Revisiting LBJ’s Legacy, 40 Years After His Death
Political journalist Sam Lubell pointed out the irony that Johnson’s Vietnam policy eventually caused a challenge from liberals by Gene McCarthy to the president with the most progressive civil rights policy ever. When President Johnson finally announced his retirement on March 31, 1968, this very proud (and very accomplished) man’s job rating had fallen to the lowest level since Harry Truman, when he was forced to stand down in 1952.
Historians have generally been kind to the Johnson presidency: the first recorded survey of professors since LBJ left office in 1969 came in 1982, when he was ranked 10th best. For the rest of the 20th century, surveys of historians generally ranked him in the top third of presidents, mainly due to his domestic achievements. In the 21st century, even with surveys that included more conservative scholars, he still averages in the top third. Many intellectuals are liberal on social issues and anyone who did that much for minorities is going to look good in their eyes.
Whatever the intellectuals think, ordinary voters are more ambivalent about the Johnson legacy. Three times since 2001, the Gallup Poll asked Americans whether they approved of how LBJ conducted his presidency. On average, 20% did not express an opinion. But his approval ratings have consistently crept upward: from 39% in 2002 to 41% in 2006 and 49% in 2010. Since Johnson always had close relationships with the black and Hispanic communities, as their share of the national population has grown, his popularity has not surprisingly begun a comeback.
“If you seek his monument, look around,” was the epitaph for the great architect of London, Sir Christopher Wren. After the last “Baby Boom” anti-war protester dies off in the 21st century and the events of the Vietnam War are as forgotten as those of the War of 1812 or the Mexican War, the monuments of Lyndon Baines Johnson — the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, the national parks created, Medicare, and the Immigration Reform Act — will loom larger than ever.
As long as I breathe, as long as that wall with the fifty thousand names on it stands, his foreign policy legacy will never fade.
I hope he’s burning.
Congress basically gave LBJ authorization for the Vietnam War with the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, a resolution based on ‘events’, part of which were highly exaggerated and part of which never happened. 50,000 more Americans then went on to die for nothing except for LBJ.
As someone who has staggered thru all Caro’s books as they came out; LBJ was a monster. A completely unprincipled piece of trash. His medal in WW2 was unearned,and he so blatantly stole his senate seat that his nick name was “Landslide Lyndon”. He micro-managed us to defeat in Vietnam, destroyed the black family with his social welfare programs; the same programs that have bankrupted us today. His rise[!?] in popularity is in direct inverse proportion to the knowledge of those who now praise him. In his time he was the Hughey Long who actually made it to the White House. A deeply ignorant and insecure man whose bullying tactics turned his own party against him. Good riddance to bad rubbish.
Back in 1995, I helped a retired pilot (now deceased) write his autobiography. One of the more interesting parts of his career was when he was a mercenary pilot in Laos flying for the CIA. He was there from 1961 through 1968 and saw a lot of corruption. There was a large American company from Texas (IIRC, now part of Haliburton) that got almost all of the big construction contracts in SE Asia. Lady Bird Johnson owned a lot of stock in that company. The pilot’s assertion was that Johnson kept the war going because he and many of his cronies were making a lot of money. LBJ reportedly retired with a net worth of more than $40 million (about $250 million when adjusted for inflation).
“There was a large American company from Texas (IIRC, now part of Haliburton) that got almost all of the big construction contracts in SE Asia. Lady Bird Johnson owned a lot of stock in that company.”
I heard the same from a guy back in 95′.
The resident evil in those days was either Bechtel or Fluor; if it involved politics or government money, they were probably in there – still are. There used to be a sign in the office of some Pipeline contractor in Valdez that said something like: “If the Great Wall of China had been built by Bechtel and Fluor, the entire population of modern China would be working on it and it still wouldn’t be finished.” There’s truth in that.
IIRC, it was Raymond, Morrison, Knutson-Brown Root and Jones.
Let’s slice out every bit of nuance possible and distill a country down to whether it will be a success or failure. LBJ not only legislated America’s future into failure, he legislated it into eventual destruction.
