Lyndon's Uncandid Memoirs

LYNDON JOHNSON presided over five tragic and bewildering years in U.S. history--an era of deeply controversial war, vast social change, urban riots and a nearly debilitating crisis of the national psyche. Yet measured against the events, L.B.J.'s memoirs* of those years, published this week, sometimes seem oddly smooth and windowless, like the travertine walls of the L.B.J. Library built to house his papers in Austin, Texas. The man who was surely the best raconteur in the White House since Lincoln has digested all of that drama --an Administration that began with an assassination and ended with something like an abdication--into more than 600 pages of what is too often dignified rationale (see box, next page).

If Viet Nam was the central tragedy of his presidency, Johnson confesses no doubts about the overall course he pursued. At a 1964 meeting with Maxwell Taylor, Dean Rusk, Robert McNamara and other advisers, Johnson reports, "as one gloomy opinion followed another, I suddenly asked whether anyone at the table doubted that Viet Nam was 'worth all this effort.' Ambassador Taylor answered quickly that 'we could not afford to let Hanoi win in the interests of our overall position in Asia and in the world.' " The others agreed. Throughout his long narrative, Johnson blindly sticks to his oft-repeated justification of American policy. At the end, he writes with implacable consistency: "We had kept our word to Southeast Asia. We had opposed and defeated aggression, as we promised we would."

While the authors of the Pentagon papers recorded an Administration moving secretly toward ever wider involvement and escalation in early 1965, Johnson's retrospective totally ignores that he ordered those policy changes kept quiet, that in fact he took the nation into a major war while billing the changes as an extension of older policy.

The Pentagon papers reported Johnson's advisers preparing scenarios for serious escalation before the 1964 elections, even while Candidate Johnson was proclaiming, in implied contrast to Barry Goldwater, that the U.S. would not send American boys to "do the fighting that Asian boys should do for themselves." The Vantage Point explains: "I did not mean that we were not going to do any fighting, for we had already lost many good men in Viet Nam . . . I made it clear from the day I took office that I was not a 'peace at any price man.' " Not entirely persuasively, Johnson insists: "The American people knew what they were voting for in 1964. They knew Lyndon Johnson was not going to pull up stakes and run."

L.B.J. admits few mistakes, and his text suffers from some of the same lack of believabilities that attended the events themselves. He engrossingly describes how he made up his mind not to run in 1964. In fact, Johnson talked about quitting up until the time he accepted the nomination. But before then, he also took the trouble to eliminate all his Cabinet members from consideration as his running mate--a move aimed at heading off Robert Kennedy as a vice-presidential candidate. It seems more likely that Johnson fully intended to run in 1964, but had to go through that ritual of being wooed, coaxed and sympathized with.

Luggage Mound. Where he is discussing the domestic achievements of his Administration--a procession of extraordinary advances in civil rights legislation, for example--Johnson's narrative can be eloquent. Deeply conscious of the irony of a Southern President's presiding over such change, Johnson observes: "I was part of America growing up." Now, as then, his battles for voting rights, open housing and other programs of social justice have a nobility that none of his enemies can deny him.

The vulgar Johnson who once displayed his surgical scar is nowhere evident in The Vantage Point. His remarkable reverence for the office of the presidency--and perhaps a self-conscious regard for his place in history --impelled him to set down the record with a soberness bordering on the dull. There are some touching moments, however. After John Kennedy's assassination, Johnson reports, Jacqueline Kennedy counseled in a telephone conversation that he take a nap every day to conserve his energy. "It changed Jack's whole life after he became President," she said.

At the end. the Johnsons saw Richard Nixon inaugurated and returned to their ranch. "In the carport behind the house," L.B.J. recalls, "the luggage was piled in a giant mound. For the first time in five years there were no aides to carry the bags inside."

*The Vantage Point; Perspectives oj the Presidency, 1963-1969, by Lyndon Baines Johnson, Holt, Rinehart & Winston Inc. $15.

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