LBJ’s America (Anthology)
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Lyndon Johnson has experienced a renaissance in public and academic opinion over the decades following his death. In the decades immediately after he died, his decision to throw America into, and then escalate its involvement in the Vietnam War rightfully obscured his legacy; hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese civilians, and later Cambodians and Laotians, died as a consequence of his actions. Tens of thousands of American soldiers were killed or maimed in the war, and the damage to public confidence that was done by the creative interpretations of the truth taken by American military and political leaders has never been undone. However, the frustrations of Jimmy Carter and Joe Biden’s administrations, the disappointment of Obama’s later stint in office and Clinton’s bland centrism have left Democrats in the USA, and liberals globally, reconsidering Johnson’s legislative achievements in light of the modern quandary progressivism finds itself in.
LBJ’s America, a collection of essays on Lyndon Johnson the man, the politician, the public persona and his policy record, is part of this trend yet resists its more excessive aspects. It is edited by Mark Atwood Lawrence, and Mark K. Updegrove, covering a wealth of issues, which this review will consider. One of its greatest virtues, however, is that it doesn’t fall into the usual issue which faces historical essay compilations. It doesn’t end up as a mere policy record, but offers insights into the philosophical and social changes that occurred before, during and after LBJ’s tenure in 1500 Pennsylvania Avenue.
The most defining part of LBJ’s legacy is undoubtedly his success in passing comprehensive civil and voting rights legislation where Kennedy, Eisenhower, Truman and Roosevelt failed. These were designed to target the Jim Crow South’s highly effective disenfranchisement and segregation tactics that had persisted since the end of reconstruction in 1877. The essays on Johnson’s approach to the African-American community, understood through his working relationship with Martin Luther King Jr, is insightful and revealing. It not only builds on the existing historical literature surrounding Johnson’s efforts, but expands on their flaws – for example, failing to approach the rights of the Latino and Asian communities with the same powerful intervention as was brought against the South. Moreover, the essays appreciate the crucial failings of Johnson the politician to meet the promises of Johnson the man; as the costs of the Vietnam War climbed, the ambitious financial programmes proposed by the Kerner Commission Johnson himself had formed were never passed, due to fiscal and political exhaustion. LBJ’s America thus aptly adds to the already-large and growing literature around Johnson by avoiding overly-simplistic portrayals of him as some cynical hick or utopian liberal, but a character of his time, resisting inequality as he saw able, yet failing to meet his own lofty goals.
The most valuable contributions, however, belong to the essays on LBJ’s approach to the Supreme Court, and his foreign and immigration policies outside of the Vietnam War. Rightfully, Johnson’s other appointments to the court have faded from history as Thurgood Marshall’s star has grown. LBJ appointed his close personal friend and leading Washington corporate lawyer, Abe Fortas, to the court by pressuring sitting Justice Arthur Goldberg to resign and take up a position as Ambassador to the UN. Johnson then attempted to make Fortas Chief Justice on Earl Warren’s retirement and elevate another Texan, Homer Thornberry, to the vacant Associate Justice’s position. Johnson’s appointment of Marshall is rightfully lauded for being the first African-American to sit on the Court, yet his other appointments better capture the changing politics of the era outside his brief dominance from 1963-66. Fortas and Thornberry were the last of a type of Supreme Court Justice that had endured since the growth of the court under Justice John Marshall; that of the political ally. The idea of the Supreme Court as a neutral arbiter of heady constitutionalism is a very modern construct, one born out of conservative backlash to the social liberalisation and desegregation advanced by the Warren Court. The slurs of ‘activist judges’ was born then, and has since characterised any efforts by America’s supreme court to better the lives of its citizens. The conservative backlash to Fortas’ nomination to the Chief Justice’s seat, preying on minor personal financial errors and his closeness to the president, was in fact completely unconservative – Supreme Court justices had long been counted amongst the close circle of sitting presidents, and were often political figures themselves. Some of the Court’s most famous figures, William Taft and Salmon P. Chase and William O.Douglas were highly prominent politicians, who had either been or seriously considered running for president. It is in that environment after 1969, part of a right-wing revolution in American politics and society, that saw the court relegated to its forced and artificial posture of an impartial arbiter, which it continues to hold today.
Johnson’s legacy on foreign policy and immigration is also an area that has received little attention by historians or contemporary commentators. In his unhappy years as Vice President, where he was frozen out of decision making, Johnson filled his time with trips to what was then termed the ‘third’ or ‘developing’ world, bringing the sort of ease he picked up as someone brought up in poverty in the Texas Hill Country, or teaching at an underfunded Latino school in West Texas, to the poor of Senegal, the Middle East, Asia and Southern Europe. His use of the executive’s agenda setting abilities was phenomenal in this time, with TV cameras capturing the VP interacting with the normal people of the world. Yet in his time in the presidency, caught in a frenetic legislative cycle and ultimately the deadly morass of Vietnam, Johnson fell inward. His trips abroad became fewer and more strategic, with less interaction with the working masses, and for someone who had no shortage of domestic vision his foreign policy became bland and static. Detente with the USSR was established, but nothing of the normalisation that would come under Nixon and Ford. Tentative links were made with communist China, but no great effort was made outside of attempts to resolve the Vietnam War. Johnson failed to grasp how the same egalitarian principles that guided his domestic policies were now taking root in Africa, or how the peoples of the world he had once freely interacted with were more than just two dimensional pawns in the game of Great Power conflict.
This is a sin that occurs in his immigration policy as well: despite removing the old racist quotas that unequally, unjustly and ineffectively regulated US immigration since the 1920s, allowing for the more diverse USA we see today, he also ended the Bracero Programme and imposed far lower caps on Mexican immigration into the USA, even on temporary worker leases. This decision has, in large part, driven the rise of illegal labour immigration into the USA in subsequent decades. The change in legal structures has not changed the need for labour, nor the companies and local authorities’ willingness to turn a blind eye in pursuit of profits and a steady, skilled and relatively cheap labour supply. The termination of the Bracero Programme has in fact worsened the standing of Mexican-Americans and Mexican workers in the USA, denying them the status that brought with it clear rights and protections and leaving them outside the American judicial system. Therefore we see again that, as elsewhere, Johnson’s intentions in immigration policy were good, but not sufficient to overcome both the political pressure on him and his failure to think more grandly or broadly.
Some of the finer longer-term work in the book considers Johnson’s role both within the American liberal tradition, and as the bogeyman around which modern American conservatism arose. It situates Johnson effectively as someone inspired by the New Deal, who was cognisant of its failings in making lasting, meaningful material improvements as well as its inaction in aiding racial equality, whatever Franklin Roosevelt’s personal views. It also illustrates how impressive Johnson’s political journey was as someone from the Dixiecrat South, close to figures like Richard Russel and distrusted by Northern Liberals like Hubert Humphrey and even moderates like the Kennedys. It also undermines the frustratingly common myth of Johnson as ‘Master of the Senate’, demonstrating the favourable circumstances he worked under – the endurance of the New Deal coalition, the domestic weakness of Eisenhower, and the Plains states turning against the Republicans during a blight and depression – that allowed him, in opposition, to be an effective actor. A further essay makes the equally convincing case for Johnson as the unwitting agent that brought about the new conservative movement from the late 1960s onwards, accelerating the WASP trend away from the Democratic Party, increasing the salience of racial and social issues, the growing size of government intervention and distrust of the government after Vietnam.
In short, Lyndon Johnson was an incredibly complex, accomplished and flawed figure, and one who deserves to be the subject of proper historical analysis rather than excessively critical or laudatory work – LBJ’s America is a clear example of how this should be done.