LBJ: Idealist as Politician

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — In the first biography of Lyndon Baines Johnson to come out since the release of his presidential tapes, the award-winning University of Arkansas historian, Randall B. Woods, argues that the same idealism that drove the Civil Rights Movement and the Great Society also drove the war in Vietnam.

In LBJ: Architect of American Ambition, Woods portrays a complex man whose passionate commitment to advancing civil rights and alleviating poverty seemed in contradiction to his leadership in the Vietnam War. Woods, however, calls these defining features of his presidency “branches from the same root.” He came to this realization after conducting in-depth interviews with many who had worked closely with Johnson, including his long-time secretary and dozens of his aides, and after studying newly released White House recordings and declassified documents.

Woods said: “The tapes are a biographer’s dream. They are just unbelievable as a resource. You see all the shades of Johnson’s personality and the complexities of the legislative process. The Great Society comprised a thousand pieces of legislation, and a lot of those votes were very close. So he had to work out these deals. He’d get Southerners to vote for an urban transit bill and Northerners to vote for a wheat subsidy bill. The poverty programs were in many ways civil rights programs. A lot of the Southerners who were segregationists would show their support for the civil rights movement by voting for the poverty programs. And Johnson would take that to Northern liberals and get them to compromise on the civil rights bills. It was a very complicated process, and he used that taping system in large part to keep up with the details.”

Woods also views his book in terms of today’s politics and the Democratic vision: “What this book offers is an opportunity for Democrats to return to their roots. Johnson was very much a New Deal/New Frontier liberal, but he was also in favor of a balanced budget and was very pro-business. He was absolutely committed to civil rights. He was a devoted environmentalist. At his behest, Congress passed the first major revision of the immigration act since 1917.”

“Johnson was an unbelievably intelligent person. His capacity to absorb information and analyze it was amazing. He was a very earthy and profane man, but he also was very much a liberal Christian,” Woods said. Like Martin Luther King Jr., in his speeches Johnson “invoked the Judeo-Christian ethic in order to shame white America into granting blacks equal rights and to mobilize support for the anti-poverty program.”

Johnson, who made his appearance on the national political scene with the National Youth Administration during the Depression, had been identified by the New Dealers as the logical heir to Roosevelt. “They believed that Johnson had the values and certainly the political skill,” Woods said, “but they despaired of his ever being elected president in his own right because even though he was a liberal, he was from the South.

“There’s a lot of irony — and he understood this — in being a Southerner and taking the lead in the Civil Rights Movement,” Woods said. “He believed that he was not only redeeming black Americans but white Southerners. As long as Southerners clung to Jim Crow and segregationism, the South was going to be marginalized politically and economically. But he also knew that in campaigning in this way he was probably delivering the South into the hands of the Republican Party, not only because of the race issue but also because of the economic issue. That is, with the reduction of poverty and the thrust of working class Americans into the middle class, you’re converting economic Democrats into economic Republicans. He knew that that was going to happen, but his wasn’t a partisan vision.

 “Johnson is still ignored, and political candidates don’t invoke him because of Vietnam,” observed Woods, who teaches in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences. In common with other leaders of his time, from Dean Acheson to John Foster Dulles, Johnson admired Reinhold Niebuhr's Christian realism and, Woods argues, the Social Gospel that was responsible for the Great Society also motivated the decision to come to the aid of the people of South Vietnam.

When it came to Vietnam, Woods observed, “Johnson was walking a tightrope.”

If LBJ didn’t fight a limited war, he believed there would be a cascade of events leading to a wider war with the Soviet Union. The Chinese threatened intervention in the event of a U.S. invasion of North Vietnam or bombing of supply lines. It was projected that this could lead to the involvement of the Soviet Union, which had a defensive treaty with China and possessed intercontinental ballistic missiles. So, Woods said, “We fought a war that Johnson perceived — and he anguished over it — but he perceived it was the lesser of many evils.”

Johnson also believed, in terms of the domestic political scene, that ending the war was not an option. He made the argument that given the strength of anti-communism in this country, pulling out of Southeast Asia would produce a conservative backlash that would destroy the “delicate coalition” supporting the Civil Rights Movement.

Woods said, “The only reason the Civil Rights Acts of ’64 and ’65 passed was that Richard Russell and other Southern segregationists agreed to let it pass. They didn’t vote for it, but they ceased their obstruction, and that was Johnson’s great triumph.”

 “To be a politician today is to be a bad person,” Woods observed. “Well, the alternative to democratic politics is fascism. And you can see that creeping in in the views of some columnists who denigrate compromise and diplomacy. They want absolutism. Ironically, many liberals still see Johnson as an autocrat. He was a superb politician, but he didn’t blackmail people. He loved gossip and personal information. I found not one instance, not one, where he ever used personal information about sex, about drinking against somebody.”

Woods described Johnson’s persuasive method as “a kind of moral deluge.”

“He’d invoke patriotism,” Woods said, offering a sample of the Johnson method: “'You’ve got to do the right thing for your country. Why are you here?’ he’d ask a congressman or senator. 'I understand that you have to be responsible to these interests and those interests, but you can vote on this. This legislation [civil rights or Medicare] doesn’t affect these interests. I’m not asking you to defeat yourself.’ He’d lambaste the Republicans over the civil rights bill by saying 'some party of Lincoln you are.’”

“His public values were admirable, which is why people tolerated his abuse and coarseness,” Woods said. “He was very aware he was an incomplete person. He knew he had a lot of demons, insecurity. He could lose perspective. Lady Bird was his perspective-giver. He trusted her with his emotions.”

 Woods returned to the comparison between Johnson and today’s Democrats: “The Democratic Party and liberals in this country have allowed themselves to be manipulated by the right. Liberalism has become a bad word. Instead of standing up for liberalism defined in New Deal/New Frontier terms, liberals have tried to argue that they’re conservatives. I think there’s a lot in this book about what the Democratic Party is and what it’s called to be.” A vision that Woods said was “as compelling for many Republicans as it was for Democrats in Johnson’s time.”

Woods, who grew up in Johnson’s 10^th Congressional District, is the John A. Cooper Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Arkansas, where he has taught since 1971. He is also author of Fulbright: A Biography, which was awarded the Robert H. Ferrell Prize for the Best Book on American Foreign Relations and the Virginia Ledbetter Prize for the Best Book on Southern Studies.

LBJ: Architect of American Ambition is published by Free Press, a division of Simon & Schuster, and will be released Aug. 1. Advance reviews and interviews with Woods have been published, thus far, in Publisher’s Weekly, Harper’s and Slate.