Lyndon Johnson is often said to have remarked, upon seeing himself skewered by Walter Cronkite, "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost Mr. Average Citizen." Nowadays there is no Cronkite-like figure. And that story is likely apocryphal anyway. There may not have been a Cronkite-like figure when Cronkite was anchor either. https://mwi.westpoint.edu/war-public-opinion-myth-cronkite-moment/ Still, I have to say -- something happened that the story does represent. Lyndon Johnson won an epochal victory in 1964 -- in 1966, despite the usual opposition party midterm gains, Johnson and the Democrats held on to majorities in both Houses of Congress. Yet in early 1968 he had to step aside and he spent the rest of the year (futilely) trying to make his VP his successor. The shift had everything to do with the Vietnam War which of course had to be reported upon at home. So the story can be taken for its grain of truth. There was a "Cronkite moment" of some sort sometime...
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President Lyndon Johnson is thought to have said, after hearing of a critical Walter Cronkite commentary about the Vietnam War, words to this effect: "If I have lost Walter Cronkite, I have lost middle America." The precise wording differs depending on from whom you heard the story. And although Cronkite held great importance in his day, more so than any one individual CAN possess in the multipolar media world of today, the story is likely apocryphal. Still, I think as a rapt reader of Caro's books, that Johnson may have had the self-awareness necessary to have said something like that. Trump would never say, "If I have lost Ann Coulter, I have lost my hypernationalist base." Maybe he should, though. https://www.thewrap.com/ann-coulter-turns-on-disloyal-actual-retard-trump-in-twitter-rant/ I have no dog in that fight. May Coulter and Trump tear each other to pieces until neither is heard from any more. Just get me some popcorn.
Not one of the more important questions one might ask about the Johnson presidency, and Caro still owes us a book, but.... Here's a link. It's a fact that Johnson despised this painting, by Peter Hurd. A recent article in Smithsonian delves into the question: why? It is in one respect compositionally innovative. I'm sure Johnson didn't actually model for the painting standing on the roof of the Library of Congress, Hurd placed him there by act of imagination. The result, a view of the Capitol Dome and environs that makes Johnson seem both towering and reflexive. Not a bad day's work. Why did Johnson despise it? Perhaps the simple asymmetry of it. Maybe he had the preconceived notion that the subject of a portrait is 'supposed' to be in the center, with a neutral background. Maybe the conjoined fact that he's portrayed on a roof, and holding a book, was off-putting, Does the L of C let people take books to the roof with them? IS there even a...
On a SLATE comment thread, I recently wrote as follows: Is it just me, or does all this have a very 1968 vibe for anyone else? Here as there, the incumbent President is a Democrat. In '68, of course, LBJ was eligible to run again, but was knocked out early. Let's ignore that difference for a moment and see what else lines up. There are two Democrats each with a plausible claim to continue the incumbent administration, for those who WANT to see it continued. There is a former cabinet member (Attorney General or Secretary of State, as the case may be) on the one side, and the sitting Vice President on the other. The establishment of the Dems could live with either of them. There is also a very non-establishment figure coming off from the flanks, with a surprisingly strong following in the base, call him Eugene or Bernie as you please. All very '68. The signature domestic accomplishment of the incumbent is in the area of health care reform, Medicare/Medicaid. Ove...
As I admitted two days ago, during my vacation I did some trawling in MEN'S JOURNAL for blog topics. This will be my second and last entry drawing upon that source. There's a fascinating though brief item about contemporary changes in van design. For purposes of historical perspective, the author [Jamie Lincoln Kitman, portrayed above] mentions an action of President Johnson in 1963. The new President, unhappy that France and Germany had imposed duties on US poultry exports, retaliated with a tariff of his own, one that amounted to a 25% increase in the price of imported vans. Kitman refers to this act of retaliation as the "chicken tax." What Kitman didn't say was whether this was something Johnson did by slipping a relevant amendment into some omnibus tax bill that then became law, or whether it was something accomplished by executive order (pursuant to some earlier mandate) or ... what. He writes as if Jonson unilaterally decreed the chicken tax, which l...
