Word: lbj
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...SINCE Doris Kearns taught Government 154, "The American Presidency" have there been so many LBJ anecdotes presented in one place at one time as in her treatise Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream. We get the complete story about Johnson's electric toothbrush fetish. There is the vivid description of LBJ's discussion with an embarrassed Kennedy-liberal while the president sat on the toilet. And, she includes an awesome account of the haggard man who tiptoed down to the situation room of the White House at 3 a.m. to see how his war was progressing. It's all interesting...
Kearns's extensive interviews with Johnson, courtesy of her status as official LBJ biographer during and after her stay as a White House Fellow, easily carry you through the chapter by chapter chronology of Johnson's career. The description of his use of the Senate as majority leader is perhaps the most enlightening passage, painting a littleseen picture of the wheeler-dealer at his best. For the first time we are shown Johnson's pathological obsession with Bobby Kennedy, a man who Johnson believed lived only to reclaim the Kennedy throne. We find out Johnson feared that Bobby Kennedy would...
...feared the "Communist bullies" above everything, and that he stayed in the war to defeat the Communist menace abroad. The answer to a most crucial question--why Johnson chose to escalate his war of aggression in Vietnam by bombing the North in 1965--is explained by this quote from LBJ: "Suddenly I realized that doing nothing was more dangerous than doing something...
...Ellsberg's essay he warns us to be aware of the Townsend Hoopes's and the Goodwins (Richard Goodwin, speech-writer for Johnson, now husband of Kearns who helped her write the book), former officials under LBJ who try to "objectively judge" the Johnsonian presidency with respect to the war, but end up underwriting "the deceits that have served importantly a sucession of Presidents to maintain support" for the immoral intervention in Vietnam...
...first glance Kearns seems to be coming from a different perspective. She writes in the opening of her book that she co-authored an essay for the New Republic about how to remove LBJ shortly before coming to work in the White House in 1967. That essay, however, accuses Johnson of little more than flagwaving and is mostly a polemic agitating for a third party. Whatever leftist baggage she may have had when she went in to the White House, she apparently lost much of it coming out. She has produced a work that is devoid of any political scrutiny...