strange days had found us

Reading about LBJ, George Wallace got onto my mental radar screen.

My first memory of Wallace was in the 1968 election:  since LBJ had decided not to run, there was no incumbent -- three candidates and no incumbent...
Richard Nixon for the Republicans,
Hubert Humphrey (from Minnesota) for the Democrats,
and George Wallace for the -- I don't know.

The only information I had heard about him was, he didn't like black people.
(That's his platform?...)

Next time he visited my "radar screen" I was in the car being driven to piano lesson, and news came from radio that George Wallace, running for president again, in the Democratic primary, had been shot -- in -- Maryland, I think....(yes, Google says Maryland...).  1972.  (Not again!)

That was horrible. 
The assassinations.
JFK
MLK
RFK
and Wallace was in a wheelchair for the rest of his life.

I think all that violence caused many people to feel disillusioned.

Reading on the internet -- George Wallace's son has written a book about his father and it sounded like part of the thesis was that Gov. Wallace was not really such a racist, but he used the "race-baiting" line and the staunch segregationist position because it "worked" to get him elected.

He became sort of a symbol of the old days and the old ways, by standing in a schoolhouse door to prevent some black students from going to class.  John S. Pancake pointed out, in a review of a TV-movie about Wallace, that standing there in the doorway only kept that school segregated for an extra four hours.

He was expressing, or standing for, the way some people felt.

Then, in the Free Encyclopedia, I come across this:
"Bremer's diary...published after his arrest shows the assassination attempt was motivated by a desire for fame, not by politics...."

That's an interesting parallel, if you think of it this way:

Gov. Wallace used the race-baiting tactic,
not because
he really wanted to hold back black progress,
but in order to
get elected,

While

Bremer's assassination attempt on
1972 presidential candidate Wallace
was not done becasue
he disliked Wallace,
or disagreed with his political positions,
but in order to
get famous.

As The Doors said,
"Strange Days."

-------------  The F.E. also tells us that Shirley Chisholm, a black woman in the U.S. House of Representatives, (at that time the only black woman in the U.S. House...) visited Gov. Wallace in the hospital, after the shooting.

And -- [excerpt, Free Encyclopedia]--------------------- In the late 1970s, Wallace announced that he was a born-again Christian and apologized to black civil rights leaders for his past actions as a segregationist.  He said that while he had once sought power and glory, he realized he needed to seek love and forgiveness.  In 1979, Wallace said of his stand in the schoolhouse door:  "I was wrong.  Those days are over, and they ought to be over." -------------------------- [end excerpt]

Looking at the above paragraph now, I wonder about a conversation I had, (or rather, was clobbered by), in the late 1990s -- there had been a cable TV-movie about Wallace starring Gary Sinise...I saw parts of it, and was impressed.  I mentioned this, in state capital, over lunch with two school superintendents, a man and a woman, and they both, like, almost went wild -- "You like George Wallace?!"  "You're a supporter of George Wallace?!"

(What they used to call a "knee-jerk reaction.")

I tried to say,
"I said the film was well-done;
I did not say that I was awaiting
an opportunity to
vote for
George Wallace,"

but it was no use.  They jumped to a conclusion, and clung tightly to it, like frogs jumping from one lily-pad onto another one. 
I couldn't move them off that lily-pad. 
Reason was rebuffed.

("I was wrong.  Those days are over, and they ought to be over."  Did those school superintendents not hear that Wallace had said that?  AND -- apologized?)

Thought, "Hmmh.  These people
can't listen
can't process information
and
they're in charge of education.
Very good."

Politics drives people crazy.

Politics drives some people crazy.

-30-

their cause must be our cause

There are different kinds of days in our Congress, in Washington, D.C.

There are days like this --
"Congress is so strange.  A man gets up to speak and says nothing.  Nobody listens -- and then everybody disagrees."
-- Senator Alexander Wiley, quoting a Russian observer  (1947)

...and there are days like this:
"...Really, it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice.  And," Johnson paused, raising his arms for emphasis, "We shall overcome."

A moment of stunned silence followed, as the audience absorbed the fact that the President [LBJ] had embraced the anthem of black protest. 

And then almost the entire chamber rose in unison, "applauding, shouting, some stamping their feet."

