Close aide Richard Goodwin on Lyndon Johnson:
Here is a MUST READ article on Lyndon Johnson by his aide Richard Goodwin: President Lyndon Johnson: The War Within. Lyndon Johnson a scheming paranoid, a severely mentally ill man, who would PROJECT his own evil intentions/tactics/methods onto others. In common parlance, that would be a "whackjob" or a "mad man." And Johnson's mental illness, delusions, paranoia (and fear of being discovered as ONE of the murderers of JFK) escalated as he became president and cracked under the pressures of the job that he had maniacally pursued his whole life. Sen. Richard Russell would say he Lyndon Johnson would break down into uncontrollable crying whenever he would visit him in the White House.
Richard Goodwin, who, along with Bill Moyers, consulted doctors on LBJ's mental instabilies, concludes: "All three doctors offered essentially the same opinion: that Johnson's behavior - if the layman's descriptions we provided were accurate -seemed to correspond to a textbook case of paranoid disintegration, the eruption of long-suppressed irrationalities. The disintegration could continue, remain constant, or recede, depending on the strength of Johnson's resistance, and, more significantly, on the direction of those external events - the war, the crumbling public support -the pressures from which were dissolving Johnson's confidence in his ability to control events."
http://www.nytimes.c...&pagewanted=all
"Around midsummer 1965, about the time the decision was made to increase by more than 100,000 the number of American troops in Vietnam - a decision that transformed Vietnam into an American war - I became convinced that President Johnson's always large eccentricities had taken a huge leap into unreason. Not on every subject, and certainly not all the time: it was during this same period that Johnson was skillfully crafting some of the greatest triumphs of his Great Society.
But there is no question that the President's conduct during 1965 was, on occasion, markedly, almost frighteningly different from anything I had observed previously. My conclusion is that President Johnson experienced certain episodes of what I believe to have been paranoid behavior. I do not use this term to describe a medical diagnosis. I am not L.B.J.'s psychiatrist, nor am I qualified to be. I base my judgment purely on my observation of his conduct during the little more than two years I worked for him. And this was not my conclusion alone. It was shared by others who also had close and frequent contact with President Johnson." ...
"The following day, I noted in my diary: ''Hugh Sidey came to see me. He said there was an increasing worry about the President around town. A fear that his personal eccentricities were now affecting policy. For example, he told me that in responding to criticism over the Ayub and Shastri affair, Johnson had said to reporters, 'After all, what would Jim Eastland [ the conservative Senator from Mississippi ] say if I brought those two niggers over here.' ''We agreed that it was such a stupid remark for L.B.J. to say - knowing that if it ever made its way into public print, he would be severely damaged - that he had to be a little out of control to say it at all.'' ...
Late that spring, alarmed at what I perceived to be the President's increasingly irrational behavior, I began to study medical textbooks. I learned that the paranoid personality may pass relatively undisturbed through a long and productive lifetime, manifesting itself only in subtle traits of behavior: a somewhat excessive secrecy and suspicion, a need for control over the external world. Because particular displays of these traits nearly all have some basis in reality - there are real adversaries, real reasons for an ambitious man to seek control over people and events - they are ordinarily perceived more as personal eccentricity than as a failure of reason or a distortion of reality. To the gifted few they may even be a source of strength, increasing their ability to achieve mastery over that always treacherous world they inhabit.
Yet if control is threatened, mastery undermined, enemies increasing in number and moving beyond reach, the mental apparatus so carefully constructed to transform potential weakness into external strength can begin to falter. The latent paranoia, liberated by the erosive pressures of misfortune and sensed helplessness, can take occasional control of the conscious mind, thereby transforming the most highly developed faculties into instruments of willed belief, even delusion.
Something like this began to happen to Lyndon Johnson during 1965, when he found himself - for almost the first time - surrounded by men and events he could not control: Vietnam and the Kennedys, and, later, the press, Congress, and even the public, whose approval was essential to his own esteem. As his defenses weakened, long-suppressed instincts broke through to assault the carefully developed skills and judgment of a lifetime.
"It was during this period, in the spring of 1965, that I first noticed Johnson's public mask begin to stiffen. In his public appearances, the face seemed frozen, the once-gesturing arms held tightly to the side or fixed to a podium. Protective devices proliferated - Teleprompters, a special Presidential rostrum that traveled with him, even the careful excision of colorful or original language -all, I now believe, designed at least in part to guard him from spontaneously voicing inner convictions that he knew, in that part of his mind still firmly in touch with reality, would, if voiced, discredit him. ''You know, Dick,'' Johnson once told me. ''I never really dare let myself go because I don't know where I'll stop.'' "
I accompanied Moyers back to his office. ''We were both shaken, alarmed,'' I noted in my diary, ''not so much at the content of Johnson's statements - surely he didn't mean to halt all discussions with the Soviet Union or pull out of the United Nations - but at the disjointed, erratic flow of thought, unrelated events strung together, yet seemingly linked by some incomprehensible web of connections within Johnson's mind. He won't act on his words, but he believes they're true.''
