CHAPTER 30

CASTRO’S AND KENNEDY’S SHADOWS

AT4:40IN THE AFTERNOON OF APRIL28, LYNDONJohnson sat down with Dean Rusk, Robert McNamara, George Ball, McGeorge Bundy, and presidential aide Bill Moyers to discuss the perilous situation in Vietnam. An hour into the meeting President Johnson was handed a cable marked “critic” (critical) from Ambassador W. Tapley Bennett in Santo Domingo. The Dominican military had spilt into at least two factions, and one was arming the populace in an effort to seize power. “Regret report situation deteriorating rapidly,” it stated. “Country team unanimously of opinion that time has come to land the marines … American lives are in danger.” After conferring with his advisers, all of whom approved intervention, President Johnson ordered four hundred marines to proceed to the Dominican capital at once. Rusk rushed off to inform all the Latin American embassies in Washington, and Moyers departed to set up a briefing session in the Cabinet Room for congressional leaders later that evening.¹

When Johnson and his advisers closeted themselves with the House and Senate leaders, Rusk stressed that the administration’s decision to intervene had been based on the need to protect American lives. Newly named head of the CIA Admiral William “Red” Raborn declared that there had been “positive identification of three ring-leaders of the Rebels as Castro-trained agents.” Everett Dirksen and John McCormack immediately warned of the danger of allowing another Castroite regime to emerge in the hemisphere and declared their support for armed intervention. Bill Fulbright’s only contribution to the council of war was to recommend that the Organization of American States be involved.²

But on April 29, Richard Goodwin warned that the Dominican crisis could be as costly “as the Bay of Pigs invasion itself.” The marine landing, he reminded Johnson, was the first military intervention in Latin America since U.S. troops left Nicaragua in the 1920s. It contravened the charter of the OAS and violated the spirit of the Good Neighbor Policy. Goodwin, coarchitect with Arthur Schlesinger of the Kennedy administration’s Latin American policy, insisted that President Johnson not put himself in the position of suppressing a popular revolution against military rule. Still, he concluded, “I agree that anything, including military intervention, should be done if essential to prevent another Castro-type takeover in the Caribbean.”³

The following day, as Dean Rusk advised reporters to play down “the ideological aspects of this thing,” Johnson met with McNamara and General Wheeler.⁴He asked them, John Bartlow Martin later wrote, “What they would need to take the republic.” One or two divisions, they replied. Martin, a former ambassador to the Dominican Republic whom Johnson had decided to send down on a fact-finding mission, recalled LBJ’s motives as he stated them: “The President said he foresaw two dangers—very soon we would witness a Castro÷Communist-dominated government in the Dominican Republic, or we would find ourselves in the Republic alone without any support in the hemisphere. He didn’t want either to happen.” Anticipating the criticism that was to come, Johnson declared that he had every intention of working through the OAS, but that he did not intend “to sit here with my hands tied and let Castro take that island. What can we do in Vietnam if we can’t clean up the Dominican Republic?”⁵

The causes of the Dominican Republic’s many troubles were varied, but most were rooted in the thirty-year dictatorship of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina. Trujillo had brutally suppressed all opposition, turned the army into his personal palace guard, and ravaged his country’s fragile economy. Then, in the summer of 1961, assassins had shot him through the head. His family tried to perpetuate his tyranny, but failed and fled into exile. In December 1962, the Dominicans elected the liberal intellectual Juan Bosch president. Tall, handsome, and charismatic, Bosch was immensely popular with peasants, workers, students, and some members of the middle class. Much as FDR had with his countrymen, he was able to project a sense of empathy with the travails of everyday life for the mass of Dominicans.⁶At the same time, he alienated the army, landed elite, and Catholic Church by forging a live-and-let-live agreement with the communist-dominated 14th of June movement and by presiding over the writing of a constitution that guaranteed basic civil liberties and legalizing divorce. By the summer of 1963, the oligarchy had decided that Bosch had to go, and on September 24, 1963, he was ousted in a military coup that forced him into exile in Puerto Rico.⁷

Heading the triumvirate that subsequently presided in the Dominican Republic was Donald Reid Cabral, scion of one of the nation’s wealthiest and most powerful families. The Caribbean nation was absolutely dependent on the sugar industry, and Reid Cabral had the misfortune to be in power when the world price for that commodity collapsed.⁸Dull and uninspiring, Reid Cabral also lacked his predecessor’s sympathy for the common man. Indeed, under his rule, trade union leaders were jailed, left-wing newspapers were banned, and the death squads that had been such a prominent part of the Trujillo regime returned. Reid Cabral soon established a cordial relationship with the U.S. ambassador, W. Tapley Bennett Jr., a veteran diplomat and a Georgian who was very close to Richard Russell and his family.⁹The Dominican Revolutionary Party (PRD) which Bosch had helped found began to make a comeback among peasants, workers, and even a contingent of left-leaning military officers.

The spring of 1965 found the Dominican military deeply divided. A minority were committed to Bosch’s return, but the majority regarded him as a dangerous revolutionary who would “open the door to the communists” and, not coincidentally, do away with the military’s privileges. When, in the spring of 1965, officers loyal to Reid Cabral attempted to arrest some of their fellows for plotting against the government in behalf of Juan Bosch, the PRD declared a general uprising and seized the presidential palace. At this point, the anti-Bosch military, led by the pious and thoroughly reactionary General Elias Wessin y Wessin, issued an ultimatum to the PRD, demanding that it turn over the palace to the army. Wessin y Wessin had become convinced that Bosch and the PRD were encouraging the Castroite 14th of June movement. When the rebels ignored his demand, air force planes began bombing and strafing the palace, as well as the slums of Santo Domingo, which were Bosch strongholds and, in the minds of the military, seedbeds of communist agitation. The brutal attacks inflamed the population, which subsequently flooded into the streets in response to calls from the PRD.¹⁰

By April 24 armed civilians, including leaders of the PRD and 14th of June movement, and dissident troops led by Colonel Francisco Alberto Caamano Deno controlled the center of the capital, Santo Domingo, including the presidential palace and Radio Santo Domingo. In a poor third world country like the Dominican Republic, in which half the population was unable to read, control of the radio waves was very important. Even the poorest barrio contained dozens of transistor radios. Meanwhile, the anti-Bosch, or “loyalist,” faction within the military under General Wessin y Wessin began to organize to storm insurgent positions. Their base of operations was the main military base at San Isidro on the outskirts of the city.¹¹At this point, P-51 Mustangs from the San Isidro air base once again began bombing and strafing the palace and subsequently the inner-city barrios where the insurgents were dug in. Over the next three days, a handful of rebels and dozens of civilians were killed. On April 26, the violence mounted, with street gangs looting houses in the more affluent part of Santo Domingo, and rebel forces besieging police stations in the areas under their control.¹²

On April 27 the battle for Duarte Bridge, connecting the suburbs of Santo Domingo with the rebel-held inner city, began. By this point, more than a thousand Americans had taken shelter in the Ambassador Hotel, the largest luxury hotel in the city. At midmorning some thirty rebels entered the building looking for the editor of a small, far-right newspaper,La Prensa Libre , who had played a role in ousting Bosch. The armed band held several American tourists at gun-point, conducted a fruitless search for the journalist, fired some rounds into the air, and departed. This intrusion convinced the American Embassy that its nationals had to be evacuated. Half were bused to two ships that had arrived at the port of Haina, while the other half were flown by helicopter to the USSBoxer , an aircraft carrier situated some five miles out to sea. There were no incidents.¹³It was in the midst of this evacuation that Tapley Bennett had sent his cable to the White House urgently requesting the dispatch of marines.

From late April through June 1965, Lyndon Johnson would spend more time on the situation in the Dominican Republic than he would on any other issue, including civil rights and Vietnam. By the time the crisis had ended, the United States had positioned twenty thousand troops in the island nation, one of the largest military interventions in the troubled history of U.S.?Latin American relations. As in so many other foreign policy crises during his administration, LBJ pursed a policy of double containment; containment of communism abroad and anticommunism at home. In the end, LBJ and his foreign policy team were able to quell the violence in Santo Domingo and bring forth a government that represented neither the far left nor the far right in Dominican politics. He believed that he could do the same thing in Vietnam.

 

THE PEACEFUL CONCLUSIONof the Cuban Missile Crisis had not ended the blood feud between Castro and the United States. The Russians had supposedly dismantled their missiles and left, but many in the United States feared that they would return, or worse, that when the Soviets had departed, they had left secreted offensive weapons in the hands of the mercurial Cuban leader. What was certain was that the Russians had turned over their surface-to-air mis-siles to Castro, who had sworn to use them to halt Yankee overflights.¹⁴The huge anti-Castro Cuban exile community in Florida and the communist government in Havana were constantly at each other’s throats. The U.S.-led economic boycott of the Ever Faithful Isle continued to take its toll. And there seemed to be a never-ending series of minicrises to plague relations between the two countries. In the spring of 1964, the U.S. Coast Guard had seized four Cuban fishing boats plying their trade in North American waters. Castro responded by cutting off the water supply to the American base at Guantanamo Bay. The incident was resolved peacefully, but as LBJ remarked to Richard Rus-sell, “I think there’s a latent feeling there one of these days, they [the American people] are going to say well we’ve just been a bunch of asses. [We cannot] continually just back down and give away and say excuse me every time we come in collision with one of these little countries just because they’re small and particularly communist countries and nobody will know just when the boiler is ready to give on it.”¹⁵Indeed, conservatives like Richard Nixon, Everett Dirksen, J. Edgar Hoover, and the editors of theNational Review were convinced that the threat of Castroism spreading throughout the hemisphere was very real. The GOP stood as ready as ever to denounce the Democrats for being soft on communism.

