(Picture credit: LBJ Presidential Library, Public Domain.) The title of today's post happens to be the title of a recent Lexington column in the Economist, echoing both the chants of Vietnam protesters ("Hey! Hey! LBJ! How many kids did you kill today!") and what the columnist calls the "current fascination for Lyndon Johnson", which he uses to discuss what it means for "Barack Obama's America".
The column resonated with me because I do find myself much more interested by LBJ than by JFK (another topic of current fascination due to the upcoming 50th anniversary of his death) - I've read Volume 1 of LBJ's biography by Robert Caro, skipped ahead to listen the entirety of Volume 4 as an audiobook during my drives (I plan to get Volumes 2 and 3 as audiobooks too), bought the abridged version of LBJ's biography, Portrait of a President, by Robert Dallek in the the meantime (because sometimes I just want to know the main facts without having to read 2,000 pages about someone), enjoyed the description of his leadership regarding the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in Ronald Heifetz's Leadership without easy answers, and generally speaking find LBJ someone of enormous complexity, with his moments of grace (the Great Society) and unforgivable failings (Vietnam) - the sort of multidimensional character that interests me a lot more than young pseudo-stars that, in the end, don't know how to make things happen and so don't achieve much.
The Lexington columnist has the following words for JFK: "like Mr Obama an aloof and cerebral global celebrity who rushed through a stint in the Senate, then promised more change than he could deliver into law." The article comes at a time when journalists are beginning to write about Hillary Clinton's possible presidential run, and one can't help but draw possible parallels between the "cerebral global celebrity" JFK/Obama and the experienced politician who knew how to use the system LBJ/Clinton (although this is more true of Bill Clinton than of his wife).
The Economist article was also about a play, "All the Way", by Robert Schenkkan, which recently finished a sold-out run at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, MA and will move to Broadway later this season, in spite of a lukewarm New York Times review ("Mr Schenkkan comes down firmly on the side of complexity, which may be the honorable path but not necessarily the most rewarding one for the audience") counterbalanced by glowing words by WBUR, Boston's NPR station (" 'All the Way' is a sensational night of theater"). The Cambridge run supposedly sold out before opening night. The play focuses on LBJ's first year in the Oval Office and is said to show the contradictions of the man who is about to pass landmark civil right legislation as well as become enmired in the Vietnam war. Needless to say, I'll be buying my ticket for the Broadway run as soon as the dates are announced.
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