Seems to me the historians know he was great for civil rights, rights of the poor, the Great Society was an inspiration, and his wife created the highway beautification system.
But all anyone else recalls is being made to step down because Nixon had an imaginary Plan for Viet Nam.
According to an HBO docudrama, the Great Society was his speechwriter’s idea. It had to be fleshed out into something meaningful. His War on Poverty had about the same level of success as all the other hypostatized “wars” — on drugs and terror and whatnot. Vietnam tore at his soul, and interfered with everything he tried to do.
One interesting thing in the movie was how the stack of papers grew that he had to sign each week for dead service men’s families. It began as small stacks, and by the end of his term, they were a couple inches thick. The war took all the money away from his causes, and McNamara was his undoing.
My favorite scene was of him with the generals and some staff viewing a pitch for more troops and more bombing. Part of what was shown was a film of an old woman using her bicycle to deliver ammunition for the Viet Cong. When it was over, the general said that if they could carpet bomb Hanoi, they could destroy some of their distribution facilities including most of their trucks.
“Trucks!?” Johnson shouted, pounding the desk. “You been payin’ any attention? They don’t need any goddam trucks! They got little ol’ ladies haulin’ guns around on bicycles!” By then, it was pathetic, really.
Apparently it’s also de rigeur amongst the tin-foil crowd to implicate LBJ in the Kennedy murder. :rolleyes:
Actually, that’s the first time I’ve ever heard that theory. No one made Johnson step down and his refusal to run for a second full term took most of us by surprise. He had no way of knowing who the Republican nominee for president would be or who would win the general election. His decision turned everything upside down.
He was a good pollitician in that he was good at twisting arms and getting people to cooperate with him. If some of the recent stories circulating are correct, he had all of the social finesse of a nine year old boy whose sense of humor hadn’t developed beyond fart jokes.
I have always been of the opinion that the Civil Rights legislation that he got through came from the Kennedy Administration, especially the concerns of Robert F. Kennedy as he became ever more aware of the problems. I do remember that LBJ’s motto or theme was “Let Us Continue” – with the implication that he wished to continue what the Kennedy Administration had begun.
What I think that he will be most remembered for is the troop build up during the Vietnam War. During his Administration, the number of troops went from approximately 16,000 to over half a million.
He was more handsome in person than on television. (He would have to be.) Taller, more polished, silvery, cocksure. I did not know him personally.
I wonder if W signs those. Certainly he has much fewer to deal with.
I’ve read enough about Johnson to believe he was sincere about his social programs. But, like Nixon and Watergate, Carter and Iran, GWB and Iraq, Johnson is judged on one thing and one thing only: Vietnam.
And I think the general (non-historian) opinion is correct.
He (at least here in Texas) is something of a local hero, although he’s widely considered to have been about as crooked as could be.
Ladybird is proably more beloved around here though.
That may be so, but the pressure for not only legislation, but for enforcement of the legislation would not have been as strong had Johnson not felt committed.
Certainly he can and should be faulted for Vietnam; just as certainly he can and should be praised for civil rights. Which one lays heavier on the balance, I can’t say.
His lonterm friend John Connolly related how his campaign workers stuffed ballot boxes for him in his senate race. But about Vietnam, the man had NOBODY to blame but himself-he was warned (by his generals) every step of the way-why he chose to get into the quagmire is beyond me. And his refusal to run in 1968-he just dumped the whole mess into Nixon’s lap. Why didn’t he just admit his mistake and get out? His immense ego (“I’ll never be the first president to lose a war”-would not let him. So I kinda doubt he shed any tears for the thousands of young men he sent to an early grave! 
:dubious: “Although”? 
“Because” ?
[hair]
LBJ took the IRT
Down to 4th Street, USA
When he got there what did he see?
The youth of America on LSD!
[/hair] 
Johnson thought that if Vietnam fell, the ghost of Joe McCarthy would rise from his grave and destroy all his domestic social programs, just as the fall of China had led to the New Dealers being destoyed because of their leftism. By the time it became apparent that conducting the war was just as destructive to his domestic programs as losing would have been, it was too late.
It wasn’t just LBJ - we all had king-size egos back then. Remember, this was all back when the US had a “we can do anything, even if only for the sake of doing it” attitude: space rockets, skycrapers like the WTC even though nobody wanted to rent office space in them, etc.
Anyone remember the Mekong Delta Project? We were told that we could do for Southeast Asia what we’d done for the Southern US with the TVA, but we’d have to swat those pesky Commie spoilers as we did it (hydroelectrification as WMD).
LBJ was a political con artist par excellence. He was popular because he spread the wealth around and everybody got a cut of what he stole.
If you look at the Johnson tapes, though, you see a real commitment to civil rights, much more than JFK had. Kennedy was really ambivalent about civil rights, called the CORE leadership a “giant pain in the asses”, and allowed Martin Luther King to be wiretapped. It’s not that I think JFK was hostile to the idea of civil rights. He supported them and he wanted integration. But his background and his history, growing up privileged in Boston, was such that racial discrimination was a problem out there…the way you or I might look at a famine in Ethiopia. He never had a personal stake in it.
For Johnson, though, it was different. He grew up in rural Texas. His father fought the Klan. He grew up seeing segregation and its effects first hand. Like he said himself
And in the '30s, when he was the Texas director of the National Youth Agency, he put together special programs for black youths, sometimes even secretly shifting funds from other programs, because he knew that youth programs for blacks wouldn’t be approved.
While Johnson’s slogan was, indeed, “Let Us Continue”, I think that was as much rhetoric as anything else. Johnson didn’t just continue Kennedy’s policies, in the matters of civil rights and fighting poverty, he went beyond them, to places that the more conservative Kennedy never would have gone.
I think Johnson was the last really liberal president we’ve had. He was the last president to say, in effect, “Government can be a force for good in this world, and the government has a duty to use its power in the cause of freedom and equality, so that everyone, regardless of race or class, can have an equal opportunity to succeed.”