Mark Malcomson
Lyndon B. Johnson: Amazing Success and Stunning Failure

Mark Malcomson | Lyndon Johnson: Amazing Success and Stunning Failure | 03.19.24

Visuals displayed throughout the presentation.

- Okay, welcome, everybody. Good afternoon, good evening depending on where you are. Delighted to be here again. What we’ve got tonight is discussing one of the most interesting, challenging, controversial presidents, certainly in recent history, but I think in of all time. I mean, Lyndon Johnson was a phenomenon. There’s no other word to describe him. He fits into American politics in a very odd way. He is hugely dynamic. He achieves an enormous amount, and yet his presidency kind of ends in failure because his inability to manage the Vietnam War; and therefore you have a huge bundle of contradictions about his record, but you also have a huge bundle of contradictions about the man. He can be brutish, bullying, cajoling, haranguing, and yet he can do some incredible acts of kindness and be incredibly sensitive. And there’s almost this duality about everything about him, his massive physical presence. He was six-foot-three-and-a-half, and he was big-boned and he dominated. And he has that overwhelming presence.

That means that people take notice of it. He also, on one hand, is dominating, on the other hand is somebody who’s very insecure. I said last week when we were talking a bit about the relationship in Eisenhower and Nixon, is that Nixon was kind of had this dual element to him. And I actually think if you look at presidents, you know, Johnson and Nixon have a lot of similarity in terms of traits. Comparing people’s always overly simplistic to some degree, but they are both big, larger-than-life characters in so many ways, and so intelligent and also know, in different fields, how to get things done, but at the same time deeply insecure. So it is that insecurity, to some degree, and that paranoia is the undoing of both of them. But today what we’re going to do is have a word through Lyndon Johnson’s life and to see how he changed the face of America, I think, and that might be controversial here, but I think there’s something to say about the fact that he’s probably one of the most consequential presidents in American history in a positive way, certainly in the 20th century.

He’s only rivalled by Franklin Roosevelt in terms of an agenda that changed the face of domestic America. Roosevelt had the New Deal, but also the Great Society probably in a shorter period of time, has had an equal, if not lasted, longer-lasting effect on America. So for me, it’s trying to grapple with him. As I said a few weeks ago, I’m very much a Kennedy fan. And it’s interesting because you have that relationship going on. And John F. Kennedy was so opposite in so many ways to Lyndon Johnson, yet both of them are fascinating. I think the thing probably to realise the most about Lyndon Johnson is he probably has also sort of been the subject of the best political, if not best biography in history. Robert Caro, the historian, has written a magisterial four volumes, and counting, on the life of Lyndon Johnson. So much so it’s kind of up there behind me. The first four volumes are 3,800 pages long and they go from his birth, at this point, at 3,800 and odd pages. He’s only just been elected as president in his own right in 1964. They’re still, the final volume which we are avidly waiting for, waiting to find out what is the sort of Caro view on the presidency.

But to have that degree written about you shows what a phenomenon he was as a character. So without further ado, that’s a little bit of context. I’m going to think about his life a little bit, and we’re going to talk about him. And then I’ve got the questions, which I’ll keep a little bit of an eye on, but I will focus on answering them towards the end. But if there’s something in particular, we’ll have a look at them later. The reason I’ve chosen this particular picture is that Johnson was phenomenally good at imagery. He wasn’t a handsome man. He was, as I said, a physical presence. But he wasn’t the charismatic, young, handsome matinee idol of Kennedy. He wasn’t the statesmanlike military guy of Eisenhower. He was somebody that was kind of grizzled and hard-worn, but he knew how to place himself in the centre of the picture. And in fact, there’s a number of images that we’ll use tonight that will show that. But I think this one of signing legislation, but he’s signing legislation with a phenomenal backdrop, he’s got the two Kennedy brothers behind him, multiple other politicians all there, and he’s the centre of the world.

And that’s what Johnson always wanted to be. Johnson, whether it was in his personal, his private, his work life, wanted to have everything revolve around him. And that, for me, is kind of fascinating. And his team worked on him to get to the best possible images. But we’re going to talk about one in a minute that is interesting about how he managed to stage something that was almost impossible to stage. Johnson is a Texan. Literally, from the more moment he’s born to the moment he dies, he’s a Texan through and through. He becomes a creature of Washington. And there’s probably no greater manipulator of the agenda of Washington in the last 100 plus years. I’ll put a little writer there and say in his time as Senate majority leader, I think Mitch McConnell, like him or loath him, has had the same amount of effect as leader of the Republicans in the Senate as Johnson did as his time as Senate leader. However, of course, Mitch McConnell is pretty much done now, whereas Johnson went on to the presidency. So if you look at what he was, he’s a Texan and Washington, those two things don’t coincide very much in terms of personality, in terms of the way that things operate.

