Aaron Asher: What happened when an anti—Vietnam War activist met his new client—Lyndon Johnson
As an American President presides over a divisive war without an apparent end, for the second time in my life, my thoughts have been drawn back nearly four decades to another President, Lyndon Baines Johnson, and his war in Vietnam. In 1969 a strange twist of history—his and mine—made me, by then an antiwar activist, the publisher of a retired President whom I both respected and hated.
Although I had seen the polls indicating that a substantial majority of the public had lost confidence in Johnson’s conduct of the war, I was nevertheless shocked when, in March 1968, he announced that instead of running for another term as president of the United States he would retire and return to his home in the Texas Hill Country.
I had once admired him 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. In 1967, when I was an editor at the Viking Press, I joined a group of publishing people who walked out on Johnson’s Vice President, Hubert H. Humphrey, as he began a speech at that year’s National Book Awards in New York’s Philharmonic Hall (now Avery Fisher Hall). We were called militant, a comically strong word to apply to book editors turning their backs to a politician, in a page-one story in The New York Times, then trying to decide if it should continue to condemn opponents of the war....
[The author goes on to explain how he became the publisher of LBJ's memoirs.]
Read entire article at American Heritage
Although I had seen the polls indicating that a substantial majority of the public had lost confidence in Johnson’s conduct of the war, I was nevertheless shocked when, in March 1968, he announced that instead of running for another term as president of the United States he would retire and return to his home in the Texas Hill Country.
I had once admired him 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. In 1967, when I was an editor at the Viking Press, I joined a group of publishing people who walked out on Johnson’s Vice President, Hubert H. Humphrey, as he began a speech at that year’s National Book Awards in New York’s Philharmonic Hall (now Avery Fisher Hall). We were called militant, a comically strong word to apply to book editors turning their backs to a politician, in a page-one story in The New York Times, then trying to decide if it should continue to condemn opponents of the war....
[The author goes on to explain how he became the publisher of LBJ's memoirs.]