[Congressional Record Volume 158, Number 38 (Thursday, March 8, 2012)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E349-E350]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                         HARRY C. McPHERSON JR.

                                 ______
                                 

                            HON. GENE GREEN

                                of texas

                    in the house of representatives

                        Thursday, March 8, 2012

  Mr. GENE GREEN of Texas. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to honor Harry C. 
McPherson, Jr., a fellow Texan. For many years, he worked for President 
Lyndon B. Johnson while he was in the White House and previously on his 
Senate staff. Mr. McPherson passed away on February 15th and The New 
York Times printed his obituary, written by Robert D. McFadden. In 
honor of Mr. McPherson, I would like to submit the text into the 
Congressional Record:

       Harry C. McPherson, Jr., an influential White House counsel 
     and speechwriter for President Lyndon B. Johnson from 1965 to 
     1969 and the author of a classic insider's memoir on 
     Washington-style politics, died on Thursday in Bethesda, MD. 
     He was 82.
       His death was from complications of cancer, his wife, Mary 
     Patricia McPherson, said. A liberal from Texas who read 
     literature and history for pleasure, Mr. McPherson went to 
     Washington in 1956 ``to do good,'' by his own account, a 
     naive, idealistic young lawyer who, like many Americans, 
     thought political integrity meant making decisions based on 
     sound principles and standing up for your convictions.
       Then he went to work for Lyndon Johnson.
       Thirteen years later--after a realpolitik education as 
     Johnson's aide in the Senate, as a Pentagon and State 
     Department official and as a presidential confidant and 
     wordsmith--he looked back on the battles for civil rights, 
     the crises of American cities and the corrosive war in 
     Vietnam with a keener appreciation for the arts of horse-
     trading and compromise, and for Johnson's Machiavellian ways 
     of getting things done.
       Mr. McPherson helped draft bills that became the Civil 
     Rights Act of 1957. Later, with Joseph A. Califano, the 
     president's special assistant for domestic affairs, he helped 
     shape Johnson's Great Society programs, the most sweeping 
     social legislation since the Roosevelt era, including 
     antipoverty and equal opportunity laws covering employment 
     and housing, Medicare, Head Start and scores of other 
     innovations.
       For years, he supported the military policies in Vietnam, 
     but by 1968, Mr. McPherson had come to believe that the war 
     was unwinnable. And as antiwar demonstrations swept the 
     country, he and Defense Secretary Clark M. Clifford helped 
     persuade the president to scale back the bombing of North 
     Vietnam.
       It was Mr. McPherson who drafted Johnson's landmark address 
     to the nation that spring, announcing the cutbacks of United 
     States bombing, although the stunning conclusion of that 
     speech--disclosing the president's.decision not to seek re-
     election that fall--was drafted by another Johnson aide, 
     Horace Busby.
       After leaving the White House in early 1969, Mr. McPherson 
     became a partner in Verner, Liipfert & Bernhard, a prominent 
     Washington law firm and one of the capital's most successful 
     at lobbying. His clients included businesses, foreign 
     governments and nonprofit organizations.
       Among other cases, Mr. McPherson helped to negotiate the 
     1998 master settlement in which major tobacco companies and 
     46 states agreed on advertising limitations, partial immunity 
     from lawsuits and payments of hundreds of billions of dollars 
     to the states to cover the costs of treating smoking-related 
     illnesses.
       Mr. McPherson also served on presidential commissions, 
     including the 1979 panel named by Jimmy Carter to investigate 
     the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, 
     and another named by Bill Clinton to recommend the closing of 
     military installations to streamline the Defense Department.
       Mr. McPherson wrote numerous articles on foreign and 
     domestic policies for The New York Times, The Washington Post 
     and other publications.
       His memoir, ``A Political Education'' (1972), was well 
     received and has become a perennial favorite of students of 
     Washington's crafty, duplicitous political merry-go-round and 
     of Johnson's years in the Senate and the White House.
       Reviewing it for The Times, Anatole Broyard called it ``a 
     lesson not only for Harry McPherson, but also for most of 
     us,''

[[Page E350]]

     adding: ``To put it bluntly, few Americans have a realistic 
     idea of how our government works. We have instead a series of 
     naive assumptions. If the message of this book were common 
     knowledge, much of the sound and fury that currently 
     caricatures our politics and our national image could be 
     averted.''
       Harry Cummings McPherson Jr. was born on Aug. 22, 1929, in 
     Tyler, Tex., the son of Harry and Nan Hight McPherson. He 
     attended Southern Methodist University and graduated from the 
     University of the South in 1949. He intended to be a writer 
     and poet and enrolled in a graduate program in literature at 
     Columbia in 1949. But when the Korean War broke out in 1950, 
     he enlisted in the Air Force and served as an intelligence 
     officer in Germany, assessing Soviet troop deployments.
       His first marriage, to Clayton Read in 1952, ended in 
     divorce. He married Mary Patricia DeGroot in 1981. Besides 
     his wife, he is survived by two children from his first 
     marriage, Coco and Peter, and a son from his second marriage, 
     Samuel.
       He earned a law degree in 1956 at the University of Texas. 
     At the urging of a cousin who worked for Johnson, who was 
     then a senator, Mr. McPherson went to Washington and was 
     hired by the Democratic Policy Committee, which fashioned the 
     legislative agenda for Senate Democrats. Johnson, the 
     majority leader, was its chairman. Over the next seven years, 
     Mr. McPherson rose to general counsel of the committee, 
     serving under Senator Mike Mansfield of Montana after Johnson 
     became vice president in 1961.
       He was appointed deputy under secretary of the Army for 
     international affairs in 1963 and assistant secretary of 
     state for educational and cultural affairs in 1964. Nearly 
     two years after the assassination of President John F. 
     Kennedy, Mr. McPherson joined President Johnson's White House 
     staff in 1965, and over the next four years, he became one of 
     Johnson's most trusted advisers.
       In 1966 he helped organize a White House conference on 
     civil rights, a gathering that included the Rev. Dr. Martin 
     Luther King Jr.; Thurgood Marshall, who was then the 
     solicitor general but would become America's first black 
     Supreme Court justice a year later; and representatives of 
     almost every major civil rights group in the country.
       Mr. McPherson also became Johnson's chief speechwriter, 
     shaping all of the president's major addresses from 1966 to 
     1969.
       In 2008, he was honored with a lifetime achievement award 
     by American Lawyer magazine.

  It is with great respect, I honor Harry C. McPherson, Jr. for his 
service to the country under President Lyndon B. Johnson and his many 
wonderful accomplishments upon his death.

                          ____________________