Oral History Transcript - Harry Middleton - February 14, 2008

Interview with Harry Middleton

 

Interviewer: Barbara Thibodeaux

Date of Interview: February 14, 2008

Location: Austin, Texas

_____________________

 

Interviewee:   Harry Middleton - The founding Director of the LBJ Library and Museum in Austin, Mr. Middleton was a speech writer for President Johnson.  He served as director of the LBJ Library and Museum for 30 years.  In addition, Mr. Middleton assisted in preparing President Johnson’s memoirs and is the author of LBJ: The White House Years.

 

 

 

BARBARA THIBODEAUX:  This recording is part of the LBJ Centennial Celebration Oral History Project sponsored by Texas State University. Today is February 14, 2008. My name is Barbara Thibodeaux. I am interviewing Harry Middleton at Austin, Texas.

 

Mr. Middleton, even though you have agreed to the terms and conditions of the release pertaining to this interview in writing, will you also verbally acknowledge your acceptance with a yes or a no?

 

HARRY MIDDLETON:   Yes.

 

THIBODEAUX:  Thank you very much.

Mr. Middleton, what circumstances brought you to the White House?

 

MIDDLETON:   I was a freelance writer, having spent a number of years working for either the Associated Press or Time Inc., but at this particular point I had been freelancing. I was asked by Burke Marshall, who had been an assistant attorney general under President Kennedy and for the first year of the Johnson administration, to work with a commission that he was chairman of. The commission was one that President Johnson had appointed to study Selective Service reform. Mr. Marshall asked me if I would work with that committee and write its report. I did that through a good part of 1966. When the report was finished, that was read in the White House and that led me into working for President Johnson in the White House.

 

THIBODEAUX:  So when did that begin?

 

MIDDLETON:   In early 1967.

 

THIBODEAUX:  So in what capacity did you serve the president?

 

MIDDLETON:   As a writer, but writing mainly speeches but not only speeches, sometimes messages to the Congress, but that was my job.

 

THIBODEAUX:  What was your initial impression of the president?

 

MIDDLETON:   It’s a cliché. The same impression everybody else had: large, awesome, towering, intimidating, although he certainly was very forthcoming with me and very generous in his suggestions and his offerings and everything, but nonetheless he was a very impressive man to come into contact with for the first time, particularly there in the seat of all that power.

 

THIBODEAUX:  Do you remember your first meeting with him?

 

MIDDLETON:   Sure. It was right after I started—well, after the report was finished, Joe Califano, who was President Johnson’s—as I later learned—chief aide for domestic affairs, called me. The commission offices that I had been working in were in the executive office building, which was a large, big old building across the alley, in a sense, from the White House, and Joe Califano called me in the office that I had there and asked me if I would come over to his office in the west wing in the White House. I did. He said when I got there President Johnson would like to meet me. President Johnson had read the report and according to Joe, he wanted me to write the report—write the message to the Congress asking for legislation based upon that report. So he said, “Let’s go in to see the President now,” and that was when I met him.

 

THIBODEAUX:  How are speeches assigned?

 

MIDDLETON:   Different ways. There’s no—at least at that time there was no set way. Speechwriters would meet at the end of every week, and the President’s schedule would be pretty well known for the week ahead. Usually Harry McPherson would be in charge of the meeting and he would make the special speech assignments for the week ahead. But that was the desired way and the way that they wanted it to work, and it did work often that way but not always. Sometimes it was by happen—you know, catch as catch can. Somebody would call and say, The President wants you to write a speech on such-and-such, you know. There just was no—the way that I described would have been the set pattern if it had always been followed, but it really was not always followed.

 

THIBODEAUX:  Who were the other speechwriters of the time?

 

MIDDLETON:   Well, the ones that were on the staff as speechwriters at that time were Jack McNulty, Peter Benchley, Will Sparks, and myself. Those were the four members of the staff who were identified as speechwriters. Bob Hardesty had been a speechwriter. He was now doing liaison with the Congress, but every once in a while he wrote speeches. Everybody on the staff at one time or another did something in the way of speechwriting, but we were the four that were identified as speechwriters.

 

THIBODEAUX:  Did you collaborate on speeches or everything was individualized?

 

MIDDLETON:   Well, for the most part, they were individualized.

 

THIBODEAUX:  Did you cover any particular topic area, such as Vietnam or foreign policy?  

 

MIDDLETON:   Yes, unhappily, I did a lot of work on Vietnam. I look back on it and say, unhappily, but that was it. At the time I thought it was great, but I did other things and some things that I liked much better, but nonetheless Vietnam was kind of my specialty.

 

THIBODEAUX:  What was your process for writing speeches?

 

MIDDLETON:   Again, there was an ideal but that was just followed in the breach. The ideal way would be for the writer to get the assignment to do a speech, for the writer then to consult the experts in government who could give him the information he needed to write the speech. He would do it and it would go to the President. The President would read it and if he had revisions would send it to the writer to make those revisions and the writer would do that, and then it would go back to the President. That’s the ideal, and it didn’t always work that way.

 

Sometimes you’d get an assignment to do something in two hours because the President was going to meet with somebody and all of a sudden he needed a speech, and so that ideal had to be changed virtually daily, I would say, but that was the ideal way.

 

THIBODEAUX:  Was President Johnson a tough editor?

 

MIDDLETON:   Yeah. Yeah. He had his own way of talking. He had his own—he had a preference for the kinds of speeches he wanted. He wanted them to be short, he wanted them to be simple, and he wanted them to be meaningful, to have useful information, all of those things, and he looked for all of that. If the speech—usually if it didn’t meet those criteria, it would not have been a successful speech. Again, that was not always followed. Some of his best speeches were written by Jack Valenti—not—helped by Horace Busby, I’m sorry, who did not work for him in the White House but had worked for him in the Senate and in the House and occasionally he came back to work, and he wrote in great convoluted sentences. And the President loved them.

 

So you know, there’s an old joke around the White House that was told mainly by Jack McNulty, who says that in a meeting the President said—talked about the kind of speeches he wanted, and he said:

 

“I want you to remember the number four. I want all of my speeches to have only four paragraphs, and every paragraph should have four sentences. And every sentence should have four words, and the best words are all four letters: home, love, food, peace.”

 

  And then he stopped and he said, “Well, I know peace has five letters, but it should have four.”

 

THIBODEAUX:  (laughs) Did he give you much direction when he assigned a speech?

 

MIDDLETON:   No. Very little. Very little. You just sort of knew the way to go. Sure, if there was some particular reason, yeah, the guidance would go along with it, but for the most part, no.

 

THIBODEAUX: Was there a middleman that you would go to to kind of flush things out before it went to the president?

