No president deserves to inherit a war and few
were less qualified to prosecute a war.
The situation called for abandonment early on and there is good reason
to think that Kennedy had reached exactly that conclusion and would have pulled
out immediately after the 1964 election had he won. Kennedy did understand how to prosecute a
war.
As it was he bought into the military’s
insatiable appetite for more. After all,
the military calculation is about wastage and more is always better. That blunder made it impossible to extract
himself later and the rest is history.
Otherwise, he did prosecute a social revolution
over the dead bodies of his Southern constituency. It happens to be plausible that the
conspiracy supporting the assassination of Kennedy included the fine folks who
likely thought that they owned Johnson.
As it was, the assassination turned a dead duck legislative agenda into
a slam dunk for Johnson who was obviously way more flexible than they ever
imagined.
This period needs to be renamed as the Kennedy
Johnson Reform Era simply because what Kennedy had proposed, Johnson disposed
to the South’s chagrin. After that it
was all downhill and essentially a good decade sooner had Kennedy lived.
I want you to think about something. Was Vietnam a genuine mistake? Before Vietnam, Communism was evangelizing
everywhere without serious challenge.
That was ended and insipient insurgencies suddenly faced experienced counter
insurgency immediately. We had two
decades of effective limited activity from that sector until it actually
ended. Our price was heavy but a price
was exacted for playing and was paid in full by Che Guevara.
Today we have plenty of legitimate insurgencies
around but none ever claims to be communist.
Lyndon Johnson's Ambivalent Legacy
Sunday, 02 March 2014 00:00
While considered by many a warmonger, President Lyndon Johnson
deserves inclusion in his book celebrating heroes and heroines of social
justice, says author Peter Dreier, because in terms of alleviating
suffering, addressing racial injustice and promoting public welfare, his
domestic reforms were almost unrivaled.
Lyndon Johnson is
without doubt the most controversial figure in my recent book, The 100 Greatest Americans of the 20thCentury: A Social
Justice Hall of Fame. I don't just mean that he was a divisive
figure in his own lifetime. I mean that many readers were shocked that I
included him in a book celebrating heroes and heroines of social justice.
LBJ was, many people
reminded me at my talks and through emails, a "warmonger" and worse.
"Johnson has the blood on his hands of over 58,000 Americans killed, and
over 300,000 Americans injured, plus the deaths and injuries of over a million
Vietnamese," one reader scolded. "How could you put him in the same
book with Eugene Debs, Jane Addams, Upton Sinclair, Paul Robeson, Franklin
Roosevelt, Betty Friedan, Dorothy Day, Walter Reuther, Pete Seeger, Martin
Luther King, and Cesar Chavez?"
"Part of the way
with LBJ" was how antiwar activists described their lukewarm endorsement
of Johnson when he ran against the right-wing Republican Barry Goldwater in
1964. They gave Johnson grudging support for his growing embrace of civil
rights and antipoverty efforts, but they could not disguise their disgust at
his escalation of the Vietnam War. Within a few years they were chanting,
"Hey, Hey, LBJ. How many kids did you kill today?"
Five decades later, that
remains LBJ's divided image among liberals and progressives: as a savvy
lawmaker who squandered his opportunity to make a serious assault on racial and
economic injustice by spending the nation's taxes and his own political capital
fighting an immoral war in Southeast Asia.
Is this a fair
assessment of Johnson's presidency?
LBJ was an accidental
president who passed several of the most important pieces of legislation in
American history.
This year, Americans are
taking a second look at Johnson's life and legacy. In April, the LBJ
Presidential Library is hosting a Civil Rights Summit to celebrate the
50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act. According to a recent front-page
story inThe New York Times,
headlined "Rescuing a Vietnam Casualty: Johnson's Legacy," Johnson's
family, friends, and supporters are clearly hoping to shift LBJ's reputation
from warmonger to civil rights champion.
Later this month, Bryan
Cranston will portray Johnson in a new Broadway play, Robert Schenkkan's
"All the Way," which focuses on LBJ's support for civil rights.
Historian Doris Kearns
Goodwin, who served as an aide to Johnson in his last year in the White House
and later assisted him with his memoirs, thinks a reappraisal of LBJ is overdue.
