Washington Decoded

RFK: The Man Who Really Brought Down LBJ

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By Max Holland   

 

    Nearly all the obituaries for Eugene McCarthy credit the former Minnesota senator with forcing Lyndon Johnson out of the 1968 race for the Democratic presidential nomination. Without taking anything away from McCarthy’s principled run against a sitting president of his own party, this is simplistic history that ignores everything we have since learned about that fateful year.

    To be sure, McCarthy added to Johnson’s sense of beleagurement when the little-known senator made an unexpectedly strong showing in the New Hampshire primary, garnering 42% of the vote. Johnson had talked plenty about quitting months earlier. He was worn and exhausted by the burdens of office, especially the war, and worried about his ability to survive another term. The Tet offensive by communist forces in South Vietnam, while a defeat for Hanoi, was particularly debilitating. It gave lie to Johnson’s claims of steady progress in the war, and was undoubtedly a decisive factor in McCarthy’s unexpectedly strong showing on March 12. Before the offensive, reliable polls indicated that Johnson was going to “annihilate” McCarthy. Johnson did not announce his withdrawal the day after the primary.

    Indeed, political soundings taken soon afterward showed that he could still garner enough delegates to win the nomination, and Johnson was convinced that if nominated he would be reelected, assuming Nixon was his GOP opponent. To some degree, Johnson relished the prospect of running against the liberal intelligentsia in his party, an element he had assiduously courted but one that had never truly accepted him. So what precipitated LBJ’s withdrawal on March 31?

     The only event of significance between McCarthy’s unexpected showing and Johnson leaving the race was Robert F. Kennedy’s entry. RFK announced his candidacy on March 16, after refusing to challenge Johnson earlier because he reportedly feared that it would be perceived as only personal. But after New Hampshire, Kennedy could plausibly claim that the Democratic Party was deeply split over the war, and that he was not the cause.

    Much of the media treated Kennedy’s entrance as proof that Johnson was unlikely to be renominated. But as any hard-boiled, vote-counting politician would have realized on March 16 - and Johnson was among the best - RFK’s entrance enhanced Johnson’s chances. The 1968 process involved a different set of rules for nearly every state, meaning that delegates were largely controlled by elected officeholders and party bosses. And since McCarthy deeply detested Kennedy, and was not about to withdraw or join forces with him, a three-way race meant the antiwar faction of the Democratic Party was irrevocably split between two Catholic, liberal senators. As The New York Times reported on March 24, LBJ seemed likely to get at least 65% of the delegates for the nomination.

  Nonetheless, it was Kennedy’s entrance that was the precipitating factor in Johnson’s withdrawal. Johnson believed, and with good reason, that he had always kept faith with the 1960 political compact he had formed with John Kennedy in Los Angeles, when LBJ stunned most observers by giving up the Senate to run for vice president. In return for subordinating himself to an undistinguished senator who was clearly his political junior, Johnson was given the opportunity to be on a national ticket and thereby transcend the onus of being a southerner, perhaps the last political vestige of the Civil War. If he ran well, LBJ could keep alive his burning desire for the presidency - in 1964, if the JFK-LBJ ticket lost, and in 1968 if Kennedy served two terms.

  Instead, of course, Johnson was abruptly catapulted to the White House in 1963. He was then treated, first by RFK, as a usurper, grabbing at the accoutrements of power, and then later by the country as an unworthy successor, even though Johnson had done far more to advance liberal causes than JFK.

    The flaw in Johnson was that he was not content to lead and be respected. Rather, he demanded almost slavish support and public adoration. Such deep emotion is reserved for very few presidents, and usually, they have to die in office to achieve it. Johnson’s curse was that he inherited the presidency from such a man. And now RFK was repudiating everything Johnson represented or hoped to accomplish. As Johnson told his biographer Doris Kearns after he left the White House: “I felt [in 1968] that I was being chased on all sides by a giant stampede coming at me from all directions. . . . And then the final straw. The thing I feared from the first day of my presidency was actually coming true. Robert Kennedy . . . openly announced his intention to reclaim the throne in the memory of his brother. And the American people, swayed by the magic of the name, were dancing in the streets. The whole situation was unbearable for me.”

