I’ve been listening to CSPANs XM channel and the recently released tapes made of LBJ’s Presidential conversations. I have to admit in listening to him talk to various sophisticated political operatives he’s very adeptly playing them like violins.
Based on most articles I’ve read about LBJ I always had perception of him as a sort of crass, boorish oaf who pulled dogs ears and whipped out his willy in cabinet meetings, however, these conversations demonstrate enormous insight into various people’s motivation and abilities, and a finely tuned, in depth understanding of all the cogs and levers necessary to get various pieces of legislation passed, and things done in general. In some of these conversations he actually sounds pretty brilliant.
Is he less of an oaf than current history would have us believe?
That’s actually why I think LBJ was just an absolutely fascinating person: was an outstanding politician, and certainly one of the most talented political operators to serve in the White House.
And he was very crude, crass, and unpredictable.
He reminds me of one of those TV show supercops who “plays by his own rules.” Except he was a President.
I don’t think history as a whole believes that Johnson was stupid or a fool. I think it has shown pretty conclusively how wrong he was about very many things, but that is a different matter altogether.
I think his stock will go up over time. Take away Vietnam, and he might be remembered as a true visionary and the Great Society would have been his legacy. He was certainly no fool, in fact he was one of the most accomplished politicians ever to become president. I predict in 50 years he will be remembered with more fondness than either Truman or Reagan.
What history are you reading? The parts of the multi-volume biography of LBJ I read in the New Yorker don’t say that. He was Majority Leader of the Senate for a long time, and knew how to get things done, and even at the time it was acknowledged that he was far better than JFK at getting bills passed - with the Civil Rights Bill the major example.
Take away Vietnam? You can’t. That’s what defined him. It saddled him while he was in office and it chased him out of office, and it ultimately ended up killing 10 times more Americans than the “Worst President Ever” flavor of the month George W. Bush. That’s like saying that without Little Bighorn Custer was a great general, or without My Lai William Calley was a great officer. And the Great Society? Please. The only thing good that came out of that was the civil rights laws, and they were coming anyway, one way or another. The rest of it saddled us with huge, bloated social programs that have been at best moderately successful, but at a huge cost.
Johnson was a horrible President. There is no way he’ll ever look better than Truman or Reagan.
There’s a little book that came out nearly 40 years ago called The Begatting of a President, a satirical look at the politics of the 1960s couched in faux-Biblical language.
The chapter on LBJ, “LBJenesis,” has LBJ creating the Great Society in six days, and throwing a barbecue on the seventh.
“Then LBJ said, ‘shucks, let there be an eighth day.’ And on the eighth day he escalated.”
Those two sentences might as well be his political epitaph.
Except for the fact that they really did seriously, and permanently, reduce the percentage of Americans living in poverty.
Yeah, well, we also learned along the way exactly what works and what doesn’t - and a lot of what Johnson proposed simply did not work.
Urban renewal was a particular focus of his - and nobody would argue that it wasn’t needed in some form. But federal urban renewal efforts went toward eliminating entire neighborhoods, including viable ones with an active, if small, middle class. These were replaced by projects - which almost instantly started to deteriorate and become magnets for poverty, single parenthood, and crime.
Johnson wasn’t alone in this blindness - but he did have it.
His welfare model, too, was one that had the unintended consequence of encouraging both joblessness and single parenthood, and causing these behaviors to persist over generations. So ingrained was defense of this welfare system in the belief system of the Democratic Party that it took until the 1990s for it to be changed under a Republican congress. Now, of course, it would be hard to find anyone who would defend the “old” welfare system.
So a lot of Johnson’s Great Society schemes proved to be unworkable or detrimental in the long term. I don’t think anyone would argue that point, even if they agree that Johnson was an incredibly consequential president. Of all the presidents since FDR, I’d say Eisenhower, Johnson and Reagan had the biggest impacts on the country, IMHO.
You’ve got a poverty rate there at around 23% in 1959, starting to drop in 1962-63, dropping to about 13% by 1968, and then not going above 15% since. Sure seems that something happened between 1959 and 1968 that permanently reduced the rate of people living in poverty.
Don’t forget, the Great Society also gave us Head Start, Medicare, Medicaid, the first substantial consumer-protection policies, and the first substantial environmental policies going beyond mere protection of untouched resources, among other things.
If you take away Vietnam, you’re taking away the most significant part of his Presidency and the worst foreign policy choice in the history of the United States of America; in fact, maybe the single worst policy decision in the entire history of American self-government that didn’t involve slavery. He was the man primarily responsible for the escalation and prosecution of a war that killed at least two million people and wounded and displaced millions upon millions of others. Bush’s Iraq War is, by comparison, a historical footnote.
I suppose you could make a lot of historical figures look better by taking away their greatest failing.
LBJ inherited the mess. Sure, he could have withdrawn sooner. But I don’t know if any other president would have done much differently prior to 1968. Iraq was a far bigger mistake, in my opinion, and Bush by far committed the greater sin. Unlike LBJ, Bush’s course of action very likely would not have been initiated by any other president.
When you take Vietnam away from LBJ, there is something left. He did accomplish a great deal and was a man of good intentions. Take Iraq away from Bush, and there is NOTHING good that he accomplished. I’m not saying that we can forget about Vietnam when we remember LBJ, but we also need to remember that he stood for something besides that war.
In Johnson’s case, his greatest failing is inextricably linked to the success or failure of his domestic policies. The Vietnam War reduced his ability to fund the Great Society and the War on Poverty.
At least we can say this: George W. Bush is a smaller man than LBJ in every way. (Meant seriously, not as a jape.) The little twerp doesn’t live up to any sort of “worst” label regarding the presidency.
Like Nixon, LBJ was a tragic figure in the original sense. He had all the makings of being something great, but was undone by a flaw. GWB, OTOH, is a mediocrity.
