Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream.
by Doris Kearns.
Harper & Row. 432 pp. $12.50.

It has been nearly a decade since the first public reports that then President Lyndon Johnson, one of the most influential political figures of the last fifty years, had chosen as a confidante and preferred biographer a comely White House fellow with Harvard connections and anti-war proclivities. In the ensuing period there have been so many intimations of revelations to come and so many rumors and announcements concerning Doris Kearns’s relationship to Johnson, to Harvard, to publishers, to lawsuits, and to Richard Goodwin that the appearance of her long-promised psychobiography seems anti-climactic, especially since Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream turns out to be an entirely unsensational book. Miss Kearns’s respect for her subject, and her restraint in handling the data at her disposal, identify this as a serious effort.

Like all biography, psychobiography attempts to describe adult behavior and to relate it to antecedent experiences which dispose the subject to deal with the world in characteristic ways. The distinctive characteristics of psychobiography (as practiced, for example, by Erik Erikson, Alexander and Juliette George, and Doris Kearns) derive from certain “Freudian” assumptions: that the self screens reality so that an individual’s behavior is always a result of personal as well as “objective” events; that behavior is influenced by unconscious and partially conscious predispositions as well as by conscious purposes; that certain childhood experiences have critical importance for the adult psyche. These assumptions result in greater attention on the part of the biographer to unconscious and subconscious phenomena—dreams, ego-defensive behavior—and to such aspects of early-childhood experience as relations with parents and siblings.

While the conventional biographer is content to describe his subject’s life and times, the psychoanalytically-oriented biographer attempts to identify patterns of behavior and to “explain” those regularities by reference to “underlying” predispositions rooted in the subject’s early life. If, like Doris Kearns, the psychobiographer is also a student of personality and politics, she will seek to discover the political consequences of her subject’s personal characteristics. Since personality and character are inferred phenomena not directly accessible to observation, since political situations are almost always complex, and since most human actions are (in Freud’s term) “overdetermined,” inquiry into the political consequences of personal characteristics is fraught with intellectual hazards among which reductionism and psychologism are notable. Doris Kearns is obviously sensitive to those pitfalls, and deserves credit for a sustained and largely successful effort to avoid them; she rarely oversimplifies or ignores the non-psychological determinants of Johnson’s behavior. And through most of the book she resists the temptation—to which psychobiographers seem especially prone—to overemphasize pathological elements of her subject’s behavior and underestimate his creativity and personal strengths. Only in her discussion of Johnson’s persistence in Vietnam does Miss Kearns adopt the perspective of the psychoanalyst explaining the dynamics of stubbornly neurotic behavior.

Miss Kearns’s Johnson is consistent with the portraits by most previous Johnson biographers: we see again an enormously intelligent, talented, hard-working, well-meaning man driven by restless ambition, endowed with a powerful constitution, possessed of an unusual talent for intimacy, for compromise, and for legislative leadership. Understanding that character derives from psychological predispositions and environmental influences, Miss Kearns gives us Johnson’s own description of his early childhood, including the relations with his mother, father, grandfather, siblings, and with the society into which he was born and with which he so powerfully identified, and she traces the evolution of Johnson’s extraordinary political skills—from the cradle through the family, school, and college, to Washington, first as assistant to Congressman Richard Kleberg, then as Congressman, Senator, and Vice President. She shows how Johnson hungrily sought and acquired the intellectual, economic, social, and political resources needed to move on to greater political successes in ever larger arenas until he arrived finally at the White. House, not merely as John Kennedy’s heir but as recipient of the largest landslide ever recorded.

Johnson’s ambition was rooted, Miss Kearns believes, in an unappeasable hunger for approval. Though Johnson’s relation to his mother was unusually close, his mother’s affection was (or seemed to him to be) contingent on his performance, awarded or withdrawn according to his accomplishment. Forever hungry for expressions of approval, Johnson was convinced from an early age that approval depended on success. Though his needs were rooted in the intense relationship with his mother, the goals he set for himself received massive reinforcement from his culture. “All my life,” he explained, “I built around a series of truisms from the Bible, folklore, honor your father and mother.” A strong constitution and good mind helped, but, “the real payoff . . . which contributed more to the successes I had was the belief that where there was a will there was a way. If at first you don’t succeed, try and try again. Pure will power and determination. Just like here at the ranch: be the first man all week on the pipe, carry the end pipe, the heavy one, in your slippers if necessary, with sheer guts, sheer will power, and finally you’ll get your own boots.”

