A Companion to Lyndon B. Johnson E-Book

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Blackwell Companions to American History
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 1551

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

This companion offers an overview of Lyndon B. Johnson's life, presidency, and legacy, as well as a detailed look at the central arguments and scholarly debates from his term in office. * Explores the legacy of Johnson and the historical significance of his years as president * Covers the full range of topics, from the social and civil rights reforms of the Great Society to the increased American involvement in Vietnam * Incorporates the dramatic new evidence that has come to light through the release of around 8,000 phone conversations and meetings that Johnson secretly recorded as President

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Blackwell Companions to American History

Title Page

Copyright

Notes on Contributors

Introduction

References

Part I: Pre-Presidential Years

Chapter 1: The Changing South

References

Chapter 2: LBJ in the House and Senate

The Participant-Observers

The Political Landscape

The Legislative Pragmatist

Notes

References

Further Reading

Chapter 3: The Vice Presidency

Notes

References

Further Reading

Part II: Lyndon B. Johnson's White House

Chapter 4: Lady Bird Johnson

Contemporary Media Coverage

Biographies and Memoirs

First Lady Literature

Conclusion

References

Chapter 5: Management and Vision

References

Further Reading

Part III: Domestic Policy

Chapter 6: The War on Poverty

References

Further Reading

Chapter 7: African-American Civil Rights

Notes

References

Further Reading

Chapter 8: Mexican Americans

References

Further Reading

Chapter 9: Women's Issues

Sex Discrimination in Employment

The War on Poverty and the Mobilization of Poor Women

Federal Promotion of Birth Control

Women and the Antiwar Movement

References

Further Reading

Chapter 10: Health Care

Policy is Personal

The War on Disease

The Capstones: Medicare and Medicaid

The Post-1965 Period

Historiography: Standard and Revisionist

Summing Up Johnson and Health Care

Notes

References

Further Reading

Chapter 11: Environmental Policy

The Modern Environmental Movement

The Johnson Administration

Key Players in the Johnson Administration

New Conservation in Congress

Agent Orange

Conclusion

References

Chapter 12: American Immigration Policy

Before Reaching the National Stage

Immigration Reform during the Johnson Presidency

Conclusion

Notes

References

Chapter 13: LBJ and the Constitution

Notes

References

Chapter 14: The Urban Crisis

References

Chapter 15: Education Reform

Enactment of the ESEA

Implementation of the ESEA

Impact of the ESEA

Conclusion

References

Chapter 16: Domestic Insurgencies

Lyndon Johnson and the Domestic Insurgencies

Movements of the Excluded

The Revolt of Privileged Youth

Connections

Note

References

Chapter 17: LBJ and the Conservative Movement

Notes

References

Part IV: Vietnam

Chapter 18: Decisions for War

Notes

References

Chapter 19: Fighting the Vietnam War

References

Chapter 20: The War at Home

References

Chapter 21: The War from the Other Side

Introduction

The Vietnam War in Vietnam

Works in English

References

Part V: Beyond Vietnam

Chapter 22: Latin America

Setting the Tone with Personnel Changes

The Alliance for Progress and the Commitment to Development

Intervention and Coup Support

Counterinsurgency

Secret Financing of Elections: Chile and the Dominican Republic

Moderation: Mexico and Cuba

The Waning of the Monroe Doctrine

Conclusion

References

Chapter 23: Europe

The Nuclear Issue: From the MLF to the NPT

The Alliance Issue: Charles de Gaulle and the Trilateral Negotiations

International Finance and Trade: Special Drawing Rights and the Kennedy Round

Eastern Europe, Bridge-Building, and Czechoslovakia

The Cyprus Crisis and the Greek Coup

1968, Social Movements, and Impact of Vietnam

References

Chapter 24: LBJ and the Cold War

LBJ, the Communist Powers and the Kennedy Legacy

U.S.–Soviet Relations, 1963–9

The U.S.S.R., China, and the Vietnam War

U.S.–China Relations, 1963–9

LBJ: Father of Nuclear Arms Control?

Conclusion

References

Chapter 25: The Middle East

References

Chapter 26: LBJ and the New Global Challenges

Environment

Population

Food

Disease

Religion

Conclusion

References

Part VI: Final Reckonings

Chapter 27: How Great was the Great Society?

“Flawed Giant”: LBJ as a Reform President

The Great Society and American Liberalism

How Did the Great Society Affect American Politics?

Whither the Great Society

Notes

References

Chapter 28: Lyndon B. Johnson and the World

References

Chapter 29: The Legacy of Lyndon B. Johnson

Notes

References

Bibliography

Index

Blackwell Companions to American History

This series provides essential and authoritative overviews of the scholarship that has shaped our present understanding of the American past. Edited by eminent historians, each volume tackles one of the major periods or themes of American history, with individual topics authored by key scholars who have spent considerable time in research on the questions and controversies that have sparked debate in their field of interest. The volumes are accessible for the non-specialist, while also engaging scholars seeking a reference to the historiography or future concerns.

Published

A Companion to the American RevolutionEdited by Jack P. Greene and J. R. Pole

A Companion to 19th-Century AmericaEdited by William L. Barney

A Companion to the American SouthEdited by John B. Boles

A Companion to American Indian HistoryEdited by Philip J. Deloria and Neal Salisbury

A Companion to American Women's HistoryEdited by Nancy Hewitt

A Companion to Post-1945 AmericaEdited by Jean-Christophe Agnew and Roy Rosenzweig

