Flawed Giant: Lyndon Johnson and His Times 1961-73 by Robert Dallek OUP 754pp, £30 in UK
A visiting European statesman once asked Lyndon Johnson whether he had been born in a log cabin. "No," Johnson responded breezily. "That was Abe Lincoln. I was born in a manger."
This anecdote, one of quite a few with which this first-rate political biography is studded, is of course interesting not only in itself but for what it tells us about Johnson. The United States is a country whose inhabitants are not much given to irony as an art form but the man who served as their President from 1961 to 1968 was, on this and other evidence ably produced for us here, a man given to truly European levels of Welt-anschauung.
At first sight - and to many people for the duration of his presidency - he was the archetypal southerner: foul-mouthed, wheeling and dealing, short-back-and-sides. Robert Dallek's book, the conclusion of his two-volume life of LBJ, does not exactly deconstruct this image, but it provides us, as well, with many different facets of the character of a man who could be as subtle as Machiavelli, as passionate as Aneurin Bevan, as tortured as Hamlet.
It is first and foremost a book about politics. With the exception of a relatively brief passage about his strong relationship with Lady Bird Johnson (at least one of the author's conversations with her remains off the record), there is almost nothing about Johnson's private emotional life. His tendency to occasional womanising is dealt with peremptorily, and we are mercifully spared details. There is a decent and, I think, appropriate reticence here. The thought of the inevitable slant of the Clinton biographies fills me with dread.
Lady Bird had her man well sized up. Once, apprised of a forthcoming disclosure about a Johnson sexual liaison, she doused the fires of prurience with marvellous deftness: "I would have thought that Alice Glass was a bit too plump for Lyndon." Johnson, too, was devoted to his wife. When she was away, he roamed the White House like a revenant, invited himself to dinner in friends' houses, and begged pals to come back and spend the night in Pennsylvania Avenue.
Three decades on, the politics still fizz, crackle and hum with the dynamo-like energy that Johnson brought to the White House. He was a far more experienced politician than Kennedy, and he played Congress like a Wurlitzer. There is no doubting Johnson's commitment to the furtherance of civil rights, the regeneration of American cities, and spending on health, education and welfare. In this he was in the great tradition of American Democratic Presidents.
But then there was Vietnam. It crawls through this book like a snake, scotch'd but not killed. And, in the end, it gets him. It was Johnson's decision to escalate the war, and he agonised about it to a degree that led some of his closest confidants and advisers to believe that he was in danger of becoming mentally unhinged. Dick Goodwin, a Kennedy aide inherited by Johnson and one of Dallek's key sources for this period, describes Johnson as "paranoiac", but Bill Moyers, another administration figure close to Johnson who worried about the president's belief in widespread communist infiltration into the media and elsewhere, denies that LBJ had become incapable of rational decision-making.
I suspect that Dallek has been innocently misled here to a degree. The more power politicians have, the more they worry that some deus ex machina is going to arrive and strip them of it. They see conspirators everywhere, and there are usually a sufficient number of conspirators around to give the general theory some credence. In these circumstances, Johnson's exasperated and an guished outbursts, expressed only to his closest associates and over a relatively brief period of time, are comprehensible, if not defensible.
Once dug into Vietnam, Johnson worried equally, and in the end ineffectually, about easing up on the war in order to get negotiations under way. The crisis, in the end, not only hounded him from office, but lost him the vital support of the American liberal establishment, which in turn affected progress on all the Great Society programmes. The difference between cannibals and liberals, he used to remark sourly, is that cannibals eat only their enemies.
The 1968 election was a disaster that the Democrats did not entirely deserve. Johnson distrusted Humphrey so much on Vietnam that he had his phone tapped, and privately encouraged Nelson Rockefeller to seek the Republican nomination. He even flirted with the idea of getting the Chicago Democratic convention to "spontaneously" draft him as candidate. In private, the Southern Democrat state governors gave the idea the thumbs down: in public, Mayor Daley's police finished the job.
There is tantalising evidence, however, that, had he not withdrawn, Johnson would have had at least a fair chance of beating Nixon. He suspected, and might even have been able to prove, that Nixon had engineered the failure of the Paris negotiations by persuading the Government of South Vietnam to boycott them; by interfering in this process as a private citizen, Nixon in fact laid himself open to felony charges. Johnson also knew about massive illegal donations to the Nixon campaign from the Greek dictatorship. And there was more popular support for Johnson's stand on the war than there was for Humphrey's well-meaning but politically suicidal improvisations.
Had Johnson run and won, though, there were skeletons in his own cupboard. He had bugged a prominent Republican party figure's phone (in the Watergate, of all places); his cronyism, which scuppered his Abe Fortas Supreme Court nomination, had left banana skins lying around all over the place; and Vietnam would not go away.
Dallek's final verdict is that Johnson will, at least, not join the long list of forgotten American presidents. This begs the question: for what will he be remembered? On the evidence of this eminently fair-minded book, the mistakes on Vietnam, enormous though they were, will in time come to be seen as only one aspect of a presidency that was characterised in many respects by courage, commitment, and even some wisdom.
John Horgan is the author of Sean Lemass: The Pragmatic Patriot