Lamar W. Hankins : Lyndon Baines Johnson As Tragic Hero

Former President Lyndon Baines Johnson, August 1972. Image from the
LBJ Library / PBS Newshour.

Lyndon Baines Johnson: 
My tragic hero

LBJ was doomed from the start, trapped by earlier mistakes that he could not avoid without being vilified by the political opponents and war hawks in his own party as well as by Republicans.

By Lamar W. Hankins / The Rag Blog /April 8, 2013

The recent unveiling of a monument to honor Vietnam veterans at the Texas state Capitol in Austin rekindled my memories about President Lyndon Baines Johnson -- known widely as LBJ. Both of his daughters participated in the ceremony marking the groundbreaking, which included reading the names of all 3,417 Texans who died in that war -- some of whom I knew. I loved LBJ for his championing of civil rights and the War on Poverty.

But the War in Vietnam was his downfall and led to my partial disaffection with him.

It may seem overblown to call LBJ my tragic hero, but in a real since he was -- at least in the Aristotelian sense.

For those who didn’t live through the 1960s, it may be difficult to imagine what it was like for someone who went from teenager to young adult in that span of years. I was an active participant in the civil rights movement while in high school in Port Arthur, a town whose inhabitants were as racist as any in the South, but with a Cajun twist that sometimes took the edge off because of the intermixing that occurred in parts of neighboring Louisiana, where many of our residents came from.

But make no mistake -- racism was rampant among whites, even if some of the vitriol was absent.

LBJ became a friend of the civil rights movement because he felt the movement’s pressure, he understood history, and he knew that racism was wrong. Without him, it is doubtful that the civil rights acts of the mid-60s would have passed as soon as they did.

The two oldest Kennedy brothers were reluctant to act decisively about civil rights except under extreme pressure. John F. Kennedy did not have the legislative abilities that LBJ possessed. It is unlikely that the public accommodations and voting rights acts would have passed in 1964 and 1965 if JFK had been president.

I am regularly reminded that the role of our military is to preserve our freedoms. But that wasn’t what the military was doing in the Vietnam War. That war had nothing whatever to do with our freedoms, but it did concern our misunderstanding of the rest of the world and the widespread belief that the United States has been called by God to control and fix the rest of the world through our overwhelming military and economic power.

A recent Gallup poll reports that Americans have greater confidence in the military than in any other of our institutions. This does not surprise me for several reasons. The military taps into the emotion called patriotism more than any other institution of government. The media give the military enormous publicity and rarely push back against military decisions.

The World War II generation has been hailed as “The Greatest Generation” because of its defeat of Hitler and Japan and the successful expansion of the economy and the middle class for several decades after the war.

But I have never shared that level of confidence in the military. The incestuous relationship between high military brass, politicians, and the corporations that feed off our taxes that support the military seems to fulfill the very definition of corruption.

Decades ago, the Pentagon developed a strategy to put some sort of military installation or award contracts for military hardware and supplies in every congressional district in the country. Consequently, most politicians provide unquestioning support for keeping military expenditures higher than the combined military expenditures of the next highest-spending 14 countries. And those expenditures make wealthy the corporations who build the military hardware and look after the military’s needs.

During the Vietnam War, I knew young men who were drafted into the military, but I also knew several who fled to Canada to avoid the draft, others who became conscientious objectors, and one who went to prison for refusing to cooperate with the draft.

I was a conscientious objector and performed alternate service for my country for two years, serving in LBJ’s War on Poverty, and I spent almost 10 more years in that same effort, living for one year on poverty wages and working for three and a half years as a Legal Services attorney.

During the Vietnam War, with help from the American Friends Service Committee, I provided volunteer counseling to young men who thought that they might qualify as conscientious objectors. My motivation during those years was to try to reduce the number of young men who were sent off to be what I regarded as cannon fodder for the war against the Vietnamese, a country that had done us no harm, and had already driven the colonialist French out of that part of the world.

To be a conscientious objector, however, is not to be a pacifist. I was delighted by some verses in a 1966 Pete Seeger song -- “Bring Them Home” -- that made this clear:

If you love your Uncle Sam,
Bring them home, bring them home.
Support our boys in Vietnam,
Bring them home, bring them home.

...There’s one thing I must confess,
Bring them home, bring them home.
I’m not really a pacifist,
Bring them home, bring them home.

If an army invades this land of mine,
Bring them home, bring them home.
You’ll find me out on the firing line,
Bring them home, bring them home.

At the time, nothing expressed so simply and elegantly how I felt and how I feel still. But I have never been associated with any organization that advocated violence, except for my 30-year dalliance with the Democratic Party, which ended in 1992.

I have read some of Tim O’Brien’s Vietnam War-themed books and heard him lecture a couple of times. One point that O’Brien makes in his lectures and discusses in one of his books -- The Things They Carried -- is that deciding to go into the military after being drafted was one of the most morally difficult decisions a young man could make. O’Brien believes that the more difficult and the more courageous decision was to oppose the draft, whether by fleeing to Canada, refusing to cooperate, or by becoming a conscientious objector. I always felt the opposite was true.

When I told my family that I had become a conscientious objector and that my application had been granted and I was ordered to do alternate service for two years, one uncle asked me if I did that because I was afraid to go fight. I had to explain to him that it was not fear that drove my decision, though one would have to be non-human not to have some fear, but it was a moral objection I had to war that I had thought about for several years. I don’t know if my uncle accepted my explanation, but he dropped the subject.

That was the same year that LBJ announced that he would not accept the nomination of his party to be a candidate for president. I have listened to some of LBJ’s archived conversations with friends and associates about the Vietnam War. I know that he agonized over what he had done in persuading the Congress to escalate the conflict, but he felt trapped by circumstance.

LBJ inherited American military involvement in Vietnam that began when Harry Truman promised the South Vietnamese that he would not let the South be taken over by the communist North. Kennedy increased our troops in Vietnam to 16,000 by 1963. LBJ could not find a way to keep Truman’s promise or get U.S. troops out of Vietnam, while preserving his and the country’s honor as he understood that term. This misguided code of honor, I believe, was his fatal flaw.

For Aristotle, the tragic hero was someone of noble stature, outstanding ability, with a greatness about him  a “great and good man.” Clearly, LBJ was such a man. His skills as a legislator have been unsurpassed during my lifetime. When he was suddenly thrust into the presidency after the assassination of President Kennedy, he was prepared. He needed no on-the-job training. In the first few weeks after taking office, he gave the country confidence that he would keep the country together and accomplish important work.

In Vietnam, LBJ’s purpose (however misguided) was the same as Truman’s, Eisenhower’s, and Kennedy’s: to defeat the spread of Chinese communism. As we have seen, even after our defeat in Vietnam, Chinese communism did not spread there. The so-called Domino Theory had no substance, though it sounded logical to many.

But Americans tend to look at the rest of the world through their own lens, which may have no relationship to reality. Our presidents and foreign policy experts have made similar mistakes over and over. And these people supposedly are our best and brightest. Their own hubris feeds that of our presidents, and of our citizens.

LBJ was doomed from the start, trapped by earlier mistakes that he could not avoid without being vilified by the political opponents and war hawks in his own party as well as by Republicans. The military-industrial complex that Eisenhower had warned about as he left office had already become an inescapable force that even our most skillful politician could not overcome.

As the Iraq War and the Afghan War’s frequent transformation and escalation over 11 years have demonstrated, wars are not as easy to get out of as they are to get into. Perhaps President Obama has found a narrative about Afghanistan that will allow him to escape the trap that LBJ could not escape in Vietnam.

But President Obama is not prepared to completely leave Afghanistan. He plans to leave a contingent of troops there and elsewhere in the Middle East to continue fighting terrorism using a special forces strategy aided by drones, even though that fight no longer has anything to do with the perpetrators of 9/11, which was the basis for the authority Congress gave President Bush to attack Afghanistan.

Since I was in kindergarten nearly 65 years ago, I have watched people in positions of authority wield power in varying ways. Sometimes, their exercise of power has been wise and the results beneficial; often times not. Every president who has served during my lifetime has made some extraordinarily bad decisions. Most of them have been based on the idea that America is exceptional and has some birthright to control the world. Without question, this idea was behind the Vietnam debacle. But it was pride (and politics) that made it so difficult for LBJ (and later Richard Nixon) to extricate us from Indochina.

While I often say I don’t have heroes, LBJ was a tragic hero for me. Unless American politics undergoes a radical change, it won’t be long before another American president will play the same role that can lead only to tragedy both here and abroad.

[Lamar W. Hankins, a former San Marcos, Texas, city attorney, is also a columnist for the San Marcos Mercury. This article © Freethought San Marcos, Lamar W. Hankins. Read more articles by Lamar W. Hankins on The Rag Blog.]