---------------------------------
Many more of the "everybody disagrees" days,
than the
"shouting-feet-stamping" days.

That's ok; that's life.

In some countries, the only feet-stamping the people do is toward the nearest border, trying to get out....North Korea, for instance....

=======================
In Robert Dallek's LBJ bio, when he describes the discussions / negotiations between President Lyndon Johnson, and Alabama Governor George Wallace, these two paragraphs stood out, for me:

1.  "Don't shit me about your persuasive power, George," Johnson replied.  "I saw you . . . attacking me [on television], George.  And you know what?  You were so damn persuasive that I had to turn off the set before you had me changing my  mind."

2.  After their meeting, Wallace remarked:  "Hell, if I'd stayed in there much longer, he'd have had me coming out for civil rights."

============= I admire and applaud the civility of those comments, each man paying a compliment to the persuading powers of the other.....

===================
[excerpt]----------- Though [LBJ's] administration representatives in the Senate had to break a conservative filibuster and fend off liberalizing provisions that jeopardized the bill, by May 26, after only two and a half months, the Senate passed the bill by a lopsided 77 to 19 count.  In the House, where conservative maneuvering presented a challenge, the bill won passage on July 9 by an overwhelming 333 to 85 vote. 

A conference committee spent all of July throwing out House and Senate additions, largely restoring the bill to what the White House had initially proposed.    [emphasis, mine]

On August 6, in remarks in the Capitol Rotunda, Johnson emphasized the historical importance of the measure he was about to sign and promised that he would move swiftly to enforce its provisions. ------------ [stop excerpt]

Now, see -- when people say, automatically, "Those damn politicians never keep their promises!" - that isn't true.  We have to be nicer to our politicians, we mustn't "beat up on" them so much.  Because look:

-------- [excerpt]:  The impact of the law across the South was evident at once.  By the end of 1966, only four states of the old Confederacy had less than 50 percent of their voting-age blacks registered, and in three of these, registration had reached 47 percent.  Only Mississippi, with 33 percent of blacks on the voting rolls, was well short of the law's requirement.  At the end of 1967, Georgia, Louisiana, and Virginia had also exceeded the 50 percent target, and Mississippi had 45 percent of its black citizens registered.  By the 1968 election, Mississippi was up to 59 percent, and black registration in the eleven Confederate states averaged 62 percent.  ...

Black office-holding now also expanded dramatically, with the number of black officials multiplying in six Deep South states during the next four years nearly sixfold.  ...As important, white politicians seeking black votes abandoned the region's traditional racist demagoguery.  In the words of one histsorian, "a new generation of moderate governors, putting aside the ancient obsession with race, gave the South enlightened leadership."  The act also made a large difference in numbers of black elected officials nationally; by 1989, the number of black office-holders had grown from the few hundred there had been in 1965, to 6000.------------------- [end excerpt]

(By 1989 an African American public office-holder could think to himself, "I used to be hated because of my race -- now I'm hated for being a politician.  Progress is beautiful!")

In Flawed Giant's Chapter 4, King of the Hill, Dallek wrote:
At a breakfast meeting the day after Johnson's voting rights speech, Florida's Spessard Holland "asked angrily:  'Did you hear ol' Lyndon say we shall overcome?'  The moderate Lister Hill, of Alabama, turning to Richard Russell, asked, 'Dick, tell me something.  You trained that boy. . . . What happened to that boy?'  The Georgia senator responded, 'I just don't know, Lister. . . . He's a turncoat if there ever was one.'

-------------------------------
You couldn't make this stuff up -- you couldn't make it up!

-------
 "What do you want left after you when you die?  Do you want a Great...Big...Marble monument that reads, 'George Wallace -- He Built'?...Or do you want a little piece of scrawny pine board lying across that harsh, caliche soil, that reads, 'George Wallace -- He Hated?'"

-------
"I know you're like me, not approving of brutality."

-------
"Don't you shit me, George Wallace."

-------
"I know you're like me...."

-------
"I wanted to talk from my own heart, from my own experience."

-------
"...a turning point in man's unending search for freedom. . . . Rarely in any time does an issue lay bare the secret heart of America itself. . . . Rarely are we met with a challenge . . . to the values and the purposes and the meaning of our beloved Nation."

