless, Lyndon Johnson is much more a work of flamboyant biography than of rigorous social science.

The relatively new field of psycho-biography is already cluttered with dismal studies such as Freud and Bullitt's Thomas Woodrow Wilson. Twenty-Eight President of the United States. In that text the authors explain the U.S.'s decision to go to war against Germany in 1916 as a function of Wilson's urge to satisfy charges of libido while pleasing his Superego. Others, like the Georges' study of Woodrow Wilson and Colonel House, are much more subtle; they present the subject's boyhood background and then use psychological imprints as keys to understanding formerly inexplicable courses of action in later life.

It is this second model that Kearns emulates. She opens with crucial stories about Johnson's youth on the Pedernales and then subtly juxtaposes the most important impressions with his later actions as a means to better understand his mode of decision-making. Sometimes it works well, as in explaining how he hoped to obtain the steady love he lacked as a child through political conquests. But far more often this type of analysis falls flat. The psychobiographical passages seem like attempts to explain an action in the future by citing any random action that occurred in the past. Programs for the advancement of blacks are seen as functions of something his mother said to him earlier about the strong caring for the weak. His decision to "stick it out" in Vietnam is partially explained by an incident when he was disciplined and shamed by his father. The validity of this methodology must be doubted. First of all, we are being asked to trust a man who will probably go down as one of the two greatest presidential liars in history. If he'd lie about bombing and killing, why should we think he'd tell the truth to Kearns about his political life, especially when he was so conscious of the way historians would treat him?

But more importantly, this work exposes the tragic flaws of using psycho-biographical analysis to explain presidential decision-making. The psychological model dictates that his mother trained him to help the meek; but the political model--far more cogent when it comes to explaining this consummate politician's behavior--dictates that he pushed for civil rights programs to gain black votes. In this case as in others, the psychological model is only one of several ways to explain presidential decision making, and often the least important.

Nowhere is the deficiency of the psychological model more glaring than when Kearns is writing about Vietnam. Kearns writes that Johnson feared the "Communist bullies" above everything, and that he stayed in the war to defeat the Communist menace abroad. The answer to a most crucial question--why Johnson chose to escalate his war of aggression in Vietnam by bombing the North in 1965--is explained by this quote from LBJ: "Suddenly I realized that doing nothing was more dangerous than doing something."

Kearns puts forth no serious explanation for Johnson's actions other than the desire for action and his fear of Communism. There is no attempt to provide a bureaucratic explanation as some liberal historians have done. Far worse, she totally glosses over any political explanation for his decisions about Vietnam. By strictly adhering to a psychobiographical analysis, she denies the frame of reference provided by the Pentagon Papers, and their interpreters. A far more logical explanation for some of Johnson's moves--the desire to stave off a defeat through stalemate until the next election, put forward by Daniel Ellsberg in his 1971 essay "The Quagmire Myth and Stalemate Machine"--is totally ignored.

The result is simply another history of American policy in Vietnam written without villains. War criminals are portrayed as kind-hearted but misdirected men. Johnson is seen as just trying to please everybody by bombing North Vietnam off the face of the earth--with limited targets no less.

In Ellsberg's essay he warns us to be aware of the Townsend Hoopes's and the Goodwins (Richard Goodwin, speech-writer for Johnson, now husband of Kearns who helped her write the book), former officials under LBJ who try to "objectively judge" the Johnsonian presidency with respect to the war, but end up underwriting "the deceits that have served importantly a sucession of Presidents to maintain support" for the immoral intervention in Vietnam.

At first glance Kearns seems to be coming from a different perspective. She writes in the opening of her book that she co-authored an essay for the New Republic about how to remove LBJ shortly before coming to work in the White House in 1967. That essay, however, accuses Johnson of little more than flagwaving and is mostly a polemic agitating for a third party. Whatever leftist baggage she may have had when she went in to the White House, she apparently lost much of it coming out. She has produced a work that is devoid of any political scrutiny of Johnson's trangressions in Vietnam. Instead, we find a portrait of a president deeply saddened that the war will tarnish his place in history as a great domestic leader. With Lyndon Johnson, Kearns earns an undistinguished berth among those former White House officials who expect us to agonize over the personal grief of the president who remorselessly planned the destruction of hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese people.