The most liberal president of the 20th century

Contrast Johnson's simple realization of the necessity of swift and decisive action with a comment made by Bobby Kennedy, then the attorney general in his brother's administration, that Johnson's advocacy was coming "when it was not useful." What the attorney general meant was that he feared Johnson was harming JFK's reelection chances in Southern states. But his words need to be examined. How is it possible for the highest law enforcement officer in the land to envision any time when it is "not useful" for American citizens to be accorded their constitutional rights?

As others, like King biographer Taylor Branch, have done, Kotz makes a steady, consistent, irrefutable case for all the ways in which JFK lagged on civil rights, even to the point of allowing the bill he introduced in June 1963 to languish as it became clear he would face Goldwater in 1964. But those facts have done little to diminish the seemingly unassailable myth of JFK as the great friend to civil rights. Part of that, of course, is a sentimental attachment to a man who died so horribly so young. Much is due to feelings that are not so defensible.

Even before JFK's assassination, people treated LBJ, as they have other white Southerners from Elvis Presley to Bill Clinton, with a finicky WASPish disdain for what they perceived as vulgar. Reporter David Broder's infamous comment about Bill Clinton in Washington, "He came in and trashed the place, and it's not his place," is the most blatant example of that attitude, a way of talking about white Southerners as if they were hillbillies who put their feet on the furniture. Broder's message was clear: Those people have no place in our country.

Whatever their differences, this was not an attitude King held toward LBJ. Kotz reports that before King's first meeting with Johnson, King's advisor Clarence Jones told him, "You've got more in common with Lyndon Johnson than you do with John F. Kennedy or with me. White and black people in the South share the same culture -- food, music, religions, speech. You need to talk with him like no one else can." King himself later said he was happy there was a "fellow Southerner" in the White House concerned about civil rights.

What I'm getting at is that, legitimate grievances with LBJ's politics, his ego, his crudeness, his mendacity and scheming aside, there has always been something inescapably patrician and white in the contempt for LBJ. Ralph Ellison wrote of this in his 1965 essay "The Myth of the Flawed White Southerner." "No one," said Ellison, "has initiated more legislation for education, for health, for racial justice, for the arts, for urban reform than he. Currently it is the fashion of many intellectuals to ignore these accomplishments and promises of a broader freedom to come, but if those of other backgrounds and interests [emphasis added] can afford to be blind to their existence, my own interests and background compel me to bear witness." Contrast that with Mary McCarthy, recalling, in 1974, hearing the news six years earlier that Johnson was not seeking reelection. McCarthy and colleagues were in a Hanoi hotel room listening to Johnson's speech on Armed Forces Radio and reports "dancing, kissing, hugging each other ... I felt a dazed pride myself. We had helped to bring the war to an end." McCarthy immediately acknowledges the naiveti of that belief. And no one in March '68 could have foreseen the hell of the next five months that would give rise to Richard Nixon's election in November.

But even without Cassandra-like foresight, McCarthy, belonging to one of the "other backgrounds and interests" of which Ellison wrote, perceived LBJ's presidency with striking narrowness. It was not white intellectuals like Mary McCarthy who had benefited most from LBJ's presidency. And it would not be white intellectuals who would suffer most when not only the war continued but civil rights were rolled back at home under the law-and-order ethos of the Nixon years. (Ellison ended his essay by saying, "President Johnson will have to settle for being recognized as the greatest American president for the poor and for Negroes, but this, as I see it," he added with an implicit chiding of those whose vision was less expansive than his, "is a very great honor indeed.")

Next Page: The relationship between Johnson and King was a tenuous marriage of idealism and pragmatism

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