    If McCarthy cannot be credited with forcing Johnson from the race, the meaning of his challenge to LBJ is hardly diminished. In fact, it reverberates to this day. It was McCarthy’s candidacy that cracked open the Democrats’ consensus on foreign policy. Nearly four decades later, the party is still struggling with that divide.

This article first appeared in the Los Angeles Times, 22 December 2005
© 2005 by Max Holland

Presidential Tapes and Transcripts: Crafting a New Historical Genre

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By Sheldon M. Stern and Max Holland 

   

    Though it has been slow to develop and achieve recognition, it is now becoming apparent that scholarly works based on the extraordinary cache of presidential recordings from the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations actually constitute a new and distinct genre of historical investigation.

    The history profession is familiar with books that exploit new primary sources, or interpret old primary sources in a fresh way, along with works that are syntheses of primary and secondary sources. There is also an honored place in the canon for books that annotate the private papers of such prominent figures as Woodrow Wilson. Books based on audio recordings, however, are arguably distinct from these traditional categories. The main reason is that the historian shoulders an even larger burden in this new genre. He or she is obviously selecting, deciphering, and making judgments about a primary source, much like the editor of a documentary collection. But, in the process of transcribing a tape recording, the historian is also creating a facsimile—while still endeavoring to produce a reliable, “original” source. In essence, the historian/editor unavoidably becomes the author of a “new” source because even a transcript alleged to be “verbatim” is irreducibly subjective at some level. As a result, the historian’s responsibility in this genre is a very unusual one, and requires the most careful scholarship imaginable. No other task of discovery and/or interpretation in the historical canon is quite comparable.

    As the audio recordings from the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon presidencies have become available, historians have eagerly taken up this unprecedented challenge—and understandably so. The attraction of being able to convey even a fraction of what actually transpired in the Oval Office and Cabinet Room from 1962 to 1969, and 1971 to 1973, is irresistible, the ultimate fantasy for many historians. The recordings offer the tantalizing prospect of history “wie es eigentlich gewesen ist”—as it really was—in the famous formulation of the 19th-century German historian Leopold von Ranke.[1] Or as Columbia University professor Alan Brinkley put it in 1997, “No collection of manuscripts, no after-the-fact oral history, no contemporary account by a journalist will ever have the immediacy or the revelatory power of these conversations.”[2] Almost a dozen “tapes-based” books have been published since 1997, more are in the offing, and this does not count the growing number of conventional histories and/or biographies and articles in newspapers, magazines, and scholarly journals that selectively but increasingly rely on the presidential recordings for substantive insights, anecdotal asides, or simply colorful quotes.[3]

    One issue must be acknowledged before leveling any criticism: transcribing these tapes is far more difficult than it appears on the surface for subjective and objective reasons. There are knotty stylistic issues, for example, that have substantive consequences. When is a hesitation or “uh-huh” significant?[4] Something as seemingly minor as eliminating a pause, or “ironing out a cadence,” as one historian put it, can shift emphasis and even change meaning.[5] Not being able to fully render tone or intonation runs the same risk. If LBJ lapses into his most Southern dialect, and that is reflected in the transcript, does he risk being portrayed as some character out of a Mark Twain novel? Alternately, does it misrepresent LBJ to render him speaking the King’s English when he demonstrably does not? Reading even the most faithful transcript will never substitute for actually listening to the recordings themselves; as one historian put it, “transcripts are not interchangeable with the original tapes.”[6] A transcript, or a narrative that attempts to capture both the verbal and affectual dimensions of the tapes, can further refine our understanding. But only the tapes can be legitimately cited as the genuine primary source.

