MB Civic

LBJ: Architect of american Ambition
by Randall B. Woods

The Making of a War President
Review by ALAN BRINKLEY

At his best, Lyndon Johnson was one of the greatest of all American presidents. He did more for racial justice than any president since Abraham Lincoln. He built more social protections than anyone since Franklin Roosevelt. He was probably the greatest legislative politician in American history, but he was also one of the most ambitious idealists. He had the rare ability to understand his own flaws and limitations, and he worked hard to overcome them. During the battle over the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a reporter asked him why he was fighting so strenuously for a cause to which he had previously demonstrated only a faint commitment. Johnson replied, “Some people get a chance late in life to correct the sins of their youth, and very few get a chance as big as the White House.” Johnson sought power not just to have it, but to use it to accomplish great things — and for a while he was spectacularly successful.

But Johnson was not always at his best. He could be crude, overbearing, arrogant and often cruel. He harbored deep resentments that frequently undermined his own stature. He had terrible relations with the press. He was personally (and sexually) reckless in ways that make Bill Clinton seem a model of rectitude. He pushed his staff and his congressional colleagues so relentlessly that his legislative achievements were often rushed and deeply flawed. And, of course, he was largely responsible for one of the greatest disasters in American history: a war in Vietnam that he inherited, escalated, fiercely defended and failed to examine with the same courage and clarity of mind that he brought to so many other issues. He was, paradoxically, at once one of America’s most successful presidents and one of its most conspicuous failures.

Johnson has not lacked important biographies. Robert A. Caro’s controversial and unorthodox multivolume biography (still in progress) is a towering and singular achievement. Robert Dallek’s two-volume study is an exemplary work of scholarship. Ronnie Dugger, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Harry C. McPherson Jr., Eric Goldman, Richard Goodwin, William Brammer and many others have all contributed importantly to our understanding of this important president. Some might question whether there is any need for another substantial biography, and Randall B. Woods, a historian at the University of Arkansas, must have asked himself the same question at times as he worked on his own book while so many others were being published around him.

But in writing “LBJ: Architect of American Ambition,” Woods has produced an excellent biography that fully deserves a place alongside the best of the Johnson studies yet to appear. He is more sympathetic and nuanced than Caro, more fluid and (despite the significant length of his book) more concise than Dallek — and equally scrupulous in his use of archives and existing scholarship. Even readers familiar with the many other fine books on Johnson will learn a great deal from Woods.

Unlike all but a few Johnson biographers, Woods is himself a Southerner, and has a particularly good understanding of the nexus of race, class, family and religion that shaped Johnson’s life. He is especially perceptive about the powerful influence of Johnson’s mother, Rebekah Baines. Other studies emphasize the role of Samuel Ealy Johnson, Lyndon’s fiery populist father, whose wildness and alcoholism ultimately destroyed his own promising political career. But Woods makes clear that Rebekah was at least as important as Sam. A stern, moralistic and demanding mother, she both loved her son and constantly judged him — always questioning whether he was living up to his potential for doing good in the world. To the enormous ambition he may have inherited from his father, she added the deep — if sometimes hidden — idealism that also defined his life.

Woods challenges as well a critical element of Caro’s extraordinary portrait of Texas politics in the second volume of his Johnson biography, “Means of Ascent.” Johnson, then a congressman, was first elected to the Senate in 1948, in a close and controversial contest in which allegations of fraud emerged that plagued him for the rest of his life. Like Caro, Woods vividly describes the complex web of corruption that accompanied this race. But he does not share Caro’s romantic preference for Johnson’s opponent, Coke Stevenson, whom Caro presents as a figure of outstanding integrity but whom Woods portrays as a hardened white supremacist whose campaign was no less corrupt than Johnson’s. And despite the many concessions to conservatives that Johnson had to make to survive in Texas politics, Woods argues that even in the 1950’s he remained the most important figure in the still substantial progressive wing of the state’s Democratic Party.

Throughout his political career, and throughout much of his presidency, Johnson chafed at what he considered the Northeastern prejudice against Southerners and Texans, and he worked tirelessly, if sometimes bitterly, to prove that he was as intelligent, talented and — ultimately — progressive as the most luminous Democratic liberals. Always the realist, Johnson understood that supporting the civil rights movement would jeopardize the Democratic Party in the South for generations, and thus the strength of the party nationally. Yet he committed himself to the cause both because he thought he had no choice and because he believed in it. His extraordinary push for a vast legislative agenda in his first two and a half years as president was driven not by ego or recklessness, as some have claimed, but by his shrewd understanding of how little time a president — even one elected by a landslide with powerful congressional majorities behind him — had before the Congress and the public began to weary and turn on him.

