Lyndon Johnson on the Record
Seven months after he left the White House, the former president sat down with his aides to work on his memoir. On only one occasion did he allow a tape recorder to run, and he spoke with surprising candor about the 1960 campaign, the Kennedys, the assassination, and Vietnam. The transcript of that session has never been published—until now.
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The Decision Not to Run in 1968
Johnson explains his bombshell announcement not to run for president on March 31, 1968. He is eager to refute charges that he pulled out of the race out of fear that he would lose after Senator Eugene McCarthy’s surprisingly good showing in the New Hampshire primary and Senator Robert Kennedy’s entry into the race. To do so, he insists that his basic decision to stay out in 1968 had been made in 1964.
THE MORNING OF MARCH 31, [1968,] LADY BIRD came in and woke me up at five-thirty. She said, “[LBJ’s elder daughter] Lynda is going through a trying period. She just told her husband 22 good-bye, and she’s an expectant mother. He’s going over there by your orders. He doesn’t even know what you’re going to say or do.” [Lady Bird] said we ought to meet her at the [White House] gate.
Lynda was coming on the red-eye special. We met her. We went upstairs and had a cup of coffee. She told us everything he had said, every little movement, where she kissed him. She looked at me, and she had tears in her eyes and her voice. She said, “Daddy, why does Chuck have to go and fight and die to protect people who don’t want to be protected?” It was hard for her to understand.
That night I looked over at Pat, 23 who had his orders for [Asia]. The only doubt I ever had about the March 31 decision—the only thing that could have made me reverse it—was those two boys, or 200,000 more, saying I was a yellow-bellied S.O.B.
The best way I know to put it is this: My best judgment told me in 1964 in the spring—May or June—that if the good Lord was willing and the creeks didn’t rise, if we had the best of everything, I could get the job done. I could get my ideals and wishes and dreams realized to the extent I would ever get them realized by March of 1968. The odds were that I could survive that physically—but there was no assurance, and there were grave doubts. 24
No one can ever understand who was not then in the valley of death how you were always conscious of that. I would see [President Woodrow] Wilson’s picture, and I would think of him stretched out upstairs at the White House. 25 I would think, “What if I had a stroke like my Grandma did, and she couldn’t even move her hands.” I would walk out in the Rose Garden, and I would think about it. That was constant, with me all the time.
I told [New York Times columnist James] Scotty Reston [in 1965 that] I’d have [to enact my legislative programs] in six to eight months: “The Eastern media will have the wells so poisoned by that time that that’s all the time I have. They’ll have us peeing on the fire,” I said. “I don’t think any man from Johnson City, Texas, can survive very long.”
President Dwight D. Eisenhower
The conventional wisdom of the time had it that as president, Eisenhower was somnolent and ineffectual. Here LBJ, who had served alongside Ike as the Democratic Senate leader for eight years, shows that he knows better.
I GOT THE IMPRESSION THAT COLUMNISTS THOUGHT IKE was not exciting and didn’t know what was going on. I never saw this. I found his knowledge of men and events complete, [but] I disagreed with his evaluation of conditions often. He was too conservative for me, too admiring of some situations and rather prejudiced towards others. But he was filled with patriotism. He was a great help to me, and he was a balance to me often.
Senator Eugene McCarthy
LBJ is being slightly disingenuous here. As his secret White House tapes show, he seriously considered McCarthy for vice president in 1964.
I ALWAYS THOUGHT OF SENATOR MCCARTHY as the type of fellow who did damn little harm and damn little good. I never saw anything constructive come out of him. He was always more interested in producing a laugh than a law in the Senate.
President Richard Nixon
In 1969 Johnson was surprisingly friendly to his old adversary Nixon. He appreciated that Nixon was essentially carrying on his Vietnam policy and that he had made no serious effort to cut into the muscle of LBJ’s cherished Great Society programs.
I DON’T FIND A LOT OF FAULT WITH NIXON. We ought to help him, I think, more than we hurt him. And we ought to try to make his load easier. I could hardly improve on what Nixon’s done to cool things since he’s been in office.
President Franklin Roosevelt
On October 29, 1940, Congressman Lyndon Johnson happened to be in President Franklin Roosevelt’s office when FDR’s isolationist ambassador to London, Joseph Kennedy—at whom Roosevelt was furious for his freelancing and his insufficient outrage against Adolf Hitler—returned to the United States. LBJ omits the detail that as FDR invited Kennedy by telephone for dinner, he drew his finger across his throat, razor fashion. Johnson twits Roosevelt for his indifference to civil rights, contrasting that unfavorably with LBJ’s own record.
