attractive, subtle and formidable

And as was considering the difference between the
impression of
health and strength
vs.
the reality
of pain, illnesses, and disorders
in the physical condition of President John F. Kennedy,
I thought about this:

Imagine the difference between a person like that, who minimizes his own suffering and refuses to dramatize, and on the other hand, the people you've known who use their constant and continuing illnesses, both real & imagined, to
a) get attention, and
b) control other people.
(How's the Health Care Plan going to deal with those?? They should have to pay in more ...)

We've all heard, "Oh well, she / he is sick, you know" to excuse inexcusable acts.

(Yes, well, officer -- I have a heart murmur, and so -- I just really needed to beat that guy up. ...)

-----------------------
Of course there's a continuum of degrees of that tactic; just read this anecdote which shows Lyndon Johnson applying it, only momentarily before veering on with some of the rest of his Schtick.

Reading the following excerpt, we must keep in mind it was published in 1965, when Lyndon Johnson was president.

{from A Thousand Days}------ Early in 1957 Lyndon Johnson wrote me that he understood I was critical of the congressional leadership and suggested that I call on him when next in Washington. Accordingly I dropped by the majority leader's office on a Saturday noon late in March. Johnson was affable and expansive. He began by saying that he was a sick man (his heart attack had taken place in 1955) with no political future of his own. His main desire, he said, was to live. He had no interest at all in the presidential nomination. He did not even mean to run again for the Senate. He planned only to serve out his present term. Being entirely disinterested, he wanted only to do the best he could for his party and his nation in the three, or two, or one year remaining to him.

He then poured out his stream-of-consciousness on the problems of leadership in the Senate. He described the difficulties of keeping the conservative southerners, whom he called the Confederates, and the liberal northerners in the same harness; he analyzed a number of seemingly insoluble parliamentary situations which he had mastered through unlimited perseverance and craft; and he gave a virtuoso's account of the role which timing, persuasion and parliamentary tactics played in getting bills through. Saying, "I want you to know the kind of material I have to work with," he ran down the list of forty-eight Democratic Senators, with a brilliant thumbnail sketch of each -- strength and weakness, openness to persuasion, capacity for teamwork, prejudices, vices. In some cases he amplified the sketch by devastating dashes of mimicry. (My notes report him "highly favorable about Kennedy, but no special excitement.")

He went on to express his annoyance over the unwillingness of the organized liberals to accept him as one of their own. "Look at Americans for Democratic Action," he said. "They regard me as a southern reactionary, but they love Cliff Case. Have you ever compared my voting record with Cliff Case's?" Thereupon he pulled out of a desk drawer a comparison of his voting record with those of five liberal Republicans on fifteen issues. On each, he had voted on the liberal side and Case on the conservative. "And yet they look on me as some kind of southern bigot." He added that maybe he was showing undue sensitivity to liberal criticism. "But what a sad day it will be for the Democratic party when its Senate leader is not sensitive to liberal criticism."

He talked for an hour and a half without interruption. I had carefully thought out in advance the arguments to make when asked to justify my doubts about his leadership; but in the course of this picturesque and lavish discourse Johnson met in advance almost all the points I had in mind. When he finally paused, I found I had little to say. It was my first exposure to the Johnson treatment, and I found him a good deal more attractive, more subtle and more formidable than I expected. After nearly two hours under hypnosis, I staggered away in a condition of exhaustion. Later I gathered that this was part of a broader Johnson campaign to explain himself to the liberal intellectuals. In a few weeks, when Kenneth Galbraith visited him on his Texas ranch, Johnson told him, "I had a good meeting with Schlesinger. I found him quite easy to get along with. The only trouble was that he talked too much." ----------------- {end excerpt}
------------------------------

{A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House,
by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.}

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