In describing the bitter, long-running feud between Johnson and Robert Kennedy, Woods is generally sympathetic to Johnson — who, despite many claims to the contrary, was offered the vice presidency in 1960 not because it was a public relations ploy (as Robert Kennedy always claimed) but because John Kennedy believed he needed Johnson in order to win Texas, and thus the presidency. After John Kennedy’s death, Johnson believed — probably correctly, Woods argues — that Robert Kennedy never accepted the legitimacy of his presidency and, consciously or not, tried to undermine it almost from the start. Woods is perhaps somewhat ungenerous in implying that this resentment explains Robert Kennedy’s conversion from an advocate of the Vietnam War during his brother’s presidency to one of its leading critics during Johnson’s. Many onetime defenders of the war recognized the folly of the enterprise in 1967 and 1968, and there is no reason to think that Kennedy’s conversion to the (moderate) antiwar camp was insincere, however much it may also have aided his political fortunes.

Woods breaks little new ground in the now vast literature on Vietnam, but his account is nevertheless perceptive and intelligent. Johnson, he argues, was never enthusiastic about the war, always skeptical about the optimistic claims of the military (and even of his own advisers) and fully realized the great damage the conflict was inflicting on the nation and himself. What drove his commitment was a justified fear of a powerful conservative reaction to any retreat — his conviction that a failure in Vietnam would subject him, and the nation, to a new age of McCarthyism. He also accepted the cold-war orthodoxy that a defeat anywhere would damage America’s credibility everywhere. But Johnson’s brilliance did not extend far enough to allow him to understand politics beyond the established institutions of government, and so he failed to grasp the power of popular (and global) opinion in undermining the very cold-war orthodoxy that had shaped his approach to the war. There would have been terrible political costs in allowing Vietnam to fall, to be sure, but the greater costs — to Johnson and the nation — lay in allowing the war to continue.

Johnson was always prone to self-pity, and at many discouraging moments in his career he told those around him that he was ready to give up politics and return to private life (even though he had no real private life to return to). But there were always friends and family around to talk him out of resigning, which Johnson never really wanted to do in the first place. His withdrawal from the presidential race in 1968 was different. Beleaguered by the war, repudiated by many of his onetime admirers, despised and ridiculed throughout the nation and much of the world, in declining health even though he was not yet 60, he began speaking privately to his family and close associates once again about stepping aside. This time, almost no one tried to dissuade him — not even his wife, Lady Bird. But this time, too, Johnson was truly weary and disheartened, and he seemed genuinely to believe that in refusing to seek re-election he was doing what was best for the country.

His last years were unhappy and painful ones, and he died only four years after leaving office. But in retirement, in addition to writing a leaden and unrevealing memoir, he returned at times to his earlier identity, before he became a failed war president, as a great leader of great causes. Days before his death, desperately ill, he spoke movingly about the unfinished task he had begun. “Let no one delude himself that his work is done. . . . While the races may stand side by side, whites stand on history’s mountain and blacks stand in history’s hollow. We must overcome unequal history before we overcome unequal opportunity.” Among Woods’s many achievements in this fine biography is to allow us to see not only the enormous, tragic flaws in this extraordinary man, but also the greatness.

Alan Brinkley is the Allan Nevins professor of history and provost at Columbia University.

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Without Precedent: The Inside Story of the 9/11 Commission
by Thomas H. Kean and Lee H. Hamilton

Intelligence Test
Review by JAMES BAMFORD

Five years after the attacks of 9/11 and President Bush’s promise to get Osama bin Laden “dead or alive,” the mastermind of the operation is still free and issuing widely publicized video and audio threats. By contrast, the C.I.A.’s unit set up to find him, code-named “Alec Station,” was recently, and quietly, disbanded after 10 years of failure. In the Middle East, America has become bogged down in an endless war and occupation in Iraq while Israel, backed by the United States, is now involved in a bloody war in Lebanon. Calling the invasion of Iraq “a godsend to Osama bin Laden,” the former Alec Station chief Michael Scheuer warned that American foreign policy in the region was playing directly into his hands. “It validated so much of what he has said and told Muslims: that the Americans want Arab oil; that the Americans will destroy any Muslim regime that appears to be powerful; the Americans will destroy any country that appears to be a threat to the Israelis; and they’re willing to invade any Muslim country if it suits their interests.”

