Oral History Transcript - Robert Hardesty - January 15, 2008

Interview with Robert L. Hardesty

 

Interviewer: Barbara Thibodeaux

Date of Interview: January 15, 2008

Location: Austin, Texas

_____________________

 

Interviewee:   Robert L. Hardesty – Mr. Hardesty served President Johnson as a speechwriter, assistant, and co-editor and contributor to Johnson’s memoirs, Vantage Point.  He has continued his close ties to the Johnson family as a member of the Steering Committee of the Friends of the LBJ Library and the Executive Committee and the Board of Trustees of the National Wildflower Research Center.  Mr. Hardesty became the seventh president of what is now Texas State University in 1981.  He served in that role until 1988, strengthening the LBJ connection by introducing both the LBJ Picnic and the LBJ Distinguished Lecture Series.  

 

 

BARBARA THIBODEAUX:  This recording is part of the LBJ Centennial Celebration Oral History Project sponsored by Texas State University.  Today is January 15, 2008.  My name is Barbara Thibodeaux.  I am interviewing Robert Hardesty at Austin, Texas. 

 

Mr. Hardesty, if you are ready.  Can you tell me how you first came to the attention of the Johnson administration?

 

ROBERT HARDESTY:   I was writing speeches for the postmaster general, and uh, I do not know if this is true or not, but I was told when the White House was looking for a new speech writer, they called the Democratic National Committee and asked them to send the fifty best speeches written during the ’64 campaign for cabinet officers.  I say 43 of them were for John Gronouski, the Postmaster General.  That’s how it came about.  I did not know anybody in the White House, and I never met President Johnson.  But, I was an advocate, a firm believer of what he was doing, civil rights, poverty, health, and so forth.  I wanted to go to work for him in the worst way, but I didn’t know how to go about it because I didn’t know anybody there.  I didn’t have an advocate.  So the only way I could do it was to write good speeches that would come to their attention – which is what happened.

 

 

 

THIBODEAUX:  So what years did you work as his speech writer?

 

HARDESTY:      At the White House?

 

 

THIBODEAUX: Yes.

 

HARDESTY:      Went over in ’65 and I left with President Johnson in January of ’69.  But in the meantime, I got involved in congressional relations as well.  So the last couple of years I was doing both speech writing and congressional relations.

 

 

THIBODEAUX:   What did congressional relations consist of?

 

HARDESTY:      Wet-nursing members of Congress; getting their votes, trying to keep a current head count on various pieces of legislation, returning their phone calls, getting messages to the president – just pick and shovel, pick and shovel work.

 

 

THIBODEAUX: What was your earliest impression of President Johnson when you first started writing for him?

 

HARDESTY:      Well, first day I was over there, Jack Valenti called and said come on over, the President wants to meet with you.  And that was quite a thrill.  I figured the first day I wasn’t going to meet the President.  And I went over to the Oval Office and he was sitting behind his desk.  I wanted to, well first thing he got up from behind his desk and came around and shook my hand, which I thought was a wonderful gesture for the most powerful man in the world to do that for a lowly speech writer.  And he said I want to get to know you because if you are going to write speeches for me, you need to get to know me.  I talked and so forth and he ushered me over to the sitting area.  He sat in the rocker and I sat on one of the facing sofas.  And he just talked about how he wanted his speeches written.  Short speeches, short sentences, short words, short paragraphs.  He said you got to write them so that the char woman who cleans the building across the street will understand them.

 

So we talked about that for a while.  And then he said, “You know, you’re here and people are going to come and try to get favors from you.  If they know you they are going to flatter you and tell you that you’re the smartest man in the world.”  He said, “You and I know you’re not.  And so if they, if they want favors, just say you are not in that business.  And if they say, well, they know the President, which is sort of a threat, say, well, you are just going to have to go to the President.”  And I never had any problems with that after that. 

 

Then he said, “Don’t do anything to embarrass the presidency.”  He said - you know, probably the White House in those days was much smaller than it is now.  “There probably haven’t been eighty or ninety people who worked as assistants to the presidents  in the whole history of the republic and your among that exalted few.  And take it seriously and don’t do anything to embarrass the presidency – ever.”  He said, “Not the president, not me, not the presidency.  It’s the greatest office in the world and don’t do anything to weaken it.”  And that was basically the core of the conversation we had and I went back and started writing speeches.

 

 

THIBODEAUX: Did you specialize in any particular subject area?

 

HARDESTY:      No, no. You specialized in what President Johnson wanted you to specialize in.  If he had something on his mind and he happened to run across you in the hall, he would assign you the speech.  Sometimes he would assign a speech to three people, the same speech, to get a little competition going.  He didn’t mind competition.

 

 

THIBODEAUX:  And then would he pick the best one or just combine the best of all of them?

 

HARDESTY:      Yea, it would vary.

 

 

THIBODEAUX: What was the usual process for preparing a speech?