"When he left the office," she told The
New York Times, "the trial and tribulations of the war were so
emotional that it was hard to see everything else he had done beyond
Vietnam." A CNN/OCR International poll found that Johnson's public
approval rating has improved from 40 percent in 1990 to 55 percent last year.
But evaluations of
presidents shouldn't simply be based on their popularity, but on their
achievements. LBJ was an accidental president who passed several of the most
important pieces of legislation in American history.
Johnson's political
career reflects the major components of post-World War II liberalism, which
included government activism to challenge social injustice and Cold War
imperialism and militarism.
All presidents operate
under conditions not of their own choosing, but which they inherit from the
past. LBJ entered the White House during a wave of mounting civil rights and
anti-poverty movements, but he also had to contend with the Democratic Party's
Southern segregationist wing, which held enormous power in Congress. Likewise,
he was caught in a vice between the Cold War-oriented foreign policy
establishment (military contractors, most intellectuals and journalists, the
Pentagon and their Congressional allies) and the burgeoning anti-war movement. In
both instances, he made choices that were based on both political calculations
and what he considered the morally right thing to do.
Johnson's political
career reflects the major components of post-World War II liberalism, which
included government activism to challenge social injustice and Cold War
imperialism and militarism. In interviews this year, Robert Caro, who has
completed four volumes of his master work, The
Years of Lyndon Johnson, portrays Johnson as a passionate believer in
government's responsibility to help the poor and minorities (as a school
teacher in his 20s he devoted long hours teaching poor Mexican-American
children in South Texas), but also as Cold Warrior who believed that the
United States had to protect South Vietnam from becoming a "domino"
in the global battle between communism and democracy.
LBJ's family had lived
in Texas for generations, fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War, and
made their living as farmers and ranchers. But LBJ's father, a one-time state
legislator, piled up huge debts, lost the family farm, and plunged the family
into financial hard times. As a schoolteacher with poor students in rural
Texas, as an aide to a Texas congressman during the New Deal, as Texas state
director of the National Youth Administration (a New Deal jobs program), as a
congressman and senator, and as president, LBJ's own experience with economic
hardship shaped his commitment to helping the poor.
In the 1930s, Texas was
part of the solid Democratic South, supporting the New Deal so long as it
provided jobs and relief and did not require racial integration or encourage
workers to join unions. LBJ was elected to Congress in 1937 at age 28. As an
ally of Franklin D. Roosevelt, he brought electricity, housing and other
improvements to his district. He lost his first bid for the Senate in 1941 and
stayed in the House, but ultimately won a Senate seat in 1948. In 1955, his
Democratic colleagues elected him majority leader. He used his legendary
parliamentary skills and powers of persuasion to get reluctant senators to vote
for liberal legislation.
Although LBJ grew up
under Jim Crow segregation and was known to use racist epithets in
conversation, he was a moderate on race issues. In 1948, he opposed President
Harry S. Truman's civil rights program, but six years later he was one of the
few southern senators who refused to sign the Southern Manifesto, a pledge to
resist implementing the US Supreme Court's desegregation order. He risked
alienating white Texas voters by maneuvering successfully to pass the Civil
Rights Act of 1957. It was a weak law, but it was also the first civil
rights measure enacted in almost a century and thus a sign of Johnson's
shifting commitments. He recognized his own
racist sentiments, but fought to overcome them, in part out of decency and in
part out of a desire to win acceptance from northern liberals among his Senate
colleagues and voters.
And no president better
reflected the tensions of post-war liberalism than Lyndon Johnson.
In 1960, LBJ threw his
Texas hat into the presidential ring, but Senator John F. Kennedy from
Massachusetts had wider appeal. JFK needed LBJ's help to win the South and to
help pass legislation in Congress, so he asked him to be his running mate.
Johnson knew he would have more power as Senate majority leader than as vice
president, but he took the offer, thinking it would be a stepping-stone to the
White House after eight years of a Kennedy administration.
Thanks to government
spending for road-building, higher education, homeownership and a permanent war
economy, the 1950s and 1960s was a period of growing prosperity. The standard
of living was improving for most families, inequality was shrinking, and people
felt hopeful about the country and its future. A growing number of American
families were able afford to move to the suburbs, buy homes, install air
conditioners, purchase a new contraption called a television, pay for a new car
every few years, take a yearly vacation (and stay at a new phenomenon called a
"motel") and even fly on an airplane. They could send their children
to college and save money for a comfortable retirement.
