Pros: The 30 pages about Goodwin's relationship with Johnson; Johnson's monologues
Cons: Filled with sappy psychobabble; heavily sanitized; approaches plagiarism
The Bottom Line: LBJ tried to help Goodwin write something that would restore his reputation-as Merle Miller did for Truman. But the Ron Howard of historians wasn't up to the task.
woody_goode's Full Review: Doris Kearns Goodwin - Lyndon Johnson and the Amer...
This could have been a great, great book. It might have been a bestseller with history-changing import-- a work that could only have been produced by two world-class talents in their respective fields. Instead, it's a brutally disappointing portrait of two gifted failures, whose careers intersected as one's was ending, and the other's had barely begun.
LBJ and the American Dream is the book Merle Miller wanted to write about Harry Truman, but didn't. The book offers most of the negatives of Plain Speaking with few of the positives. And it displays many of the traits for which Doris Kearns Goodwin has now become infamous.
This book offers rewards to those who aren't optimistic about Robert Caro's chances to finish his tetralogy. But its real value is an object lesson to anyone who thinks that Miller just got lucky.
The President and I
There are some spooky parallels between this book and Plain Speaking. In each case, a talented but unknown writer was hired to help chronicle the life of a president. Both subjects were gifted politicians; neither would ever have been elected president on his own merits.
Both Truman and Johnson became President after the death of men (Roosevelt and Kennedy, respectively) who became legends. Both Truman and Johnson offered the country decisive leadership in a time of great crisis and helped make this world a better place.
But both men's good deeds (the Marshall Plan; Civil Rights)
were eventually overwhelmed by a land war in Asia, which they failed to stop before it escalated. Both men tried to run for re-election, but abandoned the office, rather than run and lose. Each left office in disgrace, with little hope of ever regaining their reputation.
(If that sounds hard to believe, you must have been born after 1965. Trust me; there was a time when Harry Truman's name evoked as many barf noises as Lyndon Johnson's. I explain the issues in my review of Miller's book, which was written as kind of a preface to this one. If you want to check it out, here's the address-- I'll still be here when you get back: http://www.epinions.com/content_65500647044)
The differences in the circumstances should have made Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream a book several hundred times better than Plain Speaking:
1. Johnson accomplished far more (both positively and negatively) than Truman. Most of Johnson's "Great Society" programs are extremely similar to Truman's "Fair Deal" policies. But unlike Truman (who saw his policies stalled by the Senate), Johnson rammed his ideas through.
2. Truman was something of a political loner; other than House Speaker Sam Rayburn, he didn't have any friends of consequence. Other than Douglas MacArthur, he didn't fight any memorable opponents.
Johnson was friends or enemies (usually one, then the other) with every important political figure between 1930 and 1970. In alphabetical order that would be Tommy Corcoran, John Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Sam Rayburn, Franklin Roosevelt and Richard Russell.
3. With the exception of Clark Clifford, George Marshall and arguably Dean Acheson, Truman was surrounded by second-rate talent. No one close to him had the intelligence or skills needed to understand events and explain them to a buographer.
Johnson, on the other hand, had a phenomenal eye for talent. The list of former staff members begins with Kearns and includes Jack Valenti and Bill Moyers. Many of his lesser-known staffers were exceptionally skilled minds.
4. The relationship between the two authors and their subjects could not possibly have been more different. Miller went out of his way to avoid upsetting the 78-year-old, 5'6", 130-pound Truman. It was understandable on only one count-- Harry Truman was known to have something of a temper.
The relationship between Doris Kearns and Lyndon Johnson? I'd say "they could make a movie about it" except that Yul Brynner and Deborah Kerr already did.
Lyndon Johnson was 6'4" and 240 pounds; his rages are the stuff of Washington legend. Stories of him reducing strong men to tears-- using outbursts of obscenity and personal remarks--are plentiful. One of the few printable examples is "C'mon Cheavens-- won't those fat little legs carry you any faster than that?" That was shouted to a reporter--across a crowded airport tarmac.
Lyndon Johnson lived to manipulate people. When he found someone whose skills he could use, he would charm and coerce that person into his employ. Having done that, he would systematically abuse and humiliate the person until he found their breaking point. Having broken the person's resistance, he would use them as he saw fit.