 

HARDESTY:      That would vary too.  Sometimes Jack Valenti would call and say that the President has a speech such and such a date to such and such a group and he wants a speech draft.  Sometimes the President called and said he wanted a speech draft.  You just never knew.  It was very informal.  There was no chief of staff at the White House.  The President was his own chief of staff and he didn’t think anything of it to pick up the phone and say I need a speech for such and such.

 

 

THIBODEAUX: Was it customary at that time not to have a chief of staff?

 

HARDESTY:      No, no.  He didn’t want a chief of staff.  He thought it was dangerous to have a chief of staff.

 

 

THIBODEAUX: Why so?

 

HARDESTY:      Because the president loses contact.

 

 

THIBODEAUX: So he was a micromanager?

 

HARDESTY:      Ahh – yes and no.  You know he was concerned with the big picture, but he was concerned with the little picture too.

 

 

THIBODEAUX: He liked that personal contact with his staff?

 

HARDESTY:      Yes.

 

 

THIBODEAUX: Was there any particular side of  President Johnson or his persona, personality, that you tried to bring out in his speeches?

 

HARDESTY:      Well, we had sort of a dispute among the staff.  They wanted, some of them wanted him to sound like Jack Kennedy, soaring rhetoric.  And there were those of us who thought that the real Lyndon Johnson was the Lyndon Johnson the people ought to see because he was, he was very persuasive, very colorful.  And so that was a tug of war.  So it was not a very satisfactory situation.

 

 

THIBODEAUX: In an interview in 1971, I believe that was with the LBJ Library, you concluded that LBJ was a complex man, and I think that is the conclusion of most LBJ historians and scholars.  But what is your opinion of that – what made him complex or what makes a complex personality?

 

HARDESTY:      Because there were many facets to his personality.  He could be generous, thoughtful, he could be cruel, he could be brilliant, he could be hard-headed.  The list just goes on and on and on.  If Lady Bird knows all Lyndon Johnson, she is the only person in the world who does.  You just never knew which side of him was going to turn up.

 

 

THIBODEAUX: Did that make speech writing difficult, not knowing which…

 

HARDESTY:      No, no.  You, you get to know him and what is on his mind, and you get to know how he speaks, and you get to know what issues he is thinking about at the time.  That is why he always wanted us around in the White House when he was giving a speech; it gave you an idea of what was on his mind and what his priorities were at the time.

 

 

THIBODEAUX: You also described LBJ as one of the funniest men you ever knew.

 

HARDESTY:      Yeah.

 

 

THIBODEAUX: Can you give an example of that, any stories about his humor?

 

HARDESTY:      Well, there’re so many.  I remember, after we left the office we were working on the memoirs, and he was talking about the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution.  He said, “Now they are accusing me of deliberately setting up the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution so I could get Congress behind me.” And he said, “ I did.”  He said, “I remember when President Truman went into Korea unilaterally, and then when he wanted some help from Congress, Senator Bob Taft said, ‘Mr. President if you want us on the landing you should have gotten us on the take-off.’”  And he [Johnson] said then, afterward they passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution; and some of the members of the Senate said they did not know what was in it and there were hidden things in it and so forth.  Bill Fulbright, Senator Fulbright carried it on the floor.  He was the floor leader for the resolution.  And he [Johnson] said, “For a Rhodes Scholar to say he didn’t know what was in the resolution is more than this Texas hillbilly will ever believe.” That was just typical Johnson.

 

 

THIBODEAUX: Did he use his humor in any particular way to be persuasive or maybe to chastise people?

 

HARDESTY:      Always making a point. 

 

                        He was very much like Lincoln, very much like Lincoln that way.  Many similarities to Lincoln.  They were both tall and gangly, not overly handsome, they were both from the frontier, both grew up in poverty.  They used humor to relax situations that used humor to make a point.  They both had terrible wars going on that neither of them could seem to control.  Historians tell me that if the North had lost at Gettysburg that Lincoln would not have been reelected president.  And that is how close it was.  And that is how close it was in Vietnam with President Johnson, only he came out on the losing end of it.  They’re very similar – both sort of manic depressive.  You know, they just – they were very similar people.

 

 

THIBODEAUX: That is an interesting comparison.  Do you believe that you influenced policy through your speech-writing or influenced Johnson’s ideas?

 

HARDESTY:      Sure.  Dean Atcheson, former secretary of state - and before that he had been assistant secretary of commerce under Roosevelt – one of the things he was doing was writing speeches for Roosevelt from his point of view.  And then, of course, when he became secretary of state, somebody else was writing speeches for him.  He said one time, “Speech writers make policy and policy-makers make speeches.”  There is always an opportunity – big sometimes, little sometimes - to make policy.

 

 

THIBODEAUX: Going on to the Higher Education Act, the signing of it, did you accompany President Johnson to Texas State, or what used to be Southwest Texas?

