Books: Global L.B.J.

LYNDON B. JOHNSON AND THE WORLD by Philip L. Geyelin. 309 pages. Frederick A. Praeger. $5.95.

The absorbing Washington game that Philip Geyelin calls "Lyndonology"—the study of the President—is usually more of a cutting-down than a building-up pastime. Geyelin, the diplomatic correspondent of the Wall Street Journal, adds some choice cuts. In this book, the first comprehensive study of Lyndon Johnson's performance in foreign policy, Geyelin reports that the President sent the Marines to Santo Domingo with the cry that it was "just like the Alamo." And he records some presidential double-edged scorn: Handing the Dominican government back to Juan Bosch, said Johnson, "would be like turning it over to Arthur Schlesinger Jr." Geyelin alludes to Johnson's scorching private appraisals of De Gaulle, Pearson, Shastri, Ayub Khan, U Thant. He is more explicit about the President's sentiments toward the Organization of American States; using dashes in place of a four-letter word, Geyelin quotes L.B.J. as saying, "The OAS couldn't pour — — out of a boot if instructions were written on the heel."

The author finds Johnson "a hard man to measure, an enigma, a mass of contradictions." He is "titanic and petty, courtly and crude, an authentic political genius and a cornball." With all that, "more than most men, his performance must be looked at in the main." What comes through almost reluctantly in this often critical book is that in the foreign policy areas that really count, L.B.J. has in the main acted with courage and good judgment.

Against Towel-Throwing. Geyelin takes the position that Johnson, for all the seasoning he had had since 1932 in Washington, came to the presidency poorly prepared in the area of foreign policy. Shortly before, on an official jaunt through Southeast Asia, L.B.J. had shocked some Asians by letting out a rebel yell inside the Taj Mahal, and proclaiming that Viet Nam's Ngo Dinh Diem was "the Winston Churchill of Asia." On that same trip, Johnson grasped the importance of U.S. support for Southeast Asia. While others in Washington were dallying, Johnson wrote a prophetic memo to President Kennedy, declaring that the U.S. either had to "make a major effort" in the region or "throw in the towel." Then Johnson added: "Throwing in the towel is not my concept." Geyelin does not establish just what impact the memo carried, but soon afterward Kennedy began the process of increasing the U.S. commitment to Viet Nam.

With Kennedy's death, Johnson was thrust into a foreign policy maelstrom. In two years, he had to cope with riots in Panama, civil war in Cyprus, massacre in the Congo, killing in Kashmir, sag in the Alliance for Progress, Gaullism in NATO, chaos in the Dominican Republic, and above all, Viet Nam. Johnson said that he felt himself "in the position of a jack rabbit in a hailstorm, hunkered up and taking it." He also had to listen to a lot of contradic tory advice from his lieutenants. The President once petulantly complained that "the Air Force comes in every morning and says, 'Bomb, bomb, bomb.' Then the State Department comes in and says, 'Not now, or not there, or too much, or not at all.' "