In the final weeks of the 1964 presidential campaign, Lyndon Johnson flew from Washington, D.C. to New Orleans, where his wife, Lady Bird, was scheduled to cap off a grueling, four-day whistle-stop tour of the South.
Months earlier, LBJ had signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It was a crowning achievement, though as the president privately told his aide, Bill Moyers, “I think we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come.” Emotions were still raw, and LBJ’s advisers had warned Lady Bird against her southern swing. Indeed, the crowds upheld their judgment. Covering 1,628 miles and delivering 47 speeches, the First Lady was greeted by acid banners (black bird go home; johnson is a nigger-lover) and vicious jeers nearly everywhere she stopped.
Ever the political realist, the president had scarcely bothered even to campaign in the South that year, but he was determined to honor his wife’s brave and lonely journey by appearing alongside her at its terminus. Taking the stage, he launched into his standard stump speech. Then, he veered off script.
“Whatever your views are,” he said of the Civil Rights Act, “we have a Constitution and we have a Bill of Rights, and we have the law of the land, and two-thirds of the Democrats in the Senate voted for it and three-fourths of the Republicans. I signed it, and I am going to enforce it.”
That was the shot. It was the chaser that left reporters slack-jawed.
This “poor old State, they haven’t heard a Democratic speech in 30 years. All they ever hear at election time is ‘Nigger! Nigger! Nigger!’” Presidential assistant Jack Valenti would later describe the shock that followed as “a physical thing—surprise, awe—ears heard what they plainly could not hear, a cataclysmic wave hit everyone there with stunning irreversible force.” A Southern president had invoked the ugliest word in the American lexicon to convey the poisonous and self-defeating effect of racism.
Lyndon Johnson was a bundle of jarring contradictions. But his commitment to racial equality was profound. He was willing to spend down enormous political capital in its pursuit. And, as he often reminded those closest to him, “I do understand power, whatever else may be said about me.”
That Lyndon Johnson—crass and calculating, yet fundamentally principled; emotionally fragile, but fully in command when history called on him—is on bright display in Rob Reiner’s fine new biopic, LBJ. With its smart focus on Johnson’s unhappy tenure as vice president and the earliest days of his presidency, the film is at once a taut political drama and valuable history lesson.
That lesson is all the more urgent today. With each ill-considered tweet and ham-fisted measure, Donald J. Trump has diminished the power and moral authority of the presidency. LBJ reminds us of what that office once was, and what it might be again, if occupied by a chief executive who combines principle, purpose and acumen. Living in the age of Trump, it’s nearly impossible to view this film through any other lens.
On a surface level, LBJ gets it right. It feels real.
November 22, 1963, is the central moment in time from which the film winds backward and forward, and the details are precise. From the crack of the first gunshot, when Secret Service Agent Rufus Youngblood leapt over the front seat of the vice presidential limousine and pinned LBJ to the floor with his knee, to the woeful scene at Parkland Hospital, where Johnson huddled in waiting silence with Lady Bird behind a screen in a vacant patient room—Reiner and his team evoke the passage of power from JFK to LBJ in sharp definition.
The film brims over with imagery of presidential majesty: the bright reflection of the sun off the polished metal exterior of Air Force One, the intimacy of the Oval Office (a room “with no corners,” as Woody Harrelson’s LBJ characterizes it), the heavily fortified motorcade that spirits the president—first JFK, and later LBJ—from destination to destination. This was the early 1960s, before Vietnam and Watergate shook the public’s faith in American institutions. The presidency was the most awe-inspiring institution. And one feels its import most profoundly when Johnson is trapped in the vice presidency. Harrelson’s character never looks or feels more diminished than when he gazes at the White House from the window of his office in the Old Executive Office Building.
But the film’s success runs deeper than surface details. Perhaps taking a cue from Steven Spielberg, who wisely trained his eye on a defining career moment (passage of the Thirteenth Amendment) and personal struggle (the aftermath of his son’s death) in Abraham Lincoln’s life, Reiner also weaves together two plot lines—one personal, one political. We witness Lyndon Johnson, a man of seemingly unbounded ego, as he is humbled by the Kennedy brothers and subsequently thrust into a role that demands the very same public adulation he believes he will never achieve. Simultaneously, we follow the story of a Southern politician as he breaks with his past to become a champion of civil rights.
Both plot lines get at the same fundamental question. How did a coarse and calculating temporizer emerge as one of the great liberal lions of the modern era? Reiner’s answer is both simple and fundamentally correct. Lyndon Johnson believed in the cause, and he knew how to get it done.