-------
"It is the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life.  Their cause must be our cause too.  Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice."

-------
"It's his ox that's in the ditch, let's see how he gets him out."

-------
"Now you've got a lot of poor people down there in Alabama, a lot of ignorant people.  You can do a lot for them, George.  Your president will help you."

-------
"And, we shall overcome."

-------
"The real hero of this struggle is the American Negro....His courage to risk safety and even to risk his life, have awakened the conscience of this Nation...."

-------------------------------------------
You could not make that stuff up.
whatacountry


"Don't you shit me, George Wallace"

---------------------
excerpts from Flawed Giant,
Robert Dallek

-30-

the waters around you

Yesterday, was typing along, here -- thinking of reasons why many of our citizens wanted to help with the civil rights and voting rights of black Americans, and I listed several but forgot this one:
If the civil rights
mandated by the Constitution

can be denied to one group of people,

then it can be done to you or me, too...

when circumstances change, and
new bullies
with different hatreds and prejudices

get into power.

------------------------When we help make things equal and fair for other people, we are insuring and protecting our own civil rights.

==============================

Come gather 'round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You'll be drenched to the bone
If your time to you is worth savin' --
Then you better start swimmin' or you'll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin'

Come writers and critics
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won't come again
And don't speak too soon
for the wheel's still in spin
And there's no tellin' who that it's namin'
For the loser now will be later to win
For the times they are a-changin'

Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don't stand in the doorway
Don't block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
There's a battle outside and it is ragin'
It'll soon shake your windows and rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin'

Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don't criticize
What you can't understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is rapidly agin'
Please get out of the new one if you can't lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin'

The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is rapidly fadin'
And the first one now will later be last
For the times they are a-changin'

====================
a Bob Dylan single, released March 8, 1965

-30-

hurtling toward Marblehead

"And, should we defeat every enemy, should we double our wealth and conquer the stars, and still be unequal to this issue, then we will have failed as a people and as a nation." 
-- President Lyndon B. Johnson, 1965, in his voting-rights address to a joint session of Congress

Reading some in Robert Dallek's LBJ bio, I was thinking I wished I had drawn out more details from my dad, when he was living, about what it was like to travel to (Alabama?  Mississippi?...some place in the South) and help get people registered to vote.  He went, for a few days, one time -- on a bus, with other people.  (Were they all ministers?  Were some of them students?  I don't know that either.                                I don't know much....)

I think when he made that trip it was the year before I was in kindergarten, so it would have been before 1965, the year that President Johnson made that speech.  A memory that remained with me was when he returned to where we lived, in Ohio, my mother drove to pick him up and I rode along in the car.  On the way home he talked about the trip and at one point he said that the bus was "hurtling" down some winding road. 

From the back seat I asked, "What is hurtling?"

Can't recall the exact explanation, but I was given to understand that hurtling meant you were going -- mmh -- lickety-split, pretty-darn-fast....

(on-line dictionary:  hurtle.  1.  to rush violently; move with great speed:  The car hurtled down the highway.)

That image -- of a fast bus -- stayed with me.  I didn't think about it in any deeper kind of way, or put it together with anything.

------------------------------------  Some people might make an argument that people from other parts of the country who were going down to the South and helping people get registered to vote were "meddling in" other people's business.   And they wouldn't be completely wrong.  After all, people from Alabama and Mississippi weren't coming to Ohio and telling us what to do.  A person can't deny that. 

(Other hand -- my dad & the other folks on the fast bus technically weren't traveling to these "destination states" to "tell anyone what to do," they were simply helping U.S. citizens who had been denied by some of the local people, their right to vote -- just helping them get signed up, was all.  They didn't go there to dictate to the local governments what to do, but only to facilitate the voting-registration of American citizens who had been systematically and cynically bullied out of their right to vote -- for a hundred years...!!  I mean, it had been a long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long -- time.

As President Johnson said in the speech,

"A century has passed, more than a hundred years....")

