The news to come out of Reaching for Glory: Lyndon Johnson’s Secret White House Tapes, 1964-1965, presidential historian Michael Beschloss’ second volume of a planned three-volume study of Johnson, is that the president knew that the Gulf of Tonkin incident, in which North Vietnamese torpedo boats allegedly attacked two U.S. destroyers, may have been a false alarm, even though it was used as the catalyst for escalating American involvement in the Vietnam War in 1964. But when Beschloss came to Austin several weeks ago for the Texas Book Festival, I sat down with him not to ask about the Gulf of Tonkin but about the strange and modern practice of writing history from cassette tape.
Austin Chronicle: Could you tell me how the tapes in the LBJ Library actually made it into this book? You didn’t transcribe all this, did you?
Michael Beschloss: What it was, was, there’s 10,000 of them and Johnson, when he began doing these tapes, he had transcripts made because he wanted them for history, but he also wanted to have records he could use in his daily business. If some senator had double-crossed him, the next day he could go back to the senator and say, “You promised me, and I quote …” and the guy would wonder how Johnson remembered every word he said and could say it back to him. So he had these hard-working secretaries, who had worked for him for a long time, and then late at night they’d have to transcribe because he didn’t want anyone in the White House or anywhere else to know that he was secretly taping, so they had to work after everyone else went home. And so the result was that they were working under great pressure, and they produced the transcripts, but as I was reading through them, they got really less and less of good quality and it was really clear to me that I’d have to do them myself. The tipping point was, there’s a point about 10 days in — the transcript of Johnson talking to John McCormack, the Speaker of the House — and the transcript says something like, “John, I can’t talk to you long because I’ve got waiting for me a pack of bastards,” and then I looked at the record of what he did that day and listened closely to the tape, and what he actually said was, “Can’t talk to you long because I’ve got waiting for me the Pakistan ambassador.”
AC: There’s one point where he uses the word “Nigra.” Why did you spell it that way?
MB: He actually says various things. He says “Negro,” “Nigra,” “Nigro,” and he uses the “N” word on rare occasion. And in a way, it’s not exact, but it almost shows you where the guy he’s talking to is coming from. If it’s a racist Southerner he’s trying to talk to to get him to agree with him on civil rights, he’ll use the “N” word to show, “We’re both really good old boys but you should support civil rights because there’s going to be a revolution in the South unless it happens, so as a conservative, you should be for it.” And then at the other extreme if he’s talking to a northern liberal, he’ll certainly say “Negro.” It’s almost the further south, the closer he gets to the “N” word. And it shows the way he operated because he was so tuned into how to deal with someone and how to get their resistance down. But it also suggests that historians do have some minor value, I guess, and one contribution here is that if you just looked at this and didn’t know the context, you’d say, “Oh, he’s using the ‘N’ word,” when in fact he’s using it in a very specific way for a purpose.
AC: So he did not record everything.
MB: No.
AC: Do you know anything about how he chose what to record?
MB: I can make some assumptions from having heard it. And he didn’t really talk about it because this thing was so closely held, Lady Bird did not know he was taping her. Virtually all the White House staff did not know that he’d been taping at all. He sure seems to have it turned on when there’s a transaction with a senator he wants to get down or if he’s making a decision about Vietnam and he wants to get [Secretary of Defense Robert] McNamara on the record as having suggested he do a certain thing. Very presciently, he anticipated someone like McNamara years later might deny that he had said a certain thing or gave him some advice that turned out to be wrong. Johnson figured a tape would protect him against that. But as it turns out, the most interesting stuff in the book is when Johnson intends to record a conversation and then he forgets it’s on and records all sorts of things he didn’t intend. But anyway, my guess is that he thought he would control the collection later on, so that when he got out of office he’d come back to Texas and have these 10,000 conversations. Although I’m totally speculating that that’s the reason why he’s so free. I would assume he figured he could go through them and take out the things that he thought were embarrassing or damaging. And as it turns out, the presidency, because of Vietnam, turned out to be such an ordeal, the last thing he wanted to do was relive those years again, so he never touched them as far as I can tell.
AC: Did anything surprise you in the research for this second volume?
MB: I think the biggest and obvious is Vietnam. I have read about every page of everything that’s been written on the Johnsons, and what I would have expected would have been that in early ’65, he would have seen the pitfalls, but he went in with an optimistic heart and said, “It’s going to be tough but it’s important, and I think we can win.” And when I saw the opposite, the first thing it said to me was, he felt like there was no way out. And at the same time … the inevitable result of this is going to be — and he says it all, he was more foresighted than anyone else — that the campuses are going to go against him, the Senate’s going to divide, the people are going to divide, the cities will go up in flames, and in the process destroy him and his presidency. That’s why I have this ironic title Reaching for Glory. The very year he expected to be another Lincoln or FDR — which I think he should have been because of the Great Society, no president has gotten through more important laws than he did that year — instead, at the very same time he was trapped into getting into this war. Lady Bird says that he said to her, “I feel as if I’m in a plane that doesn’t have a parachute” and that’s just at the culmination of getting all these laws from Congress when he should have been in the happiest moment of his life.
AC: That tendency to be depressed when you might expect he’d be happy shows up throughout Reaching for Glory.
MB: This is a pattern with Johnson; he sure was subject to depression. Lady Bird talks about that a lot in her diary. One form it took was that he was such a brilliant politician in terms of seeing dangers around the corner and the hidden enemies around him, but the cost of it was that he frequently spent a lot of his time miserable, so that even on election night, you can see in the tapes that he’s worried about Robert Kennedy, and he’s worried that people say that this wasn’t his landslide, it was just against Goldwater. And on Inauguration Day, it should have been a terrific experience for him, but instead he’s depressed and then two days later, he collapses and goes to the hospital.
AC: You’ve written about other presidents. What interests you about Johnson?
MB: I don’t know of any president who was more effective than he was. If I were someone who had every president to choose from, and I wanted to get legislation through Congress, I would hire Johnson before I would hire any other president. And the other thing is, in terms of depth of conviction — one of the things we historians always evaluate presidents on — the thing that arrests you about Johnson and captivates you is, on something like civil rights or poverty, in private he’s more radical than he is in public because he wanted to be seen as centrist in public. In private, you can see how emotional he is about these subjects. You don’t doubt him. And also in these times when politicians are run by political consultants, he used pollsters, but the pollsters helped him to achieve what he had the burning desire to do. It was not the other way around as it so often is nowadays. 
This article appears in November 30 • 2001.