But the contradictions
of the prosperity triggered protest movements. African Americans did not share in
the rising prosperity. The civil rights movement was, to a large degree, a
result of the gap between promise and reality, including the persistence of
poverty, as described in Michael Harrington's 1962 expose, The Other America. John Kenneth
Galbraith's 1957 book, The
Affluent Society, alerted America about its "private splendor"
amidst "public squalor." Rachel Carson's 1962 book,Silent Spring, warned about the
dangers of pesticides on human health and the natural ecology. Both Galbraith
and Carson's books foreshadowed the environmental movement's concern about our
throwaway society, waste, pollution and over-dependence on oil. Ralph Nader's
1965 expose of the auto industry's indifference to safety concerns, Unsafe at Any Speed, laid the
groundwork for a new consumer movement that would demand stronger government
regulation of business to protect the public from dangerous food, medicines,
cars, toys and other products. The first inklings of the women's liberation
movement emerged from the frustrations of women living in suburbia, as
reflected in Betty Friedan's 1963 book, The
Feminine Mystique.
When Kennedy took office
in 1961, much of this disquiet was bubbling below the surface, but civil rights
activists were already on the march. The demand for a new wave of social rights
and government responsibilities tested the ability of liberalism to address
these realities. And no president better reflected the tensions of post-war
liberalism than Lyndon Johnson.
In his first address to
Congress, on November 27, 1963, a few days after Kennedy was shot, LBJ told the
legislators, "No memorial oration or eulogy could more eloquently honor
President Kennedy's memory than the earliest possible passage of the civil
rights bill for which he fought so long."
Using his consummate
arm-twisting skills and bolstered by ongoing civil protests in the South, LBJ
got the Civil Rights Act - outlawing segregation in restaurants, buses, and
other public facilities - through Congress and signed it on July 2, 1964. It
was the first significant civil rights bill since Reconstruction and changed
the country forever.
When Johnson failed to
replace the segregated Mississippi delegation to the Democratic Party
convention in August 1964, the radical wing of the civil rights movement - particularly
the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) - lost faith in his
commitment to their cause. But Martin Luther King and other civil rights
leaders continued their uneasy relationship with LBJ, particularly since they
needed his support to get Congress to pass a bill removing racial barriers to
voting in the South.
"There is no negro
problem. There is no southern problem. There is no northern problem. There is
only an American problem."
In November 1964, LBJ
beat Goldwater in a historic landslide victory, along with large Democratic
majorities in Congress. He believed that the victory could help him enact a
voting rights law the next year. Yet, like FDR and Kennedy, he was ambivalent
about the use of protest. He did not want to appear to be responding to
pressure from activists and agitators.
In February 1965, at a
White House meeting, LBJ asked King to put civil rights protests on hold,
arguing that they would harden white resistance and make it difficult, perhaps
even impossible, for him to win over moderate senators and representatives,
with whom Johnson had often successfully negotiated as Senate majority leader,
for voting rights legislation. King responded that blacks had already waited
too long.
As LBJ's then-aide Bill
Moyers recalled, King "talked about the murders and lynchings, the
churches set on fire, children brutalized, the law defied, men and women
humiliated, their lives exhausted, their hearts broken. LBJ listened, as
intently as I ever saw him listen. He listened, and then he put his hand on
Martin Luther King's shoulder, and said, in effect: 'OK. You go out there Dr.
King and keep doing what you're doing, and make it possible for me to do the
right thing.' "
According to Moyers:
"Lyndon Johnson was no racist but he had not been a civil rights hero,
either. Now, as president, he came down on the side of civil disobedience,
believing it might quicken America's conscience until the cry for justice
became irresistible, enabling him to turn Congress. So King marched and Johnson
maneuvered and Congress folded."
A month later, on March
15, 1965, in a speech to Congress, LBJ said, "There is no negro problem.
There is no southern problem. There is no northern problem. There is only an
American problem." He added, "It's not just negroes, but really it's
all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and
injustice." He concluded, "And we shall overcome."