 

MIDDLETON:   Well, Harry McPherson was the one you would go—had been with President Johnson through his Senate years and had come back to him when the president went into the White House, and he was very close. He had written for the President for years. The President trusted him a great deal, so he was sort of the chief among speechwriters and he would, for the most part, edit our copy, and if we had any questions, we’d go to him.

 

THIBODEAUX:  What was it like to work in the White House?  (laughs)

 

MIDDLETON:   I was at the White House for the last half of the administration. Those were not the glory days. The glory years were over. The years of—the great heady years the Great Society with all the exciting legislation was past. By the time I started, the divisions over Vietnam had begun to erode the great popularity that President Johnson had enjoyed, and the country was becoming more and more divided over Vietnam. That found its way into the White House. I mean, so it was an environment in which people were aware of the divisions. There were no divisions in the White House itself that I was aware of, but we were just all aware of the fact that the country was becoming divided.

 

  Then into 1968—1968 was what President Johnson called the nightmare year. That was the year of the assassination of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, which changed the course of the war, the seizure of the Pueblo in early January, the destructive democratic convention in Chicago. All of these things happened and caused President Johnson to say later when we were working with him on his book that, “I sometimes felt that I was living in a nightmare throughout that time.” So that was the overall environment. Nonetheless, nonetheless, it was an exciting place to me, an exciting time. It was heady.

 

THIBODEAUX:  What was the interaction like between the staff and President Johnson?

 

MIDDLETON:   It depends, depended a great deal on what was going on, and on his mood. He liked to have staff around him. He did not have—he did not meet on a regular basis with us. We didn’t see him very much, but he met quite often with small groups. He invited us to have lunch with him often. He invited us to—well, always to the things that were happening in the evening. I’d say the relations between the president and the staff was easy and warm and quite collegial. We all were extremely fond of him and were very loyal to him, and he reciprocated.

 

THIBODEAUX:  What was the feeling among the staff when President Johnson decided not to run for reelection?

 

MIDDLETON:   Well, I think for a good many of us it was great disappointment. I was all geared up to write speeches for his campaign, had he—I was certain he was going to run for the president and so I was very disappointed when he dropped out. And my feeling of disappointment was shared by a good many of the others. There were some who have since acknowledged that they were relieved because they felt that he would not be able to unite the country. He was by that time too divisive a force, and they were relieved when he decided not to run and to come back to Austin. But that was not my feeling.

 

THIBODEAUX:  Toward the end of his term, I’ve always heard that President Johnson was concerned that he failed to communicate the necessity of continuing the U.S. commitment in Vietnam to the public to get their support. Just in hindsight, retrospect, is there anything that he could’ve done to—more of a publicity, you know, to sway people to his side?

 

MIDDLETON:   Probably, and in retirement he wondered about that himself, but he was walking a real tightrope. Some of his close aides in the foreign policy side had wanted him to make—to go before the public and make a full explanation of the war and ask for their support. In his mind that meant, as he put it, displaying the flag, powering the flag up, and he said in retirement:

 

“I could’ve done that, could’ve put the country—called on the country’s sense of patriotism, as we did in World War II, and clad myself in the flag, and the country would’ve rallied, I’m sure. But that would’ve moved us closer to a wider war.”

 

And the tightrope he was walking, which was really quite tight, was to apply just enough pressure to convince the Viet Cong and the insurgents in South Vietnam that they were not going to be able to take over South Vietnam by force. Just that much, but no more, not enough—anymore than that would run the risk of bringing in China or Russia and triggering off a bigger war, and so he was walking that very thin tightrope all the time. And he was afraid that if he went too far in revving up the country that he would step over that line and run the risk of—surely, our country would go with him, but he would be running the risk of getting involved in something bigger than we were already involved in.

 

THIBODEAUX:  Vietnam overshadowed other foreign policy events. Do you know of any other areas of foreign policy that President Johnson felt that he was successful in?

 

MIDDLETON:   Sure. He was successful in ways that are difficult to articulate specifically, but he was successful in beginning an end to the hostilities of the Cold War with Russia primarily, with China to a certain extent, but certainly with the Soviet Union. His meeting in Glassboro [New Jersey] with the premier of the Soviet Union did not make headline news but it did establish an atmosphere of comity that was greatly conducive to an easing of tensions.

 

  He concluded an enormously important pact with the Soviet Union that kept weapons of mass destructive from space. That was a great threat at the time the space adventure started, but he worked on that and they managed to diffuse that problem.

 

  It was during the Johnson years that the whole sense of regional organization began to take hold and draw strength, and that meant freer trade and greater and stronger relations between people in the same areas. All of those things happened during this time and they were all overshadowed by Vietnam at the time, but they’re not overshadowed now by historians.

 

THIBODEAUX:  Good point. What were President Johnson’s views on the presidency and power, the use of power?

 

MIDDLETON:   I think in October of 1968, by which time I knew I was going to come down here with him. Bob Hardisty and I had been asked by the President if we would come down and work with him on his book, and we both said yes. At the same time Mrs. Johnson was very actively working on plans for the LBJ Presidential Library, and she, knowing I was going to be coming down here, asked me to work with her on some of the things that had to do with the library. I became, in a sense, kind of an unofficial—very unofficial—liaison between the President’s office and the National Archives. I’m being very—there was nothing official involved in it, it was just kind of a friendly liaison. All of those things made me very acutely aware of the library. That library was not in my future, but I just knew I was coming down here and there was going to be a library.

 

  So with that in mind, I used to do things that I thought might eventually be helpful and useful to the library. So in October of that last year, I proposed to the President that we bring in cameras, not outside, but cameras - that maybe cameramen were the ones that were doing a lot of work around the White House. We would bring in cameras and focus them on him at his desk in the oval office, and he would just speak freely about the presidency and what it was like and the power and the authority of that office. And he did that. He did it brilliantly. It is, I think, probably totally about a thirty-minute presentation of his—an informal presentation.

 

When I became director—we brought it down here and when I became director, I know we took it and we took a short minute and a half perhaps out of it, and it is part of the exhibit of the oval office now. If you go out there and you punch a button, you’ll hear President Johnson talk about that just for—I don’t know how—maybe two minutes. It’s an excerpt from that setting.

 

He believed—well, he said a number of things. They’re not all related, but he did talk about power this way. He said, “One thing that I will acknowledge about myself is that I know power. I know where it is, I know how to find it, I know how to use it.”

 

About the presidency, one of his favorite things to say about the presidency was that no man ever comes in to the presidency on a platform of doing what’s wrong. Every man who has ever had this awesome responsibility wants to do the right thing. The greatest problem that a president has is knowing what the right thing is. He said, “When issues come to the president for resolution, they’re always like this.” (gestures) Now, the recorder can’t see my hands, but it means they’re in perfect balance. If they were tipped this way or this way (gestures), they wouldn’t come to him. Somebody else would’ve made the decision, but they come to him like that (gestures), and that means they’re all difficult decisions.

