Lyndon B. Johnson: Portrait of a President
It is the last Sunday of July 2024, so it’s time for the next president which is Lyndon B Johnson, making this weeks book Lyndon B Johnson: Portrait of a President by Robert Dallek.
Lyndon Baines Johnson was born August 27, 1908 near Stonewall, TX to Samuel Ealy Johnson Jr and Rebekah Baines Johnson. He was the oldest of five children, with one brother and three sisters. The family was poor and he grew up poor, but with politics in his blood as Samuel Ealy Johnson Jr was a local politician.
He was a bit of a shit as a kid, but then again what kid isn’t, and he rebelled against his parents, moving briefly to California before returning to Texas for college, which he wasn’t really sure he wanted to do until he got into a bar brawl and got his ass handed to him by his opponent. Realizing he didn’t really have what it takes to be a street tough, he went to the local college, eventually graduating and becoming a teacher. It was in college that some of his more defining characteristics came out, namely that his classmates remembered he was very much a shit unless you kissed his butt and acknowledged his superiority. He in turn kissed his teachers asses so they never saw this side of him.
This habit of treating people seems to be a running theme throughout the book. If they kissed his butt, he would find a use for them and help them. If he thought they could be useful to him, he would be friendly. If they were above him socially…like President Roosevelt…he was all obsequiousness.
Now after a brief stint as a secretary to Congressman Kleberg starting in 1931, wherein he basically had free reign and act on Kleberg’s behalf, LBJ was put in charge of the FDR program National Youth Administration in Texas, and it was during this time he would meet and marry Claudia “Lady Bird” Taylor in 1934. They would be married for ten years before they had the first of two surviving children….I’m almost positive Lady Bird had a miscarriage in there, but I could be mixing up my first ladies. They did eventually have two daughters, Lynda Bird and Luci Baines.
As a congressman, LBJ was a staunch new dealer, and it was probably this unflagging support that earned him assistance from FDR with his Hatch Act violations in 1941 for his first attempt to obtain a senate seat on the death of senior senator from Texas, Morris Sheppard. Hence the mudslide cocktail. When LBJ did eventually win his senate seat in 1949 by the skin of his teeth, he jokingly said he was Landslide Lyndon….but mudslide is more accurate. It’s dirtier. Although to be fair, his political opponent was just as dirty.
While serving as congressman, LBJ also served as an officer with the Navy Reserves, and his pull with the President saw him assigned to an brief inspection tour in the Southwest Pacific, including stops in Pearl Harbor, Australia, and New Zealand. He served on one combat mission after talking his way onto a bombing run against Japanese bases. It sounds like he kind of made him self a nuisance to the planes regular crew men, “During the one-hour flight to the target, Johnson was all over the plane seeing everything he could.” The plane Johnson was on, the Heckling Hare, lost power in one engine and had to jettison their bombs out of formation before returning back to base. The return flight was harried by the Japanese but the pilot, Walter Greer, was more than up to the task. After landing, Johnson gave a report of the run to General MacArthur, who announced Johnson would receive a silver star. For what? Who knows! The crew members who had been shot down received purple hearts and no one else on that mission received a silver star. If I had to guess, MacArthur saw it as a way to get LBJ out his hair. It worked too. After this, Johnson returned stateside and to his congressional work.
After he returned, the IRS began their investigation of his creative bookkeeping during his senate race in 1941, and the white house stepped in and ordered the IRS to stop their investigation, lest it ruin the political future of one Lyndon Baines Johnson.
It was during this time that LBJ began to build his wealth by purchasing I believe it was a radio station first. This served a dual purpose of giving Lady Bird something to do with her days, since the couple didn’t have children yet. This was 100% legal and to his absolute credit LBJ was very careful to accumulate his wealth above board. He played dirty politically, but kept his income streams clean. He did this not just so Lady Bird could have something to do, but because he was worried his political future was in very real danger with the IRS investigation looming.
He got his next chance at running for senate in 1948, which he won, and he began to aggressively push for the passage of legislation. I think I mentioned last month how Kennedy was looking to make a mark in the Senate to increase his chances at a presidential nomination. Well LBJ made that mark, pushing for passage of more and more legislation to get a legislative record behind himself. He became I think the youngest minority whip, and eventually senate majority leader. And politics were his milieu, he was very at home in the both the house of representatives and the senate, he knew how to work people to ensure he got his way. He knew when bullying would land the prize, and when he needed to kindly hold their hand. He knew when to play party politics and when he needed to pull it back to bipartisan politics.
All of this led to his first heart attack in 1955, which almost derailed his career, but he bounced back and kept on trucking by mostly following the doctor recommended diet and quitting smoking. And in 1956 he was approached by patriarch of the Kennedy clan, Joseph P Kennedy Sr, with an offer to back Johnson for a presidential bid, with JFK as his VP. An offer which Johnson turned down, realizing that he was being used as a stalking horse to push for a Kennedy presidency.
So it was with some surprise that the Kennedy clan approached him for the VP position in 1960. An offer he almost didn’t take because he still had ambitions for the top spot himself and the last VP who had been elected to the position without his predecessor dying first was Martin van Buren. Every other VP to step into the position of president did so over the literal dead body of the president before them.
