A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror (139 page)

Lyndon Johnson, Champion Logroller

Taking the oath of office while Air Force One remained on the tarmac at Love Field in Dallas, Lyndon Baines Johnson brought to the presidency vastly different strengths and weaknesses than had Kennedy. He never understood the Kennedy mystique.
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Although he taught school briefly, for the better part of his life LBJ had been a politician and had never run any kind of for-profit enterprise. He was the third consecutive president to have entered the Oval Office without business experience, although Eisenhower’s military service had come close in terms of organizational demands and resource allocation.
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Like Kennedy, Johnson had fought in World War II, and he was the first congressman to enlist in the armed services, serving in the navy as a lieutenant commander. After the war, in 1949, he won a Senate seat. A tireless campaigner, Johnson knew when to get into the dirt, and he had his share of scandals in Texas. His most serious and potentially damaging relationship involved his onetime secretary Bobby Baker, who in 1963 was charged with influence peddling to obtain defense contracts for his own company. The connections to Johnson appeared pernicious enough that Kennedy sought to jettison the Texan before the reelection campaign of 1964, but he thought better of it when the electoral college map was laid before him. Kennedy needed Johnson to carry Texas and parts of the South. Democratic senators closed ranks around Johnson, JFK’s media machine insulated him, and when Baker went to jail, the scandal did not touch Johnson.

As Senate majority leader, Johnson had no equal. His anticipation of potential pitfalls for legislation combined with his ability to jawbone friends and opponents alike made him the most effective politician in either house of Congress. His early election victories had come under a cloud of ballot-stuffing charges (he first won his Senate seat by only 87 votes), which did not seem to affect his ability to steer legislation through the process. Johnson liked to be around people—he and his wife, Lady Bird, entertained more than two hundred thousand dinner guests over a five-year period at the White House—and when LBJ had his choice, he preferred to be around women.
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Johnson had as many sexual escapades as Kennedy, including a long-running affair with Madeline Brown of Dallas. Like Bill Clinton twenty years later, LBJ would have sex in the Oval Office, and like Hillary Clinton, Lady Bird Johnson excused Lyndon’s behavior by pointing out that he “loved people” and “half the people in the world are women.”
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Johnson’s close ties to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover helped keep his liaisons secret: he had made a calculated choice to retain Hoover as director with the memorable phrase, “Better to have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside pissing in.”

Having emerged from poverty and having seen firsthand as a teacher its impact on human life, Johnson used his legislative skills to mount the largest federal programs in history aimed at eliminating poverty. He enjoyed using government to help others, and America’s affluence made it possible to do so. Announcing his proposals in a May 1964 speech at the University of Michigan, he promised to lead America “upward to the Great Society.”

The campaign of 1964 was, for Johnson, merely a speed bump on the highway to that Great Society. The Texan dispatched his conservative Republican challenger, Barry Goldwater, with a mix of often irresponsible scare tactics and equally irresponsible promises of government largesse. Goldwater, the most ideologically “pure” candidate since William Jennings Bryan, ran as an unabashed conservative. He championed smaller government, states’ rights (which, unfortunately, put him squarely on the wrong side of the Civil Rights Act of 1964), and a stronger front against communism than Johnson. His book,
Conscience of a Conservative
(1960), provided a list of Goldwater’s policy positions, including abolition of the income tax and privatization of the Social Security system.
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These were hardly radical positions, and even after the New Deal, a large segment of the public still thought “big government” programs to be a foreign concept. Known for his supposedly inflammatory comment (penned by Karl Hess and borrowed from Roman senator Cicero) that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice,” Goldwater provided fodder for outlandish liberal cartoonists, who depicted him throwing nuclear bombs.