Calvinist ethic? Frontier spirit? Horatio Alger? This familiar creed, taught in the Baptist Sunday Schools, the textbooks, the schoolrooms, the dime novels, the folklore of Lyndon Johnson’s boyhood reinforced the lessons learned at his mother’s knee: approval depended on success, both could be won with hard work, determination, and perseverance. For such a person activity and achievement became not only a means to wealth and applause, but the way to stave off ultimate self-doubt. For such a person there is never a question of resting or of being satisfied with past achievements: “. . . each successful performance led only to the need for more.”

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A second basic predisposition rooted in Johnson’s early life was, Miss Kearns tells us, an acute dislike, even a fear, of conflict. This aversion developed out of Johnson’s need to mediate—at least within himself—the conflict between his “refined” mother who valued education, good manners, and sobriety, and his robust father, a sometime state legislator and uncertain provider whose “idea of pleasure was to sit up half the night with his friends, drinking beer, telling stories, and playing dominoes.” Again, personal conflict was reinforced by culture: a culture that associated femininity with intellectuality and “manners,” and masculinity with strength, activity, and a certain crudity. Johnson’s reaction to this earliest conflict set the pattern for life: avoid confrontation, compromise, refuse to choose—if necessary, withdraw. Anxiety in the face of direct, open conflict not only stimulated Johnson’s brilliant efforts to achieve consensus, it was present in the nearly unbearable anxiety occasioned by electoral contests. Miss Kearns tells us that fear of confrontation and of defeat led Johnson to prepare statements of withdrawal in three major elections: 1948, when he was first eleced to the Senate; 1964, when he was for the first time his party’s nominee for President; and 1968, when he startled the nation by announcing his intention to withdraw from the presidential contest. It was present as well in the illnesses which landed him in the hospital prior to three other elections, “his body asserting the desires that the mind was restraining.”

The unceasing search for approval in a conflicted environment left Johnson especially sensitive to interpersonal cues, and the resultant sensitivity and responsiveness to the needs of others became the basis of the famous Johnson “treatment” by which he disarmed opponents and won allies. It was also present in the “father/son” relations which Johnson cultivated with Carl Vinson, Franklin Roosevelt, Richard Russell, and other powerful seniors and from which he invariably profited. Johnson’s “apprenticeships” expressed an understanding of power as the ability to bind others to him by serving their interests. “I knew from the start,” Miss Kearns quotes him as saying, “all relations of power rest on one thing, a contract between a leader and the followers such that the followers believe it is in their interest to follow the leader.”

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Johnson’s understanding of power as a dimension of interpersonal relations, which rests on persuasion and mutual benefit, was ideally suited to the U.S. Congress, a self-governing institution of equals in which the influence of the leadership rests ultimately on the acquiescence of members. The diversity and low cohesion of legislative parties necessitated the building of coalitions on specific issues. And since opponents on one issue might become necessary allies on the next, it was important to limit conflict, minimize divisiveness, and eschew symbolic satisfactions. Lyndon Johnson’s proclivity for mediating conflict, avoiding confrontation, building consensus, and his distaste for the “politics of principle” were ideally suited to this style of politics and to this arena.

Yet precisely those qualities which made Johnson the outstanding modern Senate leader created dreadful problems for him as a President confronted with political polarization, confrontation politics, and personal attack. In her analytic appendix Miss Kearns suggests not only that the qualities needed for the legislature and the Presidency differ, but that a career in the legislative process may inculcate modes of behavior or strengthen qualities inconsistent with the nature of the presidential institution. Perhaps so—still, Johnson’s record of effectiveness during his first three or four years as President was an impressive one, which may only indicate that his particular executive leadership was better suited to periods of relative calm.

Miss Kearns’s picture of Johnson bears a striking (if unmentioned) resemblance to Harold Lasswell’s description of the political man: predisposed to value and to seek power, sensitized to the dimensions and outcomes of the use of power, possessing the skills needed to win power. In Psychopathology and Politics, Lasswell sketched a prototype of the political man, one who seeks power as compensation for a somewhat (but not too severely) damaged self-esteem, in the name of some conception of the public good. Like Lasswell’s political man, Johnson (as described by Miss Kearns and others) was “addicted” to politics—forever preoccupied with political questions, tactics, outcomes. But he was never power mad, and he was not guilty of seeking power for himself alone. Johnson’s frequent references to “his” boys, “his” planes, “his” people were expressions of the broad identifications desirable in democratic leaders. It was just these identifications that underlay Johnson’s comprehensive program of domestic reform.

