Looking Back at LBJ (review)
In the preface, Lerner describes this book as "the step-child" of the well-known three-volume series, Robert A. Divine (ed.), The Johnson Years (Lawrence, 1987–1993) (vii). Like Divine, Learner, has edited a collection of essays based on materials at the Lyndon B. Johnson Library in Austin, including the hundreds of hours of President Johnson's taped phone conversations and White House meetings made available to researchers since the last of Divine's volumes appeared in 1993. Using these tapes, other records at the Library, and recent scholarship, the authors employ the traditional methods of the historian to study discrete and unrelated aspects of the Johnson presidency. Readers will have to look hard to find approaches that might be described as interdisciplinary. [End Page 322] The focus is on Johnson, and the purpose is to contribute to the ongoing assessment of his presidency.
The ten essays in Looking Back at LBJ do not provide materials for broad generalizations about this administration. For one thing, none of them addresses the crucial topics of civil rights or the war on poverty. For another, some of them discuss issues of only marginal importance to this administration, in particular, Indian affairs and women's issues. Nonetheless, taken together, they add useful detail to the immense literature on Johnson's policies and character. Depending on the essay, his achievements are flawed, he lacks a moral center, or he is overwhelmed by events beyond his control.
The four essays devoted to foreign policy show the limitations of Johnson's leadership or his inability to control events. The best essay, Mark Atwood Lawrence's study of the Panama crisis in the winter of 1964, effectively uses the tapes to reveal a president determined to look tough and motivated in large measure by domestic political calculation. Johnson got what he wanted in this episode, first by forcing the Panamanian president to back down and then by offering cosmetic concessions designed to forestall Panamanian radicals and to maintain in power a man who was "in most respects an authoritarian figure of the type that had long served U.S. interests in Panama" (35).
In the other foreign policies considered in this volume, Johnson fared less well. Jeremy Suri argues that social upheaval at home damaged Johnson's leadership abroad. Distracted by unrest, the president was unable to pursue an opportunity in 1968 to improve relations with the Peoples Republic of China. Weakened by unrest, he unwisely sought a summit in Moscow that year "for purposes of public image rather than policy substance" (66). Peter Hahn offers a good summary of Johnson's diplomacy before and after the Six Day War, showing that the decline of American power doomed his efforts to prevent an Arab–Israeli clash and to fashion a lasting peace after the war was over. David L. Anderson asks whether Johnson's failure to resist the Cold War inertia that led him ever deeper into the quagmire of Vietnam constituted a failure of moral courage. His answer is "yes."
Would an interdisciplinary approach have benefited the essays in this book? The authors are historians asking the kinds of questions that historians often ask. Each essay rises or falls on how good the answers are. With the exception of David Shreve's essay on economic policy, the historians in this volume did not resort to other disciplines because they would not have helped. This is not to deny the enormous contributions that other disciplines have made to historians who have asked other kinds of questions. It is merely to say that not every worthy academic enterprise must be interdisciplinary.
