by Jon Meacham
* * *
—
By Thursday evening King was dead. When Johnson learned of King’s assassination, he telephoned Coretta Scott King and appealed to the country for calm. The next day, Friday, April 5, the president attended a memorial service for the slain King at the National Cathedral. On returning to the White House, Johnson announced a national day of mourning. “The dream of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.,” the president said, “has not died with him.”
On the road in Indianapolis on the evening King was shot, Robert Kennedy, who was seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, learned about the assassination from R. W. Apple, Jr., of The New York Times. Wearing an overcoat that had belonged to his brother Jack, RFK broke the news to an inner-city crowd. “What we need in the United States,” he said, “is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness; but is love and wisdom and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black.”
Even then the fates were not yet satisfied. In April, Jacqueline Kennedy had shared a premonition of disaster. “Do you know what I think will happen to Bobby?” she asked Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. “The same thing that happened to Jack….There is so much hatred in this country.” She was proved correct in June, when RFK was gunned down in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles after winning the California primary. Back in the ballroom, a woman screamed, “No, God, no. It’s happened again.”
The fear that the world was out of balance helped Richard Nixon, who had only narrowly lost to John F. Kennedy eight years earlier, prevail, also narrowly, in November against Hubert Humphrey. The dynamics of the ’68 campaign resonate still: Nixon—advised, among others, by Roger Ailes, who would go on to found the Fox News Channel—campaigned on a cultural populism, arguing that elites and implying that minorities were undercutting American greatness. That November, running on a third-party ticket, George Wallace carried 13.5 percent of the popular vote nationally and won five states: Alabama, Louisiana, Georgia, Arkansas, and Mississippi, giving him forty-six electoral votes. It was not a bad starting point for a subsequent populist candidate who would tell voters that walls and tariffs would bring back the America they thought they had once known.
* * *
—
At noon on Monday, January 20, 1969, Richard Nixon stood on the East Portico of the Capitol to take the oath of office as the nation’s thirty-seventh president. To the side, wearied by an inconclusive war in Southeast Asia and exhausted from the toil of seeking to build a Great Society at home, Lyndon Johnson found his mind ranging widely. “The magnitude of the job dwarfs every man who aspires to it,” Johnson recalled in his memoirs. “Every man who occupies the position has to strain to the utmost of his ability to fill it. I believe that every man who ever occupied it, within his inner self, was humble enough to realize that no living mortal has ever possessed all the required qualifications.”
Johnson had done the best he could, he recalled, the very best. “Scholars have been defining and refining the role of the President for almost two centuries,” he recalled. “At the core of all those definitions one basic tenet remains: The job of the President is to set priorities for the nation, and he must set them according to his own judgment and his own conscience….If the Presidency can be said to have been employed and to have been enjoyed, I had employed it to the utmost, and I had enjoyed it to the limit.”
Though much of his presidency was consumed by the war in Vietnam, Johnson’s domestic legacy is enormous. In addition to Medicare and the other legislation of the Great Society, he signed the landmark Immigration and Nationality Act on Liberty Island in 1965, eliminating the national-origins quotas in force since the early 1920s and opening the doors of the country more widely. And a single word in the 1964 Civil Rights Act—“sex”—included gender in the bill’s protections. The addition of women to the legislation helped give the rising women’s movement an important legislative victory as they fought for equality.
On the House floor on Wednesday, May 21, 1969, Representative Shirley Chisholm of New York spoke out in the spirit of the time to introduce the Equal Rights Amendment. (Which was first introduced in 1923, and would fail to be enacted despite years of activism.) “Mr. Speaker, when a young woman graduates from college and starts looking for a job, she is likely to have a frustrating and even demeaning experience ahead of her,” Chisholm said. “If she walks into an office for an interview, the first question she will be asked is, ‘Do you type?’ ” Chisholm continued:
As a black person, I am no stranger to race prejudice. But the truth is that in the political world I have been far oftener discriminated against because I am a woman than because I am black.
Prejudice against blacks is becoming unacceptable although it will take years to eliminate it. But it is doomed because, slowly, white America is beginning to admit that it exists. Prejudice against women is still acceptable. There is very little understanding yet of the immorality involved in double pay scales and the classification of most of the better jobs as “for men only.”…
What we need are laws to protect working people, to guarantee them fair pay, safe working conditions, protection against sickness and layoffs, and provision for dignified, comfortable retirement. Men and women need these things equally. That one sex needs protection more than the other is a male supremacist myth as ridiculous and unworthy of respect as the white supremacist myths that society is trying to cure itself of at this time.