Just as vociferous, if not as numerous, were liberals who believed that U.S. intervention into the affairs of its sister republics was immoral and counterproductive no matter what the circumstances. Heading critics of U.S.?Latin American policy was a group of U.S. senators—Ernest Gruening of Alaska, Wayne Morse of Oregon, George McGovern of South Dakota, Frank Church of Idaho, and Bill Fulbright of Arkansas.¹⁶McGovern’s first speech was entitled “Our Castro Fixation versus the Alliance for Progress.” Fidel’s revolution, the South Dakotan suggested, “forced every government of the hemisphere to take a new and more searching look at the crying needs of the great masses of human beings.”¹⁷Out of power, Arthur Schlesinger and Robert Kennedy increasingly gravitated toward this group and its arguments. “This damn Schlesinger is going all over the world denouncing us,” LBJ complained to Assistant Secretary of State for Latin American Affair Tom Mann. He was saying “how our whole policy in Latin America has changed and we had abandoned the Alliance.”¹⁸

The task confronting LBJ in the Dominican crisis, as he saw it, was to steer a middle course between the anti-imperialists and anticommunists at home and reactionaries and revolutionaries in Latin America. He regarded Castroism as an authentic threat to peaceful change and to democracy, but no more than the autocratic, privileged elites who would use the red menace for their own purposes. To a degree, these divisions were reflected within the foreign policy establishment as it pertained to Latin America. Dean Rusk, Tom Mann, Mann assistant Jack Hood Vaughn, and Tapley Bennett were anticommunists first, democrats and social reformers second. McNamara, Bundy, and particularly Abe Fortas, whom Johnson brought in to troubleshoot during the Dominican crisis, tended to err on the side of democracy and social reform. Not that they were willing to countenance the emergence of another Cuba in the Western Hemisphere, but they believed that the threat of communist infiltration and takeover must be evaluated realistically and every effort made to work with and co-opt indigenous revolutions.

With a thousand Americans trapped in the Ambassador Hotel and a show-down looming between the rebels holed up in the center of Santo Domingo and the loyalist military advancing on them from San Isidro, LBJ, at seven-thirty in the evening on April 28, had ordered the first contingent of five hundred marines into action. An hour later, he went on television to announce that the troops were being dispatched “to protect American lives.”¹⁹That night, U.S. helicopters landed on the polo field next to the hotel and began the evacuation. The administration now had to decide whether to pull out and leave the Dominicans to themselves or to intervene massively to determine the outcome of the onrushing civil war.

By this point, Bosch in Puerto Rico had accepted the rebels’ invitation to return as president and was broadcasting appeals to all freedom-loving Dominicans to support the insurgents. The issue for LBJ was the extent to which communists had taken control of the revolution. According to testimony subsequently given by Mann and others before an executive session of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, there were three significant communist contingents in the Dominican Republic in the spring of 1965: the 14th of June movement, with an estimated membership of between three and four thousand that looked to Havana for leadership; the Popular Democratic Socialist Party, subsequently the Dominican Communist Party, with seven hundred to a thousand members that looked to Moscow for guidance; and a Beijing-oriented faction, the Popular Dominican Movement, with a following of some five hundred.²⁰In Mann and Rusk’s opinion, Bosch was an ivory-tower intellectual, weak and vulnerable to manipulation by the ruthless Marxists who had infiltrated the PRD and were assuming control of the insurgency. “Bosch writes books,” Mann observed to the president. “He’s the most impractical fellow in the world. Sort of an idealist. We don’t think that he is a Communist [but we] don’t think that [he] understands that the Communists are dangerous.”²¹

On the afternoon of April 29, the U.S. Embassy and the marine detachment guarding it came under insurgent sniper fire. “I sure don’t want to wake up and find out Castro is in charge,” Johnson remarked gloomily to McGeorge Bundy.²²The Latin Americanists within the State Department, Richard Goodwin, and various press pundits continued to urge Johnson to work through the OAS. On the 28th the president had appealed to that body to authorize a joint military operation to restore peace in the Dominican Republic. To his intense frustration, the head of the OAS informed the White House that it would take time to even get the delegates together much less agree on the wording of a statement.²³

Suddenly, Johnson began to panic. When the revolution had gotten under way, he had arranged for his friend and confidante, Abe Fortas, to go to Puerto Rico and confer with Juan Bosch to attempt to persuade him to disown the communist influence within the insurgency and accept a compromise settlement with the loyalist military. Fortas had come to know Bosch through a mutual friend, Jaime Benitez, chancellor of the University of Puerto Rico, when Fortas had been undersecretary of the interior.²⁴Late in the morning of the 30th LBJ called his friend, who was operating under the code name “Mr. Davidson,” in San Juan. Suffering from a terrible cold, his voice harsh and shrill, he was barely comprehensible:

They’re killing our people. They’ve captured tanks now and they’ve taken over the police, and they’re marching them down the street and they’re saying they’re going to shoot them if they don’t take over. Now, our CIA says this is a completely led, operated, dominated—they’ve got men on the inside of it—Castro operation. That it started out as a Bosch operation, but he’s been moved completely out of the picture. Since last Saturday Bosch lasted for a few hours. Then Castro started operating. They got forty-five more in there last night—Castro-trained, Castro-operated. They are moving other places in the hemisphere. It may be a part of a whole Communist pattern tied in with Vietnam. I don’t think that God Almighty is going to excuse me for sitting with adequate forces and letting them murder human beings.²⁵

To Mike Mansfield later in the day LBJ said, “The Castro forces are really gaining control. We begged the OAS to send somebody in last night. They won’t move. They’re just the damndest fraud I ever saw, Mike, these international organizations ain’t worth a damn, except window dressing.”²⁶

That afternoon, LBJ and his advisers hit on the idea of sending several battalions of regular army troops to establish an “international safety zone” extending from the U.S. Embassy out to the polo field where the marines had rallied. Nationals of all countries seeking safety from the fighting could congregate there, and it would give the United States cover with the international community for intervening militarily in what was clearly a civil war.²⁷

With Johnson scheduled to go on a nationwide television hookup that night at 8:40 to inform the country of his decision, a nasty argument broke out among his advisers as to what justification should be used. Mann and the CIA wanted Castroism and the threat of another communist regime in the hemisphere to be front and center. LBJ wholeheartedly agreed with them. Both hard-liners like Russell and liberals like Mansfield and Morse were telling him that it was on these grounds and these grounds alone that Congress and the public would accept massive armed intervention in a civil conflict. McNamara was of the opinion that the Red card ought to be played, but that the president’s advisers and not the president ought to do it: “I think you have got a pretty tough job to prove that [they] have got a handful of people there but you don’t know that Castro is trying to do anything. You would have a hard time proving to any group that Castro has done more than train these people, and we have trained a lot of people. I think it puts your own status and prestige too much on the line.” LBJ asked him if the CIA would be able to document the fact of communist domination of the insurgency. McNamara said he did not think so. The agency might be able to demonstrate that certain people had been trained in Cuba but not that Castro was directing the rebellion in Santo Domingo or even had any control over the people he had trained.²⁸Moyers also wanted to keep the cold war out of the speech. “The CIA Cuban Man tells me Havana is still taken off balance by this,” he observed. “Their hope is that we don’t give some push to Cuba to try to get in there in a way they’re not in there now.”²⁹Bundy agreed. He did not want the president to get “pinned to a civil war against Communists that aren’t in charge.”³⁰

By six o’clock, Johnson was nearly beside himself. “While we were talking yesterday, we ought to have been acting,” he told Bundy. “I think they’re going to have that island in another twenty-four hours. We’ve run under the table and hid.” When Bundy said that some in the State Department were afraid that the OAS might take references to communist domination of the insurgency in the Dominican Republic as an effort to stampede the membership, LBJ blew his top. “All right,” he screamed at Bundy. “Let’s see if we can satisfy that bunch of damn sissies over there on that question! Let’s cut it [reference to communist influence] and say they’re ‘great statesmen!’”³¹

Johnson’s address to the nation delivered on the evening of April 30 was a disaster. He felt rotten. The klieg lights were too close, partially blinding and overheating him. In the midst of his speech, the teleprompter stopped; Johnson read the same paragraph twice. “I begged George Reedy to go [fix] it,” he complained to Fortas after the speech, “[but] he is the laziest, no-good son of a bitch!”³²He announced that he was sending marines and army personnel to the Dominican Republic to prevent further killing and restore order. “At stake are the lives of thousands, the liberty of a nation, and the principles and the values of all the American Republics.” He reviewed events and indicated that forces outside the hemisphere were attempting to take advantage of the situation. The United States must intervene to stop the bloodshed and to see a freely elected, noncommunist government take power.³³

