Episode 20: Lyndon B. Johnson
Show Notes
Overview
Today’s episode is all about Lyndon Baines Johnson, the 36th President of the United States, and arguably its most consequential. Note we did not say best or greatest or anything overexuberant like that. But if you are talking about presidents who left their mark on American society, presidents from the past whose impact we still feel today in our daily lives, for good and for ill, you could do worse than to put Johnson at the top of your list. That was true for civil rights and race relations, especially.
But that wasn’t all. To think of Lyndon Johnson in office is to immediately think Vietnam. Protesters in the streets. Riots in the cities. The sixties. The time of excitement, free love, and sadly the loss of great leaders far before their time. Star Trek debuted; the first Super Bowl took place, and rolling stone magazine first hit the shelves. Humanity first reached the moon, and got more than a little muddy at Woodstock.
Those last two events took place after Johnson had left office, but their inclusion tells a broader point not so much about chronology or what happened in the past, but how we remember. Americans naturally think in terms of presidential administrations—think, the Reagan Era—or more often in terms of decades. But decades have a habit of not actually following the calendar the way they should. The roaring twenties neither started nor ended well; the fifties we remember really didn’t begin until the Korean War ended, and by the same token, they lasted until a cool November day in Dallas, when John Kennedy’s tragic death brought the halcyonic era to an end. Of course, as students of history and listeners to this podcast you already know that not all was perfect even during eras we remember fondly, but nobody thinks the 1960s and thinks calm.
Johnson was at the center of it all. So who was this influential, some might say, accidental president? Here’s your primer. Born in Texas to a family that resided just on the razor edge between poor and middle class, you wouldn’t have expected much from Johnson if you saw him in his youth. A poor student, he was initially denied admission to college, ultimately winning a spot at Southwest State Teachers College in 1927. Ambitious despite outward appearances, he became a congressional aide in 1931, moving to Washington, where he’d represent Texas in some form or fashion over the next forty years.
Johnson came of political age during the Great Depression, and was a loyal Democrat through and through. More to the point, he was a Roosevelt man, and became a staunch ally, and not infrequent poker partner, with the president soon after winning his own congressional seat at the age of just 28 years old. He served in the Navy during World War II—though primarily served as his time in the congress—and in 1948 won election to the United States Senate. Within two years, he was the majority whip. Soon after, minority leader when Republicans briefly took back the Senate in 1952. Two years later, with Democrats back in charge, Johnson was majority leader, arguably the most powerful man in Congress, a mere six years after joining the upper chamber and little more than a decade since he’d wondered if he’d spend his days in a West Texas classroom.
Johnson was, in Robert Caro’s great phrase, the “master of the senate,” arguably the most powerful until Mitch McConnel in our own day. He helped guide the watered-down civil rights bill of 1957 to passage, signaling more to come. Indeed, elected vice president in 1961, his own time in the oval office saw Johnson transform into a true force for civil rights. Imagine that: a Texan, a Southerner, a DEMOCRAT, one familiar with the ways of Jim Crow who wouldn’t have been unhappy if you called him a ‘good ol boy,’ spent his time in office working for the poor like his mentor Roosevelt, but most dramatically working to bring about a new era for civil rights in America. “We shall overcome,” he told the Congress and the world in 1965, backing not only new legislation to protect and promote voting rights but also a slew of New Deal-style programs aimed at eliminating poverty. The Great Society, he called it. It was, he said, the lady he loved.
And he lost it all to what he also called, apologies for our language, “that bitch of a war.” Vietnam. It didn’t begin on Johnson’s watch, but it became a full-blown war with him in charge, and historians to this day still debate, and wonder, why Johnson committed American lives and treasure, and his own presidential prestige, to a far-off land in Southeast Asia. The country couldn’t build a great society and fight a divisive war at the same time: it couldn’t stomach it, and frankly, it couldn’t afford it, and Johnson ultimately left Washington in 1969 a battered and broken man, dying but a few short years later. Indeed, if you want a marker for when the sixties ended and the seventies truly began, you could do worse than to pick January of 1973, when Richard Nixon began his second term as President, and when Lyndon Johnson passed from this earth.
Truly, truly, a fascinating man—arguably the president who did more for civil rights than any other, who you’d probably have least expected to become a champion for racial equality. Today we are blessed by two tremendous guests to help us unpack this complex man, and even more complex era.
We first spoke to Julian Zelizer, a professor of political history and public policy at Princeton University. When then spoke to Elizabeth Hinton, Professor of History and Law at Yale University. Together our conversations highlighted two themes:
First, the extraordinary volume of legislation produced during the Johnson era and the influential legislation at that.
Second, the unexpected consequences of that legislation that no one saw coming—something that could be said for the entire Johnson administration.
Guests:
Dr. Julian Zelizer is one of the pioneers in the revival of American political history.
He is the author and editor of 19 books on American political history, including Taxing America: Wilbur D. Mills, Congress, and the State, 1945-1975—winner of the Ellis Hawley Prize for Best Book on Political History and the D.B. Prize for Best Book on Congress--On Capitol Hill: The Struggle to Reform Congress and its Consequences, 1948-2000, Arsenal of Democracy: The Politics of National Security—From World War II to the War on Terrorism, Jimmy Carter, Conservatives in Power: The Reagan Years, 1981-1989 (co-authored with Meg Jacobs), Governing America: The Revival of Political History and The Fierce Urgency of Now: Lyndon Johnson, Congress, and the Battle for the Great Society, winner of the D.B. Hardeman Prize for Best Book on Congress. In January 2019, Norton published his new book, co-authored with Kevin Kruse, entitled Fault Lines: A History of the United States Since 1974. Zelizer is also a frequent commentator in the media. He has published over nine hundred op-eds, including his weekly column on CNN.Com. He has received fellowships from the Brookings Institution, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, New America, and the New York Historical Society. He is currently finishing work on two books: Burning Down the House: Newt Gingrich, The Fall of a Speaker, and the Rise of the New Republican Party (Penguin Press) and Abraham Joshua Heschel (Yale University Press).
Follow Dr. Zelizer on Twitter.
Dr. Elizabeth Hinton is Associate Professor in the Department of History and the Department of African American Studies at Yale, with a secondary appointment as Professor of Law at the Law School.
Hinton’s research focuses on the persistence of poverty, racial inequality, and urban violence in the 20th century United States. She is considered one of the nation’s leading experts on criminalization and policing.
In her book From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (Harvard University Press), Hinton examines the implementation of federal law enforcement programs beginning in the mid-1960s that transformed domestic social policies and laid the groundwork for the expansion of the U.S. prison system. In revealing the links between the rise of the American carceral state and earlier anti-poverty programs, Hinton presents Ronald Reagan’s War on Drugs not as a sharp policy departure but rather as the full realization of a shift towards surveillance and confinement that began during the Johnson administration.
Before joining the Yale faculty, Hinton was a Professor in the Department History and the Department of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. She spent two years as a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Michigan Society of Fellows and Assistant Professor in the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan. A Ford Foundation and Carnegie Corporation Fellow, Hinton completed her Ph.D. in United States History from Columbia University in 2013.
Hinton’s articles and op-eds can be found in the pages of the Journal of American History, the Journal of Urban History, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Boston Review, The Nation, and Time. She also coedited The New Black History: Revisiting the Second Reconstruction (Palgrave Macmillan) with the late historian Manning Marable. Her next book, America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion since the 1960s is available for preorder now!
Follow Dr. Hinton on Twitter.