Lyndon Johnson

Johnson scored his very greatest successes by infuriating ideological opponents into self-destructive fury. He scored big legislative wins in 1963–64. But those wins were dwarfed by the score he put on the board in 1965–66. It was the 1965–66 Congress that would pass the Voting Rights Act, Medicare, Medicaid, and the other programs of the Great Society.

What made the difference between 1963–64 and 1965–66? Short answer: the calamitous miscalculations of Johnson’s conservative opponents.

The 1964 civil-rights bill finally escaped imprisonment inside the House Rules Committee (chaired by a segregationist Southerner), and departed for the House floor in early February 1964. As of that date, the leading contender for the 1964 Republican nomination was New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller.

Party conservatives had vested their hopes in Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater. Those hopes seemed forlorn, however. In every election since the coming of the New Deal, the Republican Party had rejected the preferred candidate of its conservative wing. By every ordinary calculation of politics, Goldwater was a hopeless, even reckless, candidate.

But the stunning progress of the Civil Rights Act upset the ordinary calculations of politics. While Rockefeller and Scranton strongly supported the ’64 act, Goldwater opposed it. In fact Goldwater would be one of only six Republican senators to join the 21 Southern Democrats to vote “no” until the very end—and he would ride that “no” all the way to the Republican nomination for president.

The result was total disaster, of course, and not only for Goldwater. (Although, in a portent of things to come, Goldwater became the first Republican in history to carry the Deep South: South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana.) Democrats swept races down the ballot, adding 32 new representatives and two senators to their already large majorities in both houses. The defeated Republicans mostly represented moderate suburban districts in the North and Midwest. They were replaced by liberal Democrats—so many liberal Democrats that they could run Congress with a free hand for the first time since the New Deal.

It’s hard not to detect in these pages an unspoken critique of Barack Obama. Yes, certainly, Obama shares Lyndon Johnson’s gift for driving opponents crazy, if it is a gift. But the use of power Caro so vividly describes is not something that comes naturally to our current president. The constant searching for opportunities; the shameless love-bombing of opponents; the endless wooing of supporters; the deft deployment of inducements and threats—these are the low arts that led to Johnson’s high success. You can see why a high-minded leader like Barack Obama would recoil from the Johnson style and embrace Kennedyesque rhetorical grandeur instead. Such presidents contribute great phrases to quotation books, but they tend not to add lasting laws to the statute books—or enduring change to the history books.

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