Interview with Consultant
MICHAEL BESCHLOSS
(Mr. Beschloss is an historian specializing in the U.S. presidency and American politics and is the author of many noted non-fiction books. He holds degrees from Williams College and Harvard University. He has held appointments in history at the Smithsonian Institution, St. Antony's College, Oxford University and the Harvard University Russian Research Center. He acted as consultant on Path to War.)
HBO: How did you get interested in Lyndon Johnson?
MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: Johnson was the president who presided over my childhood. I was seven years old when he came to the White House, and actually I wrote him a letter about a month after he became president saying please hire a large carving firm to carve president Kennedy's head on Mount Rushmore. And I got a reply from Johnson's secretary. My friends at the hockey rink all thought that the letter was forged because a president's secretary would not write to a kid who was seven years old. And the first time I went to the Johnson library I asked them to uh, look up to see if they could possibly find this kid's letter. And they pulled it out in about five minutes, there it was.
HBO: Really? So that must have been a very empowering experience for a seven year old to get a letter from the White House.
MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: I think when I was growing up presidents were really at the center of the solar system. Someone like Lyndon Johnson got us deeply into the Vietnam War, and also did things like civil rights and the Great Society. These figures were really enormous figures in American life. So, I think for any kid in the 1960's growing up, whoever was president would have been a big figure, LBJ especially.
HBO: Yeah. That's my childhood as well, probably the first president I remember.
MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: Uh-huh.
HBO: How would you describe his presidency?
MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: It just drives you crazy. Because if you took Vietnam out of the mix, Lyndon Johnson would have been one of the greatest presidents in American history. Almost up there along side Lincoln and George Washington and Franklin Roosevelt. And he did it to himself. He was the one who got us deeply into the war in Vietnam, a war that we now know was something that he felt from the very beginning, privately, he felt that there was no chance for us to win.
HBO: Hmm. Aside from Vietnam, what are some of his major accomplishments that still hold up, and, today?
MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: If it weren't for Lyndon Johnson African-Americans could not use hotels and restaurants. He was the guy who got that bill through. He got Americans into the habit of getting federal aid to education. Trying to do things about poverty. Trying to improve American life through government effort. All that came from LBJ, his intentions were wonderful. And what really just makes you sad is that fact that in the end, he found this ugly war in Vietnam that brought him down and did the same to the country.
HBO: What do you think was his tragic flaw?
MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: He never was willing to listen to his own best judgement. Privately about Vietnam he was saying, I know we can't win this war, but I can't think of anything worse than losing. So, he let himself be talked into getting into a war that American would be defeated in. Would be not only a tragedy for America and the world, but would destroy his presidency. And he knew it. If he was a little bit more psychologically secure, more emotionally secure, he could have said, you know, I've been in politics for thirty years, and I realize that this war is a loser, I should listen to my own judgement.
HBO: Now, I looked at books and read some of the books that you put together, you edited, I am amazed at the amount of conversations that Lyndon had recorded. Can you tell me a little about how this was uncovered? Did he just have an endless tape recording machine? I mean it just seems almost unheard of to have that much documented.
MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: Almost the second he came into the White House Johnson wanted this secret taping system put in to listen in on his conversations in the oval office, in his bedroom at the LBJ ranch, and also on the telephone. He wanted to make sure that there was a taped record of the great things he did for history later on. He also wanted this for daily business. So that if a Senator double crossed him, he would have a tape of the Senator having made a promise. And he could call the guy up looking at the transcript saying, you know, you promised me yesterday, Joe, and I quote, and Joe would wonder how Johnson had such a photographic memory.
HBO: So nobody knew that he was making these tapes?
MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: Almost no one around Johnson knew that he was taping all these conversations secretly. Not his wife, not his daughters, not most of his staff. And long afterwards I ran into members of the Johnson staff and said, did you know that your boss taped virtually all of your confidential conversations with him? And I'd see sort of a look on the face of the guy, almost like the deer in the headlights, you know, what wonderful news. And I could just see him imagining all the embarrassing and bad things he might have told Johnson that he might be worried would wind up on these tapes.
