The differences between President Lyndon Johnson and his predecessor, John F. Kennedy, at least as they appeared on the surface, jarred many Americans. With Johnson in the White House, Kennedy’s staunchest supporters thought they had descended into a demimonde, a barbaric hell where boorish behavior pricked sensibilities sharper than the cacti found in Johnson’s Texas desert. Here was a president who talked crudely, swam in the White House pool naked, and met with his advisers while seated on the toilet; a president Time magazine described vividly in 1964 when he provided a self-guided automobile tour of his ranch: Lyndon Baines Johnson 305 At one point, Johnson pulled up near a small gathering of cattle, pushed a button under the dashboard—and a cow horn bawled from underneath the gleaming hood. . . Johnson talked about his cattle, [and] once plunged into what one startled newswoman called a "very graphic description of the sex life of a bull. . . .” Through all the fun, the President sipped beer from his paper cup. Eventually he ran dry. . . and took off at speeds up to 90 m.p.h. to get more. . . . Someone gasped at how fast Johnson was driving. Quickly Lyndon took one hand from the wheel, removed his five-gallon hat and flopped it on the dashboard to cover the speedometer. Even worse to Johnson’s critics was that his backcountry coarseness blended with a talent to tell tall stories and an unbridled ambition that overwhelmed any redeeming qualities. Yet Johnson’s supporters pointed to his compassion born from his struggles growing up in the Texas hill country and his commitment to seek power not only for the sake of holding it but also for advancing the public good. In 1968 African-American writer Ralph Ellison praised Johnson for a speech the president had given at Howard University three years earlier. According to Ellison, Johnson "spelled out the meaning of full integration for Negroes in a way that no one, no President, not Abraham Lincoln nor Franklin Roosevelt, no matter how much we loved and respected them, has ever done before. There was no hedging in it, no escape clauses.” Johnson’s complexities and contradictions, his strengths and deficiencies, appeared in his policies: his War on Poverty that awoke Americans to shortcomings in their economic growth, his civil rights legislation that advanced black freedom, and his Vietnam War that cost hundreds of thousands of lives and bred deep distrust of government. k Lyndon Baines Johnson was born on August 27, 1908, near Stonewall, Texas, alongside the Pedernales River, to Samuel Ealy Johnson and Rebekah Baines Johnson. She was the daughter of Joseph Wilson Baines, a lawyer, educator, and lay preacher at the Baptist church in Blanco, Texas. Of her five children she favored Lyndon, imparting to him her fondness for books and learning. She also wrapped him in a possessive love that ensured if he did anything wrong or went against her wishes, she would turn cold and ignore him for days on end. Sam Johnson farmed and invested in real estate, stocks, and cotton. He was moderately successful, but his fondness for the bottle often cost him. Lyndon Johnson later observed, "When he had too much to drink, he’d lose control of himself. He used bad language. He squandered the little money we had on the . . . markets. Sometimes he’d be lucky and make a lot of money. But more often he lost out.” When Lyndon was five, Sam moved his family to Johnson City. With a reputation for honesty, he won election to the state legislature six times, and Lyndon traveled with him on numerous campaigns. Sam liked to sit on his front porch and talk politics with his friends; the youngster would perch himself by the doorway and listen, enthralled by the stories. But he received a crushing blow at age 13 when his father’s investments turned bad and dragged the entire family into poverty, making Sam rely on relatives to meet his mortgage payments. Lyndon hated the pain inflicted by being poor and determined he would live better. As a teenager, Lyndon picked cotton, shined shoes, and distributed handbills. After graduating from high school, he continued to work at odd jobs, washing dishes, waiting on tables, and doing farmwork. After his mother convinced him to get a college degree, in 1927 he entered Southwest Texas State Teachers College in San Marcos. Friendly and outgoing, the young man, now more than six feet tall, entered campus politics. He already had the habit of leaning his towering frame into people as he talked to them, grabbing them by the lapels, and placing his face next to theirs in order to make a point. He so 306 Lyndon Baines Johnson often stretched the truth that his classmates nicknamed him "Bull” for throwing it around. Ambitious, he did whatever it took to win office. One friend recalled, "Everyone knew that if something wasn’t straight, it was Lyndon Johnson who had done it.” While still in college he worked as the principal at an elementary school in Cotulla, Texas, that most