Johnson, Lyndon B. (1908–1973)

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JOHNSON, LYNDON B. (1908–1973)

Lyndon Baines Johnson was a strong President whose performance was tempered by an affectionate reverence for the constitutional system as a whole. He exploited the cumulative precedents for presidential leadership and authority in domestic, foreign, and military policy; protected presidential power against congressional intrusion while working with vigor to carry Congress with him; and turned the office over to his successor intact. Jointly with Congress, he extended federal power greatly in civil rights, education, and welfare. He appointed the first black Supreme Court Justice, thurgood marshall; but Johnson's attempt to assure liberal leadership beyond his term by the nomination of abe fortas as Chief Justice failed when Fortas withdrew in 1968.

All this tells us little of how the American constitutional process actually operated in the turbulent, creative, and tragic days between November 22, 1963, and January 20, 1969. The agenda Lyndon Johnson confronted was unique. Aside from the urgent need to unify the nation and establish his legitimacy in the wake of john f. kennedy's assassination, he faced simultaneous protracted crises at home and abroad: a crisis in race relations and a disintegrating position in Southeast Asia. woodrow wilson and franklin d. roosevelt had also confronted both urgent domestic problems and war; but the course of events permitted them to be dealt with in sequence. Johnson faced them together and they stayed with him to the end.

By personality and conviction, Johnson was a man driven to grapple with problems. But he also carried into office a passionate moral vision of an American society of equal opportunity—a vision he proved capable of translating into legislation, above all in the fields of civil rights, education, and medical care. The civil rights act of 1964, the voting rights act of 1965, and the Fair Housing and Federal Jury Reform Acts of 1968 were major results of his crusade for racial equality. The elementary and secondary education act and health insurance for the aged act (medicare) of 1965 were outstanding among dozens of acts passed in both fields. In carrying the religious constituencies on the Education Act, Johnson displayed skill bordering on wizardry. As proportions of gross national product, social welfare outlays of the federal government rose dramatically between 1964 and 1968 while national security outlays rose only slightly. This was possible because of an average real growth rate of 4.8 percent in the American economy.

Johnson had been a man of the Congress for some thirty years before assuming the presidency. No President ever came to responsibility with a deeper and more subtle working knowledge of the constitutional tensions between Congress and the President, and of the requirement of generating a partnership out of that tension, issue by issue. But Johnson knew from experience that, on domestic issues, a President's time for leading Congress and achieving major legislative results was short. From his first days as President, Johnson expected Congress would, in the end, mobilize to frustrate one of his initiatives and then progressively reduce or end his primacy. He was, therefore, determined to use his initial capital promptly. Although momentum slowed after mid-1965, Johnson proved capable of carrying Congress on significant domestic legislation virtually to the end of his term.

Johnson was opportunistic in the best sense. He exploited the Congress elected with him in November 1964; but he also channeled the powerful waves of popular feeling in the wake of the assassinations of John Kennedy, martin luther king, jr. , and robert f. kennedy into support for his legislative program.

Johnson believed the presidency was the central repository of the nation's ideals and the energizing agent for change in the nation's policy. He understood the advantage a President enjoys relative to a fragmented Congress: the power to initiate. He brought into the White House every constructive idea he could mobilize from both private life and the bureaucracies, setting in motion some one hundred task forces, sixty within the government, forty made up of outside experts. Where possible, he also engaged members of Congress in the drafting of legislation at an early stage in the hope that their subsequent interest and support would be more energetic.

Johnson also understood that in domestic affairs there was little a President could constitutionally do on his own. His was primarily a license to persuade. He used the conventional levers of presidential influence in dealing with Congress. But his most effective instrument was his formidable power of persuasion, based on knowledge of individual members and a sensitive perception of the possibility of support from each on particular issues. He spent far more time with members of Congress than any President before or since—face to face, by telephone, or in group meetings at the White House.

