An American Tragedy Called LBJ
CHAPTER 153
11 …their handsome young president was dead,
12 And maybe you really couldn’t get even for a thing like that,
13 Even if you were a Yank,
14 Because maybe not even Yanks can do everything.
15 Shammadamma..CHAPTER 154
And so, all of a sudden, it seemed like maybe the Yanks weren’t quite as youthful anymore,
2 Or as confident,
3 Or as hopeful,
4 Or as all-powerful as they had thought,
5 Which is usually the first sign that a Chosen Nation isn’t quite as Chosen as it used to be,
6 And is maybe getting a little tired,
7 And more than a little confused,
8 And in need of some new ideas about how to live in a world that’s a lot more complicated than it looks…”From The Book of Damn Yankees, The Boomer Bible
November 22, 1963. Lyndon Johnson takes the Oath of Office on Air Force One, flanked by his wife Lady Bird and Jackie Kennedy, still wearing her bloodstained suit. His is to be a bloodstained presidency, and he does not escape the stains even at a personal level. From his earliest moments in office there is an undercurrent, rarely voiced in public but often in private, of suspicion that Johnson may have had something to do with what happened in Dallas. He was from Texas, where the assassination occurred. He had a history with both Kennedy brothers, a history of enmity, and in 1960 he had lost a bitter fight for the presidential nomination which he lost, in his view, to Kennedy money and northeastern aristocrats of the Democrat Party. The Vice Presidency had been an insulting consolation prize for a true “Lion of the Senate” whose legislative accomplishments outweighed, even today, the sum total of those achieved by senators named Kennedy. An inauspicious beginning and an omen of The Descent to come.
He began bravely enough, with high ambitions.
The old economic truism is that a society’s chief mission is to allocate resources between “guns and butter.” Without necessarily meaning to, Johnson very early in his presidency decided to spend all the nation’s government resources on both.
He listened to his inherited JFK brain trust about choosing to continue amping up the U.S. presence in Vietnam to deter the global ambitions of Soviet Communism. He listened to his own political instincts on butter, launching an incredibly grand and expensive federal program to build a “Great Society” and use government largesse to end poverty in America forever. That much butter also helps distract public attention from what’s beginning to look like a faintly sinister series of increasingly frequent foreign wars. Four in less than 50 years: World War I, World War II, Korea, and now Vietnam. Kennedy had started it and had seemed to be vacillating toward the end about whether to continue and had actually ordered 1,000 American advisers home in late 1963. Still in 1963, John immediately reversed that order and convened his foreign policy team. The big man in Johnson, the swaggering Texan, came to agree with McNamara and Rusk that the best way to continue was to win big in Vietnam.
Johnson’s presidency was doomed from this moment on. He won his election to inherited presidency with a single TV ad that ran once and went globally viral before there was internet. The ad showed a little girl playing in a field of flowers. Then a hydrogen bomb explodes, freezing frame on the little girl, and to wind things up there’s a modest printed suggestion to vote for LBJ. The message was clear. Johnson’s rival, Goldwater, wanted to face down the Russians head to head with an ever bigger nuclear arsenal. Johnson would defeat the commies too, but not by going directly toe to toe with the Russians. Much better to snuff out the little wars in client states they use to sap American military resources and popular will. Johnson’s mistake? The Russian strategy was dead on in Vietnam. The military resource issue was actually less important than the part about popular will, which never occurred to the brain trust or the president until the situation got very much worse.
Regular troops fighting guerillas on their home turf is both a bad military circumstance and a rotten public relations opportunity. While the U.S. was never defeated in a military engagement with North Vietnamese troops and killed very large numbers of both their regular troops and the traitor Vietnam Congress in the south, there were no flashy victories for the headlines, which made the press suspicious, then hostile. Johnson’s response was to keep sending in more troops, drafting hundreds of thousands into the Army and even (gasp) into the Marines, as young people saw nothing for themselves out of the war but coming home in body bags.
The Anti-War Movement started quite early on, but its shrewdest leaders were well placed to have a major impact. They were safe inside universities. They still had their II-S student deferments, which they used to slide out of college into graduate school, where they initiated their stranglehold on the politics of humanities and social science departments while they built capable communist-style organizations made of cells and moles to have an outsize impact.
“Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” The constant refrain Lyndon Johnson had to live with, on the road and even outside the White House. The TV was filled with video of these chants, as well as battlefield footage of Vietnam, which did not show battles so much as tired, damp troops slogging their way through rain-soaked jungles. There were also videos of atrocities, monks burning themselves alive in protest and civilian children burning with U.S. napalm. Walter Cronkite could only shake his head. All he had done since Tet.
