THE STORY of Lyndon Johnson’s service in the armed forces during World War II, brief though it may be, nonetheless reveals violently clashing contradictions in his character.
During his 1941 senatorial campaign, except for an occasional reference to “scrubbing the deck of a battleship” as an ordinary sailor, he had repeatedly promised to “be fighting in the front line, in the trenches, in the mud and blood.” But he had known when he had promised to “tear up my draft number” that he would not have a draft number—it was, indeed, at least partly so that he would not be eligible for the draft that he had had the foresight to obtain a commission in the Naval Reserve. (And, naturally, since the commission was as a Lieutenant Commander, scrubbing the deck of a battleship—or performing any other function of an ordinary sailor—was not a possibility, either.) He could, of course, have torn up the commission and obtained a draft number (or could have enlisted), but he did not do that.
What he did do, in obedience to orders that he himself had a hand in drafting, was to spend the first five months of the war trying to further his political future, while ensconcing himself in precisely the type of bureaucratic “safe, warm naval berth” he had promised to avoid. For five months, he delayed and stalled, making no serious attempt to get into combat while having what his sidekick John Connally was to call “a lot of fun.” And when, after six months of the war had passed, he finally did enter a combat zone—when he no longer had any choice, when “for the sake of political future” he had to get into a combat zone, and get there fast—he went not to fight (in the trenches or anywhere else), but to observe. Despite flying more than 20,000 miles to reach that combat zone and return home, the only brush he had with the war there was to fly as an observer on a single mission, at the conclusion of which he left the combat zone on the next plane out.
Nevertheless, although Lyndon Johnson had avoided being at the scene of a battle as long as he could, once he was at it, his conduct was bold and courageous, nonchalant in the face of danger. If he had gone to the Southwest Pacific only so that he could later claim to have been in the war—and if he had been in that war for only one day—still, for that day he had been not a politician but a warrior. Ambition may have governed his war service as it governed his entire life, but, as had always been the case, in the service of that ambition he had done whatever he had to do.
NOTHING ABOUT JOHNSON’S WAR SERVICE, however, was more revealing than the way he came to portray it.
A great storyteller, he had a great story to tell, and he made the most of it. Hardly had he arrived back in Washington when he began telling it to journalists, inviting them to lunch, scheduling interviews, one after the other, with the AP, the UP, INS, Time magazine and Texas newspapers. Edwin Weisl, the counsel not only for Paramount but for Hearst Newspapers, was set to work contacting the chain’s many columnists. If deemphasizing certain facts—the precise length of his combat service, for example—was imperative, the guise of censorship and military secrecy made that de-emphasis easy; writing that Johnson had “distinguished himself ‘Down Under,’ ” Walter Winchell told his readers that “the details of how he had distinguished himself would soon be released”; another journalist wrote that he had been on “an extremely secret assignment.” The lead sentences in the articles that appeared—“Lyndon Johnson came home from the wars Monday”; “Fresh from the battlefields of the Southwest Pacific, with the boom of cannon from hostile aircraft still echoing in his ears”—were all that could be desired, and readers were told, in the Congressman’s own words, about the “suicide mission” on which he had flown, and about “the harrowing flight home under fire” from Japanese Zeroes. His criticism of “incompetents” in high military positions and of shortages in equipment, of pilots forced to fly obsolete planes (“I would just as soon try to weather a storm riding on the tail of a box kite as I would to face the fighting Jap Zero with one of those Navy PB-Y crates some of those boys are now flying”) made front pages not only in Texas but in Washington and across the country, as did copies of a picture taken of him at Seven-Mile Strip, which he had had the foresight to obtain from a news photographer.