 

HARDESTY:      Yeah. We were at the ranch and he said, “Fly down with me in the helicopter.”  Nasty day.  He said, ”There is still some work I want to do on it in the helicopter.” So we flew down and did some work on the plane.  “So now I  think we ought to say it this way.”  So we got the speech finally in the form he wanted it.  We got off the helicopter and went on in and he delivered the speech and signed it.  I was just standing around, and I said later, “If I had known I was going to go back there as president, I would have paid more attention to it.”  It didn’t mean anything to me.  It was a relatively small teachers’ college.

 

 

THIBODEAUX: That was your first visit to Southwest Texas?

 

HARDESTY:      Yes.

 

 

THIBODEAUX: Did you frequently accompany President Johnson whenever he did act signings?

 

HARDESTY:      In the White House?

 

 

THIBODEAUX: Yes, or even across the country.

 

HARDESTY:      It varied.  I didn’t travel a whole lot with him.  You know, I was stuck back writing speeches.  Although he did take us writers to the Manila Conference.  That was an historic event.  Hawaii, Pago Pago, New Zealand, Australia, the Philippines.  We flew with him to Vietnam, South Vietnam.  At that time he was the first president since Lincoln to visit a war zone.  That was a historic occasion.  I didn’t travel too much then.  I would go to the ranch sometimes.

 

 

THIBODEAUX: Did you make any subsequent trips to Southwest Texas with President Johnson?

 

HARDESTY:      No.

 

 

THIBODEAUX: That was rather ironic that you made the trip.

 

HARDESTY:      It really was.

 

 

THIBODEAUX: Did President Johnson discuss his time as a student at Southwest Texas? 

 

HARDESTY:      Oh sure, sure.

 

 

THIBODEAUX: What were his views on his days there?

 

HARDESTY:      They say he felt inferior because he didn’t get a Harvard education there.  I never felt that, I never saw that.  He talked about school and talked about what he learned.  He didn’t seem ashamed of it at all.  It gave him an opportunity to - it is where he honed his political skills, honed his speaking skills.  That’s where he learned what poverty was really all about.  Those were his very formative years.  His roommate, the late Willard Deason told me one time, he said, “You know, we could just never keep up with him.”  Said, “Lyndon Johnson could see around corners.  He knew what was going to happen before anyone else did.”  He was always right.  So he developed all of that down there.

 

 

THIBODEAUX: Was that the same at the White House – that he could see around corners?

 

HARDESTY:      Well, he could see around corners a good deal.

 

 

THIBODEAUX: How do you think Lyndon Johnson viewed power and how did he exercise power?

 

HARDESTY:      He was comfortable exercising power.  He wanted power.  He wanted power to do the things he wanted to do.  He didn’t use - it was about persuasion.  Just being the president gave you power.  Some people have power that they don’t use because they didn’t want to use up their popularity chips.  They don’t want to use up their popularity and yet Johnson took the attitude, what is it for if you don’t use it up.  And he did.  He lost the South because of the Civil Rights Act.  He knew he was going to lose the South. 

 

Somebody asked him, “Do you consider yourself a President in trouble?  He said, “What do you think a President is for?”  He would trade off to get a trade for one thing to get something else.  You know, it was just meeting with people, one on one.  There is a great story of President Johnson and Dirksen, Senator [Everett] Dirksen, who was the Senate Majority- Minority- leader, and who Johnson was trying to get him to help out on a bill which would expand the number of consulates in the Soviet Union, a treaty.  There would, there would be more in the Soviet Union and they would have more here.  And it didn’t really make any difference to us because the Soviets were all over here anyway spying.  We were just a second Moscow.  And so the President proposed it and Senator Dirksen said, “No, no, oh no, we’re not going to let all of those Russian spies come in.”  He said, “You are never going to talk me into it.”  And so he [Johnson] had him down one night and started talking to him.  He reached out under a drawer and pulled out a memo from J. Edgar Hoover, the Director of the FBI, and said, “I want you to read this. And Hoover said just basically what I said, that I would have no problem with the Soviets opening a consulate around the country because they have their spies there already.  People are free to travel in this country and we’re not going to be giving them anything.  The Soviets would be giving something up because we would be free to roam around the country to a certain extent and it would be to the benefit of the United States.” 

                        Dirksen looked at him and said, “Can a man get a drink around here?”  Johnson ordered the Filipino to bring in a couple of drinks.  Dirksen drank his drink and read this thing again.  “Well, he made a point.  He made a good point.  I hadn’t thought about that.  Can a man get another drink around here?”  So Johnson ordered him another drink.  He drank that.  Read it again. And said, “Well, I can see the point.”  He said, “I think I will support you, but you are going to have to give me a little time to change my mind.”  So that was a way of exercising power.

