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Chapter 8 - Lyndon Johnson: Means and Ends, and What His Presidency Means in the End
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Lyndon Johnson Means and Ends, and What His Presidency Means in the End David M. Shribman 233 From this vantage point, where the writing of journalism ends and the crafting of history begins, the fog has lifted, the physical characteristics of the landscape of the 1960s now are clear. A third of a century later, the view is far different. At the time—when the passions were strong, the wounds raw, the heartache real—the principal figures of the age seemed to be John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon. In popular portrayal, they were the martyred prince and the prince of darkness, polar opposites whose struggle for the presidency opened the decade and whose shadows dominated it. Lyndon B. Johnson was but the figure in the middle, the consequence of the death of one, the cause of the ascendancy of the other. Indeed, his triumphs (particularly the Voting Rights Act of 1965) and failures (especially Vietnam) were regarded alike as legacies of Kennedy and, because of the peculiar effect of the racial politics of the time and the toxic effect of Vietnam, principal explanations for the election of Nixon. In this view, which places LBJ as the bridge between the other two men, Johnson mixed the heroism of his predecessor and the brooding mendacity of his successor. He was the man in the middle, history’s accident, a comic-book figure of exaggerated aspirations and appetites, a portrait in tragedy. Though journalism seldom was gentle to Johnson, history may yet be. The most prominent political victim of Vietnam, the target of protesters ’ chants, the symbol of big-spending liberalism, the last apostle of Washington social engineering, Johnson was for many years the subject of contempt and ridicule, particularly from fellow Democrats. But now that he has been out of office for a third of a century, a new Johnson is emerging from the historical mists and myths. The new Johnson is visionary . Sympathetic. Avuncular. Wise. Effective. A lot smarter than the smart people of the time once thought. And, as Shakespeare said of King Lear, he ended his career “a poor, infirm, weak and despis’d old man” who was “more sinn’d gainst than sinning.” Lyndon B. Johnson is plausibly the dominating politician of the 1960s—and the most colorful, original, human figure of the period. The Johnson revisionism is coming only partially from the academy. It is also coming from the arena, where in the 2000 presidential election Vice President Al Gore put Johnson on the list of presidents he most admired . The economist John Kenneth Galbraith, a onetime Johnson intimate who broke with the president over Vietnam and helped lead an insurrection designed to dump him from the 1968 Democratic ticket, has described Johnson as “the most effective political activist of our time.”1 Former senator George S. McGovern of South Dakota, as LBJ apostate and antiwar Democratic presidential nominee in 1972, argued that, aside from Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and Theodore Roosevelt, “Lyndon Johnson was the greatest president since Abraham Lincoln.”2 But the current Johnson revival also reveals as much about America at the beginning of the twenty-first century as it does about the America that, in the tumultuous Johnson years, had reached the two-thirds mark of the twentieth century. It tells us there is a yearning again, in the Democratic Party and perhaps in the nation at large, for a president with big dreams, big plans, and—this is recognized in Johnson’s case more in hindsight than at the time—a big sense of self-confidence. Long before this latest burst of revisionism, there were many Lyndon Johnsons: the striving capital schemer who ingratiated himself with Franklin D. Roosevelt and became the biggest New Dealer of them all, eventually dreaming of a New Deal for South Vietnam’s Mekong Delta. The son of Depression-poor Texas who dreamed of bigger horizons for the poor, the black, and the Hispanic. The gifted Senate majority leader who felt stifled as John F. Kennedy’s understudy and then, in the most tragic transition of the twentieth century, became Kennedy’s successor. The shrewd Washington hand who slammed his social-activist program through Congress with deftness, only to be bogged down in a civil war 234 David M. Shribman [44.204.24.82] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 00:04 GMT) in Vietnam. Now the emphasis is more on Johnson as a political magician than as a cold war tactician...