07/02/12
Efficacy and Democracy Sean Wilentz
Many liberal Democrats have yet to come to terms with
Lyndon Johnson. There was—and remains in memory— a “good” Lyndon, the
surprisingly compassionate Southerner addressing a joint session of Congress and
exclaiming the civil rights movement’s protest refrain, “We shall overcome.” The
“good” Lyndon masterminded passage of the Civil Rights Bill of 1964 and the
Voting Rights Bill of 1965, and envisaged and then enacted the landmark programs
of the Great Society. But there was also the “bad” Lyndon of Vietnam and the
credibility gap. By the time Johnson abandoned the White House in 1968, the
“bad” LBJ had thoroughly displaced the “good” LBJ as far as reformist liberals
were concerned. Less than three years after he signed the Civil Rights Bill,
Johnson, the champion of social protest, had become the reviled target of
protests: “Hey, hey, LBJ/How many kids did you kill today?”
Vietnam was not Johnson’s only offense. Even before the 1960s, a strain of high-minded liberalism mistrusted Johnson for cunningly practicing power politics. Born of the old good-government tradition of the anti-party Mugwumps, and reinforced by the liberal bien pensants’ adoration of their icon Adlai Stevenson, and solidified by the cool John F. Kennedy followers’ disdain of the professional pol, this reformist outlook classified glad-handing politicians, with their party machines, arm-twisting, and smoke-filled rooms, not as agents of democracy but as corrupt evils thwarting the pursuit of open, efficient, and rational public policy. A matter of style as well as ideology, this lofty sensibility endures today among better-educated and more affluent liberal Democrats. Just as Lyndon Baines Johnson, the supremely expert practitioner of old-school party politics, made many liberals uneasy in the 1950s and 1960s, so does his history today.
Inspired by a Dump Johnson movement launched in 1967, anti-war liberals flocked first to Johnson’s challenger, Senator Eugene McCarthy, who attacked the president’s Vietnam policies with a waspish wit and a gloss of detached Stevensonian erudition. Then, to Johnson’s furious dismay, much of the liberal base bolted to Senator Robert Kennedy when he finally entered the primaries—the displaced prince of Camelot who would not just end the war but reclaim the presidency from the vulgar Texas usurper.
The contest between McCarthy and Kennedy provoked further liberal disquiets, which have endured over the decades. Johnson despised Kennedy for a multitude of personal and political slights dating back to the 1960 campaign. It was a case of mutual contempt, to borrow the title of Jeff Shesol’s fine book about their rivalry. After John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Johnson feared, not without reason, that Bobby, or some in his coterie, were plotting to remove him from the presidency. But many liberals, including McCarthy’s most ardent supporters (original Stevensonians who saw JFK as the usurper), also loathed Bobby, and nearly as much as they loathed Johnson. For them, there was a “bad” Bobby, memorably caricatured by the popular Village Voice cartoonist Jules Feiffer—an unscrupulously ambitious ruffian who had been his martyred brother’s henchman. As campaign manager and political adviser, RFK exposed the sharp-edged political side of the Kennedy operation—and because JFK was imagined to be above such sordidness, Bobby became the evil one. “We believe that he is anti-liberal and disturbingly authoritarian,” said the Bobby-hater par excellence Gore Vidal.
Continue Reading "Efficacy and Democracy"
Up in the Air: Hillary Clinton, A Lone Explorer, and the Search for Amelia Earhart
Jesse Zwick
How America's Schools Became the Battleground Between Church and State
Marc O. DeGirolami
