Presidential Recordings News

I will be light blogging for the next week because of events associated with the release of the first three LBJ tapes volumes: Friday, I’ll be part of a panel at the LBJ Library on the tapes; next Thursday, will be at the 92nd Street Y. Meanwhile, in last Sunday’s Times, Eric Foner had a review of the volumes in which he largely offered praise for the work itself but questioned the historical significance of the transcripts. In one important area, I think that Foner is simply wrong.

“Despite the insights these volumes yield into Johnson's modus operandi,” Foner notes, “they do not significantly alter our understanding of the man or his presidency.” To paraphrase Bill Clinton, this issue depends on what the definition of “significantly” is. As Foner points out, the tapes reveal a President with who was a master political manipulator and a legislative tactician of unparalleled skill, reinforcing the reputation that Johnson had in the 1960s. Yet on matters such as these, it’s the details themselves that matter, as Robert Caro demonstrated in his volume on Johnson’s tenure as Senate majority leader. The significant historical question, it seems to me, is not whether Johnson knew his way around Congress or national politics, but how he did so. And on that point, the tapes do significantly enhance our understanding of the Johnson presidency, because they access the kind of background conversations that never made it into any written record.

Foner has a couple of technical criticisms of the volumes. “Perhaps because Johnson knew he was being recorded,” Foner notes, “his legendary earthiness is missing.” Perhaps—but I’m doubtful that a President who recorded this type of conversation (with the son of the head of Haggar slacks) or recorded himself obstructing justice with future Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas screened out calls in which he was overly earthy. Johnson never intended for the tapes to become public. Additionally, Foner correctly notes that “to make the transcripts readable, the editors have inserted punctuation, turning rambling, ungrammatical remarks into coherent, complete sentences,” while making “no attempt to convey Johnson's Texas accent.” The latter point isn’t quite true—times when LBJ spoke in a pronounced drawl are noted in the text. But as Foner doesn’t call for phonetic transcription for anyone besides Southerners, such an approach, as I’ve written before, would render Southerners “corn pones” (to use a Johnson phrase) while everyone else spoke standard English.

The only aspect of the Foner review I find troubling comes in its closing paragraph: “Perhaps the greatest limitation of the presidential tapes is that they give so myopic a picture of politics and government. Almost by definition the participants in these conversations are government officials, business figures, labor leaders and heads of organizations -- what C. Wright Mills famously called America's ''power elite.'' Grass-roots civil rights activists, antipoverty crusaders and critics of America's role in Vietnam go unrepresented.”

On one hand, this is a surprising critique coming from Foner, whose own scholarship offers some of the most sophisticated interpretation that exists of mid-19th century American politics and congressional workings. On the other, perhaps the comment isn’t surprising, in that it encapsulates the underlying assumptions of the academic Left’s assault against political (or diplomatic) history in the past two decades. Because the 2500 pages of transcripts from LBJ’s first 70 days in office contain few items from “grass-roots civil rights activists, antipoverty crusaders and critics of America's role in Vietnam,” in Foner’s mind they ipso facto offer a “myopic a picture of politics and government,” focused on the ''power elite.'' (This last comment recalled for me the written statement of Brooklyn’s former women’s history professor, dismissing all U.S. political and diplomatic history classes on the grounds that they dealt with “figures in power.”)

I would suggest, however, that it is “myopic” to tell U.S. history in the 1960s as if government institutions didn’t matter, or as if the federal government (perhaps aligned with business interests) was engaged in a monolithic oppression along lines of race, class, and gender, only to be challenged by grassroots activists and crusaders of the type seen in various 1960s Leftist movements. Foner’s words almost suggest a fear that the tapes might compel scholars—to borrow Theda Skocpol’s phrase—“to bring the state back in” when analyzing U.S. history in the 1960s. I certainly hope this will be the case.