Word: goodwin
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Richard Goodwin, a former speechwriter and aide to L.B.J., has taken such recollections several steps further. In his memoir of the 1960s, Remembering America (Little, Brown; $19.95), Goodwin writes that Johnson was at times literally crazed and that his episodic madness helped propel the U.S. into "a needless tragedy of such immense consequences ((Viet Nam)) that, even now, the prospects for a restorative return remain in doubt." He brazenly diagnoses Johnson's large eccentricities as "incursions of paranoia," which led to leaps "into unreason" that "infected the entire presidential institution...
Whether or not Goodwin's amateur psychiatry is clinically correct, he has dared probe a dim corner of Washington history, a suppressed repository of whispered stories and yellowing memos written in shocked disbelief, describing Johnson's stalking the back corridors of the White House and fulminating about the enemies he saw surrounding him. Nor is such speculation confined to Johnson. In the final throes of Watergate, the tortured Richard Nixon could not focus on meetings, wandered the White House halls at night and sank to his knees in prayer with Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, behavior that suggested to some...
...Goodwin experienced the standard Johnson outrages: an interview with L.B.J. as the President sat on the toilet, a nude policy council in the superheated White House swimming pool. But from his diary of the crucial years 1964 to 1967 and from the shadows of his memory, the writer reconstructs the larger pattern of behavior that disturbed him. Goodwin did not speak up sooner, he writes, because of "misplaced loyalty or personal cowardice." An angry swarm of Johnson intimates now attacking Goodwin suggest more basic motives: money and notoriety...
...Goodwin, who helped name and fashion so much of the policy of that era (John Kennedy's Alliance for Progress, L.B.J.'s Great Society, Eugene McCarthy's crusade of dissent, Bobby Kennedy's glowing visions so tragically destroyed), cannot be dismissed. His controversial assessment of Johnson is embedded in the longer narrative of Goodwin's journey into power and out again. The book is a velvety recitation of being at the center but never of it, the brilliant crafter of ideas and words, too arrogant and defiant to last in any job very long but always sought by those scaling...
...Goodwin's case is built on Johnson's obsession that the world was being swept by Communists. L.B.J.'s enemies of all stripes included not only guerrilla leaders in distant countries but "those Kennedys" or "those Harvards." According to Goodwin, Johnson once told him, " '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 FBI file. He's a Communist sympathizer.' " At another time: "The Communists already control the three major networks and the 40 major outlets of communication." Thus, by Goodwin's account...