Volume 44, Number 16 · October 23, 1997
Feud
By Russell Baker
Mutual Contempt: Lyndon Johnson, Robert Kennedy, and the Feud That Defined a Decade
by Jeff Shesol
Norton, 591 pp., $32.50
Lyndon B. Johnson's Vietnam Papers: A Documentary Collection
edited by David M. Barrett
Texas A&M University Press, 869 pp., $94.00
In the time of Lyndon Johnson's vice-presidential agony I found myself one day in his Capitol office listening to a Johnson soliloquy. Its central theme was his devotion to John F. Kennedy, but there were several lesser motifs. When Johnson was launched on one of these meditations, torrents of words poured out of him. On this occasion he canvassed the spectrum from the magisterial arrogance of Charles de Gaulle, to poverty in India, to his youthful career as a rural Texas schoolteacher. Always, however, the talk came back to his admiration for President Kennedy.
Review, 4085 words
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