 

Just everything that comes to a president is hard to decide, and the only way a president can do—go about the business of deciding is to try to do it on the basis of what he thinks is right. He rarely knows exactly what’s right, but he tries. And sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. Those are the two things that stick out in my mind about what he said about power and about the presidency.

 

THIBODEAUX:  So after he left the White House, what was President Johnson’s purpose in writing his memoirs so quickly after he left?

 

MIDDLETON:   He wanted to get the story out and get it told, but I think in my own mind—although it was never put this way—I think always in his mind was the sense that he didn’t have long to live and he wanted to get it out while there still was time. That’s why we started working on it almost right away.

 

THIBODEAUX:  Who were the other participants? You mentioned Robert Hardesty.

 

MIDDLETON:   Well, Hardesty and I were brought down here for that purpose. The others did work on it. Walt Rostow, who’d been his national security advisor, came down here and took a post at the University of Texas, but he did work on the memoirs to a certain extent. Bill Jordan, who was in the State Department, and had worked with Rostow in foreign affairs during the administration, was brought down here on special assignment and he helped on some of foreign policy stuff. Doris Kearns Goodwin now—then just Doris Kearns—was at Harvard then working on her Ph.D. She had been a White House Fellow, and President Johnson was familiar with her by that time and he brought her down on a number of occasions to help on some of the chapters. So altogether there were five of us that he credited in his book. Tom Johnson he also credited because Tom was not a writer and was not doing the writing but he was running the President’s office.

 

THIBODEAUX:  What did President Johnson want the readers to come away with after reading the book?

 

MIDDLETON:   Well, what he hoped was that readers of that book would see what was attempted during those years, what was accomplished, and have a greater understanding of what he tried to do.

 

THIBODEAUX:  What was the process for writing the book?

 

MIDDLETON:   Well, at the very beginning Bob and I charted it all out and came up with the outline, which went to him. We plotted it and got the President’s okay, put that into chapters. I’m not quite sure at the beginning how the chapters were parceled out. I think we just sort of knew that Rostow and Bill Jordan would have the major role in, you know, foreign policy chapters.

 

Bob and I would meet. We started out meeting with the president at the end of the day while we talked over what we were going to be doing, and he would talk. We tried to do it with a tape recorder, but he didn’t like to work with a tape recorder so we would have to turn it off. And we took notes like mad, and he would talk to us in those wonderful Hill Country folksy terms about what had happened and always put them in terms of his experiences in Johnson City and the Hill Country.

 

We could never get that on tape but we would get our version of it on paper. We would try to put some of that into the things that we wrote. We’d give the chapters to him for his review. He would take all of that out. He said, “That’s not presidential. I don’t want to talk like that,” so all of that came out and we would just—so that we would have to write it straight, and then we’d send it back to him and he would approve it.

 

So in general, the procedure was talk it over with him, write it, give it to him for review. He would approve it or make suggestions. We would make whatever suggestions he—whatever changes he suggested and rewrite it if it was necessary, resubmit it. He would approve it, and that was it.

 

THIBODEAUX:  What was the most challenging part of writing the book?

 

MIDDLETON:   The most challenging part from my point of view—and I think Bob would probably agree—was his not letting us put in his Hill Country vernacular because he’d just tell these wonderful stories and reduce the whole state craft to a matter to Hill Country lore.

 

There’s only one that did make it. This will give you an illustration of what I’m talking about. I was doing the chapter on Medicare, and in talking to us about that one evening, he told the story of how Wilbur Cohen, who was the assistant secretary of HEW and the administration’s liaison man on Medicare, had worked with the House committee that was hearing it. In the committee, whose chairman had once been roundly opposed to Medicare, the committee had slowly changed and in committee they actually made an improvement—a decided improvement over the bill that was sent over by the White House. Wilbur Cohen called the President and asked him what he would do if that bill came out of the committee—the Senate committee—approved that way, and the President said, “Well, I’d run and get my brother.”

 

And then he told us what that meant. He told us this old wonderful story about a brakeman in applying for a job in one of the train stations in the Hill Country was asked in his interview what he would do if he was informed that two trains were headed for a collision on the same track. He said, “I’d run and get my brother because my brother’s never seen a train wreck,” and so the President said, “That’s what I’d do.” He said, “That’s what I told Wilbur. I’d run and get my brother because neither my brother nor anyone else has ever seen a piece of legislation improved in committee.” So that went into the chapter, and when it was over I submitted to the president with great trepidation knowing that he usually took stuff like that out, but he left it in.

 

But in just following normal procedure, I sent the finished chapter to Wilbur Cohen for review for that particular story, but just to review the whole thing to see if I was accurate. Wilbur Cohen called me and said, “Yeah. Everything you’ve got in there is fine, but that story—he did tell me that story about running to get his brother, but it wasn’t on that occasion. It was another occasion that he told me that story.” So I dutifully went back and told the President that, and the President said, “You go back ask Wilbur whose book this is.” So of all those wonderful stories we heard, that one finally made it into history.

 

THIBODEAUX:  In the two chapters on Vietnam, did President Johnson relay any lessons from the involvement, or was it just more of an explanation of why it proceeded the way it did?

 

MIDDLETON:   I’m not sure I follow you.

 

THIBODEAUX:  Did President Johnson ever—maybe not even in the book—but were there any lessons that came out of the Vietnam War that he verbalized?

 

MIDDLETON:   Lessons that came out of the Vietnam War. Another way of putting it was that Vietnam was an application so far as he was concerned—and the presidents who preceded him were concerned—was an application of a lesson in history. The great lesson of World War II so far as they were concerned was that World War II could’ve been prevented if the western nations had had enough sense and enough courage to stop Hitler in his tracks. At any one of a number of places this could’ve been done. Most notably Munich, so it was known as the lesson of Munich, and when they discerned that the Soviet Union was on the same track that Nazi Germany had been on, they formed an alliance—the western nations did—known as NATO, North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which pledged all of the member nations to ban together and stop the aggression of the Soviet Union if it applied that aggression against any one of those nations. And for years—well, for several years, whatever it was—that was NATO.

 

When it looked to them as if—what had been perceived as a threat in Europe was now the same threat as was now beginning in Asia with Red China as the communist power that was supporting aggression, a new alliance was formed called SEATO, the South East Asia Treaty Organization, which did the same thing for the nations of Southeast Asia that NATO had done for Europe. Again, it was the lesson of Munich that was being applied. And when then South Vietnam was threatened by the insurgents inside, supported by the North which was communist and supported by the communist nations, and that was perceived to be the first attempt of the communist powers to take over Southeast Asia. President Eisenhower said, “Look upon Southeast Asia as the lead domino in a series of dominos standing upright, and if it goes over all those dominos behind it are going to fall and eventually the thrust of communism in that area will reach our shores.”

