The Best and the Brightest (Modern Library)

by David Halberstam

  He was a relentless man who pushed himself and all others with the same severity, and demanded, above all other qualities, total loyalty, not loyalty in the traditional sense, not positive loyalty as John Foster Dulles had demanded, but total loyalty, not just to office or party or concept, but loyalty first and foremost to Lyndon Johnson. Then Lyndon Johnson would become the arbiter of any larger loyalty. Those who passed the loyalty test could have what they wanted. And he always knew who violated that loyalty, who said one thing to him and another thing to a possible enemy. No one could run as good an intelligence network inside Washington as Lyndon Johnson; as President he always knew who had dined with Robert Kennedy. He knew when the loyalty of his followers was waning before they did. No one was more loyal than Lady Bird. Of Marvin Watson, his last political operator, a man of great rigidity and little political sensitivity, Johnson, fiercely protective, could say that there was only one person more loyal than Marvin Watson and that was Lady Bird. High praise indeed. One reason for the long and intimate friendship between Johnson and Abe Fortas was the fact that despite the Johnson inner circle’s doubts about the political acumen of Fortas, he was one of the few major Democratic doyens of Washington who was loyal to no other major Washington figure. He was Lyndon’s man. Lyndon of course liked to personalize things: his people, his staff, his boys, his bombers. To a young Air Force corporal trying to show him the presidential helicopter—“This is your helicopter, sir”—he answered, of course, “They’re all my helicopters, son.”

  He was ill at ease with abstract loyalty, loyalty to issue, to concept, to cause, which might lead one to occasional dissent, a broader view, and might mean that a man was caught between loyalty to civil rights and loyalty to Lyndon Johnson. One reason that he was never at ease with the American military was his knowledge that their loyalty was very special, that it was first to uniform and to branch of service, and only then to civilians in the most secondary way. Loyalty was crucial: Washington, after all, was a city with enemies everywhere, with sharks swimming out there waiting for any sign of weakness. Thus the inner circle had to be secure, truly secure; particularly a man with as profound a sense of his own weaknesses and vulnerabilities as Lyndon Johnson wanted men around he could trust.

  “How loyal is that man?” he asked a White House staffer about a potential hand.

  “Well, he seems quite loyal, Mr. President,” said the staffer.

  “I don’t want loyalty. I want loyalty. I want him to kiss my ass in Macy’s window at high noon and tell me it smells like roses. I want his pecker in my pocket.” When Neil Sheehan interviewed Johnson about McNamara in early 1967, before the break on the war, he was surprised to hear Johnson talk about McNamara in terms not of ability, but of loyalty. “If you asked those boys in the Cabinet to run through a buzz saw for their President, Bob McNamara would be the first to go through it. And I don’t have to worry about Rusk either. Rusk’s all right. I never have to worry about those two fellows quitting on me.” And even two years later, after he had parted from McNamara, after the pressure of the war had become too much for the Secretary of Defense, Johnson could talk with more compassion about McNamara than he could about McGeorge Bundy. In his opinion McNamara had folded, had come apart not just because the war was too much of a problem for his ethical composition but because he had been torn between two great, perhaps even subconscious loyalties: one to the Kennedy family, which had meant a commitment to Robert Kennedy, along with his ambitions and dovishness, and a second to Lyndon Johnson and his Presidency, and that was too much. The other loyalty, Johnson would say, was a prior one. But of Bundy he felt there was no real loyalty to the Kennedys (a judgment in which Robert Kennedy had concurred), nor to Johnson, but only toward self and sense of class. The Kennedys, of course, wanted comparable loyalty, but they were always more subtle about it, and more secure in themselves, and thus less paranoiac; they had a far better sense of touching people by seeming to appeal to higher instincts. The Kennedys were for civil rights, therefore people who were for civil rights should be for the Kennedys. The Kennedys demanded loyalty out of confidence, Johnson demanded it out of insecurity. The Kennedys were for the same things you were for, that was their message; they offered you the best chance of achieving it, and by turning to you, they demonstrated your own excellence. They never presented people of considerable self-esteem with such blatant either-or choice of loyalty as Johnson did, and they somehow managed to put it on a higher plane. They were plagued by fewer doubts about themselves and they had fewer fears that intimates might reveal their shortcomings to a threatening and hostile world at large.

