Sixty Years Ago, LBJ Made the Case for the Kind of Nation Trump Is Trying to Destroy
Lyndon Johnson was not a great — not even a good — public speaker.
But on several occasions during the Long 1964 (which I define from the JFK assassination in November 1963 through the summer of 1965), he rose to the moment and made extraordinary commentaries on America’s hopes and history. One was his address to a joint session of Congress and the American people on Thanksgiving Eve, 1963. five days after the assassination had made him President. Another was his State of the Union Address in January 1964, in which he declared “unconditional war” on poverty and pledged that the civil rights bill would be enacted. A third was his May 1964 call for the creation of a “Great Society” at the University of Michigan.
The two LBJ speeches that stand out most, though, came in the spring of 1965. In the first, on March 15, eight days after the brutal police and mob attack on voting rights marchers in Selma, Johnson proposed the Voting Rights Act. He declared the horror at Selma to be “a turning point in man’s unending search for freedom.” “There is no Negro problem,” the President said. “There is no Southern problem. There is no Northern problem. There is only an American problem.” “Their cause must be our cause too,” he affirmed. “Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice.” Then this southern Democrat paused before startling almost everyone by raising his arms and declaring: “And we shall overcome.”
On June 4, Johnson gave the commencement address at Howard University. Speaking to the graduates of the historically black university, he went farther in calling for the end to injustice and for the establishment of genuine equality than he ever had before.
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If he hadn't gotten us involved in Vietnam, LBJ would have gone down in history as one of our better Presidents.