SECRECY IS CERTAINLY WORSE THAN ANONYMITY:

Late that spring, alarmed at what I perceived to be the President's increasingly irrational behavior, I began to study medical textbooks. I learned that the paranoid personality may pass relatively undisturbed through a long and productive lifetime, manifesting itself only in subtle traits of behavior: a somewhat excessive secrecy and suspicion, a need for control over the external world. Because particular displays of these traits nearly all have some basis in reality - there are real adversaries, real reasons for an ambitious man to seek control over people and events - they are ordinarily perceived more as personal eccentricity than as a failure of reason or a distortion of reality. To the gifted few they may even be a source of strength, increasing their ability to achieve mastery over that always treacherous world they inhabit.

Yet if control is threatened, mastery undermined, enemies increasing in number and moving beyond reach, the mental apparatus so carefully constructed to transform potential weakness into external strength can begin to falter. The latent paranoia, liberated by the erosive pressures of misfortune and sensed helplessness, can take occasional control of the conscious mind, thereby transforming the most highly developed faculties into instruments of willed belief, even delusion.

Something like this began to happen to Lyndon Johnson during 1965, when he found himself - for almost the first time - surrounded by men and events he could not control: Vietnam and the Kennedys, and, later, the press, Congress, and even the public, whose approval was essential to his own esteem. As his defenses weakened, long-suppressed instincts broke through to assault the carefully developed skills and judgment of a lifetime.

It was during this period, in the spring of 1965, that I first noticed Johnson's public mask begin to stiffen. In his public appearances, the face seemed frozen, the once-gesturing arms held tightly to the side or fixed to a podium. Protective devices proliferated - Teleprompters, a special Presidential rostrum that traveled with him, even the careful excision of colorful or original language -all, I now believe, designed at least in part to guard him from spontaneously voicing inner convictions that he knew, in that part of his mind still firmly in touch with reality, would, if voiced, discredit him. ''You know, Dick,'' Johnson once told me. ''I never really dare let myself go because I don't know where I'll stop.''

In mid-June, Moyers entered the Oval Office to find Johnson holding a wire-service report torn from the teletype machine that stood close to the desk. The President said: ''Did you see this? Bundy'' - McGeorge Bundy, the national security adviser - ''is going on television -on national television - with five professors. I never gave him permission. That's an act of disloyalty. He didn't tell me because he knew I didn't want him to do it. Bill, I want you to go to Bundy and tell him the President would be pleased, mighty pleased, to accept his resignation.'' Johnson paused. ''On second thought, maybe I should talk to him myself. . . . No, you go do it.'' Then, as if responding to some sensed hesitation on Moyers's part: ''That's the trouble with all you fellows. You're in bed with the Kennedys.''

Moyers wisely ignored the President's order, and left the White House to go home. ''At midnight,'' I noted in my diary, ''Moyers called me to talk about Johnson. He said he was extremely worried, that as he listened to Johnson he felt weird, almost felt as if he wasn't really talking to a human being at all.''

The next morning when Moyers entered the Oval Office, Johnson looked up at him. ''Did you speak to Bundy?'' ''No, I didn't, Mr. President,'' Bill replied. Johnson grunted, and returned to the memorandum he had begun reading. Bundy was to last another year.

A week later, Moyers and I were talking with Johnson in the Oval Office when, provoked by nothing more than my comment that his education bill had virtually complete support from liberal organizations, Johnson proclaimed: ''I am not going to have anything more to do with the liberals. They won't have anything to do with me. They all just follow the Communist line - liberals, intellectuals, Communists. They're all the same. I detest the United Nations. They've tried to make a fool out of me. They oppose me.

''And I won't make any overtures to the Russians. They'll have to come to me. In Paris, Gagarin'' - Yuri Gagarin, the Soviet cosmonaut - ''refused to shake hands with the astronauts. I sent those astronauts myself, and what he did was a personal insult to me.'' (In fact, Gagarin did shake hands, but later declined to meet with American officials, which Johnson persisted in inflating into a personal affront.) ''I can't trust anybody anymore. I tell you what I'm going to do. I'm going to get rid of everybody who doesn't agree with my policies. I'll take a tough line - put Abe Fortas or Clark Clifford in the Bundy job. I'm not going in the liberal direction. There's no future with them. They're just out to get me, always have been.''

