The Narcissist Next Door by Jeffrey Kluger

Author:Jeffrey Kluger
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2014-08-25T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVEN

The Peacock in the Oval Office

Here’s betting you don’t want to think about Lyndon Johnson’s penis. I’m not sure even Lady Bird wanted to think about Lyndon Johnson’s penis, but at least she signed on for the job. The rest of America? Not so much.

Plenty of people did have to deal with the Johnson johnson, however, especially during the five-plus years he was president. By a lot of measures Johnson was—not to put too fine a point on it—crazy. It wasn’t so much his fierce ambition—extreme even by the standards of the narcissist, though driven at least in part by the fact that he came from a family of men who had died young of heart disease and he lived with a sense that he was always racing the clock. It wasn’t just his animus toward his political enemies—particularly the Kennedys and most particularly Robert; that was just the way he played the extreme contact sport that was 1960s American politics. And it wasn’t merely his relentless, bloody micromanagement of the Vietnam War. It was a hideous and murderous exercise, but it was as much the result of floundering, fearful, willful blindness as anything else. What made Johnson nuts was the side most Americans never saw of him.

It ought not to have come as too much of a surprise that a man who affected a certain rough-hewn, country courtliness in the public eye might, in private, be foulmouthed, boorish and an often-hard drinker. The halls of government are filled with such two-faced figures. It might not have come as a surprise, either, that he was a serial philanderer, regularly helping himself to women both on the White House staff and in his and Lady Bird’s social circle. Lady Bird knew, and made a dignified, First Lady’s peace with it.

“You have to understand, my husband loved people. All people,” she said in a 1982 TV interview. “And half the people in the world were women. You don’t think I could have kept my husband away from half the people?”

Maybe not, and Lady Bird certainly would not be the first First Lady to have to reckon with a sense of sexual entitlement in the occupant of the Oval Office—as Hillary Clinton, Jackie Kennedy, Eleanor Roosevelt and Florence Harding could attest. But as far as we know, she was surely the first—and, mercifully, the only one—who had to deal with the problem of flagrant presidential flashing.

Johnson’s appalling habit of conducting meetings and even press conferences while on the toilet is well documented and oft repeated, though it’s no less jaw-dropping for its relative familiarity. It’s not easy to peel back all of the layers of pathology behind this most primal kind of exhibitionism: something proudly infantile, perhaps; some sort of animal turf-marking; some statement of dominance, surely (you can hardly make other people stand still to witness such a disagreeable exercise unless you truly are the alpha male).

The full frontal displays, however, were something else. Some of the most alarming examples of

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