Two nights later, Johnson gave a more extensive explanation. Some advised waiting, he asserted, but when the entire nine-member U.S. team in Santo Domingo indicated that without U.S. forces, “ ‘men and women—Americans and those of other lands—will die in the streets’—well, I knew there was no time to talk, to consult, or to delay.” He then played the Red card. In the midst of the unrest, events “took a tragic turn,” he said. “Communist leaders, many of them trained in Cuba, took increasing control. And what began as a popular democratic revolution was taken over and really seized and placed into the hands of a band of Communist conspirators. The American nations cannot, must not, and will not permit the establishment of another Communist government in the Western Hemisphere.”³⁴

Opinion polls taken shortly thereafter indicated popular approval for the president’s actions, but dissidents in Congress, the press, and in other American republics began to question the extent of communist influence in the insurgency and the wisdom of U.S. intervention. As they did, LBJ became more shrill and exaggerated in defense of his actions. Had the United States not intervened, blood would have run in the streets, he repeatedly told the White House press corps. Warming to the subject, LBJ declared, “Some 1,500 innocent people were murdered and shot, and their heads cut off, and six Latin American embassies were violated and fired upon over a period of 4 days before we went in. As we talked to our Ambassador to confirm the horror and the tragedy and the unbelievable fact that they were firing on Americans and the American Embassy, he was talking to us from under a desk while bullets were going through his windows and he had a thousand American men, women, and children as-sembled in the hotel who were pleading with their President for help to pre-serve their lives.”³⁵Johnson’s extravagant rhetoric, of course, betrayed a fundamental anxiety about the correctness of his course. “If I send in Marines, I can’t live in the hemisphere,” he told congressional leaders on May 2. “If I don’t, I can’t live at home.”³⁶

As to the wisdom of the Dominican intervention and the motives behind it, opinions vary. The question of communist influence aside, Assistant Secretary of Defense Cyrus Vance, who was part of the negotiating team, believed that the U.S. intervention had averted a bloodbath. “Indeed,” he confided to an interviewer, “Caamano told me privately in one of my conversations with him that if the United States had not interposed itself between the contending forces that thousands and perhaps scores of thousands of Dominicans would have been killed.”³⁷“I think you have to read this in terms of American domestic politics at the time,” said George Ball, who was in the Oval Office when LBJ made his decision. “The clamor that if we had permitted the Dominican Republic to become another Cuba, which was the thing that was on the President’s mind, I think it would have been devastating; that, plus the fact that he was getting a lot of what I thought were highly dubious reports from J. Edgar Hoover about the number of communists.”³⁸

Once the decision to intervene had been made, the U.S. Caribbean Command moved quickly. By May 1, there were sixty-two hundred U.S. combat soldiers in the Dominican Republic. By May 17, the intervention force had reached its maximum of 22,200 soldiers. The first week in May, the OAS agreed to send a delegation representing five member states to oversee a cease-fire and mediate between the two sides. Fortas and Moyers persuaded LBJ to appoint former ambassador to the Dominican Republic John Bartlow Martin to go to the island and join the American negotiating team. As U.S. troops occupied a zone between the Ambassador Hotel and the Embassy, effectively inserting themselves between the loyalist forces and the insurgents, Martin and his team convinced the junta and the rebel forces to sign a cease-fire. The loyalists, suddenly grown braver, insisted that in any final settlement the rebels surrender unconditionally and accept the punishment they had coming to them. As Martin advised Washington, “The gutless Generals” were “waiting for the U.S. to do the job for them.”³⁹

As U.S. troops poured into Santo Domingo, Colonel Caamano, who had been approved by Bosch as temporary provisional president of the insurgent republic, reported to his exiled leader that the Americans were aiding loyalist troops, tightly constricting the rebel zone while allowing the junta to move its forces into position on his perimeter. And, in truth, the American press was full of reports of such prejudicial treatment. It seemed for the moment that Washington might side openly with the anti-Bosch forces. On May 2, reports came into the White House Situation Room that American troops at the Ambassador Hotel and the polo field were under fire, with two marines dead and twenty wounded.⁴⁰“These attacks were during the night and they were carried out by very well organized, prepared, and armed men,” Martin subsequently reported to the president. “So the rebels violated the cease fire line they had agreed to.”⁴¹“Got raging disorder, concentrated mobs, Castro oratory reported. Real Holocaust. Castro Communist elements have taken over movement,” LBJ scribbled on his notepad during a meeting held that day to discuss the Dominican crisis.⁴²

LBJ followed closely and with increasing anguish the mounting critical and sometimes incredulous press reports on the intervention. “I just watched the television shows tonight,” Johnson complained to McGeorge Bundy, “and the CBS reporter from down there said we ran wild through the rebel zone and just invited people to shoot us and try to stir up trouble. We are just mean sons o’ bitches and outlaws and they are nice, virtuous maidens.”⁴³Characteristically, he could not leave well enough alone. Johnson called NBC correspondent John Chancellor, whom he regarded as one of his few allies in the press: “Now what happened is … Bosch people started it,” he confided. “Then these fellows [the communists] move in just like they do in a Negro demonstration. 8 of them were identified by midnight. 58 are identified as of last night.” Chancellor mumbled assent. “I have to be very careful,” the president added, “because I don’t want to say a guy who disagrees with me is a communist or I’m a McCarthy.”⁴⁴On May 5, Johnson calledNew York Times correspondent Charles Mohr. “This was not a fight between a great literary, fine, sweet poet and mean old Wessin,” LBJ proclaimed. “It was a fight between two goddamn thugs!”⁴⁵At the same time the White House stepped up pressure on Raborn and the CIA to come up with the names and credentials of more Castroites within the insurgent movement.⁴⁶

While U.S. marines and army units labored to contain the insurgents and build up the morale of loyalist forces, Johnson’s Dominican team, which by now included Mann, Deputy Secretary of Defense Cyrus Vance, Martin, General Bruce Palmer, commander of U.S. forces in Santo Domingo, and Fortas, labored to come up with an interim government that would be noncommunist without being fanatically anticommunist, one that would at least tolerate advocates of social reform. During the first ten days of May, Fortas and Bundy ferried back and forth between San Juan and Santo Domingo, trying to find an appropriate figurehead and negotiate a settlement under which peace and stability could be restored. Fortas, and to an extent Martin, sympathized with Bosch but believed him unfit to rule. If he were to return to assume the presidency, he would either become a tool of the communists or a victim of right-wing extremists. After meeting with Bosch, Martin reported him to be “a broken man.” “Probably the most we can get out of him is silence but of course that is something,” he told the president.⁴⁷On the other hand, he observed, “there is not a goddamn thing in the Junta.”⁴⁸

If the situation were not volatile enough, the Kennedys now chose to enter the fray. On May 6, RFK rose on the floor of the Senate to deliver a speech criticizing the administration for not working through the OAS. The text had been drafted by the ubiquitous Arthur Schlesinger. Working on another front, Schlesinger took it upon himself to confer with Venezuelan President Romulo Betancourt, a democratically elected progressive whom Trujillo had attempted to assassinate, on the Dominican situation and report to the White House. Intensely annoyed, but cognizant of the need to not appear to be acting unilaterally, LBJ agreed to meet with Betancourt. To Johnson’s delight, the Venezuelan seemed to be thoroughly in accord with his thinking. As for Bosch, he observed, “He is the best short story writer and the worst politician in Latin America, and he should spend the rest of his life writing short stories.” But he agreed with Martin that Wessin y Wessin and the other extremists were unacceptable as well. Betancourt agreed to team up with former Costa Rican President Jose Figures and the former governor of Puerto Rico, Luis Muñoz Marin, and develop a plan for an eventual OAS trusteeship for the Dominican Republic. LBJ agreed to support the effort with a massive aid package to reconstruct the wartorn republic.⁴⁹

In mid-May, Fortas came up with the name of Silvestre Antonio Guzman Fernandez as a possible compromise interim president. He was a leader of the moderate wing of the PRD, had remained loyal to Bosch, but was staunchly anticommunist. But when the junta got word of the Guzman option, it reacted violently. As a Bosch protégé he was totally unacceptable.⁵⁰Wessin and his colleagues put forward the name of General Antonio Imbert Barreras, a man who had first served Trujillo and then joined with those who had assassinated him.⁵¹All through the night of May 14, LBJ spoke with one adviser, then another. “The political emotions here are just at this particular time absolutely indescribable,” Tom Mann reported. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”⁵²In the end, LBJ was forced to choose between Imbert and Guzman, and thus between Mann and Fortas, between their respective approaches to the situation.

