LBJ’s Alter Ego (February 1989 | Volume: 40, Issue: 1)

LBJ’s Alter Ego

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Authors: Geoffrey C. Ward

Historic Era: Era 9: Postwar United States (1945 to early 1970s)

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February 1989 | Volume 40, Issue 1

"Memoirs,” Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter once told young Richard Goodwin, “are the most unreliable source of historical evidence. Events are always distorted by refraction through the writer’s ego.” Sage advice, duly reported, but not systematically applied in its recipient’s own memoir, Remembering America: A Voice from the Sixties. Richard Goodwin’s ego suffuses his otherwise admirable book, which combines a persuasive and moving account of what it was like to serve two of the most interesting presidents of the century with an eloquent reminder that beneath the turbulence of the 60s breathed a humane, hopeful spirit that we dismiss at our peril.

A brilliant, driven Boston boy whose family had survived hard times in the Depression, Goodwin sped to the top of his class at Harvard Law, served as clerk to Justice Frankfurter, helped lay bare the quiz-show scandals of 1959 as a congressional investigator, and joined Senator John F. Kennedy’s staff—all by the age of 27.

Time and sentiment have softened our memories of JFK, and Goodwin’s crisp account of the 1960 race reminds us again what a bemused, but hard-eyed campaigner his man was. When Goodwin prepared an assault on the Republicans for having “lost” Cuba to the Soviets, JFK read it through. “Of course, we don’t say how we would have saved Cuba,” he said, but “what the hell, they never told us how they would have saved China.” And Goodwin gives the lie to the retrospective legend of the well-oiled Kennedy machine with a portrait of the furious candidate, clad only in his undershorts, stomping through his suite past a distinguished group of New York campaign contributors and party leaders that included Eleanor Roosevelt to berate a hapless driver who had got his motorcade lost in the Bronx.

 

Goodwin’s principal role was as a speech writer. According to William Safire’s The New Language of Politics, presidential speech writing began at the beginning, with George Washington’s request that Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison help him with his Farewell Address. “My wish,” he told them, “is that the whole may appear in a plain stile; and be handed to the public in an honest, unaffected, simple garb.” That sort of tailoring was only intermittently required by Washington’s successors until this century, and the tailors themselves were expected to remain anonymous when discreetly called upon. Franklin Roosevelt’s insistence that those who served him display what one of them called a “passion for anonymity,” for example, reached well beyond the grave: Samuel Rosenman and Robert E. Sherwood both managed to write important books touching upon their years at the presidential typewriter that only rarely reveal just which words were theirs and which their employers.

Richard Goodwin has different passions, and the least-interesting parts of his book are those in which he first describes the very great effort he poured into hammering out speeches, then reproduces sizable gobbets of the speeches themselves, followed by fulsome excerpts