We cats have been lapping up the latest installment of Robert Caro's enormous biography of Lyndon Johnson, The Passage of Power, like a saucer of warm milk. It's seriously interfered with the other items on our "to do" list.
The book takes Johnson from about 1958 to 1964, and we're struck by all the things we thought we knew about the Kennedy Administration, which Johnson served as Vice President, but didn't. We admire JFK a lot, but unless you take the time to read someone like Caro you don't realize how much the Camelot legend has obscured the turbulence of his brief Presidency and the ugliness of the era's domestic political scene.
Think things are bad now? Well, yes, they are. As the recent Pew Research study has confirmed, our country is bitterly divided along partisan lines, more so than by race, class or ethnicity. But Caro reminds us that in 1963 police in Birmingham, Alabama were turning fire hoses and German shepherds on American citizens, and the Senate was being held hostage by a bloc of openly racist southerners led by Georgia's Richard Russell.
Within a few years, the South would bolt from the Democratic Party after Johnson became President and pushed civil rights through Congress. So make no mistake, Americans were divided then as they are now. (And Vietnam was just around the corner.)
What bothers us, though, is that even in the Senate of Richard Russell, LBJ was able to get not just the Civil Rights Act but huge social programs like Medicare passed. It was partly because of his outsize personality, his Capitol Hill expertise, and his canny casting of legislation in JFK's memory. But it was also because despite Congress's divisions, in both parties there was still room — and an appetite — for political compromise.
If we cats could sigh, we would. If you want to wax nostalgic about the not-so-lovely days of Lyndon Baines Johnson, wax nostalgic over that.
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