Were you eighty years old in 1850, you could not have looked back into history and heard the voice of Thomas Jefferson. Had you been age ninety in 1780, you could never have seen the gestures of the Puritan divine Cotton Mather as he preached a fiery sermon in a Boston church.
One of the many ways in which being old is different now from what it was until the twentieth century is how historical figures of our lifetime can be made present to us.
This is one of my reflections this week on hearing the voice of Lyndon Johnson recorded on secret tapes that he kept during his years in the White House. The contents of these tapes also stirred in me a range of emotions ranging from admiration to indignation, with many stops in between.
Texts from the tapes have been newly published by presidential historian Michael Beschloss in a book entitled “Reaching for Glory.” Appearing two weeks ago on the National Public Radio program “Fresh Air” hosted by Terry Gross, Beschloss provided background for each excerpt before playing it.
The most shocking single item that emerges from LBJ’s private conversations is an admission about the Vietnam War. Early in 1965, speaking of the opposing forces, Johnson tells his defense secretary Robert McNamara, “I don’t believe they’re ever going to quit. I don’t see any hope of a victory.”
To hear the president concede that the United States military could not win the war still, thirty-six years later, comes as a shock. As Beschloss says, “A president should never send Americans into harm’s way with no chance of winning.”
This admission of Johnson also puts into painful context the speeches he continued to give about that war. In short, he lied to the American public, over and over. Privately, he agreed with much of what the anti-war demonstrators were saying, though he dismissed them as tools of the Communists. But publicly he continued to insist that, with the deployment of greater military resources, the United States would prevail.
Why did Lyndon Johnson not edit out of the tapes statements that would reflect badly on him in the eyes of history? Beschloss believes that he probably intended to; but, when he retired to his ranch in Texas, the last thing he wanted to do was to review material on Vietnam that had caused him so much grief and driven him from the presidency.
The tapes also reveal Johnson as a man obsessed with people he saw as his domestic enemies. Beschloss labels him “the ultimate control freak.” Even after he had scored an unprecedentedly large electoral victory over Goldwater in 1964, LBJ fretted about his opponents. He badmouthed the press for portraying the vote as anti-Goldwater rather then pro-Johnson, and himself as the lesser of two evils. “They want to make a Harding of us,” groused Johnson. He also obsessed about Bobby Kennedy whom he foresaw as his electoral challenger.
The tapes also contain a conversation between LBJ and J. Edgar Hoover about homosexuals in government. It came in the wake of a scandal surrounding Walter Jenkins, one of Johnson’s closest aides. The conversation takes on added interest in the light of later speculation about Hoover’s own sexuality. Beschloss’s comments on this exchange gives reason to welcome the change of attitudes that has taken place since then. “How far we have come,” says the historian, remarking that gay people can now be appointed to governmental positions almost routinely.
Despite all that I have learned about human nature over the course of a long lifetime, it still comes as a shock to hear evidence of how petty a man could be while ensconced at the top of the American power structure. Johnson harbored within himself a sensitivity to personal slights that seems totally incompatible with the call to serve the needs of some two hundred and fifty million of his fellow citizens.
And, of course, he served those needs extraordinarily well in certain areas. Almost surely he will go down in history as the greatest champion of civil rights. One of the tapes records a conversation he had with the then segregationist governor, George Wallace. It features a delicate byplay between the two, with Wallace trying to get Johnson to call out his federal troops while Johnson urges him to rely on the Alabama national guard.
Beschloss calls himself fortunate to have this tape of “one of the great moments in history,” and celebrates Johnson’s caring more about civil rights and poverty than anything else.
The earliest event in history that I have watched on videotape is the funeral of Queen Victoria in 1901. To see various royals from Britain and other countries as they solemnly parade by on horseback and in their carriages still stirs my imagination. The history that we have lived through since then is now so well documented that we have abundant material for our reveries and our reflections about the past.
Richard Griffin