    These questions aside, the most daunting issue is the frequently poor audio quality of the tape recordings. It can be exasperating to try to decipher something as fundamental as who is speaking, particularly on the tapes from the Kennedy and Nixon administrations, which include many recordings of meetings. Even the most painstaking effort to transcribe the recordings is bound to result in some errors, the present authors’ own attempts included. Accordingly, all three presidential libraries have desisted from producing official transcripts—although without transcriptions the recordings are not user-friendly, despite the libraries’ best efforts to index and catalog them. The libraries have decided (wisely, in our view) to regard the recordings as the original document and everything after that as a facsimile or interpretation, almost a translation, so to speak, and one that must be vouched for by the scholar(s) who produced it.[7]

    Another factor, of course, is the enormous commitment of time and resources it would take for the presidential libraries to produce high-quality transcripts. When the Kennedy Library estimated, nearly 20 years ago, that it would take about one hundred hours of listening to produce an accurate transcript of a one-hour recording, it was widely suspected of manufacturing an excuse to avoid the work. But time and experience have proven that ratio to be right on target.[8] Producing books based on the tape recordings is (or ought to be) an extremely labor-intensive endeavor. It is microhistory, and presenting it accurately demands that the scholar be steeped in the subject matter. Often he or she must know the events of a given day, and sometimes a given hour. There is, in other words, a direct correlation between the time one invests in listening to the tapes, and in researching their context, and the sense one is able to make of them. Regardless of the difficulty in rendering accurate transcripts, the onus remains on those scholars of the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon presidencies who willingly assume the burden and claim in print to have carried it off.

    The remainder of this essay will examine several of the most acclaimed works in this evolving historical genre, namely, the volumes based on the Kennedy recordings by Ernest May, Philip Zelikow, and now the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia, and the books on the Johnson recordings produced by Michael Beschloss.

Libby Indicted, But the Press Still Needs a Federal Shield Law

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By Max Holland

    One of the older conventional wisdoms in our nation’s capital is that any president who tries to plug leaks in the ship of state is engaged in a futile, self-defeating exercise. The leaker(s) can never be definitively identified, and any attempt to do so involves tactics more familiar to a police state and likely to boomerang. Richard Nixon’s formation of a secret “plumbers unit” is invariably cited as proof of this proposition, as it was arguably the first step in the self-destruction of his presidency. But Washington clichés often seem like athletic records: they exist in order to be broken.

    Regardless of how it ends, the investigation into who leaked the occupation of Ambassador Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, to columnist Robert Novak has already shattered several conventions. When special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald took up his charge in 2003, many observers predicted that his probe would wind up like countless others mounted in the past. He might develop a list of probable sources, but ultimately Fitzgerald would prove unable to pinpoint the leaker(s)—and reporters, of course, never identify their confidential sources.

    But espousers of the conventional wisdom too quickly discounted several unique aspects of the case. Fitzgerald was specifically investigating whether a felony had been committed under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982, rather than some run-of-the mill leak. Plame’s standing as a CIA officer under non-official cover was also a secret known (and only of interest to) a very small circle outside the agency, chiefly the office of Vice President Cheney. By working the investigation from the inside out, via e-mails, schedules, telephone logs and interviews, Fitzgerald was able to pinpoint what two White House aides, Karl Rove and I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, knew and when they’d learned it. Fitzgerald then extracted waivers of confidentiality from the two men by hoisting them with their own petards: since the White House had confidently declared that neither aide was involved in outing Plame, Rove and Libby could hardly refuse.

    That was the moment that Rove, Libby and their lawyers must have started to feel very queasy about Fitzgerald’s ability to achieve the previously unachievable. The waivers helped open the door for reporters to talk, some more willingly than others, about their conversations with the White House aides. The Supreme Court was not about to reverse precedent and rule that reporters have an absolute right, during a criminal investigation, to protect their sources under the First Amendment.

    It seems obvious that Rove and Libby were wedded, as much as anyone, to conventional notions about how the leaking game is played in Washington. Otherwise, what happened defies explanation. The only plausible reason Libby would have given his allegedly false statements to the FBI, and committed perjury and obstruction of justice before a grand jury, was that he believed he could get away with it, i.e., he was convinced that reporters’ sworn testimony would never be pitted against his own. He also seems to have miscalculated in thinking that the main legal threat he faced was violation of the 1982 act. Fitzgerald has charged no one under that narrow law, nor is he likely to.

