The Texas Ruffian德克萨斯的无赖 (Excerpts)节选 David Halberstam 戴维•哈尔伯斯坦 The people who worked for him lived in mortal fear of him. 在约翰逊手下工作的人对他怕的要死。 He humiliated them in front of their peers, then sometimes rewarded them, dressing down one staff member while others watched, then later in the day awarding the staffman a Cadillac, winking and explaining to someone else that it helped bind a man to strike with munificence when he was down. 他当众辱骂他们，过后却给他们奖赏。他会在众目睽睽之下痛斥一个员工，而后又在这一天奖励他一辆凯迪拉克。他向别人眨眨眼解释道，这样可以使这个人在低落的时候振奋起来然后对他感恩戴德并心甘情愿的为他工作。He would call in all the press officers from the different departments and chew them out like a drill sergeant, saying they had been doing a terrible job; 他会召集各个部门的新闻发布官，像一个军队教官骂他的士兵一样痛骂他们的工作如何糟糕； he hadn’t been on the front page in weeks except for lighting a goddamn Christmas tree. Lighting a goddamn Christmas tree! 除了点燃该死的圣诞蜡烛这件事之外，他连续几周没有上过新闻头版了，点燃该死的圣诞蜡烛而已！ Now he was going down on the Ranch and he wanted them to get him on page one every day; they better dream up something and get it on the first page. 现在，他正前往农场，他想让他们每天都把自己刊登在报纸的头条，他们最好编造一些什么事来把他放在头版。 On he went, leaving the men in the room, some of them quit distinguished men in their own professions, feeling that they had been crushed and degraded. 他离开以后，留在房间里的人们感觉自己被压迫并降低身份了，其中有一些是他们所从事职业中的佼佼者。Or Johnson telling Cabinet members that they wouldn't dare walk out of his Administration, no one was going to walk out on Lyndon Johnson because they knew that if they did, two men were going to follow their ass to the end of the earth, Mr. J. Edgar Hoover and the head of the Internal Revenue Service. 约翰逊告诉内阁成员不要违背他的行政管理，没有人试图背离他，因为他们知道一旦他们背离了他，将会有两个人一直跟踪他们到世界的任何一个角落，一个人是Mr.一个是联邦调查局局长。 Johnson would forever quote a maxim of his father’s: if a man couldn't walk into a room and tell who was for him and who was against him, then he wasn't much of a politician. 约翰逊永远会引用他父亲的格言：如果一个人不能一上任就看出谁支持他，谁反对他，那么他就不配搞政治。Of course Lyndon Johnson could do it like no other man; ipso facto he was a great politician. 很明显，约翰逊在这一点上比任何一个人做的都好，事实上他是一个很厉害的政客。 Thus a key to Johnson was the capacity to move men to his objective and away from their own charted course. 他成功的关键在于有能力使别人放弃自己的计划而服从他。 That was the way to achieve things: deal with men at close combat, man to man. He believed this deeply, almost too much so. 这是与别人短兵相接时可以达到目的的有效方法，他对此深信不疑。Since he was not a contemplative man, a man who read books, and since he had little belief in the rhythms and thrusts of history, 因为他并非一个喜欢沉思而又博览群书的人，他几乎不相信历史的规律和推动力。he was convinced that you could accomplish things by reasoning with leaders, by moving them to your goal, manipulating them a little, and that finally, all men had a price. 他深信可以通过跟领导讲道理来达到某种目的，让他们为了你的目标而努力，进而一点点操纵他们，直到最后他们可以为他所用。 In part this helped bring him into trouble in Vietnam, with his instinct to personalize. 某种程度上他的个性使得他在越南遭遇麻烦。He and Ho Chi-Minh, out there alone, in a shoot-out. He would find Ho’s price, Ho’s weakness, 当他和胡志明在越南保卫战上交锋的时候，他发现了胡志明的利用价值和弱点，whether it was through bombing the North or through threatening to use troops and then offering Ho a lollipop, 但是无论是通过轰炸北方或是利用军队威胁，然后再给他一点甜头，massive economic aid and regional development, a Mekong River Delta development project. 还是提供大规模经济援助以及帮助其宗教发展，例如支助湄公河三角洲的一个发展项目，This time he would find himself dealing with a man who was a true revolutionary, incorruptible, a man who had no price, or at least no price that Lyndon Johnson with his Western bombs and Western dollars could meet. 这次他发现自己面对的是一个真正清廉的革命家，根本不会被他所利用，或者至少不是他的炸弹和美元所能收买的。 刘竞硕 译 唐海颖 校 本文来源：https://www.wddqw.com/doc/c6f9aa6c783e0912a2162add.html