THE GUT PRESIDENT

ROBERT DALLEK REVEALS LYNDON JOHNSON AS A MAN TO WHOM POWER WAS PERSONAL

Author: By Zachary Karabell

Date: SUNDAY, April 12, 1998

Page: M1

Section: Books

This startling anecdote, one of many that pepper the second and final volume of Robert Dallek's massive study of Johnson's life, demonstrates as nothing else can that for Johnson, the political was always personal. Dallek, who teaches at Boston University and is one of our leading historians of presidential politics, has written the preeminent biography of the 36th president.

Any current study of LBJ works under the shadow of Johnson's other biographer, Robert Caro. In the first two of a projected four volumes, Caro's Johnson is a deceitful, conniving, deeply insecure, troublingly ambitious Texas politician. For all the books' literary splendor, their subject is an extreme figure very much the creation of their author. The same cannot be said for Dallek. Taking advantage of thousands of hours of conversations taped in the Oval Office, Dallek lets Johnson speak for himself, and no writer could create a more colorful, entertaining, inspiring, eccentric, or troubling character. To read Dallek is to experience Lyndon Baines Johnson rather than the biographer himself. Dallek is less a Boswell to his Johnson than a faithful, diligent, and thorough amanuensis.

In his introduction, Dallek remarks that as more tapes are released by the Johnson Library, future biographers will have to reevaluate our current understanding. Yet the Johnson that emerges from Dallek's work is in many ways familiar. Johnson is a transparent figure in many ways, and the new material only adds detail to what was already known.

Johnson was a man of remarkable paradoxes. A conniving politico who rose to become one of the most powerful majority leaders in US Senate history, he was a humble and even docile vice president to Kennedy. A master of manipulation who tried to break the resistance of his advisers (he often said that if you were going to work for him, he wanted ``your pecker in his pocket''), he could be intensely loyal and supportive to his staff and friends. A man who cared fervently for the poor and disadvantaged at home, he was the driving force behind the expansion of the war in Vietnam, a war that siphoned money from the very programs he had created to help the poor, and that sent thousands of them to fight in the jungles of Southeast Asia.

Perhaps the most compelling and painful aspect of Johnson's presidency was his constant awareness that it was all going hopelessly wrong. In 1964 and 1965, Johnson took advantage of Kennedy's assassination and then his own landslide election over Barry Goldwater to enact an extensive and comprehensive series of social reforms. For those two years, Johnson achieved a legislative success unparalleled in American history, even in comparison with Franklin's Roosevelt Hundred Days in 1933. The 1964 Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, Medicare, and the complex of legislation collectively known as the ``War on Poverty'' dramatically extended the social safety nets first put in place during the New Deal.

Announcing his vision in March 1965, Johnson's rhetoric soared in front of 80,000 students of the University of Michigan. ``For better or worse,'' he said, ``your generation has been appointed by history . . . to lead America toward a new age. So, will you join the battle to give every citizen the full equality which God enjoins and the law requires, whatever his belief, or race, or the color of his skin? Will you join in the battle to make it possible for all nations to live in enduring peace -- as neighbors and not as mortal enemies? Will you join in the battle to build the Great Society?''

And for a time they did. But on the question of enduring peace, Johnson fell far short of his own mark. Dallek shows that even at the height of his legislative prowess, Johnson was racked by bouts of depression and by a deep foreboding that defeat and destruction were imminent. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, Johnson actually feared a Goldwater victory in the fall of 1964. But not all of Johnson's fatalism was misplaced. As Dallek details the unraveling of the Great Society, he also depicts Johnson as a man acutely aware of how Vietnam gradually sapped the life out of his treasured domestic program.

He was also aware by late 1966 that the United States was unlikely to secure a noncommunist South Vietnam, yet he persisted until 1968. As the antiwar movement gained in intensity, Johnson became increasingly paranoid. Convinced that communists were behind the protests over his policies, Johnson at times sounded like a man with an increasingly tenuous connection to reality. His fantasies were fed by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. Relying on one of Hoover's reports, Johnson told a group of congressional Democrats that a substantial number of the people burning draft cards ``were crazy people who had previous history in mental institutions.'' But though he tried to dismiss the protesters as 200,000 malcontents in an otherwise patriotic population of 200 million, Johnson could not pretend that the war was going well.

But he refused to deescalate. As Dallek notes, Johnson's decision to sacrifice not only his reform program but thousands of young men in order to avoid the onus of defeat must rank as one of the more cowardly, egotistical, and misguided decisions in presidential history. Some conservatives today would say that Johnson's decisions on Vietnam were only slightly more misguided than his forceful advocation of Big Government. Yet Johnson's big government programs failed against a backdrop of Vietnam. It is impossible to know if the War on Poverty might have been won if the war in Vietnam had not been lost.

Johnson himself recognized that. He raged and sulked as the promise of 1965 faded into the tragedy of 1968. Like Lear, Johnson was brought low by hubris and by his inability to distinguish what was good for him from what was harmful. Though he lived for several years after he left office, self-knowledge seems to have eluded him until the very end. He could have used a Fool in the White House, someone to advise him that he should not have become president until he had become wise. But wisdom in the White House, then as now, does not appear to be a requirement for the job. The price of folly may seem trivial when it comes to presidents and interns, but if Johnson's career, ably reconstructed by Dallek, tells us anything, it is that the price can also be terribly high.