Flawed Giant: Lyndon Johnson and His Times 1961-1973
If success and prominence were Johnson and Baines bloodlines, LBJ’s childhood also contributed to his larger-than-life personality. Johnson was an emotional orphan. He was the offspring of “absent” parents: his father was a self-absorbed character who was often away from the household, and his mother was usually too depressed to fill her children’s emotional needs. LBJ’s childhood is an object lesson in the formation of a narcissistic personality. Yet it does not explain how so self-centered a child, adolescent, and mature man was able to translate his neediness into constructive achievements that were the envy of healthier personalities. LBJ is also an object-lesson in the complexity of human behavior. He may have been, as New York Times columnist Russell Baker says, “a human puzzle so complicated nobody can ever understand it.”
.. Throughout his life Johnson had demonstrated a compensatory grandiosity that spawned legends. In one of them, German Chancellor Ludwig Erhard asked Johnson whether he had been born in a log cabin. “No, no, no,” LBJ answered, “you’re confusing me with Abe Lincoln. I was born in a manger.”
.. Johnson’s behavior largely came from the conviction that intimidation was indispensable in bending people to his will. It was gratifying to have people love you, but it was essential to overpower them if you were to win on controversial public issues.
.. I remember once asking him, `Why did you cast that vote, Mr. President?’ `Bob,’ he said, `one thing you’ll learn someday is that you have to be a demagogue on a lot of little things if you want to be around to have your way on the big things.’ I’ll never forget him saying that. A lesson in primer politics from the Master.”
..The son of a famous father, Joseph P. Kennedy, Harvard-educated, handsome, charming, urbane, a northeastern aristocrat with all the advantages, JFK appeared to be everything LBJ was not. As painful to Johnson, Kennedy’s claim on the presidency seemed unmerited alongside of his own. “It was the goddamnedest thing,” Johnson later told Kearns, “here was a whippersnapper…. He never said a word of importance in the Senate and he never did a thing. But somehow … he managed to create the image of himself as a shining intellectual, a youthful leader who would change the face of the country.” Behind Kennedy’s back, Johnson called him “sonny boy,” a “lightweight” who needed “a little gray in his hair.”