SUDDENLY, ALONG CAME LYNDON!

By Edwin Cooney

Friday, November 22nd, 1963 was, of course, the day Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson became President Johnson. However, Wednesday, January 20th, 1965, known nationally as Inauguration Day, was the day the big 6 foot 3 inch, 210 pound Texan became everyone's master.  In LBJ's mind, it may well have been Lyndon Baines Johnson's Liberation or Freedom Day. His lifelong ambition to be elected President of the United States was a reality. He was master of Vice President Hubert Humphrey, of House Speaker John McCormack, and Senate leaders Mike Mansfield and Everett Dirksen, the latter his frequent after five p.m. drinking companion. He was clearly boss of numerous former Kennedy associates including Robert McNamara, JFK's "brilliant" Secretary of Defense, and, of course, Secretary of State Dean Rusk. He had even gotten more votes in the State of New York than had Robert F. Kennedy, someone he truly and deeply despised! He was bigger physically, politically and rank-wise than most. Everyone, even social and fiscal activists, had to check first with LBJ to assure the legitimacy of their interests and even their handling of them.

His political experience was born in the 1930s when he was an assistant to Texas Congressman Richard Kleberg. By 1935, he'd been appointed chairman of the Texas branch of the National Youth Administration. In the spring of 1937, he was in Congress due to a special election he narrowly won. In 1948, he won the Democratic Senatorial Primary over Governor Coke Stevenson by just 87 votes out of a total vote of 9,888,000 Texans. Henceforth, he would be known as “Landslide Lyndon!”

His judgment of people and situations was such that he instinctively knew who he should befriend or show deference, and who he could afford to bully and thus control. He kept records of birthdays, anniversaries, instances of favor and instances of defiance. LBJ often quoted his father Sam Johnson, a state legislator, who told his eldest son: If you can't walk into a room and immediately tell who is for you and who is against you, you're in the wrong business.

As I listened to him beginning on Wednesday, November 27th, 1963, I heard more of a demanding than a  commanding voice, far from JFK's New England/Harvard eloquence. In the coming months, there were stories of how LBJ begged and wheedled Chief Justice Earl Warren into heading up the commission assigned to investigate the assassination of President Kennedy. As for his treatment of Robert Kennedy, understandable as that might be in view of their mutual dislike, it nevertheless seemed cruel and unpresidential at the time.

As the 1964 presidential campaign unfolded, as a partisan Republican, Barry Goldwater, seemed to me to be determinedly principled while Lyndon Johnson seemed purely opportunistic. Only with time and events did I begin to learn what it might have been like to grow up and become a truly progressive politician in the South. How Lyndon Johnson pulled it off is an amazing story.

He began by systematically befriending southern leaders such as House Speaker Sam Rayburn, Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Richard B. Russell of Georgia, John McClelland of Arkansas, Robert Kerr of Oklahoma and J. William Fulbright, also of Arkansas. LBJ often referred to President Franklin D. Roosevelt as "my second daddy!" (Interestingly and, I believe, significantly, I've neither heard nor read of any special relationship LBJ developed with South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond.)

LBJ was essentially a New Dealer who was devoted to using government's resources to alleviate poverty, misery, disease and ignorance, not only from the United States but from the world community as well. A number of historians these days have come to believe that one of  President Johnson's goals in Vietnam was to demonstrate to everyone that New Deal-style democracy was the ultimate and permanent answer to world Communism and despotism.

Over time, I began to understand and even sympathize with LBJ's goals although his methods were ultimately ineffective insofar as world New Dealism was concerned.

Many were shocked by Johnson's transformation from a typical Southern segregationist who would vote for poll taxes and oppose anti-lynching bills into a civil rights leader. By 1965, he had shepherded three civil rights acts through Congress breaking the House Rules Committee's stranglehold on civil rights issues, a deed President Kennedy had been unable to accomplish. He accomplished this by campaigning to have a majority of House members sign a discharge petition which, if passed, would take the bill out of the jurisdiction of the House Rules Committee. Congressman Howard Smith, the Rules Committee chairman, began to give way as House members began to steadily sign the discharge petition. Subsequently, Smith, a lifelong segregationist from Virginia, was forced to allow his committee to consider the Civil Rights bill which was passed by the House of Representatives on January 30th, 1964. This movement on LBJ's part began on the nights of November 26th and 27th,1963, LBJ's fifth and sixth days as president. When advised to move slowly on civil rights legislation, LBJ is said to have responded: What the hell is the presidency for!

What's below is Lyndon Johnson's explanation of what compelled him to become a civil rights president. He had obviously waited for the right time and set of circumstances to pull it off. I only wish I could transmit the sound of his voice as he stood before Congress and told this story on Monday night, March 15th, 1965.

"My first job after college was as a teacher in Cotulla, Texas in a small Mexican American school. Few of my students could speak much English and I couldn't speak much Spanish. My students were poor and they often came to school without breakfast, hungry! And they knew, even in their youth, the pain of prejudice. They never seemed to know why people disliked them. But they knew it was so, ‘cause I saw it in their eyes! I often walked home late in the afternoon after the classes were finished wishing there was more that I could do. But all I knew was to teach them the little that I knew hoping it would help them against the hardships that lay ahead. And somehow, you can never forget what poverty and hatred can do when you see its scars on the face of a hopeful young child! I never thought then in 1928 that I would be standing here in 1965. It never even occurred to me in my fondest dreams that I might have the chance to help the sons and daughters of those students and people like them all over the country. But now I do have that chance. And I'll let you in on a little secret. I intend to use it!” 

I believe he meant every word. Absent in his presentation of that story was his traditional whining and pleading tone.

As Johnson spoke those words, I was still in that place of spiteful ignorance incapable of a capacity for genuine discernment. I was not only ready, but even anxious to believe that LBJ surely had something to do with President Kennedy's assassination. Only gradually was I even capable to grasp what Lyndon Baines Johnson was really and truly all about!

Where are you as you evaluate people, their motives, and the events they oversee? Hopefully, you're ahead of where I once was!

Lyndon Baines Johnson these days rates in my top ten presidents, just below Theodore Roosevelt and just above Woodrow Wilson.

When I think of LBJ these days, there is lots to inspire and admire. There's even much to love! The fly in the LBJ ointment is that too often there was little to like!

Still, with all that can legitimately be criticized, especially the Vietnam War, America is better off than it otherwise would be if he hadn't been our president!

RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,

EDWIN COONEY