 

                        But I had always heard and read this story that Johnson twisted the arms and blackmailed people, and he used FBI reports against them and so forth.  And since he died I made a point of asking everybody who served Johnson and Congressional Relations, Larry O’Brien, Barefoot Sanders, a lot of people and some of the people who were involved in it, Joe Califano,  Marvin Watson, Jack Valenti.  I said did you ever see him blackmailing anybody or do something that was untoward.  They said never. Never.  As a matter of fact, somebody said he paid more attention to his enemies than he did his friends.  He just – he worked them.  That’s all.  That’s how you work power.  He knew, he knew what power was and he knew what the power of the presidency was.  He used it.  He used it in a very positive way to get the legislation through that he wanted.

 

 

THIBODEAUX: Do you think that is one reason he decided not to run again?

 

HARDESTY:      That’s so complicated.  That’s so complicated.  The war was going bad, his health was going bad, his popularity was going bad.  I think he could have been re-nominated and re-elected, but I don’t think there would be anything to govern because the country was so divided by then.  I don’t think he would have been an effective president and I think he knew that.  So I don’t know what – all three things, all three things.

 

 

THIBODEAUX: Going on to his memoirs Vantage Point, what was your contribution or your role in the book?

 

HARDESTY:      Well, the first thing I did was sketch out the contents, what the chapters would be, how we would organize the book.  And we took it out to the ranch and made some changes to it, but basically the contents of the book, the organization of the book was the way I had proposed it.  Then we made up the assignments: Harry Middleton, Bill Jordan, and I. Doris Kearns, sometimes she came down.  We each had a chapter, we each had several chapters.  We would write them, send them in and then when it was all over, I became the overall editor.  I went through the entire manuscript, editing it, making changes, rewriting and so forth. 

 

                        Big disappointment I think for all of us.  Before we left the White House, I sent to the President a memo about the memoirs and I said, “You have a great opportunity here to really solidify your place in history and write wonderful memoirs because you have great insight into people, a great sense of humor about people.  You’re a great mimic and I hope we can capture some of that in the book.”  So we started writing the book and we would capture some of his idioms and his way of writing, speaking, like that Fulbright story I told.  And then he would send the book to friends in Washington D.C., New York.  He sent a chapter up and they sent it back and said it is not presidential.  You shouldn’t say it that way.  He would cut out; I remember just cutting out the color of the book.  Plus the fact none of us had any idea those tapes were, audio tapes, telephone tapes, were in existence.  I have no idea why he didn’t give us access to those, because those were the – [would] really make the book shine.  But he didn’t do it.  I think if I had know before I came down to Texas that he had those - we didn’t even know they existed - that he had those and withheld them from us, I probably wouldn’t have come because I had great hopes he would open up and help us write it.

 

 

THIBODEAUX: Dr. Brown said there might be a humorous story from – that when you were there at the ranch house.  Doris Kearns Goodwin, in her book The American Presidency (actual title: Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream) talked about how – in the forward – how LBJ fondly compared her to his mother.  Dr. Brown thought he had heard that wasn’t necessarily interpreted that way.  Do you remember him making the comparison?

 

HARDESTY:      Yeah, we were in the office after dinner and he was seated at his desk and we were seated around him.  And Doris, who had just flown in that day said, “I’m awfully tired and if you’ll excuse me, I think I am going to bed.”          

 

She is going out the door; as she was leaving the door, the President said, “You know Doris, you remind me of my mother.” She smiled, nodded her head, went out and closed the door.  And then he looked around at us and said, “They both have a tendency to put on weight.”

 

 

THIBODEAUX: [laughter] That part she left out of her forward.  That’s very funny.

 

                        I know that you later wrote in 1983 the pamphlet, booklet, The LBJ the Nation Seldom Saw, which was very good.  Did you ever consider writing your own biography [of LBJ]?

 

HARDESTY:      I’m working on it.

 

 

THIBODEAUX: Oh, great.  That is something for us all to look forward to.

 

HARDESTY:      I’m through with the White House years.  It’s slow.  I’ve got other things to do.  It’s getting there.

 

 

THIBODEAUX: Great.  I was wondering with so much insight that you have why you had not done that so far.  I am glad you are working on it.

 

HARDESTY:      Well, I love Lyndon Johnson.  He is the most exciting man I have ever been around and he wanted to do things that I wanted my President to do, and none of them were doing it.  You know Truman tried.  Truman was so waspy, he was waspish with the Congress.  He couldn’t get anything done.  They were always mad at him about something and he would take them on like a bantam rooster.  And Eisenhower wasn’t interested and Kennedy to some degree was interested, but he didn’t have much respect from the members of Congress.  He had been a back bencher in the Senate and he didn’t have those personal relationships he could call on the way LBJ did.  I would really have some serious doubts whether he could pass most of those bills.  But Johnson never had IOUs and [when] somebody wanted a post office in their district and Johnson wanted his vote on something, they worked out a deal.  “That’s the way the country works.  But sometimes it’s just sitting people down and getting very emotional about things.  We’ve got to do this.  We can’t let this country drift.  Can’t let these Negroes,” as he called them then,  “continue to live under the yoke of discrimination.  He said it’s not right and you know it and I know it.  We’ve got to do something about it.”  