 

That was the lesson of Munich, and so as a result, Johnson—and the presidents before him—felt that the use of military force by the United States to stop aggression in Vietnam was applying the lesson from history. Now, that’s a reverse to what you said. The lessons of Vietnam I just don’t know. I don’t know what he took out of—what kind of lesson there was in Vietnam for him I don’t know. I’m just not sure that there was one.

 

THIBODEAUX:  It was so close—I mean, it was still going on, it’s kind of hard to draw—

 

MIDDLETON:   Yes.

 

THIBODEAUX:  —those conclusions.

 

MIDDLETON:   I think the lesson of history is drawn about Vietnam. It is quite clear now. There’s been a long time and I think historians for the most part think that the lesson of Vietnam is be sure you know what you’re allying yourself against because the North Vietnam did take over. The dominos didn’t fall. The juggernaut did not reach our shores. It didn’t go sweep through Southeast Asia, so in the eyes of—if not history then a good many historians, he made the wrong decision, but I think that’s history’s lesson. It wasn’t the lesson that any of us at the time took out of it and certainly not the president.

 

THIBODEAUX:  It’s my understanding, like we were talking about the kind of folksy humor that President Johnson had that was difficult to translate the humorous personal side of him into different mediums. So how did you portray President Johnson? Was it just this presidential image?

 

MIDDLETON:   Absolutely. I don’t think—certainly if you’re talking about the book—

 

THIBODEAUX:  Um hmm.

 

MIDDLETON:   —we didn’t try to—I mean, we gave up trying to portray him as this folksy storyteller. His daughter, Luci, once said that if he had never gone to Washington and never gone to the Senate, never left Johnson City, he’d still be remembered there as a wonderful storyteller and that in a land of storytellers because there were  a lot of them. And we knew him that way. But we didn’t—even though we once tried to tell the story in this book—tell the story of his administration in those terms, when we realized he didn’t want it that way, we didn’t try anymore. So, yeah, we tried to present him as presidential, strictly.

 

THIBODEAUX:  So even though you weren’t able to use his humorous, more personal side, were you satisfied with the outcome of the book?

 

MIDDLETON:   No. I’m not really. I think in one way, yes. I think it was a honest, factual presentation, true to the documentation. I don’t think there’s a false thing in it. I think it’s all quite accurate, and I think it’s reasonably well-written, and I think it does an adequate job. But missing is the persona of the president, and that’s what I—that is the element that disappoints me.

 

THIBODEAUX:  How was the book perceived by the public and the critics when it was published?

 

MIDDLETON:   I think it was well-received at the time. That’s my memory—it’s been a long time, but I think it was okay at that point. I don’t know how it’s looked upon now, but, yeah, I think at the time it was.

 

THIBODEAUX:  I have found it interesting whenever I’ve asked people, you know, what would be a good biographical list or list of books on LBJ that they usually leave out Vantage Point for some reason.

 

MIDDLETON:   Yeah.

 

THIBODEAUX:  I guess it’s because it doesn’t have the analytical look.   

 

MIDDLETON:   Well, I think so probably. I mean, most of the people think about books about him not by him.

 

THIBODEAUX:  Yeah. But I’m not through reading it, but I do appreciate his take on everything.

So what were President Johnson’s long-term plans for retirement? Did he have anything he wanted to accomplish?

 

MIDDLETON:   Well, several things. He was—certainly the creation of the LBJ Library and the LBJ School. Those were paramount in his mind. The establishment of a park out by the ranch was also very important to him. His memoirs and Lady Bird’s memoirs, these were important to him. He wanted to get that done, and finally, an arrangement with the government to turn the whole ranch over to the government in perpetuity with an arrangement that he and Mrs. Johnson would be able to live in it during their lifetimes, but after that it would become open to the public. I think those were the things that were his long-range plans, and he accomplished them all in the very short time that he had.

 

THIBODEAUX:  You said that Mrs. Johnson contacted you—or not contacted you, but worked with you on arranging things for the library. How did you formally become executive director at the library and museum?

 

MIDDLETON:   There had been in the last year of the administration a man who had been out of one of the universities in California, had been selected by the archivist of the United States as director of the library, and he came down to Austin and a staff had begun to be assembled. We all came down. Bob and I and some of the secretaries that worked out of the federal building while the library was being built, as did the director and the other members of the library.

 

It was not a crisis in any way, but it was clear to me—it was clear to most people—and I’m sure it was clear to the guy who was director that there was just no chemistry between him and President Johnson. It didn’t work. And he understood this. I don’t think there was ever any big confrontation at all in any way, but he had the good sense to realize it, and he went back to the university where he had come from while he still had a tie with it. When he did that, when he left, it was certainly not—it was not in any way part of my future.

 

We were still working on the book, but at that time President Johnson asked me—through Tom—President Johnson never initiated these things himself, but Tom Johnson came to me and said, “President Johnson wants you to take over the library.” That was it. So I did.

 

THIBODEAUX:  What was President Johnson’s vision of how the library and museum would portray his legacy?

 

MIDDLETON:   Well, there you’re going to get into something that I really know a lot about, and I’ll try to make it brief because I could talk all afternoon about it.

 

THIBODEAUX:  Well, that’s fine. (laughs)

 

MIDDLETON:   (laughs) But he wanted—one, he wanted all of the papers open as quickly as possible. Everything. When the library was dedicated, he said in his dedication speech, “It’s all here. The story of our time with the bark off. It’s all here. Everything—all the mistakes we made as well as all the successes we’ve had.” That was a speech that Bob Hardesty wrote for him incidentally, I didn’t. And he wanted that done. He wanted everything open. That’s one thing.

 

Second thing was that he wanted it to be not just a place where the past could be studied, but he wanted it to be a place where people from all different areas of American life would come and discuss and consider issues of great concern to the American people now in their time.

 

And third, he wanted a museum that would inform the general public of what was attempted in that time, what they hoped to—what was attempted and what was accomplished. Those were the three things that he wanted. And those were pretty much the guidance that I had when I took over as director of the library.

 

THIBODEAUX:  Who was involved in helping to create the library and the museum?

 

MIDDLETON:   I’d say at the top of that list was Lady Bird Johnson. Right down under her was Dorothy Territo, now dead, but she had been in a sense President Johnson’s personal archivist through the administration. A good many of the papers—whenever he wanted papers to be specially kept, he would send them over to her and she was very, very familiar with. So they were the ones that come to my mind when I think of who was really important in the creation of the library.

 

THIBODEAUX:  What were some of the discussions on how to proceed in fulfilling Johnson’s request? Was there any problems, challenges?

