Secrecy And Openness In Lyndon Johnson's White House: Political Style, Pluralism, And The Presidency

The Review of Politics

Volumn 54, Issue 1, 1992, Pages 72-111

  Barrett, David M ^a  

^a NONE   (United Kingdom)

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EID: 84974081693     PISSN: 00346705     EISSN: 17486858     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0034670500017198     Document Type: Article

References (95)

1. Character, says James David Barber's The Presidential Character, 2nd ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1977), is “the way the President orients himself toward life —not for the moment, but enduringly” (pp. 6–8, 11). I define style as characteristic patterns, chosen and employed by a president, in dealing with his job and interacting with others.
2. Sam Houston Johnson, My Brother Lyndon (New York: Cowles Book Co., 1970), p. 250.
3. On keeping options open until the last moment, with no decision being final until announced, see Johnson's oral history interview with Elspeth Rostow, p. II, 11, and Benjamin Read's oral history, p. 17, both LBJ Library.
4. Anderson, The Presidents'Men (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969), p. 328. A section of the book is titled “Caligula's Court.” Larry Berman, in chapter one of his Planning A Tragedy (New York: Norton, 1982), similarly notes and labels such interpretations of the Johnson White House. One prominent “Caligula”-style interpretation of Johnson does not (yet) deal with Vietnam: Robert Caro's multivolume biography, The Years of Lyndon Johnson, vol. 1, The Path to Power (New York: Knopf, 1982) and vol. 2, Means of Ascent (New York: Knopf, 1990). A persuasive critique of Caro is Garry Wills's “Monstre Desacre, ” New York Review of Books, 26 April 1990, pp. 7–9.
5. Barber, Presidential Character, p. 80. Chapter two of Emmette Redford's and Richard McCulley's White House Operations (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1986) demonstrates that White House personnel turnover was not high in the Johnson administration.
6. In a personal interview in October 1990, Reedy reemphasized the difference he believed existed in Johnson's advisory interactions during his Senate days and those of his White House years. Earlier, he wrote that, on Vietnam, the president “succeeded in closing the debate only in the White House and could not understand just why it persisted in the nation as a whole” (Reedy, Lyndon B. Johnson; A Memoir [New York: Andrews and McNeel, 1982], pp. 18, 142–43, 157).
7. Fulbright, oral history interview, p. 6, Richard Russell Library, University of Georgia. See also Richard Goodwin, Remembering America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1988), chap. 21. Chapter 9 of Rhodri Jeffrey s-Jones's The CIA and American Democracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989) portrays a president and White House whose “siege mentality” made Johnson “blind” to important issues (p. 163).
8. Chester Cooper, The Lost Crusade: America in Vietnam (New York: Dodd, Mead, and Co., 1970), p. 223. In truth, as Cooper notes, NSC meetings were not usually important advisory forums for Johnson.
9. Philip R. Rulon, Compassionate Samaritan: The Life of Lyndon Baines Johnson (Chicago: Nelson Hall, 1981); Jack Valenti, A Very Human President (New York: Pocket Books, 1977), pp. 52, 58.
10. Helms, oral history, p. 1, 13, LBJ Library; see Abe Fortas on this, in Kenneth W. Thompson, ed., The Johnson Presidency: Twenty Intimate Perspectives of Lyndon B. Johnson (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1986), pp. 9-10; Rusk, oral history, p. I, 37, LBJ Library; see also George M. Kahin, Intervention (New York: Knopf, 1986), pp. 348, 362, 366.
11. Not that they disagree absolutely: Reedy describes Johnson as “the consummate political leader of his era, ” who sometimes, “even when his White House setbacks produced a touch of paranoia… was willing to give serious consideration to opposing points of view.” On the other side of the spectrum, Valenti admits the president could be abusive.
12. Kearns, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), pp. 238, 323-24; Burke and Greenstein, with the collaboration of Larry Berman and Richard Immerman, How Presidents Test Reality, pp. 144–45, 237, 280, 214–16, 238. Also Patrick Hatcher, The Suicide of an Elite: American Internationalists and Vietnam (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), pp. 185—88, 286–88.
13. Redford and McCulley, White House Operations, pp. 72, 74.
14. Barbara Ward's The Rich Nations and the Poor Nations (New York: Norton, 1962) has commonly been cited as one book which Johnson read and reread.
15. Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, Lyndon B. Johnson: The Exercise of Power (New York: New American Library, 1966), pp. 10–11. This is one of the finest early studies of Johnson's political career. On LBJ and mentors see Kearns, Johnson and the American Dream, pp. 214, 239-40; also Reedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, pp. 39–44.
16. Evans and Novak, Lyndon B. Johnson, p. 148.
17. Kearns, Johnson and the American Dream, p. 148.
18. Evans and Novak, Lyndon B. Johnson, pp. 150–151.
19. William Bundy, oral history, p. 31, emphasis in the original; see also Richard Helms, oral history, pp. I, 23, 30, 33, all LBJ Library.
20. McGeorge Bundy, oral history p. conducted by Richard Rusk, p. 17, Dean Rusk papers, Richard Russell Library. Bundy isn't quite calling Johnson a liar here; George Reedy writes that Johnson “never told a deliberate lie. But he had a fantastic capacity to persuade himself that the ‘truth’ which was convenient for the present was the truth and anything that conflicted with it was the prevarication of enemies” (Reedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, 3).
21. Wheeler, oral history, p. 2, 8, LBJ Library. Dean Rusk says LBJ “didn’t like to have his hand disclosed before he was ready to announce it.” Rusk, interviewed by Richard Rusk, tape QQQQQ, pp. 10–11, Rusk papers, Russell Library. See also Walter Heller, “President Johnson and the Economy, ” in To Heal and to Build, ed. James M. Burns (New York: McGraw Hill, 1968), p. 152.
22. On Johnson's liberalism, see William Schambra, “Progressive Liberalism and American ‘Community, ’” The Public Interest, Summer 1985, pp. 32-37; also David McKay, Domestic Policy and Ideology; Presidents and the American State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), chap. 2.
23. McPherson, A Political Education (Boston: Little, Brown, 1972), pp. 263–264. On Johnson and Roosevelt, and LBJ as a “congressional president, ” see Stephen Hess, Organizing the Presidency, 2nd ed. (Washington: Brookings, 1988), pp. 94–5, 103. Also Earle Wheeler's oral history, LBJ Library.
24. Truman, The Governmental Process (New York: Knopf, 1951), pp. 399, 401–403, 422, 428.
25. Neustadt, Presidential Power (New York: Wiley and Sons, 1960), pp. 6, 9–10, 185, 188, and, in general, chap. 6.
26. Burns, The Deadlock of Democracy (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963), pp. 5–7, 257. Grant McConnell found in The Modern Presidency (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1967) that the presidency was too weak, but uniquely “responsible to all of the people” and the medium for reasserting national values.” See pp. 90–94.
27. Kernell, Going Public (Washington, D. C.: Congressional Quarterly Press, 1986), pp. 10–17.
28. Oral history interviews of Johnson, conducted by William Jorden and Elspeth Rostow for the Johnson Library, contain similar views as those expressed in Johnson, The Vantage Point (New York: Holt Rinehart Winston, 1971).
29. Vantage Point, pp. 18, 27, 28, 29.
30. Ibid., p. 433.
31. Ibid., pp. 18, 28, 41, 433, 566. Johnson differed from certain academic pluralists in believing that there was such a thing as a “national interest”; Truman and many others asserted that there is no “national interest” apart from a given balance of forces among and between groups in the country at any given time.
32. Truman, Governmental Process, p. 403.
33. Vantage Point, pp. 157–158, 438, 447.
34. Wheeler, oral history, p. 1–3, LBJ Library.
35. Roche oral history, p. 1, 50, LBJ Library. See also pp. I, 9, 54, 63, 72, 73 of this insightful record.
36. Califano, Governing America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981), pp. 140–141. This is a very readable comparison of the Carter and Johnson presidencies.
37. Townsend Hoopes, Limits of Intervention: An Inside Account of How the Johnson Policy of Escalation Was Reversed (New York: D. McCay Co., 1969), p. 58.
38. President Kennedy apparently did not expect Diem's murder —see Gen. Maxwell Taylor's Swords and Plowshares (New York: Norton, 1972), p. 301. On Kennedy and Diem, see Frederick Nolting, From Trust to Tragedy (New York: Praeger, 1988).
39. But see Richard Neustadt and Ernest R. May, Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision Makers (New York: Free Press, 1986), p. 88.
40. Hatcher, Suicide of an Elite, pp. 185–188, 286, 288; Berman, Planning a Tragedy, pp. 99-100; Goodwin, Remembering America, p. 410.