He was also somebody that came from Texas at a point where, particularly the presidency, was never expected from somebody from the South. Even 100 plus years after the civil war, the South was excluded from the highest levels of presidential politics. There had been a number of southern vice presidential candidates and vice presidents, but the reality was that South still carried a tarnish from the civil war, that meant that their politics was distrusted on a national level. And to break that, it would involve a set of circumstance and also an amazing ability to overcome that prejudice. And Johnson kind of manages to be in the centre of the ability and the preparation, but also the circumstances to become president. But he was born in the roughest, hardest, most barren part of Texas. Caro’s books are stunning in so many ways. But the actual first book, the beginning of the first book, is almost Steinbeckian in its way of describing the hill country of Texas and about how crops had failed, how the cattle failed, or just failure after failure that the young Lyndon Johnson and his siblings were born into.

He’s born in 1908, Stonewall, Texas. His dad is a local businessman, but not very good. He’s a failed businessman and therefore, so consequentially he’s in the local legislature, he’s a failed politician as well. And Johnson has this relationship with his father that is, on one hand, he kind of embodied him in the world of politics, but at the same time he’s greatly embarrassed and horrified by his father’s failure. So one way he kind of inducts him into what he wants to be, and then he doesn’t want to be it, he wants to do it very, very differently. As I said the other night, with some exceptions, and one of my friends kind of pulled me up on this and gave me a few examples of presidents who’ve been from the middle class, is the majority of presidents are people of either very lowly background or have come from great sort of wealth and riches, as you know from the Roosevelts, the Bushes, et cetera, and the same towns you’ve got the Nixons and the Johnsons and the Clintons of this world who come from very poor backgrounds. Johnson was definitely a president who came from the very poor side of things, and that kind of shaped his life.

He doesn’t get to go to a big university. And there’s this big chip on his shoulder about he never gets to go to Harvard and constantly battles with the mixture of anger and also chip on the shoulder around all of the bright people around Kennedy, this brains trust around Kennedy that made him feel so inadequate but made him rail against it. He instead went to Southwest Texas Teacher Training College in San Marcos in Texas. San Marcos is a lovely town. It’s small, and he’s at teacher training college. It means he gets a tertiary education, but it doesn’t mean he’s destined for big things. He takes time out and goes and teaches down on the border with Mexico and teaches 28 Mexican American kids who are literally the poorest of the poor in America. And the interesting thing, you know, for all Johnson’s kind of, you know, desire for riches, desire for the establishment, there’s probably no school teacher that’s ever been more committed to his kids. He does everything he can to give them opportunity. Organising baseball, organising debates, just a world of activity.

That human tornado that’s Lyndon Johnson was, for that brief moment, focused on some of the poorest kids in America, some of the most underprivileged kids in America. And that’s the bit that I think is fascinating about him. Somebody who cared that much about a group of individuals who would never get him anywhere. They wouldn’t be able to give him a favour, they wouldn’t be able to help him in his progression, yet he did it. And the one thing about Johnson I think is tremendous is that social responsibility that comes through in the legislation later and the stuff that he passes, but it’s also the idea that he is somebody that wants to make a difference, not just at a big level, but he will try and make a difference at a granular level. In Caro’s books, there are some amazing examples of individual kindness to people who had nothing. He never kind of stopped doing that. But at the same time, he’s a bully. He berates people. He constantly pushes people further and further and breaks quite a lot of them. He’s also, bizarrely for somebody insecure, a massive ego at the same time.

If he’d ever had a psychotherapist, he must’ve been an absolute case study of everything he wanted to do. His ego is of course he’s LBJ. If you went and stayed at his ranch, he would give you LBJ cuff links, there was LBJ ashtrays, there was LBJ bits of everything. And I think what’s fascinating is his wife, Lady Bird Johnson, was properly called Claudia Alta Taylor. He meets her in 1934 and then marries her, sorry, proposes to her the next night. She says she’ll think about it a bit, but goes on to marry him. They have an interesting kind of supportive and yet kind of adultery. It’s kind of one of those Washington nasty marriages on some levels, but she’s hugely loyal to him and quite a phenomenon in her own right. But so much is his ego. So he’s got Lady Bird Johnson, LBJ, and he has two daughters, Lynda Bird Johnson and Luci Baines Johnson, two little LBJs. What makes me laugh about him is, and I’m sure he didn’t even do this with a sense of self-deprecating humour, is the dog that they had was called Little Beagle Johnson. And that kind of shows you everything you want to know about the fact that this tremendous ego at the same time combined, as I said, with deep insecurity.

After teacher training college, he went to Washington and he initially becomes an assistant to a congressman. Within months, he’s basically running the Texas congressman’s district. There’s this thing called the Little Congress, which is all the assistants getting together, he gets elected speaker of that. And he basically inveigles his way into the highest echelons of particularly Texas politics. Now, on one hand, you haven’t got, you know, Texas politicians aren’t getting to the presidency, but what they are doing is controlling a lot around the House and the Senate. And ultimately, in 1932, Texas gets its own vice president in John Nance Garner. But Sam Rayburn, who could become speaker of the House, Johnson essentially becomes a surrogate son to him. He’s a bachelor, he’s very lonely, Johnson realises this. And most nights brings him home for dinner with him and Lady Bird, and he treats him as a father.

