Viewing page 12 of 252

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

LYNDON B. JOHNSON (Aug. 27, 1908, – Jan. 22, 1973)
36th President of the United States

LYNDON JOHNSON'S LEGACY
by Vernon E. Jordan, Jr.

Lyndon Baines Johnson is gone, but we must be forever grateful that he walked among us. He was, beyond any shadow of doubt, the President who held the aspirations of black citizens closest to his heart.

It was Lyndon Johnson who stood in the well of Congress and proclaimed "We Shall Overcome," and he did his very best to overcome the bitter heritage of inequality and discrimination that holds all of us — black and white — chained to conflict and confrontation when spirits should soar as eagles in a bright sky.

He sought to construct a "Great Society," but that society fell far short of greatness. It faltered in the mud of a war that was his single greatest failure, and it faltered in a backlash that still runs rampant.

But if he could not, in the short space of five years, construct a Great Society, he did take this country a long way into a Second Reconstruction. His policies helped shape the decade of the sixties; a period that saw black people emerge as a moral force in the nation, a period that saw black people take giant steps toward equality.

By one of those queer, eerie stories of chance I was writing a letter to him on the day he died, a letter thanking him for his hospitality during my participation in the Civil Rights Symposium at the LBJ Library in Austin, Texas in December. That was the last time I saw him, and I am grateful that he had the opportunity to witness the outpouring of affection and admiration at that occasion.

People from all spectrums of the civil rights movement, his Administration, and the judiciary were there to help unveil the civil rights archives of the LBJ Library and to pay tribute to the accomplishments of the sixties.

It is fashionable today to downgrade the achievements of that decade. But we ought to take time out from our concern for what has been left undone and pay tribute to what had been achieved.

Packed into that decade, and especially during the Johnson Administration, was a series of federal actions that, taken together, broke the back of legal segregation, shifted some power to minorities, reordered the way people thought about domestic issues, and created a body of law and custom that will be, for the most part, irreversible. The result was to create myriad new opportunities for black people and to bring to minorities a sense of self-confidence that will continue far into the future.

The country entered the sixties wedded to racism and it left it with a whole new attitude toward equal rights and democratic values. And the Johnson Presidency was primarily responsible for that change.

Just to list the bills he fought for and programs he initiated would take more space than this column has. What other democratic country undertook in so short a period of time such social innovations as were contained in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which eliminated discrimination in public places and in employment; the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which revolutionized southern politics and assured blacks the vote; the Fair Housing Act, which barred discrimination in housing; medical aid for the aged, model cities programs, anti-poverty programs, and a host of other actions that helped millions of people.

It is ironic that Lyndon Johnson died on the very day that a cease-fire agreement for Vietnam was initialed in Paris. That war was his undoing, and the financial and moral demands it made effectively ended the social reforms he championed. That war was a tragedy, both for the man who wanted history to remember him for his domestic accomplishments, and for the nation, which desperately needed social reforms and domestic peace.

I am confident that, long after the sour taste of the Vietnam adventure vanishes, history will record with awe the domestic actions of the Johnson era, and will reserve a place of greatness for this bold, great man.

10