Chief of Staff
Lyndon Johnson and His Presidency
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Chief of Staff to the President is perhaps the most important political appointment in our nation's government. Aside from handling the myriad of day to day details that keep the White House running, the Chief of Staff is often the President's closest confidante and gatekeeper--anyone who wants access to the Oval Office goes through the Chief of Staff.
President Lyndon Johnson bestrode the American political scene as a colossus of energy, ambition, and purpose. He attempted to achieve no less then the total eradication of poverty and expended every last ounce of his political capitol with Congress to pass Civil Rights legislation. And, throughout, he was--as he knew better than anyone else--being destroyed by a war he inherited, detested, and could do nothing to stop.
With W. Marvin Watson, his Chief of Staff and most intimate adviser, finally revealing what he knows about this extraordinary figure, readers are taken, firsthand, inside the presidential life and times of Lyndon Johnson.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Watson served as chief of staff to President Lyndon Johnson, which would have given him unique access to, and insight into, a controversial president. But in this memoir, coauthored with former LBJ special assistant Markman, Watson sheds little new light on the inner workings of the Johnson White House and a little too much on his own nondescript career in Texas politics and business before being recruited by LBJ. The few good anecdotal nuggets Watson provides regarding Johnson's White House among them a rather gleeful account of why and how he fired speechwriter and Kennedy family loyalist Richard Goodwin are suspect, for Watson is himself, judging from this account, a thoroughgoing Johnson loyalist and apologist. He paints the swear-a-minute, famously cynical Johnson as a deeply religious man. Watson also endorses Johnson's vision of himself as the victim of plots hatched by numerous goblins in the employ of a bitter and vindictive Robert Kennedy. He likewise attempts to debunk not quite successfully assertions made by Michael Beschloss in Reaching for Glory that Johnson was depressed and almost clinically paranoid at times during his presidency. Photos not seen by PW.