In later years, George Reedy, LBJ’s long-suffering Senate aide and White House press secretary, was unsparing in his criticism of his longtime boss. Yet he would go to the grave firm in the conviction that LBJ was “one of the least prejudiced or biased or intolerant or bigoted men I have ever met.”
From his first days as a Texas congressman in 1937, Johnson had been a reliable member of the Southern bloc that persistently stymied the ambitions of civil rights advocates. But he was never a true believer in Jim Crow. On the contrary, his support of segregation was in some regard worse than that of the typical, unthinking racist: He knew it was wrong but, as a Southern politician, he understood its necessity. Many of the liberals in his caucus came to despise LBJ, especially so after he neutered their landmark civil rights bill in 1957. They correctly perceived that he wanted to pass a weak bill in order to make his prospective presidential candidacy in 1960 palatable to northern Democrats but unobjectionable to his fellow southerners. In short, on the eve of his ascension, LBJ was the most unlikely of civil rights icons.
Reiner’s film portrays Vice President Lyndon Johnson as privately sympathetic toward civil rights but skeptical of its near-term likelihood to succeed. In one tense Oval Office scene, he argues passionately that it would constitute political malpractice to introduce a civil rights law that was destined to bottle up Kennedy’s entire legislative agenda. In another, he stares miserably at a television set as Kennedy delivers a powerful, now-famed address demanding congressional action.
It was indeed a landmark occasion. Disgusted by the violence that unfolded daily on the streets of Birmingham, JFK quickly scribbled out his remarks just moments before he appeared on camera. The problem, he said, “is as old as the Scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution. The heart of the question is whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities, whether we are going to treat our fellow Americans as we want to be treated. If an American, because his skin is dark, cannot eat lunch in a restaurant open to the public, if he cannot send his children to the best public school available, if he cannot vote for the public officials who will represent him, if, in short, he cannot enjoy the full and free life which all of us want, then who among us would be content to have the color of his skin changed and stand in his place? Who among us would then be content with the counsels of patience and delay?”
JFK delivered that speech on June 11, 1963. The film would suggest that he was ahead of his vice president on the issue. On the contrary, several weeks earlier, Johnson had delivered a Memorial Day address at Gettysburg National Cemetery. The draft was written by his on-and-off again aide, Horace Busby—not by Kennedy’s White House staff.
“One hundred years ago, the slave was freed,” LBJ intoned at Gettysburg. “One hundred years later, the Negro remains in bondage to the color of his skin. The Negro today asks justice. We do not answer him—we do not answer those who lie beneath this soil—when we reply to the Negro by asking, ‘Patience.’” In a speech that excoriated the stall tactics that Johnson’s former Senate colleagues had long deployed to block civil rights legislation, LBJ insisted that “our nation found its soul in honor on these fields of Gettysburg one hundred years ago. We must not lose that soul in dishonor now on the fields of hate.”
It was a transformational moment for LBJ, but also for the country; no president or vice president had spoken so forthrightly on the issue of civil rights, ever.
In later scenes LBJ aptly portrays Johnson as sincere in his defense of civil rights, particularly those moments in which he stands eye to eye with his friend and mentor, the arch-segregationist Senator Richard Russell of Georgia (played by Richard Jenkins). But the film’s one fundamental shortcoming is its suggestion that Johnson wavered, or that he was a latecomer to the cause. In fact, he got there faster than most other members of the Kennedy administration.
The slight distortion of LBJ’s enthusiasm for civil rights in Joey Hartstone’s script helps advance another central plot line in LBJ: Lyndon Johnson’s intense blood feud with Attorney General Robert Kennedy. Michael Stahl-David does a masterful job at playing Bobby Kennedy as he truly was in those days—a rich, entitled bully lacking the president’s cool intelligence and steady demeanor. Those who still carry a torch for Bobby may take umbrage at the film’s unflattering portrayal, but in earlier years, even JFK had described his younger brother as “kind of a nasty, brutal, humorless little fellow,” “moody, taciturn, brusque, and combative.”
Johnson and RFK shared a mutual loathing. That much is clear in the film. In the late 1950s, when Bobby had been a lowly Senate committee aide, LBJ enjoyed the upper hand. He dismissed him as a “snot nose” and greeted him in the hallways as “sonny boy.” In the early 1960s, when their fortunes were reversed, the attorney general and his in-crowd subjected LBJ to a steady multitude of indignities. In a telling scene, Harrelson corners Bobby in the Oval Office and pleads: “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?” The exchange really did occur, though in the White House residence, not in the West Wing.