Johnson's use of the
words of the civil rights anthem symbolized his embrace of the movement. It
was, however, an uneasy alliance. LBJ was still angry at the civil rights
activists who embarrassed him by challenging the segregated all-white
delegation at the 1964 Democratic Party convention. But he also recognized that
the willingness of activists to put their bodies on the line against fists and
fire hoses had tilted public opinion. The movement's civil disobedience,
rallies, and voter registration drives pricked Americans' consciences. LBJ
understood that the nation's mood was changing.
LBJ told his chief
economic advisor, Walter Heller, that abolishing poverty was the kind of big,
bold program he could get behind.
LBJ used every
arm-twisting trick he had to fashion a coalition of northern and border-state
Democrats and moderate Republicans to enact the landmark Voting Rights Act. The
act barred literacy tests and other obstacles to voting that were being imposed
by southern states. Within four years, black voter turnout had tripled. Since
then, the number of black elected officials at all levels of government has grown
dramatically.
Johnson and the civil
rights movement forged a productive, if tense, alliance. As the movement took
to the streets, LBJ showed increasing resolve and moral courage to be the
president from the South who brought America closer to racial and economic
justice. But Johnson did not reap the political rewards for his efforts.
Between 1964 and 1968, race riots engulfed many American cities, triggering a
tremendous backlash among white middle-class and working-class voters,
including many once-loyal Democrats.
LBJ's embrace of civil
rights paralleled his efforts to address American poverty. He recognized the
logic of King's observation, "What good is having the right to sit at a
lunch counter, if you can't afford to buy a hamburger?" Both civil rights
and labor activists were pushing Johnson to address the issue, which they
viewed as one that crossed racial lines, since the vast majority of poor
Americans were white.
Upon taking office after
Kennedy's death in November 1963, LBJ told his chief economic advisor, Walter
Heller, that abolishing poverty was the kind of big, bold program he could get
behind. Johnson mobilized America's sympathy for the slain president to achieve
goals that JFK, a much-less-skilled legislator, could not have won.
In a commencement speech
at the University of Michigan on May 22, 1964, LBJ called on the country to
move not only toward "the rich society and the powerful society, but
upward to the Great Society," which he defined as one that would "end
poverty and racial injustice."
Walter Reuther, the
influential president of the United Automobile Workers (UAW), agreed.
Representing the left wing of the Democratic Party, he advised Johnson to champion
a bold federal program for full employment that would include government-funded
public works projects and the conversion of the nation's defense industry to
production for civilian needs. This, he argued, would dramatically address the
nation's poverty population, create job opportunities for the poor
(disproportionately comprised of African Americans), and rebuild the nation's
troubled cities without being as politically divisive as a federal program
identified primarily as serving poor blacks.
But jobs programs were
expensive; the WPA had cost $5 billion in 1936. Johnson insisted that the
"unconditional war on poverty" had to cost less than a billion
dollars a year. His strategy was to help the poor improve themselves - a
"hand up, not a handout." Under the War on Poverty's major
legislative initiatives, federal aid for elementary and secondary education,
especially for poorer districts, was dramatically expanded. The plan created
Head Start (early education for poor children) and Legal Services (legal aid to
poor families) and pathbreaking job training programs. Under Johnson, Congress
established food stamps (until then a pilot project) as a permanent program.
One of LBJ's most enduring legacies is the creation of Medicare (for the
elderly) and Medicaid (for the poor), as well as funding for neighborhood
health clinics. Johnson established the Department of Housing and Urban
Development and increased funding for low-income housing. The antipoverty
program encouraged residents of poor neighborhoods to create nonprofit
community-based organizations to deliver services, build housing and organize
to gain a voice in local government.
But the antipoverty
program included no major jobs program.
Testifying before
Congress, Reuther said that "while [the proposals] are good, [they] are
not adequate, nor will they be successful in achieving their purposes, except
as we begin to look at the broader problems [of the American economy]." He
added that "poverty is a reflection of our failure to achieve a more rational,
more responsible, more equitable distribution of the abundance that is within
our grasp."
Because Johnson's
domestic achievements include the creation of Medicare and Medicaid,
antipoverty programs, and civil rights legislation, his other domestic accomplishments
are often overlooked.