 

MIDDLETON:   Again, I’m going to give you more than you really want because I just—the question of papers, I knew what he wanted about opening the papers. Okay, what did that mean? There’s an archive staff in every library. These are people who are trained to work with papers. There are rules for opening papers. The general rules set down by the National Archives and all these people worked for—all the presidential libraries are under the National Archives. The general rule is that papers which would tend to be unduly damaging to living persons should be kept closed during that person’s lifetime and then opened. That generally means—well, generally, it’s hard to say—but in my mind it really means anything that would destroy an individual if it was not necessary to destroy that person. Sometimes it meant if it was actual. It was the responsibility of the people on the archive staff to start opening papers.

 

We decided—I suggested to the President early on that the first group of papers that we should open would be on education, and we would have a conference on education at the same time so the papers would reflect the past, the conference would reflect the future. He loved that idea. He put his stamp on it—put it on his desk right away. So the people in the archives started looking at the papers on education. They came across papers that they felt they were not sure about. Should these be closed? Somebody has to be the decider. In a library like this obviously the person at the top has to be the decider, and that person is the director. These people were all experts. I am a reporter. I’d been called out of a whole different medium to take on this thing. But these things would come to me for a decision. They would build up on my desk. I would look at them, and they started, oh, about two weeks before our—we would have our conference on which day we’d also open all the papers on education. I had a stack about like that (gestures) on papers—well, not quite that big—papers that had come to me for a decision that I hadn’t been able to decide on. 

 

And at that point President Johnson from the ranch called me, and he had called on a number of occasions because he always was very interested in the conference we were going to have but he hadn’t talked about the papers. This time he wanted to talk about the papers. He said, “Now, we’re going to open all the papers on education, aren’t we?” And I said, “Yes, sir, all that we can open.” He said, “Well, what does that mean, all that we can open?” I said, “Well, you know, Mr. President, the rules are that there are some that have to be closed.” He said, “Well, what are those rules?” And so I gave to him that business about unduly damaging and harassing, and he purported not to understand what that meant, which was not untypical of him, and he said, “Give me an example.”

 

Well, I had this thing of examples, and I picked one off the top. It was a memorandum from Joe Califano to the President about a congresswoman who was obstructing the passage of a particular education bill, and Califano gave the President his reasons why he thought she was doing it, and they were scurrilous reasons. They were just absolutely scurrilous. And I said to the president—I think this congresswoman’s name was Edith Green from Oregon—and I said, “I think probably this is one that we ought to close,” and the president thought about it. He said, “No. Edith’s heard worse things than that in her lifetime. No, you know,” he said, “It’s all off here. It’s all here with the bark off and now you’re going to make me read in the New York Times said, The bark’s still on. No, no, no,” and so he made me go through several of the others in the stack. Every one was the same way. “No, you’re being too cautious. No, we’re going to open those.” Well, that set the tone. That set the tone. I knew then what he wanted. He wanted everything open. He really wanted everything open.

 

Then indeed he said, “Let me get something straight. Are you going to try to protect me the same way you seem to be protecting these other people?” and I said, “Well, Mr. President, it seems to me you deserve the same consideration anybody else does,” and he said, “Harry, good men have been trying to protect my reputation for forty years, and not a damn one has succeeded. Now, what makes you think you can?” So that was it. So when you talk about who worked on trying to get the President’s—put his thoughts into action, he worked on it, and I worked on it with him. (laughs) 

 

The same thing with the museum. About three weeks before the library was to open, he wanted to go through and take a look into the museum. And he had been there before, but this time he really wanted to look closely. And he liked it, thought everything was okay but he said:

 

There’s one difference now—one things that’s wrong. That was a very contentious time, very controversial time. We don’t have anything in this exhibit that tells about the controversies. I don’t want people to come in here and say, Well, Johnson’s got another damn credibility gap. I think we ought to let the people know that we’re aware of the controversies of that time, and let’s show those.

 

So I got in touch with the museum people and got on it, so immediately a exhibit was put together on some of the controversies of the time, Vietnam notably, but the passage of Medicare, which was very controversial, the passage of federal aid to education, very controversial, some of the others. And so I called  the President and said, “I think we’ve got one together. You might want to see it.” So he came out and we looked at—went through it, and he liked it. He said, “There’s something missing from that. You know, I got a lot of really mean letters because that was how controversial we were. I got a lot of really mean letters. Let’s find the very meanest letter I ever got and let’s put that in there.”

 

So this time I gave the problem to the archivists and they went through all of the letters, thousands and thousands of letters—well, actually, the hostile ones were kind of separated. They went through and they got a group of these together and they would show them to me, and I would take the ones that I thought were qualified. I’d showed them to the President. “I know I got meaner letters than that. Let me take a look at this,” so they brought a box to him and he went through it. Finally he held up a postcard—triumphantly held it up. And it was from a man in California, and it said, “I demand that you as a gutless son of a bitch resign as president of the United States,” and the president said, “I don’t know if you can get any meaner than that.” So that went into the exhibit.

 

Well, anyway, that’s a long story to tell you, the interest he had in shaping the museum as he was shaping the archives. He wanted this to tell the full story, and that goes to the heart of your question about who worked to put his ideas into action. He did. So that’s how we all began.

 

 told you he wanted to have a place where people would come and discuss ideas, and I told you about the person who was going to be on education. Well, the way that all started was a week and a day after we dedicated—we dedicated the library on a hot Saturday in May. A week from the—seven—it was eight days later on a Sunday. At that time we lived across on Exposition Boulevard across from the Good Shepherd Episcopal Church. And I was in the back bedroom reading the paper, and my wife came back and she said, “My God, President and Mrs. Johnson are coming up the driveway.” They had gone over to that church to go to a wedding, but Mrs. Johnson had got the time wrong, and so they were early and the President said, “Well, let’s go over and wait at the Middletons.” 

 

o they came in and when confronted with something like that, he was really not irritated but he was a little testy and he was in no—he just didn’t want any small talk, and he said, “Well, let’s go in here.” He said to me, “Let’s go in here and take up some business and let the girls have their own.”

 

So he and I went in to the little television room that we had and he looked at me and he said, “We’ve dedicated the library. Now what are we going to do?” And I fortunately had given a little bit of thought to this but not a lot, but at this time it all sort of came together in my mind, and I said:

 

Well, Mr. President, knowing what you want to do about this—having people come together, what I thought we might consider is having the first group of papers we open—knowing your interest in education—having the first group of papers be on education and at the same time have a conference on the future of education in this country.

