Forty-six years ago today Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ) gave a TV address during which he announced he would not seek re-election as President..the reasons were clear – the escalation of US involvement in the Vietnam War had torn the nation apart and consumed his Administration..while history confirms his decision to escalate the war was not one he preferred, he made the call anyway and was having to face the political consequences.. For many who lived during that era, LBJ was a heartless, ego-maniacal President who led thousands of innocent young men and women to their deaths in the jungles of Vietnam..while sadly there were some of those qualities in his character, to me there was more to the man..at the time of his Adminstration’s end and up to his death in January 1973, I was a young boy growing up in South Texas, the son of a Mexican-American mother who witnessed first-hand the struggle to rise above stigmas, and who lived for a time on the edge of the black hole of poverty.. The LBJ I was discovering in those formative years was a combination of the early LBJ, and the man who could be found living out his years after leaving the Presidency in isolation on his ranch in the Texas Hill country.. In the late 1960s and early 1970s my foster dad Ken Floyd, who loved day drives into the Hill country, would take me to the LBJ ranch on occasion, where we’d routinely take the very public tour of his vast property, including the drive to within 100 yards or so of his ranch house…the tour guides on those occasions would share countless stories of his life on the ranch, of his legacy in Congress, and of his time during his more productive early years as President..his passage of the Civil Rights act, the Voting Rights act, creation of Medicaid and Medicare, clean water and clean air laws..all elements of his Great Society initiative intended to wipe out poverty in our lifetime..they spoke of his early years as a young Congressman, fighting to bring the basic essentials of modern living – safe drinking water, electricity – to remote rural areas of the state, and of his days before a political career as a teacher who worked in border schools trying to help young Mexican immigrant children get a basic education.. I recall on one of the tours, sometime during the summer of 1972, our guide excitedly pointed out as our bus approached the ranch house, that the tall, striking gentleman, decked in a short sleeve work shirt and blue jeans, with long flowing white hair, standing near the porch, was LBJ himself..we all shuffled to one side of the tour bus to wave, and after what seemed an eternity he waved back, his arm outstretched high in the air..within a few months of that memory, LBJ would be dead..a nation mourning his passing, but not his final deeds in office.. In the years that followed my first ever encounter with a living President, I religiously soaked up any literature or documentaries I could find about LBJ..all the while, and to this day, trying to balance my hero worship of him as a young boy with the complexities of his character than made him such a hated, yet endearing, larger-than-life, yet tragic public figure.. Within eight years of that chance distant encounter through the windows of a tour bus, I would find myself in the presence on several occasions with another living President, this time as a young college intern running errands between the White House and Jimmy Carter’s re-election campaign HQ in DC.. Looking back I believe many of the opportunities I’ve enjoyed in my life can in some way be traced back to the political and legislative achievements of LBJ..even against the long dark shadow of the Vietnam War, I still hold on to a part of my hero worship of him...a man who came from a place of understanding, who tried to do good, but who lost his way..
Posted on: Mon, 31 Mar 2014 13:53:35 +0000
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