Power Beyond Reason: The Mental Collapse of Lyndon Johnson
D. Jablow Hershman
New Jersey: Barricade, 2002, $27.95
Colin Challen MP
I tend to the view, presented succinctly in Who Shot JFK?, (10) that whoever assassinated Kennedy did so with the objective of installing LBJ as President. The tantalising question that arises is: did LBJ know? This book does not answer that question, but it does address issues about LBJ’s mental state which make it feasible that he could have gone along with such a plan. (11)
Hershman traces LBJ’s mental history from childhood and finds him a serious manic depressive, a man whose compulsions knew no bounds, who was driven and riven by a mental illness which often forced him to retreat to his bed for months. His condition also forced him to well-documented extremes of personal behaviour which have no parallel in modern politics. Can you imagine even Dubya displaying his penis to the press corps and challenging any of them to match it?
LBJ’s behaviour deteriorated whilst he was president, and much of his behaviour was irrational. He was often beyond reason with everybody, including friends, except for an extremely tight and trusted inner circle, people like George Brown of Brown and Root, and the members of the 8F group, a cabal of politicians and businessmen which ran some of Texas in the 1950s and 60s.
Hershman considers at length the impact LBJ’s illness had on his prosecution of the war in Vietnam. His inability to reason and his propensity to lie cost tens of thousands of American lives. LBJ lived in a world of delusion, always believing that he was on the brink of some historic victory. His problem, common amongst top politicians, was his wish to be held in the highest regard by posterity.
There is a revealing anecdote of LBJ meeting the Pope. Where the Pope gave him something of established historical value, a 14th century oil painting, the Pope got a plastic bust of LBJ. LBJ’s generosity was always self-referencing, egotistical. And cheap.
Much of the evidence relied on by Hershman is provided in contemporary accounts and eyewitness statements which attest to LBJ’s mental illness; and my conclusion is that yes, here was a man who was capable of acquiescing in the assassination of JFK.
Notes
10 Robin Ramsay, Who Shot JFK?, Harpenden: Pocket Essentials, 2002
11 None of Robert Caro’s 3 volumes of biography of LBJ have addressed LBJ’s mental illness.