Looking for the Real Lyndon

Abstract

Reaching for Glory is the second volume of Lyndon Johnson’s White House telephone-call transcripts edited by Michael Beschloss. It covers the period from December 1964 through the end of July 1965 (with three extras, about which more presently). The publisher’s advertising materials contend that the book is “must reading” for historians, political scientists, politicians, and journalists, and invites the question of whether such an assertion is accurate. This essay will discuss the nature and utility of the source material, survey the Beschloss tape project, and examine the specific value of the book for diplomatic historians. Illumination is certainly on offer here, but among the more interesting issues are for whom and about what. The entire question of tapes and taping systems used by presidents has been attracting increasing interest in recent years. Richard Nixon’s Watergate tapes have long been known. With the release of their full contents, they are clearly a gold mine of material on the inner workings of Nixon’s White House, as well as on the politics of that era. More recently, with new accessions at the National Archives, it has become clear that Nixon taped his meetings, too, and that will be a similar trove for all sorts of policy issues. Beginning with the revelation of John Kennedy’s tapes of meetings of his National Security Council (NSC) Executive Committee meetings during the Cuban missile crisis, there has been a succession of releases, to the point that the oral record has become virtually a field of inquiry on its own. The Miller Center at the University of Virginia has made a major and continuing effort (and contribution) on the Kennedy and Nixon tapes. Michael Beschloss’s endeavor on the Johnson tapes does not possess quite that scope, but is a huge project for a single researcher.