Rayburn is completely sort of enthralled by this, as somebody who’s quite solitary, but is desperately lonely. And Johnson, even in meetings, would sometimes walk in. And if he was late, he’d go in and kiss the head of Rayburn at the top of the meeting. And it’s kind of like, you know, very, very un-Texas macho politics. He gets into these positions and he works with all of these different people in a way that gives him real opportunities to better himself and further himself. He becomes a passionate new dealer, and he works assiduously for the FDR machine and becomes very much a part of it. FDR is quite taken with him, says if the South is ever going to get a president, this boy could be the one. And he gets sent down to Texas on behalf of the administration. The administration is now pumping America through in the mid ‘30s with enormous amounts of cash from central government to try and pump and prime economy during the Great Depression. And he gets, put in charge of the Texas National Youth Administration, which has the largest to spend a lot of money in Texas to help people out. He does that, and obviously wins a lot of favours during that period.

In 1937, he gets to run in a special election for his own congressional seats, the 10th District of Texas, which includes where he grew up. He wins. He wins quite convincingly. And this is how poor these bits of Texas. We tend to think now as Texas is an incredibly rich state, which it is, but there was quite a duality during the first part of last century. And there were bits that were affluent, but there were also bits that were terribly poor. And it wasn’t until Johnson becomes congressman that he manages to get electricity to his local district. Up until that point, it had been without electricity. That’s in the late 1930s. So he’s incredibly effective as a nuts and bolts politician. He also starts to make money for himself, which is very important. He realises if he wants to do what he needs to do, he will need to have independent wealth that will make him prosperous and insulate him from having to constantly scurry around. A few weeks ago, I talked about Harry Truman. Harry Truman never had any money.

When he left the White House, he was essentially broke. He’d lived at the White House, and he had no home and no pension. Johnson wanted to make sure he was wealthy and independent to be able to do the things he wanted to do. And what he does is he works on commercial licences and ensures that television and radio licences over the course of the next 20, 30 years are given to his companies, sometimes in the name of his wife, sometimes his name. And he builds up quite a large sort of media empire in Texas at a point when media is taking off massively, becomes very wealthy because of it, is not so great at running it. In fact, the business does mostly the best when he’s away for a couple of years in Washington and also in the Pacific because Lady Bird runs it. And basically she’s gotten far more business acumen than he’ll ever have. And she, once in an unguarded moment, an interview, sort of said it was the best time of her life running the business.

The implication was that he was away, which make it as you want. He makes himself financially successful. And he realises that, as I’ve said before, with a number of the politicians we’ve discussed, House of Representatives, whilst being important, et cetera, hasn’t got that rarefied atmosphere of the Senate. You’re one of 400 plus congressmen, whereas you’re only one of 100 senators. Senators seem to have more airtime. Senators are much more likely to parlay their way into the presidency or closer to the presidency. And of course the challenge with something like being a senator is that there’s only two Senate seats in every state. And if you’re in a big state like Texas, there’s a lot of competition. And there is also not necessarily opportunities that come up all the time. And what happens in 1941 is that an opportunity comes up. A Senate seat becomes vacant and he runs for the special election, 1941, a year that, you know, it’s not a normal Senate election. He runs against this larger-than-life character Pappy O'Donnell, and he loses.

But he loses only by 1,100 votes. And he’s devastated by it. He thinks he’s missed his one opportunity to go to the Senate. It’s not going to happen again. And he goes into quite a depression around it. Melancholy, depression, you know, anguish is a reoccurring theme when Johnson sort of depict, you know, worries about failure or receives a setback. So it was interesting that he now goes back, of course, because it’s a special election, he doesn’t have to give up his congressional seat. So he goes back to the House of Representatives. The war starts and he realises, like most men of his age, which is he’s somewhat younger but not much younger than Nixon and Kennedy, that he should, but he also needs to be seen to go to war. He parlays kind of a safe option, or so he thinks, out to Asia, partly on behest of the governments and the administration. And he’s in Papua New Guinea and he’s meant to be on a reconnaissance flight.

At the last minute, he ends up changing seats to a different plane. Depending on whose version of the story you read or what he was saying, because he aggrandizes this over the course of many years. And the joke was that by the end of the war, he won the war single-handedly because of this one incident. But he leaves his seat on the three planes that are flying off together on this mission. He goes to the toilet at the last minute, comes back out, somebody else has taken his seat, he gets in the other plane. The plane he was meant to be on is shot down, everybody dies on it. And Johnson, on his plane, sees combat, but survives. He manages to parlay it into a Silver Star for bravery, but it’s nowhere near on the level of John Kennedy’s patrol boat incident and various other American presidents who’ve seen big battles.