* * *
—
Lyndon Johnson’s last public appearance, in late 1972, very nearly didn’t happen. The former president was scheduled to speak at a conference on civil rights on Tuesday, December 12, 1972, at the LBJ Presidential Library in Austin. The Hubert Humphreys were coming; so were the Earl Warrens. Congresswoman-elect Barbara Jordan of Houston was to be there, as was Congressman Henry Gonzalez of San Antonio, Vernon Jordan, and Julian Bond. Johnson was looking forward to it, but the night before the conference began, he was sick at his ranch sixty miles away in Stonewall. To make matters worse, a highly unusual winter storm had hit central Texas. The snow and the ice were so bad that the organizers in Austin were told the roads between Stonewall and Austin were impassable. “I was just heartsick at that,” Harry Middleton, the director of the LBJ library, recalled.
But Johnson, predictably, wasn’t interested in being told what couldn’t be done. First, he overruled his doctors when they advised him that he was too ill to leave the ranch that morning. “For Johnson,” the journalist Hugh Sidey recalled, “the night was filled with pain and restlessness.”
“I was determined that he wasn’t going to attend that symposium, and the doctor insisted that he absolutely, positively could not go—but he went,” Lady Bird said. “I now realize it was all right that he went, because he knew what he was spending and had a right to decide how he wanted to spend it.” The willful former president, Sidey reported, “put on his dark-blue presidential suit and those flawlessly polished oxfords” and headed out into the stormy morning. Then, en route, Johnson grew frustrated with his driver and commandeered the wheel, pressing ahead through the snow and ice.
In his remarks at the library, Johnson—his hair longer now, his frame more stooped—spoke of how far the country had come, and how far it had to go. “The progress has been much too small,” he said. “I’m kind of ashamed of myself that I had six years and couldn’t do more. So let no one delude himself that his work is done. To be black or brown in a white society is not to stand on equal ground.”
As Nick Kotz, who covered the event for The Washington Post, reported, two members of the audience jumped up to call for the conference to denounce President Nixon. Johnson returned to the podium and offered some final political counsel to the country. Here was the Johnson of old. “The fatigue of the
night before seemed to drop away, the old adrenaline machine pumping back into action,” Sidey wrote. “Going to the microphone with his hands molding the air, he delivered one of his sermons on brotherhood and reason.”
Back at center stage, if only for a moment, Johnson said, “Let’s try to get our folks reasoning together and reasoning with Congress and with the Cabinet! Reason with the leadership and with the President!…And you don’t need to start off by saying he is terrible—because he doesn’t think he’s terrible. Start talking about how you believe that he wants to do what’s right and how you believe this is right, and you’ll be surprised how many who want to do what’s right will try to help you.”
It was a word of pragmatic hope from a man who had seen the best and the worst of a nation he knew was capable, however dark the hour, of doing the right thing. He had seen it. He had done it. And he died, three weeks into the new year, believing it could always be done again.
On Sunday, June 29, 1947, at the Lincoln Memorial, Harry S. Truman became the first president to address a meeting of the NAACP. “I’m everybody’s President,” he told one white Southerner who challenged his civil rights program.
CONCLUSION
THE FIRST DUTY OF AN AMERICAN CITIZEN
The people have often made mistakes, but given time and the facts, they will make the corrections.
—HARRY S. TRUMAN
Begin with the little thing, and do not expect to accomplish anything without an effort.
—THEODORE ROOSEVELT
Great leaders we have had, but we could not have had great leaders unless they had a great people to follow. You cannot be a great leader unless the people are great.
—ELEANOR ROOSEVELT
HARRY TRUMAN KNEW there’d be hell to pay, but he went ahead anyway. In the first months of 1948 he dispatched his ten-point civil rights program to Congress. It was a revolutionary call for a new day of fairness and equality, and the president framed his proposals as part and parcel of what Truman called “our American faith.”
To be sure, like many of his countrymen, Truman was no saint on matters of race. Truman used racial slurs in private, and in 1911, while courting his future wife, Bess, he wrote her that he was “strongly of the opinion that negroes ought to be in Africa, yellow men in Asia and white men in Europe and America.” A child of border state Missouri, he was the descendant of slave owners who loved Robert E. Lee and hated Abraham Lincoln. And after his White House years Truman at times sounded reactionary, dismissing the March on Washington as “silly” and speculating that demonstrations against Jim Crow were inspired by Communists.
But as president of the United States, he saw his duty whole. Truman’s work on civil rights, including his focus on lynching and his decision to integrate the American military, was in part driven by his horror over brutal attacks like one in South Carolina, where a severe police beating to the face of a newly discharged black soldier had blinded the man. “My God!” Truman said. “I had no idea it was as terrible as that! We’ve got to do something!” In his public capacity he transcended the limitations of his personal background. “My forebears were Confederates….But my very stomach turned over when I learned that Negro soldiers, just back from overseas, were being dumped out of Army trucks in Mississippi and being beaten,” he told Democratic leaders. “Whatever my inclinations as a native of Missouri might have been, as President I know this is bad. I shall fight to end evils like this.”