The dispute was over more than just personalities. Rusk and Mann insisted that any provisional regime give categorical assurances that there would be no communist participation in the new government and that communists or suspected communists found to be engaged in subversive activities would be either deported or imprisoned. Fortas, Bundy, and Vance believed that such assurances were not necessary; the new regime should have an opportunity to co-opt members of the 14th of June movement in particular.⁵³LBJ felt a strong sense of loyalty toward Mann, whom the press and anti-imperialist senators had increasingly targeted as an uncritical supporter of the junta. “Well, now, really, honestly,” he told Fortas, “I have more confidence in Mann’s judgment than I do in Bundy’s. I have never found Mann wrong.” Fortas said that he did not think that Mann was a reactionary, merely unimaginative and inflexible. “I don’t think he’s quick to adjust his own fundamental notions to changing strategic situations,” he told Johnson.⁵⁴He could not see how backing Imbert and the junta could do anything but lead to a repeat of the present situation, and the United States would once again identify itself with the forces of reaction in Latin America. LBJ asked if stories were true to the effect that U.S. troops were actively aiding the loyalists. Fortas replied that they were not now but had been in the past.⁵⁵Later that day, LBJ discussed the situation with Moyers. Imbert, he observed, “will never have mass support,” but Guzman seemed to have support only from liberals and seemed not to have “much character, much guts.” Nevertheless, “between Abe and Tom, as of the moment I would favor Abe.”⁵⁶

While these discussions were going on, Imbert and loyalist troops began cleaning insurgents out of the northern part of Santo Domingo, home to the city’s major industrial plants. The rebel main force was prevented from coming to their aid by the cordon of American troops. In response, they vented their rage against the presidential palace, now in loyalist hands. Marines who were still guarding the structure responded to insurgent mortars and small arms fire in kind. In the cross-fire a young colonel, Rafael Fernandez Dominguez, was killed. A protégé of Bosch’s, he had flown in just a few days before, ready to play a prominent role in any provisional government.⁵⁷Caamano, furious, charged that Fernandez had been shot in the back by “Yankee assassins.” He cabled the UN that the incident was just “one more proof of the assistance which the invaders have been giving to the reactionary military forces.” “Sometime in the middle of the night,” Lady Bird recorded in her diary, “Lyndon came and crawled into bed with me. This morning, haggard and worn, he looked at me and said, ‘The most awful thing has happened!’ He said Bosch’s friends, five of them, were returning to Santo Domingo. The one who was the key to the situation was shot in street fighting and killed. Lyndon said he had only slept two hours Monday night and very little last night.”⁵⁸With great difficulty, Guzman was persuaded to keep his hat in the ring.

Johnson’s solution to the Dominican problem was to draft Guzman to head a provisional government but to force him to agree to exclude known communists and to crack down on the 14th of June movement and any other groups linked to the forces of international communism at the first sign of trouble. “I can’t sell [this proposal] to Russell and to Dirksen and to Ford and to the George Mahons [Texas congressman] for one dollar,” he cried to Fortas. “I just can’t! I can’t stand the pressure if we have a government that’s soft or sympathetic or even kind in dealing with the Communists. I’m not ever going to get Schlesinger’s support or the liberals’ support. It’s really got to be anti-Communist and proliberal.”⁵⁹“First thing that’s going to happen,” he told his friend, “they’re going to go tell Tom Dodd [Connecticut senator and staunch anticommunist]—Hoover is—that I didn’t check it and I’ve got a notorious communist as secretary of the Army. That’s what they’ll do and I’ll be destroyed.”⁶⁰“George,” LBJ remarked to Ball in 1965, “the great beast is the reactionary elements in the country. Those are the people that we have to fear.”⁶¹

During the hectic days in late April, when Johnson had been coming to the decision to intervene and subsequently to justify that intervention, he had made the mistake of asking the FBI to join the CIA in hunting for card-carrying reds in the Dominican Republic. Hoover had been more than happy to oblige. From the beginning he was convinced that “this so-called Bosch fellow and his stooge down there [Caamano] were either communists or fellow travelers.” There was no doubt, he said over and over to LBJ, that “the communists are holding and directing the principal policy of the rebel forces down there.” Now Johnson found himself hostage to the instrument he had hoped to wield to protect his right flank. As he struggled to find a satisfactory arrangement, LBJ repeatedly tried to appease the director by volunteering, in advance, the dossiers of individuals being considered for positions in the Guzman regime. From June until the end of the year, the State Department struggled to get the FBI and Hoover out of the Dominican picture, but to no avail.⁶²

Gradually, Caamano and Imbert faded into the background. Privately, the U.S. negotiating team arranged for “overseas assignments” for Wessin y Wessin and other, more extreme members of the junta and for the three most prominent leaders of the insurgency.⁶³In September 1965, moderate Hector Garcia Godoy was installed as president of a provisional government. A year later, Juan Balaguer peacefully, if fraudulently, defeated Juan Bosch for the presidency of the Dominican Republic.⁶⁴With the advent of economic stability, if not social justice, a troubled calm settled over the island. The same could be said of Lyndon Johnson. “I have nothing in the world I want, except to do what I believe to be right,” he cried out to Abe Fortas. “I don’t always know what’s right. Sometimes I take other people’s judgments, and I get misled. Like sending troops in there to Santo Domingo. But the man that misled me was Lyndon Johnson. Nobody else! I did that! I can’t blame a damn human … I know how it looks. It looks just the opposite of the way I want to look. I don’t want to be an intervener.”⁶⁵

 

THEDOMINICANCRISIS OF1965 marked the beginning of an open breach between LBJ and the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, J. William Fulbright, a break that would have profound consequences for the Johnson presidency.

On September 14, McGeorge Bundy was tipped off by “friendly newspapermen” that Fulbright was going to deliver a major address the next day indicting the administration for mishandling the Dominican situation and then intervening to no good purpose.⁶⁶Fulbright’s Dominican address was indeed a devastating indictment. After laying out the chronology, the chair of Foreign Relations blasted Bennett for underreacting and then overreacting. The embassy was paranoid concerning the threat that Castro and communism posed to the hemisphere, he said. “If we are automatically to oppose any reform movement that Communists adhere to, we are likely to end up opposing every reform movement, making ourselves the prisoners of reactionaries who wish to preserve the status quo,” Fulbright declared. Intervention had undermined the OAS and generated anti-Americanism in Latin America that had not been seen since the 1920s.⁶⁷

Fulbright’s dissent coincided with and reflected growing animosity toward LBJ by two of twentieth-century America’s most important image makers: the press and intellectuals. By the 1960s the distinction between the two had blurred somewhat with the emergence of individuals like columnists Walter Lippmann, James Reston, Joseph Kraft, Emmet Hughes, Stewart and Joe Alsop; reporters-turned historians such as David Halberstam, Malcolm Browne, and Neil Sheehan; and celebrity intellectuals such as Arthur Schlesinger, John Kenneth Galbraith, Hans Morgenthau, James McGregor Burns, Margaret Meade, and David Reisman. These “public intellectuals” were read and respected by both academics and educated laypeople. LBJ and his staff had always recognized the power of the press, but they were also mindful, like the Kennedys, of the growing power of the intelligentsia. “It is quite probable that within the next few years,” George Reedy had observed to his boss in 1962, “university professors will become much more potent politically than Mayors, County Judges, Sheriffs or political chairmen.”⁶⁸He knew they were important, but to his everlasting detriment, LBJ proved either unwilling or unable to understand either the press or the intellectual community. In fact, beginning in early 1965, the president commenced a war with the national media that would escalate to grotesque dimensions.

 

AS EVERY JOURNALISTin America knew, the public was fascinated with the presidency, “with the scope of its dramatic possibilities, the amazing range of interpretations the role can tolerate, and the considerable body of contradictions it indulges,” to use linguist Wayne Fields’s words.⁶⁹Though it claimed absolute freedom of thought and independence of judgment, the national media was made to be used by the modern presidency. The White House press corps was absolutely dependent on the entity it covered for news. Presidential words and actions were immediate front-page material. Consensus historians like Schlesinger and political scientists like Richard Neustadt had made the presidency the center of the nation’s civic life. Franklin Roosevelt, who ran successfully four times against the overwhelming opposition of the nation’s editors and publishers, had dominated the press corps by bullying and manipulating them. His skill as a speaker, particularly a radio orator, allowed him to bypass, to a large degree, editorial opinion. After the bland and often deliberately inarticulate Dwight Eisenhower, the press had been swept off its collective feet by the eloquent, candid, self-effacing JFK.

LBJ initially thought he could co-opt and control the national media, singling out individuals whom he favored for privileged interviews and freezing with total silence those who had fallen into disfavor. Stories concerning the president’s efforts to secure, intimidate, and control were legion. Joe Alsop remembered that as majority leader, LBJ always wanted to write a reporter’s story for him or her. “It seemed an inconceivable waste of precious time for this immensely able, desperately busy man to spend 20 minutes of a half-hour talk compulsively and fruitlessly peddling a lemon, thus leaving only ten minutes for the practical discussion of practical affairs—which might just reveal a bona fide Johnsonian accomplishment that could be reported with bona fide enthusiasm and of course the problem is immeasurably worse now that he is President.”⁷⁰Johnson’s drive to control was overwhelming. He read virtually every major newspaper and magazine story having to do with the administration, and of course, the three Oval Office television monitors were always on during the news. No story, particularly one he interpreted as critical, went unnoticed. He would call up Bundy or Moyers and direct him to contact the offending reporter and set him or her straight. Occasionally he would do the job himself, although most of the time he would use his personal touch to get a journalist that he considered favorably inclined toward him, like John Chancellor, to write a positive story he wanted to see in the press. Johnson nonplussed his press secretary when, during the 1964 campaign, he directed Reedy to get Peter Lisagor, Philip Potter, and other reporters whose papers had endorsed him to “send him a little note” outlining what they were going to do for him during the last three weeks of the campaign.⁷¹Leonard Marks, who replaced Carl Rowan as head of the USIA, recalled presenting the president with a survey of public opinion journals around the world on the activities of the Johnson administration. Many of the views expressed were negative. “You have ten thousand people working for you and you have a budget of two hundred million dollars,” LBJ said. “Some of them are very good people. Why can’t you tell the world what we are doing? Why don’t they understand us?” To LBJ’s consternation, Marks replied, “Mr. President, they understand us—they don’t agree with us!”⁷²

The desire to shape and control the presidential image has been characteristic of all administrations. “You tend to view everything in terms of whether it hurts your Administration, your President and that sort of thing,” Harry McPherson explained. “Or helps. You look at almost nothing from the point of view of whether it’s true or not.”⁷³George Reedy put it another way: “The most important, and least examined, problem of the presidency is that of maintaining contact with reality,” he said.⁷⁴But Johnson’s attention and sensitivity to the press seemed grotesque.