It takes a long time to wreck an entity as powerful as America, but even battery acid will become water if you just keep adding water.
The morons are already marching and the clown circus that styles itself as more sophisticated than the evil ’50s come off as clueless animals compared to the traditions they increasingly distance themselves from. They see such traditions as a leash, but in fact they are our last connection to success before a headlong plunge into the watered down culture led by the bright minds of failed Third World nations and former slaves, and other of histories also-rans and dead ends.
There is diversity and there is too many cooks. Rome wasn’t conquered, it was subverted and transformed; it conquered itself.
Johnson deserves all the scorn he has received and more. The way he got into Vietnam and treated the military was just disgusting.
http://hnn.us/node/34024
I laughed at Woodward telling us that Johnson did the most for “blacks and the young.” Funny stuff when you look at what welfare has done to black families since then. And my kids really don’t appreciate the unbelievable government debt they were born into.
LBJ and GWB, until now, have done the most damage to this country. Both expanded welfare and both sent Americans to die in wars that had nothing to do with defending our country. GWB also wanted more third world mass immigration like LBJ but did not get thanks to patriotic immigration advocates,
And let’s not forget BHO who has gotten more than twice the number of Americans killed in Afcrapistan as did GWB … … and in half the time.
Yes that little inconvenience of 9/11 had nothing to do with America.
Amen. And GWB destroyed the Republican Party to boot.
I’d be more inclined to say Johnson did more to black people. He unleashed the massive, systematic vote-buying “welfare” operation funded by the nation’s hard-earned tax dollars that has turned millions of former citizens into Democratic [sic] party and state serfs.
Between Johnson and Nixon, over 55,000 Americans and countless Southeast Asians died and were maimed for life in a war that could have been fought and won and celebrated with a victory parade in a year’s time.
Had you turned the responsibility for crafting the “war on poverty” over to a hate group like the KKK, it’s unlikely they could’ve created a plan that did more damage to poor blacks than what LBJ created.
Maybe that was the whole point.
It was all about the war, which is interesting from the perspective of the new marxist America. Despite his well-documented flaws, LBJ was the last Democratic politician who actually liked his country and believed in it. He had many of the marxist characteristics of ruthlessness, egomania, lawlessness, greed and disdain for opposing viewpoints, but without the two true marxist chromosones…and unflagging desire to destroy capitalism, and a hatred of the United States of America.
He certainly played a big part in destroying the country, but unlike his successors, and like FDR, it wasn’t intentional. He bought the koolaid that social entitlements had no downside (the marxist ruse) and that it was his perquisite to jack around with a 200 million person country that was doing better than any country ever had done.
The myth of “guns and butter” has had a very high price.
PODESTA: OBAMA CAN USE ‘ARMED FORCES’ TO PUSH PROGRESSIVE AGENDA Nov. 18, 2010
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/podesta-obama-can-use-armed-forces-to-push-progressive-agenda/
The charitable interpretation of that ill-worded statement from Podesta is that the President, as Commander-in-Chief, can enact socially liberal policies within the armed services. Past examples would be the racial integration of the military, posting women on Navy combat vessels, and the repeal of don’t-ask-don’t-tell. I don’t know if all these were actually the result of Presidential initiatives, but they could have been. In some ways, the changes simply reflected a changing society; in others, the military was ahead of the curve.
To an activist liberal President, the armed forces are a perfect laboratory for social engineering. Service members have to do what liberals wish EVERYONE would do: follow Obama’s orders without question.
Until the normal troops vote with their feet. Until they are issued illegal orders (those that go against the Constitution.) While the GOs and FOs may obey with alacrity, at the Battalion and below level the vast majority take seriously their Oath of Office or Oath of Enlistment- “… to uphold and defend the Constitution against all enemies, Foreign and Domestic…”
Did he really say “these are the most hopeful times since Christ was born in Bethlehem?” Did he really believe it? If so, he may have been insane.
LBJ’s “Legacy” is Vietnam and it will always be Vietnam.