Unless you were more powerful than Johnson--unless you had something he wanted or needed--the only way to avoid this treatment was to avoid him.
By all accounts, only three women ever managed to stand up to Lyndon Johnson. One was his mother. The the second was his wife. The third was a mousy, 25-year-old Harvard graduate student.
After filing an application to serve as an intern, Kearns co-wrote an article--published in The New Republic--entitled "How to Remove LBJ in 1968." She assumed this act would disqualify her. Instead, it got her hired; Johnson went out of his way to find her at the first White House Dinner.
Knowing Johnson, he probably gave the order to hire her because he wanted the satisfaction of breaking her. But Kearns wouldn't break. Her book details one incident. At one meeting, a discussion of administration objectives degenerated into one of Johnson's furious, hour-long lectures about why he was right about Vietnam and everyone who opposed him was wrong.
Having reached his peroration, the leader of the free world glared at his staff. "I have time for only one question," he barked. He spun his chair around, threw out his long right arm and stabbed his index finger at Kearns. "You!"
"Don't you understand," she stammered, "How can you possibly not understand how deep and serious the country's opposition to the war in Vietnam is?"
And, as he had always done when faced with a rebuke from Rebekkah Baines, Lyndon Johnson scowled, mumbled a few words and stalked out of the room.
When Johnson decided not to seek another term, he tried to coerce Kearns to move to Texas to help him work on his autobiography. When she refused, he literally begged her. Kearns refused, but she did agree to travel to the LBJ ranch when she wasn't teaching.
So, during the next four years, she spent vacations and weekends asking him questions, enduring his rages and trying to shape his responses into a readable book.
As the former president's health failed, his insomnia (which had always been a problem) worsened. In time he began keeping Kearns up to the wee hours of the morning--and then waking her well before sunrise--as he poured out his feelings on every battle he had fought and every person he had met, helped or hurt during his life.
Johnson's fears about his own mortality did not enhance his truthfulness. The man who inspired the term "Credibility Gap" continued to lie, bluster and swagger. All of Kearns's attempts to correct his statement of facts and challenge his assessment of others' were met by more bluster and new lies.
While Johnson refused to permit any of the interview material to be used in the autobiography (what he did approve was as sterile and dull as any of his televised speeches), Kearns kept her notes. After he died, she decided to use the notes as a basis for the book.
The Lady or the Tiger
But what kind of a book should she write? Merle Miller had faced the same dilemma. While he was no historian, and he'd been too timid to challenge Truman, he was shrewd enough to know he wasn't being told the whole truth. Miller spent ten years wrestling with the idea of researching the life of his boyhood hero and presenting only the Truman stories that could be factually verified.
He couldn't do it. After Truman's death, Miller finally admitted that he wanted to write "The World According to Harry." So he wrote an oral history in which he said of Truman (to borrow Huck Finn's words about Mark Twain) "there was things which he stretched, but mainly told the truth."
The book succeeded beyond Miller's wildest dreams. Even the whoppers made for good reading; whether you agreed with Truman's decisions or not, the straightforward nature of his decision-making was easy to admire. And after 30 years, passions about a lot of his decisions had cooled. Plain Speaking became a blockbuster and Truman was posthumously declared a great president.
Doris Kearns didn't have that option. First of all, a book of Johnson's recollections would have had the same relationship to history that A Beautiful Mind has to documentary filmmaking. Secondly, the effects of the Vietnam War, Civil Rights, the welfare state and many other Johnson policies were still fresh in everyone's mind.
But if she'd approached the project as a long-term renovation project, it would have been a fascinating book. Johnson was a twisted, paranoid, frequently evil genius. But he was, in his chosen field, a genius. And knowing exactly what he thought-- or even what he said he thought-- might have helped everyone make peace with him.
Due to her tumultuous relationship, Kearns had a more interesting option than Miller: present Johnson's monologues, accompanied by her own commentary, and her attempts to get him to come to grips with the truth.
There is no doubt that this would have made a spellbinding book. The 20-page prologue, the sixty-odd pages of events that occur while Kearns is in the White House and the 20 page epilogue present Kearns's direct observations about Johnson. They are compelling reading, Her frequent, unsuccessful attempts to get Johnson to come to terms with reality are fascinating. As always happens, the subject's attempts to justify himself provides considerable insight into his character.
