For The Sake of Argument : Remembering L.B.J.-- Another Voice From ‘60s

There is in our country a little-noted tribal rite. On the birthday of each former President no longer alive, a wreath is delivered in the name of the incumbent and placed on the grave.

Such a quiet ceremony was held Aug. 27, in the family burial ground at the LBJ Ranch. Lyndon Baines Johnson would have been 80 years old.

Driving back to Austin, I thought of the reported recent remark by Richard N. Goodwin that he did not expect “Johnson loyalists” to like his book (“Remembering America: A Voice From the Sixties” (Little, Brown)). I asked myself: What does being a Johnson loyalist mean?--for I certainly belong in that category.

In my case, it certainly does not mean that I agreed with L.B.J. on every occasion or found him without flaw. Like all of us, his personality had many elements not always harmonious. To paraphrase the novelist James Gould Cozzens, these were of irreducible complexity and each, by itself, inscrutable. It was “the struck balance” of his habitual predispositions that we observed, magnified by the issues he confronted and the consequences of the decisions he made.

What Johnson confronted as President were simultaneous, inescapable crises at home and abroad: in race relations and Southeast Asia. At home he also perceived a brief interval in which it might prove possible to move America toward the multiracial society of equal opportunity its values demanded and, along the way, to expand the foundations of the nation’s educational and health systems. Johnson did not permit the intrusion of urgent, short-run problems to deflect him from the pursuit of these long-run goals.

It was much the same in foreign policy. He found the energy and vision to reach beyond the immediate crises and try to move the world toward orderly peace: the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the initiation of work on the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks; the creation of a consensus in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to ameliorate relations with Eastern Europe; to build with Asian leaders the Assn. of Southeast Asian Nations and other foundations for the Pacific community whose dynamism and long-run meaning he had understood and acted on in the 1950s--long before it became the conventional wisdom. Thus, statehood for Hawaii and Alaska and the East-West Center. He was quite explicit in expressing steadily his hope that China, returning to its pragmatic and humane tradition, would join that community.

The views of Johnson loyalists are evidently not identical. But Johnson commanded--and his memory still commands--the loyalty of most who served with him because of his total commitment to the resolution of the dual crises he confronted and to his large aspirations for America and the human community.

There was, however, more to it than that. No business was conducted by Johnson without a strand of humor--usually the lovingly told and relevant anecdote; for he understood that humor breeds a sense of proportion. And then there was--only occasionally expressed--a capacity for deeply felt understanding and affection. On Dec. 12, 1972, just before his death, Johnson was closing speaker at a civil-rights symposium in Austin. He came to this last hurrah against the advice of his doctors and chewed nitroglycerin pills from time to time during the program. Looking down at the array of civil-rights leaders with whom he had fought side by side, he set aside his text and said: “When I listened to Burke Marshall and Henry Gonzalez, Clarence Mitchell and Julian Bond, whom I don’t know so well but admire a great deal, I said to myself that ‘I love these men more than a man ought to love another man.’ ”

I knew John F. Kennedy well before I knew Johnson. I first met Kennedy at lunch at the Metropolitan Club in Washington on Feb. 26, 1958. Through an aide, he had asked if I would work in support of the Senate resolution he and John Sherman Cooper were designing to generate international support for the Indian Second Five-Year Development Plan. We discussed that enterprise and, being much of an age, a great deal more. I concluded he would make a great President.

Like many others, I found Kennedy an extraordinary mixture of maturity and humor; high spirits and sense of the possibility of tragedy and the closeness of death; compassion and toughness; short-term political skill and farseeing statesmanship. His friendship, once granted, was steady and reliable and generated an answering intense loyalty.

Here, I would only make a simple point: With respect to Southeast Asia and civil rights, education and medicine, Latin America, India, NATO and arms control there was virtually complete continuity between the policies of Kennedy and Johnson. Some argue, of course, that Kennedy would have taken a different course in Southeast Asia if reelected in 1964. We shall never know. What we do know is that Johnson built his policy on the foundation Eisenhower and the Senate laid in the Southeast Asia Treaty of 1955, which Kennedy had supported and seen through until his death.

It is possible--by no means certain--that the time bought at great cost by that policy will one day be reckoned to have been an essential condition for the emergence of the dynamic, confident modern Asia we now know. Whether that proves the case or not, those who believe they know what the verdict of history will be are a bit premature.

There were, of course, dissimilarities between Kennedy and Johnson: Kennedy’s wry one-liners versus Johnson’s anecdotes, for example. Johnson’s magic was exercised best in small groups or private conversation; Kennedy had that rarest of gifts--somehow to communicate effortlessly across boundaries and cultures. Long after his death, his pictures could be found in peasant homes from the Peruvian highlands to the Nile Valley.

Kennedy once expressed what he fundamentally shared with Johnson. We had breakfast early on the morning of Aug. 8, 1958. I was in Washington to help write Eisenhower’s Lebanon-Jordan speech. Driving me to the State Department, Kennedy reviewed with sympathy, shrewdness and humor his competitors for the Democratic nomination in 1960. He concluded that the Democratic Party owed Johnson the nomination; that Johnson wanted the same things for the country that he (Kennedy) did; but that it was “too close to Appomattox” for Johnson to be nominated and elected. He, therefore, felt free to run.

A common vision for the country did not, of course, prevent tensions when Kennedy was President. Johnson had a long, healing talk with Robert F. Kennedy on April 3, 1968. My notes include the following comments by Johnson: “The vice presidency is a job no one likes. It is inherently demeaning; although no one ever treated a vice president better than President Kennedy had treated him . . . . They disagreed seldom, but they did disagree a few times.”

Looking back now, I would guess that there is no way the story of America in the 1960s can be told except in terms of the Kennedy/Johnson years of responsibility. Their lives and policies became inextricably intertwined. They may well have seen us all through the Gettysburg of the Cold War in Berlin, the Cuba missile crisis and Southeast Asia.

Close to them in those crises, shadowed by the specter of nuclear weapons, one felt the burden they bore was more than mortal man should have to carry. The reality of that burden helps explain why they began with such tenacity the long, slow process of building alternative relations with the Soviet Union and China in the Test-Ban and Non-Proliferation treaties and clearing the way for a serious dialogue with the Chinese. Between them, they moved the nation radically toward equality of citizenship and opportunity, long as the road ahead remains.

Their place in history is still to be decided; but it was a privileged experience to serve from the first Kennedy to the last Johnson day in their administrations. And, whether standing in that country burial ground in Stonewall or looking up at the slope of Arlington Cemetery on the way into Washington from National Airport, I’m glad I knew them.