41. Kahin, Intervention, pp. 348–349, 366. Kahin is quoting William Bundy, a former assistant secretary of state in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.
42. David M. Barrett, “The Mythology Surrounding Lyndon Johnson, His Advisers, and the 1965 Decision to Escalate the Vietnam War, ” Political Science Quarterly 103, no. 4 (1988-89): 637–663.
43. For examples of Ball's advice see, for instance, Ball's oral history interview, pp. 1–18, 20, and Ball tojohnson memo, 18 June 1965, p. 4, NS File, Deployment of Major Forces, box 42, LBJ Library. Ball's stance gained recognition in David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest (New York: Random House, 1972).
44. Meeting Notes File, 21–27 July 1965, box 1, LBJ Library. Also, “Views of Clark Clifford on Vietnam, ” notes by Jack Valenti, 25 July 1965, Reference File, Miscellaneous Vietnam Documents Folder, LBJ Library.
45. A draft of a Humphrey memo urging Johnson to “cut [American] losses” in Vietnam is in VP Files, 1965–68, Foreign Affairs: Vietnam, Memos to President, Feb. 1965, Humphrey papers, Minnesota Historical Society, St. Paul, Minnesota. Humphrey later published the memo in his autobiography, The Education of a Public Man (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1976), pp. 320–24. The archival evidence on Russell's advice is thinner, as Russell and Johnson relied primarily on face-to-face discussions, often over dinner or drinks at the White House or on the presidential yacht. But see memo from Mike Mansfield to Johnson, summarizing views of six senators, including Russell, that “insofar as Vietnam is concerned we are deeply enmeshed in a place where we ought not to be, ” in International Series-Vietnam, Subject file —23-31, July 1965, Russell Library. On both of these men, see Barrett, “The Mythology, ” pp. 651–655, 646–48.
46. Barrett, “Mythology, ” p. 644; Tristram Coffin, Senator Fulbright: Portrait of a Public Philosopher (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1966), pp. 188–89.
47. Mansfield wrote Johnson (as he also told him) that escalation “will win us only widespread difficulties.” He added, “I know that my thoughts have received your careful attention. I know that your assistants and the bureaucracy have studied them and occasionally even have concurred in ideas expressed in them.” This letter is from 24 March 1965, NS File, Memos to the President from M. Bundy, vol. 9, box 3, LBJ Library. On the Mansfield-Johnson relationship see Barrett, “Mythology, ” pp. 648, 651.
48. The widely accepted thesis is in Berman, Planning a Tragedy, e.g., pp. 121, 152. It is based on a claim by writers of the commentary (not original policymaking documents) in the Pentagon Papers: The Gravel Edition (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), vol. 3, p. 475 and vol. 5, p. 299. See critiques in (especially) Kahin, Intervention, pp. 362, 527, also Barrett, “Mythology, ” pp. 639, 658, and Richard Betts in Peter Braestrup, ed., Vietnam as History (Washington, D. C.: University Press of America, 1984), p. 46, 47, and former Under Secretary of State George Ball's Past Has Another Pattern (New York: Norton, 1982), pp. 399–403. Ball writes of Johnson's “agonizing reluctance to go forward [with escalation] and his desire to explore every possible alternative.” The Berman thesis is reconsidered and less stoutly defended in Berman's collaboration with John Burke, Fred Greenstein, and Richard Immerman, How Presidents Test Reality, p. 215.
49. Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy and His Times (New York: Grossman Publishers, 1973), p. 883; Berman, Lyndon Johnson's War, pp. 37, 56.
50. Fulbright, The Arrogance of Power (New York: Vintage Books, 1966), pp. 188–197. See also William Berman, William Fulbright and the Vietnam War (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1988), pp. 78, 92. Chomsky, “The Logic of Withdrawal, ” Ramparts. September 1967; revised and reprinted in American Power and the New Mandarins (New York: Pantheon Books, 1969), pp. 246–69. For contemporaneous evidence of standard “dovish” views in 1967, see also: Neil Sheehan, “Not a Dove, But No Longer a Hawk, ” New York Times Magazine, 9 October 1966; Arthur Schlesinger, The Bitter Heritage (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967), p. 34; Taylor, Swords and Plowshares, p. 379; and Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy and His Times, p. 833.
51. One who did, to Johnson's irritation, was his friend and director of the United States Information Agency, Leonard Marks. See his “Johnson and Leadership, ” in Thompson, Johnson Presidency, pp. 285–286.
