Reaching for Glory: Lyndon Johnson's Secret White House Tapes 1964-65

by Michael R. Beschloss (Editor), Lyndon B. Johnson

An indispensable window onto one of the most legendary figures of American politics and his tumultuous, controversial years in power, "Reaching For Glory" and its recordings provides an intimate look at a pivotal American presidency--in Lyndon Johnson's words, history "with the bark off."

Genres: History, Politics, Biography, American History, Nonfiction, Presidents, Audiobook

475 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2001

About the author

Michael Beschloss is the author of nine books on presidential history, including, most recently, the New York Times bestsellers Presidential Courage and The Conquerors, as well as two volumes on Lyndon Johnson’s White House tapes. He was also editor of the number-one global bestseller Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life with John F. Kennedy. He is the NBC News Presidential Historian and a PBS NewsHour contributor and has received an Emmy and six honorary degrees.

Reviews

[Lobstergirl · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the second of three volumes in which Michael Beschloss edited and transcribed LBJ's secret White House tapes. It covers 1964-65 and deals with domestic policy - Johnson's concerns about getting his Great Society agenda through Congress, his wariness of Bobby Kennedy and Kennedy's allies within his administration, conversations with politicians, MLK Jr. and the like, and with his advisers; and with foreign policy, almost entirely Vietnam (the war was slowly but surely ramping up) and a crisis in the Dominican Republic. Beschloss's criteria for selecting a conversation to include was whether it added anything of historical importance to our knowledge of LBJ, or showed us an unseen facet of the president or those close to him.

There's an entire chapter on the Walter Jenkins sex scandal. Jenkins was perhaps LBJ's closest aide, a Catholic, married with six children, and had been caught giving oral sex to a YMCA employee in a basement bathroom of the D.C. YMCA. It happened in 1964, and LBJ was terrified that it would affect his election prospects. It didn't; a privately conducted poll showed that most Americans didn't care. LBJ fussed and fretted on numerous phone conversations as Jenkins "convalesced" in a hospital, the public reason given as nervous exhaustion, before resigning. Jenkins' wife was furious and maintained it was completely out of character for her husband and that he had been entrapped, although it turned out he had a previous arrest for precisely the same thing, in precisely the same location. What was pleasant about the story was how LBJ vowed that when he got out of office he was going to give a big hug to Jenkins, and how Lady Bird felt terrible for the family and vowed to give Jenkins some kind of accounting position managing the Johnsons' personal accounts. And evangelist Billy Graham, presumably not knowing he was being recorded, was full of compassion: "You know, when Jesus dealt with people with moral problems, like dear Walter had - and I was telling Bill I wanted to send my love and sympathy to him...he always dealt tenderly. Always....I know the weaknesses of men, and the Bible says we're all sinners...and I just hope if you have any contact with him, you'll just give him my love and understanding."

There's his touching friendship with former president Harry Truman, going back 30 years, and the two men's obvious fondness for each other. LBJ also respected Dwight Eisenhower, the former Republican president, and sought advice from him.

Of course, there's the creepy command to the newly widowed Jackie Kennedy: "Give Caroline and John-John a hug for me....Tell them I'd like to be their daddy!" (Jackie's response: "I will.")

But mostly I ended up liking Johnson more after reading these conversations. With the caveat that he knew he was being recorded, and had the option to leave any unflattering things unsaid or said before or after the recording button was pushed. Here he is wanting to give a job to Patricia Roberts Harris, a black law professor at Howard University: "Why don't we make her Ambassador to Luxembourg?....These women - I want to move them up. Women and Nigroes." [Beschloss varies the spelling between Negroes and Nigroes depending on Johnson's pronunciation.] Dean Rusk: "...If she were our deputy legal adviser, she'd do a lot more work and be more help to us than...as Ambassador to Luxembourg." LBJ: "Yes, but it wouldn't have the honor and the standing and the status and the glory that all the Nigroes want - and the women....I don't want to send her to Jamaica, but I want to send her to some Scandinavian country or Luxembourg, or something like that." (She did go to Luxembourg as America's first black woman Ambassador.)