 

He put his stamp on it, “That’s great! That’s what we’ll do. Let’s do that. How long will it take to open those papers?” Well, I didn’t know. I picked a figure out of the air and I said, “I think maybe about seven months. He said: “Okay. Seven months from now let’s have that conference, and we’ll get started on that. Now, let’s don’t just end it there. At the same time right after this is over, let’s do the same thing on civil rights. So let’s do the first one on education, the second one on civil rights, and you get started on that. Let’s get together a committee. We’ve got a foundation that—[he had started one]—that is going to be able to help us on this. We can’t spend government money on some of these things that have nothing to do with the government, and I know that and I don’t want to get the library into any trouble on that, but the foundation can supply the funds. Now, we’ve got over here on this university campus and these people are going to have to help us. We need some help on putting this together. So tomorrow I want you to go over and take Lady Bird over and you see that new president—[who was Steve Spurr]—and you tell him what we’re going to do and tell him we need a committee that will help us—that he’s going to appoint—that’ll help us plan this conference we’re going to have on education and then later the one on civil rights and keep it up and keep working with us in that way.

 

Well, that was it. The next morning I called Steve Spurr—bear in mind this was Sunday that he was at our house—Monday morning I called Steve Spurr’s office. I told him about the conversation with President Johnson, what he wanted, he’d like to have—he would hope that President Spurr would agree to see Mrs. Johnson and me. What could the poor man do? He said, “Well, of course, I will.” So he set up a conference.

 

I called Mrs. Johnson and I told her we had the appointment with President Spurr. We got in the car together. In the car she looked at me rather baffled and said, “What is it we’re going to do?” (laughs) So I tried to explain it the best I could to her. We got to Steve Spurr’s office and talked about it. It was all set. Spurr set up a committee. That was it.

 

So those were the three things that he wanted to do and the papers, the museum, the coming together of the—who worked on it? He worked on it, (laughs) and I worked on it with him, but I was the tail wagging the dog, or rather he was the dog and I was the tail, so that was how it all began.

 

THIBODEAUX:  The LBJ Oral History Project, were there separate tapes of just President Johnson that you did, or does that go back to the White House where you had the videotape?

 

MIDDLETON:   Videotape or oral tape?

 

THIBODEAUX:  The oral history. Was there another taping of President Johnson?

 

MIDDLETON:   No.

 

THIBODEAUX: Okay.

 

MIDDLETON:   The oral history program that was actually begun by the University of Texas and eventually turned over to the LBJ Library was an interview with people familiar with the programs supplementing the history as recorded in the papers and documents themselves. 

 

There is another set of tapes, and these are totally different. These are tapes of telephone conversations that President Johnson made while he was in the White House—secretly. And these were left—when he died they were in the care of a woman who had worked for him since his congressional days in a confidential capacity, named Mildred Stegall. She came to me and told me that he had this facility and he had taped these telephone conversations and they were in her care, and he had left them in her care with instructions that if they were still in her care when he died she should turn them over to me with instructions that they be kept closed for a period of fifty years after his death.

 

For the first several years we followed that rule and then broke it and started opening the tapes with Mrs. Johnson’s okay because she approved it. They have proved to be enormously important historical materials. So when you talk about tapes, we’re really talking about two different—the oral history tapes are by other people, the telephone tapes were the ones that he made.

 

THIBODEAUX:  Was it customary for presidents to tape their conversations, or was that a tradition that started with him?

 

MIDDLETON:   Well, it was later discovered that Roosevelt had tried it. His was a very, very primitive system, and so there weren’t really very many of them. Truman did not. Eisenhower did. Now, they found a number of his telephone conversations that he did. President Kennedy did it extensively. And then after Johnson, we all know that Nixon did it. I don’t know anybody—certainly after Nixon I don’t think any president has ever done it.

 

THIBODEAUX:  Oh, I did look through the list of that oral history project, and I didn’t see your name listed.

 

MIDDLETON:   No, it’s not there. All the time that I was director I kept saying, “Well, there’s plenty of time to do me.” The now director, Betty Sue Flowers, is insistent that I subject to it, and I will but I just haven’t done it yet.

 

THIBODEAUX:  I got you first. (laughs)

 

MIDDLETON:   (laughs) That’s right.

 

THIBODEAUX:  I feel good about that. So how has the library evolved under your administration?

 

MIDDLETON:   How did it evolve?

 

THIBODEAUX:  Um hmm.

 

MIDDLETON:   Because of what I just told you about the President’s involvement and the way we looked upon that as a mandate, we quickly, I think, became known as an institution that was very open. I immodestly say, I think that we set the standard for openness. I think we were far more open than most presidential libraries in terms of opening documents for use, and that quickly became known to the historical community. We did begin to set the pace for symposia and conferences, and that was a good thing.

 

I think that by the time I retired—in those thirty years that we had—I think we established the reputation of being an open facility that was very, very friendly to historians and something of a pioneer in holding conferences. I think that would be fair to say.

 

THIBODEAUX: So are the symposiums held on a regular basis or just for special events?

 

MIDDLETON:   Well, we tried to have one major one a year, and then we had a number of small ones. The major ones were the kinds that President Johnson wanted that were open to the public, but we would have some scholarly conferences mainly on Vietnam that were not open. It wasn’t that they were secret, it was just that we would invite historians to take part in them and they’d be held in a somewhat not an open way and not in a big auditorium. And then we’d publish them, so over those years we had a lot of conferences.

 

THIBODEAUX:  Many of President Johnson’s staff attended these symposia and seem to keep in regular contact with each other. What is the glue that has kind of kept y’all altogether all these years?

 

MIDDLETON:   Interesting, I don’t know. It is that we’ve all talked about it. I think it was probably Johnson himself, the personality of LBJ and Lady Bird. I mean, the two of them together were—because of who they were, and the people that worked for them and worked around them just found themselves to be very, very congenial, and that congeniality has lasted through the years. I have heard historians say, “I’ve gone to other—I’ve known the staffs of other administrations and none of them are as close as the Johnson people.”  

 

THIBODEAUX:  I’ve certainly noticed that too. So did Mrs. Johnson remain very connected to the library throughout her life?

 

MIDDLETON:   Very. Yes. Very. And I know there was absolutely nothing that I ever asked her to do that she did not do it, and she did a lot. Then, you know, I somewhat immodestly say that she did a lot for me. She endowed a lectureship in my name, which I’ve very proud of. Anyway, she was very connected with it.

 

THIBODEAUX:  And I think that you told me that—you talked about the foundation. Do you still have a current association with the library? Are you still on the foundation board?

 

MIDDLETON:   No, I’m not. No, I stayed—during those thirty years—or during most of the thirty years, I wore two hats. I was director of the library and executive director of the foundation. After I retired from the library I stayed on for three years as executive director of the foundation, and then when I left that, I left totally. So I have no connection at all. I’m still there and I’m still called upon and I participate whenever I’m asked, but I have no formal connection at all with either one of them.

 

THIBODEAUX:  So the foundation, is it solely to fund activities not related to the government, or does it have any other service?