How the World changed from ’64 to ’68! In ’64 I turned 15 and had the first girlfriend I could do more than hold hands with, though not much more; those days were yet to come. Beyond “doing more,” all I could think about was the just introduced Ford Mustang and the new version of the Pontiac Tempest, the GTO. My hair was still “high and tight,” and though I did listen to and like The Beatles, I was more into West Coast surf, sun, and cars music. I can still do a few bars of Walk, Don’t Run ’64 or Pipeline with these arthritic fingers.
We’d finally quit farming the year before and subdivided those worn out cotton fields. For the first time since the 1860s, my family had a little money and there actually was some hope of getting that 10-speed down at Sears or that Simplex Challenger go-cart Western Auto had. I was still too young to drive a car on the road, so the Mustang or GTO was just a dream for the years ahead. Car and Driver did a head to head test of the Pontiac GTO and the Ferrari GTO that was surprisingly kind to the American muscle car and the snobby side of the car world was repulsed. Ford Motor Company, with the guy running it still named Ford, decided to challenge Ferrari’s dominance at Le Mans a couple years later and ultimately won. There’s a book called “Go Like Hell” about the Ford-Ferrari battles and in addition to being a good story gives a good look at what America was like when we could still do anything.
I carried a Goldwater sign that fall and most of the adults I knew did something that had been unthinkable to white rural Southerners; they voted for a Republican. Make no mistake, it wasn’t because they had suddenly accepted his Western libertarian/conservative views; it was because of his opposition to the ’64 Civil Rights Act. Johnson may well have given The South to the Republicans for 50 years, but he also finished what FDR started and that was ending the race-based economic death spiral that The South had been in since the Civil War.
Southerners can get righteous about economic exploitation by Yankee companies in the century or so after the Civil War, but in the main Southerners did it to themselves. Whenever a union showed up or the men began to seek better wages and conditions all the foreman had to do was threaten to hire some blacks and the white workers would volunteer for a pay cut. The New Deal and WWII took the surplus unskilled and semi-skilled white agricultural workers out of the Southern economy. The Great Society took the surplus unskilled and semi-skilled black agricultural workers our of the Southern wage economy and put them on the federal dole.
A few years ago I was visiting my friend and attorney in my old home town which at the time had an unemployment rate of 12% and huge welfare rolls. He took me in his new Lincoln Navigator to see the new golf course subdivision he was building. I noticed that the contractor was from Florida and the labor was Hispanic and asked him how he, an elected official, could get away with that. He replied, “they don’t care, they got their house in the project and their welfare check.” I don’t know if Johnson was so cynical, but I’ve heard more than one Southerner say words like, “if the Yankees like [blacks] so much, they can pay for them!”
The World I started grade school in in 1955 was distinguished from the World of 1855 largely by gasoline and electricity and not much of either of those. If we couldn’t grow it, kill it, make it or buy it from Sears, we didn’t have it and Christmas presents depended on the price of tobacco. By ’64, the world of subsistence agriculture was over for whites as they left for the cities or took wage work in town. By ’68 the whole social framework based on subsistence agriculture and strict racial division of labor was gone. Southern industrial wages were so low relatively and the income tax so progressive that a Southerner had to have a pretty good job to pay any federal income tax at all, so in essence the Yankees were paying the blacks to stay home and not compete with white Southerners for jobs. Funny about those unintended consequences, if indeed they were unintended.
“If we couldn’t grow it, kill it, make it or buy it from Sears, we didn’t have it and Christmas presents depended on the price of tobacco.”
Up north it was dependent on the price of pork, beans or wheat. I still remember the Sears winter catalogue and told to give Santa a hint what we want for Christmas.
The American family farm. Gone with the wind.
Interesting memories 15gg. In many ways, 1964 was the “good old days.” Thanks for the post. Where in the South were you from?