A Companion to the Vietnam WarEdited by Marilyn Young and Robert Buzzanco

A Companion to Colonial AmericaEdited by Daniel Vickers

A Companion to 20th-Century AmericaEdited by Stephen J. Whitfield

A Companion to the American WestEdited by William Deverell

A Companion to American Foreign RelationsEdited by Robert Schulzinger

A Companion to the Civil War and ReconstructionEdited by Lacy K. Ford

A Companion to American TechnologyEdited by Carroll Pursell

A Companion to African-American HistoryEdited by Alton Hornsby

A Companion to American ImmigrationEdited by Reed Ueda

A Companion to American Cultural HistoryEdited by Karen Halttunen

A Companion to California HistoryEdited by William Deverell and David Igler

A Companion to American Military HistoryEdited by James Bradford

A Companion to Los AngelesEdited by William Deverell and Greg Hise

A Companion to American Environmental HistoryEdited by Douglas Cazaux Sackman

A Companion to Benjamin FranklinEdited by David Waldstreicher

In preparation

A Companion to American Urban HistoryEdited by David Quigley

A Companion to American Legal HistoryEdited by Sally Hadden and Alfred L. Brophy

A Companion to World War Two (2 volumes)Edited by Thomas Zeiler

A Companion to the History of American ScienceEdited by Mark Largent

A Companion to Supreme Court History (2 volumes)Edited by John Vile

A Companion to American Sports HistoryEdited by Steven Riess

PRESIDENTIAL COMPANIONS

Published

A Companion to Franklin D. RooseveltEdited by William Pederson

A Companion to Richard M. NixonEdited by Melvin Small

A Companion to Thomas JeffersonEdited by Francis D. Cogliano

A Companion to Lyndon B. JohnsonEdited by Mitchell Lerner

A Companion to Theodore RooseveltEdited by Serge Ricard

In preparation

A Companion to Abraham LincolnEdited by Michael Green

A Companion to George WashingtonEdited by Edward G. Lengel

A Companion to Harry S. TrumanEdited by Daniel S. Margolies

A Companion to Andrew JacksonEdited by Sean Patrick Adams

A Companion to Woodrow WilsonEdited by Ross A. Kennedy

A Companion to Dwight D. EisenhowerEdited by Chester J. Pach

A Companion to Ronald ReaganEdited by Andrew L. Johns

A Companion to James Madison and James MonroeEdited by Stuart Leibiger

A Companion to John Adams and John Quincy AdamsEdited by David Waldstreicher

A Companion to the Antebellum Presidents, 1837–61Edited by Joel Silbey

A Companion to the Reconstruction Presidents, 1865–81Edited by Edward Frantz

A Companion to Gerald R. Ford and Jimmy CarterEdited by V. Scott Kaufman

A Companion to Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert HooverEdited by Katherine A. S. Sibley

This edition first published 2012© 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

ISBN 9781444333893 (hbk)

A companion to Lyndon B. Johnson / edited by Mitchell B. Lerner.

p. cm. – (Blackwell companions to american history)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4443-3389-3 (hardcover: alk. paper) 1. Johnson, Lyndon B. (Lyndon Baines), 1908-1973. 2. Johnson, Lyndon B. (Lyndon Baines), 1908-1973–Social and political views. 3. United States–Politics and government–1963-1969. 4. United States–Social conditions–1960-1980. 5. United States–Foreign relations–1963-1969. 6. Vietnam War, 1961-1975. 7. Presidents–United States–Biography. I. Lerner, Mitchell B., 1968-

E846.C59 2012

973.923092–dc23                                                       2011023901

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This book is published in the following electronic formats: ePDFs [ISBN 9781444347463]; Wiley OnlineLibrary [ISBN 9781444347494]; ePub [ISBN 9781444347470]; Mobi [ISBN 9781444347487]

Notes on Contributors

Pierre Asselin is Associate Professor of History at Hawaii Pacific University in Honolulu. He is the author of A Bitter Peace: Washington, Hanoi, and the Making of the Paris Agreement (2002); “Choosing Peace: Hanoi and the Geneva Agreement on Vietnam, 1954–1955” in Journal of Cold War Studies (2007); and “The Democratic Republic of Vietnam and the 1954 Geneva Conference: A Revisionist Critique” in Cold War History (2011). His current book project examines Hanoi's revolutionary strategy in the period 1954 to 1965.

Edward D. Berkowitz is Professor of History and Public Policy and Public Administration at the George Washington University. His books include biographies of Johnson-era policy-makers Robert Ball and Wilbur Cohen and books on the welfare state, disability policy, health care, and the 1970s. His recent book is Mass Appeal: The Formative Era of Movies, Radio, and Television (2011).

Lisa M. Burns is Associate Professor of Media Studies at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, CT. She is the author of First Ladies and the Fourth Estate: Press Framing of Presidential Wives (2008). She has also published scholarly articles on first lady media coverage in various journals and has been widely quoted in the local and national media regarding coverage of women in politics.

Larry DeWitt is a public historian at the U.S. Social Security Administration. A recognized authority on the history of the Social Security program, he is the author of numerous articles and essays on the subject and is the principal editor of Social Security: A Documentary History.

John Dumbrell is Professor of Government at Durham University, United Kingdom. He is a graduate of Cambridge and Keele Universities. Among his books are President Lyndon Johnson and Soviet Communism (2004: winner of the 2005 Richard E. Neustadt book prize for the best book on an American political subject by a UK-based author), A Special Relationship: Anglo-American Relations from the Cold War to Iraq (2006), and Clinton's Foreign Policy: Between the Bushes (2009). He is currently working on a book for Palgrave/Macmillan to be entitled Rethinking the Vietnam War.

Donna R. Gabaccia is the Rudolph J. Vecoli Chair in Immigration History and Director of the Immigration History Research Center at the University of Minnesota. She is author of many books and articles on immigrant life in the United States, on gender, class, and labor (recently, co-edited with Vicki Ruiz, American Dreaming, Global Realities: Rethinking U.S. Immigration History, 2006), and on Italian migration around the world (recently, co-edited with Loretta Baldassar, Intimacies across Borders: The Italian Nation in a Mobile World, 2010).

Kent B. Germany is Associate Professor of History at the University of South Carolina. He is the author of New Orleans After the Promises: Poverty, Citizenship, and the Search for the Great Society (2007), editor of Lyndon B. Johnson and Civil Rights (2010), and co-editor of The Kennedy Assassination and the Transfer of Power (2005), Toward the Great Society (2007), and Mississippi Burning and the Passage of the Civil Rights Act (2011).

Peter L. Hahn is Professor of History and Department Chair at Ohio State University. He is the author of five books on U.S. diplomacy in the Middle East, recently Missions Accomplished?: The United States and Iraq since World War I (2011) and Crisis and Crossfire: The United States and the Middle East since 1945 (2005). Professor Hahn is also the Executive Director of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. He earned his Ph.D. at Vanderbilt University and his B.A. summa cum laude, at Ohio Wesleyan University.

Susan M. Hartmann is Arts and Humanities Distinguished Professor of History at the Ohio State University. Her books include The Home Front and Beyond: American Women in the 1940s (1982), From Margin to Mainstream: American Women and Politics since 1960 (1989), and The Other Feminists: Activists in the Liberal Establishment (1998); and she is a co-author of the textbook, The American Promise: A History of the United States (4th edn., 2008).

Andrew L. Johns is Assistant Professor of History at Brigham Young University and the David M. Kennedy Center for International Studies. He is the author of Vietnam's Second Front: Domestic Politics, the Republican Party, and the War (2010), co-editor, with Kathryn C. Statler, of The Eisenhower Administration, the Third World, and the Globalization of the Cold War (2006), and editor of A Companion to Ronald Reagan (forthcoming).

