LBJ wasn’t even particularly discreet about his womanizing. At a NATO meeting in Paris in 1960, LBJ, Lady Bird, and others were having dinner. The vice president got drunk and ended up with a diplomat’s wife sitting in his lap, “groping” her. Lady Bird just had to deal with it. When he wasn’t cheating on her, he was treating her as if she was invisible in public, berating her, or speaking ill about her cooking, housekeeping, or clothes.
Johnson’s philandering was evidence of his deep-seated need to dominate and humiliate people through bullying, cajoling, or outright humiliation. This need both informed and fed his disdain for others, including those in his Secret Service detail who had pledged their lives to protect him. Johnson reportedly once “asked a Secret Serviceman to shield him while he peed outside,” and then he “purposely peed on the agent’s trouser leg.” When “the agent mentioned how gross that was,” Johnson was unapologetic. “I know,” he said. “That’s my prerogative.” Dealing with the president’s bodily functions was just a part of life in the Johnson administration. Speechwriter Richard Goodwin was once summoned to Johnson’s bathroom for a “meeting.” “I remained standing,” Goodwin remembered, because “Johnson had the only seat in the room.” The president was sitting on the toilet.
Johnson quickly established himself as a D.C. natural, but it wasn’t until he was elected to Congress’s upper chamber in 1949 that his legend as “Master of the Senate” began. In this, the world’s most “elite club,” Johnson thrived as he perfected the bullying tactics and overbearing style that would win him so many battles—and help usher in countless progressive programs.
LBJ’s main aspiration was power. Control. He would improve the lives of his fellow sad sacks in the failed farmlands of Texas by running things from Washington with a massive federal government that would build a better America. How he’d obtain that power was simple. He’d prey on the American people’s fear while harnessing his own. He’d leverage his own personal childhood anxiety about being destitute, broke, abandoned, and alone to make sure others felt those same powerful emotions.
Modern society, with its “vast wasteland” of televisions, dreary office cubicles, and the constant threat of nuclear war with the Soviet Union, could be scary. What everyone needed was a “daddy” (as FDR had been to him) in their lives. Someone to smile. Someone to reassure them. Someone to take them by the hand and tell them that they’re from the government and they’re here to help.
Always looking for a bigger desk—and more influence—Johnson ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1960. He lost, but despite misgivings, John F. Kennedy asked Johnson to be his running mate. Kennedy, an Irish-Catholic from Massachusetts, believed he needed support from Southern Democrats to win what was projected to be a close race between himself and sitting vice president Richard Nixon. Kennedy’s instincts were right. Their ticket barely beat Nixon (it was the type of election where dead people voted for the Democrats in Chicago) and took over the White House in 1961.
After Kennedy’s assassination, LBJ finally had the chance to live up to the legacy of his second daddy and make the spirit of Roosevelt proud. He “had a specific objective in mind that guided his presidency from the start,” one reporter noted. “To out-do Franklin D. Roosevelt as the champion of everyday Americans.”
He would be the next generation’s FDR. He would be their daddy. Whether they liked it or not.
What Wilson had done to organize progressivism as a political force in the first place and what FDR had done to build new progressive economic institutions during the crisis of the Great Depression and World War II, LBJ would now do by spreading progressivism into the mainstream at a time of similar tumult and disorder. And in doing so, he would set in motion the destructive forces of nihilism, hedonism, and blasphemy that marked the 1960s, a decade that would change America forever.
THE NOT-SO-GREAT SOCIETY
* * *
Johnson’s presidency is primarily remembered for two things, both of them massive failures: the Vietnam War and the Great Society. Both exacted a horrific human toll on America. The war scarred an entire generation, and its consequences can be measured in lives lost or irreparably destroyed. The Great Society, however, left its mark on several generations, pushed America farther toward progressivism, and can only be measured in lives ruined.
For progressives like Johnson, issues such as poverty, education, women’s rights, and jobs are simply tools to be used in a continual effort to consolidate power and control. To understand how this works, we have to get into a bit of psychology. By stoking the fear of failure, disorder, and the unknown, progressives manipulate our most primal instincts. They hold out the collective—or the herd—as the solution to those fears and the way to alleviate our insecurities. Let’s face it, solving our own problems is hard. Self-reliance takes work, pain, sacrifice, and, often, failure. Putting your trust in someone else to solve your problems is a lot easier.
Scared of being poor? Don’t be. Poverty can be solved; we just have to declare war on it. Scared your kid isn’t doing well in school? It’s probably not his or her fault; we just need to put more taxpayer money into public education. Scared about losing your job? Plenty more can be created if the rich would just pay their fair share. Women can achieve equality if only we provide them with government-subsidized contraceptives and health care. The environment can be saved if only we would enact sweeping regulations and new taxes that punish polluters. And on and on and on.
Every problem has a big-government solution, and these were cornerstones of the Great Society, LBJ’s ultimate promise of hope and happiness to a fearful American public. Like Wilson and Roosevelt before him, Johnson had no qualms about sacrificing the rights and personal liberty of individuals at the altar of the state. The Great Society—much like Wilson’s New Freedom and Roosevelt’s New Deal—was meant to further transform American society and government from individualism to collectivism.
