The Bitter Feud Behind the Law That Could Keep Jared Kushner Out of the White House

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/11/1976-nepotism-law-lyndon-johnson-bobby-kennedy-trump-kushner-214465

The Bitter Feud Behind the Law That Could Keep Jared Kushner Out of the White House

By JOSH ZEITZ

November 17, 2016

"Don’t smile too much or they’ll think we’re happy about the appointment,” Senator John F. Kennedy told his younger brother, Robert. It was late 1960. Jack Kennedy, now president-elect of the United States, opened the front door of his stately home in Georgetown to inform a pack of awaiting reporters that he would name Bobby to the post of attorney general.

It was the worst-kept secret in Washington, and as the family expected, few seasoned political hands approved of the selection. “It is simply not good enough to name a bright young political manager, no matter how bright or how young or how personally loyal, to a major post in government,” the New York Times editorialized. Worse, a close associate later observed, “it was nepotism, I mean, he was the brother of the president.” Anthony Lewis, a veteran courts reporter, was “appalled … thought it was a simply awful idea.” Kennedy was “a zealot with no understanding of the terrible responsibilities of an attorney general.”

Bobby Kennedy has since become an American folk hero—the tough, crusading liberal gunned down in the prime of life. But his appointment at the age of 35 to a powerful government post—a post that he was singularly unqualified to hold—at the time struck many in Washington as irresponsible and inappropriate.

More than that, it rankled one very important person in particular—Lyndon Johnson, who loathed RFK intensely and must certainly have borne that hatred in mind when, in 1967, he signed into law a nepotism statute that, among other provisions, appeared to make it impossible for a president to appoint immediate family members to the Cabinet or, some argue, to the White House staff. (The law explicitly prevents “public officials” from promoting a “relative” "to a civilian position in the agency in which he is serving or over which he exercises jurisdiction or control.”) LBJ knew that the law would have no immediate bearing on the Kennedy family. But as one aide later noted, he “couldn’t be rational where Bobby”—whom he dubbed “that little shitass”—“was concerned.” Signing the bill must have felt good.

Almost 50 years later, it’s that law—LBJ’s sweet revenge—that could prevent President-elect Donald Trump from bringing his son-in-law and chief whisperer, Jared Kushner, to Washington as an adviser—a possibility that Trump denies, despite the flurry of leaks emanating from his unorthodox transition headquarters in Trump Tower. (Trump may still be able to grant security clearance to Kushner and rely on him as an outside adviser. But he can’t place him in the Cabinet or even, some claim, on the White House staff.)

Even if LBJ signed the law out of personal animus, there’s a reason that Congress passed it by a comfortable margin. And it’s a reason worth remembering today. Presidents enjoy enough power and access to talent without needing to resort to nepotism—and as we can see from RFK’s appointment, all family members—though personally loyal to the president—are not necessarily fit to hold high office.

Shortly after naming his brother attorney general, Jack Kennedy told family friends, in jest, that he “just wanted to give him a little legal practice before he becomes a lawyer.”

Bobby was mortified. “Jack,” he complained “you shouldn’t have said that about me.”

“Bobby, you don’t understand,” JFK explained. “You’ve got to make fun of it, you’ve got to make fun of yourself in politics.”

“You weren’t making fun of yourself,” Bobby parried. “You were making fun of me.”

It stung because it was true. At age 35, RFK had just a few years of government service under his belt; he had worked as legal counsel to two Senate committees—jobs that his father and brother had arranged for him—but otherwise claimed no qualification for the role of attorney general.

But JFK had grown to rely on Bobby—the brother who, years earlier, he had dismissed as “kind of a nasty, brutal, humorless little fellow,” “moody, taciturn, brusque, and combative”—as his campaign manager, right hand and principal sounding board. “I have now watched you Kennedy brothers for five solid years,” Connecticut Governor Abraham Ribicoff told the president-elect, “and I notice that every time you face a new crisis, you automatically turn to Bobby. You’re out of the same womb. There’s empathy. You understand one another. You’re not going to be able to be president without using Bobby all the time.”