Robert David Johnson is Professor of History at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center. Two recent books of his are All the Way with LBJ (2009) and Until Proven Innocent (2007, co-authored with Stuart Taylor).

Mark Atwood Lawrence is Associate Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin. He is author of Assuming the Burden: Europe and the American Commitment to War in Vietnam (2005) and The Vietnam War: A Concise International History (2008). He is now working on a study of U.S. policy-making toward the developing world in the 1960s.

Mitchell Lerner is Associate Professor of History at the Ohio State University. He is author of The Pueblo Incident: A Spy Ship and the Failure of American Foreign Policy (2002), and editor of Looking Back at LBJ (2005). He has held the Mary Ball Washington Distinguished Fulbright Chair at UC-Dublin, and been a fellow at the University of Virginia's Miller Center for Public Affairs.

Maddalena Marinari is an Assistant Professor of U.S. history at St. Bonaventure University and specializes in migration and ethnic history. She is currently revisinga manuscript that explores the impact of restrictive immigration policies on Italian and Jewish communities in the United States from 1882 to 1965. She has presented her work at numerous national conferences and received funding from several national organizations for her research.

Lawrence J. McAndrews is Professor of History at St. Norbert College in De Pere, WI. He is the author of Broken Ground: John F. Kennedy and the Politics of Education (1991) and The Era of Education: The Presidents and the Schools, 1965–2001 (2006).

Alan McPherson is Associate Professor of International and Area Studies and ConocoPhillips Chair in Latin American Studies at the University of Oklahoma. He is the author of the prize-winning Yankee No! Anti-Americanism in U.S.-Latin American Relations (2003) and of Intimate Ties, Bitter Struggles: The United States and Latin America since 1945 (2006).

Martin V. Melosi received his Ph.D. from the University of Texas (1975). He is Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen University Professor and Director of the Center for Public History at the University of Houston. He has authored or edited 16 books and more than 80 articles. He specializes in environmental, urban, and energy history.

Sidney M. Milkis is the White Burkett Miller Professor of the Department of Politics and Assistant Director for Studies in Democracy and Governance at the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia. His books include: The President and the Parties: The Transformation of the American Party System since the New Deal (1993); Political Parties and Constitutional Government: Remaking American Democracy (1999); Presidential Greatness (2000), co-authored with Marc Landy; The American Presidency: Origins and Development, 1776–2011 (6th edn., 2011), co-authored with Michael Nelson; and Theodore Roosevelt, the Progressive Party, and the Transformation of American Democracy (2009). He is the co-editor, with Jerome Mileur, of thee volumes on twentieth-century political reform: Progressivism and the New Democracy (1999); The New Deal and the Triumph of Liberalism (2002); and The Great Society and the High Tide of Liberalism (2005).

Lorena Oropeza is an Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Davis. She is the author of ¡Raza Sí! ¡Guerra No!: Chicano Protest and Patriotism during the Viet Nam War Era.

Andrew Preston is Senior Lecturer in History and a Fellow of Clare College at Cambridge University. In addition to several journal articles and book chapters, he is the author of The War Council: McGeorge Bundy, the NSC, and Vietnam (2006) and co-editor, with Fredrik Logevall, of Nixon in the World: American Foreign Relations, 1969–1977 (2008).

Donald A. Ritchie is Historian of the United States Senate. He has published numerous articles on American political history and oral history, including “Oral History in the Federal Government,” which appeared in the Journal of American History. His recent books are The U.S. Congress: A Very Short Introduction (2010), Electing FDR: The New Deal Campaign of 1932 (2007), and Doing Oral History: A Practical Guide (2nd edn., 2003). Other publications include The Senate (1988) and Press Gallery: Congress and the Washington Correspondents (1991). He also edits the Executive Sessions of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (Historical Series). A former president of the Oral History Association and Oral History in the Mid-Atlantic Region (OHMAR), he received OHMAR's Forrest C. Pogue Award for distinguished contributions to the field of oral history.

Jeff Roche is an Associate Professor of History at the College of Wooster. He is the author of Restructured Resistance and several essays on conservative politics. He is also the editor of The Political Culture of the New West and the co-editor of The Conservative Sixties. His forthcoming book examines the origins and evolution of American conservatism.

Doug Rossinow is Professor of History and Chair of the Department of History at Metropolitan State University in Saint Paul, Minnesota. His works include The Politics of Authenticity: Liberalism, Christianity, and the New Left in America (1998) and Visions of Progress: The Left-Liberal Tradition in America (2008). He is currently writing a history of America in the 1980s.

Nicholas Evan Sarantakes is the author of four books, including the recent Dropping the Torch: Jimmy Carter, the Olympic Boycott, and the Cold War (2011). A fellow of the Royal Historical Society, he has won five writing awards, including two for articles on Lyndon Baines Johnson.

Sean J. Savage is Professor of Political Science at Saint Mary's College. He is the author of Roosevelt: The Party Leader, 1932–1945 (1991), Truman and the Democratic Party (1997), and JFK, LBJ, and the Democratic Party (2004).

Edward R. Schmitt is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside in Kenosha. He is the author of President of the Other America: Robert Kennedy and the Politics of Poverty (2010).

Robert D. Schulzinger is the Director of the International Affairs Program at CU-Boulder, and a College of Arts & Sciences Professor of Distinction. He is the author or co-author of 12 books and over 60 articles on the history of U.S. foreign relations and recent American history. Among his books are The Wise Men of Foreign Affairs: The History of the Council on Foreign Relations; Henry Kissinger: Doctor of Diplomacy; A Time for War: The United States and Vietnam, 1941–1975; Present Tense: The United States since 1945; and A Time for Peace: The Legacy of the Vietnam War.

Thomas Alan Schwartz is Professor of History at Vanderbilt University. He is the author of the books America's Germany: John J. McCloy and the Federal Republic of Germany (1991) and Lyndon Johnson and Europe: In the Shadow of Vietnam (2003), and with Matthias Schulz, the edited volume, The Strained Alliance: US-European Relations in the 1970s (2009). He has received fellowships from the German Historical Institute, the Norwegian Nobel Institute, the Woodrow Wilson Center, and the Social Science Research Center. He served on the Historical Advisory Committee of the Department of State, and was the President of the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations.

Marc J. Selverstone is Associate Professor and Assistant Director for Presidential Studies at the Miller Center at the University of Virginia, where he transcribes and annotates the presidential recordings of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. He is the author of Constructing the Monolith: The United States, Great Britain, and International Communism, 1945–1950, which won the 2010 Bernath Prize from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations.

David Steigerwald is Associate Professor of History at the Ohio State University. He is the author of three books and a co-author of one. His essays have appeared in the Journal of American History and Labor History, among many other places.