I accompanied Moyers back to his office. ''We were both shaken, alarmed,'' I noted in my diary, ''not so much at the content of Johnson's statements - surely he didn't mean to halt all discussions with the Soviet Union or pull out of the United Nations - but at the disjointed, erratic flow of thought, unrelated events strung together, yet seemingly linked by some incomprehensible web of connections within Johnson's mind. He won't act on his words, but he believes they're true.''

On June 28, I recorded in my diary that Johnson had ''asked me and Bill if we thought Tom Wicker [ of The New York Times ] was out to destroy him, if Wicker was caught up in some sort of conspiracy against him. We said no, that he writes some favorable and some unfavorable stories, but we couldn't convince him. . . .''

GRADUALLY, AS Johnson moved closer and closer to the crucial decision of July 28 -when he would raise the number of American troops in Vietnam by more than 100,000 - circumstances began to overwhelm him, elude his grasp. The decision to transform the war, which he knew was potentially fatal to his public ambitions, could no longer be evaded or postponed. Increasing opposition from the press and critics on the Hill could no longer be controlled by his hitherto almost irresistible power of persuasion. The somewhat frightening, always puzzling outbursts became more frequent.

No longer satisfied with impugning the motives of his critics (''That Fulbright,'' he told me after Senator J. William Fulbright had joined the ranks of dissent, ''he never was satisfied with any President that wouldn't make him Secretary of State''), or attributing his difficulties to ''those Kennedys'' or ''those Harvards,'' Johnson began to hint privately that he was the target of a gigantic Communist conspiracy in which his domestic adversaries were only players - not conscious participants, perhaps, but unwitting dupes.

Sitting in the Oval Office on July 5, Johnson interrupted our conversation on domestic matters: ''You know, Dick, the Communists are taking over the country. Look here,'' and he lifted a manila folder from his desk. ''It's Teddy White's F.B.I. file. He's a Communist sympathizer.''

A few days before, I had been sitting in Bill Moyers's office, when Bill walked in, visibly shaken, his face pale. ''I just came from a conversation with the President,'' he said. ''He told me he was going to fire everybody who didn't agree with him, that Hubert [ Humphrey ] could not be trusted and we weren't to tell him anything; then he began to explain that the Communist way of thinking had infected everyone around him, that his enemies were deceiving the people and, if they succeeded, there was no way he could stop World War III.''

''Suppose he really does go crazy,'' I said. And then, answering my own question: ''I tell you what would happen if we went public with our doubts. They could assemble a panel of psychiatrists to examine the President, and he would tell them how sad it made him that two boys he loved so much could have thought such a thing, and then explain his behavior so calmly and reasonably that when he was finished, we would be the ones committed.''

Shortly thereafter, I talked with a psychiatrist who was also a close personal friend. After he agreed to treat our conversation as privileged, I described the President's behavior in detail as I had observed it. At the time, I did not even inform Moyers of this step; nor did he tell me, until years later, that he had independently followed the same course, speaking with two different psychiatrists.

All three doctors offered essentially the same opinion: that Johnson's behavior - if the layman's descriptions we provided were accurate -seemed to correspond to a textbook case of paranoid disintegration, the eruption of long-suppressed irrationalities. The disintegration could continue, remain constant, or recede, depending on the strength of Johnson's resistance, and, more significantly, on the direction of those external events - the war, the crumbling public support -the pressures from which were dissolving Johnson's confidence in his ability to control events. [...]

DURING THAT SUM-mer, Bill Moyers and I - often accompanied by one of Bill's assistants -met every few days to discuss the President's increasingly vehement and less rational outbursts. We agreed that Johnson was changing, that some invasive force was distorting his perceptions, infecting the entire process of Presidential decision. Although we were reluctant to acknowledge it, the signs of aberration were too obvious to be ignored or rationalized as typical Johnsonian exaggerations. [...]

On July 5, I made a diary note: ''It has been a wild and unbelievable week - dinner with Bill and his assistant and another long discussion of Johnson in which we agreed on his paranoid condition. I asked Bill if he thought I should talk to anyone before I left, perhaps to Bob McNamara,'' - the Secretary of Defense - ''whose position might let him keep things from getting out of hand. Bill seemed to think that it might be a good idea . . . But I don't know if we can trust McNamara. He is intelligent and skilled, could understand our fears, but is also very ambitious. . . .''

If the world was beginning to slip from his control, Johnson would construct a tiny inner world that he could control, barricade himself not only from disagreement, but from the need to acknowledge the very existence of disagreement except among the uninformed and the hostile.