Not everyone looked warmly on Bobby’s appointment, particularly Vice President-elect Johnson, who privately reviled him as a “snot-nosed little son of -bitch.” Their mutual enmity—almost Shakespearean in its richness and depth—would drive power dynamics in Washington for the next decade and beyond. During his tenure as Senate majority leader, LBJ had sized up RFK (who was then a lowly committee aide) as a “snot nose,” though he acknowledged that he was “bright.” Ever eager to diminish others to aggrandize himself, he would greet Bobby in the hallways as “sonny boy.”

It’s hard to pinpoint the moment when the two men developed their all-consuming hatred for each other. It might have been in late 1959, when Jack dispatched his brother to the LBJ Ranch in Texas to determine whether Johnson intended to run for the Democratic presidential nomination the net year. In a deliberate attempt to humiliate JFK’s little brother, Johnson took him deer hunting and purposely handed him a high-caliber rifle with an especially powerful recoil. It knocked Kennedy to the ground. “Son,” Johnson said, “you’ve got to learn to handle a gun like a man.”

Or, it might have been several months later, when LBJ’s campaign spread (true) rumors that Jack Kennedy was concealing a serious illness and reminded liberal delegates to the Democratic National Convention that the candidate’s father, Joseph P. Kennedy, had opposed President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s war preparedness policies in the late 1930s. “Lyndon Johnson has compared my father to the Nazis and … lied by saying my brother was dying of Addison’s disease,” Bobby complained to one of Johnson’s close aides. “You Johnson people are running a stinking damned campaign and you’ll get yours when the time comes.”

The time came soon enough. After JFK secured the nomination, Jack offered LBJ the vice presidential slot. Johnson accepted it, and then Bobby—apparently on his own authority, or because of a miscommunication—attempted to rescind it. The story leaked widely and caused Johnson considerable embarrassment, for which he never forgave RFK.

As vice president, Johnson stoically and without public complaint weathered almost three years of endless humiliation at the hand of Bobby Kennedy. Though JFK insisted that his staff members accord LBJ all of the consideration and courtesy due to the vice president, Bobby and his loyalists were uniformly dismissive and impolite. They frequently disregarded instructions that LBJ be included in key policy and security conclaves. At Cabinet and interagency meetings, Bobby took every opportunity to humiliate the vice president.

Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson were rarely granted invitations to parties at Hickory Hill, Bobby’s estate in Northern Virginia and the unofficial social capital of Camelot. On those few occasions when they were included, Ethel Kennedy relegated them to her “loser’s table,” a repository for random guests of little social or political import. Hugh Sidey, a leading journalist, recalled the Johnson’s treatment at Hickory Hill as “just awful … inexcusable, really.” At one party, staff aides presented Bobby with a cloth effigy of Johnson, with pins sticking out of it. Then as now, Washington was a small town. The story got around.

Richard Goodwin, a Kennedy aide who later served as chief speechwriter in Johnson’s White House, observed that “Bobby symbolized everything Johnson hated. He became the symbol of all the things Johnson wasn’t … with these characteristics of wealth and power and ease and Eastern elegance; with Johnson always looking at himself as the guy they thought was illiterate, rude, crude. They laughed at him behind his back. I think he felt all of that.”

Johnson miserably accepted that such disgrace would be his lot in life for eight years—unless the Kennedys dumped him from the ticket in 1964, a fear that haunted him nightly. It was an open secret that Bobby coveted the 1968 nomination for himself. He was, according to all the news magazines, the “No. 2” man in Washington. “When this fellow looks at me,” said the actual No. 2 man during his tenure as vice president, “he looks at me like he’s going to look a hole right through me, like I’m a spy or something.”