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Bob Feldman : The Rise of the Texas 'Big Rich,' 1930-1940

Charles Marsh, owner of the Austin American and Austin Statesman (later merged as the Austin American-Statesman), also made big money in the oil business. Image from the Public Welfare Foundation.
The hidden history of Texas

Part 11: 1930-1940/2 -- The rise of the Texas 'Big Rich'

By Bob Feldman / The Rag Blog / January 28, 2013

[This is the second section of Part 11 of Bob Feldman's Rag Blog series on the hidden history of Texas.]

In his 2009 book, The Big Rich: The Rise and Fall of the Greatest Texas Oil Fortunes, Vanity Fair magazine correspondent Bryan Burrough indicated how ultra-rich Texas folks like Clint Murchison, H.L. Hunt, Sid Richardson, and former Austin American and Austin Statesman (they merged into the American-Statesman) owner Charles Marsh were, despite the Great Depression, apparently still able to make big money from Texas’s oil industry between 1930 and 1940:

Though he knew nothing about pipelines, Murchison decided to try to build one... Murchison was amazed how simple the business was; once a pipeline was built, all he did was sit back and collect checks... The pipe alone cost 3 million dollars, all of which Murchison got on credit... He coaxed every last dollar he could out of the Dallas banks, then pushed back repayment... By 1932 his debt had grown to more than $4 million dollars, far more than his net worth...

[H.L.] Hunt used most of his inheritance to buy a 960-acre farm... Negroes worked his land, allowing Hunt to spend much of his time playing cards... By that...summer of 1930 he still hadn’t found a drop of oil in Texas. Then, on Sept. 5 [1930], Hunt took a call... Despite Hunt’s later denials, court documents would show he cut a secret deal with the Deep Rock driller to supply his men with inside information in return for $20,000 in cash...

Charles E. Marsh, co-owner of several Texas newspapers, including the politically influential Austin-American...was using his spare cash to bankroll several Texas wildcatters... It is a measure of how totally Sid Richardson cloaked his business in secrecy that the name of Charles Marsh, the man whose backing made Richardson’s fortune possible, remained unknown to Richardson’s family...

Marsh...had begun negotiating a complicated deal involving First National Bank of Dallas... It appears that Marsh agreed to guarantee Richardson’s debt to the bank. In return, the bank agreed to loan Richardson an additional $210,000, followed by another $150,000... By the summer of 1935 Richardson had used most of Charles Marsh’s investment to buy land all around Gulf’s drill sites...

In 1938, Marsh encountered a sudden...financial reversal... From a single mention in a letter to Richardson -- contained in Marsh’s papers at the Johnson Presidential Library -- it appears that the Internal Revenue Service served Marsh with a request for $1.2 million in overdue taxes... Marsh was forced to repay much of the money. To raise it, he ended up selling all his Texas newspapers.”

Coincidentally, like Sid Richardson, former U.S. President Lyndon Johnson also apparently was backed by former Austin-American and Austin-Statesman newspaper owner Charles Marsh during the 1930s, when LBJ (also using $10,000 that was given to him by the father of First Lady Claudia “Ladybird” Johnson) decided in 1937 that he wanted to get himself elected as Austin’s representative in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1938. As Ronnie Dugger observed in his 1982 book The Politician: The Life and Times of Lyndon Johnson:

Johnson had a special advantage: the partisanship of the Austin newspapers. Charles Marsh... was owner and publisher of the Austin American-Statesman as well as the dailies in 4 or 5 other Texas cities, and he was for Lyndon from the first. Marsh...had been in oil deals...since as early as 1934... Marsh was also... a director and president of Richardson Oils, Inc., which gave Johnson a direct connection to oilman Sid Richardson...

Although the Austin dailies did not formally endorse anyone, Marsh turned them into Lyndon’s harmonicas. "These papers went all-out for him" said Edmonds Travis, one of their earliest editors... From the time the Johnsons arrived in Washington they frequented "Longlea," the plantation home of their friend, publisher Charles Marsh, in Culpeper, Virginia...The publisher also flew Johnson about in his private plane.

And, according to The Big Rich, LBJ also “used Texas Oil’s cash to start his march to... power.”

Besides helping to put Lyndon Johnson into Congress between 1930 and 1940 (and into the U.S. Senate and the White House, eventually, after 1940), Texas “oil money helped bankroll the birth of the religious right;” and “in a very real sense, the influence of Texas conservatives in America today -- in fact, the entire `Texanization’ of right-wing politics that brought George W. Bush and Tom DeLay to national prominence -- can be traced to forces set into motion by restive Texas oilmen during the 1930s,” according to The Big Rich. As the same book also noted:

By 1935...the Kirby Building in downtown Houston was home to...shadowy, interconnected ultra-conservative groups... The Kirby groups were little more than the Ku Klux Klan in pinstripes, a kind of corporate Klan... One of [former National Association of Manufacturers President John Henry] Kirby’s most active allies was Maco Stewart of Galveston, an attorney who...had seen his wealth mushroom when Humble found oil on land he owned south of Houston... The most extreme of Kirby’s circle was George W. Armstrong, a Fort Worth oilman who owned Texas Steel, which made oil field supplies as well as concrete supports for Texas highways...

In his definitive study of Texas conservatives, The Establishment in Texas Politics, George Norris Green pinpoints 1938 as the year oil-backed ultra-conservatives took control of the state’s political structure... Pappy O’Daniel’s victory [in 1938] initiated two decades of ultra-conservative rule in Texas. As governor, O’Daniel became Texas Oil’s reliable partner, freezing wellhead taxes and backing oil industry lobbyists’ takeover of the Railroad Commission. His administration was dominated by ultra-conservatives, many of them oilmen, including his key financial backer, Maco Stewart...

Another ultra-conservative initiative was led by...Texas congressman...Martin Dies, who in 1937 co-sponsored formation of the House Un-American Activities Committee [HUAC]... John Henry Kirby and Maco Stewart were friends and longtime financial supporters of Dies, who was widely viewed as a tool of business and oil interests in the Beaumont area... Dies’s papers indicate he corresponded regularly with Kirby and Stewart.

[Bob Feldman is an East Coast-based writer-activist and a former member of the Columbia SDS Steering Committee of the late 1960s. Read more articles by Bob Feldman on The Rag Blog.]

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Lamar W. Hankins : Paul Ryan Makes War Against People, Not Poverty

President Lyndon Johnson marked the start of the War on Poverty with a visit to Tom Fletcher's front porch in Martin County, Kentucky, in April 1964. Photo by Walter Bennett / Time magazine. Image from Daily Yonder.
Paul Ryan’s war:
Not against poverty, but against people

In 1964, long before Paul Ryan was ever swaddled in a diaper, President Lyndon Johnson declared that because America is a great nation, it should not have nearly one quarter of its people living in poverty.

By Lamar W. Hankins / The Rag Blog / October 30, 2012

In a hackneyed play on words, Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney’s extremist vice-presidential running mate, declared, “In this war on poverty, poverty is winning.” His claim created an enticing sound bite for the evening news, but it is factually incorrect.

Ryan’s argument:

With a few exceptions, government’s approach has been to spend lots of money on centralized, bureaucratic, top-down anti-poverty programs. The mindset behind this approach is that a nation should measure compassion by the size of the federal government and how much it spends. The problem is, starting in the 1960s, this top-down approach created and perpetuated a debilitating culture of dependency, wrecking families and communities.

Correspondent John Nichols of The Nation took a look at the census data and found a different reality:

In 1959, 22.1 percent of Americans lived below the poverty line. In 1969, 13.7 percent of Americans lived below the poverty line. The poverty level has varied since 1969. It has gone as high as 15 percent. But it has never again gotten anywhere near where it was in 1959.”

In 1964, long before Paul Ryan was ever swaddled in a diaper, President Lyndon Johnson declared that because America is a great nation, it should not have nearly one quarter of its people living in poverty. I was a junior in college then. Lyndon Johnson’s vision of an America in which all people had adequate food, clothing, shelter, and work moved me to drop out of college for a year to join Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA). I was assigned to a migrant labor project developed by a local nonprofit organization in South Florida.

While we helped many migrant farm workers in a modest way, what we did was a drop in the ocean of America’s poverty. But programs and agencies like Medicare, Food Stamps, Job Corps, the Office of Economic Opportunity, and Head Start made a vast difference in the lives of the elderly poor, impoverished families, poor youth in need of job skills, and the young children of America’s poor families.

After graduating from college, I spent seven years working for a local nonprofit agency in Texas that operated Head Start centers, job training programs, summer programs for poor teens, family planning and women’s health programs, and a host of projects developed by VISTA volunteers working for our local nonprofit agency -- housing programs, a credit union, employment services, tutorial programs, recreation programs, buying clubs, food distribution, and more. What was done was limited only by the imagination of the participants and those who wanted to help them, and available funds.