Anglos wanted nothing to do with because of its Mexican students. He emphasized academic discipline and used some of his own money to buy bats and balls for the children so they could play games. They long remembered him as the Anglo who cared. Johnson received his bachelor’s degree from San Marcos in 1930 and taught high school in Houston, but his ambition made him want more. He later told historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, "I wouldn’t want to be building great towers or big dams as an engineer, or big banks as a banker, or big insurance companies as a businessman. All those things are essential, but the thing that gives me the greatest satisfaction is dealing with human beings and watching the development of those human beings.” For that he wanted the bigger stage politics could provide. In 1932, Johnson left teaching for good when he joined the staff of Congressman Richard Kleberg in Washington, D.C. He was hired as Kleberg’s legislative secretary, but with the congressman’s devotion to golf, Johnson actually ran the office and honed his political skill. In September 1934 he met Claudia Alta Taylor, better known as Lady Bird, and in November they married. She bore him two daughters, Lynda Bird and Luci Baines. The following year Johnson returned to Texas, where he served as the state director for President Franklin Roosevelt’s National Youth Administration, a New Deal program to provide training and part-time jobs for young people during the Great Depression. Johnson gained a reputation for effective management and for compassion toward black and Mexican- American youths. He gained politically as well when he expanded his contacts within the state and in 1937, at age 29, ran as a Democrat in a special election for a congressional seat in the Tenth District. Campaigning as an ardent New Dealer, he won. Once he returned to Washington, President Roosevelt adopted him as a protege and made sure he gained appointment to the House Naval Affairs Committee. Johnson worked Capitol Hill as effectively as any freshman congressman could by applying what he had learned as Richard Kleberg’s secretary. In his first term and later, he obtained funding for local projects that brought electricity to rural homes in his district. He also developed a friendship with Sam Rayburn, a fellow Texan and the powerful Speaker of the House, even gaining entry into Rayburn’s inner sanctum filled with power brokers. The two men eventually had a falling out when Johnson told Roosevelt that the Speaker opposed New Deal legislation when, in fact, he really favored it. Johnson spread the story as a way to loosen Rayburn’s grip on patronage in Texas and gain more control over it for himself. In 1941 Johnson ran for the U.S. Senate. He fully expected to defeat W. Lee "Pappy” O’Daniel, the Texas governor who campaigned with a hillbilly band. Instead he lost by about 1,300 votes after he made a big mistake: He allowed the political bosses under his control in the Mexican districts along the Rio Grande to report their largely fraudulent returns early, giving O’Daniel time to counter with his own rigged ballots. Johnson returned to his seat in Congress while the United States entered World War II. During his Senate campaign, the Texan, who was a member of the naval reserve, had promised that should America go to war, he would "join the boys picked to defend our homes and our God and our liberties.” Now he dragged his feet, trying to obtain from Roosevelt an appointment that would keep him out of combat. For several months he inspected bases on the West Coast, but pressure from political opponents convinced him it would look bad if the war ended without his ever having been in a combat zone. Lyndon Baines Johnson 307 In May 1942 Johnson finally went to the Pacific as an observer, appointed to report on conditions there. Soon after his arrival, he agreed to fly on a dangerous bombing run. While in the air, the plane in which he was riding developed engine problems, and as it returned to its base in New Guinea, Japanese fighters hit it. The plane managed to limp home. Johnson subsequently received a Silver Star from General Douglas MacArthur—a politically motivated bestowal, since no one else on that flight was given one—and returned to Washington. From the exaggerated stories Johnson told, no one would ever have guessed his harrowing flight experience was a one-time, 13-minute brush with combat. He even said that the men he flew with had nicknamed him "Raider” Johnson. To display his bravery, for the rest of his political career he nearly always wore on his lapel a small bar that indicated he had received the Silver Star. Lyndon Johnson’s wealth far exceeded his congressional salary after his wife, Lady Bird, bought KTBC, a radio station in Austin, Texas. Johnson always insisted he had nothing to do with the business, but in fact his influence turned the station into a valuable property. Lady Bird obtained unusually quick approval from