Elegy for LBJ?
By John Harris Beck
Chilmark, MA, August 28, 2008 (News Commentary)
Yesterday's New York Times included a commentary by Robert Caro, famed biographer of powerful public servants. "Johnson's Dream, Obama's Speech" reminds us that LBJ's words announcing a Voting Rights Act brought tears to the eyes of Martin Luther King.
Earlier in this year's campaign Hillary Clinton took flack for mentioning that Dr. King had had a partner in LBJ without whom the civil rights impulse of the 1960s might never have become law. To the extent that she may have been suggesting that Barack Obama should stick to making speeches and leave the actual power to, well, her, she deserved the rebukes. But her history was correct.
Now that we have seen another president drive the country into the ditch, in another multinational land war in Asia, Lyndon Johnson is primed for reconsideration. Johnson shares with Bush 43 a devasting failure of strategic judgment, but he also showed real concern for the well-being of his fellow citizens. Yes, even those who had no potential to be major donors.
Back then I was a Democrat in the Rocky Mountains, a breed that evidently has made a comeback. The Texans we saw then were overbearing, their hats and their cars were too big, they drove too fast through Wyoming, and they owned too much of "our" land; but I could relate to the world of LBJ. And so, when my tears for JFK were dry, I could look at the new president, and see him, follow him.
What I recall first is that Johnson did not use the power of the presidency to demonize those who opposed his course in Vietnam. And then his signature notion of a "Great Society"--it may have missed a key point, that such things will endure only when grounded in the hearts of the people. Yet it was a clear and genuine vision of the nation's path foward, not a mere publicity phrase or worse yet smokescreen, behind which the public's purse and resources could be diverted to private use.
Chris Matthews and guests on MSNBC some weeks ago talked about Johnson's awareness of the price the Democratic party would pay for passing the Civil Rights Acts. We're giving the South to the Republicans for the next forty years, he told his old colleagues, the Dixiecrat rulers of Congressional committees, but it's the right thing to do. Remember when our leaders could say "right thing to do" and mean it?
Forty years later the tide has turned. The only presidential candidate with a potential to speak the world to America and America to the world is the unlikely nominee of our oldest political party. His rhetoric for now will have to be moderated, kept within range of our over-mediated dullness, our infantilized consumer mediocrity as thinking citizens.
Still, someone who may see how to build a great society from the grass roots up has walked on stage. Time has brought forth a sweet wind at last, to blow from the Pedernales River, over the grave of Lyndon Johnson
(c) John Harris Beck
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Comments: 38
As for what Johnson did on race, he did many great things. But as they say about "hearts and minds" (in relation to all our wars in the last 40 years), there was only so much Johnson could do. He couldn't change the hearts and minds of many people in the American South. There is still much work to do, in many part of the South.
I enjoyed reading this article! Thank you!
The quagmire that became Vietnam started in the 1945 when we sided with France and its colonial interests instead of Ho Chi Minh and the desire of the Vietnamese to be free of foreign rule The Declaration of Independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam was published in 1945 and things went downhill from there. LBJ inherited a mess that the Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations had helped create and it has been theorized, and probably rightly, that If JFK had not been assassinated he would have done the same think LBJ did.
The Vietnamese Declaration of Independence may be found at http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5139.html.
Without LBJ, the civil rights movement would never had stood the test of time. His determination to give it legislative 'legs' made a difference that we can see today. I don't agree with all he did, or how he did it, however, LBJ made a difference that made our society live up to its promises in ways that had never been done before. For that, we need to honor him.
Nathan, I could have gone Republican myself after '68, except that my father and his father and his father had been Democrats and officeholders back to the 1840s. I've worked at becoming supra-partisan, however, though Karl Rove is one of those deeply dangerous people who don't recognize evil when they unleash it. At least I think he doesn't recognize it; I'm certain, however, that divisions created by deceit are evil.
LBJ gave me a great deal, especially in terms of my education. The Great Society programs increased my high school's library by adding a great books library where I read a translation of Das Kapital. My best friend studied Russian. We were reading reprints from leading sociology journals. This was high school, man.
Those programs had good intentions and some results, too. By the way, while remembering the great men of that time please give a shout out to Adam Clayton Powell who collaborated with LBJ to give the House's support.
Great and timely read.
The only thing I could not forgive LBJ was his escalation of Vietnam.
"" Disallowed from practicing law, McClellan published Blood, Money & Power: How LBJ Killed JFK*[3], in 2003 which became a best-seller in November of that year. In the book McClellan presents a theory that Lyndon B. Johnson and Edward Clark were involved in the planning and cover-up of the Kennedy assassination. McClellan also named Malcolm Wallace as one of the assassins. The killing of Kennedy, he alleged, was paid for by oil millionaires such as Clint Murchison, Sr. and Haroldson L. Hunt. McClellan purports that Clark got $6 million for this work. French journalist William Reymond published a book the same year in which he claims that Cliff Carter and Malcolm "Mac" Wallace were key to helping plot the murder of JFK. McClellan's book has been translated into Japanese. He is presently completing a sequel to his book.
McClellan states, the assassination of Kennedy allowed the oil depletion allowance to be kept at 27.5 percent. It remained unchanged during the Johnson presidency. According to McClellan this resulted in a saving of over 100 million dollars to the American oil industry. During President Richard M. Nixon term, in 1970, it dropped to 15 percent.""
From Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barr_McClellan.