It would have been a terribly hard book for a first-time author in her thirties to write. It would have been especially tough because Kearns was very fond of Lady Bird Johnson and touched, despite herself, by the plight of the dying president. She would have been (as Robert Caro was, 15 years later), reviled by Johnson loyalists, accused of breaking confidences and tarred for libeling a man who was no longer able to fight back.
But if you read the book carefully, there's no doubt that this is the sort of book Johnson wanted her to write. Before telling a story, Johnson frequently ordered Kearns to swear that she would never, for any reason, ever repeat what he was about to tell her to anyone.
But then, noticing that she had stopped taking notes, he'd stop. "Hey, why aren't you writing all this down," he'd snarl. "Someday, someone might want to read it."
Regrettably, Doris Kearns--the spunky kid from Long Island who defied her president's wishes at every turn--chose the least interesting option of all. She went back to Harvard and got her Ph.D. She married Richard Goodwin (a Kennedy courtier), began teaching, raised a family and started writing a series of conventional, bowdlerized and growingly-plagiarized books about American history.
Lyndon Johnson and The American Dream is the best book Doris Kearns Goodwin ever wrote. It's the only one Kearns wrote before she became a Goodwin, and a de facto member of the Kennedy circle. It's the only one built from hands-on knowledge and primary sources. Because Lyndon Johnson is persona non grata among the Harvards, it is the book where she was under the least pressure to whitewash the subject's flaws.
But the book displays all the weaknesses that eventually became violations of good practice or professional ethics. It's hard not to feel a sense of profound sadness at the loss of a voice that could have been so powerful.
Better History Through Synergy
The first problem with the book-- and to these eyes, the biggest flaw-- will come as absolutely no surprise to anyone who follows news items about books and authors.
In January, 2002, several publications took a long-overdue look at the work of Stephen Ambrose. In short order, eight separate, blatant documented examples of plagiarism were identified.
It soon became very clear that Ambrose had assembled his books by stealing substantial portion of the pictures, descriptions and accounts in his book from other writers without giving adequate credit.
In the wake of that scandal, every popular historian got an immediate, thorough review of their scholarship. An examination of Goodwin's bestselling The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys revealed a large number of unattributed quotes from other authors--at least one of which resulted in a six-figure settlement to the victimized author.
There are, to my knowledge, no smoking guns in this book, but there's plenty of heavy ammunition to be found. As the footnotes and quoting clearly indicates, a substantial part of Goodwin's work was derived from the following works:
* Sam Johnson's Boy, by Alfred Steinberg (published in 1968) is the source for events in Johnson's boyhood.
* LBJ: The Exercise of Power, by Rowland Evans and Robert Novak (1966) details Johnson's years in the congress and as vice-president.
* The Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson, by Eric Goldman (1968) is the source for Johnson's domestic policy.
* The Best and the Brightest, by David Halberstam (1972) covers, naturally, Johnson's foreign policy.
Aside from the obvious issue-- that it's wrong to borrow so extensively from someone else's work-- there are plenty of secondary problems with this approach.
1. At least two sources are questionable. Steinberg's book, which was written while Johnson was president, suffers accordingly. Not many people have the nerve to say unflattering things about the most powerful man in the world. The correct description of Halberstam's book is roman a clef.
To be complete, Goldman's book is excellent, but it's not really a biography. It's partly memoir of his time in the Johnson administration and part social history of the 60's. Hard as this may be to believe, the work by Evans and Novak is the best. And, yes, it's those guys.
Goodwin's facts, needless to say, are unlikely to be better than the authors she relied on. If they overlooked details or got misinformed, she repeats their mistakes. Any of her mistakes add a new generation of errors.
2. There's little here for a serious reader. If you're really interested in Johnson's career, you're going to read more than one book about him. And since all four books are required reading, there's not much point to reading a rehash.
If you read the opening and closing sections and look at the monologues, you've got 90% of the value in Goodwin's book. And that's less than 100 pages.
Sadly, the 40% original material (the result of her firsthand access to Johnson) is the high-water mark of Goodwin's career. Her books were never less derivative than this; as recent events have shown, the percentage of new material dwindled sharply over time.
