The Triumph & Tragedy Of Lyndon Johnson – Joseph A. Califano Jr., 1991 ★★

LBJ Agonistes

Was Lyndon Johnson both the hardest-working and unluckiest man ever to inhabit the White House? Joseph Califano would have you think so.

A senior domestic-policy aide through most of Johnson’s presidency, Califano observed the 36^th President of the United States in times sunny (reelected by 44 states and 61 percent of the popular vote in 1964) and bleak (losing in Vietnam). Let others have at the negative; Califano’s admiration for his former boss overtakes all else.

His thesis in The Triumph & Tragedy Of Lyndon Johnson can be summed up thus: Johnson was Machiavellian in pursuit of justice. Beginning with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 through to the day he left office in January, 1969, Johnson did more to lift America’s underprivileged than any other president.

Whether you accept this or not may depend on your enthusiasm for “big government.” Califano’s enthusiasm for it comes across on every page. “Johnson’s legislative revolution was taking the federal government into the modern world on the side of the little person,” he writes.

Califano, who notes he was dubbed “The Deputy President for Domestic Affairs” by The New York Times, allows for the negative in LBJ as a kind of yin-yang thing:

The Lyndon Johnson I worked with was brave and brutal, compassionate and cruel, incredibly intelligent and infuriatingly insensitive, with a shrewd and uncanny instinct for the jugular of his allies and adversaries. He could be altruistic and petty, caring and crude, generous and petulant, bluntly honest and calculatingly devious – all within the same few minutes.

Califano and Johnson discuss policy in 1968. Just over LBJ's left shoulder are television monitors Johnson used to track news from all three American broadcast networks simultaneously. Photograph by Yoichi Okamoto from https://www.humanitiestexas.org/archives/digital-repository/president-lyndon-b-johnson-working-joseph-califano-1968.

People picking up this book knowing anything of Johnson expect the bad. Many, after all, flat-out accuse him of murdering his predecessor. Johnson as lever-puller, bully, cheater, adulterer, etc., is the well-documented stuff of legend. Robert Caro and other historians rub salt on that legacy; Califano breaks out the sugar instead.

Good for him, too. Not every memoir about a president has to be negative to be worth reading. But while making his case for Johnson, Califano becomes increasingly dull and strident, harping on policies big and small and crowding out personal aspects that made Johnson both compelling and problematic.

The book starts off explaining how Califano got pulled into the job, somewhat reluctantly, in 1965. While working for Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, Califano caught Johnson’s eye when he had to fill a new White House vacancy strategizing domestic policy.

To size him up, Johnson brought Califano out to his Texas ranch. It proved a memorable visit:

As we drove around, we were followed by a car and a station wagon with Secret Service agents. The President drank Cutty Sark scotch and soda out of a large white plastic foam cup; I had a Coca-Cola. Periodically, Johnson would slow down, sometimes stop for a moment, and hold his left arm outside the car, shaking the cup and ice. A Secret Service agent would run up to the car, take the cup and go back to the station wagon. Then another agent would refill it with ice, scotch, and soda as the first agent trotted behind the wagon. Then the first agent would run the refilled cup up to LBJ’s outstretched arm and waiting hand, as the President’s car moved slowly along.

After driving Califano around his ranch awhile, President Johnson drove it into a lake...without telling his passenger the vehicle could float. The result, Califano writes, amused Johnson greatly. Image from https://brooks-dyroff-m2ww.squarespace.com/dailytrivia/2018/3/14/president-lyndon-b-johnson-was-known-as-a-prankster-how-did-he-use-one-of-his-cars-to-joke-with-guests-at-his-texas-ranch.

Further details in that introductory chapter prime one to expect more color and juiciness than the rest of the book delivers.

What follows instead alternates between tortured apologia for LBJ’s handling of Vietnam and tubthumping exercise regarding almost everything else. To that end, Califano produces some labored prose:

He was a political and intellectual baker, kneading with those enormous hands until every aspect of the proposal was explored; once confident of that, he would put the bread in the oven.

A few pages later:

Johnson was everywhere, a Dutch uncle with a thousand thumbs plugging holes in economic dikes to hold off the floodwaters of inflation.

Entire chapters devolve into laundry lists of legislation and policy enacted by the Johnson Administration on everything from billboard regulation (a sizable entry) to managing the order of how young men were selected for the draft. No nuance is too fine for Califano to discourse upon at length.

Johnson famously shows his scars to the press in 1965 after undergoing gall-bladder surgery. "He had been trying to assure everyone that he had not had another heart attack; the gesture had misfired," Califano writes. Image from https://gregtheblogger.com/2014/05/19/is-everything-fair-game-in-politics-should-it-be/. 

Bigger issues get their due, but with an approach I found slanted. Not because it emphasizes the positive about Johnson, but because it presents him so often as a victim, either of others’ selfishness or of the fates themselves.

In racial matters, Johnson led off with the monumental Civil Rights Act and followed with more bills designed to improve the lot of Black Americans. But Califano allows the Johnson years would come to be remembered by racial unrest culminating in the assassination of civil-rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.

For Califano, riots in July 1967 were a matter of Johnson being punished for doing so much good. “Just as he had after Watts [in 1965], he was forced to face the fact that he might be losing his race against the ticking clock of expectations that the promise of his own legislative achievements and rhetoric had wound up,” he writes.

Johnson received “much more vitriolic mail” for pro-black polices than for Vietnam, Califano avers.

President Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Directly behind him, Martin Luther King Jr. looks on. Image from http://www.crf-usa.org/black-history-month/the-civil-rights-act-of-1964. 