the Federal Communications Commission to relocate KTBC to a more favorable spot on the AM dial and to broadcast 24 hours a day. In addition, the same supporters who funded Johnson’s political campaigns bought commercial time; Johnson, in turn, helped them in Congress. "Raider” Johnson soon obtained another nickname, this one related to his second try for the Senate. In 1948 he ran in the Democratic primary against former Texas governor Coke Stevenson. To align himself with his home state’s increasing discontent with the New Deal, he turned conservative and in speeches emphasized his vote in Congress for the Taft-Hartley Act, which he called "anticommunist” but which was really antiunion. He also distributed campaign literature with the headline "Communists favor Coke.” As the initial vote returns showed a narrow victory for Stevenson, Johnson did what Texas political tradition and his own background called for: He stole ballots. Six days after the election, with Stevenson ahead by 157 votes, Johnson’s political bosses reported a late tally from Precinct 13 along the Rio Grande that gave him 200 additional votes and made him the victor. Johnson finished with 494,191 ballots to Stevenson’s 494,104—an 87-vote margin. Extensive research by Robert A. Caro, reported in his book The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Means of Ascent, proves that Johnson rigged the Precinct 13 results. Caro says, "In the context of the politics that was his life, Lyndon Johnson would do whatever was necessary to win.” As a result of the way Johnson beat Stevenson, he arrived in the Senate with a new nickname, "Landslide Lyndon.” Johnson rose steadily, and with the support of Georgia’s powerful Richard Russell, he was chosen minority leader in 1953. Two years later, after the Democrats regained control of the Senate, he became majority leader. Johnson used his knowledge of Congress and his considerable persuasive abilities to advance legislation. In 1957, after he recovered from a heart attack, he once more displayed his political talent when he attached amendments to President Eisenhower’s civil rights bill to make it more acceptable to Southerners and move it through the Senate. Such efforts led some observers to call him the greatest majority leader ever and to talk about his potential for the White House. Johnson wanted the presidency, and he went after it in 1960. Time magazine described his power and methods in the Senate and told about the candidate’s character: He rolls out the welcome mat for every freshman Senator, works hard to maneuver the most promising men into the most advantageous committee assignments. No local bridge-building bill is too far from Texas or too petty for his full attention, if it will help a colleague’s progress toward re-election. . . . Johnson is a back-slapper, a shoulder hugger, a knee squeezer. "I like to press the flesh,” he says, "and look a man in the eye.” 308 Lyndon Baines Johnson Johnson lost the Democratic nomination to Massachusetts senator John F. Kennedy, but for reasons still disputed, Kennedy offered him the vice-presidential spot, and he accepted. After the ticket’s victory in November, Johnson found himself shunted from his powerful Senate seat to the nearly powerless vice presidency. That changed with Kennedy’s assassination at Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963. Lyndon Johnson was the one who had urged Kennedy to make the trip to Texas to help heal a rift within the state Democratic Party, and he was in the motorcade and heard the lethal gunshots that ripped through Dealey Plaza. He took the oath of office on Air Force One standing next to his wife and Jacqueline Kennedy, whose husband’s blood still caked her suit. Johnson intended to continue Kennedy’s programs while developing his own distinct presidency, and a few days later said passage of a civil rights bill that had been stalled in Congress for months would honor the slain president. "We have talked long enough in this country about equal rights,” he added. "We have talked for one hundred years or more. It is time now to write the next chapter, and to write it in the books of law.” In his State of the Union address, delivered in January 1964, President Johnson proclaimed: "This Administration today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America.” To lead the fight, the president created an agency independent from his cabinet, much as Franklin Roosevelt had done with his New Deal programs. To maintain a connection to the Kennedys, he chose Sargent Shriver, the slain president’s brother-in-law and successful head of the Peace Corps, to lead the War on Poverty, which was to be based on proposals originally developed under John Kennedy. While Johnson let Shriver handle the details of the antipoverty legislation, he applied his political influence to get the measures approved. The programs reminded many of the New Deal in the way they rapidly poured forth from the Oval Office. Beginning in