I AM old enough to remember, and raised in the South to boot. LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act in ana act of self-serving political expediency. His “Great Society” entitlement atrocities will yet be the downfall of a once great nation. He continued to get conscripted young men slaughtered in Viet Nam with no apparent intent to win for 4 long years. He stole elections to gain power, and extended the horror in Viet Nam to feed the economy and create the illusion of never ending wealth. May he burn in everlasting hell.
What confounds me today is how many men who were forced into fighting in LBJ’s money war are today die-hard Democrats. We could have ran the Viet Cong all the way to China in about 6 months if that crooked piece of crap Lyndon Baines Johnson would have let warriors run the war, and done so with one hell of a lot less cost in blood. I spit on the man’s memory.
Agreed.
After he departed, he left alot of debt that funded his war on the next adminstration to figure out how to pay. Ah, how I don’t miss the 70s’.
Great Society– over $10 trillion and counting. Meh. It’s over anyway. When current unfunded liabilities are over §87 trillion off balance sheet, there will be a course correction that will not be bloodless.
Maybe Johnson read it right when he said he was delivering the South to the GOP for 50 years. But he also said “I’ll have those n—–s voting Democratic for the next 200 years.” Demagogues have a cynical but accurate understanding of the wretched calculus of hate and resentment. But because they guess right does not make them great men.
I was reading thru here to make sure someone would remind us of that quote. I was going to if no one else did. The one should never be mentioned without the other.
The legacy of Lyndon Baines Johnson – all Americans are paying for that legacy -
50,000+ young Americans perished for the ego, the hubris, of that man.
That alone should be enough for derision and spite. However, as a bonus -
LBJ brought us ‘the war on poverty’ and ‘the great society’ – the second false wave since FDR that the US Treasurty was infinite – that half of US society; that produces everything; must be punished by tax law and the IRS to provide the other half ‘all it needs’. No country can afford that – we never have been able to afford that – and after 45+ years of this lunacy, it is exemplified daily.
The Emporer Nero followed by Caligula. We are all on the backside of the societal curve -
When LBJ became president, it seemed like a rule of history that the US never lost wars (Korea and the war of 1812 being spun in the history text books of the time as “just as good as” victories). There was a massive and growing civil-rights movement to get the national civil rights act passed — it was great fun for new college graduates who had graduated without much in the way of technical skills because they had taken non-STEM majors. These graduates became civil rights activists, attending demonstrations, getting arrested, seeing yourself on the TV news always talked about approvingly, lots of easy sex with other young like-minded people. It was a permanent political campaign with the additional advantage that this “world-shaking struggle” let you deflect Mom and Dad’s concerns about why you weren’t settling down, getting a job and starting a family.
What happened to all these happy sexy political activists when LBJ passed the civil rights act of 1964? They had now officially gotten everything they had been asking for — and were expected to settle down, get a job, and start a family — unless they could find something else to start a campaign against. And right there in front of them was the Vietnam war, young men being drafted to fight far away in a poorly managed conflict that they Pentagon seemed to have no overall plan to win. Because LBJ’s idea of how to fight Vietnam was to “escalate” the US effort by just the amount needed to match what the Communists had just now decided to do. That’s a recipe for not winning a war, as would be obvious to anyone but someone like LBJ who had been brought up on the idea that the US always won its wars, nothing to worry about there. LBJ also expected a cooperative press, the same type of media that Obama has today, when talking about US military efforts overseas. So the activist establishment refused to disband after the civil rights act passed, got in touch with their new sexy young friends in the media, and launched an anti-Vietnam war movement. Since by all the old standards of US political conduct it was basically treasonous (aid and comfort to the enemy, remember?) they had to come up with some sort of overarching moral concerns to justify their actions — and thus was born the sixties counterculture. Notice how this counterculture also provided plenty of reasons not to settle down, get a job, and start a family (So there, Mom and Dad. Sorry about all that college tuition going for nothing)
What might LBJ have been thinking about? Well, he knew that his generation of conservative southern whites were concerned about black civil rights and the US not doing enough to fight the spread of world Communism. So he may have been attempting a sort of compromise: You’ll have to give up on civil rights, but I’ll give you the Vietnam war so you can fight communism. But we won’t fight it full strength, because that might lead to a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union.