What I experienced in those years was far more than what Paul Ryan blithely describes as “centralized, bureaucratic, top-down anti-poverty programs.” After getting a law degree, I spent over three years working for a local nonprofit legal services program operating in six counties in the Bryan-College Station area. It, too, was created by Lyndon Johnson’s anti-poverty initiative to provide a modicum of civil justice to poor families.

From my personal experience, I know that what Paul Ryan said is an outright lie. He might not have intentionally lied, but he did intentionally parrot the Republican, right-wing position against making America a better, more prosperous country by correcting many of the deficiencies, injustices, and inequities in our economic, social, and legal systems.

Ryan’s opponent in his other political race (he is running also to keep his seat in Congress), Rob Zerban, had this to say about Ryan’s views on anti-poverty programs:

If poverty’s winning the war, it’s because of policies Paul Ryan supports. By doubling down on his radical plot to gut Medicaid, privatize Social Security, and decimate food assistance programs, Paul Ryan is betting against working families -- all to hand out new tax breaks for millionaires and Big Oil.

As John Nichols points out,

Paul Ryan has taken a side in the war on poverty. He’s against what works. Ryan has a right to take the positions that he does. But no one should confuse those positions with a sincere commitment to fighting, let alone ending, poverty.

And that about sums up Paul Ryan as a politician and a human being.

Like Ryan and so many cut from his mold, I can tell anecdotes from personal experience about people unmotivated to take advantage of available opportunities, but I can tell far more about people who eagerly made the most of opportunities that were available -- about children who received health and dental care as they learned what they needed to prepare for public school; about their parents, who learned how to help their children be more successful in life than they ever imagined was possible; about people with few marketable skills who acquired job skills that lasted a lifetime.

Stories about high school dropouts who obtained their GEDs and went on to colleges or jobs that enriched their lives, not just with money, but with hope made possible by opportunity; about families with renewed pride because they helped to build their own homes; about women whose lives were saved by having access to preventive health care for the first time in their lives; about elderly people who, because of Medicare and Medicaid, avoided the misery their parents experienced in old age.

In the spring of 1969, the local nonprofit agency I worked for received a crudely-written letter addressed only to “Headstart, Washington, D.C.” It had been received at the national offices of the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), the agency responsible for the Head Start program at that time. The Washington office sent it to the regional OEO office in Dallas, which forwarded it to my agency. It had been sent by a man who lived with his family of four children and his wife in rural Williamson County, Texas, where we provided services.

The man had heard a public service announcement on the radio promoting Head Start, the pre-school OEO program. His letter stated simply that “he needed a headstart.” While he had not correctly understood the announcement, he had heard that there might be an opportunity for him and his family to get some relief from their misery, and he desperately wanted that opportunity. The director of my agency, Rawleigh Elliott, a former mayor of Georgetown and businessman, asked me to find the family and offer help.

After a bit of searching, a friend and I found the family’s house -- a shack with a wood-fired stove, no insulation, and no paint on its weather-worn clapboards. We talked with the family, assessed their needs, and started finding them the help they needed to get their own “headstart.” Such families exist all over this country, even as many politicians dismiss their plight and even their existence.

One such politician is Paul Ryan, who has a deformed and myopic view of life. Ryan has never believed the words of his party’s progenitor Abraham Lincoln, that our government is of, by, and for the people. Many things are wrong in this country, but none of them involve actions by “we, the people” to make everyone’s lives less degrading, less impoverished, and less unjust, with more decency and opportunity for all.

It will be a sad day for America if someone like Ryan is put in charge of our government.

[Lamar W. Hankins, a former San Marcos, Texas, city attorney, is also a columnist for the San Marcos Mercury. This article © Freethought San Marcos, Lamar W. Hankins. Read more articles by Lamar W. Hankins on The Rag Blog.]

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RAG RADIO / Thorne Webb Dreyer : Texas Observer Founding Editor Ronnie Dugger

Pioneering Texas journalist Ronnie Dugger in the KOOP studios in Austin, Texas, Friday, June 8, 2012, during broadcast of Rag Radio. Photo by Alan Pogue / The Rag Blog.
Rag Radio:
Crusading journalist Ronnie Dugger,
founding editor of The Texas Observer

By Thorne Webb Dreyer / The Rag Blog / June 15, 2012

Legendary Texas journalist Ronnie Dugger, the founding editor of The Texas Observer, was our guest on Rag Radio, Friday, June 8, 2012, on KOOP-FM, Austin's cooperatively-run all-volunteer community radio station; Rag Radio is also streamed live to a worldwide Internet audience and is rebroadcast Sunday mornings on WFTE-FM in Scranton and Mt. Cobb, PA.

You can listen to the show here:


Brad Buchholz of the Austin American-Statesman called Ronnie Dugger “the godfather of progressive journalism in Texas.” Dugger was the founding editor of The Texas Observer from 1954 to 1961, and later served as the Observer’s publisher, spending more than 40 years with the crusading Texas tabloid.

The Texas Observer is a muckraking journal that has broken stories on major scandals and played an influential role in Texas politics. Based in Austin, the Observer, in its own words, “specializes in investigative, political and social-justice reporting from the strangest state in the Union.” The New York Review of Books referred to the Observer as an "outpost of reason in the Southwest."

In 1966, Dugger also proposed and co-founded the Alliance for Democracy, a national grassroots anti-big-corporate organization.

Ronnie Dugger, who won the 2011 George Polk Award for his career in journalism, has influenced and mentored such progressive Texas journalists as Willie Morris, Molly Ivins, Billy Lee Brammer, Lawrence Goodwyn, Kaye Northcott, and Jim Hightower. He recently moved back to Austin from Cambridge, Mass.

Dugger is the author of Dark Star, Hiroshima Reconsidered (World, 1967), Our Invaded Universities (W.W. Norton, 1973), The Politician: The Life and Times of Lyndon Johnson (W.W. Norton, 1982), and On Reagan (McGraw Hill, 1983), and edited Three Men in Texas: Bedichek, Webb, and Dobie for UT Press. He has also written for Harper's, Atlantic, The Nation, The New Yorker, and The Progressive.

Dugger has taught at the University of Virginia, Hampshire College, and the University of Illinois, and has held fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and the Shorenstein Center at the Kennedy School, Harvard.

Dugger shared with host Thorne Dreyer some of the rich history of the Observer and of Texas progressive politics and journalism, marked by such seminal -- and colorful -- figures as Frankie Carter Randolph, U.S. Rep. Bob Eckhardt, John Henry Faulk, Willie Morris, and Molly Ivins.

Once, when Molly Ivins -- who would become widely recognized as a national treasure for her special brand of populist Texas wit -- was editing the Observer, Dugger asked her, “Molly, when are you gonna get serious?” Ivins replied ("quick as a whip"): "When we have a chance to win."

On the show, Dugger discussed the legacy of the McCarthy era, the looming (both then and now) threat of nuclear war -- an issue that he has always considered preeminent -- and the Johnson presidency, which, he points out, made history with its courageous progressive domestic agenda. “Of course," Dugger says, "the Vietnam War not only ruined that, but killed two million people."

We discussed the way Lyndon’s unique saga was variously treated by the erudite Willie Morris in his heralded memoir North Toward Home and by Billy Lee Brammer, whose pre-gonzo novel, The Gay Place, Dugger called “one of the best novels written by anybody in Texas.” Brammer was Dugger’s first associate editor at the Observer, and Morris would later edit the Observer and then gain more fame as the editor of Harper’s.

And Dugger recounted a remarkable incident in 1955 that he later wrote about in an article titled, “LBJ, The Texas Observer & Me.” Then-Senator Lyndon Johnson summoned Ronnie to the LBJ Ranch with an offer -- “something of a quid pro quo.” After inquiring about the Observer's circulation (“Oh, about 6,000,” Dugger told him), Johnson made his proposal: “Stick with me and we’ll make it 60,000.”

“Johnson was trying to bribe me, basically,” Dugger remembers. “Sing my praises, and we’ll make the Observer a whamdinger.” Of course Dugger, who according to Willie Morris became “one of Johnson’s main public antagonists,” chose to decline the deal. According to Morris, Ronnie Dugger “distrusted the compromises of political power and saw his own role in Texas as that of the social critic, the journalistic conscience, the polemicist.”

Ronnie Dugger also shared with the Rag Radio audience his not-so-optimistic take on the current political scene. “I think both political parties have descended pretty low,” he said. And the Supreme Court “has opened huge corporate money vaults,” with “the scandalous idea that corporations have the same rights as persons.” Dugger fears that “we’re now an imitation democracy governed by a corporate oligarchy… and a bought Congress.”

“Congress, with honorable exceptions, is now a whorehouse,” he said.

Above (and in inset photo): Thorne Dreyer, left, and Ronnie Dugger at the KOOP studios. Behind Dugger is Grace Alfar of ZGraphix. Photos by Alan Pogue / The Rag Blog.

