American presidents (1): Lyndon B Johnson
As a portfolio worker, I have reached the point in the year when many of the organisations with which I work stop having meetings for a month or two because of the summer period. So, for the next few weeks, I’ll be reading books, seeing films, and going on short courses.
This summer, the City Lit in central London is running a series of evening courses with a session on each of the various post-war US presidents. I’ve missed the first few (actually those on Truman and Eisenhower were cancelled throught lack of interest), but have joined the course this week with the session on Lyndon B Johnson who served as 36th president from 1965-1969.
Our lecturer was Mark Malcolmson. The good news is that he was incredibly knowledgeable and very fluent. The bad news is that he spoke almost non-stop (we had a five-minute break) for two and a half hours, there were only a small number of electoral college maps and photographs, and there was no handout. We were an hour and a half into the session – a chronological account of Johnson’s life – before we reached the White House.
What came out of the session was how often Johnson’s career advanced because of luck or chance, how complex was the man’s character (a mean and vindictive bully with a strong sense of social justice), and how spoilt was his legacy (a wonderful domestic programme overshadowed by failure in Vietnam).
In 1941, he lost a primary for a Senate seat in Texas which could have been the end of his ambitions for the upper house in Congress; in 1948, he managed to win another primary for a Senate seat in Texas but by a mere 87 votes; in 1955, he had a massive heart attack which could have killed him (later one did); in 1960, he lost the Democratic nomination for president to John F Kennedy; JFK’s offer to him of the Vice-Presidential slot was unexpected and controversial; as the No 2 to a young and charismatic JFK as president, Johnson could have expected to be in the shadows for eight years; and then a visit to his home state of Texas to build up support for JFK when the Texas Democratic Party was in turmoil was the occasion when Kennedy was assassinated and everything changed for Johnson.
As President, Johnson had three main themes: the advancement of civil rights and voting rights with a raft of legislation which changed things to this day, the Great Society, the introduction of Medicare & Medicaid, and the war on poverty which cut the proportion of Americans in poverty from 23% to 12%; and the Vietnam war which he inherited from Eisenhower and Kennedy but could not prevent from being a quagmire for the USA with a low point of the Tet offensive. So he succeeded in two out three of his great objectives and, in those two, our lecturer felt that Johnson’s record bore comparison with the achievements of Franklin D Roosevelt who was in the White House much longer.
You can read more about Lyndon Johnson here.
July 23rd, 2014 at 10:17 pm
PERSONAL OBSERVATION:
You know you’re old when your personal memories become the stuff of history taught in classrooms.
More than any other U.S. president, President Johnson had the most direct impact on my life, and the lives of millions of other “baby boomers” who came of age during the 1960’s. He will forever be the “face” of the Vietnam War to me. The war touched every young person’s life, white or minority, male or female. The war influenced school plans, delayed careers and affected just about every personal decision that confronts a young person at the beginning of their adult life. Unlike today’s U.S. volunteer army, you either waited to be drafted for Vietnam, tried to avoid the draft or knew someone who was drafted or who volunteered only to return—or not—and many who did return were scarred for life.
The 50th anniversary of his announcement of “The Great Society” programs has been a time for a reevaluation of Johnson’s legacy which has generated much discussion and political chatter. Today in the U.S., politics has shifted so far right that Johnson would be pillared as a “left wing socialist” and anyone who even uttered the words “Great Society” would be drummed out of elective office. I don’t know what this attitude says about my fellow Americans, but it can’t be good.