 

                        He was very persuasive, so he used power in many, many ways.  Basically the power was the presidency and if you know how to use it, you get a lot done.  If you don’t know how to use it or you don’t care to use it, you don’t get a lot done.

 

 

THIBODEAUX: That would be an interesting book in itself.  Did you remain close to the President after he retired to Johnson City?

 

HARDESTY:      Yes.

 

 

THIBODEAUX: Well, after he retired, did you ever go back to Washington D.C. or did you stay in Texas?

 

HARDESTY:      I went back to Washington and interviewed people for the book and  ran some errands for him, political errands and so forth – so I went back a number of times.

 

 

THIBODEAUX: Do you know what plans he had for after his presidency?

 

HARDESTY:      Well, obviously the library, the book, were his two main concerns.  And then after he wrote the presidential memoirs he then talked about writing his memoirs of the Senate days.  And it became clear after a while that the second book was not going to get written – his health was not that good and his focus more and more became on the library and not on the memoirs.  It was frustrating.

 

 

THIBODEAUX: You had planned to work with him on the book about the Senate?

 

HARDESTY:      Well, I was going to stay down there and do it.

 

 

THIBODEAUX: So, how long after the book did you start working for Governor Mark White as press secretary?

 

HARDESTY:      No, no.  I went back during the ’72 convention, election, to work for Speaker Carl Albert and Hale Boggs and House Democrats to develop issues because it was quite obvious that George McGovern was going to win the nomination.  It was also obvious he was going to go down in flames, and also obvious he wasn’t standing for things that most of the Democrats in the House stood for, liberals and conservatives.  They were rather radical, young radicals, and they took over the convention.  So they just decided they were going to run their own campaign separate from the Democratic National Committee and they asked me to come out and help them do that.  So I did and (pause) I think we only lost ten or twelve seats in the House in that big landslide for Nixon.  So it was worth it.  Then  when the election was over, Carl Albert asked me if I would stay up in Washington, but my family was still in Austin.  It was going back and forth and he said would I come full-time and work with him as a consultant.  I thought, well, this is a pretty good idea.  I would enjoy that.  I like Carl.  Lot of respect for him.

 

We were up in Snow Mass (Colorado) skiing the first part of the year.  I got a call from Dolph Briscoe who had just been elected – hadn’t been sworn in yet – and said, “I’m looking for a press secretary and they tell me you’re my man.” 

 

                        I said, “Sure, I would be interested, but you need to know that I didn’t support you in the primary.  I supported Ben Barnes.”

 

                        He said, “I know that.” I know that. “But if you went to work for me, you would be loyal to me, wouldn’t you?”

 

                        I said, “Absolutely.”

 

                        He said, “Well, that’s all I am concerned about.”  So I went to work for him for three years.

 

 

THIBODEAUX: I don’t know where I picked up Mark White.

 

HARDESTY:      Well, I became close friends with him, Mark White.  Mark was Briscoe’s Secretary of State and we forged a bond that exists until this day.  We talk two or three times a week.

 

 

THIBODEAUX: So you wound up being a Texan from thereafter?

 

HARDESTY:      Yeah.  I became a Texan the easy way.  Coming down with the former President of the United States, he introduced me and Harry Middleton to people and they would invite us to their parties and gatherings and so forth.  Then you didn’t have to work at all to be accepted because you were automatically accepted.  That’s why I say I became a Texan the easy way.

 

 

THIBODEAUX: So how did you make your path to Southwest Texas?  What came after press secretary?

 

HARDESTY:      I went to the University of Texas system as Vice Chancellor – ’76, and stayed there until ’81.  And then the chairman of the board of Southwest Texas called and said, “ Would you have any interest in coming down here. You have talents and things we are looking for.” 

 

                        And I said, “Let’s talk about it.”  And at that time I was serving also concurrently on the Board of Governors of the United States Postal Service.  The year I was appointed president of Southwest Texas, I was elected chairman of the Board of Governors.  So I had two almost full-time jobs because the Board of Governors efforts - the Postal Reorganization Act of 1970 that took the postal service out of the cabinet, took the postmaster general out of the cabinet.  [In] the reorganization the president appoints nine governors and they elected a chairman.  And so they elected me chairman three times (laughs) while I was trying to figure out what I was doing down at Southwest Texas.  But it worked out in many respects because I had a lot Washington work to do up there, some lobbying, working with the Higher Education groups and so forth.  So I combined.  We met once a month in Washington, so I combined those meetings with the university’s business.  So it worked out well.

 

 

THIBODEAUX: You mentioned Lyndon Johnson in many of your speeches at the college.  Did Lyndon Johnson influence your own educational philosophy?

