I remember the beagle incident, but I don’t recall it taking on quite the depth of outrage that you seem too. 
It was probably a white liberal thing, ehe?
-XT
HOw could LBJ have done so much stuff in such a short time? In comparison, Clinton did nothing at all in two full terms.
Say what you will but the guy had Congress wired like a pinball machine.
Curtis, I don’t even know where to begin with your viewpoint on Vietnam. One of the big mistakes we made there was our almost complete lack of understanding of the country and its history - a trait I suspect you share. A lot of that (but certainly not all) was enabled by Johnson.
He increased our involvement in Vietnam in a way that was doomed to failure. What’s more, he knew it as time went by and felt he couldn’t do anything about it.
Not sure what you’re reading on that subject, but you might start with Backfire, by Loren Baritz.
LBJ handled certain things with mastery, and others with disastrous results. He was certainly one of the most powerful presidents in recent history, I’ll say that for him.
bolding mine
I thought it was very interesting in The Fog Of War when McNamara related the story of his going to Vietnam after the war.
What was worse – the beagle incident, or showing off his gall bladder scar? 
I’d also suggest McNamara’s In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam. (Yes, it’s self-serving and McNamara didn’t fully accept the blame he should have, but it paints a good picture of what a collossal fuck-up Vietnam was from start to finish)
And invade North Vietnam? Where the hell do you come up with this kind of bullshit, Curtis?
(Why am I reminded of MacArthur insisting we invade China during the Korean War?)
Yeah, Vietnam was a mess, and there is no way around that. It almost tore this country in two, and he was the one that built up our involvement. I’m not sure that if we even dropped the bomb, which many wanted, things would have changed much. I think we were doomed to defeat in Vietnam.
As a country, we totally missed the boat with Vietnam. We had no idea to what lengths they would go to to win. Vietnam was their home. They were willing to live in tunnels for months on end, fighting a grinding war of attrition that the US wasn’t prepared for.
Looking at today’s fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, it makes me wonder if we are doomed to repeat history.
Anyway, I always wondered how Johnson took the JFK assassination, and how that impacted his own presidency.
He had a talent for pushing through legislation that remains unrivaled today. Robert A. Caro’s biography of him offers a good insight into this. Civil Rights for instance was a far more incendiary issue in the 1960s than HCR is today. And you can see for yourself just how successful the Democrats today have been at passing the latter. It’s a damn miracle he got any race related legislation through in that era.
If you’re going just by his domestic agenda, he would probably be as revered today as FDR and Lincoln. But his foreign policy was disastrous and he turned Vietnam into one big sinkhole, which ended up hurting our image in the world, as well as sucking up money that could have been used to further domestic programs.
You can say that again.
That JFK, a Brahimin from liberal Boston, supported civil rights was admirable but no big deal. That LBJ, a native of the segregated South did showed real guts. Especially because he knew full well that doing so was going to lose the Democratic party the south, which it did.
He was perhaps the most masterful politician we’ve had as president since - I don’t know. And I graduated from high school the year he left office, and by the end he was definitely hated because of Vietnam. He clearly had his pluses and minuses.
LBJ was a very complicated man, much like Richard Nixon, his successor. He tried to improve the lot of the lives of the poor and oppressed and had mixed success, with his lasting achievement being the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which I think includes fixes to voter disenfranchisement due to race. This is nothing to scoff at, it was a great achievement accomplished by Johnson due to his great skill at getting politicians to vote with him. The opposition was and to this day remains ferocious to these measures. He knew the Congress as perhaps only a few Americans before him did, and he was willing to martyrize JFK to get these measures done. This was the hero part of him.
The villain part was, of course, Vietnam. LBJ was damned certain he was not going to be tagged with “losing Vietnam” the same way Truman was about “losing China”. Republicans had spent more than a dozen years demogoguing China being taken over by communists and the Kuomintang being booted to Taiwan. That too, continues to this day. And of course, it is bullshit. China was never ours to win or lose, and there was no way that the US could have prevented the Koumintang’s fall to the communists. The Nationalists were too ineffective and corrupt to have any hope of beating Mao.
So LBJ was determined not to be on the weak end of “national defense” on this issue. But he knew it was a loser. And had he played his cards correctly, he could have done what Nixon did and had China (and Vietnam) as allies in the cold war against the Soviets. All he had to do was put as much effort into courting Ho and Mao as Nixon did with Mao later. Mao needed the US and Ho was an admirer of the US. And LBJ was smart enough to know these things. But he was afraid of domestic opposition should he not pursue the war. He probably would have been a one term president in either event, but the Vietnam war tore the country apart due to the draft and costs of the war in lives and money. And it gave us Nixon, whose administration embodied everything wrong with Johnson’s policies combined with paranoia.
LBJ should have understood the hand he was dealt and improved it, not gone all in on Vietnam, a losing proposition that cost millions of lives and accomplished nothing.
I’m convinced that LBJ just wasn’t competent enough to handle Vietnam. Bill Moyers recently did a whole show on LBJ and Vietnam. The show is tapes of LBJ struggling with the decision of whether to escalate the war or not. It shows just how much LBJ was in over his head.
Yet he was the polar opposite when came to dealing with Congress. He had the Senate by the balls and wielded power in that chamber unmatched by anyone in history.