Plagiarism 101
To anyone who is well-read on the topics that Goodwin writes about, the charges of plagiarism came as no surprise. Goodwin's books have always lived in the gray area between "research" and "theft".
If you've read the same books she's quoting, it's easy to see that she "researches" books by reading existing histories, adding a few biographies and memoirs of the key players and then homogenizing a retelling of events based on those sources.
Goodwin's defense--that the books are similar because each writer is relying on the same primary sources--is nonsense. There's an easy way to disprove it, in fact. But to explain why, I need to explain what she's talking about first.
----- Primary v Secondary Sources -----
If you're serious about writing an accurate account of events, there are only two types of research materials that you can use: primary sources and secondary sources. Goodwin relies on secondary sources.
(There are other types of sources, but they're only employed by people like Kitty Kelley or Albert Goldman, who are only interested in selling books. It does put them one-up on Ronnie Howard and Oliver Stone, but that's not something that ethical people celebrate.)
If "secondary sources" sounds like a pejorative, that's because it is: they're not as good as "primary sources". The Bowling Green State University Library-- which has a superb website dedicated to explaining basic research-- defines primary sources as:
"'Firsthand documents such as poems, diaries, court records, and interviews [or] research results generated by experiments, surveys, ethnographies, and so on.' Primary sources are records of events as they are first described, without any interpretation or commentary. They are also sets of data, such as census statistics, which have been tabulated, but not interpreted."
(I added the emphasis in the paragraph. By the way, I used two sets of quotation marks in that paragraph because BGSU quoted the definition listed in The Scott-Foresman Handbook for Writers. I agree that attributions slow down your prose, Ms. Goodwin, but it's unethical to quote someone without giving them credit.)
Secondary sources-- again, quoting from BGSU-- "offer an analysis or a restatement of primary sources. They often attempt to describe or explain primary sources. Some secondary sources not only analyze primary sources, but use them to argue a contention or to persuade the reader to hold a certain opinion."
It is sometimes necessary for a historian to rely on secondary sources. But it's normally done only as a last resort. It usually occurs only when (a) you're looking for information about what a dead person said or did, and (b) that person:
* Didn't write an autobiography or memoirs
* Didn't keep a diary (or the family destroyed it)
* Didn't write letters or send memos
* Didn't give an "oral history" (an interview conducted to provide source material for future historians) to any library
* Didn't give an interview that was recorded on film, TV, radio or tape
* Didn't give a interview that was published in a book, magazine or newspaper
* Wasn't interviewed by someone who took notes for their book and deposited them in a library
* Did whatever you want to write about without being seen or talking to anyone else (or there were witnesses, but you've gone through all the above steps for every witness and come up empty)
In short, you use secondary sources only if you're stuck. You have to go with the accounts someone else presented in earlier books, because that's the best information you have. But you're not supposed to do it if you have any other alternative. Because every time you rely on what someone else is saying, you're increasing the chance of error or deceit.
As a rule, secondary sources should only be necessary if the events happened at least 80 years ago. The idea that important people should save all their papers and store them at some library was voiced as early as the 18th century, but it didn't happen often until the late 19th century, and people didn't really do it until the 20th.
One final comment before we move forward. The BGSU site is located at http://www.bgsu.edu/colleges/library/infosrv/lue/basics.html and you couldn't ask for a better place to become a more educated reader. It only takes about 20 minutes to read all their articles, and you will wind up much smarter when you arrived. With that said, back to Goodwin...
----- Does She or Doesn't She? -----
Goodwin's defense, put briefly, is that she sounds like everyone else because they're all reviewing the same primary sources and drawing the same conclusions. It sounds logical, but it's easy to assess. When you do, it soon becomes clear that Goodwin's claim isn't true
Let's look, for example, at chapter four of Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream. This 26-page chapter covers Johnson's early career in the Senate, where he made a name for himself by chairing a committee to investigate waste and fraud among Korean War suppliers. Of the 57 footnotes in this chapter:
* 16 cite Goodwin's interviews with Lyndon Johnson
* 7 cite Goodwin's interviews with other participants
* 6 cite newspapers or popular magazines, which are used as sources of quotes
* 4 cite original documents (letters or memos)
* 2 cite quotes from memoirs of other participants
* 1 cite from the Congressional Record
* 1 cite from an oral history
That's 37 primary sources out of 57--a little more than half. That's an astonishingly low number, given that:
* She's writing about events that happened less than 25 years ago, and many of the key participants are still alive during the writing.