We now, of course, realize that he overlooked what young adults — the baby boomers — might think about being drafted to fight in a no-win war. In Machiavellian terms, he might have been better off shutting down the Vietnam war — or quickly winning it — and going for a long, drawn-out conflict over civil rights. But LBJ decided his best policy was a low-key war (remember the US always won its wars!) and a quick and overwhelming civil rights victory.
Now of course we know the rule for US warfare is that the Joint Chiefs of the Pentagon never win wars that involve actual fighting (they can, it turns out, win cold wars). The last fighting war the US won was WWII which was run by a single five star general — Marshall. After WWII the Pentagon set up its current Joint Chiefs of Staff, which is like running our wars by committee, and their bad record when it comes to actual fighting speaks for itself. Too bad LBJ wasn’t aware of this new “rule” about US wars, but hey, you can’t know everything…
Presentism, seeing the past through the present’s eyes, is perhaps the historian’s greatest sin. The World in which LBJ became President didn’t look anything like you seem to think it looked. The Civil Rights Movement in ’63-64 looked BLACK! White America looked like The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, Ozzie and Harriet, and The Donna Reid Show. There were some white Northern liberals and more than a few white big city communists who showed up for the marches. There were some college students who showed up to help, but really most college student involvment came after the Voting Rights Act when the big registration drives began. There was almost no live television and the National news was only 15 minutes a day, only expanding to half an hour in the mid-’60s, so your 15 minutes of fame was hard to get. The first live TV broadcast that was available to the whole Country was the moon landing in ’69, after LBJ was gone. The student activists of the early and into the mid-’60s may have been lots of things, but they weren’t stupid, the weren’t ignorant, and they weren’t slackers.
The SAT didn’t have essay questions in those days and there weren’t any quotas, so you actually had to be either smart or rich to go to college. Even Southern state schools had an 800 minimum SAT to get in and you really couldn’t get in with only an 800. Schools that today have 15,000 students, most of whom shouldn’t be there, had 1500 who were struggling to stay there because they really would fail you and only if you went to the schools for rich people were there “gentlemen’s Cs”. State University campi that today have 50-75,000 students had 10-20,000. They still tracked students and a College Preparatory high school diploma took four years of English and you wrote real research papers, by hand, with no Google, and all that op.sit. and loc sit stuff; four years of history and civics; four years of math including trig and calculus; at least two years of a foreign language and often two years Latin and two years of a foreign language. You couldn’t get in college with out that. You couldn’t stay in college and be a doper or a slacker until the very tail end of the ’60s when professors became reluctant to fail guys because losing the 2-S (student) deferment meant you were going to Vietnam.
When the floodgates opened and the academic standards plummeted was when school integration threw blacks into high schools and colleges for which they hadn’t the slightest preparation in large numbers in the ’70s. Rather than admit that the bulk of black students were not just grade levels behind but generations, the admissions standards evaporated, academic rigor evaporated, the “studies” majors appeared, and the way was paved to the indoctrination and credentialling factories the colleges have become and we began to become a Country of slackers who’d elect someone like Comrade Obama.
“The student activists of the early and into the mid-’60s may have been lots of things, but they weren’t stupid, the weren’t ignorant, and they weren’t slackers.”
I agree with you about the student activists not being stupid, ignorant, or slackers, but they were motivated by a similar bone-deep refusal to “grow up”. You might take a close look at Timothy Leary’s career as outlined in wikipedia to see what I’m talking about.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Leary
Leary spent time at top universities in the sixties (lecturer at Harvard, before getting canned) and worked very hard at what he did, but it was all about being notorious and a celebrity — a Peter Pan, if you will, who never had to grow up — and his ideas resonated with many young and studious baby boomers who also weren’t ready to grow up and were in college or graduate school in order to get a student deferment and avoid the Vietnam era draft. Do you think Timothy Leary’s students at Harvard had to worry about working hard? I don’t, and suspect he would have loved to give everyone good grades for no work as a way of subverting the system.
