36. LYNDON B. JOHNSON (part 2)
Second Term: With the election behind him, President Johnson set on his ambitious domestic agenda that promised to be the most reaching since the New Deal. He pushed for what he referred to as his Great Society programs. First though, he needed to get through the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that Martin Luther King was pressuring him to do. Johnson was concerned that getting a voting rights act through now might derail his domestic agenda in general, but again, dumb white racists made the decision for him.
For there was an incident in Selma, Alabama known as Bloody Sunday. A peaceful march across the Edmund Pettis bridge was halted by Alabama state troopers. The marchers did indeed halt, but it didn’t end there. The troopers attacked the marchers with tear gas and nightsticks and, of course, the event was televised.
So, Johnson had his cause to act, and this time it wasn’t manufactured. He made a speech imploring white Americans that the Black Americans’ cause was theirs too. The bill passed with great bipartisan support, and it banned literacy tests among other things as well as allowing the Justice Department to intervene where discriminatory practices kept less than half of eligible voters from being able to do just that, vote. Yes, some of the bill would, decades later, be ruled unconstitutional simply because times had changed (and, of course, after George Floyd, we know that things haven’t really changed at all, thanks, John Roberts). Some of the bill survives though and it is a great companion bill to the Civil Rights Act of the year before.
With the Voting Rights Act behind him, President Johnson began work on his other projects, starting with Medicare and Medicaid, something that would guarantee at least some health insurance to the elderly and the poor. Of course, the conservatives, whose idea of helping people is to let them starve, were freaking out (You should listen to Ronald Reagan’s album, Ronald Reagan speaks out against Socialized Medicine, it’s a comedy classic). The bill passed anyway, and the Supreme Court hasn’t outlawed that as of yet (and, after okaying Obamacare twice, they probably won’t), so, along with Social Security, older people have at least a little bit of security.
Lesser known, but equally important accomplishments in the Johnson Administration, include the Department of Housing and Urban Development, or HUD for short, the National Endowments for the Arts, the National Endowments for the Humanities, the Public Broadcasting Act (PBS, if you’re wondering), and the Consumer Protection Agency, and these are just the ones I can think of right off the bat.
These great accomplishments would put any other President in the far upper tier to be sure, but sadly, Johnson’s foreign policy was a downright disaster.
For the Vietnam War was, to the doubt of no one, President Johnson’s war. The US began to bomb North Vietnam in February 1965 and soon troop levels were increasing faster than today’s gas prices. By the end of 1965, nearly 200,000 US troops were fighting in Vietnam. That number doubled by the end of 1966 and more than half a million troops were in Vietnam by the time Johnson left office.
And the war was going nowhere. Young American men had to live in fear of their lives being interrupted at best and maybe ended at worst. More and more troops were coming home in body bags and colleges were erupting in protests throughout the country. Even worse, there was still racial strife domestically as Martin Luther King was now getting resistance, first by a white mob in Chicago, then with more radical black activist groups such as SNCC and the Black Panthers that advocated violence instead of King’s non-violent approach. King even alienated Johnson for a time when he spoke out against the Vietnam War.
And as such, the last two years of Johnson’s presidency would end up in two of the worst years in American History. In 1967, despite some positive goings on such as the Summer of Love, there would be race riots in Detroit and Newark as well as more escalation in Vietnam. The ongoing war in Vietnam had an even bigger impact on the young as protests dominated throughout the year, some of them violent. The most notable protest however was very peaceful when protestors descended on the Pentagon in October 1967, remembered mostly for Allen Ginsburg’s attempt to “lift the Pentagon.”
1968 would even be worse as it wouldn’t even have a summer of love. Instead, the year started out with the Pueblo Incident off North Korea where a US spy ship was captured, and the personnel were imprisoned for almost a year.
But that paled to what would happen in Vietnam the next month. In February 1968, the Vietcong pulled a surprise attack on what was called the Tet Offensive. By now, the Vietnam War was on the TV news daily the same as if you were watching a rerun of the Flintstones. So, it was to no surprise that the horrors of the war were seen by just about everyone, with a street execution shown as the exclamation point.
This was the last straw as Walter Cronkite publicly spoke out against the war on his newscast. This, along with the entry of Robert Kennedy in the Presidential Race drove President Johnson to this fatal announcement.
“I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President”.
(We’ll cover the rest of 1968 in a special post before we get to Nixon)
Post Presidency: The few years of Johnson’s post presidency were somewhat quiet as he retired to his ranch. His heart was failing, and he never really got over the guilt of sending thousands of young men to their deaths in Vietnam. Still, he wasn’t a broken man as he kept busy writing memoirs and overseeing the building of his Presidential Library. He died in January 1973, just two days after the Paris Peace Accords officially ended US involvement in the Vietnam War.
Odd notes: Before the Presidency, Johnson was a noted segregationist
Johnson had a propensity to show off his scar from a gall bladder operation.
He grew his hair out after the Presidency
Final Summary: In some ways, you can compare Lyndon Johnson to Woodrow Wilson as something of a Jekyll and Hyde. Wilson of course did his own great things, but his blatant racism ruined his legacy. Johnson, on the other hand, did so many great things domestically and African Americans can actually congregate with White Americans freely (even if some of the whites don’t like it much). Johnson is the one most responsible for that.
But then there is Vietnam and that’s the Hyde side of LBJ. Believe it or not, as a Cold Warrior, he did it with all the best intentions, but he was too much of a cowboy President (I didn’t mention it earlier, but he ordered Marines into the Dominican Republic in 1965 to protect American Citizens), and that was his downfall when it came to Vietnam. He also was easily hurt as he felt betrayed when Martin Luther King went against him on Vietnam.
So, like Wilson, it would be easy to give Johnson and A on domestic policy and an F on Vietnam, but somehow, I think because of the domestic gains, I think LBJ deserves a little better than that.
So, I’m giving him a few bonus points.
Overall rating: B-
https://millercenter.org/president/lbjohnson
NOTE: Stay tuned as we post a special entry on Friday concerning the pivotal political year of 1968 that started the US on the slow descent that we enjoy to this day.