In a particular moment of weakness, the vice president cornered Bobby inside the White House residence and pleaded, “I don’t understand you, Bobby. Your father likes me. Your brother likes me. But you don’t like me.Now, why? Why don’t you like me?” According to a bystander, RFK “agreed to the accuracy of all this.” It was the ultimate turn of the knife.

When, on November 22, 1963, fate reversed their fortunes, Johnson tried at first and of necessity to be gracious to the man who was now hisattorney general. He had to serve out John Kennedy’s remaining 13 months in office before he could lay claim to his own mandate. But the relationship, already bad, grew poisonous from the start. Bobby deeply resented that LBJ insisted on flying back from Dallas on Air Force One, rather than on the vice presidential plane, and he believed—though he was not entirely right—that LBJ had treated Jackie Kennedy shabbily that day. At Cabinet meetings, he would show up late and openly brood, or stare with undisguised aggression at the sight of the new president sitting in his brother’s chair.

“Our president was a gentleman and a human being,” Bobby told an interviewer in confidence, even while he still served in Johnson’s Cabinet. “This man is not. … He’s mean, bitter, vicious—an animal in many ways.”

Despite his hatred of Johnson, Bobby was eager to reclaim the Kennedy family’s power base and made overtures for the vice presidential spot in 1964. When LBJ turned him down, Bobby resigned his post and ran for the Senate in New York. It proved a tougher race than anyone expected. In the closing days, RFK had to swallow his pride and ask the president—who was then riding high and on his way to a landslide victory against GOP nominee Barry Goldwater—to campaign with him in the Empire State. LBJ agreed. The photographs show a very glum Senate candidate hating every minute of their joint appearance.

In the coming years, even at the height of his power, LBJ feared that his one-time tormenter would tack to the left and challenge him for the presidency in 1968. He worried that the Kennedys might seek to launch a dynasty that lasted into the 1970s and beyond: first Jack, then Bobby, then younger brother Teddy. Goodwin thought that the president was “always afraid of Bobby. It was more than hatred. It was fear.”

In 1967, LBJ signed the law that would bar future presidents from naming their brother to the Cabinet. The anti-nepotism law was a rider to a bill that established salary rates for postal workers and other government employees. The Iowa congressman who introduced the nepotism provision later claimed that it was not inspired with RFK in mind, and indeed, it covered broader categories of public employees. But it was widely assumed at the time and now by historians that Johnson requested the rider, and it soon acquired the popular moniker, “the RFK bill.” Johnson’s morbid obsession with the Kennedys was so all-encompassing that it’s not hard to believe that he was motivated in part by a desire to stop their dynastic trajectory in its tracks.

However personal his motivations, LBJ had other reasons to be wary of RFK’s appointment. Historians are divided as to whether Robert Kennedy was a strong attorney general or presidential counselor. During his tenure the Department of Justice undertook vigorous prosecution of organized crime and launched a small, but inventive pilot initiative to combat juvenile delinquency—an initiative that later influenced components of LBJ’s War on Poverty.

But on the central issue of his time—civil rights—he was at best a temporizer.

When in 1961, Freedom Riders tested a ruling by the Interstate Commerce Commission that barred segregation in bus terminals serving interstate routes, RFK at first tried to persuade civil rights leaders to abandon their campaign. When white civilians and law enforcement officials in Alabama massacred two busloads of riders (and burned one of the buses), the Justice Department quietly cut a deal whereby a new contingent of activists was escorted to the state line unharmed, and then placed under arrest for violating Mississippi’s segregation ordinances.

Though in later years, as a senator, Bobby proved a stalwart supporter of civil rights, as attorney general he allowed Southern authorities to flout federal authority and often expressed as much frustration with demonstrators as with white officials in the South. He did so out of political expediency (RFK was loath to lose the Solid South in 1964); a commitment to federalism (he believed that the constitution limited his scope of action); and moral failure (civil rights was simply not an issue that he’d had to confront in his 35 years).

