The tapes will surprise younger Americans nursed on Oliver Stone’s ““JFK.’’ They show that three months after John Kennedy’s murder, the private LBJ was scarcely hell-bent on plunging the nation into war in Southeast Asia–a contention Stone makes in his movie. ““We can say this is the Vietnamese war, and they’ve got 200,000 men,’’ he tells Defense Secretary Robert McNamara on March 2. ““They’re untrained–and we’ve got to bring their morale up and . . . train them how to fight.’’ If the policy failed, ““we have to make another decision, but at this point it has not failed.’’ Elsewhere Johnson shows himself grimly aware of how Harry Truman and his domestic program were consumed by Korea. He warns that if he were to send large numbers of U.S. ground forces to Vietnam, ““our men may well be bogged down in a long war against numerically superior North Vietnamese and Chinese Communist forces ten thousand miles from home.''
The president records himself applying the Johnson Treatment to the 80-year old Harry Truman, who balks at LBJ’s demand that he and Bess join Lady Bird at the funeral of King Paul of Greece: ““She can sleep all the way over and Lady Bird will fix her a good Old Fashioned, a good bourbon and water whenever she wants it . . . You’ve got to go . . . These Greek people love you. There’s a few crackpots, but they love you . . . And I want to show them we love them . . . You don’t need to worry about a thing. You will be briefed on everything. And just don’t–uh, don’t run off with my wife! Bring her back, that’s all I ask.’’ Needless to say, the old man caves in.
While pressuring JFK’s brother-in-law, Peace Corps Director Sargent Shriver, to manage his just-announced War on Poverty, Johnson shows his commitment to the underclass, his fervor to keep the dead president’s intimates on board before the 1964 election and his preternatural ability to bend other tough guys to his will: ““You can write your ticket on anything you want to do there. I want to get rid of poverty . . . The Sunday papers are going to say that you’re Mr. Poverty, unless you’ve got real compelling reasons, which I haven’t heard.’’ After bagging his trophy, the president goes on to complain to Shriver about the Peace Corps: ““For Christ’s sake, if your wife, if the Kennedys had–uh, they wouldn’t have this fortune if they would have as many baby-sitters as you have in the Peace Corps. You’ve got 10,000 people and 1,100 administrators.''
Like the recordings that FDR, Dwight Eisenhower, Kennedy and Richard Nixon made of their own private conversations–all without informing the other person that the tape was rolling–the LBJ archives are a window on an American president of the kind that we will almost certainly never have again. Americans have justifiably considered presidential taping off-limits since Watergate, when Nixon’s aide Alexander Butterfield revealed to an outraged public that his boss had turned the White House into a recording studio.
We historians have slightly more mixed emotions. Of course, the right to privacy demands that people should know when they are being taped–even by presidents. But it is excruciating to note how rapidly the sources we scholars need to understand and write about presidents are vanishing. Most of our leaders are out of the habit of writing long revealing letters that even so recent a president as Eisenhower did; the private correspondence of Kennedy, Gerald Ford or Bill Clinton would not support much of a biography. Many memos by presidents and presidential aides are written in order to look good in case they wind up on a newspaper’s front page, as they increasingly do. Others are deleted from computers or shredded.
I used to ask American political figures who seemed to be enjoying particularly interesting careers whether they were keeping diaries. Years ago, they seemed to consider the inquiry mildly complimentary. No longer. Since special prosecutors began asking for the private journals of Ronald Reagan, George Bush and lesser officials, the question has elicited a nervous response akin to: why do you ask and what prosecutors do you know? Without tapes or candid letters, memos and diaries, historians are more and more forced to rely on the official version of a presidency, as conveyed in speeches, news conferences and –later–highly-paid-for, self-serving memoirs. Allowing our presidents to obscure motives and actions strips us of the ability to learn from their mistakes as well as their triumphs.
That LBJ would preserve his White House recordings for later use by critical scholars suggests that he may have been more serious about having history written ““with the bark off,’’ as he said while opening his presidential library in 1971, than many gave him credit for. It may also suggest that he knew something else. Historical figures who reveal their defects as well as their virtues often have the best crack at immortality.
Beschloss, a historian of the presidency, is compiling the five years of LBJ tapes, with annotation and commentary, in a two-volume book, the first of which will be published next year by Simon & Schuster.