Jeff Woods is an Associate Professor and Department Head of the History and Political Science Department at Arkansas Tech University. He is the author of two books, Black Struggle Red Scare: Segregation and Anticommunism in the South 1948–1968 (2004) and Richard B. Russell: Southern Nationalism and American Foreign Policy (2007).

Mary Ann Wynkoop is the Director of the American Studies Program at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. She is the author of Dissent in the Heartland: Indiana University in the 1960s (2002) and teaches courses on the 1960s, women's history, and film and American culture.

Introduction

Mitchell B. Lerner

A few minutes after 2:30 p.m. on November 27, 1963, President Lyndon Baines Johnson entered the chamber of the United States House of Representatives. A standing ovation from the collected dignitaries – congressmen, senators, Supreme Court justices, government officials, foreign representatives, and more – filled the room as LBJ, who had been president for less than a week since the assassination of John F. Kennedy, somberly made his way to the podium. Once the audience returned to its seats, LBJ opened the black notebook that contained his first presidential speech. “All I have,” he began, with words that would be remembered by generations, “I would have given gladly not to be standing here today” (Public Papers, 1964: 8). The 27-minute speech would be widely regarded as among the best he had ever given. The Washington Post called it “among the best of the state papers in American history,” and noted it was “hard to improve upon it by the alteration of a single sentence or a single sentiment” (Washington Post, November 28, 1963, p. A20). Although the speech made a few specific promises, above all else it called for its listeners to overcome the sense of crisis and affirm the promise of America. “This nation has experienced a profound shock,” LBJ declared, “and in this critical moment, it is our duty, yours and mine, as the Government of the United States, to do away with uncertainty and doubt and delay, and to show that we are capable of decisive action; that from the brutal loss of our leader we will derive not weakness, but strength; that we can and will act and act now.” For the next five years, as the authors of the 29 essays contained in this volume make clear, the administration of Lyndon B. Johnson would certainly “act and act now.”

Within 24 hours of the assassination, Johnson was envisioning a sweeping series of reforms that would reshape the country. His first night as president saw him summon his most trusted aides to his bedroom for a late night monologue about his plans:

I'm going to pass Kennedy's civil rights bill, which has been hung up too long in the Congress . . . After that, we'll pass legislation that allows everyone anywhere in this country to vote, with all the barriers down. And that's not all. We're going to get a law that says that every boy and girl in this country, no matter how poor or the color of their skin, or the region they came from, is going to be able to get all the education they can, by loan, scholarship, or grant, right from the federal government. And I aim to pass Harry Truman's medical insurance bill that got nowhere before.                            (Valenti, 2003: 37)

He would do it all, and more. The administration's signature effort at domestic reform was in the realm of Civil Rights, where he generally receives much praise for his critical role in the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. More hotly contested, however, are his efforts, as he promised in a famous speech in 1964, to “enrich and elevate our national life, and to advance the quality of our American civilization,” by creating a “Great Society.” LBJ launched a broad effort to expand programs focused on education, urban renewal, the environment, poverty, health care, and much more. These efforts made an incredible impact on the nation. It was during Johnson's presidency that the United States created Medicare and Medicaid, and dramatically increased efforts at medical research and disease prevention; by 1976 Medicare and Medicaid combined to pay for medical services for 20% of the American population (Matusow, 1984: 228). It was during Johnson's presidency that federal spending on education exploded, increasing from approximately $36 billion to $55 billion; soon 25% of American college students were receiving federal financial assistance from LBJ's Higher Education Act (Bornet, 1983: 126; Dallek, 1998: 202). It was during Johnson's presidency that annual federal spending on the poor rose from nearly $12 billion to $27 billion; that the United States passed one of the most significant immigration laws in its history, one that dramatically and forever altered the number and backgrounds of those coming to America's shores; and that the United States passed more conservation and beautification laws (approximately 300) than had been passed in all of the nation's history combined (Matusow, 1984: 240; Melosi, 1987: 113).

There is, of course, much that is disputed about the results of these programs. Some claim that the Great Society was largely successful, pointing to a decline in poverty rates, improved environmental conditions, expanded health care and resources, and more. Others, particularly political conservatives, argue that the Great Society failed, insisting that its gains are overstated and that it fostered a large and inefficient federal government that drained resources from the private sector and fostered generations of dependency; one conservative columnist in 2005 called it “a subtle destroyer of the human spirit” (Buchanan, 2005). Still others find the programs wanting, but for very different reasons, arguing not that they did too much but that they failed to do enough to address fundamental wealth and power imbalances in American society; “This, then, may serve as the epitaph of the famous War on Poverty,” concluded one historian: “ ‘Declared but Never Fought' ” (Matusow, 1984: 270). Regardless of one's conclusions about the specific nature of its impact, however, most historians agree that the impact of Johnson's presidency on American society was among the most significant in the nation's history.

The international aspect of the Johnson presidency was equally momentous. Unsurprisingly, the Vietnam War has garnered the bulk of the attention, and is widely seen as Johnson's most significant foreign policy legacy. Even now, some five decades after LBJ fatefully ordered the 9th Marine Expeditionary Brigade (the first deployment of battalion-sized U.S. combat units) to Da Nang, the nation struggles to come to grips with a war that cost 58,000 American lives, strained the country's finances and its international reputation, and divided the population like no other event since the Civil War. The passage of time has allowed for more dispassionate analysis of America's involvement, sparking a few defenses of Johnson's decision-making and some slight mitigation of his responsibility. Still, few have entirely absolved him of blame for one of the country's greatest foreign policy failures. It is no coincidence that two of the best works on America's descent into the Vietnam quagmire carry the same name: “Lyndon Johnson's War” (Berman, 1989; Hunt, 1997).

Yet, as time has passed, historians have found much to evaluate beyond Vietnam. Johnson was in charge during a major war in the Middle East, one with potential consequences so severe that it sparked the first use of the hot-line, a teletype link established after the Cuban Missile Crisis intended to allow instantaneous communications between Soviet and American leaders in times of major crisis. He was in charge when North Korea captured the USS Pueblo, an American spy ship operating off the Korean coast in 1968, and held its crew of 82 men prisoner for a year of beatings, torture, and public humiliations. He was in charge when 23,000 American troops landed in the Dominican Republic, when military coups were launched in Brazil, Argentina, and Bolivia, and when Panamanian riots began the process of revising the Panama Canal treaty. He was in charge when NATO members Greece and Turkey came to the brink of war, and when rivals India and Pakistan crossed that brink. He was in charge when the Chinese detonated their first nuclear device, and when Warsaw Pact forces invaded Czechoslovakia to crush the liberalization program directed by Party First Secretary Alexander Dubcek. He was in charge for a thaw in Cold War relations, which included the liberalization of trade and exchange programs, a treaty prohibiting the placement of nuclear weapons in outer space, and the creation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. It was an incredibly tumultuous and often dangerous five years. If LBJ had ever lamented, concluded one historian, “that half a world had fallen on him, he would not have missed the truth by much” (Brands, 1995: 4).

