Review: Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream
Lyndon Baines Johnson stands out among the Presidents of the last half century; his impact on American politics and culture was outsized, matched only by how little he appears in public discourse.
Johnson’s most recent appearance in popular culture was Rob Reiner’s LBJ, a 2017 biopic of with a narrative that sprawls in odd ways, attempting to right misconceptions of Johnson’s record. Reiner focuses on Johnson’s insecurity about his popularity compared to John Kennedy’s, his carriage and enlargement of Kennedy’s legacy. The crux of Reiner’s narrative is: “Who is this guy, LBJ?”
In answering that question Reiner omits both Vietnam altogether, and the story of how Johnson ever got to be in the Senate leadership. Where Reiner fails, Doris Kearns Goodwin in her first biographical work, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream, succeeds in capturing the detail of his coming of age, and the import of personality in leadership and institutional decision-making.
As with most art, the story of its making is instructive. Johnson came across Kearns Goodwin, then a White House Fellow, at a dance in the White House in 1967. “Do your men ever dance at Harvard?” Johnson asked as he danced with her.
That he approached her and she became the writer of his story was deliberate. Kearns Goodwin, a rising star at Harvard, could narrate Johnson to the “men and women of ideas,” who he was certain dismissed him as a feckless brute, and yet whose sentiments would decide his place in history. Winning over Kearns Goodwin, who had just written an article public in the New Republic about how to beat Johnson in the upcoming 1968 election, was akin to wooing History.
Unlike her acclaimed biography of Lincoln’s presidency, Team of Rivals, this book is unusual in the closeness between its author to her subject. The real strength of this book, and that sets it apart from others in its genre, is the intimate camaraderie between the two. Johnson provides Kearns Goodwin and so the reader penetrating visibility into his early life. Johnson’s childhood was tormented by his parents’ competing aspirations him.
Rebekah Johnson was a sophisticated mind and came from an esteemed lineage. She wrote for the local news, directed plays, and gave elocution lessons. Sam Ealy Johnson, on the other hand, was an abrasive, alcoholic rancher who savored playing dominoes. When Lyndon was born, Rebekah perceived a chance at vicarious redemption in her first-born; the boy would be learned, an intellect, and a macher.
Sam spurned intellect as effeminate. For Johnson, his parents’ love was eternally fickle, contingent on achievement. Though he seldom failed to achieve, love contingent is hardly love at all. “One of the first things I remember about my daddy,” Johnson says. “was the time he cut my hair. When I was four or five I had long curls. He hated them. ‘He’s a boy,’ he’d say to my mother. ‘and you’re making a sissy out of him. You’ve got to cut those curls.’ My mother refused. Then one Sunday morning when she went off to church he took the big scissors and cut off all my hair. When my mother came home she refused to speak to him for a week.”
Well aware of how this dynamic motivated him, Johnson cultivated it in order to engorge his control over situations and people through the various stages of his career. One hour Johnson might shower his staff, among the most loyal and effective in modern presidential history, with praise, while the next hour, he might dress them down with a vengeance. As a legislator, Johnson was a careful practitioner of that same, conditional beneficence, ensuring that is was to him and him alone those around him owed their good fortunes.
As Kearns Goodwin sketches it, the portrait that emerges of Johnson is a study in the techniques of acquiring and power.
Finding Mentors
Whenever Johnson entered a new arena, he would find a mentor. Johnson would be wary in identifying a key figure of authority and institutional knowledge, and swiftly ingratiating himself.
When he entered the Senate, Johnson’s first challenge was to situate himself between his personal progressive tendencies, and the conservative bent of his new, state-wide constituency. In his mission to understand the lay of the land, he identified Bobby Baker, the young cloakroom clerk at the time because he knew “where the bodies were buried.”
Baker pointed Johnson in the direction of Richard Russell, the elder statesman from Georgia. In order to maximize the amount of time he could spend with Russell, Johnson asked to be on his committee, Armed Services, then one of the least popular committee assignment.
Balancing Pragmatism and Idealism
Under the tutelage of Russell, then the conservative standard-bearer, Johnson struck a balance between his ideals and the exigencies of survival in the Senate. Unlike the House of Representatives, where power was determined by, above all else, time spent there, the Senate was an institution tailored to Johnson. Senior positions in the upper house were more duty than base of power. That house was ruled by an inner, informal group of elders, the unquestioned leader of who was Richard Russell.
It is also important to acknowledge that events outside of Johnson’s control contributed to his ascendancy in the Senate. Nearing the end of its run, the Truman administration became mired in the Korean War. The Democratic Party, too, was in disarray and did not have a handle on the process of selection for positions in the upper house.
