The NYT Against LBJ
By The NYT has a very strange criticism of Hillary Clinton, which was also made by Dowd on Monday:
Why Mrs. Clinton would compare herself to Mr. Johnson, who escalated the war in Vietnam into a generational disaster, was baffling enough. It was hard to escape the distasteful implication that a black man needed the help of a white man to effect change.
Sandy Levinson has the appropriate response:
I find this astonishingly ignorant and, indeed, almost offensive. Speaking as someone who opposed the Vietnam War and published (with Doris Kearns) an article in The New Republic suggesting that the left organize a third party in order to assure the defeat of President Johnson should he run again in 1968, I have no problem describing the war in Vietnam as “a generational disaster.” That being said, I also believe that Lyndon B. Johnson was, by a large measure, the greatest domestic policy president in our history, at least as significant as FDR as an agent of “change” (the mantra of the day). Indeed, he gave the single greatest speech of any president in my lifetime, the “we shall overcome” speech when he introduced the Voting Rights Act in1965 following the Selma debacle and, more to the point, accepted the death of the Democratic Party in which he had thrived precisely by pushing for the full inclusion of African-Americans in the polity. Those who believe that the Supreme Court is unique in being a “forum of principle” might ask themselves if anything other than principle is a better explanation of Johnson’s willingness to jettison the Democratic Party as it then existed.
Perhaps the Times’ editorial writer is simply appallingly ignorant of that aspect of the Johnson presidency. There is a lot of nostalgia being expressed these days for JFK. He didn’t hold a candle to Johnson as an agent of genuine domestic change. Why can’t the Times recognize that, even if it wants, altogether properly, to go on to say that the tragedy of LBJ was his inability/unwillingness to accept American defeat in Vietnam (perhaps itself based on “principle,” which proves, among other things, that “principled” commitments are not necessarily worthy of support)?
Clinton is open to criticism on a number of fronts, but to praise LBJ in the context of civil rights is entirely unobjectionable.