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May 26 - June 1, 2019
Johnson’s ascent to the presidency,” says presidential historian Henry Graff, “came at the most traumatic moment in American political history.”
coverage—“There were times during those days when a majority of all Americans were apparently looking at the same events and hearing the same words … participating together … in a great national event,” the scientists concluded; “Nothing like this on such a scale had ever occurred before”—made the assassination and the ceremonies following it an event “probably without parallel in history.”
Referring to the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963.
Lyndon Johnson never forgot or forgave, could never, until he died, stop talking about, Robert Kennedy’s visits to his hotel room during the 1960 Democratic convention to try to force him off the ticket.
But the story of Lyndon Johnson’s transition is a story not only of difficulties he faced but how he surmounted them. He not only broke the congressional logjam, he broke it up fast, and he broke it up on civil rights.
In 1957, in a dramatic reversal of that record, Majority Leader Johnson had rammed through the first civil rights bill to pass Congress since 1875.
But although the cliché says that power always corrupts, what is seldom said, but what is equally true, is that power always reveals.
as Martin Luther King Jr. had said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” during the two centuries since the United States of America had come into existence, the arc had bent slowly indeed.
laws that embodied government’s responsibility to fulfill what Johnson’s father, the Populist legislator, believed was the highest duty of government: to help people caught in “the tentacles of circumstance.”
There was Bobby’s hatred for liars, and his feeling that Lyndon Johnson “lies all the time … lies even when he doesn’t have to lie.”
“He [Bobby] recoiled at being touched,” and of course Lyndon Johnson was always touching and hugging.
Referring to one of the reasons why Robert Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson hated each other.
“It was southwestern exaggeration against Yankee understatement,” Arthur Schlesinger has written. “Robert Kennedy, in the New England manner, liked people to keep their physical distance. Johnson … was all over everybody.”
No Vice President had ever come to office with so little time in which to establish a record on which he could run in his own right. Johnson, Neustadt was to write, “faced the unprecedented challenge of assuming office and then running for election in the same first year.” Needing a record on which to run, he had very little time to create one.
This was dangerous ground. These meetings would be foreign leaders’ first impression of Lyndon Johnson, and first impressions could influence the policy of nations; look at what had happened after Khrushchev, in Vienna, had met Kennedy for the first time!
The bad impression Kennedy gave to Khrushchev helped lead to the Cuban Missile Crisis.
“We have hate abroad in the world, hate internationally, hate domestically where a President was assassinated and then they take the law into their own hands and kill the assassin,” he said. “That is not our system. We have to do something about that. We have to do something about this hate, and you have to get to the root of hate. The roots are poverty and disease and illiteracy.”
Quote from Lyndon Johnson right after he became president.
“One of the wise, practical people around the table” urged Johnson not to press for civil rights in his first speech, because there was no chance of passage, and a President shouldn’t waste his power on lost causes—no matter how worthy the cause might be. “The presidency has only a certain amount of coinage to expend, and you oughtn’t to expend it on this,” he said. “Well, what the hell’s the presidency for?” Lyndon Johnson replied.
Great moment.
the attack switched from the patriotic to the personal. “I’m gonna take a helluva lot of advantage of you, my friend, because you—you made me and I know it, and I don’t ever forget.… I’ll be taking advantage of you a good deal,” Johnson said. “I’m a Russell protégé, and I don’t forget my friends.”
Great to kiss up to someone when they accuse you of taking advantage of them.
