Remembering LBJ
They don’t make ‘em like Lyndon Johnson anymore.
(Page 2 of 3)
The Treatment
It was my first understanding of the Johnson Treatment. I walked in with Mr. Kintner, and the President was at the time finishing an interview with an Indian. I don’t know what position in the diplomatic corps of India he held—he was a very slight, short man—and as we stood in the door to the President’s small office off the Oval Office, LBJ was exhorting this Indian about Viet Nam and towering above him, waving a hand at him. He gave him that story which he subsequently used—I hadn’t heard it before then—in which he would say with grand gestures that “all he wanted was if Uncle Ho Chi would take off his gun belt and put the hand grenades away, well then, I’ll put down my guns. But if he doesn’t and I put down my guns, you know what, he’s going to shoot me right in the rear end.” This Indian was nodding politely, awed; he was about five-feet-one and looking up at six-feet-four of Lyndon Johnson. He was quite terrified.
Peter Benchley, former LBJ speechwriter and author of Jaws.
The Personal Touch
He went to great pains to show that he was deeply involved in the inner decisions of the Administration, that he was the real insider. One day in early 1961 Russell Baker, then a Hill reporter for the New York Times, who knew Johnson well, had been coming out of the Senate when he was literally grabbed by Johnson (“You, I’ve been looking for you”) and pulled into his office. Baker then listened to an hour-and-a-half harangue about Washington, about how busy Lyndon Johnson was, how well things were going. There were these rumors going around that he wasn’t on the inside; well, Jackie had said to him just the other night at dinner as she put her hand on his, “Lyndon, you won’t desert us, will you?” They wanted him. It was pure Johnson, rich and larger than life, made more wonderful by the fact that if Baker did not believe it all, at least for the moment Johnson did. And in the middle of it, after some forty minutes, Baker noticed Johnson scribble something on a piece of paper, then he pushed a buzzer. A secretary came in, took the paper, disappeared and returned a few minutes later, handing the paper back to Johnson. He looked at it and crumpled it. Then the harangue continued for another fifty minutes. Finally, exhausted by this performance, Baker left and on the way he passed a friend named David Barnett, also a journalist. They nodded and went their separate ways, and the next day when Barnett ran into Baker, he asked whether Baker knew what Johnson had written on that slip of paper. No, Baker admitted, he did not know. “ ‘Who is this I’m talking to?’ ” said Barnett.
David Halberstam from, The Best and the Brightest
From the Heart
One day in the Oval Office President Johnson was going over possible nominees for a vacated Supreme Court seat. Each of the men on the final list had his champion, and strong arguments were made in favor of several candidates, one of whom was Thurgood Marshall. I was taking notes in the meeting, and it was clear that strong arguments were being made on behalf of one or two other men than for Marshall. After everyone had filed out and I was preparing to leave, the President looked up at me and said, “Tom, I’m going with Thurgood Marshall.” I was surprised and asked him why. “Well, Tom,” he said, “You’re from Georgia. You know what it’s like there. But now those poor downtrodden black children will be able to look and see a black man on the Supreme Court of the United States. And they’ll know, too, that they can make it.” That comment came out of his gut, came out of his heart. He had heard all the presentations with his head, but the decision came from his heart.
Tom Johnson, former LBJ press secretary
Oh, My Achin’ Shins
Hubert Humphrey told me how Johnson gave him pep talks and Humphrey demonstrated, saying, “He’d grab me by the lapels (to demonstrate, Humphrey grabbed me) and say, ‘Now Hubert, I want you to do this and that and get going,’ and with that he would kick me in the shins, hard.” Then Humphrey added, “Look,” pulling up his trouser leg. Sure enough, he had some scars there. He had a couple of scars on his shin where Lyndon had kicked him and said, “Get going now.”
Robert Allen, Washington columnist
Ho Ho Ho
People always said that he did everything for publicity, that he always carried the opinion polls around in his pocket. I don’t want to dispute that, but I do know that many of the best things he did were deliberately without publicity. He had a ranch down in Mexico, for example, and every time he would go down he would take in birth control pills and nutritional supplements for the villagers. He was always after the President of Mexico to open up a school there, to bring in nurses, to improve the place. There was just this tenderness to him, particularly with children. After he had left the presidency he had a whole plane load full of toys flown to the Hill Country from Marx and Company in New York. I’ll never forget that picture of him, the former President of the United States, dressed up as Santa Claus and handing out toys. He didn’t want that to be in the papers, either. He did it because that’s just what he felt. I guess that’s the same reason he went, when he was in poor health and near his own death, to the funeral of some children who had been killed in a bus accident. When I asked him why he had gone, since he didn’t know any of them personally, he said, “Tom, those were the kind of people who cared about me, and I care about them.”
Tom Johnson
Back to the Indians
Lyndon Johnson never liked to give a speech that didn’t contain a news lead. “It’s a waste of my time. It’s a waste of the audience’s time. And it’s a waste of the reporters’ time.”
The problem was, as Budget Director Charlie Schultze used to tell us speechwriters on a regular basis, news leads, especially if they were announcing new government programs, had a tendency to cost money—lots of money. So at Schultze’s request, we used to send him advance copies of the President’s speeches so he could try to head off a news lead he didn’t think the country could afford.
But sometimes, we would be operating on such a tight deadline that the speech would be delivered before Charlie had a chance to review it. And sometimes the President would start ad-libbing in the middle of a speech and do his own violence to the budget.
One day he called Will Sparks and me into the office and told us to start working on a speech he could use in conjunction with a swearing-in ceremony for Robert LaFollette Bennett, whom the President had just appointed Commissioner of Indian Affairs.
It was to be a very high-profile occasion. Bennett, the first full-blooded Indian to assume that post in a hundred years, was to take the oath of office in the East Room of the White House—an honor usually reserved for new Cabinet members. Indian leaders from all over the country were invited.
My Library