spring 1964 Congress debated his Economic Opportunity Act, which called for a Job Corps to provide training and work-study programs for poor youths. Volunteers in Service to America, or VISTA, created a domestic Peace Corps; the Community Action Program established antipoverty programs at the local level and most notably founded Head Start, an educational program for impoverished children. The Office of Economic Opportunity coordinated the entire War on Poverty, and Shriver was named its director. In all, Congress authorized 10 separate antipoverty programs, costing nearly $1 billion. Johnson promoted the measures as helping more than the poor, stating that in the long run they would improve American society by reducing the crime that poverty bred. As Franklin Delano Roosevelt had done with the New Deal, Johnson avoided radicalism and emphasized broadening opportunities for poor people rather than redistributing wealth or income. While Johnson’s proposals moved through Congress, he unveiled a theme for his presidency. "We have the opportunity,” he said, "to move not only toward the rich society and the powerful society, but upward to the Great Society. . . . It is a place where men are more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods.” He called for rebuilding America’s cities, constructing better housing, and improving transportation. That July Congress finally passed the civil rights bill he and John Kennedy had requested. The bill made discrimination in public accommodations illegal; authorized the attorney general to file suits to desegregate schools; and prohibited most discriminatory employment practices based on race, color, religion, sex, or nationality. Lyndon Johnson’s domestic agenda came from a sincere desire to help the disadvantaged, fulfill the Kennedy legacy, enhance his own presidential reputation, and build support for his election in 1964. He much preferred domestic issues to foreign policy ones, but Vietnam soon overwhelmed him. Johnson’s entanglement in Indochina can be attributed in part to John Kennedy and the Lyndon Baines Johnson 309 White House advisers he had inherited from his predecessor. Shortly before Kennedy’s death, the American military presence in South Vietnam was increased in an attempt to bolster the government in Saigon and prevent communists directed by North Vietnam from toppling it. Though JFK ultimately withdrew some of the military personnel, Johnson entered the White House to find Kennedy’s advisers busy developing plans for a deeper commitment, with more money, more supplies, and more soldiers for South Vietnam. For his part, Johnson feared that if he lost any territory in Southeast Asia to the communists, he would appear weak, and Republicans would attack him. Early on he expressed his belief in the domino theory, saying that if South Vietnam fell to communism, so too would Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, and the entire region. In a conversation with newspaper executive John S. Knight on February 3, 1964, Johnson said, "There’s one of three things you can do. One is run and let the dominoes start falling over. And God Almighty, what they said about us [Democrats] leaving China [in 1949] would just be warming up, compared to what they’d say now.” One of Johnson’s most telling actions in Vietnam occurred in February 1964 when he secretly ordered Plan 34A and launched commando raids by South Vietnamese PT boats against North Vietnam under the protection of American destroyers. It set the pattern for most of his strategy, as he would reveal little to the public about his directives and often lie about his motives and actions. As a result, he bred distrust in the government and failed to rally the support he needed for a prolonged war. Like so many of Johnson’s decisions, the commando raids drew America deeper into Vietnam. On August 2, 1964, three communist PT boats attacked the American destroyer Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin some 16 miles from the North Vietnamese coast. Johnson said nothing publicly about the attack, though he ordered planes from an aircraft carrier to strike back, and they damaged one of the enemy boats. On August 4 the Maddox and a nearby destroyer, the Turner Joy, reported another attack by the North Vietnamese. Even though the evidence for this second raid was flimsy—radar observations were likely misread—Johnson ordered air strikes against sites in North Vietnam and went on national television to claim that America had been assaulted on the high seas. He then asked Congress for support. With little debate Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which gave him the authority "to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression.” Johnson said nothing publicly about Plan 34A, nothing about American-sponsored raids on North Vietnam, and nothing about the Maddox having been involved in electronic surveillance to support the raids. He displayed anger when Vice President Hubert Humphrey indicated American culpability in the attack. To a friend, Johnson said "Yesterday morning he went on TV and . . . just blabbed everything that he had heard in a briefing. . . . Humphrey said, ‘Well, we have been carrying on some operations in that area . . . where we have been going in and knocking out roads and petroleum things.’ And that is exactly what we have been doing!” In a speech at Syracuse University, Johnson claimed: "The [North Vietnamese] attacks were deliberate. The attacks were unprovoked. The attacks have been answered. . . . Aggression— deliberate, willful, and systematic aggression— has unmasked its face to the entire world.” According to historian Robert Dallek in Flawed Giant, Lyndon Johnson doubted whether he should deepen American involvement in Vietnam and realized the danger of sending troops there. In his February 1964 conversation with James S. Knight, when Knight said "Long-range . . . the odds are certainly against us,” Johnson replied: "Yes, there is no question about that. Any time you got that many people against you that far from your home base, it’s bad.” Dallek says that in 1964, at least, Johnson wanted the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution more to show resolve than to widen 310 Lyndon Baines Johnson the war. Yet the president believed it gave him an added option, should at some later date he decide to expand the American combat role. Whatever Johnson’s doubts, he and his advisers believed the United States could defeat communism almost anywhere, particularly in what they considered "backward” Vietnam, or as Johnson called it, a "little piss-ant country.” Such sense of strength mixed with hubris made it unlikely that Johnson would settle for anything less than complete victory. In fact, in 1964 he rejected overtures from Hanoi to discuss a settlement because it might result in communist participation in the South Vietnamese government. As the 1964 presidential election neared, Johnson portrayed himself as standing firm against communism but using restraint so Americans would never have to fight in Vietnam. He successfully contrasted his policy with the Republican candidate, conservative Arizona senator Barry M. Goldwater, who advocated a strong military response. In what Robert Dallek calls the most famous TV campaign ad ever, the Democrats showed a little girl picking a daisy, her voice counting 10 before a mushroom cloud appeared and an announcer intoned that Americans must vote for Johnson, for the stakes were too high. That fall, crowds greeted Johnson with the chant "LBJ for the USA!” He defeated Goldwater in a landslide—among the most lopsided victories in presidential history. With the election behind him, Johnson pushed his Great Society forward. In April 1965 Congress passed the Elementary and Secondary School Act, granting $1.3 billion to school districts based on the number of needy children they served. In July Medicare was passed to provide medical care for the elderly through a system financed by Social Security. When in March 1965 sheriff ’s deputies and state troopers bludgeoned civil rights protesters at Selma, Alabama, Johnson told a national television audience that he was sending a Voting Rights Act to Congress. Passed in August, it suspended literacy and other voter tests and authorized federal agents to supervise voter registration in districts where discrimination prevailed. When blacks rioted in the Watts district of Los Angeles later that month, Johnson reacted to a white backlash by retreating from additional civil rights proposals. An even worse riot in Detroit in 1965 forced LBJ to send troops into that city, and over the next several months more riots erupted elsewhere. Increasingly, whites feared blacks would turn from burning ghettoes to burning white neighborhoods, and Republicans criticized Johnson for allowing "anarchy” to spread. Johnson never understood the anger among blacks and found it perplexing and discouraging given all he had done for civil rights. It was, to him, a slap in the face. As he saw it, every cry from African Americans for "black power” jeopardized his Great Society program and made Congress hostile to liberal reform. Vietnam contributed to the national crisis and tore America apart. Johnson thought he could fight the war and advance his Great Society, but as the conflict expanded, it consumed more and more money—dwarfing spending on social programs—and more and more faith and trust. In February 1965 Johnson reacted to a communist attack on U.S. soldiers at the South Vietnamese airbase of Pleiku by unleashing Operation Rolling Thunder, which sent wave after wave of B-52 bombers over North Vietnam. In time, the total number of bombs dropped in the American air war would exceed the number dropped on all nations in all previous wars. One of Johnson’s advisers thought Operation Rolling Thunder would bring Hanoi to its knees within three months—a massive miscalculation. On April 1, 1965, Johnson authorized American