Hey it’s Professor Dave, I wanna tell you about LBJ.
Lyndon Baines Johnson was possibly the most tragic President in American History.
His accomplishments were spectacular, and his downfall equally so.
He was the first President from the Deep South since the Civil War, yet his principled passage
of the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act drove the South
into the Republican Party’s arms for generations.
He left the White House a pariah, despised by his own party, with American Society on
the brink of collapse.
His was a story out of Greek tragedy, a tale of a great man’s strengths and flaws so
intertwined, that he was unable to avoid his fate.
Lyndon Johnson had grown up poor in Texas, and would harbor resentment for his entire
life towards the moneyed Eastern Establishment.
But he never turned his back on the poor.
He taught school to Mexican immigrants and was haunted by their bleak futures.
Johnson’s political hero was the great progressive Franklin Roosevelt.
Politics in Texas was a blood sport.
The rules shifted with the wind, ballots were forged, the dead would vote early and often,
and alliances were made, broken, and reformed in the blink of an eye.
His allegedly fraudulent victory in the 1948 Senate race by a mere 87 votes earned him
the nickname “Landslide Lyndon,” which he gleefully embraced.
The tall, imposing Texas Senator had been one of the most influential Majority Leaders
in US history when John Kennedy chose him for his running mate at the Democratic convention
in 1960.
Liberals were shocked that Kennedy would choose a man viewed by many as a typical Southern
politician – a conservative segregationist, hostile to the Democratic labor base, but
Kennedy was shrewd enough to know that he needed a Southerner to win the election.
His strategy was vindicated by the slim victory over then Vice President Richard Nixon, and
Johnson went from being the most powerful Democrat in Washington to a neglected, underutilized
figure in the Kennedy Administration.
LBJ knew the legislative process intimately, and could have provided invaluable assistance
in getting Kennedy’s New Frontier agenda passed.
But his rough Texan cowboy manner and belligerent views on foreign policy did not sit well with
the urbane sophistication of the administration’s Eastern establishment inner circle.
Johnson also had a reputation as a political hustler, growing rich during his government
tenure.
Two weeks before Kennedy’s assassination, LIFE Magazine ran an expose of Johnson’s
connections to former aide Bobby Baker, including allegations of influence-peddling through
bribery and arranging sexual favors for Congressional votes and government contracts.
In order to quell suspicions about Russian involvement in the JFK assassination owing
to Lee Harvey Oswald’s Communist sympathies, Johnson quickly assembled the Warren Commission,
a bipartisan panel whose main task was to dispel suspicions of foul play and conspiracy
in Kennedy’s death.
When the Warren Commission released their findings that Oswald acted alone, this “rush
to judgment” spawned decades of speculation regarding the truth about the assassination,
which includes the Mafia, rogue CIA agents, right-wing Texans, and even Johnson himself.
Later in life, LBJ privately confessed he believed it was Castro who got to Kennedy
before Kennedy could get to him, but consensus has still not been reached on this tragedy.
Johnson was painfully aware that he was viewed as a usurper, so he pleaded with the Kennedy
veterans to remain in his Cabinet to preserve a sense of continuity.
LBJ decided the best way to honor Kennedy was to enact his stalled legislation.
With the country still grieving, Johnson pushed for a vote on Kennedy’s proposed tax cut,
which was being held hostage in committee in order to get civil rights legislation withdrawn.
After passing the tax bill, Johnson pushed even harder to pass Kennedy’s Civil Rights
Bill.
Opponents launched a filibuster in the Senate and LBJ needed Republican support to override
it.
He and other democrats vigorously lobbied GOP leader Everett Dirksen and was able to
secure enough votes to get it passed.
While signing it into law in July 1964, Johnson supposedly said its passage would lose the
South for the Democrats for a generation.
He underestimated the seismic shift he set into motion.
Johnson’s legendary persuasive skills included using his six-foot-four stature to physically
intimidate his listener.
Reasoning, pleading, threatening, tearful begging - LBJ used these tactics to get his
victim to vote the way he wanted.
In this way he was able to achieve legislative achievements unmatched since the New Deal.
Among his “Great Society” accomplishments in the next year were the Food Stamps Act,
a domestic Peace Corps called VISTA, the Head Start Program regarding education and nutrition
expenses for low-income families, and most ambitious of all, a War on Poverty.
Johnson then turned his energies on winning the upcoming election by a large majority,
in order to validate his legitimacy.
His opponent, Senator Barry Goldwater, denounced many of Kennedy’s proposals as socialist
ploys.
Goldwater was widely perceived as a rabid anti-Communist warmonger.
Johnson won in a landslide, and with a Democratic majority in Congress, he continued his frenetic
avalanche of legislative activity in the New Year.
1965 saw Johnson passing Kennedy’s Medicare bill, an Affirmative Action law barring discrimination
in the work place, a National Endowment for the Arts, the Clean Air Act, and the follow
up to the Civil Rights Act, the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
When it passed in the summer of 1965, Martin Luther King, Jr. told Johnson, “You have
created a second emancipation.”
During the 1964 presidential campaign, Johnson began ramping up military presence in Vietnam.
In August, the USS Maddox allegedly came under fire from North Vietnamese boats in the Gulf
of Tonkin.
No casualties were incurred, and the incident was not reported to Johnson or administration
officials.