Goldwater, although a nonpracticing Episcopalian, had one set of Jewish grandparents, making him (and not Joe Lieberman in 2000) the first American of Jewish ancestry to run for either of the highest two offices in the land. His anticommunist and free-market credentials were impeccable. A World War II veteran and general officer in the air force reserve, he viewed combat in Vietnam as a clear-cut prospect: if the United States committed troops to Vietnam, it should do so intending to win and using any force necessary, including nuclear weapons. Johnson’s crew demonized Goldwater, running what are widely acknowledged as some of the dirtiest ads in political history, one showing a little girl picking flowers just before an atomic blast goes off, convincing many Americans that Goldwater was a Dr. Strangelove.

Meanwhile, Johnson, who had never been considered a part of the Kennedy team, nevertheless walked under the bloom of Camelot. He smashed the Arizonan, winning by more than 430 electoral votes and garnering 16 million more popular votes. For Republicans, whose national political apparatus appeared in complete disarray, there were two silver linings to this storm. An important conservative youth movement, the Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), sprang up. This organization produced the young turks who would come into the Senate and House in the 1980s Reagan revolution. Another major benefit from that election for the conservatives was that a former Democrat, actor Ronald Reagan, made an impressive speech on behalf of Goldwater, alerting party brass to a new GOP star.

No one could deny the extent of Johnson’s victory, though. Armed with his impressive electoral mandate, Johnson unleashed a flood of new federal spending. Sensing the wave of public sympathy and the unwillingness to oppose anything that Kennedy would have wanted, he moved quickly to push through Congress construction legislation, education bills, expansion of urban mass transit, and many other pork-barrel measures in addition to the needed and important Civil Rights Act of 1964. All of this legislation sailed through, usually with Republicans providing the key margins. The Civil Rights Act in particular needed Republican support to get around Southern Democrats who vowed to filibuster the act to death.

Race, Rights, and the War on Poverty

Kennedy had scarcely addressed racial issues in his campaign or his two years in office. By 1963, however, a number of elements had coalesced to push civil rights onto the front pages of every newspaper. In February 1960, four black freshmen from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College sat down at Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro and demanded service.
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Segregation laws of the day meant that they had staged a supreme act of rebellion, and although the management refused to serve them, their numbers grew as other students and citizens joined them. After five days the owners shut down the store, unsure how to proceed. This began the sit-in movement. Blacks insisted on access to public places and the same market rights that whites enjoyed, and to accomplish this they staged sit-ins to disrupt normal business. If black people could not eat and drink at a lunch counter, no one could.
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Students formed a new group, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), to work with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).

Almost instantly other sit-ins occurred across the South, with some white supporters joining blacks. They received an intimidating reception. Some were arrested for trespassing, others beaten by mobs,…but sometimes they were served. Within a year of the Greensboro sit-in, more than 3,500 protesters had been jailed. Steadily, demonstrations against Jim Crow laws mounted, and other types of protests joined the sit-in. In 1961, to challenge segregated interstate bus terminals, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) instituted “freedom rides” carrying black and white passengers. Birmingham’s city leadership was brought to heel in part by the losses to business caused by segregation.
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A similar development was documented when Averett College, a small Baptist segregated school in Virginia, opened its doors to blacks not under government edict but under financial pressure.
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This indicated that, given enough time, the market could produce change. Market processes, however, often work slowly.

Robert Kennedy, the attorney general, instead of acting in support of federal laws, called for a cooling-off period, until an incident at the University of Mississippi again placed a president in the position of having to enforce federal laws against the will of a state.
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In 1962, James Meredith, the first black student to enroll at the university, was blocked by the efforts of Governor Ross Barnett, who defied federal marshals who had arrived to enforce desegregation laws. Robert Kennedy then sent troops in to preserve order. Meredith was admitted, and by then JFK had proposed civil rights legislation to Congress, but the issues had been ignored too long, and the laws had come too late to defray black impatience with second-class status.