Miss Kearns argues persuasively that the Great Society was a highly personal expression of Lyndon Johnson’s character and vision: expansive, inclusive, optimistic, a Johnson blend of populism, patriotism, and pragmatism. Business and labor, ghetto black and white worker, old and young, fine arts and Main Street—the Great Society would accommodate everyone, deprive no one, and move the country further toward the fulfillment of the American dream:

Medicare for the old, educational assistance for the young, tax rebates for business, a higher minimum wage for labor, subsidies for farmers, vocational training for the unskilled, food for the hungry, housing for the poor, clean highways for commuters, legal protection for the blacks, improved schooling for the Indians, rehabilitation for the lame, higher benefits for the unemployed, reduced quotas for the immigrants, auto safety for drivers, pensions for the retired, fair labeling for consumers, conservation for the . . . campers, and more and more and more.

Yet despite Johnson’s efforts to de-emphasize the war and keep the focus of attention on domestic reform, the growing burdens of escalation in Vietnam diverted resources from the Great Society. “I knew from the start,” Johnson told Miss Kearns, “that I was bound to be crucified either way I moved”:

If I left the woman I really loved—the Great Society—in order to get involved with that bitch of a war on the other side of the world then I would lose everything at home. All my programs, all my hopes to feed the hungry and shelter the homeless. All my dreams to provide education and medical care to the browns and the blacks and the lame and the poor. But if I left that war and let the Communists take over South Vietnam, then I would be seen as a coward and my nation would be seen as an appeaser and we would both find it impossible to accomplish anything for anybody anywhere on the entire globe.

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Did Johnson “cause” the Vietnam war? Did his personal characteristics shape his Vietnam policies? To this question, which has already provoked passionate answers from Johnson’s detractors and defenders, Miss Kearns brings a certain amount of new information about how Johnson himself perceived his situation and policies, a generally sympathetic assessment of the man, and a conviction that the Vietnam war was a disastrous mistake. First, she reminds us of what we already knew: that on assuming the Presidency Lyndon Johnson moved into a highly structured situation which offered few alternatives. Not only were there twenty thousand American military “advisers” already in Vietnam, but there was near unanimity concerning the appropriate definition of the problem—how could the United States deter Communist aggression against South Vietnam?—and its correct solution—by the measured application of force the U.S. would demonstate that aggression does not pay. Miss Kearns reminds us, too, that the consensus on Vietnam policy extended beyond Robert McNamara, McGeorge Bundy, Dean Rusk, and the other Kennedy holdovers to the leaders of both parties in both the legislative and executive branches.

The “lessons” of Munich convinced Johnson and his advisers that aggression must be met with force. And the “lessons” of the McCarthy period left Johnson permanently fearful of a jingoistic attack from the Right. Miss Kearns provides fascinating new documentation of Johnson’s persistent anxiety that a new McCarthy—perhaps in the form of his arch-enemy Robert Kennedy, who, after all, had a historical connection with the original McCarthy committee—would arise and challenge Johnson for lack of zeal in opposing Communism. The vision of a potentially potent challenge from the Right and the fact of an increasingly powerful challenge on the Left made it possible for Johnson to conceive his policy of measured escalation as a “middle course.” Determination to hew to this course of moderation and controlled escalation in turn led Johnson to soft-pedal the patriotic appeals and anti-Communist rhetoric needed to mobilize continuing popular support for the war. This strategy, however, which had psychological as well as strategic appeal for Johnson, neglected a crucial fact: that young men (and their families) cannot reasonably be expected to undertake ultimate risks for contingent goals. His restraint in conducting the war left Johnson without protection against the unrestrained attacks of the burgeoning peace movement.

Was it, then, Johnson’s war? Miss Kearns understands that character, belief, and environment each played a role in the decision to escalate. And Johnson, whose long political career gave little evidence of interest in foreign policy, little concern with ideology or with the Communist threat either internally or externally, came to identify himself and his Presidency with this war which proved both a personal and a political tragedy. Involved with an adversary who would not bargain, confronted by angry, often violent opponents at home, Johnson, the man who needed approval and who detested conflict, withdrew. It is a tribute to the coherence and persuasiveness of Miss Kearns’s account that Johnson’s withdrawal, which seemed so shocking in 1968, appears as a nearly inevitable response of the man to his circumstances.

