ALL THE WAY WITH LBJ

President Lyndon B. Johnson came to the presidency under tragic circumstances still shrouded in mystery, and a lingering cloud of suspicion over his possible role in the assassination of JFK still darkens his legacy, as the mystery of that assassination, investigated during his presidency, has never been solved to anybody’s satisfaction, further aggravated by the 1968 assassination of Kennedy’s brother RFK, who had been eagerly expected to reopen the JFK assassination investigation on assuming the presidency in 1969, which outcome had been assumed to be a sure bet.

Aside from this dark cloud, the heavy burden of the war in Vietnam had become an almost defining part of LBJ’s legacy, actually forcing him in 1968 to withdraw his bid for a second full term. There are indications that LBJ himself hated the war and wished he had never been drawn into it, but felt that he had no choice in this matter.

Lost behind all these image disasters was Johnson’s arguably outstanding role as the father of Great Society. Later presidential historians have tried to establish their credibility as “objective judges” by giving Johnson a higher set of marks for his performance, which now ranges from the extra-high #9 to the “more-like-it” #23, as his personal historical ranking among the presidents of the United States.

In the area of U.S.-Soviet relations, LBJ gets a very generous “satisfactory” mark from me, which is a “C.” After all, he probably did the best he could under the circumstances, only the circumstances were not good for the superpower relationship. The Russians didn’t like him at all, to put it mildly. President Kennedy had been regarded all over the USSR with great affection, taking the cue in this from Comrade Khrushchev himself. Now, JFK had just been assassinated, and everybody in the Kremlin suspected that he had been the victim of a powerful conspiracy, prominently involving the US Government. What strongly supported this US government conspiracy theory was the persona of the assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, especially considering his bizarre “Russian” connection. Oswald had been a most puzzling American “defector” to Russia, who had subsequently returned to the United States, and now had become, the Russians feared, a perfect scapegoat to lead the public suspicion toward an invisible Russian hand in the Kennedy assassination. Khrushchev was furious that this would be the case, from the instant he had been told about Oswald, and the level of his personal animosity for the new American president had gone through the roof. His successor Brezhnev openly resented President Johnson, and also had no doubt that poor LBJ had had a hand in the assassination…

It goes without saying that President Johnson never took the dangerous path of implicating the Russians, but they did not like him anyway. Still, they agreed to one “summit” meeting with him in Glassboro, NJ, in 1967. On the Soviet side they put up Premier Alexei Kosygin, rather than the actual number one Leonid Brezhnev. The American side’s decision to allow such a “markdown” of their president may not seem like a big deal, in practical terms, but it had a huge symbolic significance, showing the Russians and the closely watching world how dispirited and desperate Washington was in those last years of the Vietnam war, to try to score a foreign policy achievement on such humiliating terms.

The peculiar choice of the meeting place says something about the unpleasant taste of animosity permeating this one and only superpower summit of the Johnson presidency. Kosygin happened to be in New York at the time, attending the ongoing session of the UN General Assembly. On a crafty Soviet initiative, the two sides decided to have their meeting “halfway” between “Johnson’s” Washington, DC and “Kosygin’s own” New York, NY. Glassboro, NJ, just happened to be that geographical spot, equidistant from both.

Needless to say, no superpower breakthroughs were either expected or even planned throughout the Johnson Administration. All the way with LBJ in this context meant going nowhere. It would be the next president’s opportunity to establish normal summitry on his watch, and President Nixon would rise to the occasion in a spectacular manner.

Meanwhile, we are back to LBJ, and, finally, to his best achievement in office, which was of course his Great Society program. Here is the famous and much-quoted excerpt from his “Great Society” speech in May 1964. He delivered it during his election campaign against the Republican candidate Barry Goldwater. (See also my entry Great Society, posted on this blog on July 4, 2011.)---

The Great Society rests on abundance and liberty for all. It demands an end to poverty and racial injustice, to which we are totally committed in our time. But that is just the beginning. The Great Society is a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and enlarge his talents. It is a place where leisure is a welcome chance to rebuild and reflect, not a feared cause of boredom and restlessness. It is a place where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce, but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community. It is a place where man can renew contact with nature. It is a place which honors creation for its own sake and for what it adds to the understanding of the race. It is a place where men are more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods.

As a comment to this excerpt, I can only say that it is heavily poetic and naively impractical, and it does not agree with my mental picture of LBJ. There is no doubt that he could not have written something like this himself. But it is certainly to his credit that he read this speech, imbuing it with the power of the presidency, and that he also followed through with very significant practical steps.