THE NIGHT AMERICA CHANGED FOREVER!

By Edwin Cooney

Where were you that fateful night exactly forty years ago when LBJ changed America? Don’t be shy! It may even be cathartic for you to recall!

If you were driving through that snowy night back to college from a weekend of free love, consciousness-raising, pot smoking and beer drinking, your car probably was filled with cigarette smoke. You and your companions might have been listening to Otis Redding’s number one hit “Sitting on the Dock of the Bay” on the radio.

If you were Vice President Hubert Humphrey, you were in Mexico City attending an inter-American conference on behalf of your boss President Lyndon B. Johnson. If your name was Richard Nixon, you were on a plane between Milwaukee, Wisconsin and New York City after a weekend of campaigning. If you were Senator Eugene McCarthy, you were in Milwaukee hoping to improve on your New Hampshire showing against LBJ by actually defeating him this time in the Wisconsin primary which would be held that Tuesday. If you were Senator Robert Kennedy of New York, you were assessing your chances in the upcoming primaries in Indiana, Nebraska, Oregon and California after having announced your presidential candidacy on March 16. If you were Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., you were spending the last Sunday night of your life giving a most eloquent sermon at the Washington National Cathedral in D.C. Finally, if you were Edwin Cooney, you were traveling by automobile and bus between Attica and Rochester, New York where you would begin a new job as a darkroom x-ray technician on the morrow.

Of course, forty years ago was 1968, a presidential election year. I was rooting very staunchly for the candidacy of Richard Nixon. I believed that Nixon’s greatest election hurdle would be President Johnson, although admittedly Robert Kennedy -- were he to get the Democratic nomination -- would also have been a formidable opponent.

I reached the Batavia bus station about five minutes before my Rochester bus would depart when the man behind the counter told me I had a phone call. It was a call from home telling me that President Johnson had just announced that he wouldn’t be a candidate for re-election. “Wow,” I said. “How could he make such a decision? Did he really mean it or was this a clever Johnson ploy to encourage a sympathetic party draft?”

Lyndon Johnson’s announcement was, as far as I was concerned, the biggest story since the assassination of John F. Kennedy nearly five years before. Even more, it meant uncertainty in the Democratic Party as well as in the nation’s immediate future. It wasn‘t that LBJ was much beloved by most Americans, but he was a powerful presence, whether advocating for civil rights legislation before a packed House chamber full of important politicians and diplomats or driving a car full of reporters at high speed around his ranch while simultaneously talking and sipping from a can of beer. His presence, although lacking the sophisticated Kennedy charm, had its own force. He could tell spellbinding stories all day about his political colleagues and he was also a great mimic. The one challenge he could never successfully meet however was being as appealing as the erudite John F. Kennedy. Thus, when he was overwhelmed by the Vietnam War, there was no image of “Camelot” to distract the public’s dismay or cushion his fall from grace. Even so, he was regarded by the most astute political and societal observers to be the central pivot in the most powerful if not entirely invulnerable political system in the world—and now, without even a warning, he was suddenly dropping out of it.

So the immediate question was “why?” The more long term question was “what does this mean?”

If LBJ were surrendering power merely because of his health, what came after him would probably have little significance. If, on the other hand, LBJ was leaving office because he possessed neither the energy nor desire to keep up with the changes he knew were just over the horizon, then America was indeed in for a rough time.

Within a year of LBJ’s March 31st announcement his party would be split asunder over Vietnam and thus defeated at the polls by its worst enemy at the time, Richard Nixon. Within four years, people voting in primaries would largely replace the political bosses when it came to choosing presidential and other candidates. The South, home of the Democratic Party’s most powerful and in many cases most bigoted leaders, was irrevocably lost to the new GOP “southern strategy”. Within six years of that fateful March Sunday night, seniority would be stripped of its previous authority when it came to selecting important congressional committee chairmanships and other leaders.

With that brief announcement by President Lyndon Banes Johnson that: “…I shall not seek and I will not accept the nomination of my party for another term as your President,” America became different than she’d ever been before.

Gone was the coalition between labor, small farmers, southern populists, and big city political machines that had controlled America. Gone was the balance between political rebellion, punishment and reward. Gone was the advocacy for a strong middle class -- replaced by the idea that people should strive to be rich rather than merely content. Some will say that since the night LBJ released his hold on power, America has steadily become freer. Others, however, this observer included, will assert that America (lovable as she is) has merely become wilder and more self-possessed. No longer is there a sense that America should use her government to raise all boats or to control her political, economic or business excesses.

Forty years have passed since LBJ has uttered those famous words “come let us reason together” and that’s simply forty years too long.

RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,

EDWIN COONEY