Johnson judged that he had come to responsibility at a rare, transient interval of opportunity for social progress. Therefore, he used up his capital and achieved much. He left Washington with a sense of how much more he would have liked to have done; but he also realized that the nation was determined to pause and catch its breath rather than continue to plunge forward. Nevertheless, the programs initiated in Johnson's time continued to expand in the 1970s. As Ralph Ellison, the black novelist, said, Johnson will perhaps be recognized as "the greatest American President for the poor and for Negroes … a very great honor indeed."

But all did not go smoothly with the Great Society. In 1965, five days after the signing of the voting rights act, rioting broke out in Watts, and riots in urban ghettoes continued for three years. Despite vigorous and imaginative efforts, these problems proved relatively unyielding although violence subsided in 1968 as it became increasingly clear that the costs were primarily borne by the black community. Moreover, as new welfare programs moved from law to administration, resistance gradually built up both to their cost and to intrusions on state and local authority. Although significant modifications in the Great Society programs were made in the 1970s and 1980s, it seems unlikely that the basic extensions of public policy in civil rights, education, and welfare will be withdrawn.

Although Johnson led public opinion and drove Congress in domestic affairs, he conducted the war in Southeast Asia with a reserve that did not match the nation's desire for a prompt resolution of the conflict. Johnson's relations with the Congress on the vietnam war thus differed markedly from his approach on domestic policy. harry s. truman had decided, with the agreement of the congressional leadership, to resist the invasion of South Korea on the basis of his powers as commander-in-chief. Johnson preferred the precedents of the Middle East and Formosa Resolutions which he, when Democratic leader in the Senate, had recommended to dwight d. eisen-hower. He followed that course in the Tonkin Gulf Resolution in 1964. Despite later controversy over the resolution, the record of the Senate debate indicates that its members understood the solemn constitutional step they were taking. Johnson consulted the bipartisan leadership and received their unanimous support on July 27, 1965, before announcing the next day that he had ordered substantial forces to Vietnam—a decision which, at the time, had overwhelming popular as well as congressional support. The possibilities of a formal declaration of war or new congressional mandate were examined and rejected on the ground that they might have brought into effect possible secret military agreements between North Vietnam and other communist powers.

Johnson's determination to consult with and to carry the Congress in 1964 and 1965 was real. But he knew that legislative support at the initiation of hostilities would not prevent members of Congress, disciplined by changes in public opinion, from later opposing him. In the end, he was convinced, the primary responsibility under the Constitution in matters of war and peace rested with the President; and he accepted the implications of that judgment, including the possibility that support for his decision would fade and leave him, like some of his predecessors, lonely and beleaguered.

Johnson made his decision when the entrance of North Vietnamese regular units into South Vietnam had created a crisis, compounded by the Malaysian confrontation instigated by Indonesia with Chinese support. The choice before him was to accept defeat or to fight. He chose to fight because, in his view, the Southeast Asia Treaty (SEATO) reflected authentic United States interests in Asia; a failure to honor the treaty would weaken the credibility of American commitments elsewhere; and the outcome of withdrawal would not be peace but a wider war.

The strategy Johnson adopted was gradually to reduce communist military capabilities within South Vietnam; to use air power against the lines of supply; to impose direct costs on North Vietnam by attacks on selected targets in the Hanoi area; and to support the South Vietnamese in their efforts to create a strong military establishment and to build a viable economy and a democratic political system. His objective was to convince North Vietnam that the takeover of South Vietnam was beyond its military and political grasp and that the costs of continuing the effort were excessive. From the beginning to the end of his administration, Johnson was in virtually continuous diplomatic contact with the North Vietnamese. Protracted formal negotiations began in April 1968 in the wake of the Tet offensive, during which the communist cause suffered a severe military setback but gained ground in American public opinion.

