LBJ Was Too Busy Making History to Worry About His Legacy

This President’s Day, I found myself reflecting on presidential legacy--not Bill Clinton’s legacy, but that of Lyndon B. Johnson, whom I served. I left the Johnson White House at the very beginning of 1966, when the conflict in Vietnam had been escalated into an American war with American troops. That war was a disaster for the country. Not only because of its incredible human toll, but also because it brought to an end one of most visionary and progressive periods in American public life, a time during which Johnson sketched not merely a vision, but a program designed to enrich American life. It was called the Great Society.

For a quarter of a century the passions and divisions spawned by the war in Vietnam have obscured historical recognition of Johnson’s magnitude; dimmed awareness of how much was lost when this gargantuan president sent his country and himself into this terrible and unjustified conflict.

The war and the larger Cold War that bred it are now receding into history, allowing a newly emerged generation of scholars and commentators to understand just how large an ambition Lyndon Johnson pursued and, for a while, with such extraordinary success.

More than Roosevelt, more than Kennedy, Johnson worked to undo what he called the “great original sin” of the American nation: racial hatred and racial injustice. In a few short years he brought an end to the legalized apartheid that had characterized American society since the Civil War and guaranteed the right to vote that had been denied to black Americans, knowing that this would end the domination of his own party in the South. And then, just before the war brought an end to his dream, he asserted that the legal equality he had helped achieve must now be given content by promising black Americans the same economic opportunity to enrich individual life that was enjoyed by white Americans. “There is no single answer,” he said, “but there are some answers--jobs . . . decent homes in decent surroundings . . . an equal chance to learn . . . social programs designed to hold families together . . . care of the sick . . . an understanding heart.” Goals still not reached.

Johnson did more for the cause of civil rights than any American president since Lincoln, and far more than any of his successors in office. And his concept of racial equality was far more generous and spacious even than that of the Great Emancipator. He was the firmest ally the black man has had in the White House from the beginning of the republic to the present day.

Johnson took office during a time of great prosperity in which, unlike the present prosperity, all segments of society benefited from increasing wealth. There was no justification, Johnson said, for human poverty and degradation amid such great abundance. He declared a war on poverty and launched programs designed to give poor people the tools to escape from what he called, “inherited, gateless poverty.”

It later became fashionable to decry these goals as grandiose, beyond achievement. But it was a war that could have been won. We had enough money and enough understanding. Unfortunately, however, the other war brought it to an end. Today we are also prosperous. But the poor are ignored, inhabitants of another country, once more invisible. And they are treated with a scorn and indifference unmatched anywhere in the industrial world.

Johnson reached beyond the poor and the despised to all the public ills that menaced the quality of American life, those ills which private affluence could not heal. He was the first president to address the manifold problems of urban life, an environmentalist before that term came into popular usage. A former teacher himself he sought out ways to enhance the quality of American education. In all these areas, and in others, he drew upon scholars and experts, young idealists and veterans of ancient battles, union leaders and businessmen, to formulate programs to help heal the manifold afflictions of American public life. These were not small programs, Band-Aids for serious wounds. They were large in scope and even larger in ambition.

And Johnson accompanied these very large goals with a political skill unmatched in the history of the presidency. In the few short years of achievement, before Vietnam had stripped him of political support, he drove a torrent of legislation through the Congress. Almost as soon as they were proposed, his programs became law. Even today, nearly all of the most important progressive programs since the New Deal have their source in Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.

In today’s politics of the trivial, where leaders seem to think that to name problems is to solve them, where national abundance is directed to the satisfaction of personal desires, one could do worse than look to the speeches and messages of Johnson to find an agenda for the 21st century.

Much has changed since Johnson, but the afflictions he addressed remain, and many of his remedies still sound very good. And in doing that we can, perhaps, recapture the spirit of a time when large achievement seemed a realistic possibility, when public events cut deeply into our personal lives, when the American faith was charged with a determination equal to the needs and the promise of the nation.

When I served Johnson in the White House, before I broke with him on the issue of Vietnam, we never talked about the president’s legacy. We did not discuss how history would grade our efforts. Johnson was too busy making history to worry how the future would judge it. And so were we. And for years afterward the moans of the battlefield have obscured the narrative of achievement and spacious vision which, as his legacy, may ultimately rank Lyndon Johnson among our very great leaders.