A child of the 60s, I grew up in a Goldwater household. The very first political campaign I remember was 1964 and the chant we learned was basic: “Goldwater, Goldwater, he’s our man; Johnson belongs in the garbage can.” (Not exactly high poetry, but I was 4.) I never knew exactly why Johnson belonged in the garbage can, and he died before I was a teenager, so I never really followed up.
But things I’ve learned caused me to want to know more. The Great Society, the war on poverty, the civil rights bills he shepherded, the actual war in Vietnam, the Six-Day War between Israel and Palestine.
Goodwin’s perspective is that of an insider, as she served as a staffer in the Johnson White House. More than that, it is the product of hundreds (thousands?) of hours walking and talking with the man in the places of his childhood, besides poring over extant documents of his life and work. The gift of this book is that Goodwin manages to move beyond reporting facts to taking us inside the soul of the man — the neuroses and desires of his upbringing that drove him throughout his life — and yet she remains fairly dispassionate in the telling.
Johnson was a good man. He longed for a world that was fair to all the people who share it. He began his career as a teacher, trying to make a future possible for the Mexican children in his native Texas, which morphed easily into an advocacy for Black Americans working for dignity, suffrage and an end to Jim Crow. Goodwin tells of his experiences kindergarten, learning to speak, in high school and college of intuiting the source of power and maneuvering into its orbit — or usurping it from those he thought were using it poorly or unevenly. In college and in Congress, he took the lowliest jobs (page, janitor) and parlayed them into relationships of power and influence. His mother had taught him early that power was meaningless unless it was used to help people; this became his life’s work. Class president, Senate Majority Leader, whatever, he got there by the same skills and for the same purpose of distributing resources more evenly — student activity fees that went disproportionately to athletes, federal earmarks that never seemed to help families stay fed or housed. He achieved some pretty nation-changing things.
He was an earnest but insecure man, plagued by childhood trauma and recurring dreams of paralysis. (His grandmother had been paralyzed by a stroke when he was young; it would haunt him.) Brilliant in one-on-one conversations and deal-making, he was terrified and/or awkward in crowds. He resented the Kennedys and east coast “elites” (a refrain we continue to hear in the halls of power, though which these days rings hypocritical as its purveyors hold their Ivy diplomas whilst they ring), and, as a state-educated Southerner, bore a constant feeling of not belonging. He saw a dichotomy between “thinkers” and “doers,” and placed himself and JFK on opposite sides of the divide.
On the death of JFK, he assumed the presidency as the bearer of Kennedy’s legacy, which gave him a bit of a honeymoon to enact a great deal of domestic legislation, expanding it while pitching it as the continuation of Kennedy’s dream. (Kennedy was the thinker, remember; Johnson was the doer.) In reality, he believed Kennedy would never have gotten any of it done. He kept Kennedy’s cabinet, believing he owed the nation stability. (This struck me as similar in outcome if not in motive to Obama’s hiring Clinton’s advisors at the start of his own presidency. Elected by his inspirational drive for hope and change, Obama’s presidency devolved almost before it began into a neo-liberal hellscape. The housing/banking crisis could have been the impetus for something world-changing, but the neoliberals protected the banks and the status quo, while Obama watched. For more, see A Crisis Wasted by Reed Hundt.)
Goodwin makes the case that it was “Kennedy’s men” who advised Johnson poorly about Vietnam and created the morass he would have done better to avoid. Regarding escalation in Vietnam — a build up from 800 troops in 1960 to nearly 500,000 in 1967 — “if Johnson had wanted different advice or a wider range of opinion at the top, he could have changed his group of advisors… The point is that Lyndon Johnson never tried.” As to “the drift of events in the spring of 1965 — the inexorable movement from bombs to troops” Goodwin described as Johnson “seated on the back of a beast that was far wilder than he had imagined (and he) found himself carried along by its momentum, moving inexorably toward a wider war that he did not want.”
Among LBJ’s blindspots was in his inability to imagine that those for whom he advocated — American people of color, immigrants, South Vietnamese — might have had dreams and ambitions that were not the same as his. He had little room for cultural differences or nuance and believed that all the nations of the world could rally in peace around a shared desire for universal well-being. In Vietnam, he believed he was saving the Vietnamese people, wrapping them into American-style economy and social reality, without pondering whether this was the Vietnamese dream. Bargaining, he believed, could achieve anything; it was true in college, in the House and Senate, in the presidential domestic agenda. In Vietnam, he believed, bombs “were a means of bargaining without words.”
I was startled by the number of times I found myself thinking of Trump and Nixon — the insecurities that marked Johnson’s entire life of leadership, and his need for affection and public gratitude. Besides all that, Johnson lived in the shadow of Kennedy’s ghost, and endured his arch-nemesis Robert Kennedy watching over his shoulder, all of which added to the paranoia of lost support in later years. “Deprived of an atmosphere of public support, besieged at home and abroad, Johnson retreated more and more into the world of his imagination, directing an increasing part of his energies to the task of protecting himself…. Suspicion of motive became his chief instrument in discrediting critics on the Hill.” Sounds familiar. Too familiar.
Goodwin’s book and style are engaging, insightful and fairly comprehensive.
My single frustration is that she never got around to Johnson’s part in the Israel-Palestine conflict and his relationship with American Jews. I’d hoped for a counter perspective to Israeli journalist Tom Segev’s 1967: Israel, the War, and the Year that Transformed the Middle East (reviewed here), which painted Johnson as pragmatically, but not in principle, pro-Israel — scratching backs for domestic political purposes or keeping a distance for the sake of not muddying the waters of Vietnam, a stance that shaped the Middle East and harmed a lot of Palestinian people.
Johnson didn’t belong in a garbage can. Some Goldwater voters thought him a crook, but Goodwin presented no hint of scandal of any kind. In the end, Johnson was exhausted, undone by his best motives, his worst impulses and the tidal bureaucracy that was Washington. Civil Rights, Voting Rights, the Great Society. But Vietnam. Competing legacies to be sure, but in the balance, I’m confident Goldwater would have been the greater disaster.