HBO: I mean, aside from everything else, it sounds like he was a bit paranoid?
MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: Johnson was an extremely suspicious person, and this is a case where in some cases paranoids have enemies, because Johnson did. But Johnson was prone to always assume the worst. And that was something that served him well as a politician. Because in a politician one thing you want is someone who is going to say, there is the person in the room who might do me harm. Or there is the public problem that might be a problem for America. But the problem was he could never turn it off. And the result was that even at a happy time, all he could do was focus on the conceivable dangers that might destroy him.
HBO: Tell me about your involvement in Path to War.
MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: Early in the project when the script was being written, the people from HBO came to me and said, we'd like you to advise us on how to make this script, and the project, as historically sound as possible. And that's something I was very impressed by. Because we historians know that Americans largely get their history not so much from books, but from movies and what they see on television. So, it's very important to us to make sure it's done right. From the beginning to the end HBO was very committed to making sure that this was as historically accurate as possible.
HBO: So what was your role? Did you review the script, or did you offer suggestions?
MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: I read virtually each version of the script and offered suggestions, and also when a new source came out like the secret LBJ tapes, I'd suggest to the script writer, take a look at this, you might want to revise what you've written in accordance with what we now know.
HBO: So how much of, percentage-wise, or just in general, how much do you think is drawn from the tapes?
MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: That's more one for Daniel (Giat, the screenwriter), I think, it's hard for me to say.
HBO: What surprised you when you heard those tapes?
MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: What surprised me was that Johnson was so uncertain about himself. That this guy who I saw on television as a child, who was so commanding and so self confident, in private is almost always miserable. On election night 1964 he wins with one of the great landslides in history. You listen to Johnson on the tapes, all he's worried about is Bobby Kennedy and how he might run against him in 1968. This is someone who had every reason to be happy and feel a great sense of accomplishment. Yet, because of his peculiar psychology, he was almost always miserable and very uncertain.
HBO: If you can just kind of, thinking off the top of your head, do you think some of that might have come from the fact that he knew deep down that he wasn't the man that people wanted to be President? Not that he wasn't elected on the ticket, but he kind of came in through tragedy, and maybe he felt, I don't know if that had something to do with it.
MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: Johnson always knew that he was being compared to the ghost of John Kennedy. Ladybird says in her diary tapes, every time we walk into a room, I know that what people really want to see is not me and Lyndon, but Jack and Jackie. That's something that affected him as long as he was president.
HBO: Did you met a lot of the people that are in the film? The real people?
MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: I think everyone, yeah.
HBO: How do you think they did? Have you seen the movie?
MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: I've seen a trailer.
HBO: OK, so you can't really talk about that.
MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: I could talk a little bit about Johnson and, let me just improvise and see if any of this is useful. Here is a case where you really didn't need to distort what happened to create false drama, because the drama was all there. You had a president essentially destroying himself, and someone like Johnson who, in actuality, was absolutely mesmerizing. He doesn't say anything in an uninteresting way. He doesn't say John Smith is nervous, he says, John Smith is nervous as a whore in church. Or these Texas expressions. He says, Medicare is going to go through Congress faster than a dose of salt through a widow woman. I had no idea what this meant. I finally had to ask friends from Texas. They said, don't you know that women of Johnson's generation used Epsom salts as laxatives. So this is a guy who you just have to do it in a historically sound way, and he's absolutely fascinating. But more than that, Johnson's personal drama is a drama that affects all of us today, because here we are in 2002, every one of our lives is still affected by Vietnam.
HBO: Speaking of Vietnam, there's been a lot of films that focus on Vietnam and what happened over there. What do you think this film shows that's different?
MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: What we've never had on film is an answer to exactly one question, and that is, how did we get into this horrible catastrophe? And that's a story that's not in Vietnam, it's not on the campuses, it's in the White House, it's in Washington. So, the first time on the film, we're now getting a sense of what drove Lyndon Johnson to get us involved in this war in a big way, and what drove his advisors to tell him what they did.