In addition to being fearmongers, progressives also tend to be elitists and narcissists. LBJ had both of these traits in abundance. It takes an enormous amount of arrogance to believe that you and other “chosen” progressives know what is best for everyone else. Johnson was the apotheosis of this theory—both in terms of the personal and political contradictions at his core and in the resources, ability, and unique moral force he could deploy in its service in the wake of the JFK assassination. It’s not much of a stretch to say that the Great Society would never have happened absent the Kennedy assassination. Not just because JFK himself wouldn’t have pursued it but because it took Johnson’s skillful exploitation of the nation’s grief to get such a sweeping and radical agenda passed.
The vast scope of the Great Society speaks to the unbridled arrogance of the man who promulgated it. In championing his cause, Johnson claimed that through his leadership and expansive government powers, America could eliminate poverty, vastly improve education, create an urban renaissance, protect the environment, and produce (actual, not theoretical) equality for all.
LBJ pushed for a raft of new programs, all with FDR in mind. Cambridge University historian Anthony Badger, who wrote FDR: The First Hundred Days, described LBJ’s near-obsession with FDR like this: “Throughout his presidency, Lyndon B. Johnson consistently measured his record against that of his political hero, FDR. In April 1965 he pressed his congressional liaison man, Larry O’Brien, to ‘jerk out every damn little bill you can and get them down here by the 12th’ because ‘on the 12th you’ll have the best Hundred Days. Better than he did!’ ”
By at least one estimate, the JFK-LBJ administration added 390 domestic social programs to the federal government. Prior to their time in office, the entire federal government had only 45 such programs. The Great Society was the New Deal on steroids, the most destructive, antidemocratic, and antientrepreneurial program of the twentieth century.
Johnson’s vision was utopian, statist, and reckless, as any rational observer would have concluded. But the grief of a nation
reeling from an assassinated president and a general sense that America was spiraling out of control, coupled with the fear of doing nothing—polluted rivers, impoverished cities, failing schools, and so on—spurred LBJ to act. Using these fears, he persuaded millions of Americans to abandon their traditional values of hard work and self-reliance in exchange for the soullessness of self-actualization. The message was simple: if you merely dream it, it will happen, and the Great Society will help you get there. As Johnson explained in a May 1964 speech at the University of Michigan:
Your imagination, your initiative, and your indignation will determine whether we build a society where progress is the servant of our needs, or a society where old values and new visions are buried under unbridled growth. For in your time we have the opportunity to move not only toward the rich society and the powerful society, but upward to the Great Society.
Johnson went on to explain that the “purpose of protecting the life of our nation and preserving the liberty of our citizens is to pursue the happiness of our people.” That pursuit no longer mattered if it was just one individual’s happiness. Instead, the proper pursuit was now the happiness “of our people,” or the collective as a whole. That was our nation’s calling.
“[The] challenge of the next half century,” LBJ continued, “is whether we have the wisdom to use that wealth to enrich and elevate our national life.” Here’s how we’d do it. The Great Society:
• “rests on abundance and liberty for all [and] demands an end to poverty and racial injustice.”
• “is a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and to enlarge his talents, [where] leisure is a welcome chance to build and reflect, [where] the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community.”
• “is a place where man can renew contact with nature, [which] honors creation for its own sake, [where] men are more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods.”
• “is not a safe harbor, a resting place, a final objective, a finished work”; instead, it is “a challenge constantly renewed, beckoning us toward a destiny where the meaning of our lives matches the marvelous products of our labor.”
This was not a policy speech, it was a collectivist fantasy that could have been written by Karl Marx himself.
Fittingly, the Great Society approach started with Johnson’s disastrous “War on Poverty.” In reality, this wasn’t a war on poverty at all, it was a war against prosperity and success. Like all progressives, Johnson believed in economic leveling. Instead of lifting everyone up through commerce and capitalism, he wanted to force everyone into an economic purgatory where mediocrity was the norm and striving for greatness was discouraged.
Like all progressive scams, the Great Society sought to convince marginalized groups—especially minorities, the poor, immigrants, and so on—that their relationship with the government should be redefined from JFK’s “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country” to the complete opposite. Had LBJ been as articulate as JFK he easily could’ve framed the Great Society as “ask not what you can do for your country, ask what your country can do for you.”
LBJ pitched a simple deal to all those who felt aggrieved: the government will take away your fears and hardships, and you, in turn, will devote your life, including your paychecks, to the state.
In practice, the Great Society is an alphabet soup of government programs that cater to our every desire and complaint. If we want our children to be fed breakfast at school, there’s a government program for that. If we want more art in our public buildings or ballet in our theaters, there are government programs for those things, too. Here’s a short list of just some of the measures passed under LBJ to show how all of this paternal care was translated into big-government nonsense:
• Antipoverty programs such as the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, an Omnibus Housing Act, and the creation of Job Corps.