 

HARDESTY:      Mine?

 

 

THIBODEAUX: Yes, or did you just share a common philosophy?

 

HARDESTY:      Well, I had an educational philosophy long before I met Lyndon Johnson.  I had gone to George Washington University in Washington D.C., and they were organized in such a way that it was impossible for you to slip between the cracks and not have courses they wanted you to take.  The type of courses they wanted you to take.  When I went down to Southwest Texas State, I told this story many times, I received a letter of congratulations from a recent graduate, a young lady [sent] a very nice letter, very warm.  And it was so badly written and the grammar was so terrible, the spelling was so awful.  Even though I shouldn’t say that – my spelling wouldn’t hold up very well either, but I do know how to write.  And I found out where she – what school she graduated from, the School of Business.  So I called the Dean in and I said, “Tell me about this young lady.”  I said, “She obviously didn’t get any other education about  business when she majored  in business.” 

 

                        “Oh yeah, she was an A student.”

 

                        I said, “Well she didn’t get anything else out of the school, did she?”  He said, “Apparently not.”

                       

So then I called all the deans in and I said, “It looks like our students are slipping between the cracks.  They are getting a good education in what they major in, but they are not getting a well-rounded education.  We’ve got to do something about that.”  So we did two things.  I put a faculty committee to work devising a core curriculum.  The sixties, you know, the sixties, the students just ruined higher education.  They take what they want and don’t take what they don’t want.  And we’re not past that yet; we’re still suffering from it.  And I said we just can’t do that.  We’ve got to have some discipline on what the students are going to take here.  So let’s have a core curriculum and then let’s have a college of general studies which is going to advise students and make sure they do not fall between the cracks.  Before they were not falling between the cracks, they were leaping between the cracks.  So that was my philosophy.  I think, I think President Johnson would’ve felt the same way, wanted a well-rounded education, but he didn’t influence my philosophy of education. 

 

He influenced my ability to run the university tremendously because I had watched him over the years, how he dealt with people and how he dealt with issues.  I would, I had a crisis and I discovered I was a good crisis manager.  And I would settle a crisis and say afterwards, “Now how did I have enough sense to do that?”  I realized that is exactly what Johnson would have done.  So he influenced my being at Southwest Texas and how I ran the university a great deal.

 

 

THIBODEAUX: I know you both had a very personal touch that was appreciated.

                        You have been credited with reviving the Johnson legacy on campus.  What programs or events did you sponsor or establish at that time?

 

HARDESTY:      Well when he first came down here, he went to lecture at Southwest Texas.  And he said, “I want to bring very, various people, interesting people, high-ranking people, people from my administration [to] come down and speak so the students can get the benefit of some of the best minds in the country.”  He got a few people down, but then he died.  Then that idea just went by the wayside.  And when I went down there in ’81, we talked about it and talked about it – about how he had made that promise.  So I said let’s make it a reality.  And that’s when we started the LBJ Distinguished Lecture Series that revived his reputation a good deal.  And then of course I talked a lot about him when I would give speeches and so forth.

 

 

THIBODEAUX: How do you think that connection helped the university?

 

HARDESTY:      I think, I think, well the connection to the university because I was able to bring very bright and very distinguished people to lecture at the LBJ Lecture Series.  That’s one thing.

 

 

THIBODEAUX: In 1992, I believe that you and Tom Johnson were put in charge of arranging and hosting a reunion and symposium to evaluate President Johnson’s domestic policies.  Will you first give me the highlights of that reunion.  Can you remember anything about it?

 

HARDESTY:      Yeah, we had so many of them, but I think we called it “The Difference He Made.”  We were trying to find a theme.  We had a meeting up in Washington and Harry McPherson said, “Before we get in this thing we need to talk about the difference he made.”

                       

So I said, “You just came up with the title.”  From there we just figured out how we were going to do it, various areas of policy and so forth – the difference he made.  Get people to come down and we got people from Head Start that had gotten ahead because of Head Start.  People who were successful because of the poverty program.  People who were successful because of the education program – higher education loans and grants and so forth.  And we just tried to pull it all together in one symposium, “The Difference He Made.”  I think it was very successful.

 

 

THIBODEAUX: Who were some of the other participants in the symposium from his administration?

 

HARDESTY:      Tom Johnson was one. (pause)  Your catching me flat-footed.  (pause)

 

 

THIBODEAUX: I read it and I’m having a hard time remembering.  We can go back to that.  But I do want to continue on that.  In the preface of The Johnson Years: The Difference He Made, you commented, “We wear our service in the Great Society as a badge of honor.”  And then you quoted Jack Valenti who often said, “This was the summertime of our lives.”  Can you explain what it was like – how much you and the others in the administration shaped the Great Society?  What I am coming around to, it seems like Johnson had the vision, but it was the soldiers, he brought together a talented group, and then you turned it into a reality.

