"Ike Liked Civil Rights"

Popular history puts labels on presidents, but life is usually more complicated.

Fifty years ago, Congress took its first small steps since the abolition of slavery to free African-Americans from segregated lives in the South by giving the Federal government powers to enforce voting rights and move against segregated schools.

American mythology credits Lyndon Johnson, then majority leader of the Senate, for passing the first civil rights law in 82 years over the opposition of southern Democrats and northern Republicans.

But last week in a New York Times OpEd titled “Ike Liked Civil Rights,” David A. Nichols showed that it was Dwight Eisenhower, regarded as a play-it-safe president, who fought for and pushed through the bill. LBJ did not take the lead until he was in the White House seven years later.

In today’s Times, I add a footnote to give Eisenhower his due:

“In 1964, during the struggle to pass Lyndon B. Johnson’s civil rights bill, Eisenhower told me about a visit from Barry Goldwater, who would be the Republican candidate for president that year.

“’He came to tell me,’ Ike said, ‘he was going to vote against the civil rights bill as a matter of conscience. I said I wouldn’t ask any man to go against his conscience, but that if I were a senator I’d vote for it. Even an imperfect bill would help balance 80 years of oppression. But what I couldn’t understand was his attempt to keep the bill from coming to a vote. If I were to comment, I’d crucify him for that.’

“As a former president who did not want to roil his party, Eisenhower never spoke out, but his passion for racial justice was clear.”

Presidents were less predictable back then.

Iraq and Vietnam, Bush and LBJ

Now that the Decider is invoking Vietnam as the touchstone for Iraq, he may want to consider the fate of the man who presided over that war.

Like Bush, Lyndon Johnson believed passionately in the necessity of his conflict, in the domino theory that losing Vietnam would lead to the fall of Southeast Asia, just as this President is certain that success in Iraq will determine what happens in the whole Middle East.

Johnson was wrong. We lost. Southeast Asia did not go Communist. Bush went to Vietnam last year and at a banquet offered a toast to “strengthening our ties."

The President should look at what happened after LBJ left office. He lived the remaining four years of his life in a depression so deep that he couldn't write his memoirs and died of a heart attack the day his successor, Nixon, admitted defeat and withdrew from Vietnam.

Had LBJ survived, he would be marking his 99th birthday next week and might have some advice for Bush, his fellow Texan. A misbegotten war can undo a lifetime of achievement such as a landmark Civil Rights Act and the War on Poverty.

But then, Bush would have no idea of what Johnson was talking about. In six and a half years so far, his domestic achievements have been zero, unless you count tax cuts for the rich and denying health care to poor children.