HBO: What do you think will surprise people about the behind closed doors conversations and dramas?
MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: Vietnam was one of the big events in American history. It was a turning point. It changed this country in an enormous way. And what you'd hope to see is that inside the White House, behind closed doors, it happened after serious discussion in a rational, logical way. I think what people will be blown away by is the fact that this was a tragedy that did not have to happen, it happened largely because of human folly.
HBO: Now, I know you've just seen the trailer, but what do you think of Michael Gambon's depiction?
MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: I felt as if Lyndon Johnson had come back to life. And I think Lyndon Johnson might have felt that way too, except for the fact that Johnson always wanted himself to be presented like that wooden figure that we all saw on television giving speeches. When in fact the Johnson that's much more appealing is the Johnson behind the scenes that we see Michael Gambon playing, that was the Johnson that Johnson himself worked very hard to conceal.
HBO: Interesting. People would have felt differently... a little more open and honest...
MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: One thing that's appealing about Johnson nowadays, especially when we're in an era in which politicians are very freeze dried, very formal, they don't say a word wrong, he has this marvelous use of language. And his wonderful stories. There is nothing about the guy that is uninteresting, but that's exactly what Johnson feared that people would learn during his lifetime.
HBO: Did you gain a new appreciation for him after listening to all the tapes?
MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: I felt for Johnson in a way that I couldn't have before because when you live through a man's life the way that you do when you're listening to tapes and essentially listening to his life hour by hour, you see the almost impossible situation that he was in. At one point he says to Ladybird on these tapes, with Vietnam I feel as if I'm in a plane that's crashing and I don't have a parachute.
HBO: You bring up Ladybird. I think one of the interesting relationships in this film is LBJ's marriage. He really was a very guarded man around some people, but I felt like he really broke, broke down barriers with her. Can you talk a little bit about their relationship?
MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: There was only one person in Johnson's life who he really trusted, and that was Ladybird. Everyone else he suspected in some way of having motives that might ultimately destroy him. And the other thing was that Ladybird was almost like an in house psychiatrist. She understood his emotions extremely well. When he was up she would calm him down, and when he was down he used to go into these horrible depressions, pull the blanket over his head. She would pull him up. In her way, Ladybird Johnson made it possible for Johnson to function as President. Without her I think it would have been impossible.
HBO: The relationship between them in the film is really touching and you can see him blow up when you see...you see that she sees beyond that immediate outburst. He really did have a temper, huh?
MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: Had a bad temper. She once told me, He humiliated me, but he made me larger than I otherwise would have been. And that led her to essentially go on with the marriage, because she said, this is someone who has all sorts of petty flaws. And in many ways made her life miserable, but she could see the fact that this was also a large man who wanted to do large things.
HBO: Why was this such a controversial war?
MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: This was a war that a president and his advisors got us into without consulting the American people very much. What we'd always liked to see is, if a president is going to get us involved in a big war, like George W. Bush after September 11th, he comes to the Congress, comes to the American people and says, this is something that's important, but you'd better know it could be very costly. In Johnson's case, he kept it very quiet. He was terrified that if the American people knew what lay ahead, they would never permit the war to go forward. And what the lesson is, is democracy works when our leaders tell us the truth. If Johnson had told Americans I think Vietnam is important but it could take ten years, kill fifty thousand Americans and we might now win, Americans would have said, we don't want this war, get out, that's exactly what should have happened.
HBO: And instead, it just kept escalating until it was too late.
MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: Instead, Vietnam became one of the great catastrophes in our history. Today we live in a much more poisonous political system. There are tens of thousands of Americans who are no longer with us, whose lives might have been saved. This would be a very different country. The reason it's not is because of the very great mistakes that were made about Vietnam in the mid 1960's.
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DIRECTOR:
John Frankenheimer
WRITER:
Daniel Giat
CONSULTANT:
Michael Beschloss
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