52. Memo to the President from Tom Johnson, 7-12-67, “Meetings from Feb. '67 to Feb. '68” folder, T. Johnson Notes, box 3; Komer to McNamara and C. Vance, 4-24-67, folder: N. Katzenbach, Files of Komer, box 5; Komer to J. McNaughton, 4-8-67, folder: McNamara, Vance, McNaughton, Files of Komer, box 5, all LBJ Library; also Pentagon Papers, 4: 390–91, 440–441.
53. McNamara to Johnson, 5-19-67, in Pentagon Papers, 4: 169–75.
54. See Tom Johnson's notes of meetings, 6-12-67, 8-5-67, 8-16-67, and 8-24-67 (from which the quotation is taken), LBJ Library; also, Thomas Schoen-baum, Waging Peace and War: Dean Rusk in the Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson Years (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), p. 458; and an interview of Rusk by his son, Richard Rusk, tape PP, pp. 10–11, Rusk papers, Richard Russell Library.
55. Others favoring a bombing limitation or opposing further troops escalations included speechwriter Harry McPherson, Sen. Mike Mansfield, and even national security adviser Walt Rostow (who supported McNamara's suggestions on bombing limitations—see Rostow to the President, “Response to Sen. Mans-field, ” 8-7-67, NS file, Vietnam, Memos to the President, vol. 1, box 56, LBJ Library). Rostow supported other types of escalation, however. See also former national security adviser McGeorge Bundy's letter to Johnson, Pentagon Papers, 4: 157–169.
56. Roche oral history, p. 1, 18–20, 45–46, LBJ Library.
57. The quotation comes from Barbara Kellerman's favorable review of Larry Berman's Lyndon Johnson's War in Presidential Studies Quarterly, Summer 1990, pp. 628–31. The classic description of Johnson's advisory circle being sealed off from reality [the “enduring stupidity and the self-protecting tenacity of the inner circle” where “never was heard a disparaging word] is Hoopes's influential The Limits of Intervention. See, for instance, pp. 59–61, 150, 181, 207, 218. Clifford helped this interpretation along by his cooperation with Hoopes, a former Pentagon subordinate. More balanced is Herbert Schandler's Lyndon Johnson and Vietnam: The Unmaking of a President (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983).
58. Some of Johnson's notes have been available for years. Johnson, who retains literary copyright of the notes (at the LBJ Library) says they were taken in speedwriting and then typed up. They are not perfect, he says, but represented his best effort to reflect accurately the advisory sessions. He adds that no one except the president had access to the notes; the president used them to keep track of the twists and turns of Vietnam decision-making in his administration, and also intended that they would be available to researchers eventually. Johnson says the president, who always read the notes after they were typed, never asked him to change their contents.
59. Times story, quoted in the Pentagon Papers, 4; 588.
60. Walt Rostow, quoted in Schandler, Johnson and Vietnam, p. 202. Wheeler recognized that Johnson might et al. r the numbers sent —on 3-6-68, Wheeler told Johnson, “I sent General Westmoreland the message you asked me to give him last night. I told him… we did not have the capability to send more than 22, 000 men to him at this time. But I emphasized that no decision has yet been made on this” (emphasis in the original).
61. Tom Johnson's notes, 10-15-68, LBJ Library.
62. Rusk virtually disappears from the description of decision-making in the final days before Johnson's 31 March speech in L. Berman's Lyndon Johnson's War. This is proof, if any were needed, that the availability of archival materials to political scientists will not necessarily resolve empirical, much less theoretical, controversies.
63. On Cousins, see Edgar Berman to Hubert Humphrey, 3-19-68, regarding a 15 March Johnson-Cousins meeting lasting an hour and forty-five minutes at the White House. The memo, reporting Berman's conversation with Cousins, indicates that Johnson called Cousins to arrange the meeting. See Berman Memos to Vice President, 1968, Humphrey papers, Minnesota Historical Society.
64. Fortas to Johnson, mailed on 3-12-68, folder: “Abe Fortas, ” Files Pertaining to A. Fortas and H. Thornberry, box 1, LBJ Library.
65. The Acheson quotation is from Don Oberdorfer's Tet (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1971), pp. 309–315, which has an account more detailed but consistent with “Mar. 26, 1968—3:15 PM, Special advisory group, ” meeting notes file, box 2, LBJ Library. Russell's quotation comes from the Congressional Record, 4-2-68, pp. 8570–73.