So he is fortunate because he gets to see combat, he gets to survive combat. And at this point, Roosevelt calls back all members of Congress and said, “Either resign your seat or come back and govern the country. We need you more as government than we do in the trenches.” Johnson’s delighted 'cause he’s able to come back and spends the rest of the war doing government stuff. Not particularly excited by it because he’s one of many, he’s talking his way up within the ranks. But, as again, House of Representatives, seniority matters, he’s still very young and junior. But the war finishes and Roosevelt dies, and then his star kind of goes into wane for a while. Harry Truman is not the biggest fan. He’s not as likely to succumb to Johnson’s charms as Roosevelt was. Johnson goes into a bit of a suspended animation. And then in 1948, a Senate seat becomes available again in Texas.

But this time it’s a full election. So to run for it, you actually have to either run for your existing congressional seat or you run for the Senate seat. So Johnson bets the House on running for the Senate seat, knowing that he hasn’t got a fallback like he did in 1948, sorry, 1941. It’s incredibly close. He is running against the Democrat nomination, working on the principle if once you’ve won the Democrat nomination, the Democrats dominate Texas at this point so much that he will win the general election. He’s running against a former governor of Texas who’s hugely popular, a guy called Coke Stevenson. And it’s a phenomenon. It’s a match of the century because Stevenson should win by a landslide. He’d been a very popular governor. He’d stood down and he’s basically saying, “I will be honest. I will represent Texas. I will do all the things that you expect me to do.” He rides around Texas in very Texan fashion, on a horse. Johnson realises he’s got the fight of his life on, and he hires a helicopter.

Now at that point, helicopters were, they’d been used in the Second World War, but they were still quite new and novel. They’re also damn dangerous. So Johnson is flying around Texas, visiting small farming communities. All of these different things are going on. And he realises, after his very close loss last time, that he has to make sure that what becomes known as Johnson’s golden law of politics, which is the most important things in politics, is learn how to count. He ensures that his side has more votes in various pockets than any, the other side. And eventually, through skulduggery, there’s no other word for it, he wins by 87 votes that come in in the last minute when the count is on out of 988,000 votes. So it’s literally the closest imaginable race. And he wins and he’s hugely relieved because he gets to go to Senate. You know, Coke Stevenson contested in the court, but Johnson manages to weave his way through all of the shenanigans to become the senator for Texas.

What’s interesting about that race, 'cause it goes down kind of an infamy as a fixed election, is that he gets this nickname Landslide Lyndon, which is an ironic one because 87 Votes is not a landslide. But what’s funny is he kind of embraces it, and of course you pay it forward in 1964, 16 years later, and of course he has the biggest electoral vote, electoral popular vote landslide in American history, at 61% then. So he gets to the Senate and he immediately ingratiates himself with one of the most powerful men in the Senate. Richard Russell, who’s the senator from Georgia, but the grand old man of the Senate Democrats and the Southerners, an unashamed racist, somebody whose job is to corral the 26 southern Senators to block any sort of progress on civil rights legislation or anything like that.

They’ve had huge amount of seniority in the Senate, so they control most of, the southerners control most of the important committees. Johnson’s fascinating at this point. And Caro’s book is, this third book in the series is called “Master of the Senate.” And up until this point, the Senate was kind of seen as it’s much more independent than the House, much less whippable in terms of doing the will of the party that’s in control. But over the course of the next 12 years, Johnson masters the Senate and its works and its people. Even though he’s still very young, he’s only just 40 when he becomes a senator, he becomes the majority whip in, you know, within three years. He then goes to be minority leader, as in he leads the Democrats when they’re not in the majority. But in 1954, the majority changes and he is suddenly leader of the majority. And over the course of the next six years, he makes the Senate probably the most effective that it’s ever been in terms of passing legislation, moving things around, making sure that everything works really well, and he gets legislation that matters to him through.

And partly what he does is, very early on, gets to know everybody, but at the same time he also ensures that he masters the rules of the Senate. And the Senate has lots of arcane rules about cloture and filibuster and all of these bizarre little devices that if you don’t know how they work, you can’t really make them work for you. And he makes sure that he really understands them. At the same time, he uses his physical and intellectual presence to do what is called The Treatment, it’s to ensure that people not just on his side, but on the Republican side as well, bend to his will. And I think this picture is brilliant from the way that he’s doing it. Look, he’s smiling, he’s laughing. And look, he’s right in the other senator’s personal space. The other guy’s looking kind of a bit nervous, as he would be, but Johnson was using himself, physically, mentally, intellectually, to ensure that everybody did what he wanted to do. And he was incredibly successful about it.

There’s stories about how he would do it. He had a swimming pool at his big ranch down in Texas, and if he would invite somebody down there and he wanted to ensure that they were uncomfortable, they’d go in the swimming pool and he would manoeuvre them, so that the swimming pool had a deep end and a shallow end, he would manoeuvre them that where he was still standing, 'cause he was very tall, on the floor of the swimming pool but the other person was now treading water and constantly off balance. And therefore he had the opportunity to kind of berate them at the same time, which is, I mean, it’s fascinating from all of this stuff that’s going on. Just amazing how he just knew how to work people and make sure things worked. In 1955, he has a massive heart attack. He’s a huge smoker, as often people were of that generation.

