The Thirty-first of March: An Intimate Portrait of Lyndon Johnson's Final Days in Office - Softcover

Busby, Horace

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0374530211 ISBN 13: 9780374530211

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006

Synopsis

"I have made up my mind. I can’t get peace in Vietnam and be President too.” So begins this posthumously discovered account of Lyndon Johnson’s final days in office. The Thirty-First of March is an indelible portrait of a president and a presidency at a time of crisis, and spans twenty years of a close working and personal relationship between Johnson and Horace Busby.
It was Busby’s job to “put a little Churchill” into Johnson’s orations, and his skill earned him a position of trust on LBJ’s staff from the earliest days of his career as a congressman in Texas to the twilight of his presidency. From the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination, when Busby was asked by the newly sworn-in president to sit by his bedside during his first troubled nights in office, to the concerns that defined the Great Society, Busby not only articulated and refined Johnson’s political thinking, he helped shape the most ambitious, far-reaching legislative agenda since FDR’s New Deal.
Here is Johnson the politician, Johnson the schemer, Johnson who advised against JFK riding in an open limousine that fateful day in Dallas, and Johnson the father, sickened by the men fighting and dying in Vietnam on his behalf. The Thirty-First of March is a rare glimpse into the inner sanctum of Johnson’s presidency.
    

About this title

About the Author

Horace Busby was an adviser, speechwriter, and confidant to Lyndon B. Johnson throughout his political career. After LBJ left the White House, Horace Busby remained in the nation's capital where he built a successful business as a management consultant, political analyst, and publisher. He died in May 2000 at the age of seventy-six.

From Publishers Weekly

From Lyndon Johnson's chief speechwriter of 20 years (1948-1968) comes a revealing chronicle of LBJ's career. Although framed around March 31, 1968--the day Johnson announced that he would not seek re-election--Busby's book (left among his papers when he died in 2000) incorporates his eyewitness perspective on far more than just the narrow slice of time between March '68 and January '69. Busby was 24 when he went to work for the then Texas representative. He accompanied Johnson on to the Senate, the vice-presidency and the presidency. Always, he was an insider, and a shrewd, observant and eloquent one at that. Frustratingly, the manuscript had no chapters addressing Johnson's Senate career and his rise to majority leader. One of Busby's best and most important chapters explains his role as a key Johnson functionary on the day President Kennedy was killed and through the subsequent transition. Here are dramatic, intimate details of an uncommon and historically important variety. For example, Busby, who sat up with Johnson and other close associates on the evening of JFK's murder, notes, "I can only describe it as a night--and a room--almost unbearably alive with quiet stillness." A preface by Busby's son and an introduction by Busby's good friend Hugh Sidey help put this noteworthy work in context. (Mar.)
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Edition details

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0374530211
• ISBN 13: 9780374530211
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 272