A hard-line anti-Communist, Bobby also authorized FBI wiretaps against Martin Luther King Jr. He did so on the advice of J. Edgar Hoover, who claimed that MLK associated with communist organizers. Though the Kennedys harbored no illusions about Hoover’s personal and political motives, RFK armed him with the ability to surveil and later blackmail a Nobel Prize laureate. It was not a proud moment in the history of the FBI or the Justice Department.

Jared Kushner is approximately the same age that Bobby Kennedy was in 1960. He brings less government experience, not more, to the table.

But it’s not just a matter of experience. It’s a matter of propriety. When JFK first appointed his brother, the New York Times remarked that Bobby was a “political manager”—the Justice Department, it argued, “ought to be kept completely out of the political realm.” Just as it was wrong to install a political operative in the attorney general’s seat, it’s wrong to invite the president’s son-in-law into the West Wing, in whatever capacity. He and his wife cannot be disinterested stewards of the president-elect’s business empire—and their own—while enjoying sway over government officials and agencies and receiving classified information that could inform their commercial activities.

Donald Trump enters the White House with a very thin mandate. If his victory in the Electoral College tells us anything, it’s that many Americans are tired of living in a system that they regard as “rigged,” in which elite families subsume an outsized share of power and profit. If it was true of the Kennedys in 1960, or of the Bushes and Clintons in 2016, it must surely be true of the Trumps in 2017.

Josh Zeitz has taught American history and politics at Cambridge University and Princeton University and is the author of Lincoln’s Boys: John Hay, John Nicolay, and the War for Lincoln's Image. He is currently writing a book on the making of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Follow him @joshuamzeitz.

Remarks by the President Obama at LBJ Presidential Library Civil Rights Summit, April 10, 2014

https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/04/10/remarks-president-lbj-presidential-library-civil-rights-summit

Remarks by the President at LBJ Presidential Library Civil Rights Summit

April 10, 2014

Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library
Austin, Texas

12:16 P.M. CDT

THE PRESIDENT:  Thank you.  Thank you very much.  (Applause.)  Thank you so much.  Please, please, have a seat.  Thank you. 

What a singular honor it is for me to be here today.  I want to thank, first and foremost, the Johnson family for giving us this opportunity and the graciousness with which Michelle and I have been received. 

We came down a little bit late because we were upstairs looking at some of the exhibits and some of the private offices that were used by President Johnson and Mrs. Johnson.  And Michelle was in particular interested to -- of a recording in which Lady Bird is critiquing President Johnson’s performance.  (Laughter.)  And she said, come, come, you need to listen to this.  (Laughter.)  And she pressed the button and nodded her head.  Some things do not change -- (laughter) -- even 50 years later.

To all the members of Congress, the warriors for justice, the elected officials and community leaders who are here today  -- I want to thank you.

Four days into his sudden presidency -- and the night before he would address a joint session of the Congress in which he once served -- Lyndon Johnson sat around a table with his closest advisors, preparing his remarks to a shattered and grieving nation.

He wanted to call on senators and representatives to pass a civil rights bill -- the most sweeping since Reconstruction.  And most of his staff counseled him against it.  They said it was hopeless; that it would anger powerful Southern Democrats and committee chairmen; that it risked derailing the rest of his domestic agenda.  And one particularly bold aide said he did not believe a President should spend his time and power on lost causes, however worthy they might be.  To which, it is said, President Johnson replied, “Well, what the hell’s the presidency for?”  (Laughter and applause.)  What the hell’s the presidency for if not to fight for causes you believe in?

Today, as we commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act, we honor the men and women who made it possible.  Some of them are here today.  We celebrate giants like John Lewis and Andrew Young and Julian Bond.  We recall the countless unheralded Americans, black and white, students and scholars, preachers and housekeepers -- whose names are etched not on monuments, but in the hearts of their loved ones, and in the fabric of the country they helped to change. 

