At the end of what was in many ways a successful term, he stepped aside. He declared he would not run again. It was a momentous decision, and a surprising one. What made him do it? Why would he pull the plug on the ambition that had powered his entire career, in fact, his entire life, like a piston? Especially when that ambition was in the process of being realized? He had accomplished so much. But so many things were going wrong. Riots over black lives had rocked over 100 cities, students were protesting the war on college campuses, his attempts at a cease fire were failing, Republicans were blaming him for soaring crime. The gold market was collapsing, and a damning report by the Kerner Commission had called out institutional racism, declaring that America was moving towards two separate and unequal societies, one black and one white. And then there was the Tet Offensive, the surprise attack by the North Vietnamese on major cities that revealed to America that victory in Vietnam was not as near as they'd been told. Lyndon Baines Johnson saw his administration's accomplishments being overshadowed by its troubles, and he decided that the best thing he could do for his own reputation was to exit the scene. He wanted to ensure his place in history, after all, not in the Oval Office. But would it work? Would history take note?
It's still not clear. Was LBJ, as some historians argue, a genuine reformer and potentially great president who was dragged unwillingly into the quagmire of an unjust, unwinnable war and thus knocked from his rightful pedestal? Was he cajoled into that quagmire by advisors whom historian David Halberstam labeled "the best and the brightest" in his book about how smart people could do so many dumb things. Was the president's great work simply shouted down by young protestors chanting Hey, Hey, LBJ, How many kids have you killed today? What will history say?
Or was he, as some of those closest to him reported, a malicious, Machiavellian, petty, cruel and downright crude man whose lack of genuine compassion could not help but reveal itself in his politics? A puerile man: his apparent compulsion to drop trou in front of his aides or insist they follow him into the bathroom makes it look like 1960s America was governed by a psychological two-year-old. His habit of demanding that his aides be always and endlessly available to him makes him look like a psychological four-year-old. His habit of stopping everything to send his aides scrambling to find his favorite peanut brittle--he loved peanut brittle--makes him look about ten, and his tendency to suggest that any female politician or reporter who failed to fawn over him was in need of a good fuck makes him look like a crass teenaged boy. Will history say he was a terrible person who got things done simply because of his compulsion to control?
Or was he, as Robert F. Kennedy said, simply a liar, a man who lied so much, lied all the time, "even," Bobby declared, "when he doesn't have to lie," a man so able to change his demeanor to suit the purpose at hand and ultimately, so completely composed of deceit that if one peeled back the layers of dishonesty one would find, as in an onion, an empty pungency at the core. Will history say that?
Or will history say, as Robert Caro seems to be headed towards saying, that he was a controller who could not control himself, that he did so only briefly, in 1963, when he subdued his fundamental qualities--arrogance, self-pity, cruelty, manipulativeness--long enough to organize a flawless transition from the Kennedy administration to his, and to put in place the groundwork of the Great Society, before succumbing once more to the worse angels of his nature and turning his presidency from a triumph into a tragedy? We don't actually know if this is exactly where Caro is heading in his projected five-volume biography of Johnson--this particular historian is still writing--but that seems to be the narrative he is cuing up. The history of LBJ is still being written. It may never stop being written.
Lyndon himself was obsessed by what history would say, and he feared that it would be unfair, since history was always written by the Harvard types, the East Coast elites who dubbed him "Rufus Cornpone," who would never give a Texan like him a fair shake. "I am willing to let any objective historian look at my record," he told his aides, including historian Joseph Califano, who would later write LBJ's biography. "FDR passed five major bills the first 100 days. We passed 200 in the last two years. . . . We must tell people what we have done."
And indeed, the list of his accomplishments is long. He signed into law Medicare, Medicaid, a Civil Rights Act, a Voting Rights Act, the Freedom of Information Act, the Economic Opportunity Act. He created the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the Department of Transportation, Head Start, the NEA, the NEH, the food stamps program. He signed legislation on federal education spending, housing, environmental protection, highway safety, auto safety, mine safety, bail reform, child nutrition, cancer research, and truth in packaging. That's just skimming the surface. He knew how to get things done.
His compassion for the poor felt real, but his compassion for black people often seemed performative, rather than heartfelt. And yet an antiracist historian as uncompromising as Ibram X. Kendi declares that Johnson "had the courage" to admit that the Civil Rights Bill of 1964 didn't go far enough. As LBJ said, "You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, 'you are here to compete with all the others,' and still justly believe that you have been completely fair." Kendi calls this perhaps the most antiracist thing any American president has ever said. And he calls the Voting Rights Act of the following year--the one recently gutted by the Supreme Court--"the most effective piece of antiracist legislation ever passed by the Congress." Sometimes history says one thing, and says another thing too.
"We just read different histories," LBJ told historian Doris Kearns Goodwin in 1970, defending his legacy, worried about what history was already saying. Goodwin, a White House Fellow in his administration, worked with him for years on drafting his memoirs. She concluded that he was the victim of his ability to fool himself, to believe that his dauntless quest for power was always in the service of doing good for others. She believed that the decision to expand the war in Vietnam was a terrible choice, and that the decision to lie about how large it was to the American people was an even worse one. It led to what the press called Johnson's "credibility gap," and when you're caught lying, history goes looking for skeletons in your closet.
And there were skeletons, including the peddling of political influence during his years as master of the Senate, stories that were just being revealed in November, 1963. They were drowned out by the assassination of President Kennedy, the public outpouring of grief, the chaotic weeks that followed, and Johnson's skill and discipline in taming that chaos and taking control of the country. This was an era when stability and projecting national strength were valued more than airing the president's dirty laundry. But history can now begin to tell how Lyndon Baines Johnson, a man who held government jobs for his entire life, whose income topped out at $35,000, left the presidency a multi-millionaire, due in part to the profits of the LBJ Company. The name, LBJ claimed, stood for "Lady Bird Johnson" because it was her company, hers alone. The LBJ Company purchased a struggling radio station in 1943 and somehow (with the help of many favorable FCC rulings) alchemized that into a radio and television empire with investments in ranchland and banking. If Lyndon was not lying, one wants to learn more about Lady Bird and her outsized business acumen. That part of the history, perhaps, still needs more writing.
"There rightly is no history," declared Ralph Waldo Emerson, "only biography." With presidents, you might say the opposite. There rightly is no biography because the person is so inseparable from the era. Caro is calling his biography The Years of Lyndon Johnson, because it's not just about the man but about the times. Goodwin called hers Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream. Our understanding of past eras changes even more than our understanding of passed people. But in examining the administration of Lyndon Baines Johnson, biography keeps bubbling up and intruding on history. Time alone will tell if a personality so unappealing, a moral sense so unripe, and a character so infantile can ever earn the place in history his accomplishments merited. What history will say may never settle. But it will certainly never be simple.
36: Lyndon Baines Johnson