As the Middle East becomes an incubator for an army of future bin Ladens, it is a good time to look back at where, for Americans, it all began. The most comprehensive examination of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, was conducted by the 9/11 Commission, chaired by Thomas H. Kean and Lee H. Hamilton. Now Kean, a former governor of New Jersey, and Hamilton, a former congressman from Indiana, have written “Without Precedent: The Inside Story of the 9/11 Commission.” Told in a dry, colorless style, like the report itself, the book offers little new information on the actual attacks, but provides a keyhole view of the commission’s bureaucratic war with a White House obsessed with secrecy and control. Months after the commission’s creation, the staff was still battling the White House and the Republican-controlled House Intelligence Committee to get a look at an earlier 9/11 investigation by Congress, the Joint Inquiry report, protected under a dubious claim of “congressional privilege.” “This was frustrating,” the exasperated Kean and Hamilton complain, “particularly since we were a creation of Congress.” They add, “We were hung up with both Congress and the Bush administration over the documents that were mandated to be the starting point of our investigation.” Things only got worse.

The man standing at the gate was Alberto Gonzales, then the White House counsel and now the attorney general. In public, George W. Bush was a president deeply concerned about getting to the bottom of the most deadly attack on American soil in the country’s history. But in private, he ordered his lawyer to throw up every roadblock possible. In shirtsleeves behind the coffee table of his second-floor West Wing office, Gonzales spoke to the members of the commission as if they were bringing an insurance claim. “He never referred to the president by name or title,” Kean and Hamilton report, “but rather always said ‘client’ — ‘Let me take this back to my client,’ or ‘I’ve got to protect my client.’” The biggest battle came over access to the White House morning intelligence report, the President’s Daily Brief, especially the one dated Aug. 6, 2001, barely a month before the attack. Titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.,” the document noted that the F.B.I. was investigating suspicious Qaeda activity on American soil “consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.” When finally asked to provide the commission with his own testimony, the president said at first that he could spare only an hour of his time — and then with just the two chairmen. Later it was made clear that no recordings or transcripts would be permitted.

But throughout the life of the commission, as this book indicates, the real power resided not in the commissioners themselves, largely don’t-rock-the-boat Washington insiders, but with the families of the victims of the attack who had mobilized into a collective force known as the Family Steering Committee. “Pressure grew on the White House to loosen its restrictions,” Kean and Hamilton say. “The 9/11 families were adamant that all 10 commissioners be present; indeed, they wanted the president and vice president to testify in public, under oath.”

The White House gave in to the demand to meet with the full membership, but there was no way the president was going to testify publicly, or under oath. In fact, he insisted that he and Vice President Dick Cheney appear together, a move that led many skeptics to speculate that they wanted to ensure they kept their stories straight. Because of the insistence on secrecy, whatever was said in the room was largely lost to history. Unfortunately, Kean and Hamilton shed little additional light on the event, which is one of the problems with the book: an overabundance of self-censorship by the authors.

Another major failure of the commission was its inability directly to question people in United States custody who played key roles in the plot, because of a decision by the director of central intelligence, George Tenet. At a lunch meeting in his C.I.A. office, “Tenet opened by saying, ‘You’re not going to get access to these detainees,’” the authors write, adding “Lee, who has known Tenet for 25 years, could tell from Tenet’s demeanor that there would be no give in his position on the matter.” The decision probably had less to do with the security of the detainees than with the fact that many of them were being held in secret foreign prisons and subjected to such torture as waterboarding. “At one point,” Hamilton and Kean note, “we were told that even the president of the United States did not know where these top Al Qaeda detainees were.” The commission decided to appeal Tenet’s denial, but once again the commissioners came up against Gonzales and his stonewalling. The best they could do was to send their questions to the C.I.A.

Talking to the detainees was especially important because the commission was charged with explaining not only what happened, but also why it happened. In looking into the background of the hijackers, the staff found that religious orthodoxy was not a common denominator since some of the members “reportedly even consumed alcohol and abused drugs.” Others engaged in casual sex. Instead, hatred of American foreign policy in the Middle East seemed to be the key factor. Speaking to the F.B.I. agents who investigated the attacks, Hamilton asked: “You’ve looked [at] and examined the lives of these people as closely as anybody. . . . What have you found out about why these men did what they did? What motivated them to do it?”

These questions fell to Supervisory Special Agent James Fitzgerald. “I believe they feel a sense of outrage against the United States,” he said. “They identify with the Palestinian problem, they identify with people who oppose repressive regimes and I believe they tend to focus their anger on the United States.” As if to reinforce the point, the commission discovered that the original plan for 9/11 envisioned an even larger attack. Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the strategist of the 9/11 plot, “was going to fly the final plane, land it and make ‘a speech denouncing U.S. policies in the Middle East,’” Kean and Hamilton say, quoting a staff statement. And they continue: “Lee felt that there had to be an acknowledgment that a settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was vital to America’s long-term relationship with the Islamic world, and that the presence of American forces in the Middle East was a major motivating factor in Al Qaeda’s actions.”

Given the Bush administration’s current policies in the region, another 9/11-style attack is less a matter of if than when.

James Bamford’s most recent books are “A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq and the Abuse of America’s Intelligence Agencies” and “Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultrasecret National Security Agency.”