Between You and Me Read Online Free Page A

hasty, he stopped the car again and let Don back in.
    On reflection, the candy-wrapper incident shouldn’t have surprised us that much, for throughout his long career in Washington, Lyndon Johnson had a well-earned reputation for being almost compulsive in his need to exert authority and dominate all who came into his presence. While it was true that he was no longer the political force he’d been during his years in power, he continued to rule his own turf. At the LBJ ranch, he was still the commander in chief.
    Back in 1964, when LBJ was in the exuberant early days of his presidency, reporters covering him wrote and broadcast vivid accounts about his harrowing high-speed rides around the ranch. On at least one of those occasions, Johnson drove with just one hand on the wheel, while in the other one, he clutched a beer can from which he heartily guzzled. Once a can was empty, he invariably flung it out the window. In writing about that, some reporters observed that the president’s behavior was hardly in keeping with the campaign the First Lady had recently adopted as her pet project: a major effort to
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    B E T W E E N Y O U A N D M E
    clean up and beautify the nation’s parks and highways. In light of our experience with the candy wrapper, I can only conclude that by 1971, Lady Bird had brought her husband around to her way of thinking. As students of formal religion are well aware, there is no greater passion than the zeal of a convert.
    Later that day we drove over to the new library, situated on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin. Hewitt and I had decided to structure our piece in the form of a tour, with President Johnson as our guide. We went through a couple of informal re-hearsals that afternoon to get the feel of things and set up camera angles. Even in those dry runs, the former president displayed understandable pride as he led us past exhibits honoring his achievements in civil rights, Medicare, and other landmark programs that fell under the heading of the Great Society. When we moved into a much smaller area in the library that dealt with foreign policy, he called our attention to an exhibit on the 1967 Six-Day War in the Middle East. But in glancing around, we couldn’t help noticing that the war in Vietnam was conspicuously absent. When I asked Johnson about that, he turned somber and spoke almost in a whisper. “We don’t have that one filled in yet,” he said. “Besides, I’ve already talked about Vietnam over and over again. So there’s no need to talk about it here.”
    Hewitt and I looked at each other in disbelief. Don began to argue that we couldn’t ignore Vietnam, that it was an essential part of LBJ’s presidency. Johnson refused to budge. “I don’t want to talk about Vietnam,” he snarled. Turning to me, he said that if I brought up Vietnam while the cameras were rolling, he would cut off the tour on the spot and “send you boys packing.”
    That was enough to alarm Hewitt, who promptly walked away, leaving me alone with Johnson. After a brief silence, I decided to try
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    P R E S I D E N T S
    to persuade him from a different angle, one that would be both in-gratiating and combative, a dual tactic Johnson himself had often employed to great effect. I told him that I’d been a fervent admirer of his ever since the Eisenhower years, when he had demonstrated his political genius as majority leader in the U.S. Senate. I said that even back then I thought he was exactly the kind of president the country needed—a white southerner with progressive views on the race issue—and that when the forces of history and fate later conspired to put him in the White House, he had more than lived up to my high expectations. In particular, I said, he deserved the highest praise for the strong civil rights legislation he maneuvered through Congress during his first two years in office, since there was no question in my mind that he had done more to advance the cause than