Reaching for Glory: Lyndon Johnson's Secret White House Tapes, 1964-1965 Book

Be careful what you wish for. You might get it. Lyndon Johnson wanted to become President of the United States. But he was never comfortable or happy once he got there. In retrospect, it's no surprise at all that he didn't run for a second term.

As Senate Majority Leader, he was a master at moving legislation in a body where accountability was always shared by at least 49 others. But there's only one president at a time. Throughout his term, Johnson sought the comfort of numbers, but for presidents, there is no such thing.

He was a man of huge, unresolved and painful contradictions: Forceful to the point of brutality in getting his way, yet wounded by every word of criticism from any corner. A southerner through and through, yet sincerely and completely committed to the end of segregation and to civil rights. The list goes on and on.

If you want to know how we got entangled in Vietnam, you don't have to read some 1200 page tome. Just listen to Johnson's tape recorded phone calls as he agonizes over every step deeper into the Big Muddy. He inherited the U.S. commitment to Vietnam, but he knew we would not win a war there. His choice was to either be the president who pursued a hopeless war, sending thousands of young Americans to die in Asia; or to be the president who broke U.S. treaties, retreated from aggression, and lost Indochina to the Communists.

Faced with that choice, he relied on magical thinking, liberally laced with paranoia. He tried to convince himself and us that if we made things difficult enough for the North Vietnamese, they would stop meddling in the affairs of their southern neighbor. The trouble was, North Vietnam never saw the south as a "neighbor." It was all one country, and the meddlers were the U.S.

It leaves you wondering what would have happened if he had taken the advice of one elderly senator during the merry-go-round of U.S. puppet governments in Saigon: Install a government that would ask us to go home.

The first book of taped transcripts, Taking Charge, is also excellent.