Lyndon Johnson American Nero

All of America's worst presidents started with Lyndon Johnson who as we shall see was a psychopathic murderer.

George Reedy (1917 - 1999) worked for Lyndon Johnson from 1951-1965, serving last as his press secretary as Johnson was giving the plutocrats the war they wanted, his gratitude for saving him the embarrassment of his multitudinous scandals.

While Reedy has some blind spots in understanding the politics of the time which colored Johnson's vile psychology, he provided deep insights into the man's psychosis.

Historians like Robert Caro and Robert Dallek gloss over Johnson's heinous behavior; behavior which should have removed him from office under the 25th amendment to the constitution. Some how these men can comment on his transgressions, yet paint him as a great man. He was a small, vile, vindictive man who got to the oval office through murdering his boss - the old fashioned Roman way.

Reedy's memoirs are filled with execrable behaviors of Johnson which ultimately explain why Johnson could send American boys to their deaths and suffering in Viet Nam, to say nothing of murdering men - and his sister - in cold blood.

 

Regarding his manners and contempt for people:

There was no sense in which he could be described as a pleasant man. His manners were atrocious- not just slovenly but frequently calculated to give offense. Relaxation was something he did not understand and would not accord to others. He was a bully who would exercise merciless sarcasm on people who could not fight back but could only take it. Most important, he had no sense of loyalty- at least, not the kind of loyalty I learned on the Irish Near North Side of Chicago, where life was bearable only because people who had very little in the way of wordly goods had very much in the way of mutual trust. To Johnson, loyalty was a one-way street: all take on his part and all give on the part of everyone else- his family, his friends, his supporters.[Reedy, p. x]

 

Regarding his language:

"As a rule, his language colorful, pointed, and what can most charitably be described as "earthy." His "humor" was based chiefly on the contents of toilet bowls and he was addicted to "pie-in-the-face" practical jokes. His favorite spectator sport was watching bovine copulation and he gloried in summoning fastidious males to his bathroom, where conference and excretion could be intermingled. His consumption of beverage alcohol was for purposes other than sacramental and in quantities that did not accord St. Paul's "a little wine for thy stomach's sake." [Reedy, p.34-35]

 Regarding his drinking and abusiveness

The drinking bouts became increasingly heavy and increasingly frequent. When he was with staff members, there would usually be a point at which he would launch a tirade reviling an assistant for a long series of fancied wrongs and assumed inadequacies. ...

They were invariably preceded by a wild drinking bout. He was not an alcoholic or a heavy drinker in the commonly accepted sense of those words. But there were occasions when he would pour down Scotch and soda in a virtually mechanical motion in rhythm with the terrible tension building visibly within him and communicating itself to his listeners. The warning signs were unmistakable and those with past experience tried to get away before the inevitable flood of invective. As they found out, it was rarely possible. [Reedy 56-57]

Regarding the inevitability of the Viet Nam disaster:

The trouble was that Johnson himself became a victim of the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. It froze him into a totally uncompromising position where he had no alternatives- or thought he had no alternative- to feeding more and more draftees into the meat grinder. He had never, in his entire life, learned to confess error, and this quality- merely amusing or exasperating in a private person- resulted in cosmic tragedy for a president. He had to prove that he had been right all along. And this meant that he had to do more of what he had been doing despite the demonstrable failure of his Vietnam policies.[Reedy, p. 165]

 

In 1965, at the outset of the massive escalation in Viet Nam, and after the military service chiefs gave Johnson their unsolicited advice after the butcher Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara refused to listen to them, Johnson exploded in fury:

then suddenly discarding the calm, patient demeanor he had maintained throughout the meeting, whirled to face them and exploded.

I almost dropped the map. He screamed obscenities, he cursed them personally, he ridiculed them for coming to his office with their "military advice." Noting that it was he who was carrying the weight of the free world on his shoulders, he called them filthy names-shitheads, dumb shits, pompous assholes-and used "the F-word" as an adjective more freely than a Marine in boot camp would use it. He then accused them of trying to pass the buck for World War III to him. It was unnerving, degrading.

Robert Morrow quoted the above excerpt from The Day It Became the Longest War.

 

From this point forward, Johnson, in order to prove his generals wrong, would never reconsider their advice, and continued to throw good money after bad, and to send more men to their deaths to salvage his losing hopeless war. But in a sad way, the Americans got exactly what they deserved, and we give our deepest sympathies to the men who lost their lives and sanity proving this American Nero wrong.

 

Reference

Robert Morrow, email: Some nuggets on LBJ, 3/22/2014

Robert Morrow, Lyndon Johnson, military intelligence and the CIA murdered John F. Kennedy, no date, privately published

 

Copyright 2014 Tony Bonn. All rights reserved.