66. Thomas and Wolman, “Policy Formulation in the Institutionalized Presidency, ” in Cronin and Greenberg's The Presidential Advisory System (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), pp. 124–143. See also Nancy K. Smith's “Presidential Task Force Operation During the Johnson Administration, ” Presidential Studies Quarterly 15, no. 2 (Spring 1985): 320–29.
67. Thomas and Wolman, “Policy Formulation, ” p. 127.
68. Kearns, Johnson and the American Dream, pp. 222-23; see also Smith, “Presidential Task Force Operations”; Paul Keith Conkin, Big Daddy from the Pedernales: Lyndon Baines Johnson (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1986). In addition, there were ninety “internal or interagency” task forces. See pp. 209–212.
69. Thomas and Wolman, “Policy Formulation, ” p. 128.
70. Ibid., p. 129; Johnson, quoted in Smith, “Presidential Task Force Operations, ” p. 321.
71. Vantage Point, p. 433.
72. Thomas and Wolman, “Policy Formulation, ” pp. 131, 135. Emphasis added. The Kennedy administration faced pressures to “balance” its task forces.
73. Ibid., p. 136. See also Smith, “Presidential Task Force Operations, ” pp. 321–22.
74. Thomas and Wolman, “Policy Formulation, ” p. 137.
75. Ibid., pp. 134, 139, 140, 142–43. Thomas and Wolman observe that the Johnson task forces may be “a good example of what Theodore Lowi in The End of Liberalism (New York: Norton, 1969) has called ‘interest group liberalism, ’ a phenomenon which Lowi feels has come increasingly to characterize American politics in the 1960s” (p. 143). But Lowi describes a process in which policymaking in government is largely captured by the access and influence of interest groups; the Johnson task forces represented a decided effort to escape excessive “access” of interest groups.
76. Glenn T. Seaborg with Benjamin S. Loeb, Stemming the Tide: Arms Control in the Johnson Years (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1987), p. 19.
77. Seaborg, Stemming the Tide, p. 19.
78. Ibid., pp. 20, 23.
79. Ibid., pp. 36, 44-45; Johnson, Vantage Point, p. 466.
80. See Eugene Rostow's oral history, p. 1, LBJ Library. Also Kearns, Johnson and the American Dream, pp. 248-49: “If a reporter learned in advance that the President was going to do something on Thursday, and reported that fact in Tuesday's paper, Johnson would often change his plans in order to embarrass the reporter, who had then to explain his error, and to serve notice on those who leaked the story that such indiscretion was a serious act of insubordination.”
81. Seaborg, Stemming the Tide, pp. 136, 148.
82. Ibid., pp. 145, 146.
83. Ibid., p. 149.
84. At least 11 persons, plus the Gilpatric Committee, are listed as advising Johnson on arms control in the Seaborg account: Rusk, McNamara, Bundy, Rostow, Seaborg, Ball, Helms, Clifford, Fortas, and Senators Russell and Jackson.
85. In 1965, he even took on the language of the civil rights movement, proclaiming to Congress, “We shall overcome.” Jack Bell, The Johnson Treatment (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), pp. 159–66. It took more than Johnson's lobbying to move Smith. See Charles Whalen and Barbara Whalen, The Longest Debate (Cabin Lodge, MD: Seven Locks Press, 1985); Califano, Presidential Nation, p. 215.
86. Barbara Tuchman, The March of Folly (New York: Knopf, 1984), pp. 311, 338.
87. O'Neill, Man of the House (New York: Random House, 1987), pp. 183–184.
88. Westmoreland, A Soldier Reports (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1976), pp. 234, 230, 414; Rusk, oral interview, no. 1, LBJ Library, pp. 42, 37.
89. Ball, oral interview, p. 2, 15, and Eugene Rostow, oral interview, p. 11, both LBJ Library. Emphasis in the original.
90. p. 95. Aiken, oral interview, p. 9; Gruening, oral interview, both LBJ Library, 8.
91. Helms oral interview, LBJ Library, pp. 12, 37.
92. Bundy, oral interview, LBJ Library, pp. 27–29. Bundy says such written characterizations came from former administration officials James Thompson and Richard Goodwin in the late 1960s, and were “inherently small minded” and “rather sordid and opportunistic.”
93. Maxwell Taylor oral interviews, (1969) p. 25, (1981) p. II, 37, LBJ Library.
94. Redford and McCulley, White House Operations, pp. 72–75.
95. Roche oral history, p. 1, 42, LBJ Library.