Rescuing Johnson's Vietnam Legacy: Why? And Why Now?

I don't really think it's time to memorialize President Johnson and Vietnam (perhaps his domestic legacy, but not the war). We entered the conflict in 1964, perhaps (in a big way at least, with the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution). But there are many other dates that could commemorate Johnson's legacy much better, not the least of which is March 31, 1968, when he announced he would not seek a second term.

Interesting, in any case.

At the New York Times, "Rescuing a Vietnam Casualty: Johnson’s Legacy" [added Memeorandum link]:

AUSTIN, Tex. — Luci Baines Johnson leaned forward in her father’s private suite at the L.B.J. Presidential Library, her voice breaking as she recounted the “agony of Vietnam” that engulfed Lyndon Baines Johnson and the pain she feels to this day of witnessing his presidency judged through the prism of a failed war.

“Nobody wanted that war less than Lyndon Johnson,” said Ms. Johnson, 66, who is the president’s younger daughter. “No matter how hard he tried, he didn’t seem to be able to get out of that quagmire. Not only did he not get out of it in his lifetime, but his legacy indeed has that weight of the world on it.”

But now, 50 years later — with a coming rush of anniversaries of the legislative milestones of the Johnson presidency — Ms. Johnson and the diminishing circle of family and friends from those White House years have commenced one last campaign. They are seeking a reconsideration of Johnson’s legacy as president, arguing that it has been overwhelmed by the tragedy of the Vietnam War, and has failed to take into account the blizzard of domestic legislation enacted in the five years Johnson was in the White House.

On Monday, the L.B.J. Presidential Library and Museum will announce details of a Civil Rights Summit to be held here in April to commemorate Johnson’s signing of the Civil Rights Act, attended by three of the four living former presidents — Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush — and perhaps President Obama.

A ceremony is being planned inside the massive slab of the L.B.J. Library, to be followed by celebrations of the 50th anniversary of Johnson initiatives: Medicare, the Clean Air Act, public broadcasting, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Head Start, the requirements for seatbelts, and warnings on cigarette packs. The events are intended to offer a counterweight to the way Johnson has been portrayed over the past decades.

“Our goal has NEVER been to create a false image of L.B.J.,” wrote Tom Johnson, a former president of CNN and a former publisher of The Los Angeles Times, who served for 40 years as chairman of the L.B.J. Foundation, in an email to other foundation members. “What we are striving to do is to achieve recognition of the truth about L.B.J.’s years, most of which (except Vietnam and some recognition of civil rights) has been forgotten or swamped by Vietnam.”

Ms. Johnson responded to that with a one-word note: “AMEN!”

Larry Temple, a former Johnson aide who is the chairman of the L.B.J. Foundation, said the coming months might offer a last opportunity for the surviving members of the Johnson administration to make his case. “The next five years will be the 50th anniversary of everything he did,” he said.

The campaign comes at the end of a long period in which aides and advisers to Johnson, who died at age 64 in 1973, have largely stayed in the shadows, quieted by the memory of a war that still prompts anguished debate and condemnation. They have patiently watched the adulation of John F. Kennedy — whom Johnson succeeded and with whom he had a decidedly competitive relationship — that accompanied the commemoration of another 50th anniversary: the Kennedy assassination.

“I’ll tell you: I don’t think people understand that this country today reflects more of Lyndon Johnson’s years in the White House than the years of any other president,” said Joseph A. Califano Jr., who was Johnson’s top domestic aide in the White House.

This advocacy of a broader view of Johnson is not confined to his immediate circle. “I absolutely think the time has come,” said Doris Kearns Goodwin, a historian who wrote a biography of Johnson. “When he left office, the trial and tribulations of the war were so emotional that it was hard to see everything else he had done beyond Vietnam. The country fundamentally changes as a result of L.B.J.’s presidency.”

Keep reading.

Look, for a long time Johnson was my favorite president. I looked especially to his domestic policies as the model for the new civil rights-era Democrat Party state. That is, of course, when I was naive and impressionistic. It turns out that the Johnson administration's War on Poverty has been a complete failure, and as much as his civil rights legacy survives it's been perverted by a Democrat-progressive victimization bureaucracy that has no intention of taking advantage of the promise of equality that is Johnson's true gift. It's a travesty of our perverted politics that this is so, but what can you say? At least Democrats back then fought the good fight against the scourge of global Communism. Today the Democrats embrace Communism while squandering American lives in a mostly faux struggle against the world's forces of totalitarian Islam.

It remains to be seen what's going to be left of this country, much less the Great Society. I would think that Johnson's heirs might be more worried about that rather than whether or not a just but bungled war has overshadowed LBJ's proper place in the annals.

At the Video: Part I of Frontline's, "Vietnam: A Television History," which first aired on PBS in 1983.