Bully for A Good Cause

By Hugh Sidey/Washington

THE TRIUMPH & TRAGEDY OF LYNDON JOHNSON: THE WHITE HOUSE YEARS by Joseph A. Califano Jr.; Simon & Schuster; 398 pages; $25

Discovering the truth about Lyndon Johnson is like conducting a monstrous archaeological dig, with authors desperately collecting the shards from his mountainous record. Some are intent on assembling the dark glints, while others gather points of light. Joseph Califano, his closest aide on domestic policy for 3 1/2 years, has delivered a hard, pure nugget of L.B.J. that is close to the truth. Califano was there taking notes.

The deviousness, the bullying and the lying, which ultimately consumed Johnson, are reported so graphically in some passages that a reader must wonder how Califano or any other person could work for such a tyrant. "Unzip your fly," L.B.J. challenged Califano, when the aide believed he had cut a good deal with Arkansas' wily Senator John McClellan. "There's nothing there. John McClellan just cut it off with a razor so sharp you didn't even notice it." Califano still marvels over seeing Johnson crony Abe Fortas, by then a Supreme Court Justice, counsel the President on how the government should argue its case for the Penn Central Railroad merger, then watching the merger approval come down from the court with the majority opinion authored by Fortas.

Johnson's distrust of Vice President Hubert Humphrey has never been so starkly chronicled. He stripped Humphrey of authority on civil rights programs in a brutal maneuver that went through Califano. "He has Minnesota running- water disease," L.B.J. roared. "I've never known anyone from Minnesota that could keep their mouth shut. It's just something in the water out there." Johnson peevishly curtailed his political appointees from helping Humphrey in the campaign of 1968; Humphrey lost to Nixon by half a percentage point.

But Califano hears and sees the larger purpose struggling within that tortured man. Through the civil rights campaign and the legislative battles on health, education and housing there is a vision held high by Johnson, found even in his raw Pedernales patois. "Niggah, niggah, niggah," Johnson shouted at Califano after a meeting with Southern and Border state Governors in 1966. "If I don't achieve anything else while I am President, I intend to wipe that word out of the English language."

Johnson is the last President we have had who relished domestic affairs. Califano's portrait shows that Johnson's genius was in his uncanny insight and attention to detail. "You look like an ice-cream salesman," Johnson told Califano when he showed up in a light suit. Califano went dark gray.

One of these years we may get somebody like Califano who has a bit of poetry in him. But not yet. Califano bothers us with a lot of irrelevant comings and goings around the White House.

Califano may not have intended it, but his story casts him as a gentle usurper as L.B.J.'s power ebbs and his energy fades. Califano smothered Johnson's vindictiveness before it left the Oval Office. He just ignored stupid orders, and he pushed his own policy choices on a dispirited boss, a man who could work wonders in the back rooms but was blinded in the open sunlight.

This book is only one chapter in the long, complex Johnson political odyssey. But it is a crucial one. Califano makes no pretense at being inside or expert on Vietnam. Yet he does see and report the malignancy of war and how - the bewildered Johnson raced that curse to the very end, finally losing, but not before he had at least given the nation a glimpse of a Great Society.