“Now I know the difference between a caucus and a cactus. In a cactus all the pricks are on the outside.”
Lyndon B Johnson, after being rebuffed in a bid to preside over the Democratic Caucus
I need more! With all due respect to author Charles Peters, there is a LOT more to read and learn about the 36th POTUS than this quality contribution to The American Presidents Series could cover. I just chose far too short a book to do Lyndon B. Johnson justice. To wit, it did not touch at all on major events like the appointment of Thurgood Marshall to the Supreme Court, LBJ’s battles in (and with) the Senate and lacked reflection on the legacy of the legislation Johnson got passed as President. Maybe someday I’ll carve out time for the 3.353 pages within Robert Caro’s Years of Lyndon Johnson four-volume set. If that doesn’t cover everything I want to know, nothing will.
In 1931 Lyndon Johnson became a junior staffer for his local US House Representative and would spend all but two of the next 37 years working in Washington, D.C. Even those away times would be focused on public service. In 1935 LBJ was appointed Texas state director for the National Youth Administration, part of the New Deal, and got to meet (and impress) Franklin Roosevelt, who would be a campaign ally in later years. Aside from a six-month stint in the Navy during WWII, Johnson would spend 23 consecutive years in one wing of the Capitol Building or the other starting in 1937 and only ending his run as Senate Majority Leader because he was asked by John F. Kennedy to join the presidential ticket as running mate. (Ed. note: To assert his bona fides as deserving to be on the top ticket Johnson liked to brag, “My ancestors were teachers and lawyers and college presidents and governors when the Kennedys in this country were still tending bar.”)
In other words, Lyndon Johnson was a master politician. You could argue that’s a euphemism for saying he was a cold-hearted asshole, and in a lot of cases you’d be right. But this is what continues to fascinate me as I journey through the lives of the people tasked to lead the United States. They are at various turns complex, conniving and cut-throat deal makers doing their best to calm constituencies and cover their own asses. Then, out of nowhere, those same people churn out legislation that demands rights, opportunities and security for “the common man.” LBJ was a prime example of this selfish/selfless dichotomy.
LBJ the Bully, the Sly Politico
As a skillful operator, Lyndon Johnson…
- purchased an Austin radio station in 1942 and a TV station a few years later that coincidentally benefited greatly from several FCC rulings while he was in the Senate (despite his protests that he never intervened in those rulings).
- voted for the Taft-Hartley Act, which made it much harder for unions to maintain memberships and organize workers, a direct benefit to corporations wanting to spend less on wages and benefits (and potentially spend more on campaign contributions).
- voted to kill the Fair Employment Practices Commission which FDR had set up to help African-Americans. LBJ did so ostensibly to appease his southern constituents who saw black laborers as competition for jobs.
- helped ensure that the manned spacecraft center for NASA was in Houston to show his constituents he had them front of mind.
- would often make staff follow him to the bathroom while he shat and kept working. Also made aides swim naked with him in the White House pool so he could show off “Jumbo”, the self-appointed name of his penis, and make fun of staffers who were not as well endowed.
- cheated on his wife incessantly, including multiple long-term affairs.
- wore the stain of Vietnam. LBJ once said to Doris Kearns in an interview for his biography about why he stuck to war in ‘Nam, “There would be Robert Kennedy out in front, leading the fight against me, telling everyone that I had betrayed John Kennedy’s commitment to South Vietnam. That I had let democracy fall into the hands of the Communists. That I was a coward, an unmanly man, a man without a spine…In the distance I could hear the voices of thousands of people. They were all shouting at me and running towards me: Coward! Traitor! Weakling!” Heaven forbid.
A lot of people stop there. During my own lifetime, one where Lyndon Johnson was for most an angry memory of their spirited youth, I had the impression that the man was not much more than the bullet points laid out above. Then I read some books. Lyndon Johnson, love him or hate him, was one of the most consequential presidents in American history.
LBJ the Statesman, the Fighter for the Common Man
For all his undesirable characteristics, the Johnson Administration passed nearly 200 laws, collectively known as The Great Society. Among them were…
- Civil Rights Act of 1964 – arguably the most important law passed concerning race relations and discrimination in American history.
- Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 – which established federal programs for everything from job training to small business loans.
- Medicare – signed it at the Truman Library with Harry Truman sitting next to him. Truman had been a champion of universal health care during his presidency.
- Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 – signed in front of the one-room school he attended as a boy.
- “I will never do anything in my entire life, now or in the future that excites me more…or makes the land and all of its people better and wiser and stronger or anything that I think means more to freedom and justice in the world, than what we have done with this education bill.”
- Able to get around both religious concerns (of whether or not to fund parochial schools too) and states’ rights folks by funding students rather than the schools themselves.
- Also passed Higher Education Act in 1965 that gave aid to librarians and historically black colleges, but also loans and scholarships that encouraged baby boomers to go to college.