I think the reason people like my father, and many many more, were inspired to try to help out in that situation -- well, different reasons blended together:

1.  it had been a hundred years

2.  the processes used by some of the local white people to bar black people from voting were -- demeaning to everyone involved, even -- and maybe especially -- to the people perpetrating them (!) -- "Before you can vote, you have to pass a reading test."  "Sure, I'll take a reading test."  And they'd give him something written in Chinese.  "Whoops, you can't read, so we cannot allow you to vote."  Or -- some questions to answer on 'an intelligence test,' first question -- "How many bubbles are there in a bar of soap?"

(I mean, seriously:  DOWN WITH MEANNESS!!)

3.  Before President Johnson, President John F. Kennedy had inspired people to idealism, to generosity, and to high hopes and powerful efforts:  "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country."  It wasn't as if people just ran around, like maniacs, looking for wildly idealistic things to do to "help others" as some cynics referred to "the do-good-ers"

[yeah?  what are YOU doing?  bad stuff?  go report yourself to the police...],

but -- when a person in that era looked at the civil rights movement, and the fact that a large number of American citizens were consistently and constantly bullied and intimidated out of their right to vote, the person could say, "There's something to help out with, because that is bullshit."

4.  The assassination:  I think Pres. Kennedy inspired feelings of pride in America & wanting to contribute, if possible, to improvements, & righting wrongs -- and then after he was murdered -- some of the shock and grief and anger that people felt maybe got channeled into even stronger feelings of idealism, and tendencies toward activism.
And 5. 

It had been a hundred years.

---------------------------  In the Dallek book, the paragraph about the minister from Boston -- "...local whites the next day....beat up the Reverend James Reeb, a white minister from Boston, who died in a Birmingham hospital the following night" -- made me wonder about a couple of things....

I wondered if my mother might have wished that my father wouldn't "get involved" in such a venture, because of that type of danger, and I wondered why my dad wasn't -- more cautious.  (I mean, are ya doin' something foolish, here?  are ya crazy...?)
But then thought, he grew up during the Depression and survived that -- and served in the Army, overseas, in World War II -- and after experiences like that, I think he probably just did not feel, on a deep level, that any of his fellow Americans were going to -- beat him to death -- anytime soon.

I think when people go to war, they know the risks, and they see some bad stuff, and then develop to an emotional and psychological "place" where they are less afraid of things, in general.  They become more Tough.  (Some people think being "tough" means being "tough on" other people -- or being obnoxious toward them, but I think of a "tough" person as a person who is less afraid of stuff, & makes judicious decisions and has good priorities....)

And as I thought about the Boston minister who died, and then remembered the fast bus "hurtling"...down the road,
had new thought:

maybe
that's Why
the bus --

was Hurtling!...Hello?!

As people in Massachusetts like to say, "Light dawns on Marblehead"....

-30-

to make good the promise

March 15, 1965
Pres. Johnson to Congress: 
"What happened in Selma is part of a far larger movement which reaches into every section and State of America.  It is the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life.  Their cause must be our cause too."

on-line dictionary:  suffrage = the right to vote
(that is a weird word -- in an episode of Friends Phoebe makes note of this, saying, "Then we had suffrage -- which sounds awful, but really it's a good thing)

[excerpt]-----------------------  At a subsequent press conference, Johnson left no doubt about his intentions.  He wanted to eliminate "a deep and very unjust flaw in American democracy" by sending Congress a voting rights law that would enforce the constitutional guarantee against barring people from the polls because of race or color.  As for his meeting with Wallace, Johnson described the governor as eager for law and order.  To that end, Johnson said he had suggested three actions: 

that Wallace declare his support for universal suffrage in Alabama,

that he assure the right of peaceful assembly,

and that he call for a biracial meeting to promote greater unity among all Alabamans.

Johnson said nothing about an agreement with Wallace on how to keep the peace.  When Wallace thought it necessary, he would ask the President for help, and Johnson, according to one aide, "would help him save his political ass by accepting the subterfuge."  Consequently, after a federal court had agreed to an SCLC plan for a march to Montgomery beginning on the 21st, Wallace wired Johnson that Alabama lacked the funds to protect the marchers and asked the President to use federal means to do the job.  Johnson replied on March 20 by calling 1800 Alabama national guardsmen into federal service.

Johnson's immediate concern was to mobilize congressional action on voting rights.  He didn't think it was enough simply to send a proposal to the Hill with a special message describing the historical record of constitutional violations of black rights.  Rather, he felt compelled to go before Congress, where he could command the attention of the nation and the world and emphasize the importance and urgency of remedying this

national insult to law and democracy. 

