With the 50th Anniversary of the tragic death of Pres. John F. Kennedy, people are talking a lot about him and his administration. But I was recently thinking, did Kennedy really accomplish that much in office? The disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion. Kennedy also nominated Justice Byron White to the Supreme Court, which was kind of a disaster in itself. White later turned out to be a conservative on most issues.
Now, consider the president that followed: Lyndon B. Johnson. In my opinion, he did a lot more good. He enacted a civil rights law. His “Great Society” programs resonate to this day. And as I understand it, with his war on poverty, the gap between rich and poor shrunk to its lowest level in decades (sorry I have no cite for this yet). (Although, even liberals minimize that last item today, sadly.) He also nominated Thurgood Marshall to the highest court–and highly qualified and able jurist (and the first African American one too, let’s not forget).
I have nothing against Kennedy. But I think Johnson had a much more successful (and beneficial) presidency. Johnson left office and died when I was quite young. But even to this day, I love rediscovering his presidency.
LBJ was a truly great visionary. Pushing the Civil Rights Act through, all the while knowing that it would cost his party the South for a generation or more, was one of the greatest selfless political acts in history. He did it because it was the right thing. Take away Vietnam, and there’d be statues of him in every city.
Kennedy’s value was in his ability to inspire the country with efforts such as the Peace Corps and the Manned Moon Landing. He had a number of successes and a number of failures, (as most presidents have had), but he was not a powerful leader who pushed through any successful legislation. (This is one of the problems among the nutcases who want to believe in assassination conspiracies: JFK was not a powerful threat to any group and no one had any “need” to take him out.)
More image than substance. And Jackie helped with that, too. And of course if the press had been anything like it is today, he’d’ve been sunk in scandal. Don’t tell that to my relatives, though, being mostly New England Catholics of at least part Irish decent.
Kennedy is definetly overrated, but Johnson was a disaster. He got us in to a full on war in Vietnam, never actually commited to it enough to win, micromanaged it into a disaster, just so he would not be the first president to lose a war. He even admitted in 1965 that he didn’t think we could win, but he let tens of thousands of americans die anyway.
The Great Society programs were huge failures which spent billions of dollars and not achieved much at all. The poverty rate fell from 30% in 1950 to 17.3% in 1965, the poverty rate has declined by three percent since then. The US government has spent 15 trillion to end poverty and yet the poverty rate has fallen slower since the start of the Great Society programs then it did before they started.
LBJ’s court appointments were part of a trend to expand the rights of criminal defendants and make it harder to convict criminals. The results were disastrous as crime rates tripled in only ten years from 1965 to 1975.
As for civil rights he finally did the right thing after becoming president, but those same laws could have been passed 10 years earlier if he had backed them in the senate, but he allowed civil rights laws to be blocked and weakened as Senate Majority Leader for purely political reasons.
Johnson’s legacies are tens of thousands of dead Americans dead in Vietnam, tens of thousands of Americans dead on the streets of American cities, and trillions of dollars wasted.
One theory is that he was a threat, or at least not entirely satisfactory, to the MIC and CIA all their little wizards, who trusted LBJ to go into 'Nam full-bore.
Another is that the Mob was just annoyed with Bobbie’s union investigations and stuff.
Kennedy accomplished far more by dying (or at least gave LBJ the political capital to accomplish things) than he ever would have while living. He’s our most overrated president, and LBJ one of the most underrated (puddleglum’s amusing and wholly fictional narrative about civil rights legislation aside.)
Vietnam is rightly considered a huge blunder, of course - but LBJ wasn’t the one who came up with the policy of intervention in the first place.
I’m way way way too young to have lived through Vietnam and I can only imagine how terrible it was to be drafted into a terrible war like that. Say what you will about Iraq and Afghanistan but at least those people are voluntarily being sent over to die for stupid reasons.
So, I can totally understand why LBJ’s successes are overshadowed by Vietnam, but personally, I don’t hold it against him too much. It was probably something that while he ostensibly had the power to end it or at least manage it better, it was probably out of his hands in a practical way that we won’t ever understand very much.
I know he deeply deeply regretted Vietnam and realized what a huge mistake it was, so that at least mitigates it a little bit, unlike Bush who still asserts that going to Iraq was the right thing to do.
Correlation, not causation. Lots of reasons crime went up. Ensuring that the Constitution was followed wasn’t one of them. It actually didn’t get more difficult to convict people fairly. Besides, look to FDR and Eisenhower if you want the core of the Warren court.
But that’s revisionist history. Kennedy did support an expansion of the war throughout his Presidency and there’s no solid evidence he would have reversed that policy if he had lived. Johnson felt he was maintaining Kennedy’s legacy in Vietnam and he had a good case.
JFK was much more conservative than most folks give him credit for. LBJ was a crook on a grandiose scale. He burdened us with Medicare, etc. simply to buy votes. It was all about him, with no thought toward the long-term effects, good or bad. And let’s not go into his cowboying up and digging us into Vietnam. Pure disaster.
Gee, history seems to be repeating itself. George Santayana was a freakin’ prophet:
I love how conservatives consider trying to help lift people out of poverty to be “buying votes” and just doing things for “himself”. “The real compassionate thing is to let 'em starve! Put grandma on an ice floe and shove her off! MOOCHERS!”
He’s the one who got us into it. Well, technically we were already in it, but he’s the one that escalated it. There were 16,000 American troops in Vietnam in 1964. In 1969 that number was 553,000.
But keep in mind there were less than a thousand American troops in Vietnam in 1960. As I said, Kennedy expanded the American presence while he was alive. It’s plausible to argue he would have continued to do so just like Johnson did if he had lived.
Lots of reasons crime went up is true, Johnson appointed two members of the supreme court and neither did anything to curb the excesses of the Warren court. After the riots he appointed a commission which recommended massive social spending as a solution to crime. Spending went up massively yet crime continued to skyrocket. He declared a war on crime, which was a total failure, right along with his total failure in Vietnam, and his large failure in the war on poverty.
The southern Democrats in the Senate were able to block and weaken civil rights legislation not because of numbers, they never had a majority of democrats and republicans were overwhelmingly pro-civil rights, but because they had control of the Senate leadership. The most powerful leader during that time was LBJ. The name of the definitive book on him during that period was called “Master of the Senate”. He blocked civil rights legislation as long as he could and only changed when it was in his electoral interests. It is good that he finally changed, but he was no hero.