Considering the number of major events that occurred during the Johnson presidency, it is no surprise that the sheer volume of scholarly writings has been almost equally overwhelming. Portraits of the president and analyses of his policies appeared en masse as soon as Johnson left the White House, and have continued ever since. New materials that have emerged over the past decade, most notably the declassification of almost a thousand hours of secretly recorded White House meetings and phone conversations, and the opening of the archives of many of the former Communist-bloc states, have brought the literature into almost unparalleled heights of quantity and often quality. What follows in these 29 chapters is an attempt to bring under the microscope the different interpretations of many of these important aspects of the Johnson presidency. It is a difficult task, and I admire the authors for rising above personality and polemic to produce a collection of balanced and nuanced assessments. Readers of this volume can follow LBJ's life from its origins on a small farm in Central Texas through his ascension to the pinnacle of American power. They can learn not just about great crises and famous accomplishments but also about the lesser known events and issues that marked the era. They can learn not just about Lyndon Johnson the president but also about Lyndon Johnson the person. And above all else, they can learn about America during a critical period in its history. At the 1971 opening of the LBJ Presidential Library in Austin, Texas, Lyndon Johnson, less than two years before his death, admitted, “I do not know how this period will be regarded in years to come. But that is not the point. This Library will show the facts . . . not just the joy and triumphs, but the sorrow and failures, too” (University of Texas, press release). It is my hope that this collection will also “show the facts,” and in doing so will help readers understand exactly how history has come to regard the years of Lyndon B. Johnson.

References

Berman, Larry (1989). Lyndon Johnson's War. Norton.

Bornet, Vaughn Davis (1983). The Presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson. University Press of Kansas.

Brands, Henry W. (1995). The Wages of Globalism. Oxford University Press.

Buchanan, Patrick (2005). “ The Great Society: Failure of an Idea and a People,” Human Events September 14.

Dallek, Robert (1998). Flawed Giant. Oxford University Press.

Hunt, Michael H. (1997). Lyndon Johnson's War. Hill and Wang.

Matusow, Allen J. (1984). The Unraveling of America. Harper and Row.

Melosi, Martin V. (1987). “Lyndon Johnson and Environmental Policy,” in Divine, R. (ed.), Exploring the Johnson Years, Vol. 2. University Press of Kansas, 113–49.

Public Papers (1964). “Address before a Joint Session of the Congress, November 27, 1963” (1964). Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Lyndon B. Johnson, 1963–64, Volume I. Government Printing Office, 8.

University of Texas Press Release (1971). May 22, 1971, “5/22/71, Remarks by Lyndon B. Johnson at the LBJ Library Dedication,” Statements File, Box 300, LBJ Library.

Valenti, Jack J. (2003). “Lyndon Johnson,” in Cowger, T.W. and Markman, S. (eds.), Lyndon Johnson Remembered: An Intimate Portrait of a Presidency. Rowan and Littlefield, 33–42.

Part I

Pre-Presidential Years

Chapter One

The Changing South

Jeff Woods

Lyndon Johnson's contemporaries could not decide whether he was really a Southerner. Hubert Humphrey insisted that Johnson “did not consider himself a Southerner” while A. Willis Robertson said that he and other Southerners “called him Southern.” Clinton Anderson commented that “while he was Democratic leader, Lyndon Johnson was as Southern as hominy grits.” On the other hand, Stuart Alsop suggested that LBJ was a “Westerner at heart rather than a Southerner.” William S. White avoided any definitive conclusion, reminding readers that the Texan came from a historically Confederate State while declaring that he had never heard LBJ speak nostalgically about the old South. Johnson himself did not help to clarify things in his memoir, The Vantage Point (1971). He explained that in “Stonewall and Johnson City I never was part of the Old Confederacy,” yet, “that Southern heritage meant a great deal to me.”

Left with such incongruous viewpoints, historians have drawn a wide range of conclusions about LBJ as Southerner. Ronnie Dugger, in The Politician: From Frontier to Master of the Senate (1980), placed Johnson at the crossroads of regions: “He was a wild Christian, a woman-ridden outlaw, complexly mixed from the day of his birth in the slave-owning whites' honor-ridden South, the Indian-fighting range riders' West, and the state that gloried in itself as if it was still a nation . . . And just here, in the rocky fracture of the one great American state that is both South and West, Lyndon Johnson received his being” (pp. 26–7). Paul Conkin, in Big Daddy from the Pedernales: Lyndon B. Johnson (1986), drew a similar conclusion: “Born at the unclear boundaries of South and West, he [Johnson] never fully identified with either and, as political need dictated, alternatively claimed one or the other” (p. 7). In Lone Star Rising: Lyndon Johnson and His Times, 1908–1960 (1991), Robert Dallek argued that LBJ, despite “Southern roots,” was not a “professional Southerner” like Richard Russell, and his main contribution lay in his “nationalization of the South and the West” (pp. 7–8, 139, 380). Robert Caro, in The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Master of the Senate (2002), by contrast, emphasized a twenty year period when Johnson had been “not merely a member of the Senate's Southern anti-civil rights bloc, but an active member . . . one of the South's strategists” (p. xv). In The White House Looks South (2005), Bill Leuchtenberg analyzed a broad range of commentary on Johnson's Southernness to conclude that however hard LBJ tried to become a national politician, the Texan “could never altogether overcome his reputation as a sectionalist” (p. 332). And Randall Woods, in LBJ: Architect of American Ambition (2006), focused on Johnson's personal vision for the region, suggesting that LBJ was most Southern in his tireless advocacy for an economically, politically, and socially modern South (pp. 134–5).

Part of the problem in describing Johnson as a Southerner rests in static, reductionist definitions of the “South.” Southern historians have provided a familiar checklist of essential regional characteristics. Ulrich Phillips in his 1928 American Historical Review article “The Central Theme of Southern History” identified the first and most essential of Southern traits, its preoccupation with race. Twelve Southerners in I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition (1930) added the idea that agrarian traditions, besieged by industrialization and modernization, were fundamentally Southern. W. J. Cash in The Mind of the South (1941) mixed in religious bigotry, anti-intellectualism, and a history of bondage that set the South apart from the North and adrift from the national quest for equality and liberty. Sheldon Hackney in an article entitled “Southern Violence,” for the American Historical Review (1969) and John Shelton Reed in his book The Enduring South (1972) aggregated and synthesized traits to conclude that the South's underlying characteristic was a regional sense of grievance and a particular “siege mentality” based on its experiences during Reconstruction. David Hackett Fischer's book Albion's Seed (1989) associated the South primarily with its Scotch Irish linguistic and cultural roots, while Ray Arsenault in “The Folklore of Southern Demagoguery,” an article found in the book Is There a Southern Political Tradition? (1996), identified a unique Southern political style that played on the passions and prejudices of the region's people. And Bertram Wyatt-Brown's Honor and Violence in the Old South (1986) identified unique Southern constructions of honor and codes of violent behavior.

