On the Telephone, LBJ Was a Smooth Operator

To Lyndon Johnson, the telephone was an extension of himself. If he couldn’t reach out and grab someone by the lapels, he could grab them with his phone. He used it to cajole, court, plead, stroke, beg for sympathy.

When the Clinton White House finds itself in a new crisis, its impulse is to add a new layer of staff. A freshly released cluster of Johnson’s private telephone tapes shows that LBJ did not need spinners; he could simply reach for the phone and work his wiles.

How to make sure that Jacqueline Kennedy would be an ally in the weeks and months after her husband’s assassination? Sweet-talk her. Call her “darling” and “sweetie” and ask her to tell her now-fatherless children, “I’d like to be their daddy.”

What to do about a pesky senator who wanted to come to the White House to talk about favorite projects? Plead for sympathy. Tell him, “I would see you on anything any time but . . . I’m afraid if the paper carries that Senator X saw Johnson about location of building Y, then Senator A, B, C, D, E, F immediately think they have got to do it.”

Dishing Out Flattery, Candor

How to get help passing an Appalachian Commission bill? Call up the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, Rep. George Mahon of Texas, for some stroking. Open the conversation: “How are you, my beloved friend?”

When nothing else worked, Johnson could always appeal to patriotism. Sen. Richard Russell (D-Ga.) was unhappy when the president twisted his arm to serve under Chief Justice Earl Warren on a commission to investigate John F. Kennedy’s murder. Russell disliked Warren intensely and complained, “You’ve destroyed me.” Replied Johnson: “You’ve got to save the country.”

Johnson was generous with flattery and sometimes with candor. Talking election prospects with Sen. Albert Gore (D-Tenn.), father of Vice President Al Gore, LBJ said, “There’s not anybody I’m more interested in than myself and you. . . . Any little thing that we can do here to add to your stature, we sure want to do it.”

These new glimpses of a master politician at work emerge from tapes made public this fall by the Johnson Library in Austin, Texas, as part of its ongoing program to release all the tapes made by the only president who recorded his conversations throughout his presidency. The new batch covers September and October 1964 and includes Johnson’s previously withheld conversations with Jacqueline Kennedy.

Sweet Talk for Jacqueline Kennedy

A few shed light on historic moments. The tapes show that it was Johnson who insisted upon vigilance when two U.S. Navy destroyers, the Maddox and the C. Turner Joy, frantically messaged that they were under nighttime attack by North Vietnamese torpedo boats on Sept. 18, 1964.

Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara telephoned Johnson to report either “an intentional attack” or “at the very least there’s been a substantial attack,” the second such event in six weeks.

“What is a substantial engagement?” challenged Johnson. “That means that we could have started it.”

“I sure want more precaution on the part of these admirals and these destroyers’ commanders,” he counseled. “I don’t just want a change-of-life woman running up and saying, by God, she’s being raped.” He added: “A man gets enough braid on him, he walks into a room and he just immediately concludes that he’s being attacked.”

Nonetheless, Johnson seized the opportunity to persuade Congress to pass the Gulf of Tonkin resolution that he later treated as a blank check and as all the justification he needed to commit hundreds of thousands of troops to an undeclared war.

Johnson biographer Robert Dallek says doubts about whether the attack occurred remain to this day. “It was a dark night, there were electrical storms in the area, those guys out there were nervous,” Dallek says. “They were expecting an attack. The whole mind-set was in that direction.”

Dallek also believes that Johnson acted out of humane considerations in his solicitous treatment of Jacqueline Kennedy, but had a political motive as well. Fearing that Robert F. Kennedy might otherwise compete against him for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1964, he was eager to placate the Kennedys.

On Dec. 7, 1963, two weeks after the assassination, Johnson called Jacqueline Kennedy because “I wanted to flirt with you a little bit.”

“Give Caroline and John-John a hug for me,” the president concluded that call. “Tell them I’d like to be their daddy.”

Two weeks later, Johnson got the idea of appointing her ambassador to Mexico. Nothing came of it, but he was enthusiastic. “God almighty,” he told an aide, “all she would have to do would be to just walk out on her balcony about once a week.”

For her part, Jacqueline Kennedy urged Johnson to slow his pace and take midday naps. “It changed Jack’s whole life,” she reported.

Johnson implored her to visit the White House, and she agreed. But on Jan. 9, 1964, she said she could not yet bring herself to be there. “I’ll talk to you, I’ll do anything I can for you,” she said, “but don’t make me come down there yet.”