Lyndon Johnson is enjoying a bit of a revival.
Robert Caro’s “Master of the Senate,” the third installment of a planned four-volume biography on Johnson, recently arrived at bookstores, and HBO this month began broadcasting “Path to War,” a dramatization of the personalities and events that led to America’s deepening involvement in Vietnam.
Michael Beschloss and other historians are studying the Johnson White House tapes to learn more about a man capable of enormous generosity and indefensible pettiness.
Particularly in a visual sense, the 36th president was never an easy sell. During his speeches and news conferences, the stiff-speaking Johnson seemed to lecture Americans rather than inspire them. He came across as the ultimate insider, a wheeler-dealer who succeeded because of political contacts and favors rather than the force of ideas.
For those who lived through the 1960s, the Johnson years are not a pleasant memory. His presidency was born amid the pain of John F. Kennedy’s assassination and ended in even more pain after the awful events of 1968, one of the most traumatic years in American history that saw the loss of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. and the spectacle of the chaotic Democratic convention in Chicago.
There were no battlefield successes that could generate a TV series such as “Band of Brothers” nor the edge-of-the-abyss Cuban Missile Crisis, which inspired the movie thriller “Thirteen Days.”
The few times Johnson has been portrayed in movies have not been complimentary. In “The Right Stuff,” Johnson, then vice president, comes across as a publicity-seeking buffoon.
Johnson’s death on Jan. 22, 1973, only four years after he left the White House, robbed him of the time to polish his reputation. Even the disgraced Richard Nixon had 20 years after resigning the presidency in 1974 to put a more positive spin on his scandal-ridden legacy.
Election losers such as Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and the elder George Bush today are viewed as principled presidents who served with honor.
Johnson, who presided over an administration that escalated the Vietnam War and gave us the term “credibility gap,” is not remembered in the same light.
Yet Johnson’s 62 months as president, dark as they may have become, deserve constant re-examination, in print and in visual media.
Lyndon Baines Johnson was one of the most colorful people to serve as president. David Halberstam described him as a man of “primal force.” Charles de Gaulle, French president from 1959 to 1969, said the handsome and confident Kennedy was the mask of the American people, the image we like to show the rest of the world, while the earthier Johnson, a man of enormous contradictions and self-doubt, was the nation’s true face.
Johnson was impressive in small gatherings. A wonderful storyteller and marvelous mimic, he wasn’t shy about offering opinions. A visiting Scandinavian monarch left him so unimpressed that he told aides: “That’s the dumbest king I’ve ever met. I didn’t know they made kings so dumb.”
No president and very few legislators could count votes better than Johnson. As Senate majority leader from 1955 to 1961, he was known to tell reporters before a crucial vote precisely how the final tally on the floor would turn out. Usually he was right.
And Johnson knew exactly which congressman or senator needed to be threatened, cajoled or flattered to get legislation passed. Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen of Illinois received the full LBJ treatment before the debate on perhaps Johnson’s greatest achievement, the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which legally ended segregation in the United States 99 years after the Civil War.
Dirksen helped provide enough Republican support to overcome Southern resistance to the measure in Johnson’s own party.
It can be argued that Johnson’s forceful advocacy of the civil rights law and the subsequent 1965 Voting Rights Act ranks among the most courageous political decisions of the 20th Century. As a Democrat whose home state of Texas bordered the Deep South, Johnson knew that civil rights measures could be poison to future Democratic candidates in the region.
In the 1968 presidential election, Arkansas, Florida, North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia and Kentucky, states that had backed Johnson four years earlier, voted instead for third-party candidate George Wallace of Alabama or for Republican Richard Nixon, whose “Southern strategy” targeted Democrats wary of integration. This switch in loyalty in the “Solid South” cost Democrat Hubert Humphrey the election.
Texas, which Johnson helped put on the national political map, hasn’t supported a Democratic presidential candidate since 1976.
Younger voters who may wonder why every Southern state supported George W. Bush in the 2000 election against centrist Southern Democrat Al Gore can look back to LBJ’s championing of civil rights to understand where the South-GOP connection started.
When a weakened Johnson, with barely a month to live, dedicated his presidential library in Austin, Texas, in December 1972, it was civil rights that served as the main topic of his last and most poignant public address. Before an audience that included many veterans of the fight for racial equality, Johnson recounted their march together but concluded by saying he wished he could have done more.
It was as if Abraham Lincoln apologized for not doing enough to keep the union together or as if Franklin D. Roosevelt said he should have done more to fight the Great Depression. No apologies were necessary.
The Vietnam War did lasting damage to America’s national psyche, and Johnson was a leading actor in that tragedy. It is a worthy subject for television.
But the president who started Medicare and Medicaid, whose Great Society programs sought to eradicate poverty and hunger, deserves more time in the spotlight.
There’s more than one story to tell.
