Find Reaching For Glory: Lyndon Johnsons Secret White House Tapes 1964-65 Compiled By Michael R. Beschloss Shown In Document

very telling recordings in here, Reaching for Glory is Lyndon Johnson's taped telephone conversations duringandmomentous 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 thesand 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 wereclearly unwilling to disagree with the boss even when they knew better.
I was among the antiJohnson, antiwar throngs of the era and rejoiced when he declined to run for reelection inwe 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.
This book contains transcripts of tapes recorded by Lyndon Johnson during the years, The subject matter is interesting enough, but presented with far more detail than I wanted to plow through, 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, 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, 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 selfimage.
Now I will have to listen to/read the other books in this series,
This is the second of three volumes in which Michael Beschloss edited and transcribed LBJ's secret White House tapes, It coversand 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, 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 backyears, 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 JohnJohn 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, 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, Of course, it was. .