But we also gather here, deep in the heart of the state that shaped him, to recall one giant man’s remarkable efforts to make real the promise of our founding:  “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

Those of us who have had the singular privilege to hold the office of the Presidency know well that progress in this country can be hard and it can be slow, frustrating and sometimes you’re stymied.  The office humbles you.  You’re reminded daily that in this great democracy, you are but a relay swimmer in the currents of history, bound by decisions made by those who came before, reliant on the efforts of those who will follow to fully vindicate your vision.

But the presidency also affords a unique opportunity to bend those currents -- by shaping our laws and by shaping our debates; by working within the confines of the world as it is, but also by reimagining the world as it should be.

This was President Johnson’s genius.  As a master of politics and the legislative process, he grasped like few others the power of government to bring about change. 

LBJ was nothing if not a realist.  He was well aware that the law alone isn’t enough to change hearts and minds.  A full century after Lincoln’s time, he said, “Until justice is blind to color, until education is unaware of race, until opportunity is unconcerned with the color of men’s skins, emancipation will be a proclamation but not a fact.”

He understood laws couldn’t accomplish everything.  But he also knew that only the law could anchor change, and set hearts and minds on a different course.  And a lot of Americans needed the law’s most basic protections at that time.  As Dr. King said at the time, “It may be true that the law can’t make a man love me but it can keep him from lynching me, and I think that’s pretty important.”  (Applause.)

And passing laws was what LBJ knew how to do.  No one knew politics and no one loved legislating more than President Johnson.  He was charming when he needed to be, ruthless when required.  (Laughter.)  He could wear you down with logic and argument.  He could horse trade, and he could flatter.  “You come with me on this bill,” he would reportedly tell a key Republican leader from my home state during the fight for the Civil Rights Bill, “and 200 years from now, schoolchildren will know only two names:  Abraham Lincoln and Everett Dirksen!”  (Laughter.)  And he knew that senators would believe things like that.  (Laughter and applause.)

President Johnson liked power.  He liked the feel of it, the wielding of it.  But that hunger was harnessed and redeemed by a deeper understanding of the human condition; by a sympathy for the underdog, for the downtrodden, for the outcast.  And it was a sympathy rooted in his own experience.

As a young boy growing up in the Texas Hill Country, Johnson knew what being poor felt like.  “Poverty was so common,” he would later say, “we didn’t even know it had a name.”  (Laughter.)  The family home didn’t have electricity or indoor plumbing.  Everybody worked hard, including the children.  President Johnson had known the metallic taste of hunger; the feel of a mother’s calloused hands, rubbed raw from washing and cleaning and holding a household together.  His cousin Ava remembered sweltering days spent on her hands and knees in the cotton fields, with Lyndon whispering beside her, “Boy, there’s got to be a better way to make a living than this.  There’s got to be a better way.”

It wasn’t until years later when he was teaching at a so-called Mexican school in a tiny town in Texas that he came to understand how much worse the persistent pain of poverty could be for other races in a Jim Crow South.  Oftentimes his students would show up to class hungry.  And when he’d visit their homes, he’d meet fathers who were paid slave wages by the farmers they worked for.  Those children were taught, he would later say, “that the end of life is in a beet row, a spinach field, or a cotton patch.” 

Deprivation and discrimination -- these were not abstractions to Lyndon Baines Johnson.  He knew that poverty and injustice are as inseparable as opportunity and justice are joined.  So that was in him from an early age.

Now, like any of us, he was not a perfect man.  His experiences in rural Texas may have stretched his moral imagination, but he was ambitious, very ambitious, a young man in a hurry to plot his own escape from poverty and to chart his own political career.  And in the Jim Crow South, that meant not challenging convention.  During his first 20 years in Congress, he opposed every civil rights bill that came up for a vote, once calling the push for federal legislation “a farce and a sham.”  He was chosen as a vice presidential nominee in part because of his affinity with, and ability to deliver, that Southern white vote.  And at the beginning of the Kennedy administration, he shared with President Kennedy a caution towards racial controversy. 

