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.

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.

As soon as the Korean War ended, McPherson enrolled at the University of Texas School of Law.

"This was the era when McCarthyism was at its peak. I was very upset about Joe McCarthy and decided that I wanted to be a lawyer to defend people against the likes of McCarthy. I was worried that he was going to usher a period of totalitarianism in the United States. I wanted to fight that."

He received his LL.B. in 1956.

Shortly afterwards, he was invited to Washington by a cousin who worked for Lyndon Baines Johnson.

Johnson, who was at the time the Senate majority leader, was seeking a young lawyer from Texas to work for the Democratic Policy Committee, which Johnson chaired.

McPherson served as assistant general counsel (1956–1959), associate counsel (1959–1961) and general counsel (1961–1963) to the Democratic Policy Committee, the Democratic Party's key legislative policy organ on the Senate side.

His duties included summarizing bills coming before the Senate for members of the Calendar Committee.

McPherson's A Political Education, covering the years 1956 to 1969, concludes as follows:

An outspoken advocate for civil rights, he helped draft legislation that became the Civil Rights Act of 1957, whose goal was to ensure that all African Americans could exercise their right to vote.

After Kennedy was elected with Johnson as his vice president, McPherson continued to serve as counsel to the Democratic Policy Committee under Senator Mike Mansfield.

From 1963 to 1964, McPherson served as deputy under secretary of the Army for international affairs and special assistant to the secretary for civil functions.

His responsibilities included settling civilian disputes in the Panama Canal Zone and Okinawa, and overseeing the Army Corps of Engineers.

"Perhaps the most serious question of all was whether we could learn from our experience and shorten the lag between events and our response to them. Nearly twenty years passed from the time black Americans began leaving the South, until the national government began to respond to their unique problems in the Northern and Western cities. Our apprehension of the danger to us in the unification of Vietnam under Hanoi's rule was the same in 1963 as it had been in 1954. Our political leaders, like the rest of us, dealt with new phenomena on the basis of prevailing assumptions. Usually the assumptions were changed only by bitter experience, not by analysis and foresight. The public's reluctance to think new thoughts had much to do with that; so did their faith, which their leaders shared, that as a nation we were immune to history. We believed we could afford the lag, with our cushion of power, wealth, and resourcefulness.

Detroit and Tet told us otherwise.

It was Lyndon Johnson's fate to be President at a time when the cost of the lag came home.

On the whole, he paid it bravely.

... He finished the old agenda, and by painful example taught us something about the new."

The following year (August 1964-August 1965) he served as assistant secretary of state in the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, which arranged for thousands of foreigners to study at American universities, for foreign officials and cultural groups to visit the United States, and for American orchestras and dance companies to travel abroad.

In August 1965, McPherson became special assistant and counsel to the president, and then special counsel to the president (1966–1969).

McPherson was one of Johnson's most trusted advisers, influencing his support for equal employment and Medicare legislation.

In Flawed Giant, his massive biography of Johnson, Robert Dallek notes:

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.

"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.

McPherson drafted Johnson's landmark televised address of March 31, 1968, announcing the policy turnaround in Vietnam as well as the fact that he would not seek reelection.

A prominent Washington lawyer and lobbyist since 1969, McPherson was awarded American Lawyer magazine's Lifetime Achievement Award in 2008.

McPherson's A Political Education, 1972, is a classic insider's view of Washington and an essential source for Johnson's presidency.

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."

Soon after Johnson left office, McPherson joined the Washington-based law firm Verner, Liipfert, and Bernhard, which he helped turn into one of the capital's best-known lobbying firms.

(In 2002 the firm merged with DLA Piper.) McPherson counseled businesses, nonprofit organizations, foreign governments, and individuals on a range of matters involving Congress, the executive branch, and regulatory agencies.

Notable cases included:

He died February 16, 2012, in Bethesda, Maryland.

McPherson was born and raised in Tyler, Texas.