• Education (and brainwashing) programs such as Head Start, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, and the creation of Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA).
• Sweeping health-care “reforms” such as the creation of Medicare and Medicaid.
• The beginning of job-killing, reactionary environmental controls via the Wilderness Protection Act and the Air and Water Quality Acts.
• Creation of the federal-government-as-cultural-patron through programs such as the National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities.
Under LBJ, the nation witnessed the true creation of a welfare state based on massive entitlement programs and predicated on the government’s ability to drive the populace to an ambition-destroying focus on “inner meaning” and “quality of life” instead of character, ambition, and success. This, in turn, created a crisis of conscience and confidence in people that made them both susceptible to undermining traditional norms and predisposed to reliance on the state to handle the things that were “too hard” for them.
LBJ laid the groundwork to create an environment for self-actualization through the government: conservation programs, federal patronage of the arts, and public broadcasting, to name a few. These were not meant to foster national elevation or celebrate American greatness; they were created as a corporate, secular replacement of religion as sources of spiritual fulfillment for the masses. Replace God with government, and you control not just people’s minds but their hearts and souls as well.
Johnson’s conclusion in his Ann Arbor speech that day in 1964 should be telling for anyone who’s wondered how the Founders and their principles have become so marginalized over the last few decades: “Let us from this moment begin our work so that in the future men will look back and say: It was then, after a long and weary way, that man turned the exploits of his genius to the full enrichment of his life.”
This “long and weary way” he refers to is, of course, the previous centuries of American history. Centuries in which our forefathers built the greatest and most free country in the history of the world. This is what Johnson wished man to turn “the exploits of his genius” away from.
It’s no surprise that this speech by a gruff Texan reads like a self-help book. Johnson was more than just a daddy to the masses; he was also the father of the new powerful cultural trends that gave people the excuse to be selfish. The Me Generation would never have existed if Johnson hadn’t set out to specifically engender self-obsession. True freedom didn’t come from hard work or any kind of traditional definition of professional achievement, such as becoming a doctor or a lawyer. True freedom, Johnson argued, could only be obtained by pursuing whatever you personally found fulfilling, whether other people found it useful or not.
Johnson was not the only the proponent of this kind of progressivism. Half a century earlier, John Dewey had taught that a new, progressive social order would allow individuals more freedom because government would be there to back them up. In 1902, Dewey, along with the like-minded John Tufts, wrote:
The more comprehensive and diversified the social order, the greater the responsibility and the freedom of the individual. His freedom is the greater, because the more numerous are the effective stimuli to action, and the more varied and the more certain the ways in which he may fulfill his powers. His responsibility is greater because there are more demands for considering the consequences of his acts; and more agencies for bringing home to him the recognition of consequences which affect not merely more persons individually, but which also influence the more remote and hidden social ties.
That is a perfect—if not somewhat opaque—summary of the spiritual and personal fulfillment that progressives believe is achievable through reliance on an all-powerful State.
LADY BIRD’S GOOD FORTUNE
Inherent in the progressive mind-set is the belief that most rules don’t really apply to them.
After all, progressives believe themselves to be more enlightened than the rest
of us. It follows, therefore, that they have every right to tell others what to do, even if they don’t do those things themselves.
Do as I say, not as I do.
LBJ was a perfect embodiment of this philosophy.
Johnson had always been known as a wheeler-dealer, with implications of the kind of quid pro quo approach to politics that skirts the line of legality and morality. But corruption in the Johnson White House, not to mention in his own personal household, ran deep. He was no stranger to scandal, corruption, and graft.
The New York Times obituary for Lady Bird Johnson, who died in 2007, states that the Johnsons came to Washington, D.C., in 1934, and that by the time Lyndon became president, Lady Bird had become “a successful businesswoman,” especially through the purchase in 1942 of a small Austin, Texas, radio station, KTBC.
The Times notes that although “the station was bought in Mrs. Johnson’s name,” her husband’s political influence “helped in acquiring the license from the Federal Communications Commission.” Afterward, Lyndon Johnson “became the commission’s champion at a time when Congress was about to cut its budget,” and Lady Bird’s “application was speedily approved.”
Lady Bird’s Washington Post obituary told a similar story. The station’s “previous owners had been unable to obtain approval from the Federal Communications Commission for a power increase, but Mrs. Johnson was granted approval within a month.” Critics “concluded that her husband’s close connection to Franklin D. Roosevelt had made the difference.”
The Post also notes that while Mrs. Johnson was president of her company, “it was her husband who negotiated an affiliation with the CBS radio network,” which “dramatically boosted advertising revenue and made the Johnsons millionaires.”
Johnson often used Lady Bird as his financial vessel, purchasing businesses and stock in her name while peddling influence to increase the value of these holdings. During the twenty years after the purchase of KTBC, the Johnsons would amass something of a telecommunications empire, with the purchase of numerous affiliates, a television station, and “cable interests,” as well ranches, real estate, and a bank.