Word: lyndon
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...maybe the third protagonist of the '60s should be conjured up. Until the middle of last week, I had been working on the conceit that Bill Clinton is Lyndon Johnson Without Tears--both Clinton and Johnson being big-hearted, triple-slick Southern boys, and mama's boys, with a genius for politics, and a bardic gift for storytelling, and huge egos and insecurities interbraided, and minds aggressively intelligent, instinctive, fiercely absorptive, and with a love of people, and a general incapacity to tell the truth. Or anyway (let's be nice) a way of thinking of the truth as only...
...Lyndon Without Tears. Up to the great train wreck, Clinton's presidential career had been astonishingly lucky and frictionless. Now, presumably, there are tears enough, and much gnashing of teeth up in the family quarters. Americans try to imagine what Hillary Clinton is saying to her husband; some envision the air full of flying lamps. Or maybe she comforts...
...After Lyndon Johnson's death in 1973, a biographer hesitantly asked Lady Bird Johnson how she reacted to Lyndon's many extramarital love affairs. With that heroically relentless smile of hers, Lady Bird replied that Lyndon loved people and half the people on earth are women, so it seemed natural that he would love them...
Arguably the most significant achievements of the '60s were the victories of the civil rights movement. Yet today race relations are in an abysmal state. Lyndon Johnson championed the Great Society. Thirty years later, we're still trying to sort out the welfare system while our inner cities spiral into decay. As for the Vietnam War, student activism helped bring about an end to that. But that activism also entrenched a vitriolic suspicion of patriotism that still pervades college campuses across the country...
Branch's narrative is rich in historical ironies, none more telling than the gruesome discovery of Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner on the same day that Lyndon Johnson used a dubious North Vietnamese attack in the Gulf of Tonkin as an excuse to enlarge a war he privately did not believe...