“I know my Germans,” President Lyndon B. Johnson liked to say, having grown up with a German grandmother near German settlements in the Texas hill country. For Johnson, this “knowing” denoted admiration, apprehension, and a touch of condescension for a powerful, talented people with dangerous tendencies. Remembering from his youth an estranged German farmer who had hanged himself in a barn, LBJ told National Security Adviser Walt W. Rostow, “If you let the Germans isolate themselves, they will do crazy things.” Johnson determined to keep the Germans “by my side where I can count on them and where I can watch them.” Within weeks after becoming president, LBJ hosted Chancellor Ludwig Erhard at the Texas ranch, gave the German a cowboy hat, and announced, “I like simply everything about him.” Erhard replied, “I love President Johnson, and he loves me.”

Johnson embraced the Germans out of fear as well as fondness. He saw divided Germany as a hobbled giant, with the horrific past of two world wars and the Holocaust. In 1922 and in 1939, the Germans had wrenched world politics by making sudden deals with the Soviets. Since the end of World War II, West Germany had nursed political and territorial grievances against the Soviet Union and its allies. Viewing this turbulent history, Johnson declared that his “overwhelming interest was to make sure that the Germans did not get us into World War III.”