Just a Cowboy Making Love

By R.Z. Sheppard

LYNDON: AN ORAL BIOGRAPHY by Merle Miller; Putnam; 645 pages; $17.95

Merle Miller is a novelist, journalist and author of the 1974 bestseller, Plain Speaking: An Oral Biography of Harry S. Truman. What is an oral biography? Essentially, it is a dramatic device to present a subject through an arrangement of quotations threshed from hundreds of interviews. The result is documentary folklore in which the leading character--usually described as larger than life--does not stop growing simply because he is dead. Miller's Truman emerged as the most uncommon common man ever to say s.o.b. in the White House. Until, of course, Lyndon Baines Johnson. L.B. J. was, by all accounts, one of the most physically exuberant occupants of the Oval Office. He could sit a visitor down for a morning-long rundown on the intellectual capacity and personal habits of every member of the Senate. He had a grand way of picking his nose, scratching himself and eating food off other people's plates. When the Pope had difficulty opening a present that Johnson handed him, L.B.J. whipped a jackknife from his pocket and cut the string. He hated knots, especially when tied with red tape. In his impatience to get things done, he browbeat and literally manhandled associates. Hubert Humphrey recalled having been kicked in the shins affectionately but painfully. The Texas hill-country rancher would prod men as well as cattle. Yet, said Humphrey, "many people looked upon him as a heavyhanded man. That was not really true. He was sort of like a cowboy making love."

This was all part of the famous "Johnson treatment": an allfours assault accompanied by a nonstop verbal barrage. Ben Bradlee, executive editor of the Washington Post, remembers: "One hand was shaking your hand; the other hand was some place else, exploring you, examining you... He'd be feeling up Katharine Graham and bumping Meg Greenfield on the boobs. And at the same time he'd be trying to persuade you of something."

Stories about Johnson's coarse man ners could ruffle the pages of Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel. The wildest is repeated by Coates Redmon, a Washington journalist and widow of Hayes Redmon, a member of Johnson's White House staff: "One day Bill [Moyers] telephoned him [Hayes] to come quick to the President's bedroom. I think Lynda Bird was in there, and Mrs. Johnson, and Marie Fehmer was taking dictation. The President was lying on his side in his bed and facing the group. There was a nurse on the other side, the three television sets were all going, and he was going snap, snap, snap. He's batting dictation to Marie, he's switching the channels, he's yelling at Bill--and I think there were others there, someone from one of the networks and another from the White House staff--and he's yelling at them too.

And everybody in this fairly large group was acting normal as all get out. And Hayes said that he started to walk around a little, because he couldn't figure out what the nurse was doing there. Bill said, 'Can't you see?' Hayes said, 'No, I can't see anything.' But little by little it was getting apparent, and Bill whispered to him, 'Well, you wanted a good one, you got a good one--he's having an enema.' " Authority implemented with scatology was natural to Johnson's agrarian traditions of rough paternalism. He got things done through personal contacts; he knew everybody and their skeletons. As the young secretary to Texas Congressman Richard Kleberg, he persuaded Western Union boys to leak him telegrams announcing federal projects. Johnson then released the news first, under his own name. As a New Deal Congressman, he was a favorite of F.D.R.'s. As Senator Johnson, leader of the majority, he ruled at the center of a web woven of short hairs. His knowledge of what people wanted, what they had to hide and what they were willing to give made him the Great Conciliator.

Much has been written about Johnson's decision to relinquish his powerful majority leadership to run as John F. Kennedy's vice-presidential candidate. There was a health reason: L.B.J. had suffered a heart attack in 1955 and needed a less taxing job. But Johnson also foresaw the end of his senatorial strength. Explains Moyers, a future presidential assistant: "If a Democrat got the nomination and won the election, then that Democrat was going to be Mr. Democrat in the nation. Not Lyndon Johnson . . . On the other hand, if Nixon were President--partisan, narrow, an infighter, a vehement man, not given to collaboration . . . Johnson knew that his relationship with the White House was over."

Vice President Johnson's ties to the Kennedy White House were strained. Bobby and others on J.F.K.'s staff dismissed him as "Uncle Corn Pone." There is much evidence, however, that John Kennedy sincerely liked Lyndon and went out of his way to stroke his ego. There were, for example, those raucous fact-finding trips through Asia and India during which Johnson spurned State Department advice to avoid shaking hands with the unwashed masses. Nothing released his old progressive juices better than a crowd of impoverished farmers waiting for the word.

The cheering stopped in 1963. As the accidental President, L.B.J. found himself with a liberal apparatus long on promise and short on action. Says Liz Carpenter, then press secretary to Lady Bird: "Kennedy inspired . . . Johnson delivered."

Nothing in this sweeping account alters history's preliminary judgment: L.B.J.'s domestic record on health care and civil rights is outstanding, his foreign policy tragic. Viet Nam defied a political solution as he understood the term. "I think he wrongly thought that the same assumptions prevailed there that prevailed here," says Moyers. "He'd say, 'My God, I've offered Ho Chi Minh $100 million to build a Mekong Valley. If that'd been George Meany he'd have snapped at it!' "

Miller's corral full of voices is spacious enough to accommodate Johnson's personal weaknesses. But the superficial treatment of the Bobby Baker scandal, the relationship between the Johnsons' business interests and the FCC and the Tonkin Gulf deception lets L.B.J. off the hook. Miller also fails to reflect strongly enough the extent of the damage caused by Johnson's Viet Nam policy. Eulogistic gloss tends to soften some of the harder truths. Perhaps this is the nature of oral biography. At one point the author notes that "memory is a gentleman." True. But when memory serves legend more than history, it becomes a gentleman's gentleman. --By R.Z. Sheppard

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