Years ago, when Bill Clinton was styled as America’s first black President, more than a few Americans, knowing it to be hyperbole, were tolerantly amused. It was fun to appreciate the direct connection the African American community and he shared but, of course, along came Barack Obama. My bemusement at the Clinton pretext stemmed from the wanton disregard of Lyndon Johnson’s role in cracking open the world for African Americans – and HispanicLatinos simultaneously. After decades of oppression, minority communities began to emerge from their suppressed selves because of Johnson. LBJ was America’s first black president politically and America’s first HispanicLatino president, to boot.
Johnson’s epic role in American history comes crashing back into public memory every time Robert Caro writes another book. Johnson had to put his political skin on the line for minorities, and he had to do it in real time, that is, in the real time of politics, using skill and strategy and force over weeks and months – at high political risk if he failed. LBJ wrote the music; Clinton played the saxophone; Obama was elected. LBJ also put large federal budgets behind his beliefs. By contrast, Clinton proclaimed the era of government to be over. LBJ was by no means a saint. He had to overcome years of having helped defeat civil rights bills but he turned around and did nothing less than inaugurate the current, new chapter of America’s history. Aside from ethnic minorities, did not the blows LBJ dealt against racism not give birth to the woman’s rights movements against sexism and encourage gays and lesbians to move against their secondary status in life?
In his fourth book on LBJ, The Passage to Power – with a final, fifth book yet to come – Caro retells how Johnson maneuvered, connived and pushed for civil rights – backed up by real governmental and budgetary force that would create a new world altogether. The Kennedy’s did not end the 1950’s as much as Lyndon Johnson did. In fact, without Johnson, John F. Kennedy would never have been elected. LBJ, for his own, often selfish reasons, created the modern world.
Caro also puts the fabled Kennedys in perspective. Kennedy’s administration, for the most part, was failing when he was killed in Dallas. JFK was on his way to becoming a presidential bust. He had handled the Cuban missile crisis gallantly and through it recovered brilliantly from his weak bungling of the Bay of Pigs invasion – which caused the Russians to provoke the crisis in the first place. But everything was stuck in Congress. And in his book, Caro documents Robert Kennedy as the ruthless twit who, thankfully, grew over time.
Had RFK not been brilliant helping his brother during the Cuban missile crisis, history would remember him as having run for President and as another victim of an assassin’s bullet. Their brother, Teddy – the least of the brothers – was considered a joke but became the only true great Kennedy. The retelling of history can be unkind. John and Robert Kennedy – their filmed murders repeatedly on television – will be remembered but Teddy is already fading – except for those who read and know history, which is why Caro writes.
Historians research their subjects to the maximum and provide write true history – good and bad. The historian’s responsibility is lost on some reviewers of Caro’s book, faulted as too long, too repetitive and too detailed. Some of these reviewers come from an age that cannot consume more than 140 characters at a time.
Clinton, of course, was one of the most capable of Presidents. David Broder, the revered columnist for The Washington Post, told me at the 2000 Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles that he believed Clinton was the most equipped man ever to be President. And because Clinton remains so active, he is extending, in a way, his Presidency as no former chief executive has. He might yet prove decisive in re-electing Obama. Compared to Clinton’s amazing ability to continue to do good, LBJ is lost to many already – a product of his mistake in prosecuting the war he inherited in Vietnam from Kennedy.
If it takes Caro another 1,000 pages in his final installment of his opus, he should make the most of them to put history right so that the nation’s first black and HispanicLatino president is not lost in time to us, who should appreciate him more.
Feel free to forward these blogs adapted from previous writings, with additional thoughts published invariably in between.