    Judging from Fitzgerald’s five-count indictment, if Libby had simply feigned a loss of memory or told the truth, he might still be the vice president’s chief of staff and national security adviser. At this writing, the only difference between Rove and Libby seems to be that Rove and/or his lawyers were quicker to realize that this leak investigation just might be different. Rather than initially attempting to deceive and later to obstruct, Rove seemed to have a fresher memory of events with every grand jury appearance.

    Libby’s indictment has already exacted a political toll on the Bush administration regardless of how this situation plays out. Even with the Iraq War raging, and even though the White House further distorted already flawed intelligence to justify that war, President Bush had managed to enjoy a positive rating with the public in terms of his personal integrity. No longer. The Libby revelation has struck a nerve with the public. Nearly six out of every ten citizens believe the administration is ethically challenged, according to an Associated Press-Ipsos poll conducted in early November.

    If the Plame affair were to be investigated no further, it would likely be remembered as the pivotal mistake of the Bush presidency, the moment when the administration’s arrogance and bald duplicity on national security matters finally caught up with it. But the shattering of conventions in this leak case has likely not yet run its course. If recent signals from Libby’s lawyers are to be believed, his defense team plans to pursue testimony from journalists aggressively, both those named, and those unnamed, in the indictment, and to seek access to their notes and records. Such a strategy threatens to turn any trial into a protracted legal battle over reporters’ privilege, with reporters coming out the losers.

    Such a turn would be in keeping with an ominous trend, because the Libby indictment is not occurring in a legal vacuum. For nearly three decades following the Supreme Court’s decision in a 1972 case known as Branzburg v. Hayes, federal courts rarely issued subpoenas seeking the disclosure of reporters’ anonymous sources, despite the absence of a federal “shield law” protecting reporters’ historical privilege to keep the identity of their sources confidential. But in the last few years this privilege has come under concerted attack in a variety of cases. Both prosecutors and defense attorneys have been resorting, in increasing numbers, to the tactic of using reporters and/or their ostensibly privileged information to achieve victories in court that might otherwise be unobtainable.

    In a pending lawsuit brought by Wen Ho Lee, for example, five journalists are facing contempt-of-court charges and $500-a-day fines because they refused to reveal their government sources for stories written or broadcast in 1999 about the former Los Alamos nuclear weapons scientist. Lee was publicly accused of espionage then—wrongly, it turned out—and he is now suing the Energy and Justice departments, and the FBI, for violating his rights under the Privacy Act. He claims that five reporters (H. Josef Hebert of the AP, Robert Drogin of the Los Angeles Times, James Risen of The New York Times, Walter Pincus of The Washington Post, and Pierre Thomas, then with CNN) received confidential information about his employment and finances from federal officials. It does seem obvious that they did. But in order to prevail in his civil suit, Lee must identify precisely which government entity provided the information, and only the reporters know that.

    Short of complying with the lower court order to be questioned by Lee’s attorney, the reporters have only one recourse: an appeal to the Supreme Court. If the Lee case is accepted by the Justices, it will mark the first legal test of reporters’ privilege since 1972, the last time the Court addressed the issue. And while there is little doubt Lee is justified in seeking redress for the grave personal damage done to him, a marked erosion of reporters’ privilege would be a high price to pay for compensating him.

    Meanwhile, an entirely separate legal proceeding raises a somewhat different, but still very troubling, issue. In this instance, federal prosecutors seem bent on criminalizing the dissemination of classified information to a journalist. The case involves a Washington Post reporter, Glenn Kessler, and two lobbyists, Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman, from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a pro-Israel organization.

