The stories about LBJ's bad behavior that I've heard concern people much higher in the status hierarchy. I'm not an LBJ scholar, but I suspect much of this behavior was a twisted dominance game. He would ritually humiliate his targets, mostly (I suspect) people he suspected of thinking themselves intellectually or socially superior to LBJ: e.g., a Member of Congress or cabinet member or intellectual policy wonk who might look down on Johnson as a crude embarrassment. That's not an ego game he would have felt any need to play with the support staff. With them, I suspect he had an open, bantering relationship (not unlike Bill Clinton when Hillary wasn't around and when they weren't engaged in screaming matches).
I wish someone would write a good book on this subject. Not so many years ago, many people (especially liberals) would be surprised when Jesse Helms and Paul Wellstone annually topped the "most liked" or "nicest Senator" lists. Lefties always imagined Helms as a fire breathing monster. They were always surprised to find out that he was the Senator who knew the names of the elevator operators, the "walk and talk" ladies dishing out food in the Senate cafeteria, and the Capitol Police guy at the front door. Helms not only knew their names; he often asked about their wives and kids. He took care to know people he didn't need to know. Wellstone was the same way.
I see the distinction you make, and I understood the context you said it in.
As an aside, I always found LBJ to be an interesting subject. He was well known for his various “arts of persuasion”, some funny, some not so funny.
He was known to give people (who he was trying to sway to vote a given way) what was called “the treatment”.
He would get right up in their faces, his nose literally an inch away, jawboning at them the entire time with his eyes and eyebrows going up, down, and all around...apparently, not many people could stand up well to it.
But personally, I found him a misguided, tragic person not equal to the task at hand. I don’t think he was evil, even if I think his misguided polices were evil. I think he was in over his head in Vietnam, and he couldn’t subject the North Vietnamese to his “treatment” to get his way.
I remember people being horrified that he picked his beagles up by the ears, but it made me laugh...it was something a good old boy would have done in front of his friends, but Johnson apparently couldn’t discriminate between friends and the press.
I have always viewed the way people treat those under them in a chain of command or station in life as a mark of their quality. People who treat servants and people under them as serfs are despicable, and Hillary was clearly one of those.
They say Bill Clinton was fairly genial with the help, which I would expect, because he always came across as one of those people who needed to be liked.