  His almost desperate need for loyalty was the other half of the coin of insecurity of this great towering figure who had accomplished so much, was so much a man of Washington, and yet in so many important sections of the city felt himself an alien, the Texas ruffian among the perfumed darlings of the East. It was a profound part of him; his sense of being alien, of the prejudice against him, was never assuaged (in October 1964 when George Ball handed in his first memo against the war, Johnson turned to an aide and said, “You’ve got to be careful of these Eastern lawyers. If you’re not careful they’ll take you and turn you inside out”). He was haunted by regional prejudice, and even the attainment of the Presidency did not temper his feelings. Later, after he had left office, he became convinced that it was his Southern origins, not the war, which had driven him out, that they had lain in wait for an issue, any issue, and had used the war, which was their war in the first place, to drive him from office. In July 1969 he sat in Texas, an ex-President of the United States, and listened to the news of the tragedy of Edward Kennedy and Mary Jo Kopechne at Chappaquiddick, and became convinced by the second day that Teddy Kennedy would get off scot-free. He became almost bitter about the injustice of it all; Kennedy would get off because he was a Kennedy, there was a double standard, “But if I had been with a girl and she had been stung by a bumblebee, then they would put me in Sing Sing,” he said. Even as President he had been haunted by these feelings: “If something works out, Joe Alsop will write that it was Bundy the brilliant Harvard dean who did it, and if it falls flat he’ll say it was the fault of that dumb ignorant crude baboon of a President,” Johnson would complain, and he would remind people again and again that in the chamber where these great decisions were made, there sat the head of the Ford Motor Company, a Rhodes scholar, the dean of Harvard University, and one graduate of San Marcos State Teachers College. He had triumphed over one area of Washington, the doers, the movers, men of the South and West, shrewd insiders, but he had always failed in another area, the taste makers, so much more Eastern, more effete, judging him on qualities to which he could never aspire, all the insecurities confirmed. Hearing in the late fifties that Walter Lippmann was important in the taste making of Washington, that he set and determined everyone else’s taste, and knowing that Fulbright knew him well, Johnson had insisted that Fulbright bring him together with Lippmann, which Fulbright with great misgivings had done. It turned out to be a predictably horrendous evening, Johnson giving Lippmann the treatment, an evening of exaggeration and braggadocio, Johnson showing his worst side to the genteel and gentle, self-contained Lippmann, confirming all the worst doubts about the lack of subtlety in this gargantuan figure. Johnson, aware of this, terribly aware of enemies everywhere, of Georgetown’s distaste and the Metropolitan Club’s distaste, sometimes even as President seemed to want to aggravate the sore, trying to emphasize what the Easterners would consider his own boorishness, trying to inflict some crudity on them, demanding that they accompany him into the bathroom for conversations during the most personal of body demands, virtually driving Douglas Dillon out of the Cabinet by this maneuver alone.

  This very earthiness was very much a part of him, and he reveled in it; he was the earthiest man in the White House in a century; his speech was often obscene, shrewd, brilliant. Of one Kennedy aide he could say, “He doesn’t have sense enough to pour piss out of a boot with the ins
tructions written on the heel.” Trying to get rid of J. Edgar Hoover and then finding it was simply too difficult, he admitted, “Well, it’s probably better to have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside pissing in.” Asked by reporters why, when he was Senate Majority Leader, he had not taken a particular speech of Vice-President Nixon’s seriously, he said, “Boys, I may not know much but I know the difference between chicken shit and chicken salad.” And once, driving around the Ranch showing its sights to a CBS television team, he stopped in the midst of particularly rough undergrowth to urinate. “Aren’t you afraid a rattlesnake might bite it?” a CBS cameraman asked him.