These attempts to describe the heart of the Southern identity, while enlightening, emphasize continuity over change. Yet as C. Vann Woodward reminded his readers in The Burden of Southern History (1968), the standard list of Southern characteristics, however accurate in a given period, “often changes markedly over the years, sometimes under one's very eyes” (pp. ix, 27–8). John Egerton in The Americanization of Dixie: The Southernization of America (1974) went as far as suggesting that the South over time was even losing its distinctiveness. More recently James C. Cobb's Away Down South (2005) argued that Southern identity was best explained not by a list of static traits but by the points at which those traits were challenged and changed. Recognizing continuity within change and the relativity of perception, Cobb maintained, was the key to understanding the South.

Johnson, like the South, was far from static. His and the region's identity shifted depending on active personal and political relationships. Along with many of his fellow Southerners, LBJ was sometimes parochial, demagogic, and preoccupied with race, while at other times he was nationalist, moderate, and progressive. He changed, and the South changed. Johnson biographers, as a whole, have described this ebb and flow while not always fully recognizing its significance. Five phases of LBJ's Southern identity emerge from these works – his ancestry and youth; his pre-political career; his time as a regional representative; his move to become a national leader; and his presidency. Tracing biographers' treatments of Johnson's evolving identity as a Southerner through these phases reveals a South as dynamic as the man himself.

The facts of Johnson's upbringing and heritage have been repeated by historians without significant variation. Johnson was born and raised in Texas, a state of the old Confederacy. The Hill Country of his youth was agriculturally dependent and suffered the residual effects of slavery, Civil War, and Reconstruction. Johnson biographers agreed that he was most definitely Southern by the particular geographic and historic circumstances of his birth. LBJ's great-great-grandfather on his father's side was an Anglo-Celt immigrant, Georgia farmer, and slave owner. His father's grandfather was a slave holder in Alabama who migrated with his family to Texas the year Texas became a state. His father's father and uncles fought for the Confederacy, and his father inherited Populist political leanings. Johnson's mother's family originally came to North Carolina from Scotland. Her grandfather was a Baptist preacher and legislator in Alabama who migrated to Texas in the 1850s. Her father was a Confederate veteran. She attended Baylor University as a literature major and at one point even planned to make a career of writing novels about the Old South. LBJ married a Southerner as well. Lady Bird Johnson grew up in a Southern mansion on a cotton plantation near the border between Texas and Louisiana. Her family had deep roots in Alabama and boasted several Confederate veterans.

That Johnson spoke Southern, some historians have suggested, was indicative of his regional identity as well. As Kent Germany pointed out in a Miller Center article entitled “‘I'm Not Lying About That One’: Manhood, LBJ, and the Politics of Speaking Southern” (2002), Johnson shared a common language with Southerners that reinforced his bond with regionalists throughout his life. LBJ and other Southerners talked about hunting, football, the weather, honor, manhood, politics, and even race in an idiosyncratic Southern way. Perhaps most tellingly, Robert Caro highlighted in Means of Ascent (1990), when Johnson wanted to, he had the “slow drawl of the South: when Lyndon Johnson said ‘Negroes,’ for example, it came out, despite all that speech coaches could do, as ‘Nigroes,’ close to ‘niggers’” (p. xviii).

Yet several historians have pointed out that Johnson was never as fully Southern as blood, soil, and accent might suggest. His father had been something of a political rebel and had foresworn some of the more typical Southern routes to power, like acquiescing to the Ku Klux Klan. Nor was Johnson's hometown environment fully Southern in its racial makeup or attitudes. Ronnie Dugger wrote in The Politician (1980), Lyndon Johnson may have “absorbed the Southern heritage from his parents, but there was little in the daily life of the town to make him a racist” (p. 71). Dugger drew on comments Johnson himself made in The Vantage Point (1971): “There were no ‘darkies’ or plantations in the arid hill country where I grew up. I never sat on my parents' or grandparents' knees listening to nostalgic tales of the ante-bellum South.” Being Southern gave him “a feeling of belonging and a sense of continuity,” but he was embarrassed by the “certain parochial feelings that flared up defensively whenever Northerners described the South as ‘a blot on our national conscience’ or ‘a stain on our country's democracy’” (p. 155). Several biographers, in addition, argued that the place and environment of Johnson's birth and youth made him western as much as Southern. Ronnie Dugger, Paul Conkin, and Randall Woods, among others, emphasized that Texas was at the crossroads of regions. The state was big enough and diverse enough to claim many cultural identities. And some historians deemphasized region as a critical influence altogether. Johnson's Southern roots are certainly downplayed in Doris Kearns' Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream (1976), while things Southern are conspicuously missing from Robert A. Caro's biography of Johnson's early years The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power (1982). On the whole, the South as commonly conceived was certainly a part of Johnson's heritage and upbringing but proved only marginally useful to historians in identifying who he was.

Historians' discussions of Johnson's early career addressed endemic Southern problems, namely race, education, and poverty. Most agreed that Johnson did not easily fit the poor, anti-intellectual, racist Southern stereotype, but he nevertheless had to conform in particular ways to his time and place in a Southern setting. His teaching job in Cotulla marked the first test of his public decisions about racial prejudice and segregation. In his first job out of college, Johnson taught at a segregated Mexican-American grade school near the Mexican border. Robert Dallek in Lone Star Rising (1991) noted LBJ's compassion for his students amidst the poverty, prejudice, and illiteracy of Cotulla. Their wretched living conditions, Dallek wrote, struck a “sympathetic chord” in Johnson that inspired the Texan's desire to nourish their “little brown bodies,” minds, and souls. Dallek's rendering implicitly contrasted Southern and non-Southern traits in Johnson. Johnson's whipping of Spanish students who dared speak English in class arguably smacked of a stereotypically Southern nativism, but Johnson's compassion for minorities and desire for their equal status in society did not (pp. 78–80). Other biographers examining Johnson's early career offer alternative arguments for balancing LBJ's Southern and non-Southern traits. Randall Woods in LBJ (2006) emphasized the political risk Johnson took on behalf of Mexican children. The larger Southern white population of Cotulla, Woods argued, considered LBJ's embracing of the latino community “dangerously subversive” (pp. 62–5). Robert Caro in Master of the Senate (2002), on the other hand, concluded that Johnson's “compassion” invariably took a back seat to “calculation.” He argued that LBJ was more complicit than not in the segregationist system that kept minorities subservient. Johnson's experience teaching Mexican students, Caro maintained, was less a rebellion against Southern racial norms than racist paternalism (pp. 732–4).