Rag Radio, which has aired since September 2009 on KOOP 91.7-FM, a cooperatively-run all-volunteer community radio station in Austin, Texas, features hour-long in-depth interviews and discussion about issues of progressive politics, culture, and history.

Hosted and produced by Rag Blog editor and long-time alternative journalist Thorne Dreyer, a pioneer of the Sixties underground press movement, Rag Radio is broadcast every Friday from 2-3 p.m. (CST) on KOOP and streamed live on the web. Rag Radio is also rebroadcast on Sundays at 10 a.m. (EST) on WFTE, 90.3-FM in Mt. Cobb, PA, and 105.7-FM in Scranton, PA. After broadcast, all Rag Radio shows are posted as podcasts at the Internet Archive.

Rag Radio is produced in the KOOP studios, in association with The Rag Blog, a progressive internet newsmagazine, and the New Journalism Project, a Texas 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation. Tracey Schulz is the show's engineer and co-producer.


Coming up on Rag Radio:

THIS FRIDAY, June 15, 2012: American Botanical Council Director Mark Blumenthal on Herbal and Alternative Medicine.
June 22, 2012: Gay Marriage in America with Gail Leondar-Wright and Betsy Leondar-Wright.

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Ronnie Dugger : LBJ, The Texas Observer & Me

Former Texas Observer editor Ronnie Dugger with President Lyndon Johnson. Photo by Yoichi Yokamoto / Courtesy LBJ Library / Texas Observer.
LBJ, The Texas Observer & Me

None of us knew it yet, but we Americans were about to be trapped in the history that Lyndon Johnson would make.

By Ronnie Dugger / The Texas Observer / June 6, 2012

Ronnie Dugger, founding editor of The Texas Observer, will be Thorne Dreyer's guest on Rag Radio, Friday, June 8, from 2-3 p.m. (CDT) on KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin, and streamed live on the web. The show will be rebroadcast on WFTE in Scranton and Mt. Cobb, PA, Sunday, June 10, at 10 a.m. (EDT). After broadcast, all Rag Radio interviews are posted as podcasts at the Internet Archive.

[This article was originally published by The Texas Observer on August 21, 2008, and was reposted at The Rag Blog the next day.]

The confrontation between Lyndon Johnson on one side and The Texas Observer and me on the other arrived on its own terms at his ranch in the Hill Country in 1955.

He was the senior United States senator from Texas and the new majority leader of the Democrats in the Senate. He had developed his concept of journalism as the editor of his college paper sucking up to the college president, and by 1955 he was hell-bent on the presidency.

A group of national liberal Democrats and I, chosen as editor, had launched the Observer the preceding December. I had been editor of my high school and college newspapers, a sportswriter, columnist, an occasional correspondent for the San Antonio Express-News, and a hanger-out with Edward R. Murrow’s boys at CBS News in London when I was studying in England. Johnson was 47; I was 25.

None of us knew it yet, but we Americans were about to be trapped in the history that Lyndon Johnson would make, and I was about to be trapped in his persona and career. He was not an idealist, but he served ideals when it suited and expressed him. He was not a reactionary, but he fanned reaction when it helped him advance himself.

As I wrote in my 1982 book about him, “Lyndon Johnson was rude, intelligent, shrewd, charming, compassionate, vindictive, maudlin, selfish, passionate, volcanic and cold, vicious and generous. He played every part, he left out no emotion; in him one saw one’s self and all the others. I think he was everything that is human. The pulsing within him, his energy, will, daring, guile, and greed for power and money, were altogether phenomenal, a continuous astonishment.”

Ahead of us lay his ascension to the presidency after the assassination of John Kennedy and his calamitous Vietnam presidency, but also his presidency of Medicare, Medicaid, the Voting Rights Act, the Fair Housing Act, Head Start, federal aid for the education of the poor, bilingual education, affirmative action, and the establishment of public radio and television.


Lyndon was the driven son of an ambitious, all-empowering mother and a failed liberal politician who made it no higher than elected membership in the Texas House of Representatives. After a lot of hell-raising, Lyndon, following his mother’s lead, took $100 from his folks and enrolled at Southwest Texas State Teachers’ College in San Marcos. The 700 students there came from the farms and towns in the area. They were almost all white, only a few Mexican-American.

Already aiming to be president, Lyndon was set on getting power even in school, and having watched his father, he knew how to try and how not to try for it. Since he got not another nickel from his parents, he had to work his way through Southwest Texas, but after a stint janitoring around the campus, he simply strode into the office of Cecil Evans, the president of the school, and talked his way into a slightly better job.

Walking on campus with his cousin Ava, Lyndon divulged to her his theory of how to get ahead. “The first thing you want to do,” he told her, “is to know people -- and don’t play sandlot ball; play in the big leagues ...get to know the first team.”

“Why, Lyndon,” she exclaimed, “I wouldn’t dare to go up to President Evans’ office.”

“That’s where you want to start,” he told her.

“I knew there was only one way to get to know him, and that was to work for him directly,” Johnson told me later in the White House. For most of his time at Southwest Texas, he was special assistant to the president’s secretary, with his desk next to the secretary’s. This paid him $37.50 a month, but he wanted to be editor of the student paper because that would pay him another $30.

In his first signed editorial in the student paper, the College Star, Lyndon rebuked fellow students-- “celebrities,” he called them -- who were using the college bulletin board for personal messages. The board “must be kept free for school matters,” he wrote, of course thereby pleasing Cecil Evans. Lyndon “knew how to ingratiate himself,” as one of the English teachers there said, and when the student council made him editor of the Star, he demonstrated further that he would use the paper as a tool for personal advancement. Profiling his own boss, Lyndon wrote: “Dr. Evans is greatest as a man,” what with “his depth of human sympathy... unfailing cheerfulness, geniality, kind firmness,” and so on.

Throughout his career on the make, Johnson cottoned up to selected powerful political leaders, both accommodating and abetting them, and thus predictably becoming a favored protégé. He did this, for example, with House Speaker Sam Rayburn, President Roosevelt, and Sen. Richard Russell, as well as with business leaders such as contractors George and Herman Brown. In flattering Dr. Evans in the college paper that he edited, he was just warming up his game of protegeship through the opportunities provided him by his temporary status as a journalist.



In 1955, Rayburn and Johnson, the Democratic Party’s bosses over the two branches of the distant Congress, were gigantic figures in one-party Texas politics. The Democrats in Texas were venomously divided between the “loyal Democrats” -- also called national Democrats, who generally favored the policies advanced by Roosevelt and Truman -- and the reactionary governor, Allan Shivers, and his fellow segregationists and conservatives, who had total control of the state Democratic Party.

The previous October, a group of about 100 “loyal,” that is, national, Democrats in Texas, sensing that Shivers and his followers would go for Eisenhower for president in 1956 (as they did), gathered in Austin to found a liberal journal and asked me to edit it.

They knew, of course, that my views were liberal. They had some knowledge of my years of reporting on the thoroughly corrupt Texas Legislature in The Daily Texan, the student paper at the University of Texas in Austin, and my year as editor there championing racial integration, repeal of the oil depletion allowance, and other liberal causes. For a year my columns from abroad, laced with some of my policy opinions, had run in the San Antonio daily. A speech I had given to the Houston Rotary Club advocating, among other things, national health insurance, had provoked the physicians in the club to issue an outraged written objection.

Most of the liberals who had assembled in the hotel downtown, however, appeared to want a party organ, its editorial voice subordinated to the calculations of the national Democrats in Texas. My models for reporting were: the great muckrakers; Ed Murrow; James Reston. My idea of journalism included standing enough apart from government and political parties to report independently of them and to criticize any institution when that was called for. Although party organs have their place, I did not want to work on one.

Acting through Jack Strong, a lawyer in East Texas, the liberals offered me the editorship on the Friday before the Monday when I was leaving for Corpus Christi to work on a shrimp boat and jump ship in Mexico, eventually to write a novel about the Mexicans who (then as now) were wading, swimming, and drowning in the Rio Grande in search of work.

That night I batted out a long letter to the group addressed to Mrs. R.D. Randolph, one of the group’s leaders who was an heiress to the Kirby lumber fortune in East Texas, outlining what sorts of stories I would want the Observer to investigate and what sorts of editorial crusades we likely would launch, but also my position on a party organ. Addressing the group in the hotel downtown, I told them I was not interested in editing a party organ, but I would stay and edit the new journal, provided I had exclusive control of all the editorial content. The paper’s publisher could fire me at any time for any reason, but as long as I was the editor, I would determine the editorial content.

This arrangement, which protects the journalists and the journalism from politics or the business of publishing, I later, as Observer publisher until 1994, explicitly ceded to every editor who succeeded me.