Popular support for the war eroded very significantly in 1965 and 1966, as not just academics and professors took up the fight. Civilians didn’t have time available radical students did, but they had numbers and word of mouth and increasing conviction. After the Tet Offensive, mild-mannered poet and U.S. Senator Eugene McCarthy (D) threw his hat into the ring to run against the president. The New Hampshire primary was held on March 12, 1968. Johnson won hardly convincingly against an opponent as obviously symbolic as McCarthy.
The president could not attack McCarthy and he could not yield on Vietnam, whose dollar costs had broken the budget without his acknowledgment and whose human costs he could only increase by his warmaking strategy. He was trapped. He pondered peace talks, but it was already too late for that to succeed, short of announcing total American withdrawal, which he could not do.
He therefore announced he wasn’t running for re-election on March 31, 1968. But he was still the president and the nation he presided over was falling apart. The radicals gave him no quarter and increased their efforts to compound their victories and drive the outcome of the nomination process.
Johnson had only the FBI to fight them with. They were totally unequipped to deal with the new breed of national enemy arrayed against them. They wire-tapped Martin Luther King but were seemingly unable to prevent his assassination in April. Which only compounded his domestic woes. An ambitious new Civil Rights bill had been proposed early in 1964, but it died in Congress, traded for the Kennedy tax cuts Johnson also could not do, though the war had spent the increased revenues, and he had been lying when he told them the money was being spent on the Great Society. Money was being spent on social programs all right but not like what was being spent on the war. There were race riots in Los Angeles over perceived inequities in spending and law enforcement. And all Johnson had to fall back on was the war, the war, and the war.
He talked about peace talks, and Robert Kennedy leaped into the race after New Hampshire, confident of displacing McCarthy. Then RFK was assassinated in June. Hubert Humphrey, LBJ’s Vice President, was pressed into service to uphold the honor of the administration and forestall its abject failure at the polls. Humphrey, a politician’s politician, believed strongly in both sides of the war issue. He supported LBJ’s policies 100 percent and he was also 100 percent for efforts to find an early, honorable way of ending the war.
Then came the Democratic Convention. Year by year, month by month the Johnson Descent went on like a downhill dirge. The Chicago riots were by comparison an explosion of rage and a brand of political animus and heedless violence the American public had never seen. These were children who were throwing Molotov cocktails and bags of their own excrement at cops equally enraged. Inside the Convention Hall, the Democrat Party leaders looked like hostages. The president did not attend.
Various other things happened on up to the election. The country was in shock, angry at everyone. The president was in a state of torpor, like Napoleon sitting catatonically on his log at Waterloo while the Prussians stormed to victory.
Johnson’s tragic flaw? Failure to admit and correct massive errors. He feared the suspicions of his relations with the Kennedys, so he kept the Kennedy team largely in place and followed their advice before he could learn that they were disastrously wrong about Vietnam. He kept McNamara and Rusk, who hated and looked down on him. He kept Robert Kennedy who hated and betrayed him as he had in the past. LBJ did in fact learn that the war had ceased to be a rational issue and was unwinnable in the context of public and press opposition. Yet he persisted in his error at tremendous national and personal cost. The failure to admit catastrophic error is not a uniquely American flaw, but it is American, ingrained in us as is our refusal to surrender against great odds. Johnson had elements of greatness, but that’s why his catastrophe when it came was so devastating, with such incredibly long term aftereffects. One must feel sad for him. But it’s near impossible to forgive him.
We can leave him here for now.
But there is one last formal definition that matters to our story. The Aristotelian Descent ends with something called The Catastrophe. This is when all the bad stuff that has been building against the tragic hero slams down on him with a finality he cannot escape. The Chicago riots were not Johnson’s Catastrophe. They were the nation’s Catastrophe. They were mad at Johnson, but they were also mad at SDS, the Chicago cops, Mayor Dailey who ordered the protester beatdown, and Hubert Humphrey who was the Dem candidate and looked like an ad for Eunuch Suitings by Brook Brothers.
Johnson’s Catastrophe was still to come. After the election of Richard Nixon. After New Year’s Eve. His Catastrophe WAS the New Year. All of it. 1969. Which we will now take a close look at. It constitutes Johnson’s presidential legacy, one which we are still paying for. It may never be undone.