But marchers kept marching.  Four little girls were killed in a church.  Bloody Sunday happened.  The winds of change blew.  And when the time came, when LBJ stood in the Oval Office -- I picture him standing there, taking up the entire doorframe, looking out over the South Lawn in a quiet moment -- and asked himself what the true purpose of his office was for, what was the endpoint of his ambitions, he would reach back in his own memory and he’d remember his own experience with want. 

And he knew that he had a unique capacity, as the most powerful white politician from the South, to not merely challenge the convention that had crushed the dreams of so many, but to ultimately dismantle for good the structures of legal segregation.  He’s the only guy who could do it -- and he knew there would be a cost, famously saying the Democratic Party may “have lost the South for a generation.” 

That’s what his presidency was for.  That’s where he meets his moment.  And possessed with an iron will, possessed with those skills that he had honed so many years in Congress, pushed and supported by a movement of those willing to sacrifice everything for their own liberation, President Johnson fought for and argued and horse traded and bullied and persuaded until ultimately he signed the Civil Rights Act into law. 

And he didn’t stop there -- even though his advisors again told him to wait, again told him let the dust settle, let the country absorb this momentous decision.  He shook them off.  “The meat in the coconut,” as President Johnson would put it, was the Voting Rights Act, so he fought for and passed that as well.  Immigration reform came shortly after.  And then, a Fair Housing Act.  And then, a health care law that opponents described as “socialized medicine” that would curtail America’s freedom, but ultimately freed millions of seniors from the fear that illness could rob them of dignity and security in their golden years, which we now know today as Medicare.  (Applause.)

What President Johnson understood was that equality required more than the absence of oppression.  It required the presence of economic opportunity.  He wouldn’t be as eloquent as Dr. King would be in describing that linkage, as Dr. King moved into mobilizing sanitation workers and a poor people’s movement, but he understood that connection because he had lived it.  A decent job, decent wages, health care -- those, too, were civil rights worth fighting for.  An economy where hard work is rewarded and success is shared, that was his goal.  And he knew, as someone who had seen the New Deal transform the landscape of his Texas childhood, who had seen the difference electricity had made because of the Tennessee Valley Authority, the transformation concretely day in and day out in the life of his own family, he understood that government had a role to play in broadening prosperity to all those who would strive for it.

“We want to open the gates to opportunity,” President Johnson said, “But we are also going to give all our people, black and white, the help they need to walk through those gates.” 

Now, if some of this sounds familiar, it’s because today we remain locked in this same great debate about equality and opportunity, and the role of government in ensuring each.  As was true 50 years ago, there are those who dismiss the Great Society as a failed experiment and an encroachment on liberty; who argue that government has become the true source of all that ails us, and that poverty is due to the moral failings of those who suffer from it.  There are also those who argue, John, that nothing has changed; that racism is so embedded in our DNA that there is no use trying politics -- the game is rigged. 

But such theories ignore history.  Yes, it’s true that, despite laws like the Civil Rights Act, and the Voting Rights Act and Medicare, our society is still racked with division and poverty.  Yes, race still colors our political debates, and there have been government programs that have fallen short.  In a time when cynicism is too often passed off as wisdom, it’s perhaps easy to conclude that there are limits to change; that we are trapped by our own history; and politics is a fool’s errand, and we’d be better off if we roll back big chunks of LBJ’s legacy, or at least if we don’t put too much of our hope, invest too much of our hope in our government.

I reject such thinking.  (Applause.)  Not just because Medicare and Medicaid have lifted millions from suffering; not just because the poverty rate in this nation would be far worse without food stamps and Head Start and all the Great Society programs that survive to this day.  I reject such cynicism because I have lived out the promise of LBJ’s efforts.  Because Michelle has lived out the legacy of those efforts.  Because my daughters have lived out the legacy of those efforts.  Because I and millions of my generation were in a position to take the baton that he handed to us.  (Applause.)

