The most liberal president of the 20th century

"All we've accomplished" was not just a politician's vanity. One of the great virtues of "Judgment Days" is the case it makes for LBJ as the most liberal American president of the 20th century. That statement will no doubt anger or amuse those who still insist on seeing Johnson's shameful deceptions regarding Vietnam as the totality of his presidency; those who confuse politics with the priesthood and recoil from Johnson's pragmatic mastery of political deal-making; or those who wish for all the change that power can effect without understanding that you first have to have the power to effect change.

Near the beginning of "Judgment Days," Kotz writes of Johnson in the hours following JFK's assassination, finally retreating to his bed only to sit up until 3 a.m. with a small group of aides. Johnson began talking passionately and determinedly about how he intended to pass the civil rights bill, a voting rights bill, a bill to allow Americans to pay for higher education, and how he was going to realize Harry Truman's cherished dream of providing healthcare to the elderly. "No president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1930s," Kotz writes, "had attempted such a broad assault on social and economic inequality." Furthermore, Johnson was talking this ambitiously only a few hours after the murder of a beloved president. And he was not dissuaded when, two days later, a poll showed that 70 percent of Americans did not believe he could govern as well as JFK.

Liberals were suspicious of Johnson's record of voting with the segregationist Dixiecrats on every civil rights bill that came before him during his time in the House and the Senate. But as much of a burden as the presidency came to be to Lyndon Johnson, it was also his liberation as a politician. Having attained the highest office in the land (and not sure he would be able keep it come November '64) Johnson began acting like the politician he always dreamed he could be.

This was a man who had been an ardent New Dealer. Johnson had shepherded the rural electrification bill that brought electricity to the Texas hill country where he grew up. He had seen the effects of poverty on the poor Mexican students he had taught during his time as a schoolteacher. And, as Robert Dallek reported in the first volume of his LBJ biography, "Lone Star Rising," after visiting Germany in the '30s, Johnson arranged passage to Mexico for Jews, who were then smuggled into Texas job-training camps that Johnson had helped set up to aid his constituents in finding work during the Depression. At the opening of a Houston synagogue in 1968 where LBJ and Lady Bird were the guests of honor, members of the congregation approached Mrs. Johnson to tell her they'd be dead if it hadn't been for her husband.

Of course there were political considerations behind Johnson's socially progressive legislation. Always concerned about his place in history, Johnson wanted to prove himself worthy of the liberal legacy of JFK.

What should long ago have become a plain fact of American history but remains hostage to political myth is that LBJ dwarfed JFK as a president. Johnson's vision, his willingness to cast civil rights and the war on poverty as moral issues, his shrewd use of the power of the presidency to ensure the passage of his bills, makes Kennedy's timid, halfhearted gestures toward civil rights seem puny in comparison.

For Kennedy, civil rights had the inescapable air of noblesse oblige, something that he would get around to when he deemed the moment was right, expecting blacks to be patient meanwhile. Civil rights neither engaged his sympathies nor resonated with his experience the way it did with Johnson's. For Johnson, civil rights was the cornerstone to realizing his gargantuan and romantic vision of the presidency. Wanting to, as he said, "out-Roosevelt Roosevelt" and "out-Lincoln Lincoln," Johnson attempted nothing less than to end the Civil War by enshrining the New Deal as the highest legislative expression of American principles.

Two quotes from Kotz's book suggest the breadth of Johnson's vision and the timidity that characterized Kennedy's presidency. On May 30, 1963, Johnson made the hundredth Memorial Day speech on the battlefield at Gettysburg. He spoke with more bluntness, eloquence and urgency about the plight of American blacks than any president had to that time. "One hundred years ago," Johnson began, "the slave was freed. One hundred years later, the Negro remains in bondage to the color of his skin. Until justice is blind to color, until education is unaware of race, until opportunity is unaware of the color of men's skins, emancipation will be a proclamation but not a fact. The Negro today asks justice." Then, rebuking those who, like Kennedy, feared that civil rights must not proceed too fast, Johnson said, "We do not answer him -- we do not answer those who lie beneath this soil -- when we answer 'Patience'."

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