The Presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson by Vaughn Davis Bornet
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
While Lyndon Johnson was only president for 5 years he did a great many things–using his experience as a senator to pass more legislation than one might have thought would be possible.
Bornet paint a picture of Johnson as being an aggressive, ambitious determined man whose idealism drove him as president to use the government as a tool for social change…furthermore Kennedy’s death and Johnson’s desire to uphold the legacy of Kennedy (along with his landslide reelection as president) most likely contributed to his desire to effect change immediately. His heavy-handed policies, “Gun and Butter” which focused on internal problems like poverty and civil rights and healthcare and his external problems like Vietnam strained the US economy and social fabric. While the 60s were already set up to be a tumultuous time, Johnson’s radical widesweeping changes eventually backfired on him, as the US wasn’t ready for such change. As Bornet points out, much of the white middle class felt left behind and threatened (their interests ignored) as Johnson concentrated on the poor and non-whites. This head to two things, 1) the election of Nixon and a changing of the administration and legislation from Democrat to Republican and 2) economic problems in the 70s as government spending reeled out of control to fund these new programs (without increased taxation).
So while Johnson did great things because of his experience and skill, he failed on many fronts. The first was that he didn’t communicate to the American public that Vietnam was going to be a long and hard fight. He relied too much on historic precedents where American soldiers in foreign lands win wars (even though there is often a military presence for much longer after the fighting). So in that sense, he set himself up for problems when the reality of Vietnam popped up. The second failure it seems, is that Johnson didn’t understand the national scene. He defunded the Democratic leadership and shuffled unwanted people from the White House and government into positions within the party, leaving a void in funding and planning. This presented much last minute scrambling come the election of 1968.
In some ways, this book, in its current edition, is already outdated, as recently news of Nixon’s backhanded dealings in Vietnam as a candidate for presidency messed up Johnson’s negotiations for peace has become public. Johnson also seems to have bumbled Humphrey’s candidacy at times, which seemed like an incomplete picture which Bornet didn’t really explain too well. He kind of didn’t really talk about the vice-presidency much either.
Over all, this book is concise and well written. At times I wasn’t sure where Bornet was going, but history is often less a coherency than it is a list of events that are chained together through some arbitrary time period or effective event. Bornet paints a picture of Johnson as a man really who stepped up to the plate when Kennedy was unexpectedly assassinated. Johnson did the best he could and was quick to capitalize on change. There were some evident character flaws, but Bornet sides with Johnson as an idealizing hard working man, one who didn’t run for a second term for health reasons but nonetheless sought to leave the country a better place than he left it.
