Perhaps surprisingly, Kissinger wrote rather touchingly in his book White House Years about LBJ as the Democrat's time in the White House came to a close. Kissinger was soon to be Nixon's National Security Advisor and was generously allowed access to White House information ahead of time by LBJ and Walt Rostow, so as to be ready to take up office when the time came. He met with LBJ in the Oval Office and described the frustration palpably present in the very bones of this man who had so much to offer but had been confronted with issues and times he simply couldn't master.
LBJ supposedly ended the meeting with this (I write from memory, but the thrust is right): "May I offer you some advice, Professor?" (Kissinger leans forward to absorb the accumulated wisdom of a lifetime of public service) - "read the columnists carefully. Whichever of your staff is described therein as dedicated, or able, or anything like that, then fire them: that's the person leaking against you."
Kissinger records that he left the meeting and the White House determined - sadly ironically, given the ultimate destination of the Nixon presidency - to avoid the isolation and fortress mentality of the Johnson administration, which was so destructive and unproductive.
I bring this up now because, to me at least, it seems an interesting parallel with Gordon Brown's No. 10. There is, I gather, more than a hint of the suspicion and hostility towards the media / his own followers / his wider party / the other that characterised both LBJ's and Nixon's administrations in the Brown camp.
Both Blair's and Cameron's relations with their respective parties / the media / political class / interested advisory bodies etcetera were and are (generally) better than that. This, Kissinger would say, is not just ephemoral distraction from the real work of politics, or self-serving publicity-seeking, or attempts to protect one's own position. The lesson Kissinger would have us draw is that the instinctively suspicious attitude to the media class and to the political world more widely isn't just a character flaw - the inability to reach out and to reassure and to co-opt is destructive, as it neglects to grease many of the wheels that government needs to turn in order to do the business of governing.
Admittedly, the LBJ/Brown parallel falls down when considering the causes of that terminal decline. Kissinger viewed LBJ as the consummate domestic issues politician, whose abilities were fundamentally unsuited to the most important issue of his time (Vietnam). Brown, who was supposedly an economic expert, has run aground on the most important issue of his time - the economy - so he has no such excuse.