 

MIDDLETON:   Well, it’s set up to provide special funds for the LBJ Library and the LBJ School of Public Affairs, both of them. And so far as the library is concerned, those activities that are not funded by the federal government and for the School of Public Affairs, those activities that are not funded by the legislature or the university.

 

THIBODEAUX:  I want to talk about your book. Why did you pick a pictorial format? I thought it was very interesting.

 

MIDDLETON:   Well, I’m not quite sure how that all began, but I began to think at one point that there should be—we had such rich photographs—there should be a pictorial book on Johnson. And I don’t really quite know what the—if it had to do with an anniversary of any kind, I just don’t know. I don’t think it did. It might’ve, but I don’t remember that in particular, but I posed that and—I mean, it was in my mind, and I was wondering how to present it.

 

In my earlier days I had been a freelance writer and I had worked with an agent, and I was still friendly to my agent. Her name was Dorothy Olding in New York, and I asked her just as a matter of information—told her what I was planning to do—and I had no idea that I was going to do it. I just wanted to pitch the idea and have somebody take it up. And I said, “Who would be the person that would really be more receptive to this than anybody in your experience?” And she said, “Clearly, Abrams,” [Harry N. Abrams Inc.] and she told me about—

 

So I called the man and I made an appointment to see him in New York the next time I was there, and I then took a few photographs along. I said, “I just wondered if I could see if you have any interest in this sort of thing,” so I left them with him. I got a call a week later from him saying, “We would like to do that book, but we’d like to sign you on as writer.” I had not thought of that in any way. So I took a leave of absence from the library for, I think, a period of four months and wrote the text for the book. I did not select the photographs. They sent somebody down to work with the people in the photo lab themselves to select the pictures. Once the pictures were selected, then I wrote the text.

 

THIBODEAUX:  This is from the pictures that—the photographs after you suggested to President Johnson that he bring in a photographer to take pictures?

 

MIDDLETON:   I’m sorry. Say it again.

 

THIBODEAUX:  You mentioned earlier in the interview that you had suggested to…

 

MIDDLETON:   President Johnson that he bring in a photographer.  My suggestion to him was that before he leave office, we bring in a motion picture photographer with a video camera to record his talking about the presidency, and that’s what this—that has nothing to do with still pictures.

 

THIBODEAUX:  Okay.

 

MIDDLETON:   There was an office of photographers in the White House led by Yoichi Okamoto, who was the man who took most of those pictures, and they were the ones that shot the still pictures of President Johnson throughout his administration.

 

THIBODEAUX:  I thought it was interesting since President Johnson always wanted to seem presidential and you said—some of those pictures didn’t look, you know, so presidential. The man looked pretty human, just an ordinary person— (end of CD) —and you say, I think, in the preface that he gave maybe unprecedented—I think that may be my own word—but unusual access to him by the photographers.

 

MIDDLETON:   Absolutely. Yeah. Oh yeah.

 

THIBODEAUX:  So why did he do that?

 

MIDDLETON:   I think that along with everything else, I think President Johnson had a very keen sense of history, and I think he did realize that it would be useful to have as much of his life as president recorded pictorially as possible, and that was it. I think that’s it. He never talked about it, but that’s what I assume was—

 

THIBODEAUX:  Lady Bird seems to have a quiet presence. In the few photographs that she’s in with President Johnson, she’s usually in the background, of course. Was she a visible presence in the oval office or in the working area?

 

MIDDLETON:   During the White House years?

 

THIBODEAUX:  Um hmm.

 

MIDDLETON:   No. She was pretty much over in the east wing running her own shop. She showed up on occasion, and they were always important occasions but, no, she certainly was not intrusive in the west wing at all.

 

THIBODEAUX:  Do you have any favorite photographs?

 

MIDDLETON:   You know, I don’t. I’m familiar with most of those photographs, and I like them. I guess the one that I like the best is the one at the very end, which is all of us on the last day of the administration with the President—or the last week of the administration. But it’s not historic and there’s no reason—you know, it has nothing to do with history. It’s just a very personal thing. I love that one. [LBJ: The White House Years, pg.253]

 

THIBODEAUX:  I do too. It reminds me that he was always an educator. [LBJ, pg. 262]

 

MIDDLETON:   Yeah, he was. Oh, I don’t think I could find this now, but anyway, it’s a picture of all of us who stayed till the very end. And the president asked us to come down and have a picture taken with him in the oval office, which we did. But that’s just a sentimental picture, that’s all. The rest of them—the historical photographs I don’t think I could pick out one that is my favorite.

 

THIBODEAUX:  There is a contrast that I thought was kind of interesting, see if I can find in there. Oh, I like these. These are a sense of the Johnson treatment. [LBJ, pg. 161]

 

MIDDLETON:   Oh, they’re great.

 

THIBODEAUX:  I like these because it looks like President Johnson’s body language—he had such body language—expressive.

 

MIDDLETON:   Oh, this is just by now kind of a signature photograph that’s used all over, and it’s very, very good. It tells a lot of stories.

 

THIBODEAUX:  Who is this?

 

MIDDLETON:   Abe Fortas.

 

THIBODEAUX:  It looks like whenever he was engaging you and wanted to make a point—

 

MIDDLETON:   Absolutely.

 

THIBODEAUX:  —he certainly leaned in.

 

MIDDLETON:   Oh, absolutely. Yes.

 

THIBODEAUX:  Kind of captivated you. You weren’t going to be able to slip away very quickly. (laughs) This one is so—is this kind of the image that he always wanted to portray?

 

MIDDLETON:   Absolutely.

 

THIBODEAUX:  This is President Johnson at his desk.

 

MIDDLETON:   Yeah, absolutely.

 

THIBODEAUX:  And this is the way he wanted people to see him?

 

MIDDLETON:   Well, no. This is the way we all wanted people to see him. This was—George Christian had talked him into having a press conference with a lavaliere mike, which was one that was around your neck here that would free him from being behind the podium. He said, you know, “The image that you get behind the podium you’re too stiff and too formal, and if we could hang this mike around your neck, it’ll enable you to be freer and to move around a little bit.” And it was a tremendously successfully press conference. People loved it. The staff did. He got all kinds of letters from everybody else, and he never did it again. The reason was he just was afraid that in that kind of environment—well, first of all, he didn’t think it was presidential. He thought it was much more presidential to be behind that podium, but also in this sort of thing he’d be so freewheeling that sometimes he would say things that he didn’t want to say.

 

THIBODEAUX:  It’s always been an interesting observation that his personal style just did not translate into TV mediums.

 

MIDDLETON:   Oh, absolutely. TV was his enemy. Mrs. Johnson said about him that he was the last of the courthouse politicians, that the courthouse square was about the size that contained the size of a crowd that he could best relate to on a personal basis. And he was at his best with either a one-on-one or with small groups or with a group that size. But when he got to television—you know, whereas television had just caressed John Kennedy, it did not do that to Lyndon Johnson at all.

