Word: johnson
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Many of the other keen, questing intellects also left. Johnson was always a man who took public issues personally; dissent of any kind became increasingly intolerable to him. With many intellectuals in loud and often unreasonable opposition, his old feelings of insecurity and inferiority about his rural background and mediocre education became more pronounced...
...narrow sense, Lyndon Johnson could function superlatively under stress. He could rap out hard decisions, maneuver in delicate foreign squabbles, intervene effectively in complex labor disputes. But in the less tangible sphere of sustaining the nation's confidence, understanding the drift of opinion, coping with articulate critics, Johnson was all too vulnerable...
...President has a far more effective podium than any band of writers and academics, but Johnson rarely used it to good effect when the Viet Nam debate became virulent, or when the nation became confused and distressed over racial unrest. He might have survived the assault if he had earlier amassed a reservoir of popular confidence. This he had never really done. He tried to come across as the protean President, large in heart and body and energy, but that aura was not consonant with all-too-accurate stories of his pettiness, his bullying of aides, his unnecessary deceptions...
Even in 1966, Johnson was still promising to fight vigorously on both the war and home fronts. Perhaps it could have been done. By then, however, Johnson was running out of political credit. Crime and violence were becoming national issues. The antipoverty program, already suffering grave administrative problems, was held down. Appropriations for other domestic activities also had to be checked. Congress became increasingly intransigent. The Republican gains in the 1966 congressional election ended any possibility that Johnson could fulfill his earlier goals...
After ghetto rioting and Negro militance began to turn popular opinion against the black cause, Johnson's response was uncertain. He continued to fight for civil rights legislation, and his successes will be a durable monument to the will of a Southerner who had earlier been less than zealous on the Negro's behalf. Still, in 1967, when Hubert Humphrey urged a "Marshall plan" for impoverished areas following the Detroit riots, Johnson quashed that kind of talk. And when the Kerner Commission last year made ambitious recommendations for helping the Negro-findings that could easily have been mistaken...