A Rogue, Yes, but With Great Vision

By JAMES WILLWERTH Robert Dallek

Q. Your book, Lone Star Rising: Lyndon Johnson and His Times, 1908-1960, follows a bitter controversy over biographer Robert Caro's dramatically negative view of Johnson. How do you differ with Caro's view of Lyndon Johnson as an amoral opportunist?

A. Mr. Caro sees Johnson as an utterly unprincipled man. The view is unrelenting. He believes Johnson wasn't a committed New Dealer but an opportunist who supported Roosevelt to get elected. Johnson is a monster. I don't agree. I see what the French call a monstre sacre ((holy monster)). Johnson was a scoundrel. He broke laws at every level of politics and once even had sex with a White House secretary on her desk. But he was also a brilliant politician and a visionary who married his ambition to his country's interests.

Q. But Caro describes "two threads, bright and dark, ((that)) run side by side" through Johnson's life. Isn't he calling him a sacred monster too?

A. If you read both ((of Caro's)) volumes, you'll find it very difficult to locate the bright thread.

Q. What bright threads do you find?

A. Primarily, Johnson's extraordinary vision. Early on, he understood that his native South must join the mainstream of American life. Racial segregation, he realized, also segregated the South ((from the rest of the U.S.)). Johnson's role in the South's development was historically important.

Q. If he was such a visionary, why as a Congressman did he support poll taxes and vote against antilynching laws?

A. Otherwise he couldn't have stayed in office. But a different Johnson worked behind the scenes. As head of the National Youth Administration in Texas in the 1930s, he stayed overnight at black colleges to see NYA programs at work. If that had been known, he couldn't have been elected to Congress. Once there, he raised what one Washington bureaucrat called "unshirted hell" because black farmers in his district weren't getting federal loans equal to those offered white farmers. When he brought public housing to Austin, he insisted that the units be opened to blacks and Latinos.

Q. And what else did you discover?

A. During 1938 and 1939, Johnson secretly helped Jewish refugees from Europe enter the U.S., through Galveston. I don't know of any other Congressman who did that. Out of 400,000 constituents, his district had only 400 Jewish voters. Something deep in this man's psyche, probably harking back to his Texas hill-country boyhood, made him identify with the underdog.

Q. If this is a "balanced" portrait, surely not all of what you found was positive.

A. During the 1937 congressional election campaign, Johnson's group probably paid $5,000 to Elliott Roosevelt, one of Franklin Roosevelt's sons, for a telegram in which Elliott suggested that the Roosevelt family favored Lyndon Johnson. I found this in an oral history from one of Johnson's opponents, Polk Shelton, who was offered the same, but declined.

Q. Anything else?

A. Johnson insisted that he built up his Texas radio and television empire without back-room help from the Federal Communications Commission. That's a blatant lie. When New Deal loyalists Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson wanted to buy their first Austin station, KTBC, the FCC had been blocking a conservative Austin publisher from purchasing it. The Johnsons were quickly approved. In later years, FBI wiretaps show Johnson talking to political fixer Tommy Corcoran about seeing this or that FCC commissioner on his behalf. Other Texas cities of similar size eventually had two or three television stations. For decades, the Johnsons' single Austin station never had a competitor.

Q. You and Robert Caro disagree dramatically in your accounts of Johnson's 1948 Senate race against former Texas Governor Coke Stevenson, a crucial moment in Johnson's political career. Why?

A. Mr. Caro sees Stevenson as a man of absolute integrity, which makes Johnson's vote stealing even more unsavory. My research shows that Stevenson had a long history of manipulating votes. He and others helped Texas Governor "Pappy" O'Daniel change more than 6,000 votes in East Texas to frustrate Johnson's first try for the Senate in 1941. Stevenson was a reactionary and a racist, hardly a saint.

Q. Considering all the lawbreaking involved, was it worth getting Lyndon Johnson to the Senate and eventually to its leadership?

A. I think he was the greatest Senate majority leader in history. His personal power made the position important. The Johnson "treatment" is legendary. He'd back you into the corner, press his nose against yours, tower over you, put his arm around you. He also understood when to speed up or slow down debate, when to settle things in a back room. He knew what each Senator liked to eat and drink, needed politically, wanted personally. He changed the seniority rules and provided choice assignments to younger Senators. That was good for the Senate, and it obligated them to him. He brought vision to the job. He helped create NASA to keep the space program away from interservice military rivalry. There's no better example of his vision than the 1957 civil rights law. People have said it was more symbolic than substantive, which is true. But Johnson understood that symbolism had to precede substantive change. We hadn't had a major civil rights bill since 1875. This opened the door.

Q. What about Johnson's presidential ambitions?

A. One striking revelation I've come across is that Joe Kennedy sent Tommy Corcoran to Texas in 1955 to ask if Johnson would be willing to try for the presidency in 1956 with Jack Kennedy as his running mate. The Kennedys would provide the funds. Johnson turned it down flat. He knew the Kennedys hoped only for a respectable loss that would neutralize the Democratic Party's worries about Kennedy's Catholicism. It would be the end of Johnson's presidential ambitions. When Bobby Kennedy heard that Johnson had refused, he threw a fit. I think this was the beginning of the Bobby Kennedy-Lyndon Johnson feud.

Q. If Johnson had such fierce presidential ambitions, why did he give up his powerful Senate position for the powerless vice presidency?

A. He felt his power ebbing in the Senate. Liberal Senators were coming in who resisted him. He thought he could change the vice presidency as he'd changed everything else in his career. He'd make it more important than it had been.

Q. Where do you rank Johnson historically?

A. I consider him a near great President, on a level with Truman. His vision of American domestic life approaches greatness. Johnson also had profound flaws. Examining his failure in Vietnam will be the task of my second volume.

Q. How do you feel about Johnson personally?

, A. One doesn't simply write about Lyndon Johnson. You get the Johnson treatment from beyond the grave -- arm around you, nose to nose. I should admit that he also reminds me of my father, quite an overbearing and narcissistic character. And in some ways, he reminds me of myself. Another workaholic.