| Even before the Viet Nam War consumed Lyndon Johnson, his dark rantings sometimes shocked the White House press corps. The first serious criticism of his conduct of foreign policy came in 1965, when he sent 20,000 troops into the Dominican Republic to quell domestic violence. Stung, Johnson summoned a small group of reporters to an off-the-record lunch that began at 1:30 p.m. and did not end until 5:30. The four hours were taken up by the President's pacing, raving, justifying his action. When it was over, the numbed newsmen hurried to a nearby bar for a stiff drink. The most experienced of the group stared into his double martini and muttered, "That was really frightening."
Now Richard Goodwin, a former speechwriter and aide to L.B.J., has taken such recollections several steps further. In his memoir of the 1960s, Remembering America (Little, Brown; $19.95), Goodwin writes that Johnson was at times literally crazed and that his episodic madness helped propel the U.S. into "a needless tragedy of such immense consequences ((Viet Nam)) that, even now, the prospects for a restorative return remain in doubt." He brazenly diagnoses Johnson's large eccentricities as "incursions of paranoia," which led to leaps "into unreason" that "infected the entire presidential institution."
Whether or not Goodwin's amateur psychiatry is clinically correct, he has dared probe a dim corner of Washington history, a suppressed repository of whispered stories and yellowing memos written in shocked disbelief, describing Johnson's stalking the back corridors of the White House and fulminating about the enemies he saw surrounding him. Nor is such speculation confined to Johnson. In the final throes of Watergate, the tortured Richard Nixon could not focus on meetings, wandered the White House halls at night and sank to his knees in prayer with Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, behavior that suggested to some that he had lost all touch with reality.
Goodwin experienced the standard Johnson outrages: an interview with L.B.J. as the President sat on the toilet, a nude policy council in the superheated White House swimming pool. But from his diary of the crucial years 1964 to 1967 and from the shadows of his memory, the writer reconstructs the larger pattern of behavior that disturbed him. Goodwin did not speak up sooner, he writes, because of "misplaced loyalty or personal cowardice." An angry swarm of Johnson intimates now attacking Goodwin suggest more basic motives: money and notoriety.