Friday, Nov. 22 marks the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
Around the country, everyone is thinking back to that era which we imagine as Camelot on the Potomac, but in actuality was an extremely turbulent time – think civil rights, George Wallace segregationists and Freedom Riders; think Cuban Missile Crisis; think Vietnam.
But Nov. 22 is also the 50th anniversary of Lyndon Baines Johnson assuming office.
LBJ does not have the same devotion – progressives who should admire him as having the greatest impact on accomplishing civil rights, voting rights, the War on Poverty, Medicare and Medicaid, despise him (and probably protested against him) because of Vietnam.
And conservatives despise him because of the Great Society. They are still fighting to undue landmark achievements including Medicare and Medicaid, Head Start, food stamps, federal funding for public education – the list goes on and on.
A recent visit to the LBJ Presidential Library in Austin, Texas, made me appreciate all the more Johnson’s phenomenal accomplishments, especially since so many aspects of his legacy are being relitigated today.
Within hours of the Supreme Court’s decision to eviscerate the Voting Rights Act – effectively pronouncing racism past history – the state of Texas put into place the onerous voter ID and gerrymandered redistricting that the Department of Justice had blocked, under that same provision of the VRA which SCOTUS deemed “unnecessary” because the nation “has changed.”
I saw that image of LBJ signing the Voting Rights Act in 1965 at the library, a mammoth marble building on the campus of the University of Texas – the subject of another SCOTUS decision last session that was a blow to affirmative action setting the stage for overturning affirmative action altogether. (We are in a post-racial society, don’t you know.)
The library is mere steps away from the state’s Capitol Building, a replica of the nation’s Capitol, grand dome and all, where state Senator Wendy Davis filibustered under Texas’ torturous rules for 11 solid hours; she needed to run out the clock so that the Republican-dominated legislature could not pass anti-women, anti-choice, anti-women’s health law. Under the redistricting map which the DoJ had blocked and now Texas will enact, her seat would have been eliminated and her supporters would not have had representation at all.
She was successful for that day, but the Texas Legislature returned and passed the severe restriction on women’s reproductive health anyway.
There is so much about LBJ that resonates today: Obama’s fight over the Affordable Health Care Act hearkens back to LBJ and Medicare – except that LBJ actually had a Democratic majority in Congress and never faced the obstruction – the routine use of filibusters in the Senate – that Obama has had to contend with since he took office in 2009.
Johnson never had the coordinated effort to block every single action, even those that were the opposing party’s idea, even when the nation’s very economy was at risk of sinking. Johnson never had to face the extortion of a Congress that would destroy the nation’s full faith and credit in order to reverse a reform.
Johnson showed the way to mount a successful War on Poverty, with Medicare and Medicaid, federal funding for public education, Head Start, food stamps, raising the minimum wage.
To get an understanding of the impact Johnson had, consider that when Johnson became president in 1963, only 25 percent of the population, 54 million, graduated high school; 35 million, and one third of the six million people 65 years old or more lived in poverty.
In the late 1950s, the poverty rate for all Americans was 22.4 percent, or 39.5 million people. These numbers declined steadily throughout the 1960s, largely because of the Great Society policies, reaching a low of 11.1 percent, or 22.9 million individuals, in 1973. He cut the rate of poverty in half.
Now let’s consider that between 1993 and 2000 (the Clinton economic boom years), the poverty rate fell each year, reaching 11.3 percent in 2000.
But since the 2000s, with the Bush/Cheney policies that redistributed wealth to the wealthiest 1 percent, even before the Great Recession which caused unemployment to soar and wages to drop, the poverty rate has been rising again. By 2010, 15.1 percent of all persons lived in poverty, the highest poverty rate since 1993, and there is the greatest gap between rich and poor since the Gilded Age, and the greatest gap in the Industrialized world.
Between 2009 and 2012, the first years of the economic recovery. The top 1 percent saw their incomes climb 31.4 percent — or, 95 percent of the total gain — while the bottom 99 percent saw growth of only 0.4 percent.
Do you think the sequester, the policies of slashing funding for Head Start, Meals on Wheels, food stamps, unemployment benefits, the failure to increase the minimum wage (now in real terms less than what it was in 1963), could be contributing to growing poverty? And as Paul Krugman writes this week, all of this contributes to depressed consumer demand which is causing the economy to be in a permanent state of stagnation.
Every time anyone mentions the need to address the policies which are causing more people to fall into poverty with little opportunity to rise into the middle class, the 1 percent scream “class warfare.” Yes, there has been class warfare, but it has been waged by the Have-Mores against everyone else.
Coming into the library, the overriding question I had in my mind was how this native Texan, this man of the South who voted with the Segregationists while he was in Congress up until 1957, became the force who achieved Civil Rights and completed what Lincoln started a century before with the passage of the 13th and 14th amendments.
As you walk into the exhibit hall, there is a timeline of his life in photos (though I would have preferred to see more of his childhood and his family background to understand him better).
One photo here stands out, and goes far to answer my question: it is of a young LBJ, recently graduated from college, sitting on a porch with his students in Cotulla, Texas, a poor Mexican-American village, where he taught 1928-9.
“He saw the pain of prejudice….. the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice,” the narrator of the video says.
LBJ took from this a first-hand experience an understanding of how the lack of access to good education, food, health care – everything that the comfortable White majority took for granted for themselves but denied others – perpetuated the cycle of poverty and deprived the rest of society of the potential talent that was squandered.
“No president since Lincoln comes close to LBJ on civil rights – he changes the face of America, opened the political process,” the narrator says.
