December 13, 2006
Aaron Asher's LBJ Posted by Fredric Smoler at 10:25 PM EST Today’s lead piece on AmericanHeritage.com, an article from the November/December issue of American Heritage, is an account by Aaron Asher, a New York editor and publisher, of his meetings with Lyndon Johnson. In 1969 Asher, passionately opposed to the Vietnam War, reluctantly publishing LBJ’s memoirs as a condition of accepting a better job and a doubled salary. This is, I think, a charming piece of writing, although its very even tone leaves me uncertain about how much irony inflects Asher’s story of the remarkable sanctimony that seems to have been part of him in the late 1960s and early 1970s—and, as I remember those times, was part of a lot of us. Asher begins by noting that he “had once admired [LBJ] as the man who had pushed through the legislation that for the first time since Reconstruction enabled all eligible African-Americans to vote. I respected him as the leader whose Medicare legislation fulfilled the early promises of the New Deal, as the President who wanted to fight a war on poverty. . . . But the escalation of his other war had overwhelmed my earlier admiration.” This is worth thinking about. The younger but clearly adult Asher weighed up the passage of, among other things, the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act—which Johnson had rammed through Congress, and which ended a few centuries of de jure racial domination in America—against Johnson’s necessarily violent attempt to stop a tyranny from conquering 16 million people, and found that his detestation of the latter enormity “overwhelmed” his approbation for the former achievement. At the time, of course, the American intervention in Indochina was more commonly described by people at least a little like the younger Asher (I was one of them) as a genocidal war. In the wake of that war’s loss, when real genocide was practiced in Cambodia by one of the forces we had been fighting, or later on, when an authentic genocidal war was waged by a Hutu government on the Tutsi, and by Saddam Hussein on the Kurds, or by a Serbian government on Bosnian Muslims, or by a Khartoum government in Darfur, the ease of that tag “genocidal” looks at least a little odd.
In any event, the following anecdotes show Asher charmed by Johnson and sometimes impressed by him, but also describe a few episodes of what seems to me, at this remove, to be unreflecting self-righteousness, although a self-righteousness almost everyone I knew at the time displayed on a remarkable number of occasions. I cannot tell whether Asher is quietly amused, or even a little appalled, by this quality of his younger self, or whether he thinks that younger self was simply a creature of its time and place, or whether he thinks that younger self was admirably stringent. So I shall not speculate about his intentions, but merely note that if disproportion is the soul of comedy, the spectacle of one of the country’s better editors repeatedly (if silently) condescending to one of the country’s greatest Presidents is not without comic possibilities. The emotions—the orgiastic sanctimony, the exultant indignation—that Asher made me remember have in recent years been displayed by many of the people I know, and in many of the people I read, nowadays against President Bush, but a few years ago against President Clinton. The comparison, I think, is a limited one. Looking only at the former, George Bush, although like Johnson a President who prosecuted an unpopular war, did not ram through any Civil Rights Acts; he instead managed to cut taxes on the richest among us and make it harder for very poor people to get out of the clutches of their less than scrupulous creditors. He did not set up Medicaid, he rather managed to stop medical research that was in the long run likely to free uncounted numbers of people from great pain and disability. But despite the injustice of the comparison, I am struck by how orgiastic sanctimony and exultant indignation now seem to be a durable part of our political culture. War memoirs have been described by Samuel Hynes, both an author of one and a brilliant analyst of the genre, as an old man looking back in wonder at the younger man he had been and puzzling over how that younger and now vanished self had once done and thought and felt certain things. I wish I knew whether this modest antiwar memoir was animated by that same curiosity—but I cannot tell.
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