On June 28, I recorded in my diary that Johnson had ''asked me and Bill if we thought Tom Wicker [ of The New York Times ] was out to destroy him, if Wicker was caught up in some sort of conspiracy against him. We said no, that he writes some favorable and some unfavorable stories, but we couldn't convince him. . . .''
President Lyndon Johnson: The War Within
By Richard N. Goodwin; Richard N. Goodwin was assistant special counsel to President John F. Kennedy from 1961 to 1962, and special assistant to President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964 and 1965. This article is adapted from his latest book, ''Remembering America: A Voice From the Sixties,'' to be published by Little, Brown next month.
Published: August 21, 1988
But the foreign-policy pundits did not swallow Johnson's explanation. We had, they wrote, deliberately offended two of Asia's most important leaders because they did not approve our bombing of North Vietnam. A week later I sat beside Johnson as Air Force One carried us from the Texas ranch to the White House. Suddenly, Johnson leaned over to me, looked around, and, speaking in tense, almost whispered tones, as if he were confiding the highest secrets of state, said, ''Listen, Dick, do you know why there was so much trouble about Ayub and Shastri?'' ''No, Mr. President,'' I replied. ''Well, you ought to know about it, so you can keep on the alert. I had it investigated. Do you know there are some disloyal Kennedy people over at the State Department who are trying to get me; that's why they stirred things up?'' ''I didn't know that,'' I answered. ''Well, there are, and we can expect to hear from them again. They didn't get me this time, but they'll keep trying.'' In my diary entry of that date I noted that ''the President spoke in an intense low-keyed manner, characteristic of his most irrational moments.''
''I don't want telegrams like that,'' he said, almost shouting, then he picked up the phone. ''Get me Rusk. . . . Listen, Mr. Secretary,'' he began, softly sardonic, ''you know those telegrams about Humphrey?'' We couldn't hear Secretary of State Dean Rusk's reply, but listened as the President suddenly raised his voice: ''If they send me any more telegrams like that, I want you to call them back. Fire the bunch of them. I don't want any more telegrams like that.''
The President replaced the handset and turned toward Moyers. ''You know what it is, Bill, don't you, it's those damn Kennedy ambassadors trying to get me and discredit me.''
IT WAS NOT SURPRISING THAT THE ''Kennedy crowd'' should be the prelude to that swarming mob of ''enemies and conspirators'' that began to infect Johnson's mind. Not only had he felt humiliated - and with some cause -during Kennedy's Presidency, but the enduring shadow of Camelot -glamorous, popular, intellectual Camelot, enshrined in steadily growing myth - seemed to him to obscure the achievements of his own Presidency, preventing others from seeing how much more he was accomplishing than his predecessor.
Johnson once explained why Fulbright and ''all those liberals on the Hill'' were squawking at him about Vietnam. ''Why? I'll tell you why. Because I never went to Harvard. That's why. Because I wasn't John F. Kennedy. Because the Great Society was accomplishing more than the New Frontier. You see, they had to find some issue on which to turn against me, and they found it in Vietnam.''
For Johnson, the omnipresent ghost of that past was reincarnated in the person of Robert F. Kennedy and his followers. But understandable hostility would soon be displaced by the more ominous conviction that Robert Kennedy was not just an enemy, but the leader of all Johnson's enemies, the guiding spirit of some immense conspiracy designed to discredit and, ultimately, to overthrow the Johnson Presidency.
''Why does he keep worrying about me?'' Robert Kennedy once asked me. ''I don't like him, but there's nothing I can do to him. Hell, he's the President, and I'm only a junior Senator.''
''That's right, that's the reality,'' I replied. ''But we're not talking about reality. In Johnson's mind you're the threat. If he had to choose between you and Ho Chi Minh'' (to be his successor in office), ''he'd pick Ho in a minute.''
In May 1965, I drafted a speech that Johnson was scheduled to deliver in San Francisco on the anniversary of the United Nations Charter. Not limited to the standard plea for increased peace and understanding among the nations, it contained several tangible and far-reaching proposals for the control of nuclear arms. Johnson was delighted with the draft, approved it, and ordered that it be prepared for delivery. Then, shortly before the President was scheduled to go to San Francisco, Robert Kennedy addressed the Senate, calling for progress toward nuclear disarmament. The Kennedy speech received little public attention. But it infuriated Johnson.