LBJ wanted to appoint African Americans to high positions in his administration. He called Thurgood Marshall (at that time an Appeals Court judge) and said, "I want you to be my Solicitor General." "Wow!" said Marshall. LBJ continued, "I want you to do it for two or three reasons. One, I want the top lawyer...representing me before the Supreme Court to be a Negro, and to be a damn good lawyer that's done it before...Number two, I think it will do a lot for our image abroad and at home...Number three, I want you to...be in the picture...I don't want to make any other commitments. I don't want to imply or bribe or mislead you, but I want you to have the training and experience of being there [at the Supreme Court] day after day.....I want to do this job that Lincoln started, and I want to do it the right way....I want to be the first President that really goes all the way." And of course LBJ did appoint Marshall to the Supreme Court a year after this conversation, in 1966, after Marshall had gained the Solicitor General experience. It's nice to see LBJ telling Marshall that he's doing this because he values Marshall's expertise, and for image reasons. Marshall would know this anyway, but the honesty is appealing.

Finally, Beschloss includes some tapes LBJ had made in recording thoughts for his memoir. Here he is on JFK: "Kennedy was pathetic as a Congressman and as a Senator. He didn't know how to address the chair." [Speak on the Senate floor.]

On Bobby Kennedy: "I thought I was dealing with a child. I never did understand Bobby. I never did understand how the press built him into the great figure that he was." As JFK's vice president, LBJ would sometimes get "elbowed out" by Bobby. "[JFK] asked me to do things, I'm sure, Bobby didn't approve...On civil rights, I recommended to the President that no savings and loan association...could continue if they did not make loans for open housing. Bobby called and said, "What are you trying to do? Defeat the President?" "

On the Secret Service: "Not all the Secret Service are sharp. It's always worried me that they weren't. They are the most dedicated and among the most courageous men we've got. But they don't always match that in brains. But the problem is, you pay a man four or five hundred dollars a month and you get just what you pay for." (LBJ exempted his own agent, Rufus Youngblood, from this description; he found Youngblood tougher and more intelligent than the others. It was he who had prostrated himself over LBJ at the moment of JFK's assassination.)

On bigots: "The greatest bigots in the world are the Democrats on the East Side of New York."

Errata: in the cast of characters at the end of the book, Bill Moyers' birth year is given as 1919. Of course, it was 1934.

[Neil Pierson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Be careful what you wish for. You might get it. Lyndon Johnson wanted to become President of the United States. But he was never comfortable or happy once he got there. In retrospect, it's no surprise at all that he didn't run for a second term.

As Senate Majority Leader, he was a master at moving legislation in a body where accountability was always shared by at least 49 others. But there's only one president at a time. Throughout his term, Johnson sought the comfort of numbers, but for presidents, there is no such thing.

He was a man of huge, unresolved and painful contradictions: Forceful to the point of brutality in getting his way, yet wounded by every word of criticism from any corner. A southerner through and through, yet sincerely and completely committed to the end of segregation and to civil rights. The list goes on and on.

If you want to know how we got entangled in Vietnam, you don't have to read some 1200 page tome. Just listen to Johnson's tape recorded phone calls as he agonizes over every step deeper into the Big Muddy. He inherited the U.S. commitment to Vietnam, but he knew we would not win a war there. His choice was to either be the president who pursued a hopeless war, sending thousands of young Americans to die in Asia; or to be the president who broke U.S. treaties, retreated from aggression, and lost Indochina to the Communists.

Faced with that choice, he relied on magical thinking, liberally laced with paranoia. He tried to convince himself and us that if we made things difficult enough for the North Vietnamese, they would stop meddling in the affairs of their southern neighbor. The trouble was, North Vietnam never saw the south as a "neighbor." It was all one country, and the meddlers were the U.S.

It leaves you wondering what would have happened if he had taken the advice of one elderly senator during the merry-go-round of U.S. puppet governments in Saigon: Install a government that would ask us to go home.

The first book of taped transcripts, Taking Charge, is also excellent.

[Brett C · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a great follow-up to the first volume. I've read numerous books about LBJ, and I think I could engage in a competent exchange. But these two books added for me another dimension to LBJ with emotion, power, influence, and opinionated thoughts. These transcriptions provided more insight into the times and his dealings as a president. This volume took off after the Tonkin Resolution from the first book and went into 1965. I have read other reviewers and seen where they've mentioned a third volume in the works.

These are worth the read or the listen. I found both books on Google books as an audiobook as well as Amazon. If I engage in these again, most likely, I will listen to these. Highly recommended for those interested in American politics of the times and the LBJ administration. Thanks!

