Word: ranching
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...history as it is lived. Yet Jim Bishop, chrome-plated chronicler of "days" in the lives of Christ and Kennedy, Lincoln and-now-Lyndon Baines Johnson, carries the device too far. For eleven days, Bishop tagged the President's heels-even into the flowered fields of the L.BJ. ranch-notebook at the ready for the drop of a detail...
...himself in to sleep: "The extra pillows are cast aside, the great head sinks back, the arms are sometimes folded across the top of the sheet; after a few sighs, his mind wanders away from crises and commitments to the pleasant task of re-creating happy scenes at the ranch or on the lake; he remembers old friends . . . they all flow together in a slowly swirling series of thoughts which fade at the first soft snore...
Unlisted Number. Judge Johnson pays no attention. Two boys once burned a cross in his front yard, but to Johnson it was just a prank. After anonymous callers threatened to bomb his family, he simply got an unlisted number; federal agents have periodically guarded his comfortable ranch house ever since. He keeps a current file on all active Alabama Klansmen. Asked whether his wires are tapped, Johnson lights up another Home Run cigarette (a brand that makes Gauloises seem bleu by comparison) and noncommittally drawls: "I've made a studied effort to avoid areas of paranoia...
...here to say 'You do that and you do this,'" Johnson told the Presidents. "I'm just here to listen." When he did speak, he was well informed; he had already talked with Latin American ambassadors to Washington when they visited his Texas ranch, had sent Secretary of State Dean Rusk on ahead to Punta del Este to bone up on problems...
...result is not, as Manchester hoped it would be, "contemporary history." Any kind of history is a weave of event and evaluation, but the evaluation must have a veneer of rationality. Manchester is simply unable to make sense most of the time. When, for example, Kennedy visited the LBJ Ranch shortly after after the 1960 election, he reluctantly forced himself to shoot a deer because, Manchester says, was a national leader he was obliged to resolve any doubts about his mettle." It is doubtful that Manchester discerned Kennedy's thoughts, and this bit of interpretation, like many others, is unconvincing...