Because of the Civil Rights movement, because of the laws President Johnson signed, new doors of opportunity and education swung open for everybody -- not all at once, but they swung open.  Not just blacks and whites, but also women and Latinos; and Asians and Native Americans; and gay Americans and Americans with a disability.  They swung open for you, and they swung open for me.  And that’s why I’m standing here today -- because of those efforts, because of that legacy.  (Applause.)

And that means we’ve got a debt to pay.  That means we can’t afford to be cynical.  Half a century later, the laws LBJ passed are now as fundamental to our conception of ourselves and our democracy as the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.  They are foundational; an essential piece of the American character. 

But we are here today because we know we cannot be complacent.  For history travels not only forwards; history can travel backwards, history can travel sideways.  And securing the gains this country has made requires the vigilance of its citizens.  Our rights, our freedoms -- they are not given.  They must be won.  They must be nurtured through struggle and discipline, and persistence and faith. 

And one concern I have sometimes during these moments, the celebration of the signing of the Civil Rights Act, the March on Washington -- from a distance, sometimes these commemorations seem inevitable, they seem easy.  All the pain and difficulty and struggle and doubt -- all that is rubbed away.  And we look at ourselves and we say, oh, things are just too different now;  we couldn’t possibly do what was done then -- these giants, what they accomplished.  And yet, they were men and women, too.  It wasn’t easy then.  It wasn’t certain then. 

Still, the story of America is a story of progress.  However slow, however incomplete, however harshly challenged at each point on our journey, however flawed our leaders, however many times we have to take a quarter of a loaf or half a loaf -- the story of America is a story of progress.  And that’s true because of men like President Lyndon Baines Johnson.  (Applause.)

In so many ways, he embodied America, with all our gifts and all our flaws, in all our restlessness and all our big dreams.  This man -- born into poverty, weaned in a world full of racial hatred -- somehow found within himself the ability to connect his experience with the brown child in a small Texas town; the white child in Appalachia; the black child in Watts.  As powerful as he became in that Oval Office, he understood them.  He understood what it meant to be on the outside.  And he believed that their plight was his plight too; that his freedom ultimately was wrapped up in theirs; and that making their lives better was what the hell the presidency was for.  (Applause.)

And those children were on his mind when he strode to the podium that night in the House Chamber, when he called for the vote on the Civil Rights law.  “It never occurred to me,” he said, “in my fondest dreams that I might have the chance to help the sons and daughters of those students” that he had taught so many years ago, “and to help people like them all over this country.  But now I do have that chance.  And I’ll let you in on a secret -- I mean to use it.  And I hope that you will use it with me.”  (Applause.)

That was LBJ’s greatness.  That’s why we remember him.  And if there is one thing that he and this year’s anniversary should teach us, if there’s one lesson I hope that Malia and Sasha and young people everywhere learn from this day, it’s that with enough effort, and enough empathy, and enough perseverance, and enough courage, people who love their country can change it.

In his final year, President Johnson stood on this stage, racked with pain, battered by the controversies of Vietnam, looking far older than his 64 years, and he delivered what would be his final public speech. 

“We have proved that great progress is possible,” he said.  “We know how much still remains to be done.  And if our efforts continue, and if our will is strong, and if our hearts are right, and if courage remains our constant companion, then, my fellow Americans, I am confident, we shall overcome.”  (Applause.)

We shall overcome.  We, the citizens of the United States.  Like Dr. King, like Abraham Lincoln, like countless citizens who have driven this country inexorably forward, President Johnson knew that ours in the end is a story of optimism, a story of achievement and constant striving that is unique upon this Earth.  He knew because he had lived that story.  He believed that together we can build an America that is more fair, more equal, and more free than the one we inherited.  He believed we make our own destiny.  And in part because of him, we must believe it as well.

Thank you.  God bless you.  God bless the United States of America.  (Applause.) 

