T A B L E+T A L K The greatest love story ever written: Name your pick in the Books area of Table Talk R E C E N T L Y Out of Sheer Rage By Geoff Dyer Noniction (05/05/98) The Student Body By Jane Harvard Fiction (05/04/98) Like a Hole in the Head By Jen Banbury Fiction (05/01/98) An Ocean in Iowa By Peter Hedges Fiction (04/30/98) On Television By Pierre Bourdieu Nonfiction (04/29/98) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - SEARCH REVIEWS BY: title of book author publisher reviewer F E A T U R E Communism on your coffee table! By Barbara Ehrenreich All-conquering capitalism has turned Karl Marx's "Communist Manifesto" into the perfect accessory for your ironic, upwardly mobile lifestyle (04/28/98)		__FLAWED GIANT .|. PAGE 2 OF 2 But perhaps more than any president this century, Johnson was willing to use the weight of his office to champion moral necessities when there was no immediate political gain and considerable political fallout. Nothing marks Johnson as more of an anachronism, or more sums up the meanness of our current politics, than that the greatest accomplishments of his presidency -- the War on Poverty and especially the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 -- are anathema amid the ongoing revolt against "big government" and "special privileges." "I wanted power to give things to people," he said, "all sorts of things to all sorts of people, especially the poor and the blacks." What is there, in presidential oratory, to equal Johnson's words to Congress in 1965 in support of the Voting Rights Act? "Because it is not just Negroes," he said, "but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome." This wasn't a politician's trick, an attempt to defuse protest, but a validation of a group of Americans claiming that the United States government had sanctioned injustice as law. Johnson didn't hide behind any of the traditional political dodges, like telling blacks they must be patient or claiming that his administration had already made great strides. He left himself no out, and offered blacks no chance for compromise. It was victory or nothing, he told them. The language of the speech, his greatest, is both plain and grand, beautiful in its vision and terrible in its implications of the consequences of failure. "There is no constitutional issue here," LBJ said. "The command of the Constitution is plain. There is no moral issue. It is wrong -- deadly wrong -- to deny any of your fellow Americans the right to vote in this country. There is no issue of states' rights or national rights. There is only the struggle for human rights." These are not the words of a radical integrationist but of a man who saw integration as so basic a fulfillment of America that there could be nothing radical about it. They were written by a Jewish New Yorker, Richard Goodwin, but their weight comes from being delivered by a white Southerner. LBJ embodied the region that had come to stand for intransigence in the face of the moral demands made by the civil rights movement. The leaders of that movement had feared what LBJ would do as president. During his Senate tenure, he had voted with the Dixiecrat segregationist block against a civil rights bill. He was only half-kidding when, as president, he explained his change of heart to Roy Wilkins with the words "Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, I'm free at last." What he was freed from "as president of all the people" was the narrowness enforced by regional political loyalties. What he was released into was a vision that took in both blacks fighting for the most basic freedoms and the white poor of the Texas hill country he came from. LBJ was able to see both groups as chained together in the bondage of Southern racism. The Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act would have been sweet victories, would have changed the lives of Southern blacks no matter what president introduced them. But no other president could have articulated them as a national reconciliation, an uncompromised victory, in the way LBJ did. The moral urgency of his civil rights advocacy was a fulfillment of what it means to be a participant in America -- not a sublimation of individual identity, but an affirmation of individuality found in community. His congressional speech was as stirring and profound as any in American politics since Lincoln's second inaugural address 100 years earlier. And then it all went to hell. It may be the cruelest irony of Johnson's presidency that a man who said, "I'm going to be the president who finishes what Lincoln began" wound up presiding over another civil war. If one image sums up the view of Vietnam as Johnson's folly, his mark of Cain, it's the famous David Levine caricature of LBJ lifting his shirt to show the map of Vietnam in place of his gall-bladder scar. But Dallek goes far beyond that, beyond any of the other caricatures of Johnson as a murderous Yankee cowboy napalmin' his way through the Big Muddy. Without sparing LBJ an ounce of the blame he has to bear for Vietnam, Dallek achieves a sort of horrified compassion. His lucid yet irreducibly complex delineation of the war puts Johnson's role into a context that is an unholy tangle of political ambition, bad advice and the president's own escalating paranoia. Dallek allows neither himself nor the reader the superiority of distance. He gives proper weight to the American public's Cold War mind-set and reluctance to think we could ever lose a war to an obscure nation. Nevertheless, Dallek never misses a chance to show how LBJ might have prevented the war from dragging on if he had leveled with the public about the depth of the nation's involvement and victory's projected cost in time, dollars and lives. Dallek knows that, ultimately, the war as it was conducted during LBJ's presidency was a product of the president's insecurity and arrogance. Would that he had listened to his friend, Speaker Sam Rayburn, who said of "the Harvards" (Johnson's phrase for Robert McNamara and McGeorge Bundy, men who impressed Johnson, the graduate of Southwest Texas State Teachers College, enormously), "They may be every bit as intelligent as you say, but I'd feel a whole lot better about them if just one of them had run for sheriff once." The painstaking detail with which Dallek records each new level of our entanglement in Vietnam parallels the way Vietnam crowded out the other issues of Johnson's presidency. Johnson prevaricated about that involvement for fear that his domestic programs would be killed if the real cost of the war were known. But Vietnam sucked the lifeblood out of LBJ's vision of the Great Society anyway, even as he continued passing domestic legislation that, given the funding available, could be only symbolic gestures. Dallek's acute depiction of LBJ's self-inflicted torment reminds you of the considerable difference between, in Dallek's phrase, "a principled scoundrel," and a real one. One of the coups of Dallek's research is his confirmation that, during the 1968 presidential campaign, Nixon used emissaries to convince the Vietnamese to delay their participation in the Paris peace talks until after he was elected. Nixon, a private citizen, was committing treason (delaying peace talks for a war in which America was involved) in pursuit of political office. Johnson had this information (as well as proof that the Greek military junta was funneling millions to the Nixon campaign via Spiro Agnew) and refused to use it. He saw it as leverage against any investigation Nixon might undertake against him that would sully his image. That reluctance is the final proof in "Flawed Giant" of Johnson's obsession with his eventual place in history. How cruel that both his sins and virtues are held against him -- the former by liberals who see him as an unprincipled warmonger, the latter by conservatives who see him as the unprincipled embodiment of failed tax-and-spend liberalism. At LBJ's funeral at the Johnson family cemetery in Texas, his friend John Connally said, "Along this stream and under these trees he loved he will now rest. He first saw light here. He last felt life here. May he now find peace here." History has so far denied him that peace. But Ellison's evaluation, "President Johnson will have to settle for being recognized as the greatest American president for the poor and for Negroes," can stand. Only in the dimensions of tragedy can that honor become something to settle for. SALON | May 6, 1998 Charles Taylor lives in Boston. He is a regular contributor to Salon. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - RELATED SALON STORIES Will Clinton go down in history -- or in flames? By Lori Leibovich An interview with Robert Dallek on President Clinton's place in history