Word: lyndon
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...tragic impulses of any President," insists Clark Clifford, a Washington insider for 40 years, "is the desire for vindication." There are in history a few examples of Presidents standing in splendor on their ideology and being vindicated finally by events. Lyndon Johnson's fight for a civil rights bill in 1964 was a sometimes lonely road to glory. But our system is not an ideological one. It is based on flexibility, compromise. Clifford recalls Johnson as he sealed his fate in the sweltering officers' club of Cam Ranh Bay in Viet Nam, urging his field commanders to "come...
...that he was only doing what John F. Kennedy had quietly practiced, Historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., a Kennedy friend and onetime aide, found it "inconceivable" that J.F.K. had bugged his visitors. Schlesinger insisted haughtily: "It was not the sort of thing Kennedy would have done." Declared Ramsey Clark, Lyndon Johnson's Attorney General: "I don't believe it happened. It's a shameful thing...
...momentous events had been preserved while only the President was aware that every comment, however unkindly phrased or crudely expressed, might one day be revealed. The names on the Kennedy logs evoked an eventful era: General Douglas MacArthur, former Presidents Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower, then Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, U.N. Ambassador Adlai Stevenson, Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara, Secretary of State Dean Rusk and General Maxwell Taylor, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff...
Kennedy and Nixon were by no means the only Presidents to preserve conversations. Lyndon Johnson could reach under a table in the Cabinet Room and throw a switch among the buttons marked COFFEE, TEA and FRESCA to turn his recorders on and off. So far, only a few transcripts have been made public. Harry Truman is known to have made about ten recordings, and it was revealed only last month that Franklin D. Roosevelt used a mike in his office desk lamp to record at least 14 press conferences and a few other conversations. Eisenhower is known to have taped...
...beyond anything that Roosevelt ever proposed. It was one of Roosevelt's beliefs, for example, that welfare should be a temporary measure, and that the recipients should be put to work, a view that is judged heartless when Reagan proclaims it today. It was not Roosevelt but Lyndon Johnson who first organized Government medical insurance, which now costs some $57 billion per year, more than eight times the average federal outlay during Roosevelt's first term. It was not Roosevelt but Richard Nixon who turned