 

HARDESTY:      Well don’t overemphasize that.

 

 

THIBODEAUX: (laughs) Okay.

 

HARDESTY:      He was responsible for the Great Society and told people what to do and the soldiers did it.  But he was the one, he organized, had his staff organize task forces – education, civil rights, health, and so forth.  He had distinguished people coming in meeting with them and making recommendations, and to that extent, Califano and Moyers and those people were responsible for the programs of the Great Society and the legislation.   But it was Johnson, you know, he just couldn’t do it all so he assigned people to do it.  Then they went to him and said these are our recommendations – higher education, health – and he would go through it and he’d say I don’t like this idea or this one won’t fly, and we can’t get it through Congress, and so forth.  When it came right down to it he made the decisions and [I] don’t think any of us ever thought we were molding pieces of policy and helping run things.  He was running things and we knew it.  But we were proud to help him in anyway we could.

 

 

THIBODEAUX:             Do you think…

 

HARDESTY:      He was very, a very smart man and he knew government probably better than anybody who had ever served in the presidency.  Stop and think.  He was a Congressional secretary when he was in his 20s, ran for Congress when he was 28, he became United States Senator 41 or 42, he became Senate minority leader, senate majority leader, vice-president, president.  He knew every interdependency, was and did and who was running it.  It was just phenomenal.  You know, he also had close relationships with kings and prime ministers and princes and presidents all over the world.  He just had his hands on things.

 

 

THIBODEAUX: In your opinion, what do you think is LBJ’s greatest legacy?

 

HARDESTY:      (pause) That’s very difficult to say.  I will say right off-hand civil rights.  But then you have to realize that the poverty program was part of civil rights, the education program was part of civil rights, Medicare was part of civil rights.  Black families, older parents get sick and they did not have the money to get health treatment, and if they did they were depriving their kids of education.  So that was a part of civil rights.  So it’s all mixed up.  The poverty program, these other aspects, were part of the poverty program too.  You know what I’m saying?

 

THIBODEAUX: Yes.  Yes, it was all interrelated.  It’s hard to separate it out.

                        You also made a statement in the preface to the Johnson Years [[The Difference He Made] that one of the purposes of the symposium was to balance the scales of history.  Do you think over this whole time period that has been accomplished yet?

 

HARDESTY:      No, no, not at all.  I’m hoping to live long enough to see it happen, but I don’t think I will.  You know, just the debate between Hillary and the blacks.  What she said the other day.  Martin Luther King Jr. had a dream and Lyndon Johnson put it in to action.  Everybody got mad at her and said she is denigrating Martin Luther King Jr..  And she, the paper this morning [is] trying to clarify it and suddenly Lyndon Johnson is dropped out of the picture. 

 

 

THIBODEAUX: I noticed that.  She mentioned President Kennedy.

                        What do you think is the least known or realized about LBJ?

 

HARDESTY:      Oh, I think the least known and least realized [is] what a colorful, persuasive person he could be in small groups of people.  How funny he was and how persuasive he was.  Just, you can’t describe how effective he was in smaller groups.  He was just terrible on television.  But that’s, I think, that’s the, you know, if people knew it they have forgotten it.  It’s going to take a good historian, but all the records are there, and if somebody wants to come along and spend half a lifetime going through the record and putting it together, piecing it together, the Lyndon Johnson that has been torn apart.  It’ll, it’ll come around.

 

                        He gave a speech one time to a group of, to a group of candidates for Congress.  They weren’t incumbents, they were fresh candidates, fresh Democratic candidates.  He was telling stories and he talked about Medicare, the doctors, and how the doctors said it was never going to work.  He said, “That sort of reminds me of old Uncle Ezra from Johnson City when they brought the train through.  Built the tracks, brought the train through and had the stands all there and had a big ceremony and the little high school queen with a bottle of wine.  And when they are ready to go she hits the locomotive over the snoot and this thing begins chugging slowly out.  Uncle Ezra says, ‘They will never get the damn thing started.’  And pretty soon the engineer got up a head of steam, a head of steam, and the train was going [at a] pretty good clip and going around the bend and disappearing.                                                                                                                   

And they said, ‘Well what do you say now Uncle Ezra?’

                        He said, ‘They’ll never get the damn thing stopped.’”

 

 

THIBODEAUX: (laughing) That’s a good story.

 

HARDESTY:      That’s a Lincoln story.  You know, the same kind of things Lincoln would talk about.

 

 

THIBODEAUX: What misconception of Lyndon Johnson would you like to change?  I think you more or less said that to me already, just his perception of being a warm, just a human person versus what he came across as on the T.V.?  Any other misconceptions, ideas that you would like to see changed?

 

HARDESTY:      Well, you know, he had flaws and he knew it, and he didn’t try to hide it.  Get Harry Middleton to tell you this story about – a good man, trying to save my reputation for years – none of them have ever succeeded yet.  He will tell you a wonderful story.