In his 1948 message on civil rights Truman was doing just that. “We believe that all men are created equal and that they have the right to equal justice under law,” the president wrote to Congress. “We believe that all men have the right to freedom of thought and of expression and the right to worship as they please. We believe that all men are entitled to equal opportunities for jobs, for homes, for good health and for education. We believe that all men should have a voice in their government and that government should protect, not usurp, the rights of the people.”
Hence the need for federal action to fulfill the nation’s promise on voting, employment, housing, criminal justice, and public accommodations. Southerners, in particular, were aghast; the Speaker of the Mississippi House of Representatives, Walter Sillers, said Truman was proposing “damnable, communistic, unconstitutional, anti-American, anti-Southern legislation.” At a White House luncheon for the executive committee of the Democratic National Committee, a committeewoman from Alabama, Mrs. Leonard Thomas, confronted the president.
“I want to take a message back to the South,” Mrs. Thomas said to Truman. “Can I tell them you’re not ramming miscegenation down our throats? That you’re for all the people, not just the North?”
The president thought the moment right for a history lesson. Then and there, in front of the leaders of his party in a contentious time just ahead of a closely fought presidential election, Truman reached for American scripture—the Bill of Rights.
Taking a copy of the Constitution from his pocket, the president, in his flat Missouri accent, began to read. “ ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances,’ ” Truman said, then moved on from amendment to amendment, enumerating the liberties of the people—all of the people. When he finished, he declared himself immovable on civil rights.
“I’m everybody’s president,” Truman told Mrs. Thomas. “I take back nothing of what I propose and make no excuses for it.” A White House waiter, an African American, was said to have become so animated by the tense exchange that he inadvertently knocked a cup of coffee out of Truman’s hands.
“Those—the Bill of Rights—applies to everybody in this country,” Truman said, still addressing his visitor from Alabama, and “don’t you ever forget it.” Recalling the moment years later, Truman laughed. “I was just thinking of that old woman’s face when I started reading her the Bill of Rights,” he said. “It was quite a sight….But you know something? It’s not a bad idea to read those ten amendments every once in a while. Not enough people do, and that’s one of the reasons we’re in the trouble we’re in.”
* * *
—
In his long retirement in Independence—he lived for nearly twenty years after leaving the White House—Truman often mused about history and the presidency. Dictating to his secretary or to his wife or daughter and in scribbled notes to himself, the thirty-third president was characteristically plainspoken. “You never can tell what’s going to happen to a man until he gets to a place of responsibility,” Truman observed. “You just can’t tell in advance, whether you’re talking about a general in the field in a military situation or the manager of a large farm or a bank officer or a president….You’ve just got to pick the man you think is best on the basis of his past history and the views he expresses on present events and situations, and then you sit around and do a lot of hoping and if you’re inclined that way, a certain amount of praying.”
You just can’t tell. Sobering words, but we still have to try, or else the whole democratic enterprise becomes even less intelligible than it already is. History—which is all we have to go on—suggests that a president’s vices and his virtues matter enormously, for politics is a human, not a clinical, undertaking. So, too, do the vices and virtues of the people at large, for leadership is the art of the possible, and possibility is determined by whether generosity can triumph over selfishness in the American soul.
It’s easy to be cynical about, and dismissive of, such a view. But if natives and newcomers alike can live up to the American idea of inclusion, then our best instincts will carry the day against our worst. To think this angle of vision hokey fails to take the common sense of our history into account. As a matter of observable fact, the United States, through its sporadic
adherence to its finest aspirations, is the most durable experiment in pluralistic republicanism the world has known. Other national revolutions have descended into dictatorship and persecution; ours has produced enviable, if fragile, democratic institutions.
In the main, the America of the twenty-first century is, for all its shortcomings, freer and more accepting than it has ever been. If that weren’t the case, right-wing populist attacks on immigrants and the widening mainstream wouldn’t be so ferocious. A tragic element of history is that every advance must contend with forces of reaction. In the years after Lincoln, the America that emancipated its enslaved population endured an uneven Reconstruction and a century of regional revanchism. Under Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, the America that was rapidly industrializing and embracing many progressive reforms was plagued by theories of racial superiority and fears of the “other” that kept us from acting on the implications of the promise of the country. In the age of Franklin Roosevelt and of Harry Truman, the America that rescued capitalism, redefined the role of the state to lift up the weakest among us, and defeated fascism fell victim to racial hysteria and interned innocent Americans of Japanese descent. Truman and Eisenhower played critical roles in building an America of broadening wealth, and there was the beginning of progress on civil rights, in roughly the same years the country was roiled by McCarthyism and right-wing conspiracy theories.