Although Reuther threw
the UAW's political weight behind Johnson's antipoverty programs, his critique
was correct. Since the 1960s, federal efforts to address poverty have
consistently suffered from a failure to address the fundamental underlying
issues, especially full employment at living wages.
Despite this, these
programs have played a significant role in reducing poverty. Even LBJ's
successor, Richard Nixon, didn't dare slash most antipoverty programs created
under Johnson's Great Society initiative. As a result, the nation's poverty
rate was cut in half, from 22.2 percent in 1960 to an all-time low of 11.1
percent by 1973. Most dramatic was the decline of poverty among the elderly,
from 35.2 percent in 1959 to 14.6 percent in 1974, thanks to enactment of
Medicare in 1965 and cost-of-living increases for Social Security. The poverty
rate among African Americans fell from 55.1 percent in 1959 (when most blacks
still lived in the rural South) to 41.8 percent in 1966 (when blacks were an
increasingly urban group) to 30.3 percent by 1974.
Because Johnson's
domestic achievements include the creation of Medicare and Medicaid,
antipoverty programs, and civil rights legislation, his other domestic
accomplishments are often overlooked. These include landmark environmental
protection and conservation measures, including the Clean Air Act, the
Wilderness Act, and the Endangered Species Act. It was under Johnson that the
National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities
were created. He signed the Immigration Act of 1965, which substantially
liberalized US immigration policy toward non-Europeans, as well as the Highway
Safety Act, the Public Broadcasting Act and legislation to provide consumers with
protection against dangerous and shoddy products. Johnson issued two executive
orders to promote affirmative action by prohibiting race and sex discrimination
by federal contractors along with a requirement that they engage in good-faith
efforts to expand job opportunities for minorities and women. He appointed the
first African American to the Supreme Court (the heroic civil rights lawyer
Thurgood Marshall) and the first African American cabinet member (HUD Secretary
Robert Weaver).
LBJ's biggest blind spot
as a liberal Democrat was organized labor. His reluctance to follow Reuther's
advice to push for a full employment agenda stemmed from his close ties to
business, particularly Texas' oil industry. In the 1960s, unions still
represented almost one-third of the nation's workforce, they were a key player
within the Democratic Party, and they actively supported LBJ's 1964 race
against Goldwater. Recognizing labor's influence, Johnson signed a
comprehensive minimum rate hike that also extended coverage under the Fair
Labor Standards Act to 9.1 million workers.
In the decade before LBJ
became president, the United States escalated the arms race, intervened
militarily in 10 countries, and overthrew democratic regimes in Guatemala and
Iran.
LBJ and labor joined
forces in support of civil rights legislation, Medicare, and Medicaid. But
Johnson was hardly a union enthusiast. In Congress, like other southern
Democrats, he voted for the anti-union Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, which weakened
many parts of the New Deal's landmark Wagner Act of 1935. After his landslide
1964 victory, Johnson promised labor leaders that he would help repeal
Taft-Hartley's "right-to-work" provision, which gave employers an
upper hand during union organizing drives by prohibiting the union shop.
Johnson even called for repeal in his 1965 State of the Union speech. Unions
and their allies organized a major push for repeal. The House voted for repeal
by a 210-203 margin, but Senate Republicans filibustered the bill. To union
leaders' dismay, Johnson did not use his famed arm-twisting skills to win the
Senate votes needed for repeal. This meant that the South - including his
native Texas - would remain unorganized, that southern black, Latino, and white
workers would not be mobilized together, and that the South would continue to
serve as a destination for businesses seeking low-wage workers and low tax
sites, and remain a bastion of conservatism.
In the 1950s and 1960s,
most liberals embraced the Cold War. In the decade before LBJ became president,
the United States escalated the arms race, intervened militarily in 10
countries, and overthrew democratic regimes in Guatemala and Iran. LBJ
inherited America's involvement in Vietnam from the Eisenhower and Kennedy
administrations. But he dramatically escalated the war, making it more
expensive in both lives and money. Unfortunately, LBJ relied on most of JFK's
military and foreign policy advisors - both inside and outside the government.
They viewed Vietnam as a crucial battleground of the Cold War and persuaded LBJ
to invest more troops and money into the war. Moreover, as Johnson often
remarked, he did not want to be the first president to lose a war - especially
a war with communists.