[Terry · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reaching for Glory is Lyndon Johnson's taped telephone conversations during 1964 and 1965 -- momentous years that included Medicare and civil rights legislation, escalation of the war in Vietnam, the invasion of the Dominican Republic and much more. And this proved a lot more interesting that you might think. You really gain insight on Johnson's methods -- rhetorically, at least -- and how deeply committed he was to Medicare and the civil rights bills (even knowing he was alienating his own Southern constituency) and how he agonized over Vietnam. He was terrified of going down in history as the president who lost a war -- or who lost the Dominican Republic to Castro. It's easy to forget now just how threatening communism was in the 1960s--and how little room for maneuver politicians had in foreign policy. Conversations about the Walter Jenkins scandal (top level presidential aide caught having sex with a man at the DC YMCA) are a reminder of how homosexuality was viewed in that era. Also revelatory was how obsequious and deferential Johnson's top advisers and cabinet secretaries were--clearly unwilling to disagree with the boss even when they knew better. I was among the anti-Johnson, anti-war throngs of the era and rejoiced when he declined to run for re-election in 1968 (we got Nixon instead!) but Reaching for Glory reminded me of the good that he did (Medicare, civil rights) and made me more sympathetic and understanding of his foreign policy decisions.

[Sgilbert · Rating 4 out of 5]

I actually listened to this book and highly recommend to go that route. LBJ taped all of his conversations which were the major parts of the book, along with Lady Bird's dictated diary. He was quite the reluctant leader in many ways, but one who most definitely expected people to do whatever he said. And his treatment and view of women... not the greatest. He viewed himself as a big civil rights supporter but his choice of language and use of inappropriate words did not match his self-image. Now I will have to listen to/read the other books in this series.

[Dave Gaston · Rating 5 out of 5]

An awesome set of audio books. Beshloss does all the setup and color commentary between the actual taped recordings of President Johnson. Johnson had all his phones taped, the oval office, his private lines, the coffee table, the situation room. Beshloss screens the previously sealed archived collection and hand picks critical and sometimes comical sound-bites from throughout Johnson’s ruckus first presidency. It is just an astounding effort. We’ll never again have taped access to the intimate running of the White House as we do in this collection (thanks to the Nixon Tape snafu). Lady Bird is there in full glory, Martin Luther King and the Southern black movement. Jacq, Jack and Ted Kennedy jockey for position in the wake of John’s death. Mac’s Vietnam is contemplated, launched and promptly mismanaged. The list goes on and on. It will change your vantage of Johnson to the positive. Powerful stuff.

[Tommy Kiedis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reaching For Glory by Michael Beschloss is "required reading" (listen to the audio version for an extra bonus as it includes LBJ's own voice) for those who want to better understand the enigmatic life that is Lyndon Johnson. Covering the years 1964-1965, Beschloss gives us the unvarnished and "uninterpreted" voice of Johnson, Lady Bird, and many of his associates. I especially appreciated the Editor's Note (some of Beschloss research methodology), the Cast of Characters (listing key players of the time), and the Appendix (some of Johnon's "ramblings" from 1969 as he reflected on his time in the Oval Office. Unfortunately, the Audible version is abridged only so one who would follow both the written and audible versions will have their work cut out for them. That said, it was worth all the time to follow both, which I did.

[Tom Schulte · Rating 3 out of 5]

The author frames the tape excerpts with very little commentary, which I like because the reader can draw their own conclusions from LBJ's words. The LBJ I saw was an imprerfect, conflicted man with the office thrust upon him trying to find a way forward for civil rights and a way out of Vietnam but without the gifts to do either gracefully.

[Ray LaManna · Rating 5 out of 5]

The work of democratic government has always been viewed as messy...and this excellent audiobook of actual tapes of conversations of Pres. Johnson really brings this idea home. Listen to the tapes, don't read the book.

[Patrick Barry · Rating 4 out of 5]

Transcripts from the Johnson White House with commentary by the author. Good stuff for the history buff!

[zoloftprincessdiaries6-9 · Rating 3 out of 5]

Skimmed through to mainly read the transcripts clearly

[Tom Morgan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting overall. Some of the transcripts were less than vital. Now that the internet has given everyone a voice and a huge megaphone to broadcast it, it's nice to hear the actual motivations behind how and why things are done at the highest levels. While I may not agree with the thinking or like the mores of the times it is compelling to read about.

[Frederick Bingham · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book contains transcripts of tapes recorded by Lyndon Johnson during the years 1964-1965. The subject matter is interesting enough, but presented with far more detail than I wanted to plow through.

[Scott Butki · Rating 3 out of 5]

fascinating perspective of LBJ's years as president directly from his tapes

[Michele · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some very telling recordings in here.

[Jennifer · Rating 3 out of 5]

A great historical primary source but not the best pleasure read.

[Karen]

After all this scandal with Trump and the firing of Comey, this book is should be a fun read especially because if you buy the audio book, you get the Johnson White House tape recordings as currate and narrated by Michel Beschloss. Highly recommended.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ex71I...