BOOK REVIEW by OnTheIssues.org:

Lyndon's brother had a unique viewpoint on Lyndon Johnson's career. In his 1970 memoir My Brother Lyndon he dishes the dirt about many of the political figures of the time, not pulling his punches on people like Bobby Kennedy or Robert McNamara. As a personal assistant to his older brother, and who lived in the White House during his presidency, he was privy to all sorts of intimate details.

There's no pretense that this is a thorough study of LBJ's career in general or presidency in particular. There's no discussion, for example, of the battles over Medicare or the Voting Rights Act. There is much about the tensions with the Kennedys, and how John Kennedy and his people sidelined Johnson as vice-president in spite of his mastery of the Senate. Sam gives a later example when the Senate was taking up the Civil Rights Act where LBJ let the Southern senators filibuster at length – this was in the days of the so-called "talking filibuster" – realizing they had to appease their constituents back home by showing they were fighting it. Meanwhile Johnson was working with Republican Minority Leader Everett Dirksen to make sure he had the votes to get it passed.

It is in the chapter on the Vietnam War that he paints the most complex portrait of his brother. According to Sam, LBJ had inherited the war from Kennedy, and it was Kennedy advisors like McNamara (who stayed on as Secretary of Defense) and Secretary of State Dean Rusk who took the hawkish position while others opposed escalation. (Sam claims McNamara was two-faced and would take a more dovish pose with others.) LBJ, according to Sam, was torn, believing in the "domino theory" that made a Communist victory in Vietnam a wider threat, but also severely troubled by the casualties and the inability to win an all-out war that might risk escalating into war with Russia or China.

"How in the hell can anyone know for sure what's right and what's wrong, Sam," LBJ muses around the time of the Tet Offensive, "I've got to choose between my opposing experts. No way of avoiding it. But I sure as hell wish I could really know what's right." [p.4] That confusion and doubt is very different from the public face Johnson put on prosecuting the war. The man who cut the knot was Clark Clifford, who replaced McNamara as Defense Secretary in 1968. According to Sam, Clifford's realization that the war couldn't be won was what his brother needed to hear. "If Lyndon had gotten rid of McNamara in 1965, replacing him with a man like Clifford, the Vietnam War might have ended by 1966 or early 1967 – and my brother would have been unbeatable in 1968." [p.247]

While not the definitive word on LBJ or the Vietnam War, the book makes a worthy contribution to our understanding of that turbulent era.

-- Daniel M. Kimmel, Feb. 2022

OnTheIssues.org excerpts:  (click on issues for details)

Civil Rights

Homeland Security     Lyndon Johnson: Vietnam: How in hell do I know what's right & what's wrong? .     Lyndon Johnson: Hurt by accusations that he was a bloody warmonger.

Principles & Values     Lyndon Johnson: Unashamed to do things that might rankle the press.

War & Peace     Lyndon Johnson: Felt Vietnam's strategic importance meant showing no doubts.     Lyndon Johnson: Limited military actions to avoid widening Vietnam war.

Click for quotations from other sources by: Lyndon Johnson