* Everyone who is dead was a public figure, who has his personal papers and/or recollections stored in some library or another.
* She spent parts of four years interviewing Johnson and was only a few minutes away from his presidential library, where plenty of material about these events is stored.
Of the 20 times that Goodwin cites a secondary source, two are analyses for scholarly journals. The other 18 are books by other authors. Of the 18 cites, nine come from a single volume: LBJ: Exercise of Power, by Evans and Novak. After the Johnson interviews, that's the source Goodwin relied on more than any other.
Now let me show you what the notes of a real historian look like. Chapter 7 of David McCullough's Truman covers Harry Truman's early years in the Senate, where he made a name for himself investigating fraud and corruption among World War II suppliers (and Lyndon Johnson got the idea for his Korean War committee). Of the 91 footnotes in that 38-page chapter:
* 30 cite Truman's account, from either his memoirs or his letters
* 13 cite testimony in the Congressional Record
* 12 cite quotes taken from newspapers or magazines
* 10 cite from the personal papers of other participants
* 6 cite the author's interviews or oral histories
All in all, 80 of the 91 footnotes cite primary sources. Even though McCullough is writing about events that are over twice as old as Goodwin's--and all the participants are dead--fully 90% of his information comes straight from the horse's mouth. That, ladies and gentlemen, is the work of someone who isn't recycling.
Saying that Goodwin constructed her Chapter Four out of her interviews with Johnson and her retelling of Bob Novak's book is overstating things a bit. But it isn't unfair. If you read the two books side by side, it's fairly clear that Goodwin's Johnson is Novak's Johnson-- that even when she isn't quoting the book, she's relying on it for the portrait of her subject.
It's not technically plagiarism-- but it's not an honest day's work, either. And it's why I don't have any sympathy for Goodwin. A writer who continually turns to other writers for insight is destined to end up in trouble someday. If the only thing separating "research" from "plagiarism" are a few quotation marks--and the care with which you insert them--you're eventually going to screw up. The only foolproof way to avoid it is to do your own homework.
If You Can't Say Anything Nice
It's annoying to be able to pick up one of Goodwin's books and guess--without opening it--which authors will appear (credited or otherwise) in her books. But it's infuriating to be able to know what won't be in her book.
Goodwin's authorial voice is as soft and uncritical as Georgia Engel (Georgette on the Mary Tyler Moore Show). If the subject is touchy in any way, you can be certain that she'll tiptoe around it.
Let's begin with the treatment the Kennedy family. Since Goodwin is a professor at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, you wouldn't expect her to offer a Seymour Hersh hatchet job about John Kennedy. But her analysis of Kennedy's ill-treatment of Johnson as vice-president is more timid than the one Arthur Schlesinger (a Harvard professor and a former Kennedy staff member) offered in his 1965 memoir of the recently-martyred president.
People frequently joked that Joe Kennedy was trying to use his fortune to buy the nomination for his son. It was so well-known that JFK used to joke about it in his speeches ("Jack, don't buy a single vote more than necessary-- I'll be damned if I pay for a landslide"). It is generally believed that the Kennedy fortune bought at least two states in the 1960 primary campaign. Several other authors have quoted Johnson extensively on the topic. Goodwin never mentions the subject.
Goodwin's book suggests that the relationship between Johnson and Robert Kennedy stemmed from a miscommunication during the 1960 campaign. In his 1964 oral history--which is stored at the Kennedy Library in Boston--Robert Kennedy described Johnson as "Mean, bitter, vicious-- an animal in many ways... He's got this other side of him in his relationship with human beings which makes it very difficult unless you want to kiss his behind all the time." Sounds like some misunderstanding, doesn't it?
Faced with the task of describing her subject's peccadilloes, Goodwin is equally mealy-mouthed. No rational person doubts that Lyndon Johnson stole the 1948 senatorial election. The evidence isn't merely overwhelming--Johnson used to brag about it. He went so far as to show one biographer a photo of his political operatives standing around a ballot box that was reported as "stolen." Most biographers devote a chapter to that campaign--Robert Caro wrote a book about it. Goodwin devotes less than a page, focusing mostly on Johnson's illness during the race.