Back in Texas a week after his return, he outdid himself. His demeanor was that of the battle-weary veteran who has seen war, and has been sobered by it. So sobered, in fact, that to one reporter “the congressman was noticeably a changed Lyndon Johnson.” While in Washington the only reminder of his illness had been his loss of weight (weight which was rapidly being replaced), in Texas his weakness was so pronounced that only with difficulty could he summon up the strength to make speeches to his constituents. Sometimes, during a speech, he had to call for a chair in which to sit on the stage, so greatly was the effort taxing his energy. Sometimes he could barely make himself heard. At the Businessmen’s Luncheon in Taylor on August 5, for example, he spoke, with evident strain, for some minutes in a voice so low that it was almost a whisper—“his talk went unheard by portions of the audience, as his recent illness prevented him from raising his voice”—until someone brought him a microphone. (At another speech, that very evening, in San Gabriel Park in Georgetown, Texas, his recuperative powers displayed themselves when he spoke for ninety minutes in his pre-war shouting style.) Whispering or shouting, however, his speeches, as one reporter wrote, “impressed and inspired” the farmers and ranchers of the Hill Country, many of whom had sons fighting overseas. “I have just returned from a tour of duty with some of the loneliest men in the world.… You may not know where your boy is tonight. Perhaps you have just had a letter telling you not to write to the old address again, not to send another bundle for a while.” But of one thing they could be sure, he said: “your boy” is fighting bravely; he, Lyndon Johnson, had seen for himself the bravery, against long odds, of America’s fighting men. And, he reminded them, he had been with those men. “I am happy to be here. How happy you don’t know until you have been where I have been and have seen what I have seen,” he said. He told his audiences that God had helped him return: “There are no non-believers at 12,000 feet with Jap Zero fighters around.”
Good as the stories were, though, they grew better—and better. At first, they were improved only by exaggeration: in interviews and speeches, the pneumonia he had contracted became a more dramatic disease, and one evocative of the South Pacific jungles—dengue fever; the 25 pounds he had lost became 35 pounds, then 38 pounds, and then 40; the mission he had flown became missions; the 20,000 miles he had flown became 50,000 miles, and then 60,000; the time he had spent in combat was made to appear longer and longer.
Exaggeration is a normal aspect of war stories, only to be expected. With Johnson, however, exaggeration spilled over into something more—until the story of his wartime service bore little resemblance to the reality: which was that, exciting though his flight may have been, it was only one flight. He had been in action for a total of thirteen minutes. When, in December of 1942, five months after his return from this action, a reporter asked him, “Were you in actual combat?,” he replied, “Yes, I was. I was out there in May, June and part of July. We exchanged greetings quite often. They paid us very busy visits every day for a time.” After another interview, a reporter wrote that “the tall, dark and handsome Texan … speaks with deep emotion about the war,” and no wonder: “He has had months of exciting active duty with the Navy.… He saw action in the South Pacific on sea and then on land in Australia. In the past year he has flown between 60,000 and 70,000 miles, part of the time in bombing raids.…” His actual role—as an observer, not an airman; an observer who had flown a single mission; an observer who had not had “months” of active duty and who had never been paid “busy visits every day for a time”—all but vanished from the telling; he portrayed himself as a war-scarred veteran of many battles on many fronts: by 1944, he was stating—in writing—“I lived with the men on fighting fronts. I flew with them on missions over enemy territory. I ate and slept with them; and was hospitalized with them in the Fiji Islands.…” And always the
details became richer, more vivid. He began saying that because he had been too tall to fit into the parachute provided, he had flown without one; then he added another fillip: only one parachute had been available, and he had given it to a friend. The engine that had malfunctioned on his plane now, in his accounts, had been “knocked out” by Japanese Zeroes. Several of his crew had been wounded. In reality, his squadron had shot down a single Zero; in his retelling, the number steadily rose: “I saw fourteen of ’em go down in flames right in front of me.” He even gave himself a nickname: he told a reporter that the men who had flown with him had come to admire him so much that they had named him “Raider” Johnson; that was how he had been known among the men of the 22nd Bomb Group, he said.