I WAS WITH PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT THE DAY he fired Joe Kennedy. He picked up the phone and said, “Hello, Joe, are you in New York? Why don’t you come down and have a little family dinner with us tonight?” Then he hung up and said, “That son of a bitch is a traitor. He wants to sell us out.” Well, Kennedy did say Hitler was right.
Anyway, Roosevelt didn’t have any Southern molasses compassion. He didn’t get wrapped up in going to anyone’s funeral. Roosevelt never submitted one civil rights bill in twelve years. He sent Mrs. Roosevelt to their meetings in their parks, and she’d do it up good. But President Roosevelt never faced up to the problem.
President John F. Kennedy
Six years after JFK’s death, Johnson still cannot figure out why Americans were so enamored of the man whom he had considered a backbench absentee senator of little promise.
I THINK KENNEDY THOUGHT I WAS AUTOCRATIC, bossy, self-centered. Kennedy was pathetic as a congressman and as a senator. He didn’t know how to address the [Senate] chair. Kennedy had the squealers who followed him reported [on]. All of us have had squealers after us—the girls who giggle and the people who are just happy to be with you—but Kennedy was the only one the press saw fit to report on.
Robert F. Kennedy
A year after RFK’s assassination, LBJ displays his abiding exasperation toward the man who had been his chief political enemy.
I NEVER DID UNDERSTAND BOBBY. I never did understand how the press built him into the great figure that he was. He came into public life as [Joseph] McCarthy’s 26 counsel and then he was [John] McClellan’s 27 counsel and then he tapped Martin Luther King’s telephone wire. On civil rights I recommended to the president that no savings and loan association or no [FDIC] bank could continue if they did not make loans for open housing. Bobby called and said, “What are you trying to do? Defeat the president?” But the media was so charmed. It was like a rattlesnake charming a rabbit.
Getting His Name
I WAS THREE MONTHS OLD WHEN I WAS NAMED. My mother and father couldn’t agree on a name. The people my father liked were heavy drinkers—pretty rough for a city girl. She didn’t want me named after any of them.
Finally, there was a criminal lawyer—a county lawyer—named W. C. Linden. He would go on a drunk for a week after every case. My father liked him, and he wanted to name me after him. My mother didn’t care for the idea, but she said finally that it was all right; she would go along with it if she could spell the name the way she wanted to. So that was what happened.
I was campaigning for Congress in [inaudible]. An old man with a white carnation in his lapel came up and said, “That was a very good speech. I want to vote for you like I always have. The only thing I don’t like about you is the way you spell your name.” He then identified himself as W. C. Linden.
NOTES:
1. The transcript has been edited for clarity.
2. Sam Rayburn, the Speaker of the House and Johnson’s friend and mentor.
3. LBJ had suffered a massive heart attack in 1955 that almost killed him.
4. The liberal governor of Michigan.
5. Published by Harper and Row in 1967.
6. Rural Electrification Administration.
7. LBJ’s opponent in the Democratic primary.
8. At the Cortez Hotel in El Paso in June 1963.
9. LBJ’s former aide who was the deputy director of the Peace Corps at the time.
10. On November 21, 1963.
11. Manchester reported in The Death of a President that JFK had lambasted Johnson for pursuing his feud with Texas senator Ralph Yarborough.
12. Sponsored by the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce at the Hotel Texas.
13. In his speech in the hotel parking lot before breakfast, Kennedy said to the crowd, “Mrs. Kennedy is organizing herself. It takes longer, but then, she looks much better than we do when she does it.”
14. Lucia and Birge Alexander.
15. The Johnsons took a separate plane, Air Force Two, to Love Field, landing just in time to greet the Kennedys.
16. LBJ’s Secret Service agent Rufus Youngblood.
17. Here LBJ refutes Manchester’s The Death of a President, which insisted that RFK had wanted LBJ to wait to take the oath until he arrived in Washington so that JFK could return to the capital one last time as president.
18. The federal district judge who administered the oath of office.
19. Published by Simon and Schuster in 1997.
20. Because of the separation of powers doctrine.
21. The Johnson administration.
22. Charles Robb, who was leaving for duty in Vietnam.
23. Younger daughter Luci’s husband, Pat Nugent.
24. LBJ refers once again to his heart attack in 1955 as well as to the fact that most Johnson men did not live past the age of 65.
25. Wilson was paralyzed after he suffered a stroke in 1919.
26. The demagogue senator from Wisconsin who was censured by the Senate for his hearings on Communist activity in the U.S.
27. The segregationist senator from Arkansas.
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