Now, I get that statement is a bit dark, please understand. I don’t think ANYONE expected Johnson to gain the presidency in the way he did, especially not Johnson. He had every expectation that Kennedy would outlive himself by decades, despite Kennedy’s health issues, which were apparently not as secret as Kennedy thought, since Johnson made at least one reference to Kennedy’s illnesses, calling him like rickety baby or something like that.
Now, as VP, Kennedy wanted to keep Johnson as far from himself as possible, given that Johnson WAS a masterful politician. So to that end, Kennedy would send Johnson on good will missions overseas, where Johnson would visit third world countries and hand out pens and lighters and tickets to visit the senate gallery. All of this seems utterly ridiculous unless you look at it from the context of the times. His role was to convince these governments to follow America into democracy and not follow the Soviets into communism. By handing out these tchotchkes he was demonstrating that America was so well off, we could just give these things away, things that cost a great deal of money in these countries.
And that’s more or less how Johnson spent the first 2 years, 10 months, and 2 days. And then November 22, 1963 happened. And the world was horrified, not least of which was Johnson, who most definitely did not want to gain the prize at this cost. Which is fair, only a true monster would want to ascend to power in this fashion. But he stepped in and to his absolute credit, he took his cue from Chester A Arthur, who believed that the presidency wasn’t his, his job was to complete the presidency of James Garfield. Johnson’s job was to complete Kennedy’s presidency, and to that end he spent the remainder of Kennedy’s term following the policies as laid out by Kennedy.
And then Johnson ran for and won in his own right in the 1964 presidential race, and now Johnson was president in his own right. Just as an aside, he absolutely mastered the negative ad campaigns, including this absolute gem which aired like once, and is still the talk of political campaigners 60 years later.
And once he was sworn in, he immediately began wheeling, dealing, and strong arming to get his Great Society legislation passed, which included a host of civil rights legislation and welfare measures to assist the poor, lower taxes, and miliary spending to increase troop movements in Vietnam.
Now, the Great Society legislation looks great on paper and has paid absolute political dividends for anyone who supported the legislation, because who wouldn’t support more money to assist the poor and medicare for the retirees, and fair and equal housing. All of these SOUND great on paper. The problem was Vietnam. And those pesky tax cuts. See, if you cut taxes but don’t subsequently cut spending, then you end up with massive deficits. And Johnson had deficits until like the last six months of his presidency. And because he had to make budgetary allowances to fund the war in Vietnam, he was never able to fully fund the Great Society programs. Which has also, interestingly, paid dividends for the supporters as they consistently point out that detractors have failed to fund those programs which is why they don’t work. Rather than looking at the reality, which is if you pay people not to work, then they won’t work. For example. There was a lot more than just unemployment benefits passed into law under Johnson’s watch.
Other problems that happened are the massive riots in the 1960’s, which actually also helped derail the Great Society legislation as people were like hey, we’re trying to help the poor people and the black communities in return rioted and caused millions of dollars of property damage. It cooled the reform ardor of huge swaths of America.
But Johnson’s real problem was Vietnam. And this is interesting, because apparently, Johnson never read Ralph Waldo Emerson, who said “Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.” Because Johnson genuinely believed that those who disagreed with him were out to get him, He hated the hippy protestors, and there was a really great quote from him regarding the college protests, which he said to George Ball “don’t pay any attention to what those little shits on the campuses do. The great beast is the reactionary elements in the country. Those are the people that we have to fear.”
So yeah, he believed if more people would support the war, we would be doing better. One thing that bothered me is the author would throw out lines like X was popular and 70% of American’s backed it without providing what the polling numbers were. If they only polled 100 people, and 70 agreed with them, than 70% is true. Or is this more of a Family Guy situation?
Anyway, four years on, and following the Tet offensive in 1968, which America won, but seemed to sap American desire to keep fighting, Johnson announced that he did not choose to and would not accept another nomination for presidency. Which he could have, the way the 22nd Amendment is worded is “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once.” Since Kennedy only had a little over one year left when he was assassinated, Johnson could have run for a second term on his own merit. But did not want to.
Vietnam and the backlash at home over this quagmire had worn him down. The Great Society was failing from lack of funding and while it continues to more or less limp along, and he was not sure he would survive a second term.
So he voluntarily withdrew from running in 1968, and then managed to spoil VP Hubert Humphries chances at winning when he ran against Nixon, making Nixon next months president.
I enjoyed this one more than I enjoyed the book on Kennedy. Same author, but this one was much better organized. It humanized Johnson in a way I’m not sure was possible prior to reading this, and I will admit to a great deal of bias here, I grew up listening to Tom Paxton and his song basically ran on a never ending loop in my brain while reading this book because my dad was one of those 50,000 more than Johnson sent to Vietnam to save it from the Vietnamese.
But Dallek managed to convince me that LBJ did actually care about the poor and underrepresented black communities. I think he did want to do right by people. But I also think he cared a great deal about being in power. The two goals are not mutually exclusive, and he saw the bulk of America, those underrepresented classes, as being his ticket to power and to keeping power. So if he could buy votes with Great Society legislation, he could do some good, and keep himself in the cockpit.
This book very early on highlighted the danger of worshiping our political leaders, the way we do these days. Because they are, after all, only all too human. Including Johnson, who died at home on January 22, 1973.