''I want you to take out anything about the atom in that speech,'' he said. ''I don't want one word in there that looks like I'm copying Bobby Kennedy.''
''But, Mr. President,'' I protested, ''the Kennedy speech is very different from yours, and it's only his opinion. These are formal proposals from the President of the United States. The entire world will be listening.''
It was as if I hadn't spoken. Johnson picked up a newspaper. ''Here's Reston's column on Kennedy's speech. You make sure we don't say anything that he says Bobby said. I'm not going to do it.'' Thus all the arms-control proposals were excised, the American initiatives were canceled simply because Bobby Kennedy had made a speech.
Late that spring, alarmed at what I perceived to be the President's increasingly irrational behavior, I began to study medical textbooks. I learned that the paranoid personality may pass relatively undisturbed through a long and productive lifetime, manifesting itself only in subtle traits of behavior: a somewhat excessive secrecy and suspicion, a need for control over the external world. Because particular displays of these traits nearly all have some basis in reality - there are real adversaries, real reasons for an ambitious man to seek control over people and events - they are ordinarily perceived more as personal eccentricity than as a failure of reason or a distortion of reality. To the gifted few they may even be a source of strength, increasing their ability to achieve mastery over that always treacherous world they inhabit.
Yet if control is threatened, mastery undermined, enemies increasing in number and moving beyond reach, the mental apparatus so carefully constructed to transform potential weakness into external strength can begin to falter. The latent paranoia, liberated by the erosive pressures of misfortune and sensed helplessness, can take occasional control of the conscious mind, thereby transforming the most highly developed faculties into instruments of willed belief, even delusion.
Something like this began to happen to Lyndon Johnson during 1965, when he found himself - for almost the first time - surrounded by men and events he could not control: Vietnam and the Kennedys, and, later, the press, Congress, and even the public, whose approval was essential to his own esteem. As his defenses weakened, long-suppressed instincts broke through to assault the carefully developed skills and judgment of a lifetime.
It was during this period, in the spring of 1965, that I first noticed Johnson's public mask begin to stiffen. In his public appearances, the face seemed frozen, the once-gesturing arms held tightly to the side or fixed to a podium. Protective devices proliferated - Teleprompters, a special Presidential rostrum that traveled with him, even the careful excision of colorful or original language -all, I now believe, designed at least in part to guard him from spontaneously voicing inner convictions that he knew, in that part of his mind still firmly in touch with reality, would, if voiced, discredit him. ''You know, Dick,'' Johnson once told me. ''I never really dare let myself go because I don't know where I'll stop.''
In mid-June, Moyers entered the Oval Office to find Johnson holding a wire-service report torn from the teletype machine that stood close to the desk. The President said: ''Did you see this? Bundy'' - McGeorge Bundy, the national security adviser - ''is going on television -on national television - with five professors. I never gave him permission. That's an act of disloyalty. He didn't tell me because he knew I didn't want him to do it. Bill, I want you to go to Bundy and tell him the President would be pleased, mighty pleased, to accept his resignation.'' Johnson paused. ''On second thought, maybe I should talk to him myself. . . . No, you go do it.'' Then, as if responding to some sensed hesitation on Moyers's part: ''That's the trouble with all you fellows. You're in bed with the Kennedys.''
Moyers wisely ignored the President's order, and left the White House to go home. ''At midnight,'' I noted in my diary, ''Moyers called me to talk about Johnson. He said he was extremely worried, that as he listened to Johnson he felt weird, almost felt as if he wasn't really talking to a human being at all.''
The next morning when Moyers entered the Oval Office, Johnson looked up at him. ''Did you speak to Bundy?'' ''No, I didn't, Mr. President,'' Bill replied. Johnson grunted, and returned to the memorandum he had begun reading. Bundy was to last another year.
A week later, Moyers and I were talking with Johnson in the Oval Office when, provoked by nothing more than my comment that his education bill had virtually complete support from liberal organizations, Johnson proclaimed: ''I am not going to have anything more to do with the liberals. They won't have anything to do with me. They all just follow the Communist line - liberals, intellectuals, Communists. They're all the same. I detest the United Nations. They've tried to make a fool out of me. They oppose me.
''And I won't make any overtures to the Russians. They'll have to come to me. In Paris, Gagarin'' - Yuri Gagarin, the Soviet cosmonaut - ''refused to shake hands with the astronauts. I sent those astronauts myself, and what he did was a personal insult to me.'' (In fact, Gagarin did shake hands, but later declined to meet with American officials, which Johnson persisted in inflating into a personal affront.) ''I can't trust anybody anymore. I tell you what I'm going to do. I'm going to get rid of everybody who doesn't agree with my policies. I'll take a tough line - put Abe Fortas or Clark Clifford in the Bundy job. I'm not going in the liberal direction. There's no future with them. They're just out to get me, always have been.''