    Unbeknownst to Kessler, Rosen and Weissman were put under FBI surveillance in 2004 after Larry Franklin, a Pentagon analyst, admitted to having passed classified information on to them as well as directly to journalists on numerous occasions. Franklin had agreed to participate in a “sting” operation, whereby he would pass an allegation about an Iranian plot in Iraq to Rosen and Weissman while the FBI monitored the two lobbyists to see what they would do with the information.

    On this occasion Franklin handed no actual documents to Rosen and Weissman, so when they phoned Kessler in July 2004, all they could convey was oral information, gleaned, they told him, from “an American intelligence source” whom they would not identify. Kessler never wrote a story based on the leak, but that tape-recorded conversation is now part of the federal indictment of Rosen and Weissman, who were charged in August with “conspiracy to communicate [classified information] to persons not entitled to receive it.”

    This particular allegation represents a very aggressive application of the 1917 Espionage Act. Indicting either AIPAC lobbyist for knowingly passing classified information to a representative of a foreign power (which the lobbyists deny they did) is one thing, but still in keeping with traditional prosecutions under the statute. On the other hand, including “members of the media” as persons not entitled to receive that information is a startling departure. If allowed to stand, it will tend to “criminalize conversations with journalists,” as Howard Kurtz of The Washington Post put it, if not nudge application of the 1917 law uncomfortably close to a British-style Official Secrets Act.

    Another worrisome situation concerns Dana Priest, a Washington Post reporter, who broke a November 2 story about a “hidden global internment network” run by the CIA to house suspected members of Al Qaeda. The so-called “black-sites program” dates back to six days after the 9/11 attacks, when President Bush signed a directive authorizing the CIA to kill or detain Al Qaeda members anywhere in the world. The first black site was established in Afghanistan, and by mid-2002 another two existed in Thailand and at the U.S. base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, alongside the prison that is known to the public. By early 2003, the agency had brokered deals with two Eastern European countries—later identified in England’s Financial Times as Romania and Poland—to establish black sites in Soviet-era compounds. “The top Al Qaeda prisoners exist in complete isolation from the outside world,” wrote Priest. “Kept in dark, sometimes underground cells, they have no recognized legal rights, and no one outside the CIA is allowed to talk with or even see them, or to otherwise verify their well-being.”

    This is precisely the kind of investigative reporting Americans acutely need about the war being waged in their name. Priest’s story was drawn directly from, among others, CIA officials who are deeply concerned about the legality, morality, wisdom, and/or the sheer practicality of imprisoning even hardened terrorists indefinitely, in complete secrecy, and without the slightest bow to international law or convention. What is surely extremely troubling is that the covert program, originally designed to sequester the top Al Qaeda leaders thought to be directly responsible for 9/11, has grown like mad. The standard for consigning suspects to this “invisible universe” has been lowered or ignored, Priest wrote. “They’ve got many, many [prisoners] who don’t reach any threshold,” said one intelligence official.

    Under normal circumstances, Priest’s biggest concern would surely be what to wear when she accepts a Pulitzer Prize for her work. Instead, she is contemplating the distinct possibility of a proceeding that might ultimately attempt to force disclosure of her confidential sources. CIA director Porter Goss, a former Republican congressman from Florida, has referred the leak to the Justice Department for investigation—thus putting in motion the same process that resulted in Libby’s indictment.

    Meanwhile, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN) and House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL) have ostentatiously called for a joint congressional investigation, with Frist declaring that the leak itself presents a greater threat to national security than the existence of the black sites. And the House Intelligence Committee has announced it will oblige Hastert, which might force Priest into an awkward confrontation with grandstanding politicians.

    The rank partisanship that pervades Washington now threatens to spill over into arenas that have been comparatively free of bitter, tit-for-tat politics. The sooner reporters’ privilege is codified into law at the federal level, the better off everyone will be. The District of Columbia and 31 states have passed shield laws for the press. There is no reason why there should not be a federal statute so that reporters can go about their job without having to look over their shoulder to see if lawyers are coming after them.

This article first appeared in The Washington Spectator, 1 December 2005
© 2005 by Max Holland