  “Hell,” said Johnson, “it is part rattlesnake.”

  He was a man of primal force. Not a man, in the words of James Reston, that you would hand your hat to without thinking twice. His genes were seemingly larger and more demanding than those of other men; he dominated other men, leaning on them, sensing that every man had his price or his breaking point. (Once a young and very ambitious staff member was challenging him on an important point and was being unusually persistent in his opposition. Johnson took it for a while and then said very softly, “You know, Joe, you’d make a great Attorney General.” The staff member folded like an accordion.) He knew the uses of force, of flattery and threat, honing in on the weakness like a heat-seeking missile, cataloguing each man’s weakness in that incredible memory, to be summoned forth when necessary. Always wanting to know a little more about a potential friend or potential adversary. And everyone was a potential adversary. As President he enjoyed reading FBI files, they gave him lots of tidbits about some of the people he had to deal with. He had, there is no other word, a genius for reading a man instantly, for knowing how far he could go, how much he could push, what he could summon from the man, when to hold on and when to let go. He often took too much, leaving men who had worked for him depleted, exhausted and feeling that they had been misused.

  The people who worked for him lived in mortal fear of him. He humiliated them in front of their peers, then sometimes rewarded them, dressing down one staff member while others watched, then later in the day awarding the staffman a Cadillac, winking and explaining to someone else that it helped bind a man to strike with munificence when he was down. He would call in all the press officers from the different departments and chew them out like a drill sergeant, saying they had been doing a terrible job, he hadn’t been on the front page in weeks except for lighting a goddamn Christmas tree. Lighting a goddamn Christmas tree! Now he was going down on the Ranch and he wanted them to get him on page one every day; they better dream up something and get it on the first page. On he went, leaving the men in the room, some of them quite distinguished men in their own professions, feeling that they had been crushed and degraded. Or Johnson telling Cabinet members that they wouldn’t dare walk out of his Administration, no one was going to walk out on Lyndon Johnson because they knew that if they did, two men were going to follow their ass to the end of the earth, Mr. J. Edgar Hoover and the head of the Internal Revenue Service.

  In front of visiting dignitaries he was wont to put up his feet on Jack Valenti’s lap and use it as a stool. Similarly, when he was visiting Nehru in 1961 as Vice-President and the meeting was breaking up, Johnson turned to an aide and asked if a press conference had been arranged. When the aide said he knew nothing of a press conference, Johnson berated him in the most forceful terms, finally telling the aide, “The only way to deal with you is to handcuff you to my belt, so you’ll be there when I need you.” His close aide Walter Jenkins in particular lived in terror of Johnson, who had borne down on him so often and so hard that there was little left. Once when an exhausted Jenkins was about to take a brief nap, he told Bill Moyers to guard the office for thirty minutes. Moyers, who like his boss was an excellent mimic, got in the doorway a few minutes later and did a magnificent imitation of Johnson catching Jenkins napping. Jenkins turned first from total panic to total anger: “Don’t you ever do that again . . . Don’t you ever do that again . . . Don’t you ever . . .”

  There was in all of this more than a small element of the bully in Johnson and an occasional misreading of people. Even then he learned quickly. When General Wallace Greene, the Commandant of the Marine Corps, attended his first high-level meeting with the President, he was appalled by the way the President treated the people around him, abusing them, almost humiliating them, and Greene decided immediately that he would not take this. So the first time Greene spoke up, it was on the subject of Vietnam. Johnson did not like what he was saying; Greene was very hawkish and said he thought too little force was being used, and Johnson began interrupting him: “Speak up! Speak up! I can’t hear what you’re saying. Speak up!” Greene waited deliberately; then he looked up at Johnson and said in his carefully controlled voice, “You can hear what I’m saying and so can everyone else in this room,” and calmly continued to speak. Greene noticed that from then on, whenever he appeared at the White House, Johnson seemed to solicit his advice and opinion, and marked him down for a bully, though of course not many men would enter the National Security Council with the same sense of confidence in himself as the Commandant of the Marine Corps. (General Greene was not the only person who sensed this; Gene McCarthy in 1967 told friends that he thought Johnson was a bully, and that if the early primaries were not good, he would come apart rather than fight back.)