I accompanied Moyers back to his office. ''We were both shaken, alarmed,'' I noted in my diary, ''not so much at the content of Johnson's statements - surely he didn't mean to halt all discussions with the Soviet Union or pull out of the United Nations - but at the disjointed, erratic flow of thought, unrelated events strung together, yet seemingly linked by some incomprehensible web of connections within Johnson's mind. He won't act on his words, but he believes they're true.''
On June 28, I recorded in my diary that Johnson had ''asked me and Bill if we thought Tom Wicker [ of The New York Times ] was out to destroy him, if Wicker was caught up in some sort of conspiracy against him. We said no, that he writes some favorable and some unfavorable stories, but we couldn't convince him. . . .''
GRADUALLY, AS Johnson moved closer and closer to the crucial decision of July 28 -when he would raise the number of American troops in Vietnam by more than 100,000 - circumstances began to overwhelm him, elude his grasp. The decision to transform the war, which he knew was potentially fatal to his public ambitions, could no longer be evaded or postponed. Increasing opposition from the press and critics on the Hill could no longer be controlled by his hitherto almost irresistible power of persuasion. The somewhat frightening, always puzzling outbursts became more frequent.
No longer satisfied with impugning the motives of his critics (''That Fulbright,'' he told me after Senator J. William Fulbright had joined the ranks of dissent, ''he never was satisfied with any President that wouldn't make him Secretary of State''), or attributing his difficulties to ''those Kennedys'' or ''those Harvards,'' Johnson began to hint privately that he was the target of a gigantic Communist conspiracy in which his domestic adversaries were only players - not conscious participants, perhaps, but unwitting dupes.
Sitting in the Oval Office on July 5, Johnson interrupted our conversation on domestic matters: ''You know, Dick, the Communists are taking over the country. Look here,'' and he lifted a manila folder from his desk. ''It's Teddy White's F.B.I. file. He's a Communist sympathizer.''
A few days before, I had been sitting in Bill Moyers's office, when Bill walked in, visibly shaken, his face pale. ''I just came from a conversation with the President,'' he said. ''He told me he was going to fire everybody who didn't agree with him, that Hubert [ Humphrey ] could not be trusted and we weren't to tell him anything; then he began to explain that the Communist way of thinking had infected everyone around him, that his enemies were deceiving the people and, if they succeeded, there was no way he could stop World War III.''
''Suppose he really does go crazy,'' I said. And then, answering my own question: ''I tell you what would happen if we went public with our doubts. They could assemble a panel of psychiatrists to examine the President, and he would tell them how sad it made him that two boys he loved so much could have thought such a thing, and then explain his behavior so calmly and reasonably that when he was finished, we would be the ones committed.''
Shortly thereafter, I talked with a psychiatrist who was also a close personal friend. After he agreed to treat our conversation as privileged, I described the President's behavior in detail as I had observed it. At the time, I did not even inform Moyers of this step; nor did he tell me, until years later, that he had independently followed the same course, speaking with two different psychiatrists.
"All three doctors offered essentially the same opinion: that Johnson's behavior - if the layman's descriptions we provided were accurate -seemed to correspond to a textbook case of paranoid disintegration, the eruption of long-suppressed irrationalities. The disintegration could continue, remain constant, or recede, depending on the strength of Johnson's resistance, and, more significantly, on the direction of those external events - the war, the crumbling public support -the pressures from which were dissolving Johnson's confidence in his ability to control events."
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George Reedy, who worked closely with Lyndon Johnson from 1951-1965, calls LBJ a “bully, a sadist, a lout, and egoist” in his book
“Deeply disturbed” does not adequately describe Lyndon Johnson … pathological xxxx, master manipulator, clever sociopath, and serial killer along the lines of a John Wayne Gacy or Ted Bundy (charming … then you are dead)
George Reedy, former press secretary for Lyndon Johnson: http://www.absolutea...cs/George_Reedy
George Reedy on Lyndon Johnson:
• "He may have been a son of a bitch, but he was a colossal son of a bitch."
• "Not only did Johnson get somewhat separated from reality, he had a fantastic faculty for disorienting everybody around him as to what reality was."
• "What was it that would send him into those fantastic rages where he could be one of the nastiest, most insufferable, sadistic SOBs that ever lived and a few minutes later really be a big, magnificent and inspiring leader?"
In his book, Lyndon B. Johnson: A Memoir by George Reedy… Reedy is quoted on his book flap as calling LBJ “a bully, a sadist, lout, and egoist.” He describes LBJ as “magnificent, inspiring leader; the other that of an insufferable bastard.”
Edited by Robert Morrow