Bob Eckhardt, the great legislator of my generation in Texas and soon to become one of my closest friends, told me later that a fierce debate occurred after I left the hotel. He said that Mark Adams, a New Dealer and a yeoman printer, said that “if ever a rattlesnake rattled before he struck, Dugger has.” Mark, who became my first printer at the Observer, denied saying it.

But they accepted my terms, and as we prepared to begin, I settled on a motto for the front-page masthead, Thoreau’s “The one great rule of composition is to speak the truth,” and wrote a policy credo that contained the sentence, “We will serve no group or party but will hew hard to the truth as we find it and the right as we see it.”


I had no sting out for Johnson, far from it. While a student at UT, I had worked downtown in Austin as a reporter and news announcer for his and Lady Bird’s radio station, KTBC. His senatorial office, that is, he, had helped me get a job in Washington one summer in the division of international organizations at the Department of State. Returning from abroad, I had applied unsuccessfully for a job on his Senate staff. I learned that Horace Busby, one of his top advisers, had said to him something like, “Ronnie’s not our kind of guy,” but I didn’t know that for many years.

The first year or so at the Observer, I was the only reporter and editor, and we had one subscription person. The founding group watched quietly as I did my best to begin to wreak havoc on racism, corruption, poverty, discrimination, and the rancidness of the plutocratic ideals blatted forth by the allegedly Democratic Gov. Allan Shivers.

When I reported the racial murders of two black children in Mayflower, Texas, near Tyler, I was told that one of the Observer founders, Franklin Jones Sr., a very successful plaintiff’s lawyer in Marshall, exploded profanely on seeing my photograph of the body of one of the dead children on the front page: “Here I am working my ass off getting subscriptions for the Observer, and Dugger sends us pictures of dead Negroes all over the front page.” But if Franklin did say that, or something like it, he said nothing to me.

A new Democratic National Committee member from Texas had to be chosen, and it became known that Sen. Johnson had exerted his power to achieve the selection for that honor of the reactionary and racist Lt. Gov. Ben Ramsey, who presided as the dictator over the Texas Senate to the purring pleasure, protection, and profit of every corporate fat cat in the state, the oilmen most of all. In editorials, I damned Johnson to hell and back for it.

Johnson had been opposing the Texas liberals -- on Ben Ramsey, by effectively favoring conservative Price Daniel over the liberal Ralph Yarborough for governor, and in other ways -- to get Texas reactionaries behind him, or at least to quiet them down, for his candidacy for president, which Rayburn and he would soon make public.

Nearly all of us at the Observer and all our readers were in agreement on a new drive to build a grassroots uprising of the liberal and populist Democrats to throw Ramsey and his ilk -- Shivers, Sen. Daniel, the lot of them -- into the Republican Party where they belonged. Obviously a Democratic Party answering to well-organized Democrats in the cities directly challenged and would at least diminish the boss-rule powers that Rayburn and Johnson exercised and enjoyed, and Johnson went to calling all of us involved in this organizing effort “the redhots.”


At some point that fall, with the Ramsey controversy smoking, I received a phone call that Sen. Johnson would like to see me, and would I call on him at the ranch at a certain hour on a certain afternoon. I had never been out there. After wheeling my family’s 1948 Chevrolet, which we called the Green Hornet, through the Pedernales River muscling itself shallowly over Johnson’s low-water bridge, I pulled up in front of his grand spread and saw that he was swimming in the pool, off to the right there. We greeted, nodding, and for some time I shifted from one foot to the other by the pool, feeling rather high in the air, as he continued his swim and, desultorily, we talked.


Toweling off and sitting us down on the pool furniture, cocking his long face toward me, Sen. Johnson asked me:

“Ronnie, what’s the circulation of your paper?”

“Oh, about 6,000.”

“Stick with me and we’ll make it 60,000,” Johnson said.

I knew at once what he meant. “Stick with me” meant support his policies and decisions, about Ben Ramsey and anything else, celebrate his sagacity and wisdom in all that I wrote about him, and support his presidential ambitions; “and we’ll make it 60,000” meant that in return, he would employ his standing, power, and connections to build up the Observer. The one great rule of composition would be to promote Lyndon Johnson. The Observer would be not a party organ, but a Johnson pipe organ that his nod could cause to bellow forth with Wagnerian splendor

The senior senator from Texas and the Democratic majority leader of the U.S. Senate had called me out here to propose straightforwardly that the Observer and I replace journalistic integrity with loyalty to him. He was trying to bribe me and The Texas Observer, or, if this was not to be a bribe, the deal -- the secret understanding -- the quid pro quo, obedient loyalty and feigned adulation in return for the other’s use of his power on your behalf, would have been not different from a bribe by a dime.

Johnson’s problem was, he would soon make public his campaign for the presidency. He knew the Observer was a novelty, conspicuous in reactionary Texas, reporting long-covered-up events and expressing unpredictable opinions; he knew that national newspeople, traipsing to and from his ranch from Austin, would often drop by the Observer offices for inside dope or just for the devilment of it, as in fact they were to do for the rest of the decade; and he knew that if his sellouts to the Texas yahoos and rednecks on the way to the White House became clear to the national Democrats, they might not nominate him for president.

My problem was how to get out of there. I could have just said, “I’m sorry, senator, no deal,” but this was not my style while practicing rebellious journalism in Texas. I extended myself and taxed my fellow Observer reporters to be fair and accurate, both in order to be fair and accurate and in self-defense, although, that done, in editorials I let miscreants and villains have it straight on.

In person, in my life day after day, I was carefully polite and civil with all parties. If I was formally polite to a fault, well, it was a kind of protective coloration. On this afternoon with Johnson, I realized that the Observer and I had been misgauged and underestimated, but that for the rest of the occasion my part was to avoid any accusative remarks or implications, any incautious, offensive, or popinjay responses, and to graciously take my leave as soon as that might appear mannerly.

Sitting there side by side on plastic chaise lounges -- someone brought us cold drinks, I believe lemonades -- we talked along gingerly for maybe an hour. Well, senator, it’s an honor to have met you, and I appreciate your having me out -- don’t want to overstay, I’d better be getting back to town -- I said something like this, starting to rise to head back to my Green Hornet.

No, he said, why don’t you stay to dinner. No trouble, Bird’ll have plenty.

Although I had nothing more to say to him, I had not said no, and he had something more to say to me.

After an interim during which nothing happened, I sat down to dinner in a half-dark chamber at the center of the Johnsons’ well-staged home with Lady Bird Johnson and Johnson’s personal secretary, Mary Margaret Wiley, who had been my managing editor in high school in San Antonio when I had edited the Brackenridge Times. Mary Margaret is a beautiful person. While I had perceived no romantic flash in our friendship and work together in high school, we admired and respected each other; I was glad she was there.

As Johnson sat down at my left at the head of his table, though, I realized, silently appalled, “My God, the subject is at hand, all I can do is explain journalism to him as if he actually doesn’t know what it is.” If the situation had not been unbelievable, it would have been incredible.

I struck forth uncertainly, as if we were dining on a pitching log, addressing only Johnson to describe, as best I could, the role of journalism, the Fourth Estate, separation from government, providing facts and explanations, democracy’s inexpendable need for an independently informed electorate. I may even have quoted Jefferson.&

I might as well have been talking to the log I was riding. Johnson said to me, No, the thing a smart young reporter does, and should do, is survey the field of candidates, pick the best one, and enter into a deal to help that one win whatever office and prevail in whatever controversy, subordinating his reporting and comment to the interests of the candidate.

Johnson was far too smart to really think that is what journalism is or should be. He was feigning adherence to a theory of journalism, a blend of his own practice on his college paper and his political strategy of protegeship upended for the advance of his juniors, that might work somewhat, with me and others, as a disguise for his use of journalists to serve his will to power.

Later it became embarrassingly clear that he had induced some of the leading reporters and columnists in Texas and the nation to make some such a deal with him or assent to some such understanding: Leslie Carpenter, William S. White, Joseph Alsop, some of the authors of those surprising articles in the big magazines in the late 1950s promoting the lanky Lyndon Johnson of Texas for president of the United States.

I remember (I am not referring, for this essay, to my notes on all of this) that neither Lady Bird nor Mary Margaret said one word all evening. Oh, perhaps one or two, but I don’t remember even one. They sat silent and still as good women of old were supposed to during an argument among the men. Yet both Bird and Mary Margaret were highly intelligent.

How strange the evening must have seemed to them, their guy trying to turn a journalist into his secretly bought public promoter, their senator and this younger guy battling over irreconcilable opinions, completely missing each other, reaching no agreement.