"I wanted to use every ounce of moral persuasion the presidency held," Johnson wrote later.  "I wanted no hedging, no equivocation.  And I wanted to talk from my own heart, from my own experience."

...It was Johnson's greatest speech and one of the most moving and memorable presidential addresses in the country's history.  Comparing Selma to Lexington and Concord, to Appomattox, Johnson described it as "a turning point in man's unending search for freedom. . . . Rarely in any time does an issue lay bare the secret heart of America itself. . . . Rarely are we met with a challenge . . . to the values and the purposes and the meaning of our beloved Nation. 

The issue of equal rights for American Negroes is such an issue. 

And

should we defeat every enemy,

should we double our wealth

and conquer the stars,

and still be

unequal to this issue,

then we will have failed as a people and as a nation."

The issue, Johnson said, was democracy, the right of the individual, regardless of race or color, to vote.  "There is no constitutional issue here," Johnson asserted. 

"The command of the Constitution is plain. 

There is no moral issue. 

It is wrong -- deadly wrong --

to deny any of your fellow Americans the right to vote in this country.  There is no issue of States rights or national rights. 

There is only the struggle for human rights."

And, Johnson declared, measuring every word, "what happened in Selma is part of a far larger movement which reaches into every section and State of America.  It is the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life. 

Their cause must be our cause too. 

Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must
overcome
the crippling legacy
of bigotry and injustice.  And,"

Johnson paused, raising his arms for emphasis,

"We shall overcome."

A moment of stunned silence followed, as the audience absorbed the fact that the President had embraced the anthem of black protest.  And then almost the entire chamber rose in unison, "applauding, shouting, some stamping their feet."  Tears rolled down the cheeks of senators, congressmen, and observers in the gallery, moved by joy, elation, a sense that the victor, for a change, was human decency, the highest standards by which the nation was supposed to live.

..."A century has passed, more than a hundred years, since the Negro was freed.  And he is not fully free tonight. . . . A century has passed, more than a hundred years, since equality was promised.  And yet the Negro is not equal. . . . The real hero of this struggle is the American Negro," the President added.  "His actions and protests, his courage to risk safety and even to risk his life, have awakened the conscience of this Nation. . . . He has called upon us to make good the promise of America.  And who among us can say that we would have made the same progress were it not for his persistent bravery, and his faith in American democracy?"

Martin Luther King, watching on television in Birmingham, cried.

------------------------- [end excerpt]

{Flawed Giant.  Lyndon Johnson and His Times.  1961 - 1973.
Robert Dallek.
Copyright, 1998.  Oxford University Press,
New York, Oxford.}

-30-

I know you're like me

President Lyndon Johnson,
to Governor George Wallace:

"Why don'tcha just desegregate all your schools? 
You and I go out there in front of those television cameras right now, and you announce you've decided to desegregate every school in Alabama."

Gov. Wallace:  "Oh, Mr. President, I can't do that, you know.  The schools have got school boards; they're locally run.  I haven't got the political power to do that."

Pres. Johnson: 

"Don't you shit me, George Wallace."

-----------------------------
-----------------------------

Spring 1968:  Pres. Johnson announces he will not seek re-election.
But three years earlier...
[excerpt]-------------------  He focused his efforts on trying to head off more violence in Alabama.  When King announced that he would begin another march to Montgomery on March 9, the White House urged him to avoid a fresh confrontation.  With a federal judge issuing a temporary order barring all marches, King was reluctant to defy the very authority he was trying to enlist in his campaign.  Consequently, he agreed to a compromise worked out by a mediator the President had sent to Selma.  King led 2000 marchers, including 200 religious leaders from all over the country, across the Pettus Bridge, where Alabama troopers once again blocked the way.  After singing "We Shall Overcome," the anthem of the civil rights movement, and kneeling in prayer for several minutes, King led the marchers back to Selma without incident.

King's restraint contrasted dramatically with the actions of local whites the next day.  They beat up the Reverend James Reeb, a white minister from Boston, who died in a Birmingham hospital the following night.