LBJ would show his spurs to the members of the Fourth Estate in a variety of ways. He was fond of leading the White House press corps on extended, rapid walks around the White House grounds, especially during the stifling summer months, carrying on an extended monologue that might or might not contain newsworthy tidbits. Frank Cormier described one of these jaunts in his memoir of the Johnson years: “As we negotiated lap after lap, our ranks thinned considerably. A reporter for theChicago Sun Times dragged himself into the pressroom and phoned a half-frantic, half-admiring message to his bureau chief in Atlantic City: ‘He’s going around again. Twelfth time. We’re dropping like flies. It’s a death march!’”⁷⁵

The president could be particularly brutal with reporters who covered the Texas White House. He continued to believe that the press had no business following him around as he toured his pastures, sunned aboard one of his motorboats, or attended a nearby church on Sunday. To him it seemed proper that in his own domain, the press ought to appear only when summoned either to cover some stage-managed event or to be his guests. When they reported on events while enjoying his hospitality, it infuriated him. Journalist Lewis H. Lapham recalled one mass humiliation by auto. Emerging from church one Sunday to find the entire press corps assembled in a line of cars to follow him wherever he might go, LBJ grinned mischievously and crooked his finger for the journalists to follow. “Picking his way along a series of back roads and trail-ing a high cloud of dust,” as Lapham described the incident, “the President first returned to the town of Blanco. To continue to Johnson City he had only to make a simple right turn at the main intersection, but instead he turned left and drove slowly, in a full circle, around the town square. The resulting confusion was extensive. Some of the cars got halfway around the square before guessing the President’s intention. Others stopped short. Some, at the end of the line, turned left and passed Mr. Johnson’s car going in an opposite direction. All players again maneuvered for position, and their collective trickiness resulted in a stalemate: all cars stopped, the drivers beating helplessly on their dashboards in frustration and rage. The President meanwhile drove serenely back onto the highway, smiling and waving at those he recognized.”⁷⁶“If I can’t go to an adjoining place, somewhere I’m working on a house, eleven miles without somebody having flack [complaining that they had not been notified],” he once complained to George Reedy, “well, they’re little chickenshits.” He instructed his press secretary to tell them that there was an area of forty or fifty miles that he felt he ought to be free to move in without calling a press conference.⁷⁷

LBJ found press conferences to be excruciating. He was frequently brusque, rarely forthcoming, and sometimes rude. When a reporter asked him during a question-and-answer session at the ranch shortly before the inauguration if he would give the press a hint about his future travel plans, he replied, “No!” The journalist persisted: “Could you give us a clue?” LBJ interrupted, “I said no!” Later in the session, he observed that there was no point in giving out information, because he would only be misquoted, and he accused reporters of being patsies for leaks from overly ambitious administration officials who did not know “come here from sic em!”⁷⁸

Increasingly, LBJ blamed his deteriorating relationship with the press on George Reedy. The president was acutely aware of the Georgetown cocktail circuit, where members of the cultural and political elite convened to network and gossip, frequently about LBJ and his personal and professional shortcomings. There the Schlesingers, Achesons, Fulbrights, Lippmans, Alsops, Galbraiths, Bundys, Kennedys, and Freemans participated in an open-ended salon in which all matters of import were discussed with verve and wit. LBJ could never hope to be part of the Georgetown scene, but he wanted an emissary—not Bundy or McNamara, who would always be suspect in his eyes—but one of his own. He expected his press secretary to be such a figure. Reedy, slow-talking, slowmoving, overweight, ungainly, simply lacked the sparkle to fit the bill. More and more often, LBJ would complain to McNamara and others about Reedy’s dullness, his laziness, and his lack of imagination. Johnson upbraided Reedy personally about his weight and his rumpled appearance. “I’m going to try to build you up,” he told Reedy when he named him press secretary. “You’re entitled to prestige … you’ve worked for it harder than anybody else … but you’ve got to help me yourself. You don’t help yourself, you come in those damned old wrinkled suits … and you come in with a dirty shirt … and you come in with your tie screwed up … I want you to look real nice … put on your corset if you have to … But look like a top-flight businessman. You look like a god-damned reporter.”⁷⁹And Johnson bullied him unmercifully. Finally, in July 1965, Reedy resigned, using impending foot surgery as an excuse. Liz Carpenter staged a “hospital send-off party” with guests bringing pajamas and reading materials as gifts and Luci dressing up in a nurse’s uniform.⁸⁰Though LBJ gave Reedy one of his old Lincoln Continentals and helped him find a lucrative job in the private sector, his long-time aide was not amused and with the passage of time would become increasingly bitter.

To replace Reedy as press secretary, LBJ named Bill Moyers. He knew that the Kennedys liked and trusted Moyers and that the Georgetown crowd found him marginally acceptable. And, in fact, the White House’s relationship with the press improved markedly in the aftermath of the change. The press corps was flattered that LBJ would appoint one of his advisers of substance to be their liaison.⁸¹“George had reached the point where he was impossible,” journalist Charles Roberts observed. “He was afraid to say anything, tell you anything. Bill came in: he was very articulate and would tell you not only what the President was doing, but what he was thinking and what he might do and his reasons for doing the things he did. He was interpreting the President to us and since he had so much access to him, his guidance was good.”⁸²But not even Moyers’s wit, charm, or cultivation of Arthur Schlesinger Jr. could overcome LBJ’s suspiciousness, his tendency to try to manipulate the press and abuse it if he could not, and the press’s growing conviction that the president was either the biggest deceiver in American political history or a man with multiple personalities, each completely walled off from the other.⁸³In this suspicion, journalists were not alone.

“It is always a sign of trouble when a leader loses the support of the intellectuals,” former Tennessee Valley Authority head David Lilienthal observed in his diaries in 1965. “This seems to be happening with Johnson because of Vietnam, and it will probably also happen because of the Dominican affair.”⁸⁴In truth, the alienation of the intellectuals had to do with those foreign policy crises but also with other factors as well. There was first of all the burgeoning Kennedy mystique. “President Johnson is to most of us an ideological cipher,” political scientist and Americans for Democratic Action president John Roche wrote Bill Moyers, “and as I told you, we suffer from a certain urban parochialism which tends, I suspect, to exaggerate the political virtues of the late President at the expense of his successor.”⁸⁵In the wake of the assassination, theNew York Review of Books had run a special edition, with such luminaries as David Reisman, Richard Hofstadter, Norman Mailer, Irving Howe, Dwight Macdonald, and Hannah Arendt speculating on the reality and promise of the fallen president. “People in other countries, oppressed by the ham-handed or iron-fisted or flabby leadership of elderly non-intellectual men,” Reisman wrote, “looked to President Kennedy with admiration and even a touch of envy.” Hofstadter saw him as the ultimate democratic ruler: “He belongs to those men in all times for whom politics has been a distinguished and demanding craft.” David Bazelon put it in more romantic terms: “He made love, to be succinct, to the American people. He concentrated on it, and he managed to get the people to love him. So he left a nation of unfulfilled lovers behind him.”⁸⁶In trying to pinpoint the hold that JFK came to have on the imagination of educated Americans and intellectuals in particular, Gary Wills quoted Walter Bagehot on Bolingbroke: “There lurks about the fancies of many men and women an imaginary conception of an ideal statesman, resembling the character of which Alcibiades has been the recognized type for centuries. There is a sort of intellectual luxury in the idea which fascinates the human mind. We like to fancy a young man in the first vigor of body and first vigor of mind, who is full of bounding enjoyment, who excels all rivals at masculine feats, who gains the love of women by a magic attraction, but who is also a powerful statesman, who regulates great events, who settles great measures, who guides a great nation.”⁸⁷Such was much of educated America’s view of John F. Kennedy. It was an image that never tarnished, but was only burnished, because JFK was not alive to disappoint. It was with such a mythic figure that Lyndon Johnson had to compete.