troops to take the offensive against communist forces in South Vietnam. Not only did he keep this crucial decision secret, but he also said at a press conference that he foresaw no change in America’s combat role. Then on July 28 he made a critical decision to increase the number of troops in South Vietnam from 75,000 to 125,000, without calling up reserves Lyndon Baines Johnson 311 or levying taxes to fight the war. As a result, he avoided an open debate with Congress that a declaration of emergency would have entailed and misled the public into thinking the sacrifice would be painless. When the pain from the loss of American lives became too great, antiwar protests intensified, as did the animosity between those who supported the war and those who condemned it. When these differences were added to divisions between whites and radical blacks and between young and older Americans—or what was called the generation gap—American society splintered. As criticism of Johnson spread, the president demanded full loyalty from those around him. He also ranted about communists leading the dissenters, about communists taking over the nation. Some thought he had become completely unglued. "We are [in Vietnam],” LBJ said, "because we have a promise to keep. . . . The central lesson of our time is that the appetite of aggression is never satisfied. To withdraw from one battlefield means only to prepare for the next.” By October 1965 more than 200,000 American troops were in Vietnam, yet Johnson failed to discuss the escalation openly or reveal future prospects. Privately he saw a tough road ahead; publicly he said victory was just around the corner. Although Johnson’s social reforms contributed to a decline in poverty from 38 million poor people in 1959 to 25.9 million in 1967, internal disputes and funding problems imperiled his programs. When crime rates surged in 1966 and 1967, Americans opposed his leadership all the more. Johnson reacted by proposing a crime bill that included prohibitions on wiretapping and bugging, a surprising provision given that he had bugged opponents at the 1964 Democratic National Convention, bugged embassies and homes, and secretly recorded 10,000 conversations in the White House. Further, in 1967 Johnson and his National Security Council ordered the CIA to investigate possible links between foreign groups and student protesters in the United States. This mission, called Operation CHAOS, violated the National Security Act of 1947, which prohibited the CIA from engaging in "internal security functions.” Most Americans in 1967 backed their country’s troop presence in Vietnam, but support was rapidly eroding, and in South Vietnam itself, military officers were saying the war could not be won. The greatest blow to Johnson’s war came in January 1968 when the communists launched the Tet Offensive, a massive assault throughout South Vietnam. American troops beat back the enemy, but it showed that victory was distant and would require yet more soldiers above the 500,000 already stationed in the embattled country. The Tet Offensive greatly damaged Johnson’s approval rating and gave momentum to Minnesota senator Eugene McCarthy’s campaign to wrest the Democratic presidential nomination from him. In March 1968 Mc- Carthy, a sharp critic of the war, shocked the country when he won more delegates than LBJ in the New Hampshire primary. A few days later John Kennedy’s brother, Robert Kennedy, entered the race. In late March, Johnson presented his own surprise: He announced he would not seek reelection. Instead, he would try to open peace talks with Hanoi, and toward that end he declared a unilateral halt in air attacks over most of North Vietnam. For this action he received widespread praise. Preliminary peace negotiations began in May 1968 and more intensive ones in January 1969, but they would last several years. When Johnson left the presidency, he retired to his ranch in the Texas hill country, along the Pedernales. There he died on January 22, 1973, following a heart attack. The magnitude of the issues that confronted Lyndon Johnson, combined with the enormousness of his personality and the tragedy of his policies, encouraged some observers to present him as a Shakespearean figure. Barbara Garson did so viciously in 1966 when she staged the play 312 Lyndon Baines Johnson Macbird, a takeoff on Macbeth, that implied Lyndon Johnson had used palace intrigue and murdered John Kennedy. Others made Johnson into a King Lear, who realized his own faults but failed to rise above them and whose rages revealed an unstable mind. Johnson himself spoke in Learlike tones when in private he said, "People . . . think I want great power. And what I want is great solace—and a little love. That’s all I want.” Any understanding of Lyndon Johnson’s presidency should compare Ralph Ellison’s words of 1968 with these from Shakespeare’s King Lear: O, sir, to wilful men The injuries that they Themselves procure Must be their
Schoolmasters.