His advisors' views -
that an increase in bombing, combat troops and aid to Saigon's corrupt
government leaders would bring about a South Vietnamese victory against
communist North Vietnam - proved disastrously wrong. Nightly news report on TV
and reports in daily papers and weekly magazines confirmed that the United
States was losing the war. The Tet offensive in early 1968 - where North
Vietnamese troops penetrated major cities in South Vietnam - revealed to many
Americans that the United States was not winning the war, despite LBJ's public
comments to the contrary.
Politically, Vietnam was
LBJ's undoing, costing him credibility with many liberal Democrats. The number
of American troops in Vietnam grew to 100,000 in 1965 and to 500,000 three
years later. As antiwar protests grew in number and size, LBJ's ratings among
Democratic voters dropped sharply. King's first major speech opposing the war,
in August 1967, deepened the nation's antiwar feelings and ruptured the
relationship between the preacher and the president. That year King wrote:
"The bombs in Vietnam explode at home; they destroy the hopes and
possibilities for a decent America." America could not afford to
simultaneously fight a war on poverty on our own soil and an imperialist war overseas.
LBJ predicted,
correctly, that by identifying closely with the civil rights movement, the
Democratic Party would lose its hold on many white southerners
By the spring of 1968,
Johnson had concluded that he would face strong opposition in the Democratic
primaries and could even lose the November election. On March 31, 1968, to the
surprise of some of his own staff, LBJ announced that he would not seek
reelection.
Four days later, King
was killed in Memphis, Tennessee, and riots broke out in a number of cities.
LBJ recognized that King's murder could also spark a renewed push to pass a
bill outlawing racial discrimination in housing that had been languishing in
Congress. Despite being a lame-duck president, LBJ was still able to use his
prodigious political skills. Within a week, on April 11, Congress passed and
LBJ signed the Fair Housing Act.
LBJ predicted,
correctly, that by identifying closely with the civil rights movement, the
Democratic Party would lose its hold on many white southerners. Democrats
also lost many white voters who blamed the party for the violence of the urban
riots and the terrorist wing of the antiwar movement, as well as for the
"drugs, sex, and rock and roll" culture of the hippie movement. In
November 1968, appealing to what he called the "silent majority,"
Richard Nixon beat Vice President Hubert Humphrey for the White House, which
political analysts viewed as a rebuke of LBJ as well.
No other modern
president except FDR rivals Johnson's domestic reforms in terms of alleviating
suffering and addressing racial injustice, but Vietnam still overshadows his
other achievements.
What lessons should
today's progressive activists learn from LBJ's presidency?
Throughout American
history, progressive change has come about when both "inside" and
"outside" strategies are at work. Activists need advocates in the
White House and Congress to voice their concerns and pass legislation. But even
with such allies, activists have to keep the heat on, be visible, and make
enough noise so that policy makers and the media can't ignore them. Boycotts,
strikes, civil disobedience, and mass marches -- traditional outsider
strategies -- help put new issues on the agenda, dramatize long-ignored
grievances, and generate media attention. This type of agitation gets people
thinking about things they hadn't thought about before and can change public
opinion.
Savvy liberal and
progressive elected officials understand that they really need
"radical" protestors to change the political climate and make reform
possible. When "disruption" is taking place in the streets, and
grassroots groups are engaged in lobbying and rallying, policymakers can appear
statesmanlike and moderate when they forge compromises to win legislative
victories.
Progressive activists
also need to understand that all legislation is typically a compromise. In
politics as in other arenas, the perfect is often the enemy of the good. Some
compromises can co-opt a movement's ideas and energies with token changes, but
other compromises are stepping-stones towards more dramatic reform. Most of the
key LBJ-era victories were subsequently built upon and strengthened. That's
what social movements do.
As the great
abolitionist Frederick Douglas noted, without protest there is no progress.
Activists always need to focus on immediate issues that improve people's lives,
but they also need to build support for system-changing reforms – particularly
changes in our system of legalized bribery called campaign finance, expansion
of voting rights, and modernizing our labor laws to level the playing field
between business and employees -- that will give ordinary Americans a stronger
voice in our democracy.
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