Of course, the entourage that gathered around the heir apparent did their best to keep the Kennedy mystique alive and be sure that it was transferred to RFK. At a speech delivered to the eighteenth annual convention of the Americans for Democratic Action in the spring of 1965, Arthur Schlesinger attributed the concept of the Great Society entirely to New Frontiersman Richard Goodwin. All of LBJ’s men—Valenti, Busby, Reedy—were against the idea, Schlesinger insisted, arguing that the “dreamy vague proposals would be interpreted as a hangover from the Soviet Union’s series of unsuccessful five-year plans.” Warming to his audience, he hailed the triumph of Goodwin’s proposals as “a clear victory of the liberal cause of American politics over the messianic conservative complex of the President’s Texas mafia.”⁸⁸

The degree to which LBJ had become demonized in the collective mind of the Kennedys became clear during a 1969 interview that Kenny O’Donnell gave on his time at the White House. “All I can say is that in my opinion he [LBJ] was the worst politician I’ve ever seen in my life,” O’Donnell insisted, “just unbelievably bad.”⁸⁹Clearly, Bobby and those around him reveled in stories that LBJ had someway, somehow been complicit in JFK’s death. “He was regarded as a usurper and, no doubt by millions of people around the world, as probably responsible for Kennedy’s death. In Asia, Latin America and parts of Europe, it was inconceivable that a President assassinated in the Vice-President’s home state had not been killed as part of a coup by the Vice President,” Harry McPherson observed. “Other people also believed it in a milder way. As Hamlet says to his uncle, ‘he was to you “as Hyperion to a Satyr.” ’”⁹⁰

It was often not the substance of the Johnson policies that offended journalists and intellectuals, but the ways they were presented, articulated, or justified. Reedy and Johnson had believed that JFK’s staff and cabinet were too visible, that in their speeches, articles, and public appearances they had become minicelebrities that detracted from the president and the presidency.⁹¹After he succeeded to the White House, LBJ swore his staff to anonymity. In the first days of the Johnson administration, the media attempted to develop stories on the men around the president. He flatly refused to let Moyers, Valenti, and Busby be interviewed, much less profiled. They were to be neither seen nor heard outside the political apparatus that Johnson sought to manage.⁹²Rumor had it that LBJ had sent McGeorge Bundy to Santo Domingo during the Dominican crisis to prevent him from debating Schlesinger, Morgenthau, and other critics of administration policy at a teach-in in Washington. “I don’t think a White House staff member ought to be doing these things, except the press secretary,” he told Moyers.⁹³Horace Busby, among others, tried to convince LBJ that by keeping his staff in the background, his image was suffering. In large part, the JFK mystique had been created by Schlesinger, Sorenson, Goodwin, and O’Donnell. “The Kennedy ‘image’ was—for the president personally—the foam atop a heady brew of intellectual ferment, in Washington and out,” he told his boss. “If the people around him had been hesitant, reluctant or simply ill-equipped to talk about plans for the future, the now-existing Kennedy image would never have risen to the top. President Kennedy was the beneficiary of the accessibility and self-confidence of his associates, intimate or peripheral. But, by contrast, the edginess, evasiveness and simple ‘in the dark’ ignorance of persons in this Administration works against any successful image program.”⁹⁴But Johnson would not listen. Busby left the White House staff, disgusted, within a year. Thus, reporters and columnists were left to talk among themselves or with LBJ’s enemies about the very peculiar man who had succeeded JFK in the White House.

Those who would understand Lyndon Johnson were confounded by his habit of inventing versions of himself and putting them up for inspection and approval.⁹⁵There was Johnson the Son of the Tenant Farmer, Johnson the Great Compromiser, Johnson the All-Knowing, Johnson the Humble, Johnson the Warrior, Johnson the Dove, Johnson the Romantic, Johnson the Hard-Headed Pragmatist, Johnson the Preserver of Traditions, Johnson the Crusader for Social Justice, Johnson the Magnanimous, Johnson the Vindictive. The only person really capable of writing a biography of LBJ, George Reedy observed, was the Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello, whose best-known playsSix Characters in Search of an Author (1921) andHenry IV (1922) exploited the notions of multiple personality and the relativity of reality.⁹⁶Some of these LBJs were carefully calculated to appeal to a particular constituency or audience, some a reflection of the various roles presidents are expected to play. Indeed, Johnson’s commitment to consensus led him at times to try to be all things to all people. “He sent out all kinds of wrong signals to the people,” John Chancellor observed. “He would send out liberal-conservative signals at the same time. He would send out internationalist-isolationist signals at the same time. He could get up and make a speech at Howard University on the Negro family and what we would do about the Negroes, which was one of the most inspiring speeches I have ever heard in my life. And yet what did you see when the speech was being made? You saw somebody with that long face and the regional accent and that sort of high collar white shirt and that sort of luminescent suit he used to wear, that all added up to a visual impression of a man who couldn’t possibly be saying anything good about blacks.”⁹⁷

Some of Johnson’s role-playing was an involuntary response to the unbelievable stress he endured. In his anger and desire to strike back, LBJ adopted the ironic and self-defeating habit of acting out a caricature in front of those whom he believed caricatured him. Thus his exhibitionism and crudeness in the company of those, usually perceived to be part of the Eastern establishment, whom he believed were whispering about his credentials behind his back. In the presence of “the Ivy League types,” Reedy said, “there would come bubbling to the surface a very intense crudity, an obviously deliberate effort to be disgusting in their sight.”⁹⁸

 

FROM THE VERY BEGINNING, journalists and public intellectuals had predicted that foreign affairs would be LBJ’s Achilles’ heel. In late January 1964, Douglas Kiker, writing in theNew York Herald Tribune , cited “mounting evidence” that the new president “has yet to develop an effective technique for the day-to-day conduct of foreign affairs.”⁹⁹Johnson responded by constantly listing the numbers of meetings he had held with foreign heads of state and ambassadors. But it all seemed for naught. A year later, Newsweek ran a feature article on Johnsonian diplomacy entitled “Foreign Policy: Drift or Design?”¹⁰⁰

LBJ’s penchant for venting sometimes confused his friends in the press and played into the hands of his enemies. In early 1965, Stewart Alsop cited an interview with the president, who, after listening to questions concerning Vietnam, Panama, the Middle East, and Central Africa, spoke in exasperation of the United States pulling back from its commitments. “The President said in effect,” Alsop wrote, “this country had been ‘listening too much to our own propaganda about being leader of the free world.’ Perhaps it had been too easy for tin-pot dictators to blackmail us by saying, ‘Pay me or I’ll go Communist.’ Maybe it was time to ‘let some people sweat a bit—let them go right up to the end of the street and see what happens.’ Maybe it was time we let the other side have a try at running the world.” What a contrast with Kennedy, Alsop wrote.¹⁰¹Four months later, following a flood of presidential rhetoric declaring that America would never abandon its righteous mission to defend the free peoples of the world from the scourge of communism, that it would never “tuck tail and run” in Vietnam, that it would never permit another Castro in the Western Hemisphere, luminaries such as Walter Lippmann and Hans Morgenthau were blasting LBJ as a simple-minded interventionist whose sole foreign policy reference was the Alamo.¹⁰²

Throughout the spring and summer of 1965, voices inside and outside the White House criticized LBJ for not providing a compelling rationale for a U.S. presence in Vietnam and for not rallying the American people and Congress to support a war that clearly America had decided to take over. “By not talking about the enlarged operational mission for enlarged U.S. military forces,” John Steele wrote his editors, “he [LBJ] appeared to me to be raising a crisis of confidence with the people. By generalizing, by down playing, by emphasizing the unlimited nature of his willingness to talk, by an unwillingness to sacrifice at least for the moment his lust for a Great Society, by postponing until a later day the rendering of the real bill, he seemed to me to bring into question the American purpose.”¹⁰³Johnson’s rhetorical excesses and confusion during the early days of the Dominican crisis produced a spate of stories in theNew York Times and scores of other journals blasting him for overreacting and then inventing a Castroite communist menace to cover his mistake, for claiming that he worked through the OAS when he clearly did not. “There is now a deep-seated distrust because of a feeling that we are not fully and frankly explaining what we are doing,” James Reston advised McGeorge Bundy.¹⁰⁴It was in the summer of 1965 that that famous term “credibility gap” began to appear in news stories.

Most upsetting to the press and public intellectuals was Johnson’s tendency to question their right to dissent, to imply that they were being at best irresponsible and at worst disloyal. Increasingly, he complained that naysayers were uninformed armchair quarterbacks and unwitting dupes of the communists. Most annoying, he seemed to be equating those who dissented with those appeasers who had opened the door to the Nazis and Japanese imperialists in the 1930s and 1940s. “If the President’s version of history is correct,” Lippmann wrote indignantly, “it follows that when there is an issue of war and peace, the only safe and patriotic course is to suspend all debate and rally around the President.”¹⁰⁵The objects of his attacks responded by wondering aloud if the president had not crawled in bed with the very mindless hawks he had defeated in 1964. “The testiness of the President is not mysterious,” Emmet John Hughes wrote in May 1965. “It is not pleasant to receive the most candid critiques from the Fulbrights or the Mansfields in his own party. It must be yet more disconcerting to be cheered on by Barry Goldwater and theNew York Daily News. But it might be expected that this very discomfiture would force some twinge of doubt on whether he had not, perhaps, slipped into the wrong pew in a strange church.”¹⁰⁶

To Lyndon Johnson, an intellectual was, benignly, a wordsmith and idea machine, and, malignantly, an ideologue. It was not that LBJ could not think abstractly: he was a master at political calculus. He was given to utopian dreaming and at times a kind of Emersonian, transcendental mysticism. “I have heard him, when we were on his ranch going by and watching the animals,” Wilbur Cohen recalled, “refer to all sorts of sexual characteristics of the animals and of people, and then five minutes later you could stand on the hillside there watching the sunset and you’d find a man who was a poet in describing the sunset and the relationship of the land to the people and his hopes and aspirations for people.”¹⁰⁷He seemed to respect Walter Lippmann initially and made repeated attempts during his first year and a half in office to cultivate him.¹⁰⁸But Lippmann was different from Morgenthau and academic celebrities in general. He was himself a pragmatist, “a philosopher with an intense interest in how Government works—not the mechanics but the actual manipulation of power,” as George Reedy put it.¹⁰⁹

LBJ was enamored of expertise. As one architect of the Great Society points out, the number of task forces he established and the number of Ph.D.s (especially from Harvard and MIT) he recruited for cabinet and subcabinet positions exceeded those of any other president in the nation’s history. But LBJ made a distinction between experts and intellectuals. Johnson identified the latter with liberals like Paul Douglas and Joe Rauh, individuals possessed by rigid ideologies and fixed agendas. Shortly after he left office, LBJ blurted out to an aide, “I didn’t let them control my mind; I didn’t let them control my mind.” LBJ agreed with Sam Rayburn and John McCormack, who once exclaimed to a reporter who had called him a liberal, “Don’t you call me that! Liberals are those people who want to own your mind. I’m a progressive.”¹¹⁰To LBJ, most liberal intellectuals were ideological imperialists attempting to entrap those who exercised power within a preordained philosophical structure that placed the interests of the system before the interests of the individual.