END
12:46 P.M. CDT

The Man or the Moment By Frank Bruni

January 7, 2015

The New York Times

We measure our presidents against not only our hopes for the present, which are sometimes unreasonable, but also our understanding of the past, which can be just as flawed.

Has a misreading of history informed a misappraisal of Barack Obama?

That's a question raised, not explicitly but implicitly, by a new book by the Princeton historian Julian Zelizer, ''The Fierce Urgency of Now,'' to be published on Thursday.

Its setting is the 1960s, as the title, a phrase uttered by Martin Luther King Jr., suggests. Its focus is Lyndon Johnson. And one of its conclusions is that despite Johnson's legend as a peerless legislative tactician, he was largely a hostage of Congress and of forces beyond the presidency.

Zelizer reminds us that many of Johnson's signature victories came during a two-year period when Democrats had two-thirds majorities in both the Senate, where they held 68 seats, and the House, where they held 295.

Zelizer also reminds us that Johnson's trouncing of Barry Goldwater in the 1964 election spooked Republicans to a point where many fought progressive legislation less stridently than before, lest they be portrayed as Goldwater-style extremists.

Those dynamics and others worked powerfully to Johnson's advantage, and when the climate and the Congress changed, so did his fortunes. On the domestic front (as well as on the foreign one), the final two years of his presidency were a bust, at least in comparison with what preceded them.

Obama's name appears just twice in Zelizer's book. But it's impossible not to think of him more often, given how frequently the yardstick of Johnson's presidency has been applied to his.

If only Obama were a schmoozer like Johnson. If only he had Johnson's taste for the muck of lawmaking. If only he had Johnson's patience for minutiae.

Zelizer told me that when he began work on the book more than five years ago, ''I still had a kind of view of Johnson, as many do, as someone who really knew how to work the system. What's surprising to me is that as conditions in Congress change, he is really shut down. I didn't expect the last part of the book: a president who's really emasculated and can't get anything done even though he's trying the same old tricks. It really became crystal clear to me how Congress determines the fate of the presidency.''

Republicans currently control both chambers, and have a House majority bigger than before. That bodes disastrously for Obama's legislative dreams, and it's the point of reference for his impulse to wield executive authority.

Zelizer said that instances over the last 50 years of a president truly imposing his will on a Congress fully or partly controlled by the opposing party are rare. Ronald Reagan got tax cuts in 1981 despite a Democratic majority in the House, but he'd just shellacked Jimmy Carter in the 1980 elections and Democrats were running scared.

Johnson's name is popping up a lot now. This year is the 50th anniversary of many of the laws grouped under the Great Society, and the movie ''Selma'' is drawing complaints for its portrayal of Johnson as resistant to voting rights for blacks and sharply antagonistic to King.

''It's not fair to Johnson,'' Zelizer told me.

But in his view, Johnson has been considered too kindly by writers who attribute the Great Society to his wizardry.

''He was cagey, he was smart, he was politically savvy,'' Zelizer said. ''But that doesn't explain why the bills passed.''

And Obama can indeed be cold and disengaged. But, Zelizer said, that's not why he hasn't scaled the legislative heights that Johnson did.

Johnson benefited from ''a vibrant period for grass-roots mobilization as a result of the civil rights movement,'' he said, adding that there was pressure for legislation from the bottom up, which is most effective.

There hasn't been any commensurate mobilization during Obama's presidency. Zelizer said that voters frustrated with congressional inertia should examine their own exertions -- and the ways in which campaign financing, lobbying and gerrymandering have created a dysfunctional legislative branch -- as much as any president's character.

Zelizer's read on things leaves ample room for Obama to be questioned on foreign policy and for not making more of his first two years, when Democrats controlled Congress. It's also possible that he should have made less of them, that delaying health care would have spared Democrats their 2010 drubbing and given him additional time with a friendly(-ish) Congress.

But it's undeniable that we treat our presidents as larger than life, simplifying the stories we tell. They're not always mighty frigates parting the waters. They're just as much buoys on the tides of history, rising and falling with the swells.