LEONARD MARKS was one of President Lyndon Johnson’s closest cronies. He acted as the architect of the L.B.J. family fortune by helping Johnson’s wife to acquire a Texas TV station which was to make them rich, and was appointed by Johnson as Director of the United States Information Agency (USIA) during the Vietnam War.
Marks, only 5ft 2in, and Johnson, well over 6ft, made an odd couple. The Johnsons were among the first clients of Marks, a communications lawyer, and after Lady Bird Johnson purchased a small radio station, licensed only to operate at night, Marks negotiated to allow a 24-hours-a-day operation on a superior frequency. It was Marks’s idea to make the application to the Federal Communications Commission for the purchase of a television station in Austin, the Texas capital.
Charges that Johnson, advised by Marks, had pulled political strings to possess the profitable station dogged Johnson throughout his political career, but Marks repeatedly explained that the success was due to the business shrewdness of the future First Lady. “She could,” he declared, “read a balance sheet the way a truck driver reads a road map”. Marks’s role in guiding her investments into immensely profitable media holdings proved crucial to Johnson’s political career and in 1964 Marks also acted as treasurer to his successful presidential campaign.
In 1965, as the Vietnam War escalated, Johnson made Marks his controversial choice to head the USIA, a $180 million a year operation which had been headed by such distinguished journalists as Edward R. Murrow. During the war Marks, in the role for three years, became a member of then National Security Council, taking part in discussions with top military and diplomatic policymakers.
As, in effect, the head of US war propaganda, Marks implemented an unusual plan to explain US policy to the Vietnamese. Later, in a memoir, he wrote: “The Vietnamese household was well served with gossip and information when the women gathered each morning at the fish market. At the suggestion of one of our employees, I retained the services of talented storytellers who, each day, would compose stories describing the issues in the Vietnamese conflict and report on the progress being made in repulsing the communist invaders.”
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But Marks’s optimism about the outcome of the war eventually evaporated and he recalled that one morning he told the President it was time “to bring the boys home”. Marks later declared: “In all the time that I knew him, he never said a cross word to me, but that day he told me to get out of the room.”
This did not affect their friendship and, when Johnson’s body was lying in state in 1973, Marks, with other close friends, kept overnight watch.
Leonard H. Marks was born in Pittsburgh and majored in political science at the University of Pittsburgh, where he taught for four years in the law school, from which he had graduated with honours. In 1942 he moved to Washington to be assistant to the general counsel of the Federal Communications Commission, overseeing the Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service, which monitored foreign radio broadcasts. In 1946 he joined Marcus Cohn to form the law firm Cohn & Marks.
Marks led many efforts in communications, press freedom, space, foreign policy and humanitarian matters, including serving as president of the International Rescue Committee, which aided Vietnamese boat people in the 1970s.
A highlight of his career at USIA, he recalled, was a cultural exchange programme to challenge the pan-Arab nationalism promoted by President Nasser of Egypt. The meeting ended in Washington with Johnson and other officials. One visitor was Anwar Sadat, the future President who was to align Egypt with the West.
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Marks’s wife, Dorothy, predeceased him in 2001. He is survived by two sons.
Leonard Marks, lawyer, was born on March 5, 1916. He died on August 11, 2006, aged 90.