While he reveals RFK for the unpleasant and abrasive individual he often was, Hartstone also adheres closely to a standard pop history plotline that casts Bobby a deeply committed liberal. That’s unfortunate. While he later blossomed into a genuine progressive during his brief tenure in the Senate, from 1965 to 1968, as attorney general Bobby Kennedy derided liberals as too soft and, when push came to shove, proved a qualified failure on the issue of civil rights. Yes, his deputy stood down Alabama Governor George Wallace on the steps of the state’s flagship university. But Bobby also permitted J. Edgar Hoover to wiretap Martin Luther King, Jr.
After violence befell Freedom Riders in Alabama, RFK quietly arranged with state officials in Jackson to have the activists quietly and peacefully arrested upon crossing the Mississippi state line. The Freedom Riders were testing a 15-year-old Supreme Court ruling that barred segregation in interstate bus facilities. It was Bobby Kennedy’s job, as the nation’s top law enforcement official, to safeguard that ruling and protect the constitutional rights of American citizens. Instead, he arranged for their imprisonment. You won’t see that in the film.
Reiner can be forgiven this over-simplification. It’s difficult to convey nuance in a 90-minute movie, and if time has proven anything, it’s that many people still prefer a mythical Bobby Kennedy to the more complicated and textured (and interesting) Bobby Kennedy of real life.
The most telling moment in Reiner’s film is subtle and easy to miss. Just days after the assassination, Harrelson sits across from JFK’s longtime wordsmith, Ted Sorensen (played by Brent Bailey), and reviews a copy of the speech that he will soon deliver before a joint session of Congress. In an instant, he looks up and angrily locks eyes with Sorensen, who appears visibly unnerved. He then redlines something in the text and resumes his work.
Sorensen’s original draft included the line: “I who cannot fill his shoes must occupy his desk.” It landed on the cutting room floor.
Therein lies the importance, in this particular historical moment, of Reiner’s film. In fact, LBJ could fill John Kennedy’s shoes, and did.
For three years, conservatives in Congress had ground JFK’s domestic agenda to a halt. Not only did the House and the Senate refuse to take up key New Frontier measures. They also refused to pass eight of 12 routine appropriations bills, thus leaving whole parts of the government unfunded and operating on a continuing resolution that set spending at the previous year’s levels. Not long before JFK’s assassination, the columnist James Reston admitted to “a vague feeling of doubt and disappointment about President Kennedy’s first term…[H]is problem is probably not how to get elected but how to govern.”
LBJ ends just days after the passage of power. We get only a glimpse of the new president as he unceasingly works the phones and plies his former congressional colleagues with the “Johnson Treatment.” But it’s clear that something has changed. This was a man who knew how to get things done.
It’s not just that Johnson knew how to work Congress. He proved an able chief executive, assembling a talented White House staff that, in the space of five years, built revolutionary government initiatives like Medicare, Medicaid, Head Start, and federal aid to primary and secondary education, all while peacefully de-segregating hospitals, nursing homes, schools and places of public accommodation throughout a third of the country. He was a master legislator, but also a deft administrator.
He and his aides worked hard at it. LBJ famously put in “two-day” days—beginning bedside meetings as early as 6 a.m., retiring for an afternoon nap around 3 p.m., and—after a shower and change of clothes—returning to the West Wing. When the president wrapped up in the Oval at about 8:00 p.m., he retired to the residence for dinner, and by 10:00 settled into bed for his “night reading”—stacks upon stacks of memos from his staff members, many of them requiring feedback (“OK/LBJ,” or “Have him see me,” or a simply check mark next to the words “Yes” and “No”). Jack Valenti, who curated the night reading, later estimated that LBJ pored over 200,000 words each week—which of course meant that Valenti read more than 200,000 words of policy and political memorandums weekly.
Fifty years ago, the presidency meant something special to the American public, and the man who occupied the Oval Office—for all of his shortcomings and flaws—approached the job with moral purpose and commitment. In this regard, the man who now resides in the White House could not be more different.
Johnson presided over a moment of national reckoning and reconciliation. Nearly every day, Trump drives a sharp wedge to divide Americans—white against black, native-born against immigrant, Christian against non-Christian. One president sought unity; the other prospers by discord.
Johnson stepped up to his responsibility. He committed himself 18 hours each day to absorb the contours and details of public policy—from poverty and agriculture to transportation and urban renewal. Trump abides no such tolerance for hard work, choosing instead to dither away his days live-tweeting Fox and Friends or playing golf at his many eponymous resorts.
Johnson assembled a top-flight White House staff that knew how to make government function like a fine-tuned machine. Trump’s staff is the gang that can’t shoot straight, and unsurprisingly, they have little to show after nearly a year in office.
LBJ is a stark reminder of the American presidency’s commanding potential, made all the more evident by the political climate in which we live today.