LBJ's work with black minorities as director of Texas's National Youth Administration (NYA) offered historians additional points of debate regarding Johnson's Southern racial attitudes. Ronnie Dugger (1980) demonstrated that as NYA director, “Johnson began using his public power covertly on behalf of blacks.” LBJ visited Negro colleges, offered surplus funds earmarked for white colleges to black colleges, and applied administrative savings to black needs (pp. 187–8). Randall Woods concluded that “if Johnson had had his preference, the Texas NYA would have been completely color-blind,” but the author also added that “the state director realized there were limits.” As Johnson put it to Chuck Corson, “the racial question during the last 100 years in Texas, has resolved itself into a definite system of mores and customs which cannot be upset overnight” (p. 113). Johnson's recognition of Southern political realities in part drove his reluctance to appoint a black member to the NYA state advisory board. Robert Dallek concluded that “it was clear to him [Johnson] that a reputation as a successful state director and all that would mean for his political future partly depended on satisfying the demands from Washington for action in behalf of blacks without touching off local racial antagonisms.” Dallek (1991) acknowledged the idea that “Lyndon's position on blacks was purely expediency,” but he added that while the Texan's “Southern roots and an attitude common to his place and time moved him in private to speak of blacks as ‘niggers’ and describe them in official correspondence as ‘negroes,’ he was warmly disposed to giving disadvantaged blacks opportunities for education and employment which allowed them to help themselves” (pp. 137–9).

Biographers agreed that Johnson was at his most Southern in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Even though LBJ was a devoted New Dealer, Ronnie Dugger explained, Southern political expectations limited the Texan's ability to support legislation that posed an overt challenge to segregation. LBJ supported the minimum wage and farming legislation that helped his black and Mexican constituents, “but on legislation that could be recognized as pro-black, Johnson seemed to be just another Southern racist” (pp. 215–16). By the late 1940s and into the early 1950s, Dugger argued, Johnson's Southern conservatism intensified into “Red-baiting and reaction.” In 1948 Johnson ran for the Senate on a ticket opposing communists, labor unions, and civil rights reform. Johnson “threw his Stetson into the crowd,” Dugger wrote, “and then he condemned proposals for the equal opportunity laws he would later administer, stormed against civil rights bills he would later sign into law, blasted labor bosses he would later court, and pledged to fight the socialized medicine his medicare would later resemble” (pp. 307–17). Eric Goldman suggested in The Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson (1969) that while Johnson's political views on race and the economy were not fundamentally as extreme as many of his Southern colleagues, he publicly identified himself with Southerners. Goldman described Johnson's political style in these years as “Fergusonism” after the famed Texas politicians Ma and Pa Ferguson. The author argued that this approach was not as fundamentally racist or anti-corporate as common Southern demagoguery. Nevertheless, when Johnson appealed to “we of the South,” fighting federal laws designed to “enslave a minority [the South]” in his 1949 inaugural Senate speech, it was just pure down home Dixie (p. 45). Ultimately, Theodore H. White calculated in his book The Making of the President, 1964 (1965), Johnson voted “as a Southerner, with the other Southerners, no less than 39 times on matters of civil rights” between 1940 and 1960 (p. 303). As Bill Leuchtenberg contended in The White House Looks South (2005), “a national identity Johnson may have had, but for two decades no one could differentiate his behavior from that of any other Southern congressman who dutifully followed the lead of ardent white supremacists” (pp. 245–6).

Whether Johnson's Southern conservative jag was the result of political necessity or personal proclivity has been debated among scholars. Johnson frequently altered his public persona to suit particular audiences. Robert Caro wrote in Master of the Senate (2002) that LBJ's “accent changed depending on whom he was talking to” but especially in front of Southerners, Johnson adopted a “syrupy Southern drawl” (p. xv). Complicating matters, Johnson was apt to hold seemingly contradictory, inconsistent, even erratic personal opinions about the most definitively Southern issue, race. Johnson “niggered” his black employee, Robert Parker, unmercifully when white Southern racists were around, many biographers have pointed out, but LBJ also gave a black woman his seat on a segregated Washington D. C. streetcar. In discussing Johnson's opposition to the Fair Employment Protection Commission, anti-lynching and anti-poll tax legislation in the mid-1940s Robert Dallek wrote, “While Johnson genuinely wished to see greater opportunities and improved conditions for blacks that would ultimately serve all Southerners, he also shared conventional Southern attitudes toward blacks” (1991: 276–8). Yet as Randall Woods suggested, in arguing his opposition to the FEPC, Johnson never justified his position in terms of race; rather LBJ contended that the legislation enacting the FEPC violated the sanctity of contract between employer and employee. There was, Woods argued, “at the core of LBJ's attitude toward African Americans, a floor beneath which he would not sink.” Even at his most Southern, Johnson believed “that blacks must be part of the body politic.” Nevertheless, Woods conceded, LBJ also knew that “there was nothing more useless than a politically dead liberal.” By going along with the South, Johnson had better opportunities to win bread and butter issues that were really more important to all of his constituents, including blacks (pp. 188–9).

Students of Johnson's relationship with his colleagues point out that LBJ's most Southern period was also a matter of establishing a base of power in Congress. During his early years in the Senate, Johnson went out of his way to associate most closely in public and private with Southerners. His allegiance to the Southern bloc and especially to Senator Richard Russell of Georgia was unquestioned. When Johnson arrived in 1949, Russell's Southern caucus headed several Senate committees and had managed to ride herd, in alliance with Senate Republicans, over most liberal Democratic initiatives, especially civil rights. Johnson sought Russell out, flattered him, befriended him, fed him Southern food, had his daughters call him Uncle Dick, made sure he found a desk next to Russell in the Senate chamber, and acquired a spot on Russell's Armed Services Committee. Russell saw in Johnson a man with remarkable political abilities and the potential to one day overcome the nation's bias against the South and become president. The men differed on questions of race, but they were bound by a common vision for their home region. As John A. Goldsmith wrote in Colleagues: Richard B. Russell and His Apprentice Lyndon B. Johnson (1998), the men “both looked to a time when the South could be returned to the mainstream of the country's political and economic life” (p. 12). And they were both dedicated to keeping the South solidly within the Democratic Party.

