Word: goodwin
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Despite scattered allusions to the famed Kennedy woman-chasing, Goodwin avoids turning his story into a kiss-and-tell memoir. Psychoanalyze-and-tell better describes Goodwin's finished product. The most provocative chapter in the book, entitled, "Descent," describes Lyndon Johnson's progressively paranoid behavior following the 1964 election. This chapter has drawn the most attention--and fire--to the book. Former Johnson aide Jack Valenti and former Secretary of State Dean Rusk have both bitterly attacked Goodwin's portrayal of the president. They accuse Goodwin of misunderstanding Johnson's eccentricities and misusing psychiatric terms that he knows little about...
...GOODWIN does seem to have a point about some of the alleged Johnson "eccentricities." In a chapter called, "The Master At Work," Goodwin describes LBJ's infamous habit of conducting meetings while on the toilet. Goodwin tells how Johnson forced him to attend one of these bathroom meetings. "I remained standing, of course," Goodwin relates, "Johnson had the only seat in the room." Later Goodwin details Johnson's rantings about the Kennedys and "Harvards" and his absurd orders to fire one official or another for perceived acts of disloyalty. At one point, Johnson demanded that one of his top foreign...
...some, Johnson's distaste for academics may seem perfectly rational, but Goodwin believes Johnson's self-control was disintegrating. "I am not Lyndon Johnson's psychiatrist," Goodwin warns, but he does offer his psychiatric analysis of the president and concludes he had an obsessive paranoid personality. It is on this point that Goodwin's critics take issue with...
They claim Goodwin, ignorant of Johnson's ways and untrained in psychiatry, has no right to psychoanalyze the President of the United States. His random quotes from psychiatric textbooks and his few unnamed psychiatrist friends do not constitute an informed medical judgment. Most importantly, Goodwin, a Kennedy man at heart, really didn't know Johnson, having worked under him for less than two years. These arguments are persuasive and demonstrate the dangers in armchair psychiatry...
Putting such pitfalls aside and fully aware that I'm no psychiatrist, I feel confident in saying that you don't have to be a genius to realize that possibly Goodwin himself could use a little couch time. "I've always viewed slacks," he writes about his dating experiences, "as the greatest challenge to my coordination." Is Goodwin's awkwardness with women in pants a case of misplaced Oedipal urges? "Now the ghosts dissolve," he writes at the book's end. Ghosts? But then Goodwin seems to be preoccupied by the supernatural. He begins his book by quoting Paul Simon...