Especially significant was the fact that he persisted in these exaggerations, and added new ones, in circumstances that would have deterred other men. He began inviting journalists and friends to his house to see the “home movies” he had filmed on the trip before his movie camera was lost—to see them over and over again. At every dinner party at the Johnsons’, it seemed, the movies would be shown, with a narration by the host, in a self-promotion so relentless that it made the guests smile even when they thought Johnson’s narration was true. And because some repeat guests were hearing the narration more than once (not a few were hearing it more than twice), they could hardly help being aware that it was changing, that the story of Lyndon Johnson’s war service was different every time they heard it. As they compared notes, the story became a joke among them. “Sometimes,” says Harold H. Young, counsel to Vice President Henry Wallace, “you could hardly restrain yourself from shouting: ‘Oh, bullshit, Lyndon.’ ” Sometimes their disbelief was expressed to his face, in derisive remarks only thinly veiled with laughter, during his presentation. His predilection for identifying each soldier or airman visible on the film who was from Texas similarly became a subject of ridicule; Ben Cohen, who had seen the film several times, said to him dryly: “Lyndon, now why don’t you tell us the fellows who aren’t from Texas? It would save you some time.” Johnson could hardly have been unaware of the growing amusement and disbelief with which his stories were being received. But that did not stop him from telling the stories—and continuing to improve them.
ALSO REVEALING was the fact that he would persist in these exaggerations and keep adding new ones—until the story of his war service bore little relation indeed to fact—even under circumstances in which he must have been aware of the possibility that the facts might be checked: when he was President. In October, 1966, for example, when “Credibility Gap” had already become a phrase in common usage, President Johnson showed the home movies to a group of journalists gathered in the White House, and delivered a narration about his service during World War II. Although some of the facts in the narrative were correct, the President also said: “During the months we [the three observers] were there, we must have talked to 10,000 men, flown to hundreds of bases.…” And, discussing the Lae mission—it is not at all clear from his narrative that this was the only mission he ever flew—the President said: “I lost some good friends on that mission. We came back with a lot fewer planes than we left with.” On December 13, 1967, he was interviewed in the White House by a Texas journalist, Ronnie Dugger, generally hostile to him, who was writing his biography. In the book, Dugger wrote of the interview: “He not only let falsehood pass for truth, he faked his record himself. Telling me about the mission over Lae, he said that when twenty Zeroes attacked them, ‘it was like shooting fish out of a barrel.’ … Fourteen of the planes got the hell shot out of them. He saw Colonel Stevens’ plane go down. He said that everybody who survived that mission got a Silver Star; everybody who died got the Distinguished Service Cross.”
So deeply and widely mistrusted had Lyndon Johnson been at little Southwest Texas State Teachers College in the Hill Country that the nickname he bore during his years on campus was “Bull” (for “Bullshit”) Johnson. And his fellow students (who used his nickname to his face—“Hiya, Bull,” “Howya doin’, Bull?”) believed not only that he lied to them—lied to them constantly, lied about big matters and small, lied so incessantly that he was, in a widely used phrase, “the biggest liar on campus”—but also that some psychological element impelled him to lie, made him lie even when he knew the lie might be discovered, made him, in fact, repeat a lie even after it had been discovered, made him, in one classmate’s words, “a man who just could not tell the truth.” Now, in 1942, he was acquiring the same reputation in Washington.
More significant still was another reason for the skepticism about his war stories. Though he had flown only one mission, the story of that mission, told by him with the vividness of the master storyteller he was, was to some degree the story not only of a courageous man but of a patriot and idealist. Essential though such an image was to Lyndon Johnson politically, the image he needed in his inner life was very different. It was, as it had always been, very important to him that he be seen as shrewd, pragmatic, cynical—“different from Daddy.” A shrewd, pragmatic man would have volunteered to place himself in danger only because of political necessity, so Johnson, almost as if he could not help himself, kept making clear, often to the very same men to whom he was telling the story of the courageous mission, that he had gone to the Pacific only for political advantage—only because he had, in terms of his ambition, no choice—and that, once there, he had done the absolute minimum necessary to safeguard that ambition. Before leaving for the Pacific, he had told Jonathan Daniels he wanted to go only “for the sake of political future”; after a conversation with Johnson now, after his return, Daniels noted in his diary that the trip had been “politically essential.” The wink and the tear do not complement each other; even men fond of Johnson, hearing out of the same mouth a story of bravery and a story of pragmatism, found it difficult to give much credence to the first. They tended to doubt the story—including those parts of it (admittedly more and more rare) that were true.
But most significant of all was Lyndon Johnson’s own attitude toward his war story: he was coming to believe that it was true.
The symbol of his belief was the Silver Star.
