Jeff Greenfield is a five-time Emmy-winning network television analyst and author.

You watch your boss melt down on a national stage, erasing his attempt at damage control just a day earlier. You hear him talk about the "very fine people" at an overtly racist gathering, where anti-Semitic chants filled the night. You watch him once again demonstrate an inability ever to acknowledge any error, much less an understanding of what white supremacism has meant in this country.

If you were a significant player in the White House, and you were becoming more and more convinced that something was seriously wrong with your president’s mental and emotional health, what could you do? Who could you talk to?


These aren’t questions that President Donald Trump's White House staff have been asking publicly, or even leaking quietly. But if they did, they wouldn’t be the first. During Lyndon Johnson's presidency, some of his closest aides started to talk privately behind his back about whether the president’s mind was buckling under the pressures of an escalating war in Vietnam, and radical and generational upheaval at home. As these pressures fed into the darker side of the president’s character, more and more of these aides began to search, with no path to guide them, for answers.

The frightening scenario of aides considering an unhinged president first surfaced publicly in 1988, when Richard Goodwin published his memoir, "Remembering America.” Goodwin, who was a young staffer in John F. Kennedy's White House, had stayed on to become a significant player for Johnson; he was the principal author of LBJ's "we shall overcome" speech in 1965, one of the greatest of presidential orations. But by 1965, he wrote, "I became convinced that President Johnson's always large eccentricities had taken a huge leap into unreason. ... My conclusion is that President Johnson experienced what I believe to have been paranoid behavior."

Hastening to add that, as a layman, he was not making a clinical diagnosis, Goodwin wrote: "I base my conclusion purely on my observation of his conduct during the little more than two years I worked for him. And this was not my conclusion alone."

What kind of conduct? Johnson already had a conspiratorial streak in his thinking; he’d long held the conviction that disloyal followers of Robert Kennedy were seeking to undermine him. (To be fair, each man had plenty of reason to doubt the other.) But he had begun to share with his aides the belief that a huge Communist conspiracy was behind the anti-war protests and racial unrest. "The communists control the three major networks," he said to Goodwin. Walter Lippmann is a Communist. So is Teddy White,” referring to, respectively, the most prominent political columnist of his era and a distinguished historian. He would darkly note the presence of the Soviet ambassador at dinner parties and other social gatherings where members of the Washington media were present.

Goodwin was not alone in worrying about the state of mind of the man who controlled the nuclear button. Bill Moyers, who served as one of LBJ's closest advisers, told historian Robert Dallek that when members of Johnson's administration were deeply concerned about his behavior, “they would call me ... Cabinet officers and others." So concerned were Moyers and Goodwin about Johnson's behavior that they independently consulted with psychiatrists, describing patterns of behavior without revealing whom they were talking about. Both were told that the behavior they described fit the label of "paranoia."

What followed from those investigations? Nothing. For one thing, many of Johnson's aides, who had long suffered under the lash of an outsize, often bullying personality, saw his rants as part of a "release mechanism," not to be taken seriously. (Goodwin's memoir was denounced by several of Johnson's ex-aides, whose loyalty survived long beyond the administration.) Nor did Johnson ever act on his most outlandish delusions; to offer a ludicrous extreme, he didn't seek to indict Lippmann or White under the Smith Act.

But there was no mechanism to constrain the president from turning his dark fantasies into policy if he'd wanted to. Back in 1965, there was no 25th Amendment, allowing a group of officials to declare the president unfit and install the vice president in his place. That wasn't adopted until 1967. So the fantasy of a vice president and a Cabinet majority declaring the president unable to fulfill his office was just that—and still is, for that matter.

Significantly, LBJ's most "out there" beliefs were never displayed to the public—so he never gave the broader population any reason to worry about his darker visions. This is in stark contrast to the kind of behavior on blatant display at Tuesday’s news conference, which has convinced many psychiatrists, both professional and armchair, that our current president's seat back and tray table are not in the fully upright and locked positions. The decades of flatly false, easily refutable claims that have characterized Trump's business and political life have been multiplied geometrically by what’s at stake when Trump isn’t just talking up a building, but rebranding neo-Nazis and racists as upstanding citizens with legitimate concerns. In the mental-health community, concern has reached the point that there's a serious debate about whether to abandon the longstanding rule that professionals are not to offer judgments about people they have not personally treated.

Today, the Trump aides who might be seen as most likely to harbor such concerns—Defense Secretary James Mattis, chief of staff John Kelly—may well be too occupied trying to keep their boss from doing anything existentially dangerous to engage in the kind of amateur psychology that Johnson’s aides delicately dabbled in. Maybe in 20 or 30 years, we'll learn how deep their concerns went—and what, if anything, they tried to do about it. The Johnson experience suggests that even if they did try, there are few options when your boss is the president of the United States, except to buckle down and hope the nation can safely ride it out—unless that 25th Amendment scenario that I’ve long described as “fantasy” has moved a bit closer to reality.