As you point out in your comment, during the sixties and early seventies our educational establishment was still adequately educating people, but it failed to turn out enough young scholars who believed in the “relevance” of what they had been forced to learn. People with Leary-like attitudes went on to become professors — to all too many tenured professors any other type of job seems too much like work — and educational standards disappeared several decades later as these demoralized scholars began to work for and dominate our schools and universities.
No argument from me about some of the professors. When I entered a small, rural Southern campus of the Georgia University System in 1967, most of my professors in humanities classes ranged from very liberal to outright communist. What gets lost is that the Sixties of legend really were only the last couple of years of the Sixties and the early Seventies. When President Nixon started talking about ending the 2-S deferment for graduate students, their mommies and daddies, many of whom had supported Nixon, went nuts and the Country exploded. The big anti-war marches were in the early ’70s and a lot of the impetus was from all the grad students whose parents had been paying for them to be professional students were facing getting their little pink a**es shot off in Vietnam. Unfortunately for the Country, those grad students kept their 2-S and many became the tenured professors of the late-’70 and ’80s, and some are still around even today.
Interesting series of posts. I, too, well remember those days of rapid social change. You have touched on one aspect of the unrest the others have omitted, and I think it was the most significant propellant of the anti-war movement.
The draft.
It was a constant cloud on the horizon of every male student in the ’60′s and didn’t end even with the system of drawing birthdays which allowed Bill Clinton to avoid military service. It was a powerful driver of the resentment of the war by the youth in the country, so much so that when Nixon ended the draft and introduced the all-volunteer military, the war protests evaporated, even though we were still fighting in Vietnam.
I remember. I was there.
@SongDog -
I think the most significant propellant of the anti-war movement was some serious communist support and organization, quite possibly aided by KGB assets. The organization enabled tapping into the seething resentment of the draft and a war the purpose of which was hard to determine and whose explanation kept changing.
I was brought up on that log cabin to President, pay any price, bear any burden stuff, but when it became time to actually begin living my life, I was greeted, salutated, and hereby ordered to report. In retrospect I was, indeed, a “tender and callow fellow,” to borrow a line from my high school graduation song, but I was not so naive to blindly believe what a government that had become seriously “credibility challenged” was telling me. I was no activist, but I came to be very anti-war and anti-draft. Since the house was burning, I kept warm and stayed in school with my 2-S deferment and my National Defense Education Act student loans, but I also was not so naive as to fail to recognize the hypocrisy of it and the unfairness of the draft. I was smart enough to get in school and could get the money and do the work to stay there. If you couldn’t you either had to go to Canada or get drafted; grossly unfair. When the lottery came, I got a high number, dropped out of that stupid college, and got on with my life.
For the prevaricator of the Pedernales ( who owned the media in the ’64 campaign ) to complain about the “Eastern press” demonstrates his complete immersion in 20/unicorn historical revisionism.
There isn’t enough free beer and aren’t enough eager vagabonds to properly implement the memorializing event Hey Hey ( …lbj, how many… ) deserves.
Johnson and McNamara both share a place right beside Benedict Arnold for what they did to this nation. I’d spit on LBJ’s grave if I thought he’d notice.
LBJ was a typical pre-Vietnam lib Dem. They brought us blooody foreign wars that were none of our business, forced military service (aka slavery), and gigantic government social programs designed to reduce everyone in America to the status of a serf dependent on government handouts.
He’d be as loved as Roosevelt, if only he hadn’t screwed up Vietnam which allowed Dick Nixon to get elected President in 1968. For that, he’ll never be forgiven by liberal historians.
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This author needs to do some homework, particularly on who in Congress actually passed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.
I’ll bet he thinks Clinton reformed welfare.
Where’s the “rolling eyes” smiley around here?
History will not judge him well, he planted the seeds that have born bitter fruit today. What a disaster his leadership was in retrospect, all the roots of today’s problems can be laid solely at the feet of LBJ.