Many’s the time since that evening there has replayed on the stage in my mind a vivid re-seeing of what happened upon my departure that evening. I am five or six feet away from Lyndon and me, watching the two of us illuminated by the ranch-house lighting locked in animated argument in front of his house at his low wire fence, he inside the fence, I outside, our knees braced against it and each other, intensely disputing directly into each other’s faces a few inches apart, he leaning first a little into my face, and then a little more, and then so much my head is bent back, and I shift my heels backward to be able to stand up straight to him again.


My first associate editor at the Observer, Billy Lee Brammer, a reporter on the Austin daily (and later the author of the classic Texas novel The Gay Place), started showing up unbidden evenings and helping me clip the 3-foot-high mounds of the rotgut Texas daily newspapers of that era, then quit downtown and came on staff. He flourished in reporting Texas politics for us, most memorably “the Port Arthur story” and the Austin lobby’s junket for Texas legislators to the Kentucky Derby, until Johnson hired him onto his Washington staff.

The liberal Democratic organizing of the ’50s caught hold in the cities, especially in Houston and San Antonio. In the 1956 Democratic state convention, over the furious objections of Johnson and his operatives there, the delegates elected Mrs. Randolph, who had become the de facto publisher of the Observer, to the Democratic National Committee.

Four years later, favorite son Johnson trounced his opponents in Texas and swept into that year’s state convention, where he had Mrs. Randolph replaced. In one of these conventions, Mrs. Randolph told me, Johnson sent her word asking her to call on him, and when she did he asked expansively, “Well, Mrs. Randolph, what can I do for you?” She replied: “Nothing.”

Texas labor leaders Fred Schmidt and Hank Brown told me that, when they lobbied the Democrats’ Senate leader in Washington, he railed against the Observer and me, on some specified occasion with a copy of the journal on his desk. Mrs. Randolph said that when he asked her to get me to do something or other she replied, “Talk to him.” At least I could think, when for example I wrote a series of columns on the horrors of nuclear weapons, or during the Vietnam war when I ran a headline across the front page, “Will Johnson Bomb China?” that the man himself might be reading it.

During one state Democratic convention, I was running tandem some with Mark Sullivan, the Southwest bureau chief for Time-Life, for which I was a stringer. Mark and I approached Johnson on the convention floor for an interview. Johnson barked out that he wouldn’t talk to us with me there because “that boy prints lies about me.” We left him -- or at least I did; I am not sure what Mark did.

That was the first and has been the only time in my life when I have directly experienced from another person the will to ruin me. The Time-Life connection was enabling me to hold up my financial end with my wife and children despite my annual Observer salary of $6,500. With this one ferocious remark to my boss at Time-Life, Johnson surely meant to kill me professionally. Deep in my convention story in the Observer, I reported the scene and what Johnson had said about me. I was deeply offended, and a year or two had to pass before my anger about it subsided. But Time-Life stood by me (in fact in 1961, after a lunch with Henry Luce, I was invited to join the staff of Time, which I did not).

In 1959, preparing a special focus for the Observer on Johnson’s candidacy for president, I asked him for an interview in Washington, and he granted it. I remember that on my way into his regal office as majority leader, I saw Mary Margaret at her desk, and we exchanged cautious smiles and slight nods when my eyes briefly met hers as I passed. The interview went well enough. This time I got the full Johnson treatment of persuasion, charm, raillery, and menace -- stories, brags, ridicules of his colleagues, jokes, hands on my knees -- again and again the leaning into my face.

Perhaps I should also record that, in the early 1960s when Johnson was vice president, I became a correspondent in Texas for the then-liberal Washington Post, and I intuitively suspect on the basis of the facts and context of what happened, but I have no evidence, that Johnson used his extremely close ties to that newspaper’s executives to have them eventually drop me.

The Observer never endorsed Johnson for president except in his contest with Barry Goldwater in 1964. In columns, I was for Estes Kefauver in 1956, Averell Harriman in 1960.

Except for an oblique column in the Observer full of obscurities after the confrontation at the ranch, this is the first report I have written about these events since they occurred half a century ago. Initially there was the off-the-record problem, but that’s gone now. I have not wanted to write about it, too, because how could I without being perceived as possibly self-serving? I relate them here now because the Observer editor asked me to.


In November 1965, I was one of the eight speakers who addressed the first massive demonstration against Johnson’s escalation of the Vietnam war, and afterward I typed out a copy of my speech and sent it to President Johnson (the Observer ran the text of it). Johnson had George Reedy, then his press secretary, send me a note that “the President asked me to tell you he seeks no wider war,” the first time I saw or heard him hide behind that lying bromide.

In 1967, having signed a contract with W.W. Norton for a book on Johnson, I wrote him asking him for biographical interviews and telling him that I intended a fair and accurate book worthy of the attention of serious people, and he gave me extensive interviews in the White House in late 1967 and 1968. He introduced me around the White House as “the leading liberal in the Southwest.” Discounting that as the Texas blarney it was, he had given off accusing me, or the Observer, of printing lies about him.

He tried to bring you into his field of overmastering personal power; that failing, he tried to ruin you; that failing, well, OK, he would deal with you again. In my last interview with him in the White House, on March 23, 1968, we were carrying along merrily. He was telling me a story when he suddenly interrupted himself and said, “Now, Ronnie, I’m giving you all these great stories, I want a friendly book!” I leaned forward and began, “Well, now, Mr. President -- ” but he shut me off and continued with the story.

He was so charming, engaging, such an engrossing person, funny, fun to be with, such a good raconteur, I did not remember that he had said that until I was outside the White House that night. I went on back in and spoke with his press secretary then, my old friend George Christian, whom I had reported alongside years earlier in the offices of the International News Service in the Texas Capitol.

I reminded George I had told Johnson I intended to write a fair and accurate book worthy of the interest of serious people, but that during our interview that evening he had said he wanted “a friendly book.” Oh, hell, George said, you know Lyndon, he didn’t mean anything by it. Maybe George was right, but “Yes, he did,” I said, “and please tell him from me, on that point, no deal.”

The next day, I suspected pro forma in light of what had occurred, I asked that my next interview with the president be scheduled, and then I waited some days in the Hay-Adams Hotel across Lafayette Park from the White House, where I was staying. No call came. A week later Johnson quit the presidency. Another week later, he began his interviews with Doris Kearns.


The Observer maintained its integrity and its independence of Lyndon Johnson before and during his presidency. He was who and what he was, the Observer and I were what and who we were and are, and this is the story of Lyndon Johnson, The Texas Observer, and me.


[Ronnie Dugger, founding editor of the Texas Observer and, later its publisher, was also co-founder of the Alliance for Democracy. Dugger is the author of Dark Star, Hiroshima Reconsidered (World, 1967), Our Invaded Universities (W.W. Norton, 1973), The Politician: The Life and Times of Lyndon Johnson (W.W. Norton, 1982), and On Reagan (McGraw Hill, 1983), and has written for Harper's Magazine, The Nation, The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The Progressive, and other periodicals.]

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BOOKS / Tom Hayden : Was LBJ More Lear Than Machiavelli?

Was LBJ more Lear than Machiavelli?
Reflection on Robert Caro's The Passage of Power

By Tom Hayden / The Rag Blog / May 8, 2012

[The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert A. Caro (2012: Knopf); Hardcover; 736 pp.; $35.]

Robert Caro’s impressive biography of Lyndon Johnson seems beyond the reach of criticism, having won the National Book Critics Circle Award and been described as a “monument” (Michael Beschloss) and “at the summit of American historical writing.” (The Washington Post) Yet Caro may have identified far too much with his subject, a form of Stockholm Syndrome, perhaps, in which a prisoner identifies with his jailer.

Hardly mentioned in Caro’s latest 700 pages are two crises, each which left an indelible stain on the Johnson presidency:

1. His secret deal-making to deny the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party seating at the 1964 Democratic convention;
2. The famous White House deceits leading to the Vietnam War after candidate Johnson promised not to send ground troops.

Rather than minor errors, these judgments led to the polarizations that eventually destroyed LBJ and the potential of the Great Society.

Regarding Mississippi, Caro says virtually nothing about the 1964 Democratic convention controversy; the word “Mississippi” appears only three times in the Index. Yet Johnson’s backroom pressure prevented the convention delegates from voting for Fannie Lou Hamer and other MFDP delegates opposed to the all-white Mississippi delegation that was pledged to segregation and defiance of the federal government. Johnson dispatched Hubert Humphrey to “put a stop to this hell-raising,” and to “get his Reuthers and the rest of ‘em in here -- and Joe Rauh -- and make ‘em behave.”[1]

By all accounts, LBJ was testing Humphrey’s loyalty, and that of his closest liberal allies, before agreeing to name him the vice-presidential running mate. These machinations, including wiretaps on the MFDP and Bobby Kennedy, were stunning errors of judgment by Caro’s master politician, for they alienated the MFDP and SNCC, sickened many northern liberals, led the next year to the formation of the Black Panther Party in Lowndes County, Alabama, and, indirectly as least, four consecutive summers of black urban insurrections -- and the gradual transformation of the Goldwater movement into the very white backlash Johnson feared but couldn’t prevent.

