Jack Valenti was a close aide to President Lyndon Johnson from 1963-1966, and one of only two special assistants to U.S. presidents who have lived in the White House -- the other being FDR special assistant Harry Hopkins. Now president and CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America, Valenti was interviewed for this episode of COLD WAR in October 1996.

On LBJ:

I have, in my lifetime, known just about every president, prime minister, president of other countries, congressmen and senators. He was the single most formidable political character, political leader, that I have ever known. In him resided all the elements of a great leader, which is, first: conviction. A man without conviction is going to be right only by accident. Second, stamina: the ability to commit a full day; or, as Lord Wellington says, "to do the business of the day in the day." Third, an intuitive structure somewhere in his brain; he had some little elf that resided somewhere between his belly and his brain, who was able to say "No, Lyndon, not that way." Judgment, intuition, instinct, without which no great military or political captain will ever survive. And fourth, the ability to persuade those around him to his point of view, which [in his case] verged on sorcery. He was quite a guy.

When he was a young man of 19, he taught in a tiny school in Cotulla, Texas -- a rundown little place, inhabited totally by young Mexican children. That year's teaching seared his mind. Poor, desperately poor children, with zero hope for the future, and most of them eager to learn; and he early on decided, if he ever had political power, that he was going to make sure kids like that weren't going to be submerged in the subsoil.

Now remember, he was in Congress for 24 years; he spent three years as vice president; and all that time he thought about what he would do if he had the power. On the very night that he became president, when we flew back from Dallas on November 22, 1963, I was one of three people who sat with him in his bedroom, and later spent the night there. And for about six to seven hours, he lay propped up on his vast bed, ruminating with the three of us, not really asking our viewpoints but I think that [we] served as a sounding board. And that night, I learned later, he had sketched out the Great Society, and what he wanted to do. As he said: "Now that I've got the power, I aim to use it," and he said, "I'm going to pass that Civil Rights Bill which has been locked up too long. I'm going to pass an Education Bill which is going to make it possible for every boy and girl in this country to get all the education they can take, with federal loan scholarship or grants" -- and that was unheard of. "Number three," he said, "I'm going to pass Harry Truman's Medical Insurance Plan," which today is Medicare. And he went on and on and on. The striking [thing about] all of this was, this is what he said on the night he [became] president, and this is what he did as president. How many people cleave that closely to a given agenda that they've made a few hours after they have ascended to the Mount Olympus of American politics?

On LBJ and civil rights:

He was determined, in his civil rights program, to win a Voting Rights Act. He won the Civil Rights Act, and now he wanted to win his Voting Rights Act. Because he said, "If you give people the right to vote, you give them power, and with that political power they can better their lives. So the first thing I'm going to make sure is that it is a federal crime to deny a citizen of this country, no matter his or her color or religion, the right to vote." I think that most black leaders would say that was a seminal piece of the Johnson legislation.

I remember so well one day in the Cabinet Room, just after the passage of the Voting Rights Bill, all the great black leaders had been summoned: Phil Randolph, Bayard Rustin, Whitney Young, Roy Wilkins, Dr. Martin Luther King, Dorothy Hite and others, and it was a religious jubilation in that room: hugging and kissing each other, and of course saluting their champion, Lyndon Johnson. When we left the room, Roy Wilkins, who was then the legendary head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the NAACP, put his arm around me as we walked out to the lawn face of the White House, and he said, "Jack, God does move in strange and mystic ways, wondrous ways." And I said, "How is that, Roy?" and I looked at him, and his eyes had misted over, and he says, "Well, I'll tell you. I find it strange and wonderful that the greatest and most effective friend that the Negro in America has ever had is a Southern president, to whom we owe everything." It was a strange anomaly that many young black kids growing up don't realize that the one great champion that they had was Lyndon Johnson. ...