Same year as Eisenhower has his big heart attack. Johnson thinks his career might be over. He’s also worried that people will judge him about health issues. Actually the Eisenhower attack, or, and the fact that Eisenhower goes to reelection, helps nullify to that some degree. Johnson gives up smoking immediately afterwards and he now contemplates running in 1956. He probably, had he wanted to, could have actually been the nominee. But for what avail? Eisenhower was going to win without a doubt in 1956. And whilst the Democrats had ultimately give ally Stevenson a second go, is people who lose tend not to get that second chance. So he rightly, in my view, decides not to run in '56 and sets his sight on '60 when he knows Eisenhower can’t run for a third term and he’ll be ready there. This is the interesting piece around him. He makes quite a bad tactical error, and he’s not usually bad at tactics. But what he hadn’t realised was that his currency, all of the things he controls, are the old boy network in the party.

What he hadn’t realised was slowly the Democrat Party was becoming more democratic, and the primaries and the caucuses that were being held, which is John Kennedy’s chosen route, were becoming more important. So by the time he gets to the convention by 1960, he thinks he’s very likely to be the nominee because he’s got owed so many chits from party bosses around the country, but that’s not where all the power is anymore. And he’s quite shocked and stunned, is that’s scrawny boy with rickets, as he described Kennedy, who of course he had been Kennedy’s boss as majority leader in the Senate, had won the nomination. That could’ve been the end. He would’ve gone back to the Senate. He would’ve been a very, very powerful man. He actually would’ve been very effective for John Kennedy, helping him get legislation through. But Kennedy, very shrewdly, offers him the vice presidency.

There’s a whole saga in its own right about what actually happens over those couple of days. When he’s offered the vice presidency, Bobby Kennedy tries to stop him, et cetera, et cetera. But in the end, he accepts it. And he accepts it as a, “Right, this is really a chance for me. I want to be president.” The chances of being elected as president as a southerner are unlikely. But if Kennedy wins two terms, you know, Johnson would be way into his 60s by that point, which honestly nowadays young pup, but at that point could’ve been seen to be past it. So he takes the vice presidency, despite John Nance Garner advising him that it really isn’t something he should do. The years of the vice presidency are a disaster for him. He hates every minute of it. He thinks he’s going to be the go-to person for the Kennedy administration. With Congress, Kennedy, in my view, foolishly doesn’t use the amazing abilities of Lyndon Johnson. His team are very dismissive of Johnson about what Johnson can do for them. And Johnson wallows.

He’s sent on foreign trips. He’s not particularly good at them. He has no power. He tries to kind of maintain his authority in the Senate, that his fellow senators, former senators say no, that we’re not interested in that. He’s being drawn into a financial scandal. Bobby Baker, his close trusted aid, is involved in a financial scandal and it’s getting very close to Johnson, and then suddenly the world changes. The president is assassinated on the home ground of Lyndon Johnson. Actually, there’s a lot of kind of evidence that Kennedy probably would’ve dropped Johnson from the ticket in 1964. He didn’t see he was needed. He’s annoyed that he has to go down and campaign in Texas. That should be Johnson’s job. But the Texas Democrat Party is in civil war and Kennedy’s just having to go down there to look after what is going horribly wrong. I mean, the assassination catapults Johnson from being an irrelevancy and somebody who’s on the way down to suddenly being president two hours and eight minutes after the president is shot.

Here is Johnson being sworn in on Air Force One. I just want to take briefly a note about this picture. It’s fascinating. It’s on Air Force One. And, again, as I said at the beginning, Johnson is a master of the political image. He has cajoled Jackie Kennedy, who has just witnessed her husband’s assassination and is still covered in his blood, to stand next to him. If you notice, Lady Bird is actually behind him. Jackie Kennedy is there in the front to give almost a passing of power between them. It’s the only time in American history where a woman has given the oath of office. It’s usually the Supreme Court Chief Justice. There has been no male Supreme Court Chief Justice. Johnson, his power of patronage in Texas, had got this judge her appointment and specifically asked for her to give the oath of office. And everybody’s in there. It’s a scene that is for the ages in terms of the passing of power to Johnson.

That’s how he’s thinking already. From somebody who’s been on the edge of depression or in depression during his vice presidential years, he suddenly rebounds, the power comes to him. Over the course of the coming weeks and months, he does everything to control the presidency and ensure that his control over it is paramount. He sets up the Warren Commission, gets people like Richard Russell and Gerald Ford and Earl Warren, who’s the chief justice, to chair it. None of them want to be on it, but he, “You have to do this for the country,” et cetera. He’s incredibly kind to Jackie Kennedy. He gets to the point where he feels so bad and will not move out of the vice president’s residence and leaves Jackie there, because how could he move this widow with her young children out of her home? And eventually his aides have to go and get this sorted out. But, again, this duality, this very odd nature of him of he is kind and sensitive and at the same time bullying and cajoling.

