Aging & Wisdom Quote by Erich Leinsdorf

Name-dropping doesn’t get more politely loaded than this: a famed conductor recalling his first brush with Lyndon B. Johnson and reducing it to two soft-focus facts - introduced, friendly. On the surface it’s bland, almost bureaucratic, the kind of sentence that could live in a guest book. That’s the point. Leinsdorf’s restraint is doing the work.

In celebrity memoir culture, the first meeting with a future titan is usually framed as destiny: a glint in the eye, an aura, a hint of greatness. Leinsdorf refuses that script. “The young Congressman” deliberately shrinks Johnson to a pre-myth scale, before the Senate arm-twisting, before the presidency, before Vietnam and civil rights harden his legacy into something polarizing. “Very friendly” is an anesthetic adjective: it signals access without intimacy, significance without commitment. It lets Leinsdorf acknowledge proximity to power while staying safely noncommittal about the man who will later invite stronger judgments.

The subtext is classically mid-century: artists and cultural elites orbiting politics, careful not to look starstruck yet keen to document they were in the room. Leinsdorf, as a public figure whose authority comes from taste and discipline rather than ballots, can’t afford overt political praise or condemnation in a passing reminiscence. So he offers a credential instead: I met him early; I observed him; I can testify he knew how to work a room.

“Very friendly” also carries a faint, knowing edge. Johnson’s famously forceful charm could feel like warmth or strategy, depending on where you stood. Leinsdorf leaves that ambiguity intact - an elegant way to say: make of it what you will.