When Johnson was president for three weeks, in December 1963 ... he said, "Call Dick Russell and see if he'll come to coffee." Richard Russell, the senior senator of Georgia, was the single most influential man in the Senate. He would have been president if he had not also been the leader of the segregationist forces in the Senate. But he was a close friend of Johnson. ... So when Russell arrived ... Johnson put his arm around him and sat him down, and they sat very close to each other, and President Johnson leaned over and he says, "Dick, I love you, and I owe you. I wouldn't be president if it wasn't for you. You made me [Senate Democratic] leader in 1952. I wouldn't have been vice president without you; I wouldn't be president without you. So I owe you so much." And then he said, "Now Dick, I asked you to come here because I want to tell you something. Do not get in my way on this Civil Rights Bill, Dick, because if you do, I'm going to run you down." And I remember Russell, in those rolling accents of his Georgia countryside, said, "Well, Mr. President, you may very well do that, but if you do, you will not only lose the South forever, you will lose this election." In all the later years in which I became so intimate with LBJ, never was I prouder of him than that Sunday morning a long, long time ago, for he looked at Dick Russell and he says, "Well, Dick, if that's the price I have got to pay, I will gladly pay it." ...

One final story about this. Two days before Lyndon Johnson left office, a dinner was held for him in New York, and all of the great leaders of the Democratic Party were there -- all of Johnson's friends, the contributors, Cabinet, everyone. And I was there. And one of the speakers was Ralph Ellison, the great black writer who had written the seminal book "Invisible Man." Ralph Ellison, a great friend of President Johnson's, leaned over the podium and looked directly in the face of the president, and he said, "Mr. President, because of Vietnam, you're just going to have to settle for being the greatest American president we have ever had for the undereducated young and the poor and the old and the sick and the black." And he hesitated, but he said, "Mr. President, that's not a bad epitaph."

On Vietnam:

Johnson had to demonstrate to the country on November 22, 1963, when he took the oath of office on Air Force One, that while the light in the White House may flicker, the light in the White House never, never goes out. And to do that he had to establish that the Kennedy legacy was intact, that it would be pursued. And indeed four days later he went before the Congress of the United States and he said, "John Kennedy said let us begin; I say let us continue." So he had to stay [in Vietnam].

Now after that, the question is how do you disengage? How do you leave, when all [that is] displayed on the record is a moderate, dead president's belief that we ought to stay there and deter aggression, and a new president's commitment to redeem that legacy? How then do you just, as we say in Texas, haul ass out of there? ... We made what in retrospect probably was a bad decision. The military began to tell President Johnson that we could win this war essentially on the cheap, by moving in, interdicting the forces from the North and then beginning some bombing in 1965 ... and then later, that we would in time be able to restrain the North Vietnamese and probably then get them to a table where we could negotiate out. And so he began to apply the pressure incrementally, on the advice of the military. And Johnson took that advice, because as he used to say, a man is no better than his information; [and] his information was coming from the military. They were offering him a way out which he desperately and passionately desired. ...

Keep in mind that throughout 1964 and 1965 and 1966, the general public in America supported what we were doing. The great administrative organs, The New York Times, the Washington Post, were very much supportive of the president's course of action. It was only toward the end of 1966 and the beginning of 1967 that the unrest began, led mostly by college students, and began to feed this dissident infection. ...

I think [LBJ] realized, as we all did, that most of the protests were done by young people who didn't want to go to war. ... We have people in high places in the United States today who felt the same way, and tried to do their damnedest to stay out of the war. He understood that. But the young people didn't understand Johnson. Johnson's sole motivation was to try, as we say in Texas, "to haul ass out of that war," to get out of there. He didn't know how to do it. He could not just unilaterally retreat and take the soldiers out; then every right-wing enemy [of his] would have said, "You coward, you poltroon, you disgrace the American nation, and you have spat on its flag because you put your tail between your legs and you ran." So he couldn't do that. The military kept telling him, "If you do a little bit more and a little bit more, a little more bombing, a little more interdiction here, the North Vietnamese will cave." Well, that wasn't working. The only thing that he could do was to try to find a way to negotiate.

I remember many times after a meeting -- and I attended every meeting on Vietnam, in the days when the meetings counted --and we'd go back to his office, just the two of us, tired and worn. You could see it in his face; he'd lie back in the chair and put his arms at the back of his head and clasp his hands and lean back, and he'd say, "You know, Jack, if I could just sit in a room with Ho Chi Minh, if I could just sit down with him, the two of us alone, to talk, I believe I could convince him that negotiation was the best way. And when you have a negotiation, you want to make sure that each side has something to take back to their people, and we could have done that if I could only sit down and talk with him." I mean, that's how he felt. But it was not to be.