"There's no question that he wanted to sotto-voce the whole thing"
 |
| Jack Valenti (far left), Lyndon Johnson, Jacqueline Kennedy |
The man is Jack Valenti, an aide to Lyndon Johnson when Johnson was ushering in the modern era of presidential lying, misleading Congress, and evading the Constitution.
McMaster quotes Valenti several times in the book's final chapters, once in the stilted declaration that LBJ was "in the middle of the biggest legislative fight of Johnson's history" and another time admitting that "There's no question that he wanted to sotto-voce the whole thing."
Sotto-voce the whole thing, presumably said with a straight face? The man was born to be a macher in movies.
© Peter Rozovsky 2013
Labels: H.R. McMaster, history, Jack Valenti, Lyndon B. Johnson, military, things that drive me nuts
posted by Peter Rozovsky at 1:36 PM
6 Comments:
I like it. I hope to be able to work it into a conversation one day.
There's a poignant bit near the end of the book where McMaster quotes Gen. Harold Johnson, the Army chief of staff at the time, as looking back at 1964 and 1965 and agonizing over his silence. Johnson's inaction, McMaster says, "haunted him for the rest of his life."
If Johnson had been Jack Valenti, he'd have said: "I can't believe I sotto-voced the whole thing."
I don't have that much of a problem with verbing nouns. Now, start nouning verbs, and I'll have to cut you.
Valenti verbed an adjective, that creative genius.
If you like McMaster, you'll also like Sabato's new book, The Kennedy Half-Century, which I have reviewed for the online site, BookLoons (to be posted in ten days).
People of our age--baby-boomers--have certainly had our share of politicians with questionable values and abilities.
I'll look for it; thanks. I came to the book not via an interest in Kennedy or Johnson but rather because Thomas E. Ricks cites the book with approval in his excellent book The Generals, about which I have posted several times recently here. More than anything else, I was interested in how political leaders work with and manipulate their generals.
As for baby boomers and their politicians, I found myself comparing and contrasting Johnson's way, including concealment and subterfuge, with Nixon's, Reagan's, and Clinton's. I may put up a post about that.
Post a Comment
<< Home