The Johnson Treatment: How President LBJ attempted to influence Samuel Newhouse

Lyndon B. Johnson speaks at the dedication of the Newhouse School of Public Communications on Aug. 5, 1964. Around 20,000 people were in attendance. Courtesy of Syracuse University Special Collections Resource Center

10 months ago

efore President Lyndon B. Johnson dedicated the Newhouse School of Public Communications on Aug. 5, 1964, he took a car ride from Syracuse Hancock International Airport to Syracuse University with then-Chancellor William Tolley and Samuel I. Newhouse.

In each version of the story, LBJ demands that Newhouse, one of the largest newspaper owners at the time, have his various publications endorse him over Republican Barry Goldwater in the upcoming election. While Richard Meeker wrote in his 1983 biography on Newhouse that he first protested LBJ’s demands, the media magnate immediately capitulated to the president’s requests in author Carol Felsenthal’s retelling of the drive based on Tolley’s account.

And Tolley, who sat in the front while Newhouse and Johnson sat in the back, gave his own perspective on their interaction in “At the Fountain of Youth” — a book he wrote that focuses on his time at SU. While Newhouse was originally comfortable handing over the endorsement of his newspaper in New Orleans, he protested when Johnson demanded the support of all of his papers, Tolley wrote.

“Sam, you know why I’m here, don’t you?” Johnson asked early in their conversation, according to Tolley. Newhouse, nervous about breaking his rule of noninterference, told LBJ that he would see if he could get him help “with the way the headlines are written,” Tolley wrote.

After the ride, Johnson, weighed by reports of American boats firing upon the North Vietnamese, sat on a stage in front of thousands. By sheer coincidence, the speech was his first public appearance after the Gulf of Tonkin incident. He wasn’t just speaking to Syracuse, he was speaking to the world.

“Aggression — deliberate, willful and systematic aggression — has unmasked its face to the entire world. The world remembers, the world must never forget, that aggression unchallenged is aggression unleashed,” Johnson said at SU. “We of the United States have not forgotten.”

However, the report Johnson gave to Syracuse, and the justification he used to kickstart further American intervention in Vietnam, was faulty.

The two U.S. destroyers involved in the Gulf of Tonkin incident weren’t attacked on Aug. 5, though one of them had engaged North Vietnamese torpedo boats days prior. With the Gulf of Tonkin — and what Onondaga Historical Association Curator Robert Searing said historians call a “blank check” created by the ensuing Tonkin Gulf Resolution — Johnson tried to use his speech at SU, and his time with Newhouse, to help launch and gain support for a war that killed millions.

Though Johnson tried to sway Newhouse over the five miles between the airport and university, the seeds of his influence had been planted months earlier. Newhouse, by his own account in his privately published biography, “A Memo for the Children,” arrived at the White House on March 13, 1964, expecting a simple lunch. He was there to secure Johnson as his new namesake’s dedicator.

He was met by Bill Moyers, a special assistant to Johnson, who informed him that the president could no longer make their lunch due to a series of devastating floods. Moyers then asked Newhouse if he wanted to join the president on his helicopter trip across the Northeast and Midwest.

“The next thing I knew I was flying all over the countryside,” according to Newhouse’s account. “We went from Pennsylvania to Ohio to Illinois and I forget where else. In each state, there was a brief speech, a meeting with the governor, with LBJ dragging me up to be introduced at each stop.”

“On Johnson’s part, this had been a brilliant move,” Felsenthal wrote. “Sam was a captive audience, there being no way of exiting the plane or of extricating himself from Johnson’s huge group. The president was smart enough to hold back from asking Sam for specifics. There would be plenty of time to do that the next August.”

Once they returned to the White House, LBJ continued his time with the newspaper owner. Newhouse was brought into a conversation with then-Secretary of State Dean Rusk in the president’s private quarters, according to his book. McGeorge Bundy, the special assistant for national security affairs, was also in the room, according to LBJ’s diary.

After the other men started to talk about “some sensitive foreign policy matters,” Newhouse moved to excuse himself.

LBJ said no, telling him to “stick around.”

With a 6-foot-4-inch frame, Johnson had mastered a combination of negotiation and intimidation, known as the “Johnson Treatment,” to get his way long before their scheduled lunch.

“(It was) Lyndon Johnson’s way of getting what he wanted from somebody,” said Mark Updegrove, the president of the LBJ Foundation, of the “Johnson Treatment.” “That treatment can be flattery, can be cajolery, it can be cruel, it can be kind.”

The meeting wasn’t the first time LBJ and Rusk had spoken that day. Before Newhouse arrived, LBJ individually met with Bundy and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara as well as a group that included Rusk, according to the U.S. Office of the Historian.

McNamara had just returned from a days-long trip to Saigon to assess the South Vietnamese military situation the night prior, according to “The Vietnam War Day by Day.” The U.S. Office of the Historian wrote that Johnson was briefed in at least one of those meetings about McNamara’s draft report on the trip.

The final memo McNamara addressed to the president on March 16, 1964, went over the country’s policy on Vietnam and possible next steps for the U.S. to take. McNamara’s first recommendation to the American government was to make clear that the U.S. would continue to support South Vietnam “for as long as it takes to bring the insurgency under control.”

Though Johnson’s diary references the meeting and attests to Rusk and Bundy’s attendance, it does not mention Newhouse being in the room. Newhouse did not disclose in his memoir what the men discussed, but he wrote that he was “astonished to hear them talk in my presence about several sensitive subjects.”