Caro mentions none of this, emphasizing instead LBJ’s masterful tactics in passing the 1964 civil rights bill.

On the tapes, LBJ reveals his control-driven fear of a floor fight over seating the MFDP, saying, “they’ll have a roll call… [and] the Northern states will probably prevail.”[2] Instead of accepting the convention’s majority choice, LBJ turned to his dark and questionable tactics, surrounded by his seeming lackeys. Humphrey told him, “We’re just not dealing with emotionally stable people on this.”[3] Reuther warned the president, “we can reduce the opposition to this to a microscopic faction so that they’ll be completely unimportant.”[4] LBJ was driven by exaggerated fears, at least at the time, of losing white Southern states if he appeared to cave in to the Mississippi Freedom Democrats. He defeated Barry Goldwater handily that November. But granting his fear for the sake of the argument, the question is why he delegated the MFDP decision to Humphrey and others who were desperate for his favor.

A last-minute White House compromise proposal for two non-voting seats for MFDP observers was bound to be rejected as too little, too late -- “Didn’t come all this way for no two seats,” Ms. Hamer said in leaving. Another promise being floated -- to seat the two non-voting MFDP observers and publicly guarantee a four-year track to full integration of southern delegations in 1968 -- just might have succeeded if LBJ had used all his private and political powers in the weeks leading up to the convention. Instead LBJ was stubborn to the end.

“The only thing that can really screw us good is to seat that group of challengers from Mississippi… I’ll guarantee the Freedom delegation somebody representing their views like that will be seated four years from now. But we can’t do it all before breakfast,” Johnson privately said to Reuther on August 9. When the UAW leader tried to interject, “we’ll lose Mississippi, but the impact on the other southern states...” LBJ cut him off.

Whether SNCC, COFO, or the MFDP would have accepted a four-year enforceable transition is impossible to know, and probably doubtful. But the point here is that Johnson’s behind-the-scenes behavior was emotional and petulant, not that of a sophisticated Machiavellian genius. Throughout, he was convinced without evidence that Bobby Kennedy was plotting the MFDP challenge -- “I rather think that this Freedom Party was born in the Justice Department.”[5] After several days of tantrums, LBJ told his aides he had drafted a lengthy retirement statement and, sunk in depression, went to bed.


The Vietnam Debacle

Beschloss’ LBJ book includes tapes exposing White House confusion and unmistakable deceit around the August 1964 Gulf of Tonkin “incident” in North Vietnam’s waters, which LBJ quickly used to push a war authorization through a gullible Congress, with only two senators voting against, Oregon’s Wayne Morse and Alaska’s Ernest Gruening. Caro mentions none of this.

Caro provides evidence for the view that Johnson’s Vietnam escalation decision occurred immediately after John Kennedy’s assassination, marking a sharp turn in U.S. policy while masked in the rhetoric of continuity. Intriguingly, Caro promises to examine Vietnam decision-making in greater depth in the next volume of his history, including the question of whether the course of events in Vietnam would have been different had Kennedy lived, and whether other options were feasible.[6]

Caro writes that LBJ concealed his plans from both Congress and the American people. In Caro’s account, on October 2, Kennedy appointees Maxwell Taylor and Robert McNamara reported after a trip to Vietnam that 1,000 U.S. advisers could be withdrawn in 1963 and “it should be possible to withdraw the bulk of U.S. personnel” by the end of 1965, one year after JFK’s presumed re-election.“We need a way to get out of Vietnam, and this is a way of doing it,” McNamara said, according to Caro.

President Kennedy endorsed the McNamara-Taylor recommendations the next day through his press secretary Pierre Salinger.

It may be just coincidental, but McGeorge Bundy was drafting a new National Security Action Memorandum on Vietnam on November 21, the day before Kennedy’s murder.[7] Four days later, on November 26, the new U.S. president approved the memo as NSM 273.

While the main thrust of NSM 273 was to emphasize consistency with Kennedy’s Vietnam policy, it included a proposal for “possible [increased] military activity,” a reference to the recommendations of a secret committee, led by Marine General Victor “Brute” Krulak, who were proposing “progressively escalating pressure” on North Vietnam.[8] The Krulak paper was presented to Johnson at his Texas ranch on January 2, just before the inauguration. The Krulak plan recommended one year of commando raids along the North Vietnamese coast, and shelling by U.S. ships around the waters of the Gulf of Tonkin.

Those operations were to begin on February 1, just as LBJ was “juggling the figures” to make it appear that the withdrawal of the 1,000 advisers was on schedule.[9]

Once again, the Bechloss tapes were available to Caro, but are not referred to. LBJ made his famous pledge to “seek no wider war” on August 4, ironically on the same day that the bodies of three civil rights workers were found buried in a Mississippi swamp. Johnson already was implementing the Krulak recommendations to attack North Vietnam’s coastal facilities and oil refineries -- “there have been some covert operations in that area we’ve been carrying on… we’ve been playing around up there,” he confided.[10]

Defense secretary McNamara formally advised LBJ on Aug. 8 that the Tonkin matter was “a very delicate subject,” and, “one that you have to dissociate from and certainly not admit that any such incident took place, but neither should you get in a position of denying it,” since it was part of “that covert operational plan.”[11]

In Caro’s perspective, Johnson’s decision to escalate was based on his desire “to keep Vietnam from becoming a major political issue” in the 1964 election. Caro fails to explain how such an historically fateful and ultimately irrational decision fits with Caro’s narrative of LBJ as the master politician of his time. Instead it proved to be one of the worst blunders in American foreign policy history.

It is quite possible that Caro will pivot to depicting LBJ as a modern King Lear in the next volume. But for now, when similar controversies over military secrecy have surrounded both the Bush and Obama presidencies, Caro regrettably gives his Lyndon Johnson a pass.

[Tom Hayden is a former California state senator and leader of Sixties peace, justice, and environmental movements. He currently teaches at Pitzer College in Los Angeles. His latest book is The Long Sixties. This article was also published at Tom Hayden's Peace and Justice Resource Center. Read more of Tom Hayden's writing on The Rag Blog.]


References

[1] Beschloss, Michael. Taking Charge. 1997, p. 485-6.
[2] Ibid, p. 516.
[3] Ibid, p. 515
[4] Ibid, p. 535
[5] Ibid, p. 532
[6] Caro, Robert. The Years of Lyndon Johnson, The Passage of Power. Knopf, 2012. p. 434.
[7] Caro, p. 403
[8] Caro, p. 533
[9] Caro, p. 403
[10] Beschloss, p. 493-494
[11] Beschloss, p. 509

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Harry Targ : Remembering the Great Society

President Lyndon B. Johnson meets with Martin Luther King, Jr. in the White House Cabinet Room. Photo from Wikimedia Commons.
Remembering the Great Society:
Addressing poverty and hunger in America

By Harry Targ / The Rag Blog / September 28, 2011

On Monday, September 26, the Reverend Jesse Jackson visited Ohio University, located at the northern edge of Appalachia. President Lyndon Johnson had introduced his vision of a “Great Society” in 1964 at this site and Jackson was returning 47 years later to call for the establishment of a White House commission to address poverty and hunger in America.

Jackson pointed out that Athens County, Ohio, where he spoke, represented “ground zero” as to poverty in America today. Thirty-two percent of county residents live in poverty.

The fact that increased poverty is a national problem was underscored in a September 13 press release from the United States Census Bureau. The Census Bureau reported that 46.2 million people lived below the poverty line in 2010, the highest number in 52 years. In 2010, 15.1 percent of Americans lived in poverty, the highest percent since 1993. The poverty line for a family of four was $22,314.

The New York Times (September 14, 2011) quoted Professor Lawrence Katz, economist, who said that “this is truly a lost decade. We think of America as a place where every generation is doing better, but we’re looking at a period when the median family is in worse shape than it was in the late 1990s.”

In a press release, the Census Bureau identified some additional data which reflects the economic status of large numbers of Americans:

• The number of Americans below the poverty line in 2010 increased by 900,000 over 2009.
• Proportions of Black and Hispanic citizens living in poverty increased from 2009 to 2010. Black poverty rose to 27 percent from 25 percent; Hispanic poverty 26 percent from 25 percent.
• 48 million Americans, 18 to 64 years of age, did not work at all in 2010, up from 45 million in 2009.
• Median income declines were greatest among the young, ages 15 to 24, who experienced a 9 percent decline between 2009 and 2010.
• Childhood poverty rates rose from 20.7 percent in 2009 to 22 percent in 2010.

Timothy Smeeding, Director, Institute for Research and Poverty at the University of Wisconsin, was quoted in the New York Times article: “We’re risking a new underclass. Young, less-educated adults, mainly men, can’t support their children and form stable families because they are jobless.”

