Behavior: L.B J. Unraveled

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Psychohistory is the attempt to fuse the insights of psychology and psychoanalysis with those of history, and the big league of the burgeoning academic movement is the annual Wellfleet seminar on Cape Cod. At this year's closed meeting, such luminaries as Kenneth Keniston and Robert Jay Lifton were there. So was Erik Erikson (Young Man Luther, Gandhi's Truth), the founding spirit of the movement and the group. But the center of attention this year was Doris Kearns, probably the first aspiring psychohistorian to be prodded into print by her subject.

Kearns, 31, an associate professor of government at Harvard, is a former protegee of Lyndon Johnson. Unlike some psychohistorians who have roused skepticism with their long-distance analyses, she knew her subject at firsthand, and well. Her Wellfleet report on her book in progress on L.B.J., hailed as brilliant by several in attendance, grew out of the extraordinary role she played in Johnson's last years.

You Harvards. When Kearns met the then President in 1967, she was a promising young academic, a White House Fellow, and an antiwar activist who had just co-authored a New Republic article calling for Johnson to be driven from public life. Yet L.B.J. took a shine to her, personally assigned her to White House duties, and gradually confided in her. As the relationship grew, he pressed small gifts on her, including one electric toothbrush after another —twelve in all.

Washington sprouted with talk that L.B.J. and Kearns were lovers; but Kearns told the Wellfleet group Johnson's needs were psychic—and historical. The President poured out stories of his inner life, urging Kearns to write them, apparently in the belief she was his last best hope of reaching "you Harvards" who would write the histories.

Near the end, the broken ex-President told her of dreams, fantasies, childhood pains, and in a moment of revelation, said she reminded him strongly of his mother. "In talking with me," Kearns reports, "he said he had come to imagine he was also talking with her, unraveling the story of his life."

On the basis of these chats, Kearns postulates that L.B.J. was torn between his mother and father—with considerable anger and resentment toward both. Johnson's mother was a genteel woman who read Milton and Shakespeare to the young L.B.J. and forced him to take ballet and violin lessons. She saw her husband, a lusty small-time farmer, trader and politician, as a limited, vulgar man, and turned her affection to the young Lyndon in what Kearns calls "an emotional overfeeding that led him to grow up thinking the whole world should accommodate itself to him." But when Lyndon was 15, according to Kearns, Rebekah Johnson turned off the affection, often ignoring her son for weeks, and indicated that love would have to be bought through achievement. Kearns argues that L.B.J.'s often obsessive contempt for books, ideas, liberals and gentility all bore the heavy mark of his ambivalent feeling about his mother.