Harry McPherson

Harry Cummings McPherson Jr. (August 22, 1929 – February 16, 2012) served as counsel and special counsel to President of the United States Lyndon B. Johnson from 1965 to 1969 and was Johnson's chief speechwriter from 1966 to 1969. McPherson's A Political Education, 1972, is a classic insider's view of Washington and an essential source for Johnson's presidency. A prominent Washington lawyer and lobbyist since 1969, McPherson was awarded American Lawyer magazine's Lifetime Achievement Award in 2008. He died February 16, 2012, in Bethesda, Maryland.

Early life, education, military service McPherson was born and raised in Tyler, Texas. He attended Southern Methodist University and received his B.A. in 1949 from the University of the South. Intending to be a poet and a writer, he enrolled at Columbia University for a master's degree in English literature. When the Korean War broke out in 1950, however, he enlisted in the Air Force. McPherson served in Germany as an intelligence officer, studying Russian troop deployments and plotting targets. In Flawed Giant, his massive biography of Johnson, Robert Dallek notes:

Though he worked as the President's personal lawyer for the next two years, he principally served as Johnson's top speech writer. An evocative writer with a keen feel for Johnson's style of speaking and desire for terse, spare prose that included "a little poetry" and some alliteration, McPherson crafted all the President's major addresses beginning in the summer of 1966.

In 1966, McPherson and his colleague Berl Bernhard organized the White House Conference on Civil Rights, whose 2,400 participants included Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Thurgood Marshall, and representatives of almost every major civil rights group. According to Kevin L. Yuill, "This conference, promised in Johnson's famous Howard University speech in 1965, was to be the high point of Johnson's already considerable efforts on civil rights."

McPherson came to believe the Vietnam War was unwinnable, and along with Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford helped persuade Johnson to scale back the bombing of North Vietnam.

In a 1981 interview, McPherson called Johnson "a vehement, dominant, brilliant man – not intellectually brilliant in the sense of having a vast store of reading and knowledge about world history, certainly not the historian that Harry Truman was. But brilliant in sheer wit, in sheer intellectual mental horsepower. The smartest man I ever saw." He reiterated this admiration in 1999: "To this day, Johnson is still the smartest man I've ever met, although maybe not the wisest." Brokered the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement in 1998 between Big Tobacco and 46 states, which gave tobacco companies some immunity from class action suits in exchange for limiting nicotine levels and paying antismoking groups about $250 billion. with whom he had a son, Samuel.

Publications and awards A Political Education (originally published 1972) is McPherson's insider view of the nation's capital from 1956 to 1969. Anatole Broyard of The New York Times described the book as "fascinating to read" and McPherson as "refreshingly candid in both his praises and his criticisms." A Political Education has become a political classic and is considered essential reading for understanding of LBJ and the Johnson administration. It is frequently cited in two definitive biographies of Johnson, Caro's Master of the Senate and Dallek's Flawed Giant.

McPherson was the author of numerous articles on foreign policy and political issues published in The New York Times, the Washington Post, and elsewhere. He served on the Editorial Advisory Board of Foreign Affairs and the Publications Committee of The Public Interest.

In 1994, McPherson was recipient of the Judge Learned Hand Human Relations Award. In 2008, he was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award by American Lawyer magazine.