Johnson now came under strong pressure to intervene with federal troops.  Sympathy marchers in cities around the country urged the President to protect the protestors in Alabama, while pickets outside the White House carried signs denouncing Johnson's inaction:  "LBJ, just you wait -- see what happens in '68."

Johnson was pained at the attacks on his commitment to support black voting rights.  "Once again my Southern heritage was thrown in my face.  I was hurt, deeply hurt," he wrote later.  But he was determined "not to be shoved into hasty action."  Though he had put 700 troops on alert during the second march on March 9 and though federal attorneys, marshalls, and FBI agents had been sent to Selma to keep the peace, Johnson was reluctant to publicize his actions.  Southern obstructionists eager to show the South as a victim of overbearing federal power might use them to their advantage.  If he acted too aggressively, Johnson believed it would alienate southern moderates, antagonize centrists everywhere, and block passage of a voting rights act.  On the other hand, if he did nothing to protect the marchers, it would deepen the rift between North and South and undermine his ability to lead a law through Congress.

Johnson needed the cooperation of George Wallace, who also wanted to prevent further bloodshed.  Wallace had national ambitions and the sense to see that more violence would mark him as simply a racist rather than an opponent of federal authority, which he rightly believed could be made into a popular political issue.  "Now that Wallace, he's a lot more sophisticated than your average southern politician, and it's his ox that's in the ditch, let's see how he gets him out," Johnson said at a meeting convened to discuss the crisis.

To escape his dilemma, Wallace asked Johnson to see him.  Johnson agreed at once, and they met at the White House on the afternoon of March 13.  The meeting provided the occasion for what one aide called possibly LBJ's finest performance.  Johnson's objective was to put Wallace on the spot, to make clear that he would back the legitimate demands of the marchers and insist that Wallace protect peaceful demonstrators from police violence.

Johnson orchestrated every aspect of the meeting.  He received Wallace in the Oval Office, where he sat him on a couch with soft cushions that placed him some three or four feet above the floor.  Johnson positioned himself in a rocking chair "and leaned toward the semi-recumbent Wallace, his towering figure inclined downward until their noses almost touched."  After Johnson let Wallace say his piece against outside agitators stirring up trouble and his opposition to federal intervention in the affairs of his state, Johnson gave him the "treatment."  "I know you're like me, not approving of brutality," Johnson said, and handed the governor a newspaper with a picture of a state trooper kicking a black protestor who had been knocked to the ground.  Johnson waved aside Wallace's explanations that the troopers were only doing their duty, that it was an isolated incident, and that they didn't start the ruckus.  Johnson pressed Wallace into acknowledging that there was "brutality."

Then raising the issue of black disenfranchisement, Johnson asked Wallace to persuade Alabama registrars to give blacks their constitutional right to vote.  Wallace protested that he didn't have the wherewithal to sway these local officials.  "Don't shit me about your persuasive power, George," Johnson replied.  "I saw you . . . attacking me [on television], George.  And you know what?  You were so damn persuasive that I had to turn off the set before you had me changing my mind."

..."Why don'tcha just desegregate all your schools?" he asked Wallace.  "You and I go out there in front of those television cameras right now, and you announce you've decided to desegregate every school in Alabama."  Wallace replied:  "Oh, Mr. President, I can't do that, you know.  The schools have got school boards; they're locally run.  I haven't got the political power to do that."  Johnson said, "Don't you shit me, George Wallace."

After nearly three hours of hammering at the governor, Johnson appealed to his sense of history.  He urged Wallace not to "think about 1968; you think about 1988.  You and me, we'll be dead and gone then, George.  Now you've got a lot of poor people down there in Alabama, a lot of ignorant people.  You can do a lot for them, George.  Your president will help you.  What do you want left after you when you die?  Do you want a Great...Big...Marble monument that reads, 'George Wallace -- He Built'?...Or do you want a little piece of scrawny pine board lying across that harsh, caliche soil, that reads, 'George Wallace -- He Hated?"  After their meeting, Wallace remarked:  "Hell, if I'd stayed in there much longer, he'd have had me coming out for civil rights."
------------------------- [end excerpt]

{Flawed Giant.  Lyndon Johnson and his Times, 1961 - 1973.
Robert Dallek.  Copyright, 1998.  Oxford
University Press.  New York.  Oxford.}