  But generally Johnson had that brilliant sense of how far to push and this made him particularly effective in the U.S. Senate, where he could employ his knowledge at close-range maneuvering, where his shrewdness, remarkable intelligence and sheer energy would overwhelm lesser men; totally uncorrupted and never distracted by other pursuits, he considered the Senate, and his maneuvering there, his life. Manipulation of another human being was deemed normal and indeed necessary to the job. But it was a different thing when Johnson was in the White House, where he could extract from people what he needed and wanted, and then when he was finished, when the Johnson stamp was indelibly, and sometimes too indelibly, on them, Johnson would let them go (which often left a bad taste, a feeling after the fact on the part of people that they had been exploited, which was true, they had been, though for the greater good). Once, even before it all went sour on Vietnam, when Johnson was at the height of his accomplishments, he had complained to Dean Acheson about the fact that for all the good things he was doing, he was not beloved in the hearts of his countrymen, and why was that? Acheson looked at him and said simply, “You are not a very likable man.” Indeed, those who knew him best (men like Clifford and Fortas, who enjoyed that rarest of things, his respect) were uneasy about working for him. In 1967 Johnson sent an emissary to talk with Clark Clifford about the possibility of his becoming Attorney General, a suggestion Clifford dismissed because he was afraid the job would undermine that fragile balance between being something of an equal and then overnight a total servant having to bear those tongue-lashings.

  Johnson would forever quote a maxim of his father’s: if a man couldn’t walk into a room and tell who was for him and who was against him, then he wasn’t much of a politician. Of course Lyndon Johnson could do it like no other man, ipso facto he was a great politician. Thus a key to Johnson was the capacity to move men to his objective and away from their own charted course. That was the way to achieve things: deal with men at close combat, man to man. He believed this deeply, almost too much so. Since he was not a contemplative man, a man who read books, and since he had little belief in the rhythms and thrusts of history, he was convinced that you could accomplish things by reasoning with leaders, by moving them to your goal, manipulating them a little, and that finally, all men had a price. In part this helped bring him into trouble in Vietnam, with his instinct to personalize. He and Ho Chi Minh, out there alone, in a shoot-out. He would find Ho’s price, Ho’s weakness, whether it was through bombing the North or through threatening to use troops and then offering Ho a lollipop, massive economic aid and regional development, a Mekong River Delta
development project. This time he would find himself dealing with a man who was a true revolutionary, incorruptible, a man who had no price, or at least no price that Lyndon Johnson with his Western bombs and Western dollars could meet. But it would take him quite a while to find out that he had met his match. For a long time he thought that he could handle Ho the way he handled senators and bureaucrats, and opponents. Put a little squeeze on him, touch him up a little, then Ho would see the light, know whom he was dealing with and accept the lollipop.

  Nothing existed for him but politics. The idea of his going to a symphony or reading a book was preposterous, and before he took office he would boast of how little he read. When a young Senate staff member named Bill Brammer wrote a brilliant novel about Johnson entitled The Gay Place, Johnson did not read the book but was annoyed, not so much about the portrait Brammer had drawn of him, but about the fact that Brammer had written the book at night while working for Johnson, when he clearly should have stayed up late answering Johnson’s mail. (If he was not a great reader, in his earlier incarnation, he became sensitive about this failing once he assumed the Presidency, particularly when his lack of reading was contrasted with Kennedy’s voracious reading.)