She is less successful, though, in dealing with Johnson’s own explanation of his political difficulties. Johnson’s conviction that he was “sabotaged” by the media, the Eastern intellectual establishment, the Kennedyites, is dismissed by Miss Kearns as delusion, as part of a desperate effort to find a scapegoat, to feel exculpated and martyred: “. . . to believe oneself the target of a giant conspiracy was such a leap into unreason that it could only mean disintegration of Johnson’s thought, that the barriers separating irrational thought and delusion were crumbling.”

But were they? The notion that the networks, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the political jet-set have the power and the inclination to bring down Presidents, and the belief that these groups share some distinctive perspectives on Communism and anti-Communism, patriotism and national security—these ideas are too widely shared to be dismissed simply as delusional thinking. Johnson’s successor held precisely the same view concerning those who were after him. And this was no folie à deux, affecting only incumbents of the White House. The same groups figure prominently among the “bad guys” in the political cosmos of George Wallace, Spiro Agnew, William Rusher, Kevin Phillips, and Patrick Buchanan.

Johnson was convinced that “they’ll get me anyhow, no matter how hard I try.” To Miss Kearns all this is absurd. She believes that Johnson, usually so astute in his judgments concerning people and power, was led into error by ego-defensive needs. She therefore takes little note that the opponents of whom Johnson spoke did, in fact, play a major role in his political destruction.

Miss Kearns also shows a certain weakness for clichés unsupported by evidence (“the American people were anxious for a renewal of belief”), and an occasional failure of imagination (“ft is difficult to understand how anyone could have rationally believed that [Robert] Kennedy might be a crusading hawk”) or information (French failures in Indochina did not nearly bring down the Fourth Republic). In her strictures on Johnson’s parochialism, furthermore, Miss Kearns herself succumbs to a fashionable brand of “cosmopolitan parochialism.” (the phrase is Irving Kristol’s). Was it really so naive of Johnson to believe that “there were no foreign cultures, only different ways of pursuing universal desires?” Many students of culture believe that a limited number of basic human desires and needs recur among the most diverse peoples, and the notion of universality in art and religion is based on just such an assumption.

Finally, it was not then and is not now nearly so clear as Miss Kearns believes that “the Vietnamese people were interested in unanimity, not pluralism,” that they placed no value on the freedom of individuals or families, that they had no desire for private property. Like the two million refugees who streamed into South Vietnam after Ho’s seizure of power, the hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese who fought to the end and the tens of thousands currently undergoing “reeducation” in forced-labor camps provide good grounds for doubting that Vietnamese Communism is simply a modern expression of traditional communal habits and longings. There are obvious pitfalls in projecting American or Western values and goals onto other peoples, and it may be, as Miss Kearns argues, that Johnson and his advisers were guilty of an arrogant and uninformed parochialism. But there are also dangers—to which many are currently less sensitive—in supposing that the citizens of dictatorship prefer to live without individual freedoms and personal security. Miss Kearns walks boldly into the erroneous assumption that the Communist success in the South indicates the compatibility of Communism with traditional Vietnamese culture. Tin’s position bears a dismaying resemblance to some odious philosophies from our own traditional culture: that whatever is should be; that might makes right; that “lesser breeds without the law” do not desire the legal protections we routinely claim for ourselves.

These criticisms aside, however, Miss Kearns has written an interesting and useful book, one which contains fascinating information on how Lyndon Johnson saw himself. Is the portrait accurate? Some Johnson associates say no, and assert that Doris Kearns was merely the last person to receive the famous Johnson “treatment.” They suggest that the dreams reported in the book were never dreamed but are stories composed by Johnson to interest a psychoanalytically-oriented Harvard intellectual. Miss Kearns, these critics argue, has swallowed and regurgitated Lyndon Johnson’s preferred self-image. It is, of course, impossible to determine what Johnson did or did not dream, but the fascinating dreams which express a lifelong fear of paralysis (powerlessness) are not only consistent with what is known of Johnson’s character, they are products of his mind—awake or asleep—and so are relevant to understanding him.

Miss Kearns’s book is not the definitive biography of Johnson—she made little use of the accounts of others concerning their association with Johnson, or of available contextual materials—but she has illuminated the “fit” among Johnson, the institutions in which he served, and the policies he authored. Her book should be appreciated by all but the most determined opponents of psychobiography.

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