Arloc Sherman, from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, reminded readers that the level of poverty was higher and median income was lower in 2007 than 2001.

In this economic context, it was surprising that the calls by Reverend Jackson for a new Great Society largely were ignored by the liberal blogosphere as well as most of the mainstream media.

One impressive exception was an interview on Up with Chris Hayes, MSNBC, on Sunday, September 25. On this program, Jackson pointed out that if it had not been for President Johnson’s disastrous Vietnam War policy he would have been recognized as one of the transformational presidents in American history.

The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights has pointed out in an interesting essay entitled “Race, Class and Economic Justice” that the Johnson programs, the “Great Society,” and its “War on Poverty,” were grounded in the civil rights struggle for jobs and justice. When LBJ’s program got mired in the escalating war in Vietnam, Dr. Martin Luther King launched the “Poor People’s Campaign.”

Both the Great Society and the Poor People’s Campaign need to be revisited as young people, workers, men and women of all races and classes, mobilize along Wall Street and in virtually every city and town in America to demand economic and social justice. And as the Reverend Jackson reminded students and citizens of Athens County on September 13, LBJ’s program was a comprehensive one linking government and community groups. Among its major achievements the following need to be celebrated:

• The Food Stamp Act (1964) provided low income families with access to adequate food.
• The Economic Opportunity Act (1964) created the Job Corps, VISTA, and other community-based programs.
• The Tax Reduction Act (1964) cut income tax rates for low-income families.
• The Civil Rights Act (1964) outlawed discrimination in housing, employment, and public accommodations.
• The Wilderness Preservation Act (1964) protected over 9 million acres of national forests from developers.
• The Elementary and Secondary School Act (1965) provided federal aid to schools with low-income students, including the establishment of the Head Start program.
• Amendments to the Social Security Act (1965) established Medicare for retirees and Medicaid for low-income health care recipients.
• The Voting Rights Act (1965) ended racial discrimination in voting.
• The Water Quality Act (1965) required states to clean up polluted rivers and lakes.
• The Omnibus Housing Act (1965) provided for low income housing.
• The Higher Education Act (1965) created scholarships for college students.
• The School Lunch and Child Nutrition Act (1968) was expanded to provide food to low-income children in schools and day care facilities.

Between 1964 and 1968 the United States Congress passed 226 of 252 bills into law. Federal funds transferred to the poor increased from $9.9 billion in 1960 to $30 billion in 1968. One million workers received job training from these programs and 2 million children experienced pre-school Head Start programs by 1968.

Progressives should revisit this history and tell the story of the successes and failures of the 1960s vision and programs and work for the fulfillment of the dream articulated by Dr. King and LBJ. Both visions presupposed the connection between government, communities, and activists.

And, it should be made clear that the Great Society floundered, not because of errors in the vision or programs, or because of “government bureaucrats,” or because the “free market” could serve human needs better, but because of a disastrous imperial war that sapped the support for vibrant and needed domestic programs.

Slogans about Money for Jobs and Justice, Not for War, constitute the lessons for today. The Reverend Jesse Jackson should be supported in his efforts to revive the vision of the Great Society.

[Harry Targ is a professor of political science at Purdue University who lives in West Lafayette, Indiana. He blogs at Diary of a Heartland Radical -- and that's also the name of his new book which can be found at Lulu.com. Read more of Harry Targ's articles on The Rag Blog.]

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Jim Simons : Sargent Shriver and the Forgotten War Against Poverty

Sargent Shriver. Photo from Time/Life.

Sargent Shriver, warrior against poverty (1915-2011)

R. Sargent Shriver, the exuberant public servant and Kennedy in-law whose career included directing the Peace Corps, fighting the War on Poverty, ambassador to France and, less successfully, running for office, died Tuesday [January 18, 2011]. He was 95. Shriver, who announced in 2003 that he had Alzheimer's disease, had been hospitalized for several days. [....]

The handsome Shriver was often known first as an in-law -- brother-in-law of President John F. Kennedy and, late in life, father-in-law of actor-former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. But his achievements were historic in their own right and changed millions of lives. [....] President Barack Obama called Shriver "one of the brightest lights of the greatest generation..."

-- Jessica Gresko / Associated Press

Sargent Shriver… built the left flank of John Kennedy’s remarkable 1960 presidential run. In so doing he freed President Kennedy to make critical choices in favor of civil rights and economic justice.

-- John Nichols / The Nation

Poverty in America:
Sargent Shriver and the forgotten war

By Jim Simons / The Rag Blog / January 20, 2011

I heard a recording the other night of the telephone conversation between LBJ and Sargent Shriver when Shriver was appointed to head the War on Poverty. Johnson said something like, “I want to get on with it and end poverty in America.” He said this as one might say, “I want you to bring me the newspaper,” as though it could and would be done.

Shriver became the Director of the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) when it started. There could have been no better person for the job. The legislation (yes, it actually passed Congress) was inspired, so the story went, by Michael Harrington’s milestone book The Other America. There was significant poverty in the world’s richest country at the midpoint of the 20th century and it was inexcusable. It was that simple.

No one lambasted Johnson for being taken in by a socialist. Indeed, Harrington was a democratic socialist as well as being an intellectual and social critic with strong publishing credits. If anyone did yell “socialism,” no one paid any attention. How times have changed.

The War on Poverty initiated a panoply of wide-ranging programs designed to eradicate poverty -- Head Start, Legal Services, VISTA, and the big one, the Community Action Program (CAP). CAP put hundreds of local Saul Alinsky’s in the poor communities nationwide, organizing and mobilizing the poor to make fundamental changes designed to bring the people up out of poverty.

President John F. Kennedy with brother-in-law, Sargent Shriver, then director of the Peace Corps, after signing a bill giving the Peace Corps permanent status, Sept. 22, 1961. Photo from UPI.
Well, that was the theory. Oddly enough it was working to do just that when, finally, the predictable backlash came. Members of the establishment everywhere became riled up about the upset to the social order of their communities. If CAP had not been so effective we might never have heard from these representatives of the local power structures.

As it happened, newspapers editorialized and Congressional hearings were set in motion. Now came the chant of "socialism" and "communism." OEO and the foment it swelled was every bit as big as the civil rights legislation of the same period. And it was working until backlash shut it down. Whenever there was a confrontation between the organized poor and the power structure, guess who prevailed.

Sargent Shriver died this week and I remembered that I had worked for him at OEO in 1966-1967. I met him once in Washington, D.C. and I believed in his commitment and ability to win the war on poverty. In the summer of 1966 he, or his deputy director, Edgar May, sent Peter Spruance of the OEO Office of Inspection (which May headed) to Austin where the Southwest Regional Office of OEO was. They wanted to find a suitable person to occupy the local Office of Inspection in the regional office.

Spruance, who was a lawyer from California, called Ronnie Dugger, editor of the (then) crusading liberal paper, The Texas Observer. I was working as Assistant City Attorney of Pasadena, the Houston suburb, and hating the job and the town. At this very time I was in Austin trying to find a job or some practice situation so I could live in Austin. I happened to call my friend Dugger and that is when he put me in touch with Spruance who interviewed me. As it is said, the rest was history.

So I was in a unique place and time to witness the winning of early skirmishes by the people and the ultimate losing of the war. The former was thrilling beyond words and I have never felt better about the work I was doing. The latter was among the saddest defeats I’ve ever been dealt, defeats for all of us as the ship went down.

Sargent Shriver, then director of the Office of Economic Opportunity, shown with Dr. Martin Luther King, Oct. 24, 1966. Photo from Bettman / Corbis.
Over my two years at OEO the war in Vietnam was radicalizing me, to be sure. But the demise of the war on poverty set in motion in those years contributed to the process and probably had as much to do with my personal radicalization as did the war in Southeast Asia. They were interrelated wars. After that, I opted to open a basement law office to represent the peace and justice movement that had been waked in the country in the ‘60s. And that too was history.

But I have never forgotten the experience of the war on poverty, or for that matter, Sargent Shriver. I’ve always had immense respect for him. The times conspired to keep him from attaining high political office. I fear we will not see that caliber of person in politics unless the country changes more than now seems possible.

It is a big loss. But what strikes me as saddest of all is that the poor in America have been totally forgotten. No one talks of a war on poverty anymore. Supposedly progressive politicians speak of the middle class, not the poor. Everyone acts as if they don’t exist. There are more people in poverty now than in 1966 and it is getting worse all the time as the elite and the middle-class jockey for position in electoral politics.

When will we face again the challenge of ending poverty in America?

[Jim Simons practiced law in Austin for 40 years, representing many movement activists, including anti-war GIs. Jim served as a counsel for members of the American Indian Movement who were arrested at Wounded Knee in 1974. After he retired he published his memoir Molly Chronicles in 2007].

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