-30-

peace with honor

"This country's ultimate strength lies in the unity of our people.  There is division in the American house now.  There is divisiveness among us all tonight.  And holding the trust that is mine, as President of all the people, I cannot disregard the peril to the progress of the American people and the hope and prospect of peace for all people. . . . With America's sons in the fields far away, with America's future under challenge right here at home. . . I do not believe that I should devote an hour or a day of my time to any personal partisan causes.
. . . Accordingly, I shall not seek, and will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President."
----------------------------
President Lyndon Baines Johnson said that to Americans in a speech in 1968.  He had come to the presidency November 22, 1963, and then won election in 1964.  He was eligible to run for re-election in 1968 (by that time, presidents had been limited to two four-year terms, [after President Franklin D. Roosevelt's four elections to the office kind of bugged some people], and -- really, if Johnson had been re-elected in 1968, and served to 1972, he would have been president for nine years, which would put him one year "long" of the 2 four-year term limit, but I guess the rules with the term-limit must have allowed for that....) but decided to step back -- hard to do for a man who was so very competitive, but then health concerns helped to weigh in on that decision, as well.

In Robert Dallek's second volume of his LBJ biography, Flawed Giant, covering 1961 to Johnson's death in 1973, there's a lot of coverage of the Vietnam War -- oh my gosh, it'd be difficult to come up with anything more tedious.  And I don't mean that the writing isn't good -- it's just -- OMG Vietnam War era was such a tension-building horror, in some ways.  And to read this, and try to have more understanding -- it's like, what stands out is kind of a lack of clarity and leadership on the part of President Johnson (with all due respect) and on the part of his advisors.


The phrase "wishful thinking" keeps coming up.
Wishful thinking.
And people going to Vietnam, looking over the situation, and then coming back and telling Johnson that the war was going well, and then telling their intimate friends and family members that it was NOT going well.
They would tell him what they thought he wanted to hear.
(That's hard to believe, but sounds like that was what was going on....)

Wishful thinking.
Indecision.
and
A failure to communicate successfully with the public about the war, to keep their support.

A "limited war" simply did not have the
clear goal and end-point,
nor the tangible evils
that had been present in, for example, World War II -- so that people really understood what was being fought for....

Saigon, Hanoi, ground-war in the South, bombing in the North -- but not too much bombing, so as not to draw the USSR or China into it, causing potential nuclear holocaust and then we're all gone....
(Not "too much" bombing...
Bombing-Lite. 
Low-fat, gluten-free bombing....)

Containing the spread of communism was a lllllooooonnnngggg tedious job, with some successes along the way, and some flub-ups, and deciding to send Americans into harm's way in the distant jungles was an aspect which just never became popular.

And the polls -- oh my God, this book is like, Johnson had a poll which said 56% of Americans supported this, but 44% were against that, and ... yada-yada...Can you run a war based on weekly polls of house-wives and ministers and Coca-cola bottlers and truck drivers...?  I mean, everybody is like, Sure, we Support Our Men Overseas.  (Who doesn't, right?)
But then these Washington  people would take that poll and say, OK, the people support us, so send in more men...And then they get killed or maimed, and -- the objective (on which people remained unclear, and Johnson could not effectively explain) got No Closer.
It just -- what a nightmare. 

---------------- When I was in, maybe, third grade, we had Washington's Birthday as a Day Off from School -- or maybe it was Lincoln's Birthday, or both.  (I don't think they had declared "President's Day" yet...I think we got them both "off" from school...) -- anyway, I asked my dad, If we get Lincoln's birthday off from school, how come we don't get President Johnson's birthday off from school, too?  Since he's the president now...?

And my dad said, "Oh...we're not so sure we're very happy that we elected him."

And that comment stayed with me in my awareness, because I knew my mom & dad voted for Johnson, in 1964, and so I assumed we "liked him" enough to take his birthday off....But -- seemed all was not happy, and I knew there was a "Vietnam War" and that it would be nice to have it over-with, so that there could be Peace.  But that day I don't think I put Pres. Johnson together with the war, in my mind -- I only absorbed a feeling of All Might Not Be Well and a blank feeling of I Didn't Know And Could Not Impact Or Even Understand Events Or Situations.

