The Best and the Brightest: Kennedy-Johnson Administrations (Modern Library)

by David Halberstam

So the first time Greene spoke up, it was on the subject of Vietnam. Johnson did not like what he was saying; Greene was very hawkish and said he thought too little force was being used, and Johnson began interrupting him: “Speak up! Speak up! I can’t hear what you’re saying. Speak up!” Greene waited deliberately; then he looked up at Johnson and said in his carefully controlled voice, “You can hear what I’m saying and so can everyone else in this room,” and calmly continued to speak. Greene noticed that from then on, whenever he appeared at the White House, Johnson seemed to solicit his advice and opinion, and marked him down for a bully, though of course not many men would enter the National Security Council with the same sense of confidence in himself as the Commandant of the Marine Corps. (General Greene was not the only person who sensed this; Gene McCarthy in 1967 told friends that he thought Johnson was a bully, and that if the early primaries were not good, he would come apart rather than fight back.)