not so simple; not so complicated

{excerpt, Lone Star Rising: Lyndon Johnson and his Times, 1908 - 1960. Robert Dallek}------------ [Richard] Russell had a reputation as a staunch conservative, but he had helped create the Rural Electrification Administration and the Farmers Home Administration. "I'm a reactionary when times are good," Russell once said. "In a depression, I'm a liberal." Although Russell was much more southern and committed to racial segregation than Johnson, they both opposed Federal activism in behalf of civil rights in the early fifties. More important, they both worked for the fuller integration of the South and the West into the nation's economic and political life. They wanted both regions to gain a larger share of the national wealth and power than they had controlled during the first half of the century.

Johnson got close to Russell, but he consciously strove to avoid becoming "a professional Southerner" like Russell. Hubert Humphrey remembered Russell as "smarter than others, shrewd in the ways of the Senate, brilliant in tactics and parliamentary maneuver, and . . . constructive on most matters of foreign policy and on many domestic issues." But "his tremendous ability was weakened and corroded by his unalterable opposition to the passage of any legislation that would alleviate the plight of the black man throughout the nation. He was the victim of his region, the victim of a heritage of the past, unable to break out of the bonds of his own slavery." Russell himself told Harry McPherson, he "just let the twentieth century pass him by."

Johnson wouldn't let that happen to him. As a liberal nationalist who wanted to rise above a regional identification, Lyndon put some distance between himself and Russell. Their relationship "intrigued" Hubert Humphrey. Johnson "was a close friend of Dick Russell's; a close associate of Walter George, who was a powerful senator from Georgia; he had good working relationships with every southerner, but he wasn't quite southern. He was a different cut. ..."
---------------{end excerpt}
{Copyright, 1991. Oxford University Press, Inc.
New York, New York}

"I'm a reactionary when times are good. In a depression, I'm a liberal."
The time frame being written about there is 1949 - 1954.
Here's a time-line:

*** 1949 - 1954. U.S. Senator Lyndon Johnson "opposed federal activism on behalf of civil rights."

*** 1964. President Lyndon Johnson signs Civil Rights Act.

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