A lot of Johnson’s difficulty while in office stemmed from what was dubbed at the time “the credibility gap.” To an unprecedented degree, people in the 1960s just didn’t trust their president.

Califano argues this didn’t begin with Johnson. “Johnson’s credibility problems were built upon Eisenhower’s and Kennedy’s,” he writes. He adds this went beyond American involvement in Vietnam to matters such as lying about a spy mission (in Eisenhower’s case) and the Bay of Pigs fiasco (Kennedy).

But one can understand such dishonesty about clandestine operations. Johnson lied often and vigorously about everything, even in Califano’s telling here. Trying to prevent a steelworkers’ strike early in his second term, Johnson plays both sides off one another and pretends he is their ally. He browbeats Califano and other staffers to underestimate the costs of both his domestic spending and his Vietnam policy so he can sell both to Congress until it comes time to pay the bills.

When one liberal congressman, New York Democrat Richard Ottinger, raised questions about whether the country has enough money to pay for such ambitious spending, Johnson’s reaction was characteristically ruthless:

“Tell him we’re prepared to put a public housing project right in the middle of his fancy Westchester district to demonstrate to him and his constituents how much money there is for domestic programs. Maybe that’ll help him to vote an increase in the debt limit.”

Lyndon Johnson's powers of persuasion with legislators was legendary. "You’ve got to know you’ve got him, and there’s only one way you know," Califano recalls Johnson saying. "And that’s when you’ve got his pecker right here." Image from http://deadpresidents.tumblr.com/post/59538408660/the-johnson-treatment.

Califano, a true believer, is fine with such tactics, lending this book a kind of instructive fun-house-mirror quality. It’s not the impression he wants to give, but it accumulates the more you read, Johnson as an instinctual bully enabled by yes-men.

Califano’s book is more engaging, and more aware, relating Johnson’s tortured relationship to his predecessor, John F. Kennedy. “Lyndon Johnson, who had achieved more in each year of his presidency than most chief executives accomplish in all their White House years, was possessed by an internal class struggle with an icon, and tortured by an envy he could not exorcise,” he writes.

So great was this envy that it sparked an intense rivalry with Kennedy’s brother Robert, the Attorney General when his brother was murdered. Johnson so hated Robert Kennedy that it dictated relationships with other Cabinet members. Dean Rusk, the secretary of state, was trusted by Johnson precisely because Robert Kennedy urged Johnson to fire him, Califano writes. Sargent Shriver loyally ran Johnson’s Office of Economic Opportunity but endured suspicion anyway for the sin of being Kennedy’s brother-in-law.

Califano does not address rumors of LBJ complicity in the assassinations of either John or Robert Kennedy. In his telling, Johnson was a shocked and saddened observer both times. He does add Johnson himself believed in something other than the lone-gunman theory regarding John: “President Kennedy tried to get [Cuban leader Fidel] Castro, but Castro got Kennedy first,” he quotes Johnson.

Johnson’s failure in Vietnam is presented as a matter of bad luck and poor advice, though Califano notes he did not work with Johnson on this issue. He notes several times Johnson was never bullish about the war; rather LBJ felt boxed in both by commitments to South Vietnam and worries of being thought soft on communism. Such criticism, he felt, would threaten his progressive domestic agenda.

Johnson listens as General Creighton Abrams, U. S. military commander in Vietnam, explains the situation during a National Security Council meeting in March 1968. At left, Vice President Hubert Humphrey looks on. Califano describes one Vietnam meeting the month before evoking "a chorus of despair." Image from https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2008/summer/lbj.html.

Inflexibility comes across as Johnson’s chief flaw in Califano’s telling, albeit somewhat reluctantly. You see it in the matter of Abe Fortas, Johnson’s former counsel. First he placed Fortas on the Supreme Court, then wanted to make him Chief Justice.

All this time, Johnson kept bringing Fortas into cabinet meetings to discuss domestic-policy strategy, including possible Supreme Court decisions. This created a massive conflict-of-interest controversy when discovered. Califano ascribes it to Johnson being Johnson:

…he refused to be denied access to his best attorney just because he had given him to the Supreme Court. It was not in LBJ to think there was any advice or information to which he was not entitled.

Reading his account of the Fortas controversy, it occurred to me that Johnson had the additional problem of aides unwilling to point out this sort of thing as wrong. Califano mentions his surprise at seeing Fortas attending these White House discussions, but apparently never shared these critical reservations with his boss. At least he doesn’t say so here.

Johnson's warmer side is recounted by Califano many times, including his love for Yuki, a mongrel his daughter Luci rescued from a gas station in 1966. Yuki spent as much time with LBJ in the Oval Office as anyone. Image from YouTube.

Illuminating, sometimes amusing anecdotes pepper this book and give it readability. Johnson objects to being described in newspapers as “sputtering mad” so much he works himself into a rage: “I am not…never have been…never will be…sputtering mad.” Califano describes Johnson’s habitually profane negotiating techniques with legislators, and even his chronic dissatisfaction with his vice-president, Hubert Humphrey. Califano speculates LBJ might have preferred Republican Nelson Rockefeller as his successor.

But as a memoir of presidential service, The Triumph & Tragedy Of Lyndon Johnson is too hung up in monument-polishing to fully engage as either a portrait of a man or a snapshot of his era. At times, the prose reads like an undelivered State of the Union address, stiff and full of civic blandishments. Califano’s enthusiasm for his former boss is both impressive and sincerely felt, just not all that convincing.