Hey Hey LBJ

How many kids did you kill today? I don’t believe I ever joined in on that chant, not much of a chanter myself, people chanting look stupid, but I guess I agreed with the sentiment.

I was never that big a fan of JFK, but I remember thinking, oh my God is that cornpone going to be running the country after he got shot. I was in college and not paying much attention to what was going on in the outside world while he was president, but that old crazy Asian war certainly got my attention when they wanted me to do my patriotic chore.

I was watching the tv when he announced that he wouldn’t be seeking reelection and probably I let out a big whoop, thinking ha, me and my hippie hordes had beaten him and now the unpopular war would be ended and the army would not be needing my help and all would be groovy again.

But then we got Nixon and the war went on at least four more years, and yadda yadda yadda.

After time had passed, I began hearing reassessments of LBJ. Doris Kearns Goodwin, who wrote that book about Lincoln that they made that movie out of, went down to the LBJ ranch and interviewed him not too long before he died, and then there were those Mark Caro books that I heard about and I took up reading them, and they are just fantastic. Not a fan of everything he did, especially the war, but the man fascinates me.

Kind of a strange man, well all the president’s were strange men, but what distinguished LBJ was his single-minded pursuit of power. Everything he did since he entered San Marcos Teachers College was geared towards increasing his power, and becoming the president of the USA. When he first ran for office it was because the right wing Brown Brothers wanted to put someone in office to vote for a dam that they wanted to build. Themselves they hated FDR, but they knew that the voters loved FDR so they had LBJ run as an FDR fanatic, so he started out as a liberal. Later, by the time he got to Washington, he saw that the southern dems had all the power and he cozied up to them and appeared to be a conservative. Then JFK made him VP to carry the state of Texas, but once in office he, and more particularly, his brother and his other allies, treated him like shit.

And then Kennedy got shot, and LBJ was widely seen as conservative but nobody was really sure, and then bam he pounds through a very liberal agenda and would probably have become a liberal icon along the lines of FDR, but then he almost absent mindedly stepped into the war thinking it would be a trifling matter, thinking he could just make Ho Chi Minh a deal, or maybe beat him up a bit and the war would be over, but Uncle Ho was not making any deals and then LBJ was making that tv appearance that made me whoop and holler and packing up for the ranch.

Well I was just down in Austin and of course I saw the LBJ Museum which got all this stuff rolling in my mind.

On the way I was reading another book about JFK and LBJ (Tom Wicker), and one thing that came through was that JFK came into office with a liberal ideology but couldn’t get anything done, and LBJ came in with no particular ideology and got a shitload done.

And I’m thinking ideology is pure and moral and you can hold your head up high, and actual politics with people is messy and dirty, but it’s the only way to get things done.