Eric Goldman, among others on the White House staff, insisted to LBJ that, as a Democratic president with dreams of fulfilling and transcending the promises of the New Deal, Fair Deal, and New Frontier, he must maintain an amicable relationship with liberal intellectuals. Wandering in the political wilderness since the days of FDR, the Galbraiths, the Schlesingers, and the Balls had been overjoyed to be welcomed back to the halls of power by JFK. They were ripe, indeed anxious to be courted by LBJ, Goldman and Goodwin argued. To this end, in June 1965, the White House staged a gala Festival of Arts.¹¹¹For thirteen hours, more than four hundred poets, novelists, actors and actresses, historians, playwrights, musicians, composers, and artists hobnobbed at the White House. Lunch was held in the National Gallery’s East Garden Court. After dinner that evening at the White House, George Kennan addressed the group on the artist’s place in contemporary society. Soprano Roberta Peters accompanied by the Louisville Orchestra entertained, and then excerpts from four American plays and several movies were shown.

The proceedings were marred by an undertone of discontent, however. The distinguished poet Robert Lowell, who had been a conscientious objector during World War I, had ostentatiously returned his invitation in protest over administration policies toward the Dominican Republic and Vietnam. During the festival, cultural critic Dwight Macdonald circulated an antiwar petition. Despite the fact that Macdonald garnered only nine signatures, LBJ was not pleased. Informed of Lowell’s protest beforehand, he memoed Dick Goodwin, “I’ve been very dubious about this from the beginning—when you get in a pen with pigs you get some of it on you.”¹¹²Although Lady Bird was prominent throughout the proceedings, the president appeared only briefly, striding out onto the White House lawn to deliver a few remarks. “Your art is not a political weapon,” he said tersely. “Yet much of what you do is profoundly political.” He shook a few hands and then turned on his heel and marched back to the Oval Office.¹¹³

By fall, the intellectuals were in full revolt. Writing in theNew York Review of Books , Hans Morgenthau observed that the principal motive for U.S. involvement in Vietnam seemed to be credibility; America’s credibility and its prestige with its allies in the cold war. But, he insisted, to become bogged down in a guerrilla war that it could not win, a war fought for dubious purposes, would destroy, not enhance, America’s prestige. The article was embellished with a David Levine cartoon depicting LBJ crying giant crocodile tears.¹¹⁴Perhaps most important, Reinhold Niebuhr, the man who had provided moral justification for the war against the Axis, the conflict in Korea, and containment in general, put his dissent on record. Interviewed by theNew Republic , he declared, “The analogy between our defense against Nazism and our defense of South Vietnam against the Communist North is flagrantly misleading. Nazism’s military nationalism threatened the moral substance of Western culture, the Jews with extinction, and non-German continental nations with slavery. None of these issues is involved in a civil war between two portions of a partitioned nation, one Communist and the other non-Communist.”¹¹⁵

The White House remained defiant. Warned by James Reston that military intervention in the Caribbean and Southeast Asia was alienating much of the nation’s cultural elite, McGeorge Bundy rebuked him. “I went on to tell Reston,” he reported to LBJ, “that any President who was asked to choose between the understanding and support of the American people, and the understanding and support of the intellectuals, would choose the people.”¹¹⁶It was all Bill Moyers could do to persuade an angry Johnson not to abolish the Medals of Freedom award program, which recognized individual excellence in the arts, humanities, sciences, and public service.¹¹⁷

The first week in July, Jack Valenti attempted to refurbish his boss’s failing image. Unfortunately for him and the White House, his rhetoric got out of hand. “He is a sensitive man, a cultivated man, a warmhearted and extraordinary man,” the effusive and somewhat sycophantic Valenti gushed. “The President, thank the Good Lord, has extra glands, I am persuaded, that give him energy that ordinary men simply don’t have. I sleep each night a little better, a little more confidently because Lyndon Johnson is my President.”¹¹⁸When the text of the Valenti speech was reprinted, “The whole town exploded in a hilarious howl of disbelief,” theWall Street Journal reported. Political cartoonists such as theWashington Post’ s Herblock had a field day. He depicted three cringing White House staffers, bare to the waist with their backs deeply lacerated, striding away from the president, who was holding a bullwhip. The piece was captioned “Happy Days on the Old Plantation.”¹¹⁹Significantly, LBJ could see nothing wrong with Valenti’s remarks and was infuriated by the satire.

By the fall of 1965, the American people were being assailed with a number of conflicting images of the thirty-sixth president. There was still Lyndon the Compassionate. “At no time since the New Deal, and probably not even then, has this country had such a clear sense of purpose on the home front as it has today,” James Reston wrote in theWashington Post. “President Johnson is work-ing toward a just and compassionate society with remarkable vigor, skill and success.”¹²⁰Walter Lippmann could still speak of the president’s “Inexhaustible Gift of Sympathy.”¹²¹Then there was Lyndon the Competent. Jim Bishop hailed the president as “A ‘Can Do’ Man. Mr. Johnson has not only assumed the office of president, but he has taken complete charge.”¹²²Most pleasing of all to LBJ were Lyndon the Emancipator and Lyndon the Consensus Builder. Shortly after the assassination, British commentator Alistair Cooke had compared LBJ favorably to Abraham Lincoln. Both hailed from humble origins, Lincoln born in a simple log cabin on the nineteenth-century American frontier and Johnson “to a tenant farmer on the central plain of Texas, a 400-mile stretch of pulverized concrete planted with mesquite and cat’s claw.” Both men were possessed of a “deep conviction that good men ought to differ but can be decently made to collaborate” and “a solemn sense of the national good.”¹²³A political cartoon in theLouisville Courier-Journal posed LBJ as a grinning Statue of Liberty, clutching tablets labeled Voting Rights and Medicare, and captioned “Give Me Your Rich, Your Poor, Your Old, Your Young, Your Black, Your White, Your Huddled Masses Yearning to Breathe Free.”¹²⁴

But increasingly, as Vietnam and urban rioting came to overshadow the Great Society, negative images would come to overshadow positive. “The contrast of the home front with policy and direction on the foreign front is startling,” Reston wrote in the spring of 1965. “The President’s goals and priorities are clear at home. They have been defined and broadcast to the nation in a remarkable series of speeches and messages to the Congress, and this is precisely what has been lacking in the foreign field.”¹²⁵As unease metamorphosed into distrust, portraits of the thirty-sixth president grew more sinister. There had always been Lyndon the Westerner. “The man who is the 36th President of the United States is a big, breezy, rough-cut man of the plains and of the dust, ‘the drought, the hail and the wind’—as Walter Prescott Webb put it,” Tom Wicker wrote in early 1964.¹²⁶The papers were still full of LBJ in khakis and Stetson, inspecting his cattle, instructing ranch foreman Dale Malechek in the art of fencing, presiding over vast barbeques for visiting dignitaries, riding, hunting. But that image began to take on a negative tone, that of a hip-shooting Texas Ranger with an Alamo mentality and a mind capable of thinking only in simple black and white.¹²⁷

Then there was Johnson the Uncouth, an image that included several shadings. There was LBJ the Hick, a subset of Lyndon the Westerner. Russell Baker parodied the president’s speech pattern with a piece entitled “Let’s All Escalate Up to the Purdnalis.”¹²⁸Writing in theTexas Monthly, Nicholas Lemann captured the essence of the hick image, which seemed particularly evident on television. “ ‘Mah fell’ Ummurrukuns’ ‘Yew-nited States’ ‘Futher’ instead of ‘further’ ‘Tinnytive’ instead of ‘tentative’ ‘Wahr’ instead of ‘telegram’ ‘Prospairity’ ‘Coontribyit.’ And that’s not to mention his whole demeanor: the hair slicked straight back; the upper teeth concealed by a flabby lip; the lower lip shooting out to the side when he talked; the nervous, false little smile; the blinking; the tidal rise and fall of his eyebrows; the dark, hooded eyes.”¹²⁹Describing LBJ’s rush to the television studios to announce the end of the rail strike, T.R.B., writing in theNew Republic , declared, “He introduced the rival spokesmen like a Head Scout producing two troop members who had just won the rope-tying contest … There he was, proud as a new father, his big ears fairly shaking with gratification.”¹³⁰

