The Member from Johnson City
In his recent biography of Lyndon Johnson, Flawed Giant,
Robert Dallek writes, “During a private conversation with some
reporters who pressed him to explain why we were in Vietnam,
Johnson lost his patience. According to Arthur Goldberg, LBJ
unzipped his fly, drew out his substantial organ and declared,
‘This is why!’”
Way back then, President Johnson could be
confident that the reporters would not share this moment of
presidential bonding with the public. Quaint questions of
taste aside, it might not have struck them as news anyway. The
president’s fascination with his substantial organ was an old
story to the White House press corps.
I first heard of it when
I was working on a profile of White House press secretary
George Reedy for The Saturday Evening Post. Everybody in the
press room had a glancing acquaintance with the President’s
privates, which he was forever prodding and redistributing
through his pants. And ambassadors calling to present their
credentials sometimes had a closer acquaintance than that. It
was Mr. Johnson’s occasional practice to invite new envoys for
a swim in the small indoor pool built for FDR. Skinny-dipping
was the long-established tradition, which allowed the
President to establish genital dominance at the start of a
diplomatic relationship.
And down on the LBJ ranch near Johnson
City, Texas, Mr. Johnson liked to go fishing and
whisky-drinking on Johnson Lake with the Secret Service and a
few close friends. The small boat had no facilities, which
meant that the president had to relieve himself over the side
like everybody else. As Mr. Johnson was zipping up, one of the
agents told me, he always made the same little joke: “It ain’t
too cold, but it sure is deep.”
Back in the White House, the
President was well known for sharing the most private moments
with his staff. Rather than interrupt himself, he would leave
the door open when he went to the toilet so that cabinet
members could watch him as he sat on the throne, issuing
orders and so forth.
None of this made it into my George Reedy
piece, of course, those being simple and innocent times except
for race riots, draft resistance, campus revolt, drug-taking,
free love, urban terrorism, and the carpet-bombing of small
Southeast Asian nations by giant, eight-engined, Guam-based
B-52s.
The George Reedy piece didn’t make it into the magazine
either, its subject having jumped or been pushed from his
White House job before the article could run.
The same
disaster was to happen soon enough to Lyndon Johnson himself,
allowing Mr. Nixon and his trusty sidekick, Dr. Kissinger, to
take over the war in January of 1969. The next month I became
a very minor sidekick of Mr. Nixon myself, having been posted
as press attaché to our embassy in Laos. The first person I
met when I got off the plane was my former editor at The
Saturday Evening Post, Don Schanche, who was in Vientiane to
do research for a book.
Too much later, in a saloon called The
Third Eye, I was going on about how pathetic it was for a big
boy in his sixties like Johnson still to be bragging about his
whopper. I wandered off into a confused thesis to the effect
that the former president’s compulsion to live up to his penis
might even have been what got all of us stuck over here in the
Big Muddy, where it ain’t too cold but it sure is deep.
“Johnson doesn’t have a particularly big one,” Schanche said,
stopping me from further foolishness.
The Saturday Evening
Post, it turned out, had once been planning a special issue
on the Vietnam war. When the president heard about this he
invited Mr. Schanche and another editor to Washington for the
famous Johnson treatment. It included the Full Monty,
poolside.
“I don’t remember being impressed,” Mr. Schanche
told me. “If anything, it was a little smaller than average.”
There went my thesis, which in any case had begun sounding
shaky even to me. We weren’t in Southeast Asia because the
presidential organ was bigger than average, but because it was
smaller. Another inch or two and--who knows?--Mr. Johnson might
have had enough self-confidence to pull out harmlessly from
Vietnam as General De Gaulle had earlier withdrawn from
Algeria.
In any event Johnson’s disturbing fondness for
flashing raised a character issue of real consequence, and one
which should have been reported at the time. The President’s
in-your-face immodesty and puerile boasting suggested personal
insecurities so crippling that they should not have been left
to future historians like Mr. Dallek.
President Clinton’s more
recent exposures, on the other hand, could have been ignored
by the press and the special prosecutor with perfect safety to
the Republic. Never mind how tacky Mr. Clinton’s behavior with
Paula Jones and Monica Lewinsky may have been, it pointed to
no character flaw that really mattered much to the nation or
the world.
The difference lay not in the two presidents’ acts
of exposure, which were equivalently low-rent, but in their
choice of audience. Mr. Clinton, needing above all to be
loved, exposed himself to women; Mr. Johnson, needing above
all to dominate, chose men. The lust for love is arguably
private business, but the lust for bullying can lead, in a
president, to the very public business of war.