I hope he’s enjoying that warm place where he rots eternally.
While the volume and focus of the demonstrations weakened overall after the Nixon lottery, and the dezinformatsia angles rotated to continue targeting the largest available mass of discontent, some of the more memorable events of the era were staged in the early 70′s. Kerry’s medal return and the arrests of 10,000 + individuals in a day in D C were in 71. GBUSA
Lyndon Johnson was the worst president of the 20th century. Nobody else comes close. Not even the hapless Jimmy Carter. (Obama may give him a run for the money, but it’s too early to tell.)
Roosevelt II was the worst president in U.S. history, and nobody comes close, not even LBJ or Woody Wilson.
Born in 63, I was too young for LBJ. My earliest political memory is the 68 election and my parents telling me they were voting for Humphrey. I had no idea who that was, but thought it was a funny-sounding name.
What I do remember is the rumblings of the world blowing up around us. As divisive as things are now, I remember their being worse back then. I may have been new to the world, but it seemed things were falling apart. People were angry. And I was in a nice, safe, suburban town in NJ. (It really was beautiful there.) All my relatives had just moved out of NYC and were settling in Bergen County. I do remember Vietnam very well and remember when LBJ died.
My own sense from reading, listening and almost having been there isn’t as sophisticated as many of the commenters here. I did grow up and investigate the ruins, so to speak. I worked in Newark with reporters who’d covered the riots. The burned out buildings were still there in the mid-80s — no one removed them.
I’d rank LBJ among the worst presidents we ever had, if not the worst, because of his corruption, his cynicism, Vietnam, and the extreme damage his social welfare programs did to the poor. I’m not against social welfare programs, but those projects were the most dangerous places in cities and it took forever to get Democrats to admit it. Every time you criticized what they’d done they acted like you didn’t want to do anything for the poor.
But the damage from the 60s and 70s wasn’t all the fault of LBJ. It was a generation of idealistic politicians who in an effort to liberalize did enormous damage to our institutions, and technological changes as well. The Warren Court’s divisive social engineering, the pill, a baby boom that overwhelmed our institutions, mass media … it was more than just LBJ.
Nixon handled it better, but not much better. Ford seemed feckless and Carter demoralizing. I think we had five crappy presidents in a row, from JFK to Carter. The so-called greatest generation.
As far as Obama’s legacy, I don’t know. I find it extremely demoralizing, even to despair, and that’s my own fault. I see Obama as the final triumph of Affirmative Action — and the Democrats’ cult-like insistence on denying that fact scares the crap out of me. There is no way they can let him fail or even seem like he has failed. He has to succeed, even if they have to make it up. I don’t think Obama will end up any worse than Dubya, though Dubya will be ranked down there. He wasn’t qualified to be president, either. Total Turtle on a Fence Post, just like Obama.
One thing that’s changed is this sense of a president earning it. JFK and the Bushes were sons of privilege, Obama is an Affirmative Action baby, but every president from Truman to Clinton at least started out as one of us. It makes a difference in America. You gotta steal it fair and square, as the saying goes. LBJ at least did that much.
There can be no doubt that JFK’s assassination marked the start of the decline of the US. Here are a few dimensions, in no particular order:
– The great rush to centralize government and weaken federalism
– The rise of the debt state
– The beginning of foreign adventures that cost lives and treasure but bring no increase in security
– The rise of government by special interests
– The loss of confidence and the sense that as a nation we can do great things
– The rise of the entitlement state
– The rise of the effectivelt state controlled media
There is no way out now except to let the system fail, then start over.
The loathing of LBJ expressed above is completely justified. As a 21 year old I voted for the scum. It turned out that even Goldwater would not have committed his vile crimes. Civil rights, Medicare–that was Kennedy’s agenda. Johnson’s agenda was personal power and ego. If some dumb liberal professors rate him for his “positive” works, they are merely showing how badly they understand this evil man. I hope he is in some hell where he will experience all of the agony that his ego imposed on millions in his ego driven Vietnam debacle. -John