 

THIBODEAUX:  This is a picture of the unfinished agenda, and I’m not sure who this is.

 

MIDDLETON:   Barefoot Sanders, now a federal judge in Dallas.

 

THIBODEAUX:  Did President Johnson leave having a feeling of an unfinished administration?

 

MIDDLETON:   Oh, absolutely. One of his favorite stories that he told so often that we would—on the staff would cringe when he began to tell it, it was about Winston Churchill in the dark days of the war, who was approached by a group of ladies from the British Temperance Union that came to him and said—the leader of it said, “Mr. Prime Minister, it is our understanding that you have drunk so much alcohol in the course of this that all of it if it was brought here would come halfway up to fill this room.” And Churchill, according to the story, looked at her and looked at the room and said, “My dear little lady, so little have we done, so much we have yet to do.” And Johnson used to love to tell that story because, yeah, if he had gone through another administration, another four years, and had lived through it, there’s a lot that he would’ve liked to have done, but he didn’t feel that he could do it.

 

THIBODEAUX:  This picture is President Johnson and Mrs. Johnson in bed. [LBJ, pg. 243] (laughs) So he certainly gave the photographer complete access to him.

 

MIDDLETON:   Well, it was an historic occasion. I don’t think that the photographer was ever allowed just to roam through their bedrooms, but that was the night of the democratic convention in Chicago when all hell was breaking loose. So not just President and Mrs. Johnson but the two daughters, and then even Tom Johnson was there in the doorway. It was considered an historic enough occasion to let the photographer in on that.

 

THIBODEAUX:  I notice there’s several photographs throughout where he is in bed but working.

 

MIDDLETON:   Yes, he does that. Yeah.

 

THIBODEAUX:  And then this last picture that we both liked. [LBJ, 262]

 

MIDDLETON:   Yeah, that’s a wonderful one.

 

THIBODEAUX:  Was this at University of Texas?

 

MIDDLETON:   That was in San Marcos. He went to his alma mater and I think he went there twice and met with them, and this was on one of those occasions and then he met with the students at the LBJ School on at least one occasion. So he did not meet as often as he had thought he was going to with students, but those were memorable occasions when he did.

 

THIBODEAUX:  Well, I enjoyed the book and I enjoyed the synopsis of the events.

 

MIDDLETON:   Good.

 

THIBODEAUX:  It put things in perspective.

 

MIDDLETON:   Well, good. I’m glad you did.

 

THIBODEAUX:  Civic responsibility is the theme of the common experience of the 2008-2009 academic year at Texas State University. There’s a question coming with this. (laughs) Can you give me a few thoughts on what President Johnson would say to students about civic responsibility?

 

MIDDLETON:   It’s hard for me to know what he would say today. I know what he did say in his time. He felt that—he really felt strongly that every young man and woman should have the obligation of serving their country in one capacity or another for a year at least, but so many of them at that time were in the army. But he believed in service in the Peace Corps and the other programs that were part of that War on Poverty in which young men and women went into the ghettos and the poor districts in this country and worked with kids.

 

He had come out of an experience in which after he left college, he was director of the Texas Chapter of the National Youth Administration for a while, which was a New Deal program that put young men and women to work and to earn money so they could go to college or even in high school. And they did a lot of things. They created roadside parks here in Texas and created playgrounds and parks and all sorts of things. He liked that.

 

So he did believe that young people had and should have a civic responsibility that would bring them a greater citizenship. Now, what he would say today I don’t know, but that’s what he thought at the time.

 

THIBODEAUX:  There was a symposium—I think it was in 1992—it was the one that was titled, “LBJ: The Difference He Made.” And a comment was made, and I believe it was by Mr. Hardesty that, “Johnson has not been given sufficient credit for the social programs enacted in his administration.” Do you think this is still true?

 

MIDDLETON:   Yeah, I think it is. I think it’s less true now perhaps. I think that he’s coming into his own better now, a little more clearly now than he was. I think that Vietnam—the tensions over Vietnam, the divisions over Vietnam—were so strong when he left office that—and they continued certainly through the Nixon years and even beyond that—and they obscure, for the most part, public perception, public awareness of what had been accomplished during his years. As those tensions began to abate a little bit and Vietnam was taking a backseat to history, in a sense, the others came to the fore.

 

I don’t think Iraq is doing him any good. I think Iraq brings back a lot of those memories, but nonetheless, nonetheless, the fact is that most of the programs that he created—that were passed during his administration are still in effect. Some have fallen but very, very few of them. Most of those programs are still there and are still funded, have been funded by administration after administration, no matter how they might have railed against them, but they were. President Reagan said he wanted to dismantle the Great Society. Well, he didn’t. The programs are still there.

 

I don’t know that the public is as aware of that as I would like for it to be. I hope that one of the effects of this centennial year is that that awareness will get greater. Ten years ago—maybe even a little bit less than that—the first sign that his reputation was being rehabilitated was when he was elected by a group of American historians—I think the American Historical Association—as a member of the top ten American presidents because of what he had accomplished in his domestic programs. That’s bound to be an important factor and particularly this year.

 

THIBODEAUX:  What would you want the public to know more about President Johnson?

 

MIDDLETON:   I would go with what he said when he left the Congress—when he left Washington and he appeared before the Congress. He said,

“I hope—” he said a hundred years from now, but it could’ve been any time.  “I hope that in the future it will be said that we worked to make this country more just. That’s what I hope, but I believe it will be said at least that we tried. I think it’s a damn good epitaph, and I hope you’ll put that—I would like to believe that that will be said.”

 

THIBODEAUX:  Of all that’s been written about President Johnson, do you think there is any story left to tell?

 

MIDDLETON:   Sure. I don’t think the right thing—I don’t think the book has yet been written about him. I have the feeling that no historian is going to be able to get to him as well as a dramatist will. He was just too rich and too complicated a character. History can go so far with it, but you have to get inside the psyche of the man and in a way that history cannot do but a dramatist can. And I just don’t think it’s been done yet. It will be one of these days.

 

THIBODEAUX:  That’s an interesting observation. Those are the questions that I have. Do you have anything you’d like to add, any stories?

 

MIDDLETON:   I don’t think so. I think you’ve drained me.

 

THIBODEAUX:  (laughs) I’m so sorry. (Middleton laughs) I should’ve asked you if you wanted a break.

 

MIDDLETON:   No, no. No.  That’s fine. I’m glad we did it. Can I get a copy of this when you get it done?

 

THIBODEAUX:  Absolutely.

 

MIDDLETON:   Okay.

 

THIBODEAUX:  I really appreciate you taking the time to spend with me.

 

MIDDLETON:   Well, I hope it’s worked for you. I hope it’s been— 

 

(End of interview)