He uses the final year of Kennedy’s presidency, Johnson’s first year, to pass some amazing legislation. He takes the mantle of a number of pieces of legislation around civil rights and also around tax cuts that were dead in the water in the Senate. And he plays an almost 3D chess with them to ensure that they get through. He passes the tax cut, he gets the first, in 1957 in the Senate, he gets the first piece of legislation around civil rights since the civil war passed through, but it’s mostly toothless. 1964, they passed some really consequential civil rights laws. And some '64, '65, he gets them through by playing off different sides, using the Republicans when necessary, working with the liberal Democrats, keeping the conservative southern Democrats on side because of the relationships he’s has with them. He gets the tax cuts through on the Revenue Act and then the Civil Rights Act of '64, which the Bruce Hornsby and the Range song is classic, which is they passed a law in '64 to give those who ain’t got a little more.

He just does all of this in a whirl of activity as well as ensuring that his political future is married to the feeling that he’s successful. He’s hugely paranoid around Bobby Kennedy. They grow to hate each other right the way through the 1960s. Bobby has been part of this group that’s very dismissive of Johnson, Johnson feels very insecure around him. But now the tables are turned. Johnson has asked all of John Kennedy’s administration to stay on as his cabinet. Of course that means he has Bobby Kennedy as his attorney general. There’s a lot of talk within the party of having Bobby Kennedy become Johnson’s running mate in 1964. Unappealing to both men, but still an idea that that would be a very, very strong ticket, which it would’ve been. The downside for Johnson’s view was he would then be seen to have relied on a Kennedy to get the presidency yet again. This problem is solved actually by Bobby Kennedy.

Bobby Kennedy decides to run for senator of New York in 1964, and does it, actually runs a pretty disastrous campaign, but is pulled over the finishing line by Lyndon Johnson. Lyndon Johnson wins New York by over two million votes, whereas Bobby Kennedy only does it by about 700,000. So it’s a really interesting dynamic. It means that Bobby is out of his hair immediately, but then goes in a position where he’s independent and, over the course of the next four years, becomes a very harsh critic of the Johnson administration. You get to '64, and let’s just remind ourselves of the electoral college. Remember that the 1960 vote is very, very close. It’s not .2% in the popular vote. It plays out a little bit better in terms of the electoral college, mainly because of the shenanigans that went on in Illinois and Texas, which of course Johnson gets kind of blamed for. Would Texas really have gone into Kennedy’s column had Johnson not be there? Johnson had served a purpose by the way. He had ensured that what had been the Solid South, which was already starting to fray, stayed on site for Kennedy. And given how close the election was, that was hugely important.

But look at that electoral college map. The blue is of course the Democrats. And look at the result for 1964. As I said at the beginning, 61% in terms of the electoral college vote is the popular vote and an electoral college landslide. Obviously both Nixon and Reagan got 49 states in their time, but this is really damn impressive. Barry Goldwater, who’s the senator from Arizona, who’s his opponent, holds his own state of Arizona, but also heels off five southern states. And that’s the beginning. Johnson predicted this when he signed the Civil Rights legislation. He said, “There goes the South for a generation.” He was wrong. It actually gone for probably about three generations for the Democrat Party. It’s only now that they’re starting to kind of reclaim some the ascendancy they had. He’s chosen Hubert Humphrey as his vice president, liberal senator from Minnesota. And he embarks on an amazing legislative programme.

So he’s been an incredible, this goes back to the amazing success, he’s been an incredibly successful senator, a whatever kind of vice president, but then vice presidents are mostly whatever. But now, as first year as president, filling out Kennedy’s term has been successful. But he’s there in his own right. He’s won in his own right for the second term, and also carried a large number of senators and congressmen into Congress, on his coattail. So he has massive majorities in both the Senate and the House to get legislation through. And he does. He passes so much radical legislation around the giving opportunities to people, Medicare and Medicaid. Again, always one for symbolism. There’s him signing the first medical legislation into American history. And of course the first card that is produced is given to number 00001 is Harry Truman, 0002 is best Truman.

Again, brilliant imagery. Let’s get this there. Let’s get the guy who couldn’t get the legislation through back in the late 1940s to early '50s to be part of the idea. And it’s not just medical legislation, it’s anti-poverty legislation. The 88th Congress, which is the two-year period from beginning of '65 to the beginning of '67, just gets through so many things. You look at Johnson’s legacy here. It’s so many important things that are still hugely important to America now, as they were then. And no matter with the change in political weather, the Republicans have never really been able to get rid of a lot of these big programmes. They’ve tinkered with them at the edges, but Medicare, Medicaid, you know, have been the bedrocks. And even you’ve seen Republican presidents expand on them because of their popularity. And that’s Johnson for you in terms of how he gets through things for those first couple of years. Now, the problem with that is that it’s not the only thing he has to do. If it was down to domestic legislation, I think Johnson would be considered to be one of the greatest presidents in American history.