The Great Society even included gun control. After the epidemic of assassinations of JFK, Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy, Johnson was able to take political advantage – the events muzzled at least temporarily the pro-gun advocates – to get sweeping gun control legislation passed in 1968.
Look at us now – even the massacre of 20 elementary school children can’t shake Congress from their bonds to the NRA to pass universal background checks or limits on military-style assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. What level of horror will it it take?
We think of John F Kennedy as the one who launched the space program after the humiliation of Russia’s Sputnik, but it was under Johnson that NASA created the Gemini and Apollo programs that put a man on the moon just six months after Johnson left office.
He also signed the International Space Treaty (which George W. Bush repealed; Bush’s idea of a space program was to fund private contractors like Lockheed Martin to weaponize space).
And it was Johnson who stepped up and literally saved Israel in the Six-Day War in 1967 (as Israel’s former Ambassador Yehuda Avner made clear during the Gold Coast International Film Festival screening of “The Prime Ministers: The Pioneers, here in Great Neck).
The most astonishing revelations at the LBJ Presidential Library come from audio tapes of his telephone conversations which were only revealed to the public in 2008, which go far for me in changing my understanding of Johnson and Vietnam, the biggest blight on his legacy, which probably has parallels to Obama’s drone program.
I hear for myself Johnson confronting Everett Dirksen, the Minority Leader in the Senate, in October 1968 over Nixon operatives interfering with Johnson’s negotiated peace accord that would have ended the Vietnam War. Hearing Johnson say, “That’s treason,” and telling Dirksen to get the Nixon people to stop is heartbreaking as you realize that tens of thousands of American soldiers need not have died in the five years of fighting that followed (58,000 Americans died in Vietnam), and that Hubert Humphrey, not Nixon, probably would have become president.
When I hear the recording, I feel like crying.
As to why Johnson did not make Nixon’s action public, that is apparently because it would have revealed that he was wiretapping the Vietnamese regime – which resonates with today’s controversies with Wikileaks, Edward Snowden and the NSA revelations.
Such eavesdropping and wiretapping continued under Nixon, but Nixon used his intelligence-gathering capability (as well as the IRS) to destroy the people on his “Enemies List.” Bush/Cheney also used the NSA eavesdropping – first illegally and then under cover of the Patriot Act and FISA – to go after their political enemies, like the Quakers for mounting an anti-recruitment protest.
Now we have the so-called scandal that the NSA is gathering up metadata on phone calls and Internet (essentially doing what Bush/Cheney had done, but keeping up with the advancing technology) which, along with the drone strikes issue, is turning progressives against Obama in much the same way as Vietnam turned progressives against Johnson.
Snowden said that the NSA – through its private contractors like the company he worked for, Booz Allen Hamilton – had the ability to eavesdrop even on President Obama’s phone calls.
Why this revelation has enraged progressives is beyond me. The government has had this ability to eavesdrop and wiretap since Alexander Graham Bell first invented the telephone, and now, with everyone’s most personal and private information going everywhere over the Internet and being tapped by commercial entities for profit, it should be no surprise that this is the new communications realm to be monitored in the cause of “national security.”
But while Snowden accused the government of having the capability, so far there has never the claim that the Obama White House is actually targeting individuals who are political enemies for personal or political benefit.
The real scandal is having private contractors with no loyalty to the Constitution and an allegiance only to making money, having this kind of access to information which they could exploit for personal profit.
When Romney and other conservatives bemoan the loss of the America of their youth, they mean the 1950s, before Johnson’s Great Society, when women and Negroes knew their place and political establishment, the police, and employers could force them to stay there. There was a growing middle class (consumer society), but people were docile. Censorship and McCarthyism, which preyed on people’s fears of Communist takeover, made sure of that. Presidential administrations had no compunction of assassinating heads of state (Chile) or mounting coups (Iran) to prop up dictators (Egypt) who would further the national (corporate, oil) interests of the US.
And in this, there has been a perfect storm of unparalleled opposition and obstruction by Republicans. There is no comparison or precedent. When a Republican president had a Democratic majority in Congress, they found ways of compromising and working together – Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neil are a famous and relevant example.
The Republican majority on the Supreme Court has been the enabler to overturn every aspect of the Great Society.
Johnson did so much to expand access to the political process and open opportunity in the labor market. The Supreme Court has done its best to chip away with its decisions on Citizens United, Voting Rights Act, affirmative action, gun control, and in its back-handed undermining of the Affordable Care Act (effectively giving the states veto power).
Today, the dominant challenge is not voting rights, but voter suppression. It is not about economic progress and the American Dream, it is about the growing gap in wealth and political power. It is not about the expansion of the middle class, it is about growing poverty.
This visit to the LBJ Presidential Library reminds you that Johnson was famous for his power of persuasion, which has come to be known as “The Treatment.” You see that famous pose of him towering over some hapless person or poking a guy in his chest with his long index finger.
LBJ “was a force of nature, a tornado in pants, honest, raw,” the film narrator says. “The internal engine in him that would not stop. He was intimidating, driven by his desire to serve.”
His toughness as a Senator and Majority leader was legendary and he brought his skill in managing the Congress with him to the Presidency.
“He had a sense of the jugular of Congress – where each member of Congress stood, his strengths, what he needed or wanted for his constituents…He recognized that, as he said, ‘people are moved by love and fear – put the right combination’.”
Compared to Johnson, it is maddening to hear how Obama is branded a “dictator,” portrayed as Hitler, with daily calls for his impeachment, when progressives complain he is far too reasonable and open to compromise.
But there are many of us who want to see Obama’s agenda for climate change, gun violence protection, immigration reform, public education, universal health care enacted who wish he would consider tapping into LBJ’s playbook.