Even despite all his corruption, if he was only judged by his domestic policy he would have been remembered a hero. You couldn’t win an election back then unless you played dirty. In fact, the first time LBJ ran for the Senate he lost because he announced his vote totals from his corrupt districts too early. His opponents quickly changed the totals in their corrupt districts so that it would add up to more than what LBJ announced earlier.
He grew up dirt poor in a really poor district. When he became a Congressman he brought electricity to that district. When he became President he passed the Civil Rights Act. He and FDR probably did more than any other Presidents to help poor people. I don’t think anyone one else even comes close.
I view LBJ with great admiration, especially since he was born without any “silver spoon.” Decisions about Vietnam were difficult … which is why it’s better just not to embark on foolish wars in the first place.
Contrast this with GWB! Any sentence which tries to formulate comparisons between these two Presidents will be insanely absurd.
You seriously need to learn some history before spouting off. And get some compassion.
To some people the spectre of the Welfar Queen stalking poor Lady Liberty with a garrotte is a very real thing. Saint Ronnie told them so.
-Joe
Are we evaluating LBJ as a historical figure, or just his presidency? Because on the subject of civil rights we should note that his record is a bit mixed - he sent Eisenhower’s 1957 Civil Rights Act deliberately to committees headed by rabid segregationists to water it down before passage. He did this solely to prevent a Democratic party split.
This isn’t to deny his later achievements - which cannot be denied. But the 1957 Act was a comparatively weak act in large part because of Johnson’s actions.
As for the Great Society, the impact of its programs on family stability in inner cities (and in other pockets of extreme poverty like Appalachia) were noted by liberals like Daniel Patrick Moynihan. And while the corrosive effects of the “man in the house rule” can’t be pinned on Johnson alone, his programs perpetuated these issues which clearly did exist (see Supreme Court case King v. Smith). This is one reason that the welfare reform of the 1990s was so desperately needed.
It is my impression that Johnson’s support for civil rights was a lot like Nixon’s concern for the common man.
Nobody actually believed it, and he wouldn’t admit it, but he wouldn’t have done so damn much for it if he didn’t care somewhere.
(Nixon: EPA, OSHA, various consumer rights protections, etc)
Brainglutton: I’d say Ike’s interstate program did at least as much as the Great Society did. A lot of people worked on the highway, still wearing their threadbare fatigues, the anecdotes go. I really wonder how much it did to avoid a depression after WWII, as the surplus manpower returned.
Yeah, Moto, but it did get passed, and that was a big start. Man was a genius at working the Senate.
LBJ took the IRT
Down to Fourth Street, USA
When he got there, what did he see?
The youth of America on LSD! 
– Hair
Forty years ago, there was a humorous little book called “The Begatting of a President” retelling the politics of the Sixties in pseudo-Biblical language. The chapter titled “LBJenesis” describes how LBJ created the Great Society in six days, and on the seventh day he threw a barbecue. The chapter continues:
That might as well be LBJ’s political epitaph.
I think this is a very unfair conclusion. Consider what was at stake: staying involved in the war and continuing to lose thousands of Americans; or ending the war and facing the consequences of making the US look like a weakling against the rising power of the Communist bloc. Keep in mind that these decisions were being made just a few years after the US and USSR came THAT close to nuclear war, and at and just after the time that France left NATO’s command structure. One cannot help but wonder whether pulling out of a inconsequential but costly war could have effects that would embolden the Soviets, fracture NATO, and shake the West’s confidence in the US security guarantees. Looking at the situation with fifty years of hindsight of course gives one a false sense of confidence that the problems in US foreign policy were the result of a lack of competence, but I do not think that there is any president at any time in this country’s history who could be considered to have been fully up to the task (whatever that means) of dealing with the decisions that LBJ had to.
We can look to other foreign policy crises, and not to be too dismissive of the high stakes in any of them, and see that good outcomes were not assured by the leadership. The Cuban Missile Crisis: in no way was JFK in full control of the situation, as McNamera states, “We just got lucky” in avoiding nuclear war. The containment doctrine after World War II: Truman was not a genius. Nor was he smart. He admitted upon taking the office that he doubted whether he was up to the job, got the country mired in an unwinnable war, too, but fortunately adopted the good advice of some subordinates (George Kennan) and avoided the bad advice of others (MacArthur). World War II: for as serious as the stakes were in supporting our allies prior to Pearl Harbor, and as difficult a domestic situation was, FDR was not faced with a dilemma of only bad options in guiding the US through the early war period.
I don’t mean to absolve LBJ of his Vietnam policy. His early decisions to deepen US involvement (especially after Tonkin) essentially boxed himself in to a situation where there were no good options. The idea that some other leader could have turned the mess around is to fail to understand the lack of good options after 1964.
It’s well known that it is economist Thomas Sowell’s contention that there are statistical measures that show black progress in education, out-of-wedlock births and income were hindered after 1964. I haven’t read his books so I can’t personally vouch for his findings, and who knows what would have happened if some of those programs weren’t enacted. Sure, it FEELS like all the programs were the right thing to do (It feels right to me), but apparently he is a stickler for figures and that intentions are not important, but results and unintended consequences are. I’m sure he’d want the civil rights act portion though, he is black.