Yet many authors have suggested that LBJ's senatorial alliances had limits as well. Johnson, for example, refused to attend Southern caucus strategy meetings. Indeed, Doris Kearns pointed out in Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream (1976), he was the only Southerner besides Estes Kefauver of Tennessee not to do so. “Having openly and effectively allied himself with the Southern position,” Kearns wrote, Johnson “felt free to decline Russell's invitation to join the Southern caucus.” LBJ “always found ways to serve those he needed, and conform to their standards and values,” she explained, “but he never submitted his will, never became a devoted and unquestioning subordinate” (p. 111). Robert Dallek put it differently. “Behind the scenes Johnson left no doubt with Southern senators where he stood,” even while his public justifications for siding with Southerners did not conform to their more racist and conservative arguments. In arguing for the South's right to filibuster, Johnson was careful not to fit the Southern “hater” image. “The filibuster is not a Southern creation;” Johnson said, “it belongs to all the Nation, and to all the minorities – racial, religious, political, economic, or otherwise.” “When we of the South rise here to speak against this resolution or to speak against the civil rights proposals, we are not speaking against the Negro race. We are not attempting to keep alive the old flames of hate and bigotry” (pp. 365–6). Robert Mann noted in Walls of Jericho (1996), Johnson's relationships in the Senate were not exclusively with Southerners. Most important was the alliance he built with freshman Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota. Humphrey, of course, had gained national attention after delivering the fiery pro-civil rights speech that precipitated the Dixiecrat revolt in 1948. Humphrey would be among the few Senate liberals of his day convinced that Johnson would join them when it was politically possible for him to do so.

LBJ's most Southern period came to an end in 1956 and 1957. In these years Johnson actively began to shed the regionalist label. He was one of only three Southern senators in 1956 not to sign the Southern Manifesto condemning the Supreme Court's ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, even though LBJ's mentor, Richard Russell, was among the Manifesto's principle drafters. As Russell biographer Gilbert Fite wrote in Richard B. Russell Jr.: Senator from Georgia (1991), the Georgian never pressured Johnson to sign. Russell had sponsored Johnson's rise to majority leader, did not want to compromise the Texan's power to unify the Democratic Party, and did not want to ruin the South's best hope to win the presidency (p. 336). And as Mississippi Senator John Stennis, another of Russell's protégés, recalled, “we wanted him [LBJ] to sign it, but at the same time we recognized that he wasn't just a Senator from Texas, he was a leader and he had a different responsibility in that degree. It wasn't held against him, I'll put it that way, by the Southerners that he didn't sign it” (Leuchtenburg, 2005: 252). Nevertheless, many historians consider Johnson's refusal to sign the Manifesto as an important personal and political milestone. Randall Woods maintained that Johnson long “believed that civil rights was an issue whose time was coming” (p. 304). However, it wasn't until 1956, Robert Dallek argued, that the pressure on Senate liberals to consider some kind of civil rights legislation that reinforced the Brown decision had become “irresistible” (p. 497). Robert Caro emphasized Johnson's ambition rather than a personal dedication to civil rights or changing political opinions about segregation. In his book Master of the Senate (2002), Caro argued that Johnson's “great goal,” his “master plan” was to win the presidency. Rather than the brave act of principle that liberal Oregon Senator Richard Neuberger attributed to Johnson in refusing to sign the Manifesto, Caro insisted that LBJ was driven primarily by an obsessive quest for political power (pp. 473–4, 785–90).

Caro extended this argument to explain Johnson's sponsorship of the 1957 Civil Rights Act, the most significant rebellion against the South to that point in LBJ's career. According to Caro, when Johnson lost the 1956 presidential nomination, the Texan came to believe “that you couldn't win the nomination as the ‘Southern candidate,’ that you had to have substantial northern support, and that northern antipathy to him ran very deep – had devastating implications for his chances to win the nomination in 1960.” Johnson understood that he “had no choice,” Caro wrote, and that “there was only one way to change his image in liberals' eyes: to support the cause that mattered to them above all others; that so long as he didn't change his position on civil rights, it didn't matter what he did for them on other issues.” At the same time, LBJ “had to keep the states of the Old Confederacy on his side” in order to win the presidency (2002: 832, 850). Thus LBJ famously struck the middle ground in ushering the 1957 Civil Rights Act through Congress. His support of the first major civil rights legislation since reconstruction certainly appeased northern liberals, while his help in stripping the legislation of federal enforcement power catered to Southern demands. Caro prioritized Johnson's motives in championing the compromise: “During Lyndon Johnson's previous political life, compassion had constantly been in conflict with ambition, and invariably ambition had won. Given the imperatives of his nature, in such a conflict, it had been inevitable that the ambition would win. For the compassion to be released, to express itself in concrete accomplishments, it would have to be compatible with the ambition, pointing in the same direction. And now, at last, in 1957, it was” (2002: 862).

Robert Dallek, among others, acknowledged that Johnson's presidential ambitions stretched back to as early as 1953 and that he certainly leveraged Russell's and other Southerners, desire to have one of Dixie's sons elected president, but, Dallek reminded his readers, the Texan was just as motivated by genuine desires to unify the country and modernize the South. Dallek suggested that LBJ used the 1957 Civil Rights Bill to “transform him from a Southern or regional leader into a national spokesman.” Along with his genuine “sympathy for racial equality,” Johnson's hopes that an end to racial animosity in the South would allow the Democratic Party to reunite for progressive change were equally important motives (1991: 517–20). Johnson's 1957 turn to embrace civil rights legislation openly, moreover, came in the same year that President Dwight Eisenhower mobilized troops to enforce desegregation in the Little Rock crisis, the year that historian Numan Bartley in The Rise of Massive Resistance (1969) regarded as the beginning of the end of Southern resistance to segregation. And as David Chappell described in Inside Agitators: White Southerners in the Civil Rights Movement (1996), LBJ was part of a white South that was hardly monolithic or static in its opposition to civil rights. He was one of many Southern white moderates who became crucial agents of federal authority keeping racial extremists in check and easing the transition to a desegregated and modern South (p. xxiii).

In a chapter entitled “Southerner with a National Face,” Bill Leuchtenberg wrote that from the time of Johnson's “decisive departure” from the South in 1957, the Texan “broke more and more consistently with his old friends” (p. 267). Yet implied in Leuchtenberg's title, taken from a William S. White article in the New York Times, was the idea that Johnson's escape from his regional roots after 1957 was incomplete, perhaps even superficial. Johnson, the author suggested, even in his national period from 1957 to 1963, remained a Southerner.