“I didn’t think I was in a wise position for a prudent publisher who wanted to preserve his independence,” Newhouse detailed in his autobiography. “(I’ve made sure never to be in that sort of situation again.)”

Johnson immediately leveraged his time with Newhouse for political gain. Hours removed from his speech at SU, LBJ put in a call at the White House for Robert Jones, an Alabama congressman, according to a call archived by LBJ’s presidential library.

The president attempted to use the call to get Jones, a Democrat who had just voted against Johnson’s Civil Rights Act of 1964 the month prior, to vote for the anti-poverty bill. After directly asking him if it would “beat” Jones to vote for poverty, Johnson asked if The Birmingham News, which Newhouse owned, had “helped any.”

Once Jones later responded that the paper was going to support Goldwater, Johnson detailed his conversation with Newhouse.

“I talked to (Newhouse) today and I told him … that I wondered if he’d mind asking him to ask his editor to help (Jones), if he could help me with this poverty bill,” Johnson said. “He said, ‘No, I’d be glad to.’”

Newhouse, according to Tolley, was not glad to.

“When we arrived on campus, Sam had had enough. I accompanied Johnson to the airport after the ceremony, but Sam did not,” Tolley wrote. “He had one arm broken and was not about to have the other one broken as well.”

Lyndon B. Johnson speaks at the dedication of the Newhouse School of Public Communications on Aug. 5, 1964. Around 20,000 people were in attendance.
Courtesy of Syracuse University Special Collections Resource Center

Regardless of Newhouse’s feelings on the matter, Johnson added over the phone to Jones that the newspaper owner had also helped him with “one or two of the Republicans.”

When the poverty bill came to a vote, it wasn’t incredibly close in the House of Representatives, passing 226-185. Jones voted “aye.”

Outside of Johnson’s intrusion, Newhouse prided himself on noninterference.

In a statement to what was then SU’s School of Journalism, Newhouse wrote that an ideal newspaper owner should have “an intense interest in all of the operation of his newspaper, but who can top that intense interest with an even greater degree of self-control.”

When covering Newhouse’s $15 million gift — $151.1 million in today’s dollars, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics — TIME Magazine was less kind. The magazine wrote that Newhouse was “often criticized as a crass financier whose only concern is his profit” and that he has “done little to improve the quality of his often mediocre papers.”

Felsenthal said that, as a newspaper owner, Newhouse wasn’t very interested in influencing the way news was covered. First on his mind, she said, was seeing that his papers had their advertising squared away.

“Johnson and the Vietnam War were the only times Newhouse interfered in the editorial coverage of any editorial report (in) any of his papers,” Meeker told The Daily Orange.

But by speaking at the dedication of his namesake, however, Johnson did Newhouse a huge favor. With that, the newspaper owner’s actions were consistent with a quality he demonstrated throughout his life, Meeker said.

“When someone did him a favor,” Meeker said, “he always tried to repay it.”

LBJ’s call with Jones also wasn’t the first time Newhouse and his papers were discussed in the White House, according to calls stored by LBJ’s presidential library. A week before the president’s trip to Syracuse, LBJ and Edwin Weisl, a friend of Johnson’s, had a phone conversation in which Weisl mentioned that he had called Newhouse with a request.

“He’s calling his editor in New Orleans to put the pressure on Abers on the anti-poverty bill,” Weisl told the president, potentially referring to Mississippi Congressman Thomas Abernethy.

Abernethy did not go with Johnson, voting “nay” along with the entire Mississippi delegation.

He had one arm broken and was not about to have the other one broken as well.

Former Chancellor William Tolley

While he did not always positively engage with the media, LBJ had a significant understanding of its importance, said Tom Johnson, who worked as a deputy press secretary under LBJ and shares no familial relation with the former president.

“LBJ was watching the two wire services almost whenever,” said Tom Johnson, who later became the president of CNN. “He was watching the three TVs that he had in his office and bedroom and at the ranch … He was just an enormous consumer.”

Johnson had plenty of friends within the press that he had lunch with, including a columnist at The New York Times and White House correspondents, Tom said. In a 1969 interview, Weisl said he had called the heads of CBS, NBC and ABC “to be sure that they would project the feeling that this was a dedicated man that would be a great President” following John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963.

“I got in touch with Mr. Newhouse who then owned the largest chain of newspapers, and, you know, got him to feel that this President was a great man and would be a great President, and to convey that feeling to the public,” Weisl said.

And if Johnson’s goal was to have the support of Newhouse’s newspapers in the upcoming election against Goldwater, he got it. In his book “Newspaperman,” Meeker notes that, while both of Newhouse’s papers in New Orleans supported Republican Richard Nixon in 1960 and 1968, they endorsed Johnson in 1964.

“Overall, only two Newhouse papers endorsed Goldwater in 1964, while thirteen supported Johnson,” Meeker wrote. “In the nation as a whole, less than five papers out of every ten (42.3%) endorsed Johnson that year.”

Johnson was even more successful in winning the actual election against Goldwater, capturing over 90% of the electoral vote and 61% of the popular vote. He only lost six states, which included Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana.

A decade after Johnson’s last days as president, Newhouse died in August 1979. In his obituary, The New York Times characterized Newhouse as a man who did not use his newspapers to push certain ideas on the American public. And outside of his spat with Johnson, that was true.

“I am not interested in molding the nation’s opinion,” Newhouse is quoted as saying in the obituary. “I want these newspapers to take positive stands of their own; I want them to be self-reliant.”