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The Boston Globe OnlineBoston.com Boston Globe Online / Editorials | Opinion
Hardball, LBJ-style

By David Nyhan, Globe Columnist, 10/22/97

have an eminently sensible suggestion for all the heavy-breathers in the news biz, hereinafter to to known as the Pressed Corpse. Get yourself a copy of ''Taking Charge,'' the new book about Lyndon Johnson's secret White House tapes. You need this. But Michael Beschloss' fairly and deftly edited set of fascinating LBJ conversations should carry a warning label in this age of self-aggrandizing media political correctitude. ''Beware: Following Transcripts Show Grownups at Work in the Grisly Game of Politics: May Be Unsuitable for Small Children and Journalists with Weak Stomachs.''

For the overwrought editorialists and easily gulled reporters who've been flapping their gums and keyboards over the Clinton administration ''scandals,'' the transcripts of a real pro in action will demonstrate the difference between raw politics and the specious journalism of the 1990s.

Here is LBJ in all his painful, twisted glory, the great brawny liberal of the Great Society and civil rights, the accidental president haunted by the shade of the martyred JFK and the threat of RFK's very real enmity toward the gauche Texan. What's astonishing is how clever, devious, simple-minded, coarse, and savvy was the tormented Lyndon.

He had an incredible knack for persuading others that he was in line with their thinking, but had to balance the conflicting interests of other, opposite forces. In hundreds of conversations, LBJ persuades Southern conservatives that he's one of them, black leaders that he shares their dreams, budget hawks that he's trying to be fiscally responsible, the Great Society advocates that he's serious about ending poverty.

He is brilliant, dumb, sensitive, lewd, considerate, bullying, decisive, hesitant. It's all here, and it demonstrates, in dozens of anecdotes, right from the horse's mouth, how politics is played, how government decisions are fashioned, how national policy is implemented.

Now hold up these transcripts of LBJ in action against the paper-and-videotape trail of Bill Clinton's presidency, and you see all this huffing and puffing about the Clinton ''scandals'' is a paltry tissue of innuendo and two-bit political revenge.

The journalists of today are suckers for everything handed out to them: A subpoenaed tape or document that is siphoned up by the Republicans running Congress is broadcast, leaked, or otherwise distributed, with the intent of maiming the victor in the last election.

Nowhere is Clinton ever doing anything remotely approaching the political connivance or coverup of scandals that LBJ routinely engaged in. The Bobby Baker affair, the illicit love affairs of Capitol Hill, the rumors of impropriety or bribery or extortion that were the stuff of politics in the turbulent '60s found LBJ in scandals that would cause contemporary editorial moralists to swoon.

Our blushing editorial writers get giddy over Clinton's innocuous fund-raising speeches to contributors, such as: ''We realized we could run these ads through the Democratic Party, which meant we could raise [so-called ''soft''] money in $20,000 and $50,000 and $100,000 blocks. So we didn't have to do it all in $1,000 [sums limited by individual donor ceilings] ...''

Clinton told a hotel audience: ''The fact that we have been able to finance this long-running television campaign ... where we have always been framing the issues ... has been central to the position I now enjoy in the polls.'' Big deal, right?

Nothing illegal to me. But not to The New York Times's William Safire, the old Nixon loyalist who considers himself an expert on the Clintons (remember how Hillary is a ''liar''?) In Safire's fevered logic ''that's a smoking gun,'' because Clinton admits to ''framing the issues'' with soft money.

Such ethical niceties, not evident in Nixon's criminal reign, overwhelm many journalists these days besides the super-sensitive Mr. Safire. ''Abuse of power,'' croaks The Wall Street Journal. ''A Stolen Election,'' gasps the Journal's White House columnist, Paul Gigot: ''... the president stole his reelection as slyly as any Chicago ward boss ever did.''

Gasp and double-gasp! Yo, Paul. And yo, Bill. Get a grip, guys. Your boy - Bob Dole - got clocked. Period. End of story. You're trying to rerun the Dole Disaster and rewrite the script retroactively through your newspapers, which reflect the lack of sophistication of the Washington Pressed Corpse.

Why does contemporary journalism get it so wrong? Why are we mesmerized by the dross of a politician's foibles, and virtually ignore his or her character, commitment, and foresight?

I've not yet read ''The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House during the Cuban Missile Crisis.'' But reviewers call it a riveting account of how JFK stood off all the advisers who wanted to invade Cuba or risk nuclear exchanges with the Soviets. With maneuvers both shrewd and gutsy, Kennedy brought the world through the crisis, the closest anybody's ever come to all-out nuclear war. But what do are young know of Kennedy's character? That he diddled, maybe, with Marilyn Monroe? That he had ladies of dubious virtue on the side? That as a young man he played the field?

Is that all there is to the news these days?

More and more, the print business comes to mirror the most meretricious practices of television, which was conceived as an open window on the world, and became instead our open sewer.

David Nyhan is a Globe columnist.

This story ran on page A19 of the Boston Globe on 10/22/97.
© Copyright 1997 Globe Newspaper Company.

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