More than anything, Lyndon Baines Johnson wanted to be loved—by his family, his friends, his staff, the nation, everybody. He liked to envision himself as a benevolent dictator of the world, supplying every living soul with housing, clothing, a job and eternal peace. Fate could not have been more cruel, then, in denying him the love he craved, in making him so hated during the latter part of his presidency that he dared not venture outside the White House. In his bewilderment and despair, he ruefully asked: "How is it possible that people could be so ungrateful to me after I have given them so much?"
Doris Kearns, 33, associate professor of government at Harvard, describes that last bitter period of L.B.J.'s presidency in Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream, a biography to be published by Harper & Row in June. It is a sad, dispiriting account of ebbing power and influence, of vast ego and appetites deflated, of a world collapsed.
Psychic Distance. Johnson first met Kearns at a party for White House Fellows in the spring of 1967. A Ph.D. candidate at Harvard, she had been selected for the program even though she had written a magazine article entitled "How to Remove L.B.J. in 1968." When it was Kearns' turn to dance with the President, he boasted that Harvard men "can't dance like I'm dancing now." She obviously waltzed her way into his affections, because after working for several months in the Labor Department, Johnson had her transferred to the White House. As he prepared to leave office, he asked her to come to Texas to help with his memoirs. She replied that she wanted to continue working with the poor in Cambridge, Mass. Never mind, said L.B.J.; he would find her bigger and better poor in Texas. She finally succumbed and spent much of the next four years at the Texas ranch.
Johnson doubtless expected love at least from his biographer, but in this, too, he was to be disappointed. He told Kearns that she reminded him of his mother, and so he unburdened himself of dreams, ambitions and regrets that he had confided, apparently, to no one else. He hoped that she would salvage his reputation at Harvard, citadel of real and imagined enemies. But Kearns was too well trained on alien terrain and kept her psychic distance from her overwhelming subject. Imbued with some of the 1960s suspicions of practical politics, she is fair to L.B.J. but unfailingly cool. To her, Johnson is a monstrous amalgam of political good and evil, worthy of meticulous dissection. Her scalpel is cutting, and the wounds inflicted will not be easily healed by later biographers. In her book, Johnson is naked to his enemies as he never was when alive.
The book provides no confirmation of rumors that author and subject were lovers. Kearns insists that the relationship was strictly literary. She was bemused but scarcely impressed by the gifts he lavished on her. She received no less than a dozen electric toothbrushes, a gift L.B.J. favored for friends, "for then I know that from now until the end of their days, they will think of me the first thing in the morning and the last at night."