 

 

THIBODEAUX:  I will.  That will be interesting.

                        Where do you think this image of Johnson came from that was so, saw him as, I guess he came across as being cold publicly, but where did he get this reputation as ruthless, mean, and ill-tempered from?

 

HARDESTY:      His enemies.  He was ill-tempered, he could be very ill-tempered.  I mean, you know, I have seen him chew people out that was just – God.  Never did me.  He knew how to treat people.  He knew if he really lit into me, I probably would have gone out and gotten drunk and wouldn’t come back for three weeks.  I have thin skin and I’m sensitive.  If I did something he didn’t like he just shut me out for three weeks, give me the cold shoulder, cold shoulder.  But he could be very, very mean.  Very, very nasty.  But when it was over, he would always do something to make up for it.  He never apologized.  He would give them a gift, send them down to Camp David for a weekend, anything just to show that he loved them and just something that happened on the spur of the moment.

 

 

THIBODEAUX: So there was a greater truth to all the bad stories, but there was more to it than just that. 

                                    Was Johnson concerned about his personal image?

 

HARDESTY:      (laughs) I don’t know.  I don’t know if you read about or heard about the lavaliere mike.

 

 

THIBODEAUX: Oh yes.  I’m sorry.

 

HARDESTY:      He got up there and put the lavaliere mike on him and [he] started walking around on national television and gesturing and so forth.  I think it was when he was trying to get the surtax passed.  And he was marvelous.  He was just typical Lyndon Johnson.  And telegrams came coming in, telephone calls – why haven’t we seen this Lyndon Johnson before?  And Bob Kempner  took all these things up, put them in front of the President and he said, “This is what you should be doing.  Look at all of this, look at all of this.  You’ve captured the country.”

 

                        He never did it again.  Kempner asked me, “Why, why hasn’t he done that again?”

 

                        He [Johnson] said, “I’m not in show business.”  Of course he was, but he didn’t look upon it that way.  Kennedy was in show business.  Johnson did not look upon himself as being in show business.

 

 

THIBODEAUX: Did he concern himself more with looking presidential than looking like himself?

HARDESTY:      Yeah.

 

 

THIBODEAUX: This is my last question.  The Common Experience topic for this coming year at Texas State University reflects on civic responsibility and Lyndon Johnson’s legacy.  What lessons or ideas would you hope these students [will] take away from, with them from the Common Experience activities that will be going on this year?

 

HARDESTY:      Compassion for people, everybody.  Trying to get people to work together.  Sort of like [what] Obama’s talking about now, but Johnson did it.  He never had any lasting enemies in the Congress.  If somebody voted against him, he never, never (pause) punished them, because he knew two weeks later he might need that guy in another vote, close vote.  So he did, he just pulled them together, and I think that is one thing people ought to learn.  And as I said compassion for [the] least fortunate.

 

 

THIBODEAUX: Was there anything that I have ignored that you would like to comment on?  Anything else that you would like to add?

 

HARDESTY:      Well energy, energy.  He just had boundless energy.  And he expected us to have boundless energy.  He taught us to stretch ourselves.  We would stretch ourselves as far as we think we could go, and it stretched us a little bit more.  We realized that we could do a lot more.  I’ve written this someplace.  I wrote a speech at two o’clock in the morning after having just finished another major speech.  I was, [the speech] had to be in his morning reading and I just couldn’t do anymore.  I was too tired.  So I finished it wasn’t a particularly a good speech, and I sent it in.  I went back the next morning and the speech was back on my desk.  The operator came on and said, “Mr. Hardesty, the President is coming up there.”

                       

                        He said “Robert.”

 

                        I said, “Yes sir.”

 

                        He said, “That speech you sent over last night…”

 

                        I said, “It wasn’t very good.  I said, “No,”  I said, “I don’t think it was very good.”

 

                        He said, “No it wasn’t.  And he said, “You know, I’ve got a war in Vietnam, I’ve got a civil rights bill tied up in Congress, I’ve got inflation heating up, I’ve got two cabinet officers resigning.”  He just went through this whole litany, realizing what he was going through.  And he said, “What I’m trying to say is, I have more to do than have to worry about writing my own speeches.  Now do you think you could get at that speech and in a couple of hours rewrite it and give me something I would be proud to give and you would be proud to say you wrote?”

 

                        God, you know, it’s just, it’s just the adrenaline of it because you realize what he was going through.  Just because you didn’t have enough sleep, that’s not enough justification for not writing a good speech.  He was just boundless energy. [He] worked two full days a day.

 

 

THIBODEAUX: Amazing.  Thank you Mr. Hardesty.  Good information.  I really appreciate you taking the time.

 

HARDESTY:      I am sure there are a dozen other things we could talk about.

 

 

THIBODEAUX: I know.  We have to do a follow-up, if you don’t mind.

 

(End of interview)