Reaching for Glory: Lyndon Johnson's Secret White House Tapes, 1964-65.

• Author: Garrow, David J.
• Position: Listening to Lyndon: the private agony of a president no way out

REACHING FOR GLORY Lyndon Johnson's Secret White House Tapes, 1964-65. By Michael Beschloss Simon & Schuster, $30.00

FOUR YEARS AGO, MICHAEL BESCHLOSS published his first volume of President Lyndon B. Johnson's secretly-recorded telephone conversations that covered the period from November 1963 through August 1964. This second volume of edited transcripts advances the project through July 1965. Though phenomenally rich and valuable as historical documents, only dedicated political junkies will wish to plow through all of these dense--though often fascinating--conversations. Scholars of America's involvement in Vietnam will draw the greatest benefit from Reaching for Glory, though many other subjects, from the Dominican Republic to Johnson's own tormented psyche, are substantially illuminated.

None is so deeply fascinating as Johnson's intensely contradictory feelings about surreptitious wiretaps. Beschloss notes that the White House recordings rarely, if ever, reveal Johnson preening for the tape recorder or even speaking in a way that suggests he was conscious of it. But so thorough and purposeful was his taping that the recordings manage to capture both Johnson's fervent denunciations of wiretaps and his explicit pleasure in their results, particularly the FBI's electronic surveillance of Martin Luther King, Jr.

In late March 1965, Johnson instructed Attorney General Nicholas deB. Katzenbach that the number of wiretaps be "brought to an irreducible minimum. And only in the gravest cases. I want you to authorize them, and then, by God, I want to know about them. I'm against wiretapping, period." But Johnson's conviction had one remarkable exception: "I assume that in one of our friends' cases"--he was speaking of King--"from what I have seen, that must be where the evidence comes from. I mean, on [his] Hawaii jaunts ... California, and with some of the women ... You know who I'm talking about?" "Yes," Katzenbach replied. Johnson added, "Nobody's ever told me that's where it comes from. And I don't want to know."

The contradiction was dramatic. "I'm a red-hot one-million-two percent civil liberties man, and I'm just against them," Johnson told Katzenbach a moment later. "I don't want any wiretapping around." Katzenbach noted that his predecessor, Robert F. Kennedy, had authorized King's wiretap, and Johnson did not order it removed.

But the president who so opposed tapping loved to tape his own conversations with people who were unaware...