I also think that he is the guy that got civil rights right. He gets some credit. I don’t think he gets as much credit as he should do. But what happens is the pent-up frustration and the pent-up challenges around civil rights because basically it had been bubbling for decades. Johnson starts to take the lid off it, but it kind of bubbles over. And what you see is that he cannot keep up with the changes. You see the march on Washington, you see all of these other changes that happened in the 1960s, and also the riots that happened in lots of the major cities that are kind of coupled in with Vietnam, but not just about Vietnam, is you get the Watts riots in Los Angeles, all of these things start to happen and he loses control of the civil rights agenda to a large degree. He works really hard for it. And, again, I don’t think there’s a president that’s had more concrete results around civil rights, but it’s not enough, and it was never going to be enough.

And so he struggles on that piece and he struggles to keep the domestic narrative completely on his own side. But what he does do is ensure that you have a much fairer and much economically fairer America. And that’s kind of gone from today. I would actually say, I’ll put my neck out here, I know some of you might disagree. But in terms of domestic agenda in terms of the running of the United States, his time, those two years, are much more consequential even than FDR. FDR would put through legislation, but often it was rejected by the Supreme Court and, again, often it would go wrong and wouldn’t work and he’d junk it and then move on to the next idea. Johnson’s stuff has really stood the test of time. You might not agree with it, but there’s a longevity there for 55 plus years of embedded itself in the nature and the workings of America. If you see the fights that go on in Congress around budget, it’s Johnson’s legacy that’s being looked at. And rightly or wrongly, it’s constantly being challenged.

But it kind of twined itself around the body politic of America and is very, very hard to release. So if it was just to judge Johnson by the domestic agenda, if it was just to judge Johnson by the civil rights agenda, he would be up there in the pantheon of greats, if not at the top of it. However, it really isn’t about that. And the reason that most of us remember Johnson is Vietnam. And he has this problem right from the beginning. Kennedy, Eisenhower first to taking over from the French, Kennedy getting a bit more embroiled, so there’s 12 and a half thousand people by the end of Kennedy’s presidency. By the time Johnson leaves the White House, there are over half a million people. And I know some of the people watching today will be some of them, and it escalates to such a degree. It’s interesting. This isn’t Johnson’s war; this is America’s war. The war will still be with you. Yes, that’s true, but it is Johnson’s war. And it becomes so entwined by his abilities and his lack of abilities on foreign policy that he cannot get control of it.

He’s too beholden to advice from the military, which isn’t always accurate. So what he’s being told. And it becomes an issue for him around, you know, saving face or losing face. And he constantly doubles down. It becomes an issue. If you look right at the beginning, his undoings very early on during that last stub period of the Kennedy presidency of where there’s an alleged attack on an American ship in the Gulf of Tonkin, and the House and the Senate passed a resolution called the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. It basically gives the president a blank check to prosecute the war in Vietnam. There is never any other authorization after that from Congress, and yet it is a blank check. So it is used by the administration again and again to prosecute a war that they just can’t get ahold of. And Johnson is a genius at domestic policy, but has a lot less interest, if you look at his time in the sense, et cetera, foreign policy was never where his heart was.

Very different from Nixon. Nixon did domestic politics, but he was a foreign policy animal. He really, that’s what he thought. Johnson was the mirror image of that. Foreign policy was not where he was that heartened, but he knew he had to do it. It’s the leader of the free world. It starts to go wrong in '66. They start talking about the credibility gap, is what Johnson’s saying and what people are starting to report back. More and more young American men are being drafted. You start to see a split in the Democrat Party. 1966, you see the midterm elections, the Democrats get a kicking. Bobby Kennedy, Eugene McCarthy, people on the left of the party start to criticise him. It makes him more stubborn and more determined to win. He gets to the beginning of 1968 with every expectation to run again. Remember that you can run for two full terms. And if you’ve inherited a term as long as it’s in the second part, which it was for Johnson, you are allowed to run for that second full term. He intends to run.

But at the beginning of '68, there is the Tet Offensive, which really underlines how out of control Vietnam has become for the administration. And in the New Hampshire primary, he gets challenged by Eugene McCarthy. Bobby Kennedy can’t, the psychodrama between Bobby Kennedy and Johnson is a book in its own right. It is a book in its own right by the way. It’s called “Mutual Contempt,” which is very good if you get a chance to read it. Bobby Kennedy won’t enter the race 'cause it’ll be just seen as him being petulant, but Eugene McCarthy does. And Johnson wins the New Hampshire primary, but he only gets 49% of the vote to McCarthy’s 42%. So it’s a Pyrrhic victory. By the end of March, Johnson goes on television on a Sunday night, says, “I’m going to dedicate myself to peace,” et cetera, et cetera, and talks about Vietnam. And right at the end, nobody’s really expecting it, he says, “And because I’m going to focus on peace, I am not going to stand for reelection. I will not be the nominee,” et cetera, et cetera.

