The Crazy Shepherd, the Underground Press and America’s Left

A Previously Unpublished Interview With President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Press Secretary, George E. Reedy

After 37 years, I finally got around to digging out of my archives and transferring from an old-school cassette tape to digital technology what is now a historical recording of an important figure in the Lyndon B. Johnson presidency. [The Interview.]

I was 24 years old and just putting my toes into the journalism world when I conducted this interview as part of a research project while a graduate student in mass communications at Marquette University in Milwaukee — which I attended on a research scholarship.

The individual I interviewed at the time, 1983, was George E. Reedy, then a professor at Marquette who served as Johnson’s press secretary from April 1964 to July 1965, when he took a leave of absence over disagreements with Johnson’s Vietnam War policies. In 1971, while that war still raged, Reedy wrote an op/ed in the New York Times:

“The public’s business — at the highest level of life and death — was being determined as though it were none of the public’s business,” he wrote.

One could argue that same lack of candor and attention given to the public good during the…