In one of his first interviews after his return to Washington, he told reporter Marshall McNeil that he thought he didn’t deserve the medal. When McNeil apparently agreed with him (the reporter was later to comment, “He got it for a flight, not for a fight”), Johnson assured him: “Well, I’ll never wear the thing.” In at least one of his speeches in Texas, he went further, telling a responsive audience that he had refused the honor because “I believed that the small part I played in the trips [sic] did not entitle me to the same honor that went to men who risked their lives in daily combat.” He drafted a letter of formal refusal (“My very brief service with these men and its experience of what they did and sacrifice makes me all the more sensitive that I should not and could not accept a citation of recognition for the little part I played for a short time in learning and facing with them the problems they encounter all the time.… I cannot in good conscience accept the decoration”), and then had the letter typed, ready for his signature.
It is indeed somewhat difficult to conclude that the medal was awarded for any considerations other than political. Lieutenant Greer, whose brilliant flying saved the Heckling Hare, did not receive a medal, nor did Corporal Baren, who shot down the Zero—no one on the plane received a decoration for the mission over Lae except the observer; in fact, some members of its crew were to fly twenty-five missions without receiving any medal, much less one as prized as the Silver Star.
But Johnson’s attitude changed—and as with so many Johnson changes, the change was dramatic and total.
The letter refusing the medal was filed away, unsigned. All talk of refusal abruptly ended. Instead, not only did Johnson accept the Silver Star, he arranged to accept it in public. Several times. After purchasing the decoration (in an Army-Navy store in Washington), he took it to Texas, where in a number of public ap
pearances it was affixed to his lapel as if for the first time; in Fort Worth, for example, the commander of the local American Legion post pinned it on him while a crowd of Legionnaires cheered and Johnson stood before them, head bowed, face somber, hardly able to blink back the tears.
And once he had it, he flaunted it; a medal for Lyndon Johnson was not a medal that was hidden away in a drawer. By the end of 1942, he had added a new item to his daily attire: a small silver bar with a star in its center. It was the “battle ribbon” emblematic of the Silver Star, and he wore it in his lapel for the rest of his life. And because the silver bar was unfortunately rather inconspicuous and audiences might therefore not notice it (and, even if they did, might not recognize it), Johnson introduced a gesture into his speeches: while referring to his combat service and the medal he had been awarded—and for some years his speeches were liberally studded with these references—he would place his left hand on his lapel and pull it forward and back, waving it, almost, to focus his audience’s attention on the silver bar.
Had he once felt that he did not deserve the medal? Lyndon Johnson rapidly came to feel not only that he deserved it but that he deserved more: that the Silver Star was not a sufficiently high honor for such heroism as his.
One of his protégés in Texas politics was a young attorney from McAllen, Joe M. Kilgore. “Fighting Joe Kilgore,” he was called—with reason. Enlisting when the war began, Kilgore became an Air Force pilot, flew a twenty-five-mission tour over some of the most hazardous targets in Europe in Flying Fortresses, re-enlisted, and flew ten more. In a state that produced many heroes, Kilgore was one of the bravest. Once, seeing Nazi fighters swarming around another Fortress that had already been hit and crippled, the young pilot turned back into the face of the enemy, and flew cover for the other Fortress as it struggled home. He was awarded the Silver Star. After the war, Johnson brought Kilgore, now a promising young legislator, into his political camp. Constantly reminding Kilgore that he, too, had won the Silver Star, Johnson took great pains to make sure the younger man understood that in his (Johnson’s) case that medal was not really sufficient acknowledgment for what he had done. “I had the Silver Star, and I kind of felt you got it for something special,” Kilgore recalls. “I never heard [Johnson’s mission] was anything more than a routine raid in which he got shot at. And to hear the man complaining that he had gotten only the Silver Star for an experience that thousands of people had had was almost irrational,” but “He bitched and bitched because he only got the Silver Star.” And, Kilgore came to realize, “he believed what he was saying. He believed it totally.” During twenty years of political alliance with Lyndon Johnson, Kilgore came to understand, he says, that Johnson could believe whatever he wanted to believe—could believe it with all his heart. “He could,” Kilgore says, in words that are echoed by the closest of Johnson’s associates, men like George Brown and John Connally and Edward Clark, “convince himself of anything, even something that wasn’t true.”
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