- Immigration Act of 1965 – abolished the previous quota system that limited immigration from non-European origins.
- Voting Rights Act of 1965
- LBJ went full bore on all his bullying and persuading, calling every member of Congress making sure they would vote correctly.
- In a joint session of Congress Johnson stated, “There is no Negro problem. There is no Southern problem. There is no Northern problem. There is only an American problem, because it’s not just Negroes, but really it’s all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.”
- A bill with teeth! Federal officials were sent out in places to ensure compliance. In one Mississippi county alone registered blacks went from 320 to 6,789!
- Putting Thurgood Marshall on the Supreme Court – The color barrier on the country’s highest bench was broken for good.
Lyndon Johnson is not the person you would expect to provide a landslide of legislation benefitting the black man. When asked how he could be such an ardent supporter of the 1964 civil rights bill given his Senate voting history (which included, among other things, opposing the public accommodations section of the 1957 Civil Rights bill) Johnson said, “You will recognize the words I’m about to repeat: Free at last. Free at last. Thank God almighty I’m free at last.” As President, he could support things that as a legislator from a southern state he, politically, could not.
Epilogue
I came across an article while constructing this essay that hits at the core of two themes I’ve been exploring on this presidential biography journey. The first is a fervent belief that we are not “more divided than ever” in the United States during the Trump/post-Trump years. The second is wondering when and how the near complete inversion of political loyalty happened; why the dark blue Democratic “Solid South” of the late 1800s became a wall of Republican red. Below is an extended excerpt from a 2001 piece by Jeremy D. Mayer in Prologue Magazine, a publication of the US National Archives. It touches on both topics, showing how race is at the core of each. You can read the full article here.
“It was the summer of 1964, and Lyndon Johnson was scared. Having just achieved one of the greatest congressional victories in history by passing the Civil Rights Act (CRA) over the strident objections of his native South, Johnson was now confronted by black riots in several urban centers. He feared that his Republican opponent, Barry Goldwater, would exploit the racial turmoil by appealing to the white backlash. The riots were even labeled “Goldwater rallies” since the conflagrations helped the GOP so directly. Would racial politics cost LBJ the White House?
“Both Johnson and Goldwater would face several tests of their character in the long election season of 1964, tests involving the CRA, urban riots, the George Wallace candidacy, and the white backlash. The election of 1964 is considered by many to be the most racially polarized presidential contest in modern American history. As such, it has been seen as a watershed in the evolution of our two-party system in recent times. Yet what has been missed in previous analyses of 1964 is how assiduously both Goldwater and Johnson worked to take race off the agenda. Johnson believed that if the election became a referendum on civil rights, he might lose. Goldwater believed that history would judge him harshly if his campaign blatantly exploited the racial hatred of whites.
“Still, despite these efforts, the racial implications of the 1964 campaign would linger for decades. The first Southerner to occupy the White House for more than a hundred years lost the heart of his region, signaling the dawn of an era of Republican dominance of the South in presidential politics. The first man of Jewish descent to run on a major ticket would lead the Republican Party into a monochromatic whiteness from which it has not yet recovered. After 1964, Democrats could take the black vote for granted as the GOP became the party through which whites expressed their unease over black progress. The contest between Johnson and Goldwater shaped American racial politics for the next thirty-six years.”
Trivia
- LBJ didn’t just win the 1964 election, he CRUSHED Goldwater in one of the most lopsided elections in US Presidential history, winning every state save Goldwater’s home of Arizona and five in the Deep South that resented his stance on Civil Rights.
- On Selma, and moving towards Civil Rights legislation, Johnson said, “At times, history and fate meet at a single time in a single place to shape a turning point in man’s unending search for freedom. So it was at Lexington and Concord. So it was a century ago at Appomattox. So it was last week in Selma, Alabama.”
- Graduated from the Southwest Texas State Teachers College in San Marcos and taught in rural Cotulla, TX right out of school.
- 6-term US House Rep from TX’s 10th District
- 2-term Senator, serving as majority whip, minority leader and majority leader over time
- Father was in the Texas legislature; mother graduated from Baylor, a rarity for women of the time, especially farmers
- Per LBJ’s extramarital affairs, wife Lady Bird seemed resigned to it, once saying, “Lyndon loved people. It would be unnatural for him to withhold love from half the people. I guess I’m used to it, ‘ cause I like for women to like him and I like him to like them.” Her father was also a womanizer.
- Was a chain smoker and drank about a fifth of scotch every day. When the doctor told him he had to quit smoking after a near-fatal heart attack he said, “I’d rather have my pecker cut off.”
Follow-up Reading
- Robert Caro’s Multi-Volume Magnum Opus: The Years of Lyndon Johnson
- The Path to Power
- Means of Ascent
- Master of the Senate
- The Passage of Power