In any event, Johnson would become deft at what appeared to be pursuing contradictory positions. On the floor and by his vote, he sided with the conservative Russell. He never joined Russell’s Southern caucus, however. Johnson calculated that by doing so, he could keep Russell’s affection, while remaining palatable enough to the Northerners.
Johnson’s ability to navigate this liminal, treacherous terrain, is why it was he, and no other man then in the Senate who could have carried civil rights legislation to passage. Johnson understood that though liberals rightly wanted to an expansive bill, he distilled it down to its essential provision: the right to vote. Though it bred animosity from liberals, Johnson had the procedural wherewithal to see that amending a bad bill was possible, whereas passing the perfect bill was not.
Ability to Find Common Ground
More than institutional knowledge, for many others understood the making of a sausage, Johnson was able to reconcile differences by finding common ground, or fabricating it for himself. In the Senate of the late 1950s, filibuster rules dictated that a bill’s opponent needed only 33 votes to keep it from seeing the light of day. Russell’s coalition had 22. Add Midwestern and other conservatives, and a filibuster was all but assured.
Johnson looked to the Western and Rocky Mountains. These states had few blacks living there at the time. For them and their constituencies, civil rights as a concept was perceived more as uncomfortable theory than ruinous practice. Johnson, who had worked tirelessly to know every detail of each Senator’s and constituencies’ political pressures and pork-barrel yearnings, knew these states wanted a dam.
If he could horse-trade his way to a dam built between Oregon and Idaho, which meant cheap electricity to the Rocky Mountain states, then Johnson could get the votes he needed. Whereas other legislator would have been bogged down in legislation itself, Johnson understood the constellation of interests that surrounded it, and that if he could tinker with them in the right way, he could make something good work.
Kearns Goodwin sketches an expansive portrait of a caring autocrat. She is able to penetrate into his thinking and emotions and expose Johnson’s inner demons in a way Johnson himself would’ve rather avoided. If her closeness to Johnson provided that insight, it also injected an unfortunate, moralizing niceness. Throughout his career, Johnson derived power from situating himself not just at the center, but in the role of benefactor. This Kearns Goodwin conveys. Johnson giveth, but Johnson also taketh away. Johnson was known to have said of himself: “I’m just like a fox. I can see the jugular in any man and go for it.” That ruthlessness is altogether absent from Kearns Goodwin’s portrait.
To my generation of Americans — the millennials — Johnson is a paradox. “Sure,” the liberal and progressive millennial will grant, “civil rights legislation happened, but Johnson was dragging his feet.” “His amendment is un-American,” the part-populist, conservative-leaning millennial will posit (yes, they exist). “Johnson is the reason religion had its wings clipped in this country, and money started going from farmers to people in the cities.”
Fascinating as that bit of ironical common ground is, beyond the canonical supposition that “Vietnam was a quagmire,” Johnson’s tenure in popular memory remains a sleepy hollow.
With the publication of Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury, the questions surrounding Mr. Trump’s mental condition, and a Congress indulging the dysfunctions of wacky Mr. Trump, Johnson’s presidency seems worthy of review.
Johnson’s years represent a study in how the mind and character of the executive can shape the institution. Lyndon Johnson’s life offers us much to learn: different institutions reward different types of individuals; the executive branch’s power is what he or she makes of it; the media and public opinion are the only, absolute mechanisms to the metaphor “checks and balances”; enduring change in America requires compromise and consensus politicking.
For figures of outsized ego and unalloyed ambition, for figures like Johnson and Trump, politics is simply a means of earning love and gratitude. As the end of his presidency and Johnson’s ultimate, unwilling withdrawal from public life demonstrates, it is a dangerous game.
It is an equally dangerous game to draw historical parallels where none exists, or to interpret today through the prism of yesterday and to consider tomorrow foreordained. If you study ancient Roman leadership, you are bound to come across Lord Acton’s adage: “Absolute power corrupts absolutely.” The arc of ancient Rome bent toward consolidation of power, and at its terminus, decay. The institution of democracy survived Johnson, of course.
And so Lord Acton’s maxim holds only part true in the American context. Still, power reveals. Biography, particularly one of a president, is the study of power and what it exposes. The man at the center when things are good, she writes, remains there when they go bad. Toward the end of his life, Johnson hoped that history would forgive him, and that forgiveness would be the final form of love. More than how to acquire or wield power, Kearns Goodwin’s portrait of Johnson shows that the admixture of politics and personality — as we observe today — though it can go far in defining norms of leadership and deciding the direction of institutional momentum for a time, it, too, succumbs to the History’s reckoning.
Originally published at medium.com on January 14, 2018.