Over at Yahoo!Answers, I fielded the following question, "How did the Cuban Missile Crisis fit into the Cold War? How does it help one to understand the cold war?" My answer: "The Kennedy administration found it necessary to make a concession but impossible to be SEEN making a concession. They publicly claimed they wouldn't offer any tit-for-tat regarding withdrawal of the missiles from Cuba, but privately through a back channel they DID offer a tit-for-tat in connection with missiles in Turkey. And that was accepted." Added. They had to keep this back channel a secret so they could get headlines that said things like "Reds Back Down on Cuba." Returning to my yahoo answer.... "Robert Caro has a good account of this in his latest volume of his biography of LBJ, who was of course VP at the time. "How it helps one understand the cold war is that it offers an example of a dangerous combination of power politics and juveni...
An issue quite analogous to depreciation is depletion. For businesses that operate by extracting resources from the ground, surely one of their most important assets is the expected amount of oil, coal, diamonds, or whatever-it-might be that is still down there, yet to be extracted, on the land owned or leased by the company for this purpose. Over time, as oil [let us say] is removed, necessarily the remaining oil under there is depleted. The issue has often been politically contentious. Indeed, references to the oil depletion allowance in various stages of its development run like a Wagnerian motif through the various volumes of Robert Caro’s work on the life and times of Lyndon Johnson, who as both Representative and Senator from the oil-rich state of Texas was a stalwart defender of a very generous allowance for the tax accounting books, one which does not have to be duplicated in the financial accounting books. But let’s stick to the latter. One way in which account...
The Federal Lawyer this month ran my review of the fourth volume in Robert Caro's ongoing biography of Lyndon Johnson, the 36th president of the United States. I discuss aspects of the volume not discussed much in the other reviews I've seen, including Johnson's dealings with Bobby Baker and ( through Bobby Baker) with insurance salesman Don Reynolds. Here is a quote from the book (I don't quote it, though I allude to it, in my review): Reynolds told Williams that in 1957, having been advised that a 'political connection' would be helpful in building up his insurance business, he contacted Bobby Baker, a fellow South Carolinian, and they entered into an agreement under which he would make payments to Baker 'because,' as Reynolds was to put it, 'of his social contacts and his wide knowledge of people [whom he] could present to me.' Baker had shortly thereafter introduced him to Walter Jenkins. Johnson, that same year, had mentioned to Bak...
This term, largely because of the bang-up way it ended, has seen the beginnings of right-wing resentment against Chief Justice John Roberts. There is even an "impeach Roberts" meme bubbling about in some quarters! It will go nowhere, unless some extra-judicial scandal is brewing I haven't heard about, but it is an intriguing symptom. In the Warren Court era, there were "Impeach Earl Warren" bumper stickers and billboards apenty. Never got traction. There was also a push to impeach Justice Douglas, who was a good bit to the left of Warren by anyone's metric, and that did get a little traction. That arose from Douglas extra-judicial activities. He wrote an artticle for "Avant Garde," a magazine published by Ralph Ginzburg, at a time when litigation concerning alleged libel by Ginzberg, litigation that had constitutional significance and would eventually reach SCOTUS, was underway in the federal courts. The content of the actua...
In a forthcoming review on Caro's new book -- the fourth volume of THE YEARS OF LYNDON JOHNSON -- I summarize some of what Caro has to say about Bobby Baker. The Baker anchor was an important aspect of the Johnson VP and early Presidential years, at least as Caro is reconstructing them, and some of Caro's other reviewers seem to have said nothing or far too little about it. That review should appear in the next issue of The Federal Lawyer. Meanwhile, I've discovered that I wrote something about Caro once before. I'm the author of a book on the political history of the US Supreme Court, from the New Deal era to the George H.W. Bush presidency. In that context I mentioned Baker. It introduced my book's first invocation of the concept of executive privilege. I'll just quote that passage here: Early in 1964 the Senate opened a formal inquiry into allegations of influence peddling brought against Bobby Baker, Johnson's longtime friend and former aid...