The Man Who Saved LBJ
Harry Middleton made the decision to release Lyndon Johnson's secret White House recordings. The rest is history.
(Page 2 of 2)
But he could be relentless. In a conversation that is famous among LBJ tape connoisseurs, Johnson, knowing that his good friend senator Richard Russell of Georgia does not want to serve under Chief Justice Earl Warren on the commission investigating the Kennedy assassination, calls Russell to say that he has already released a statement saying that the senator is on the panel. When Russell protests, Johnson says, “You’ve never turned your country down. This is not me. This is your country!” He adds, “You’re my man on that commission and you’re going to do it!” Russell did it.
Harry Middleton never knew that the recordings existed when Johnson was alive. He had moved to Texas after the president’s term expired, in January 1969, to help work on Johnson’s memoirs. “The preliminary talks were usually delightful,” Middleton wrote in his 1990 book, LBJ: The White House Years, “[b]ut transferring these reminiscences to paper rarely survived his final review. Such informality, he felt, was demeaning to the office. So the prose became less vivid and more stately, and we watched helplessly while Lyndon Johnson disappeared behind it.” The library was under construction at the time, and its initial director was a California academician whom Johnson called “Doctor”—a sure sign that their personalities did not mesh. In 1970 the director returned to California, and Johnson wanted Middleton to take the job. In theory, the head of the National Archives selects the directors of presidential libraries, but in practice, living ex-presidents get what they want. “I was a new kind of animal,” says Middleton. “The typical director of presidential libraries at the time was an archivist. I was a shock, no question about that.”
Following the library’s dedication, in 1971, Middleton had a conversation with Johnson that years later would influence his decision to open the recordings. The library had planned a symposium on education in 1972 that would include the opening of presidential papers on the subject. A few days before the symposium was to begin, Middleton told Johnson that some papers couldn’t be released because archivists followed a rule that anything unduly embarrassing or harmful to living persons should remain closed. Johnson was skeptical. “You’re being too cautious,” he said. And then, as Middleton recalls, he went on, “Harry, good men have been trying to protect my reputation for forty years and not a damned one has succeeded. What makes you think you can?” When Middleton decided to move forward with making the recordings public in 1990 (a time when Johnson’s reputation was, as Middleton puts it, “in the basement”), the memory of this conversation spurred him to go through with it.
He had learned of the recordings shortly after Johnson died, in January 1973. Mildred Stegall, a former secretary in the White House, told him that she had seven boxes of Dictabelts from telephone conversations. Johnson had left them with her on the condition that if they were still in her care when he died, they were to be given to Middleton with instructions that they not be opened for fifty years. For three years they remained in storage, until Middleton decided that they couldn’t just sit around and turn to dust; they had to be preserved. But by 1976 the Dictabelt technology was already obsolete. The staff couldn’t even locate a Dictabelt machine; the library had to build one from scratch so that the recordings could be transferred to a reel-to-reel tape before going back under seal.
Years went by. In 1982 CBS subpoenaed the library for any materials that might relate to its defense of a libel suit brought by the former commanding general in Vietnam, William Westmoreland. Middleton learned that somebody had made transcripts of some of the recordings, but they turned out to contain errors; a Johnson comment about having a “pack of bastards waiting on me,” for example, turned out to be “a Pakistan ambassador.” The library did an inventory and sent some transcripts. The idea slipped into Middleton’s mind: “We’ve broken the seal now, why not open them?” But it wasn’t until 1990 that he went to see the lawyer for the National Archives to ask if it was legally permissible to breach the fifty-year restriction. When he got a favorable reply, he met with Lady Bird Johnson. “I believe if the president were alive, we could persuade him to open them now,” he told her. When she agreed, the library started duplicating the tapes for subsequent release.
Middleton is 78 now, still spry and enthusiastic but definitely ready for retirement; friends say that he stays on because Lady Bird wants him to. He looks anything but scholarly; his face almost always wears an impish expression that is exaggerated by lines that travel across his forehead in waves like complex mathematical functions. In conversation, he hunches forward, knees splayed, eyeglasses dangling between them from a cord around his neck. But if he were more like the typical archivist, chances are that he would have regarded himself bound by the fifty-year injunction and the tapes would have remained closed.
Middleton is delighted with “the return of LBJ,” as he puts it, but his library has never been protective of its namesake. Through the long years when Johnson was regarded as one of America’s worst presidents, Middleton rarely spoke out in defense of his patron—with two notable exceptions. In a 1983 article in the Friends of the LBJ Library newsletter, he panned the first of Caro’s two volumes, The Path to Power, by citing “the extent of his hatred for his subject, a loathing so deep it coats a steamy sheen over his prose.” The second time was a 1992 speech in which he said of Stone’s JFK, “As theater, the film is powerful. As propaganda, it is highly effective. As history, it is destructive and malicious nonsense.” He regrets the former—“It was indiscreet,” he says of his criticism of Caro (he declines to discuss the second volume)—but not the latter. What about the tapes? Did he release them with the idea of saving Johnson’s reputation? “Consciously, no,” Middleton says, “I just thought that these were important historical records that should be open. Subconsciously, maybe so.”
Pages: 1 2
My Library
