Insights into LBJ

By Ed Silverman

In 1968 while hosting a Channel 7 Editorial Board luncheon, I got to meet and talk with our special guest, Thomas Dewey — former New York district attorney, governor and twice-failed GOP presidential candidate.

I, like many others, had preconceived ideas about Dewey. I thought of him as a cold, aloof, calculating man, above the fray. To my pleasant surprise, he proved to be one of the most warm and charming men I have ever met, regaling us with selfdeprecating stories. His favorite story was about Lyndon Baines Johnson — one which gave me a rare and lasting insight into the president.

Dewey said that he was invited each year to a law enforcement convention in Washington.

“I always stayed in a cozy suite at the Mayflower Hotel. Only this year I get a call from the White House. It’s LBJ. ‘Towm (that’s how he pronounced my name) this is your president. I hear you’re going to be in Washington soon. Well, I want you to come stay with me at the White House, as my guest.’

“That was the last thing I wanted to do, but how do you say no to a president? So LBJ thinks he’s doing me a great honor by giving me the Lincoln bedroom. The room was an anachronism, cold and uninviting, with a big, old, hard bed. All I could think of was the room I wasn’t occupying at the Mayflower, while I had visions of dead and murdered presidents. It was a fitful night, so around dawn I slipped into my robe and headed downstairs. Who do I run into but LBJ, often a night prowler himself.

“‘Come on into my office, Towm. I got me some calls to make, then we’ll order up some breakfast.’

“Who, I asked myself, is he going to call at the crack of dawn? Well, it wasn’t dawn in Vietnam, where General Westmoreland was waiting to take his call. I gathered that this was a regular procedure as LBJ tried to micromanage the war from his desk. When he finished with the general, he placed one more call — a local call, to someone who turned out to be a mid-level official in some obscure DC agency. ‘Hello, this is your president.’

“Then he went into a harangue about how badly the official had handled some minor matter. He ended by slamming down the phone. He turned to me and gave me that big old Texas grin and said, ‘When the president calls you in the middle of the night and reads you the riot act, believe me, that’s going to keep you on your toes.’”

Dewey said LBJ went on to explain that Westmoreland wanted another half-million men to successfully complete his mission. “‘Towm, things ain’t going too well there and neither the Congress nor the people will stand for the drafting of that many men and the attendant cost. You’re lucky you never won the office. At times, no, most of the time, this job ain’t worth diddly squat.”

“I saw a battered and beaten man that morning, and it was no surprise to me when a short time later he announced that he would not seek re-election. He showed no disappointment when I cut short my stay to return to the Mayflower. I’d heard all kinds of stories about how explosive and erratic he could be, but I also know he had a clever and calculating mind. So, I think that after our pre-dawn meeting, he was convinced that I had gotten the message that maybe fate was being kind to me when I lost my two presidential election bids.”

I got another insight into LBJ and the way he manipulated people from Jim Hagerty, president of ABC News, and Leonard Goldenson, chairman of ABC-Paramount. They wanted to run an idea by the president for a project that might need federal approval.

They arrived at the White House and had lunch with LBJ, who told them to hold off on any business talk until after lunch. Immediately afterward, LBJ proposed they talk informally during a swim in the indoor pool. A nude swim, as it turned out. As Bill Moyers once said, after his first nude swim experience with LBJ, “To see that huge, hulking man cavort naked in the pool was like swimming with a polar bear.”

“Leonard was a rather conservative individual,” said Hagerty, “and not at all comfortable with it. I gotta admit,” he recounted, “it’s pretty damn difficult to present a business proposition when you’re splashing around a pool with your private parts hanging out. We never did get to put our proposition on the table. We showered, LBJ thanked us for coming, and went on to his next appointment having fulfilled his promise to meet with us, but cleverly avoiding the need to make any judgments or decisions. Crazy like a fox.”

My own first encounter with LBJ took place when he was vice president — a humiliating job for the man who had been America’s most powerful and influential legislator as Senate majority leader. His job now consisted mostly of attending trade meetings, and acting as a goodwill ambassador during trips to foreign nations.

It was at one of these trade shows, at the old Coliseum convention center at Columbus Circle, where on a slow news day, I had been assigned to interview him on the off chance he had something newsworthy to say. As my cameraman was setting up, LBJ, towering over me, said, “Young feller, where I come from, you can tell the cut of a man’s jib by the way he stands and looks you in the eye.”

I straightened up, dug in, and locked eyes with him as I shocked him by saying, “I just happen to also come from where you do, and I’m looking you straight in the eye.”

I then explained to him that as a teenager I had spent several years in Dallas, right on through high school and still had kinfolk all over Texas. I scored a touchdown when I told him I had played high school football, and when in the Navy during World War II, I had competed against Texas A&M’s great All-Amerian fullback, “Jarrin’” John Kimbrough. When he learned that I had lived in South Dallas, a heavily Jewish enclave, he peppered me with questions about Jewish community leaders, businessmen and clergy he knew.

I was to learn about his strong commitment to Israel and his close ties to a Jewish constituency. At the age of 26, when he was appointed by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to head the Texas division of the National Youth Administration, he had facilitated emigration of Jews from Nazi Germany. There was a humane and complex man underneath that good-ol’-boy facade.

We finally did an interview for the record, but to use LBJ’s own vernacular, and as anticipated, it wasn’t worth diddly squat. But I had made a friend and learned a great deal.

Another insight I gained into LBJ was through his wife, Ladybird. I traveled with her when she made a “poverty tour” through Appalachia. Ladybird was impressive as she worked the crowds, making each and every person who asked her a question feel that she was genuinely interested in them. I remember her telling one woman, “Your story has really touched me, and I’m sure when I tell it to Lyndon as soon as I get back, he’ll feel the same way and want to do something about it.” The supplicant left with hope in her heart.

Later that evening, I asked Ladybird if she would really tell LBJ all these stories. “As the Good Lord is my witness, I surely will,” she said. “These are Lyndon’s kind of people, and he’ll want to help them.”

LBJ left a great mark on the presidency and on the nation. It was he who introduced the era of the Great Society, and engineered the greatest civil rights legislation in history, covering housing, public facilities, the workplace, education, and voting. Then there was Medicare and Medicaid. He created effective anti-poverty and economic opportunity programs as well as the Job Corps, VISTA, and Head Start. He pioneered environmental clean up acts for water and air, led the fight for new standards for traffic and highway safety and mandatory safety improvements for automobiles. He appointed the first black man, Thurgood Marshall, to the Supreme Court. And Johnson became the first president to sell state-of-the-art fighter planes and tanks to Israel.

Despite this stellar record of achievement in just a little over four years, his memory has been overshadowed by his controversial handling of the Vietnam War, which tore the nation apart.

Prior to his retirement from office, LBJ had survived two heart attacks. But the trauma of the pressures of the office and the terrible burden of the war had taken their toll on his health. Late in 1972, while at his ranch, he suffered another heart attack from which he was unable to recover. He died a few months later.

Ironically, this man who had survived unscathed from action he saw as a naval lieutenant commander in World War II, had become a casualty of another war which he oversaw from afar, as commander-in-chief.