White racists’ reaction to black demands for rights rapidly spun out of control. In June 1962, Medgar Evers, an official of the Mississippi NAACP, was assassinated. Martin Luther King Jr. continued to instruct demonstrators to abstain from violence. King’s strategy was to bring the attention of the white nonracist and nonsegregationist majority to bear upon the minority racists and to use righteous indignation as the weapon. This approach required a sharp awareness of the power of the media, which King had. King also appreciated that the power of the pen had been surpassed by the emotional, virtually real-time appeal offered by the television camera. To tap into America’s sense of justice and morality, King perceived that black people not only had to force their adversaries into public acts of brutality, but also had to do so under the eyes of the omnipresent television cameras. He possessed this essential insight: that the power of mass demonstrations would not just sway policy makers from the sites of the demonstrations, but also public opinion across the country. This insight, of course, relied on the fact that the majority of the population was moral and just and that change was possible in a democracy.

The clearest test of King’s strategy came on August 3, 1963, when King’s nonviolent campaign climaxed in a march on Washington, D.C., of two hundred thousand blacks and whites. There, in front of the Lincoln Memorial, King delivered his immortal “I Have a Dream” speech. Telling the massive crowd that “we have come here today to dramatize an appalling condition. In a sense we have come…to cash a check,” he cited the “magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence,” a “promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.”
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King concluded his speech with words almost as famous as those of the Declaration to which he had referred, saying:

 

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit together at the table of brotherhood. I have a dream that one day, even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice…will be transformed into an oasis of freedom…. I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists…little black boys and little black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers. I have a dream today!
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The moment became etched in the American memory as the multitude cheered and sang “We Shall Overcome,” but unfortunately, the violence had just begun. Several weeks later a bomb detonated in a black Birmingham Baptist church and killed four children. Civil rights demonstrators were greeted by fire hoses, police dogs, and, when attackers thought they were anonymous, deadly force.

During a series of protests in Birmingham, Alabama, during May 1963, the police commissioner, Eugene “Bull” Connor, ordered his men to use dogs, tear gas, electric cattle prods, and clubs on nonviolent demonstrators—all under the lights of the television cameras. King was jailed by Connor, whereupon he wrote “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” a defense of nonviolence rooted in Judeo-Christian and Enlightenment thought and Revolutionary principles, and quoting both Jefferson and Lincoln. “We will reach the goal of America in freedom,” King wrote, “because the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands.”
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Yet if King changed America, Connor changed King, who now decided that melting the hearts of Southerners might cost too many lives. After Birmingham, King shifted his strategy to persuading non-Southern Americans, outraged at what they had seen, to force the federal government into action.

The civil rights movement’s legitimate goals did not protect it from infiltration by communist elements, which sought to radicalize it. That, in turn, only confirmed in the minds of some, such as FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, that the communists were behind the protests.
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They had almost nothing to do with the civil rights leadership, but that did not prevent Hoover from calling King “the most dangerous Negro…in this nation.”
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Although King’s marital infidelities convinced Hoover that he needed watching, the murders of black leaders and bombing of black churches apparently did not warrant the resources of Hoover’s FBI.
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There were, in fact, some “dangerous Negroes” in the land, most of them King’s black opponents who thought his program too pacific and servile. One faction, the rapidly growing Black Muslim movement of Elijah Muhammad, saw King as a tool of “the white man.” Muhammad, departing from traditional Islam, claimed to be the true Messiah. Muhammad hated America and embraced her enemies, and with a new acolyte, Malcolm X, he recruited thousands of members.
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Advocating violence and black separatism, Muhammad and Malcolm ridiculed King and the civil rights movement, comparing the march on Washington to getting “coffee that’s too black which means it’s too strong…. You integrate it with cream, you make it weak.”
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Hoover’s ever-vigilant FBI also kept constant files and wiretaps on Muhammad and Malcolm, but in this case there indeed was a threat to the public order afoot. After Malcolm X was assassinated in 1965, apparently at Muhammad’s instructions, the movement (now prominently featuring a newcomer named Louis Farrakhan) turned increasingly violent and anti-Semitic. Between 1960 and 1970, Muhammad’s power and health waned, but the rhetoric grew more aggressive, especially against the Jews, whom the Muslims blamed for every malady.