In those days, Johnson's conversations with his Cabinet would often begin with: ''What are you doing here? Why aren't you out there fighting against my enemies? Don't you realize that if they destroy me, they'll destroy you as well?'' The meetings themselves, no longer a forum for debate, were largely confined to reports by each secretary on the affairs of his department. Questions about Vietnam were discouraged, and, if asked, went unanswered.

Nor could the National Security Council be trusted. ''Those National Security meetings were like a sieve,'' Johnson remarked. ''There's that Arthur Goldberg'' (then representative to the United Nations) ''with a direct pipeline to The New York Times. . . . And those fellows from Defense were the worst of all. . . . Every time I saw some Department of Defense official's picture in the paper with a nice story about him, I'd know it was the paper's bribe for the leaked story.''

Those who attended security council meetings were sometimes told they should not use the occasion to voice doubt or disagreement. The President didn't want to hear it. ''I know how you feel, Arthur,'' the faithful Robert S. McNamara told Ambassador Goldberg before one meeting, ''but it would be better if you didn't say anything. The President has already made up his mind, and you would only embarrass him.''

Gradually, all meaningful discussion and decision were confined to the small, carefully chosen inner circle: Secretary of State Dean Rusk; Robert McNamara; the Director of Central Intelligence, William F. Raborn Jr.; the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Army Gen. Earle G. Wheeler, and, occasionally, others who could be trusted to maintain complete secrecy.

Meanwhile, dissent from the outside - press or Congress or public - was discounted, rejected as the malignant tissue of ignorance, political ambition, disloyalty, or even a multiplying conspiracy. The only effective restraints were Johnson's judgment of the limits of public and Congressional tolerance, and his fears that certain uses of American military force might precipitate Soviet and Chinese intervention.

Later, after he had left the White House, Johnson spoke of ''secret treaties,'' formal documents committing the Soviet Union and China to go to the aid of North Vietnam should the United States transgress defined limits. ''I never knew when I sat there approving targets one, two, three, whether one of those three might just be the one to set off the provisions of those secret treaties. I kept asking myself, what if one of those targets you picked today triggers off Russia or China?'' There was, of course, no evidence that any such treaties existed. But Johnson needed them to justify his acts, and so he believed in their reality.

The incursions of paranoia - a kind of guerrilla warfare of the mind - are subtle, carefully establishing their chimerical, delusive outposts on still-firm remnants of reality. There was aggression in Southeast Asia, and opposition at home. These things were true. But the transformation of disagreement into disloyalty, political opponents into personal enemies, spreading dissent into a gigantic conspiracy, the rebels of Vietnam into the advance guard of world conquest, were the work of mental processes that bent and twisted the clay of reality into menacing fantastical shapes. [...]

Yet now this man of such intensely personal gifts was set at the head of a gargantuan bureaucracy, managed by people he could not know or observe; compelled to reach for his constituency while sitting in an empty office staring at the curved, blank lens of a television camera.

Often he would awaken in the middle of the night and -clad in pajamas, feet encased in thickly padded slippers -go down to the Situation Room of the White House, where he would sit for hours receiving the latest reports of bombing raids and missing planes, captured villages and fresh casualties, as if, somehow, in this way he could establish contact with the struggles, the secret desires, of living flesh.

But it could not be done. A master of men, the invulnerable genius of the small town had become the servant of technology. His perceptions confused, judgment distorted, no less shackled because he believed in the power of that technology, the mathematical accuracy of transistor computation, he even liked the machines with their illusion of control, but liked them as a small boy likes a mechanical toy - never fully trusting, but with no other choice. His increasingly angry, increasingly baffling frustrations were a manifestation of America's own transformation.

During the next few years, as I campaigned with Eugene McCarthy and then Robert Kennedy, I never disclosed -even to my closest friends and colleagues - the wild surmise that had preoccupied my final days in the White House.

Later, I was to question my failure to disclose what I knew of Johnson's mental condition: was I, through misplaced loyalty or personal cowardice, betraying my obligation to the country? Yet such disclosures would undoubtedly not have been believed. After all, what credentials did I have? I could not have proved my judgment then. Indeed, I cannot prove it now, although the subsequent escalation of an unwinnable war in Vietnam - an escalation fueled by self-deception throughout - added testimony far more persuasive than my own observations.

Still, to this day, I have never overcome the suspicion that my secrecy may have been a very large mistake of judgment or of timidity.

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