But two days later, reports of a second attack reached the president.
The Johnson Administration used this second attack in the Gulf of Tonkin to seek Congressional
Authorization for unlimited presidential action against any Communist Aggression in Vietnam.
There was just one problem; there are widespread claims that either or both of the supposed
attacks on the Maddox never took place, even though Johnson went on national television
to claim as much.
And so the most destabilizing foreign war in American history conceivably began under
false pretenses.
But why would Johnson do this?
The simplest answer is ignorance, errors at the hands of the NSA and the captain of the
Maddox.
But whatever the case may be, Johnson was looking for an excuse to flex his muscles.
During the Cuban Missile Crisis, he sided with those urging attacks on Cuba.
And Johnson would later confess that he opposed Kennedy’s plan to withdraw US troops from
Vietnam, likely out of sheer hubris.
No Third World Asian country would defy the mightiest nation on earth while Lyndon Johnson
was in charge.
For three decades, the policy of the United States towards Soviet expansionism had been
containment.
First in Iran in 1946, when Truman threatened to use nuclear weapons if the Russians didn’t
leave the northern oil fields.
Then in Berlin during the 1948 Airlift, and most notably, in South Korea, repelling the
North Korean invasion.
Unfortunately, the situation in Vietnam was much different than the Korean War.
It was essentially a war for reunification under the Communist North that was opposed
by the corrupt and unpopular government in the South.
And so, even as Johnson was enjoying an election landslide victory, he was laying the groundwork
for events that would destroy his Great Society.
Aerial bombings of North and South Vietnam, collectively known as Operation Rolling Thunder,
began in March of 1965, and the first battalion of Marines landed, a force that would swell
to over half a million troops.
This only hardened North Vietnamese resolve that peace talks should be left to them alone.
LBJ was gripped by a fear that China or Russia might enter the conflict and it would escalate
into a nuclear confrontation, so he refused to fully commit troops to combat roles.
He insisted he would not be the first president to lose a war but his hesitancy ensured it.
Other events outside his control plagued Johnson that summer.
Race riots exploded in the Watts ghetto of Los Angeles.
Over the next few years, similar urban rebellions would engulf Detroit, Chicago, and Washington
DC.
Protests against the war erupted around the world and across college campuses, where draft-age
students burned their Selective Service cards.
In 1966, a drug-fuelled counterculture arose in opposition to what it considered a corrupt
conventional society.
The phrases “sex, drugs and rock & roll” and “Turn on, tune in, drop out,” became
mantras, and the Beatles’ “Sgt.
Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” became the clarion call for the emerging hippie counterculture.
The reaction to this social upheaval was swift.
In liberal California, the popular governor Pat Brown was defeated by a right-wing underling
of Barry Goldwater, a B-movie actor named Ronald Reagan.
Across the nation, the Republican Party, which had seemed dead just two years prior, was
now resurgent, and an anti-war faction in the Democratic Party, headed by Robert Kennedy,
now a senator from New York, threatened to challenge Johnson for the 1968 nomination.
Johnson grew paranoid, blaming the war protests on Communists, the Eastern Establishment,
and Kennedy loyalists.
Society seemed to be falling apart, and the middle class, long the base of the Democratic
Party, blamed Johnson.
The war dragged on with no end in sight, revolution was in the air both in America and Europe,
and in February of 1968, the North Vietnamese Army launched its Tet Offensive, overrunning
much of South Vietnam.
Veteran CBS newscaster Walter Cronkite, “the most trusted man in America,” questioned
whether the war was winnable on the air, whereupon Johnson famously remarked, “If I’ve lost
Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.”
When Robert Kennedy announced his candidacy to challenge Johnson for the Democratic presidential
nomination, Johnson’s worst fears were realized.
His poor showing in the New Hampshire primary against a little-known anti-war Democrat,
Eugene McCarthy, showed Johnson his support had evaporated, and he announced he would
neither seek nor accept his party’s nomination.
Within three months, both Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy would be assassinated.
In August, rioters clashed with police during the Democratic Convention in Chicago.
The New Left, a coalition of hippies, civil rights activists, and Marxists, opened up
new possibilities in progressive politics but failed to unite around a single candidate
in 1968.
This failure, combined with conservative backlash, ensured the election of Richard Nixon, who
had risen from the ashes of his 1960 defeat, having repackaged himself as a “New Nixon,”
who could end the war and bring law and order to the country.
Johnson retired to Texas in disgrace, grew his hair out like an aging hippie, and in
an act of willful suicide, resumed smoking.
His 60-a-day cigarette habit had caused a near fatal heart attack in 1956, and in 1973
he would die from another massive heart attack at the age of 64, just as the Vietnam War
Peace Accords were being signed.
Lyndon Johnson’s domestic achievements were overshadowed and undermined by the Vietnam
War, and he damaged the Democratic Party by severing its base in the South.
The emerging Republican majority, with its emphasis on law and order, had managed to
become the political party of both the wealthy Eastern Establishment and the working class,
shattering the 35-year coalition that FDR had created between labor unions, the South,
and the Middle Class.
Although history has begun recognizing Johnson’s domestic accomplishments, the social and political
divisions unleashed by the Vietnam War shattered the optimism once so prevalent in the American
spirit, and unleashed furies from both the left and the right, fierce political fissures
that remain with us today.