Word: goldmans
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...TRAGEDY OF LYNDON JOHNSON, by Eric F. Goldman. 531 pages. Knopf...
...tried to judge the past. Today Presidents have taken to employing historians as personal aides, partly in the hope that they will be written up lovingly. Sometimes they are-witness Arthur Schlesinger's study of John F. Kennedy. And sometimes the joke is on the Chief Executive. Eric Goldman's bestselling memoir of White House life with Lyndon Johnson emphatically belongs in the latter category...
Congratulations and Condolences. Like instant coffee, instant history can be remarkably palatable. Goldman's pronouncements about Johnson (that he was a tragic failure, "an extraordinarily gifted President who was the wrong man from the wrong place at the wrong time under the wrong circumstances") may suffer from myopia, but his book is stuffed with tangy anecdotes. Most of them hardly come out sounding like Hail to the Chief; yet they shade and amplify Johnson's enigmatic image in ways alternately provoking and satisfying...
...Princeton professor, Goldman worked for Johnson for two years and nine months starting just after President Kennedy's assassination. He was charged with providing the new President with a flow of ideas; among those he helped shape was the Johnsonian conception of the Great Society. He also served, more and more uneasily, as a general liaison man, trying to improve relations between the brilliant but unread Texan President and the intellectual community. "Congratulations and condolences," an academic friend quipped when Goldman first went to Washington. "Nobody has had a better job since the N.A.A.C.P. sent a man to Mississippi...
...view proved prophetic. Goldman's diplomatic effort came to total disaster at the famous June 1965 White House Festival of the Arts. Incensed by then about the Viet Nam war and always snobbishly intolerant of the presidential manner, a number of intellectuals noisily stayed away. Among those who did come, one guest-New York Critic Dwight Macdonald-cheekily circulated an anti-Johnson petition at the gathering. Another, John Hersey, chose to read pointed excerpts from his book Hiroshima despite fierce White House displeasure ("The President and I," said Mrs. Johnson, "do not want this man to come here...