That would have been in the same year, or same two-year span when Dallek recounts a story of military advisors meeting with LBJ and when the president left the room, the one guy said to the other three, "I look at you sitting over there & you're like a bunch of buzzards sitting on the fence, sending the young men off to war -- you ought to be ashamed of yourselves."

Reading this book, the author will say, "in the fall of 1965,"  "in the spring of 1967", etc. -- and I wanted to figure out, several times, 'what grade was I in?" -- I wanted to place the events and trends, in time, in my life.

Two of my cousins served in the military during the Vietnam war, but they were in the Philippines, I think.  They came home.

My 7th grade English teacher had a son who was killed in Vietnam.

In 5th grade and 6th grade -- maybe in 4th, too -- we children started drawing "peace signs" on the home-made jackets we created for our school books.

In those years, some men started wearing their hair longer -- and some adults would talk, and discuss, and complain so much, I thought, about the "long hair" or -- calling the actual people "the long-hairs," or "the long-haired hippies."  (If I had known the word "obsession," I would have thought to myself, "What is these people's obsession with hair?  Other people's hair?  Leave 'em alone!"  I remember having feelings and thoughts like that, but not having enough Words to "stick on" them....express them....)

(And when Lyndon Johnson died in 1973, I remember a photograph of him in either TIME or Newsweek that showed he had let his hair grow...!  It was receding in the front, but long in the back.  Like a "hippie."  I remember I thought that was interesting.)

And speakin' of hair -- the "hair"-trigger tempers, on the subject of the war:  while reading Robert Dallek's book, his descriptions of Pres. Johnson having arguments with people who'd been his friends in the Senate, like Senator Fulbright for example, and having it get very heated and personal -- the war made the president very bummed-out and uncomfortable, and hearing anyone talk against the war made him feel like he was being attacked.  And I can remember the impressions I had, when in grade school and junior high -- that the "Vietnam War" was everywhere around you, and yet people couldn't talk about it, sometimes, because someone would get mad or have their feelings hurt.

It would be like -- the person who was anti-war knew right exactly where the "pro" person was coming from, and vice-versa, so neither person needed to talk, they both knew what the other would say, and even without talking or arguing, both could be mad anyway....

At the end of my fifth-grade year in Rootstown, Ohio, there was a student protest against the war, at Kent State University, where my mother took some classes.  The National Guard came, and four students were killed, and others wounded.  That was a very bad day.  I wrote a poem about it, for school.  The poem was also very bad.  My teacher said that it was possible that communists had come in and started the protest.  I took that theory home and was told by my parents that there weren't any communists in Kent, or anywhere in northeastern Ohio, and that some people just got in the habit of, whenever they don't like something, they say communists are "behind it."

(I pictured Russian guys hiding behind things....

Man -- LOL! -- I am scr---d up!  The 60s totally "wrecked" me -- I had "hallucinations" and "flash-backs" without any drugs...lol...)

The main thing I thought, reading the Dallek LBJ bio, is that
Johnson
was
better at being Senate Majority Leader
than he was at being
President.

And I don't say that as a "put-down." 
Being the Chief Executive is a whole different job than being
"chief horse-trader and lobbyist" in the U.S. Senate.

Because LBJ was legendary in his Senate "job" people, I think, assumed (probably including himself) that he would be very good at being president.  But when you read this, it's like -- the misery of the man in that position (of pres.) is palpable -- it stares at you from the page.

Congress is near the White House, but being good at one job does not necessarily lead to being good at the other.

(JFK was the opposite way around -- he was unexceptional and frequently absent, in his House and Senate service, but did well as president....)

[And in my own experience -- most lobbyists I knew who had been state legislators before, did not like lobbying.  I knew one lobbyist who had been a state senator, and hated that. 

(They asked him in committee, "what do you think about this?"

  -- "I didn't hear what they said, I was asleep"....) 

Don't know if there was anyone who loved doing both jobs....]

Herding those senators like a bunch-a cattle down on his Texas ranch, massaging the votes, making the behind-the-scenes deals necessary to work the first meaningful civil rights legislation through the complex, fearful, and stubborn "body" known as the U.S. Senate -- that was Lyndon Johnson's genius. 

The Senate was his "zone."

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