Lyndon Johnson made his fortune by turning a small radio station into a regional powerhouse. The Wall Street Journal won a Pulitzer Prize in 1965 for documenting the unusually long series of favorable FCC decisions that made him a multi-millionaire. "The evidence is inferential," Goodwin sniffs. "There may well have been no transgression."
"Few Presidents have permitted the kind of intimacy between themselves and their staffs that Johnson encouraged", Goodwin writes. This is her sole comment on Lyndon Johnson's habit of holding face-to-face conversations with other people--men, women, secretaries, cabinet officials-- while he sat on the toilet.
This practice was one of Johnson's portfolio of tools for imposing control. If he perceived you to be squeamish about bodily functions and insufficiently deferential, you were forced to watch him defecate. It would be hard to think of a more revealing character trait. But the above sentence is the only analysis Goodwin offers.
Most accounts agree that Johnson's sexual appetites were voracious. Even observers who dislike John Kennedy agree that LBJ had more conquests during his presidency. Johnson was such a public, unabashed flirt that people would even tease his wife about it. She developed several witty rejoinders as stock replies.
Johnson would, several biographers agree, display his genitalia to new male acquaintances, inviting everyone to acknowledge their unusually large size. The number of different sources--and their willingness to go on record-- leaves no doubt that this is true.
Goodwin never comes to grip with either topic. She mentions that he flirted with her at one or two social occasions, but describes it as innocent. She spent months with Johnson--and there were rumors about every other woman LBJ was ever alone with for more than ten minutes (many of which were later confirmed by the partner). But Kearns adamantly denies that even an attempt ever occurred.
Are those subjects appropriate for a presidential biography? Not in a political biography. But if one wishes readers--as Goodwin's preface says she does--to "know Lyndon Johnson emotionally, to be able to experience vicariously the feelings that he experienced, to understand why he behaved as he did", how do you omit them?
The book offers 80 pages of speculation about the development of Johnson's personality and the impact of his upbringing on his behavior. To support her speculations, Goodwin presents Freud's theories of personality and offers dozens of quotes from Freudian psychiatrists.
Now since Freudians believe that all behavior patterns stem from your reproductive and digestive habits, how can you not talk about Johnson's behaviors--especially since they were so blatantly displayed?
Because they're icky, that's why. Doris Kearns Goodwin is more than willing to analyze Johnson's institutional impact on the Senate. Or to profile the personality of a boy raised by parents who didn't know how to give him enough love. But she's not going to be gross, or be mean to his wife.
Part of me is tempted to call it "admirable restraint." I don't like Howard Stern or Jerry Springer. Our appetite for tabloids and talk shows and fetish for gossip (the more disturbing the better) disturbs me. I'm repulsed by most of the trash that currently passes for journalism and commentary.
But if you set yourself the task of explaining how someone thinks and why he or she behaves in a given way, then you can't shirk the assignment. And, in the words of Harry Truman, if you can't stand the heat, then you get out of the kitchen.
Ends and Means
I'm old-fashioned about recommendations. The two questions I ask are "Is this product worth the price they're asking?" and "Is this the best tool for the purpose?"
Goodwin put enough good stuff about Lyndon Johnson into this book to make it interesting. But is 100 good pages out of 200 a good bargain? Is it the best one-volume account of the life and work of Lyndon Johnson?
The decision isn't open-and-shut-- but in both cases, my answer is "No." There have been at least two dozen books published about Lyndon Johnson since the first edition of this book hit the stands. Most of those authors have excerpted the most truthful and revealing quotes that Goodwin has to offer. You'd be much better off choosing one of those books first.
If you're going to read this because you're going to read everything about Johnson, then do the authors she recycles the courtesy of reading their books first, so you don't give her credit for their work. And you'd be much better off with the two Bobs (Dallek and Caro).
Besides, if you want the book, most library sales and flea markets have inexpensive used copies. Or you can even read the best part for free--Amazon makes scans of the prologue available on their site.
You'll save yourself some money and time. And it would be poetic justice to rip Goodwin off for a change.
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