With Johnson, you never know. He always entertained the view that the party might come back to him, that they’ll go, the Congress, in Chicago in the summer, they’ll rally around him. You see a year of turmoil. Martin Luther King gets assassinated in the April. Bobby Kennedy, on the verge of winning the nomination, gets assassinated at the beginning of June. Ultimately, Hubert Humphrey inherits the mantle. Johnson will not allow him to break with the administration. Hubert Humphrey is constantly fighting Richard Nixon sort of half manacled, does remarkably well considering the Congress in Chicago is a disaster, and he can’t separate himself from the administration, like most vice presidents have that problem with, but this was more acute than ever, yet it becomes a very close run race. As we talked about last week, it was incredibly close race given that in September everybody thought it was going to be a Nixon landslide.

Johnson leaves the White House in the beginning of '69, hands over to Richard Nixon, who he loathes and thinks has actually connived with the South Vietnamese to stop peace negotiations going on, which would’ve helped the administration and helped solve the war. Interestingly, gets on Marine One to be flown away for the first time. And for the first time since 1955, gets a packet of cigarettes out, his family go nuts at him, and he goes, “I’ve done it for everybody else, now it’s about me,” continues to smoke. He retires, spend a lot of his time in retirement trying to get his legacy reevaluated. He’s left the presidency in a spectacular failure for somebody who is at the heights of power, a mere four years before.

He lives for another four years and does some good jobs of trying to rehabilitate his legacy. He died on the 22nd of January 1973, which is only two days after Nixon’s second inaugural. He gets to see one of his great nemesis not only win, but win 49 states, having been very popular off the back of seeming to take control of the Vietnam situation and, again, kind of makes the situation worse for Johnson. So a legacy that is hugely mixed in terms of getting America in and further and deeper into a war that you would not have really, in hindsight, I don’t think anybody would’ve carried on, the war. I think it would’ve been something. Hang on, I’ve tried to be clever with, I’m trying to see if you can see me properly. Hang on a second.

• [Host] We see you great.

• Oh, great. Yeah, sorry, I’ve just detached the screen. I’m just trying to get the questions and answers up at the same time. That’s brilliant.

Q&A and Comments

Hugely problematic end to his presidency, but also balanced by amazing successes as early president and also as a master of the Senate. And if you’re going to read one book, I think the Robert Caro volume three, “Master of the Senate” will teach you of everything you might want to know about Johnson and about America in the 1950s and the balance between the various completing factions. Just a couple of questions.

Q: Shelly asks, “Southern Senators weren’t known for being positive on civil rights. Why was he?” A: I think Johnson really had a fundamental mission to do right by underprivileged. And whilst he could say stuff, he was born in the South, so some of the stuff he says is just appalling in terms of the language he used. But ultimately he wanted, whether it be African Americans, Mexican Americans in the southern part of Texas, he wanted them to do well. And it was also true of poor whites. He came from that background and he just wanted people to have greater opportunity. So in a way, I would never say he was colorblind, but he was certainly somebody that you would say he was driven by inequality. Bobby Kennedy kind of takes that mantle to some degree in the later years, but obviously comes from a very different point. He gets to see poverty, but he’s never lived it. He’s been a Kennedy, he’s been in this castle on a shining hill up until this point. So, you know, civil rights was an interesting one. And a bit like the phrase, “only Nixon could go to China,” only a southerner and somebody who was seen as part of the southern establishment could’ve delivered civil rights in the 1960s like he did.

Q: Why do you think that JFK wouldn’t have given the vice presidency to someone other than LBJ? A: In '64, I think LBJ had served his purpose. I think Kennedy was a very, very pragmatic politician, very ruthless in lots of ways. Johnson had been the key factor, in my views, probably one of the most consequential vice presidential choices to enable the ticket won in '60. Kennedy was strong enough in his own right to win the presidency in '64, and potentially LBJ was a declining asset. Trouble in Texas, generally the trouble that he was going through about his finances. People were looking at him as a bit of yesterday’s man. The argument to keep LBJ on the ticket was Kennedy didn’t believe that he would win in '68. And if JFK had appointed somebody else to the vice presidency, they would’ve challenged Bobby and ultimately JFK’s view, in my view, JFK would’ve wanted to ensure that the succession in '68, had he lived, would went to his brother.

So that’s an argument for keeping LBJ in place, but at the same time LBJ was damaged goods and suddenly, in the blink of an eye, everything changes on that. Obviously, there are lots of conspiracies in history about Kennedy was assassinated in Texas, so was Johnson involved, et cetera, et cetera. I personally don’t think anything about that’s ever been proved or sounds true. I think Johnson was appalled at what happened. And whilst, you know, desirous of the presidency, never really did anything to undermine Kennedy as his president. I think he was deferential around that. And whilst he hated Kennedy’s people, he always had a kind of grudging respect for Kennedy.

I think that’s most of the questions I can see. I know some of you had some issues getting in. I’m sorry about that. And I think this is recorded. So if people came in late or if you’ve got friends who weren’t able to get in, hopefully you’ll be able to see it when it’s kind of uploaded later. But thank you very much for joining me this evening and hopefully you’ve had a little bit of insight into a truly fascinating politician. Thank you.

• Thank you so much, Mark. We look forward to having you back.

• Thank you very much, everyone.