Johnson's cautious strategy in Vietnam conformed to the views of neither the hawkish majority in American public opinion and the Congress, nor the dovish minority. Johnson realized that his conduct of the war was unpopular and that public support had eroded; the nation resisted a protracted engagement with limited objectives and mounting casualties. He nevertheless held to his strategy and resisted those who advocated decisive military action on the ground outside South Vietnam. As Commander-in-Chief, Johnson was determined to conduct the war in a way that minimized the chance of a large engagement with Chinese Communist or Soviet forces. The memory of Chinese Communist entrance into the korean war may well have played an important part in Johnson's determination; and he knew that he would be judged in history, in part, on whether his assessment of the risks of a more decisive course of action was correct. Johnson's strategy may also have been affected by two other considerations: a determination to maintain the momentum of his domestic initiatives; and fear that an all-out mobilization might regenerate an undifferentiated anticommunism, with disruptive consequences for foreign policy and McCarthyite implications at home.

The tension between impatient public opinion and Johnson's cautious strategy led to a quasi-constitutional crisis in the early months of 1968. The bipartisan unity of the American foreign policy establishment, which began in 1940, ended, for a generation at least, in 1968. Johnson's distinguished outside advisers, who had been united in November 1967 in support of Johnson's Vietnam policy, were hopelessly divided four months later.

Many complex factors contributed to the schism, but in part it was the product of conflicting images. For Johnson and others who had foreseen the Tet offensive and acted to frustrate it, the communist military failure was apparent, and Johnson's March 31 bombing reduction and proposal to negotiate were designed to exploit a position of relative strength. For those to whom the offensive was a shock and a demonstration of the futility of the American effort, Johnson's negotiation initiative seemed an admission of defeat. Johnson's simultaneous announcement of his decision not to seek reelection may have strengthened the latter image in the public mind.

Thus, Johnson left to his successor a greatly improved military, political, and economic situation in Southeast Asia, a weary and discouraged majority of Americans, and a divided foreign policy establishment in addition to an ardent minority that had been advocating withdrawal from Vietnam for several years.

The antiwar crusaders challenged Johnson's assessment on multiple grounds, among them: the importance of American interests in Southeast Asia; the legality and morality of the war itself; and the belief that Vietnamese nationalism was overwhelmingly on the side of the communists. Johnson weighed carefully the antiwar views, but he remained convinced to the end of his life that his assessment of the issues at stake was correct. He was less sure that his cautious military strategy had been correct.

There was a great deal more to Johnson's foreign policy than the war in Southeast Asia. He stabilized NATO in the wake of French withdrawal from its unified military command; saw the Dominican Republic through a crisis in 1965 to a period of economic and social progress under democracy; and encouraged regional cohesion in Latin America, Africa, and Asia.

Like all American Presidents in the nuclear age, Johnson consciously bore an extraconstitutional responsibility to the human race to minimize the risk of nuclear war. He sought to normalize relations with the Soviet Union; he carried forward efforts to tame nuclear weapons through the Non-proliferation and Outer Space treaties; and he laid the foundation for strategic arms limitation talks.

But the central fact of his administration was the convergence of war and social revolution that resulted in an accelerated inflation rate and yielded four years of antiwar demonstrations and burning ghettoes against a backdrop of prosperity and social reform. Johnson was required, at the request of the governor of Michigan, to send regular Army units to suppress riots in Detroit in July 1967; and troops had to be deployed again in Washington, D.C., in April 1968 after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.

In 1967, after reading the results of a poll assessing his presidency, Johnson said: "In this job you must set a standard for making decisions. Mine is: "What will my grandchildren think of my administration when I'm buried under the tree at the Ranch, in the family graveyard.' I believe they will be proud of two things: what I have done for the Negro and in Asia. But right now I've lost twenty points on the race issue, fifteen on Vietnam." As Lyndon Johnson's voice repeats many times each day on a tape played at the LBJ Library, "… it is for the people themselves and their posterity to decide."

W. W. Rostow
(1986)