Then there was Lyndon the Satyr. Although 1965 was a time in which the press still eschewed stories concerning the sexual improprieties of public figures, at least heterosexual improprieties, tales concerning the president’s long-term affairs and casual intercourse made the rounds of the Washington gossip circle with increasing frequency. Lyndon the Vulgar became a staple. By pulling up his shirt to show reporters his appendix scar, by continuing to skinny-dip in the White House pool, by burping and farting his way through innumerable conversations, Johnson seemed to feed this image with a vengeance. Johnson the Ogre had been around ever since the Texan had first assembled his staff. The Kennedys, particularly Bobby, never tired of recounting tales of LBJ’s abusive outbursts to his underlings. Humiliated and increasingly embittered by his rude dismissal after years of faithful service, George Reedy began to vent his spleen. “As a human being, he was a miserable person,” he wrote, “a bully, sadist, lout and egoist. He had no sense of loyalty (despite his protestations that it was the quality he valued above all others) and he enjoyed tormenting those who had done the most for him. It was customary for his staff to excuse his deplorable manners and his barnyard speech as ‘the simple ways of a man who was born and lives close to the soil.’ That was incredible nonsense. Most of his adult life was spent in Washington, D.C., which is not exactly the hookworm and pellagra belt. His lapses from civilized conduct were deliberate and usually intended to subordinate someone else to his will.”¹³¹Even Valenti would later comment on this trait: “I never lost the fascination of simply being around him, because he was very exciting. But he was also one tough son of a bitch and he was a hard, cruel man at times. I remember once I was sitting in his bedroom and on an open car phone he lashed into Bill Moyers like I had never heard anybody lash into anybody. And when I tried to take Bill’s side of the argument, he damn near blew me away.”¹³²

Finally, with the publication ofThe Making of the President: 1964 by Theodore H. White, Johnson the Usurper made its reappearance. After paying lip service to all the LBJ positives, White portrayed him as an obsessively vain, ambitious man without values and without magnanimity. Most important, he came across as not only an accidental but a completely unworthy successor to his cultured, idealistic, and sophisticated predecessor, almost a cruel parody of him. “When he thought of America,” White wrote of Johnson, “he thought of it either in primitive terms of Fourth-of-July patriotism or else as groups of people, forces, individuals, leaders, lobbies, pressures that he had spent his life in intermeshing. He was ill at ease with the broad phraseologies, purposes, and meanings of civilization.”¹³³

Hurtful images indeed, but what president, even Washington and especially Lincoln, had not been pilloried and vilified? Polls indicated that the people approved the way the president was handling Vietnam by 57 percent to 43 percent. There was no dearth of voices pointing out to LBJ that his obsessive sensitivity was counterproductive. After interviewing Johnson in May 1965, David Brinkley called Jack Valenti. “I think he pays too goddamn much attention to what the papers say about him,” he exclaimed. “If I was president of the U.S., I’ll be goddamn if I’d read the papers to find out anything about foreign policy. Who gives a goddamn what John Oakes [editorial page editor for theNew York Times ] writes? … For Christ’s sake what does he care? He knows a hundred times more about what’s going on than any of us. What the hell does he read ’em for? It’s silly.”¹³⁴During a frank conversation in September 1965, Connecticut senator Abraham Ribicoff advised Johnson to stop pressing: “You are doing so well that I would just be Lyndon Johnson and figure if I had 70% I was doing so damn well that I am not entitled to 100%. No man is entitled to 100%. I think if you try to reach for love, nobody can make it because love is an ephemeral thing. Now you have got the greatest ingredient of any man that I know of in the presidency and you have got universal respect.”¹³⁵But LBJ did continue to read critical news stories and he continued to care—deeply. “The attitude of the Post, Times, and Newsweek,” he complained to George Reedy before he left, “—not just the Baker thing, or the gold cufflinks, or the Texas hat, or the string bow tie—on things such as Panama, the editors are still critical. Even though things worked out well and were done the right way, ‘the fella is still a son-of-a-bitch.’” The press was showing the same attitude toward him as “Mississippi shows toward Harlem.”¹³⁶

Increasingly, the president’s interviews deteriorated into an ongoing effort to refute misperceptions and misjudgments he believed the press held about him, punctuated by occasional efforts at reconciliation. In a remarkable interview withNewsweek’ s James Cannon and Charles Roberts, he said, “Liberals like to talk about a lot of things without doing them; we like to do them. We don’t twist arms. Most of that comes from people who are not informed. Now they say that Bobby’s against me, that he’s my sworn enemy. But Bobby came in here and asked me to keep Katzenbach as Attorney General, and I did. Now some of you fellows criticized me on the Dominican Republic, but if you look at Gallup, Harris, Quayle and all the other polls, you’ll see that we went up from 63 percent to 69 percent.” Denying stories that he was planning to dump Dean Rusk as secretary of state, LBJ exclaimed, “They don’t try you fellows for writing stories to the contrary. They don’t shoot you for it. You’ve got that First Amendment. I can’t be responsible for the veracity of your profession. Somebody ought to do an article on you, on your damn profession, your First Amendment.” Then, “I never go to bed without thanking the Good Lord for the people who are helping me as President.”¹³⁷James Reston perhaps best summed up LBJ’s impossible relationship with the Fourth Estate. “If you don’t tell the precise truth about him, which is almost inevitable, he thinks you are dishonest, and if you do, he feels you are disloyal.”¹³⁸

What, then, were the sources of this grotesque relationship with the media? “The one thing that I’m positive about,” George Reedy said, “is that whatever else may be said about him, he was a tormented man. I don’t know what tormented him.”¹³⁹Nancy Dickerson recalled a bizarre conversation with LBJ at the 1960 Democratic Convention. “I am like an animal, a wild animal on a leash,” he blurted out. “I always keep that leash in a very tight rein. My instinct is always to go for the jugular.”¹⁴⁰Most obvious, Johnson’s goals for himself continued to be absurdly high. His mother was watching, his father was watching, FDR was watching, God was watching, grading, always grading. In 1968 Harold Lasswell, an expert on psychology and the political personality, made some observations about the Johnson psyche: “One thing of outstanding interest is the extent to which Johnson had to struggle to achieve independence from his mother. She was an ambitious, domineering woman who thought she had married beneath her. She was determined that this lad would be a great success and she pushed him very hard. It puts the son in a conflict. On the one side there is a tendency to accept domination and on the other hand a rebellious tendency to reassert one’s independence and masculinity and sense of adequacy. It is a reasonable inference that Johnson was very much concerned about remaining independent of outside influence. His subsequent political career—with his demand to make his own decisions and his demand to control a situation—has these very deep roots.”¹⁴¹Horace Busby observed that LBJ believed that a president must be knowledgeable about everything of real or potential national importance. He believed that those in power in the executive branch, in Congress, and in the press expected this of him.¹⁴²That was an incredible burden to bear, one that made the presidency much more of a pressure cooker than it already was.

Most simply and most profoundly, however, LBJ was multifaceted, elusive, combative, and, at times, paranoid with the press because he literally internalized the incredible diversity and ambiguity of the American republic during the turbulent 1960s. He felt it was his duty, if not his destiny, to take on the burdens of the nation—throwing off two hundred years of racism, obliterating poverty, protecting the free world from communism without leading it into Armageddon—and it whipsawed his already conflicted personality. Like a moth circling the flame, Johnson was drawn irresistibly to the storms of American life, even though they would consume him. After reading an article inLife in 1958 about General James Gavin, Lyndon had written his mother, “One quote from him struck me as particularly good: ‘I went forth to seek the challenge, to “move toward the sound of the guns,” to go where danger was the greatest, for there is where issues would be resolved and decisions made.’ I think that is a wonderful thought … because I always seem to be right up to my neck in problems and decisions it appears to me to be more than an adequate justification for what I can’t seem to help anyway.”¹⁴³

LBJ was committed to the common men and women of America, the tenant farmer, the factory worker, the ghetto dweller, the shoe salesman, the domestic worker, and the pharmacy owner. Outside of the white South, he was generally respected, and among black Americans, even revered. “I admire President Johnson because he stands on his own feet, and he’s firm in his beliefs,” Cosby Harrell, a black manual laborer from Lake Purdy, Alabama, told an interviewer. F. L. Pippne, black owner of a prosperous dry-cleaning establishment, commented to pollsters that he thought the president’s “personality is wonderful” and that he admired him because he “has helped everybody, but especially the under-privileged people.” William Nalomski, a welder from Chicago, responded when asked his opinion, “He’s a thinker, not quick with his judgments. He’s got a big load on his shoulders—you can see it in his face. He may turn out to be another Lincoln.” Glen Lochem, a farmer from Plainfield, Illinois, said, “I like him, because he doesn’t believe in letting those Communists push him around in Vietnam.” Johnson’s approval rating on the economy was 77 percent to 23 percent and on Vietnam 65 percent to 35 percent. Among modern presidents, respondents rated him better than Truman and Eisenhower but worse than FDR and Kennedy.¹⁴⁴

But for LBJ, that was not enough. He may have dismissed the best and the brightest rhetorically, but their disapproval served as a constant goad to him. However, given his values, Johnson could see no other course in foreign and domestic affairs than the one he was following and he was who he was; thus was LBJ doomed to wander for the rest of his presidency among those whose respect he craved but could never obtain. Typically, LBJ’s response was to try harder.