Clinton, Obama and Martin Luther King

In the week before his 79th birthday tomorrow, Martin Luther King was in the news again.

To make a point about the difference between rhetoric and reality, between Barack Obama and herself, Hillary Clinton said, "“Dr. King’s dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It took a president to get it done.”

That December, after receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, Dr. King went to the White House, where President Johnson told him he that, if he tried to pass a voting rights bill, Southerners in Congress would block other measures of his Great Society program, which would benefit his people in important ways.

"The President said nothing could be done," Dr. King recalled. "But we started a movement."

Three months later, in Selma, Alabama, on what became known as Bloody Sunday, police beat peaceful protesters on a bridge, and days afterward Lyndon Johnson made a speech to a joint session of Congress that Martin Luther King called "one of the most eloquent, unequivocal, and passionate pleas for human rights ever made by a President of the United States."

"Our struggle in Selma had brought the whole issue of the right to vote to the attention of the nation," King said. "Selma brought us a voting bill...We had a federal law which could be used, and use it we would. Where it fell short, we had our tradition of struggle and the method of nonviolent direct action, and these too we would use."

On his birthday tomorrow, Americans will not have to choose between Martin Luther King and Lyndon Johnson in remembering that achievement. Both played their parts, as Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are playing theirs in another historic turning point in American life. When voters cast their ballots for either of them, they will be making statements as powerful as Dr. King and President Johnson did back then.

"And That's the Way It Is..."

After the Tet offensive in early 1968, the Most Trusted Man in America announced the war in Vietnam could not be won. "If I've lost Cronkite," the President of the United States said, "I've lost America" and conceded by announcing he wouldn't run for reelection.

Walter Cronkite is 91 now, and George W. Bush is no Lyndon Johnson, but America's news nanny, who tucked us in every evening for two decades by ending the CBS Evening News with "And that's the way it is," has declared "Our Troops Must Leave Iraq."

In a piece co-written and appearing in print, Cronkite's voice is still being heard. In the Japan Times, on the eve of Pearl Harbor day, he concludes:

"Congress must act. Although Congress never declared war, as required by the Constitution, they did give the president the authority to invade Iraq. Congress must now withdraw that authority and cease its funding of the war.

"It is not likely, however, that Congress will act unless the American people make their voices heard with unmistakable clarity. That is the way the Vietnam War was brought to an end. It is the way that the Iraq War will also be brought to an end. The only question is whether it will be now, or whether the war will drag on, with all the suffering that implies, to an even more tragic, costly and degrading defeat. We will be a better, stronger and more decent country to bring the troops home now."

Trust is not what it used to be, and age has diminished the reach of Cronkite's voice, but he is still trying to tell America how it is.

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.

Harry Reid, the Un-Lyndon Johnson

Before he became President and lost a war, Lyndon Johnson was the most effective Senate majority leader in history. Today’s Democrats, trying to stop another war, could use his skills.

To put it kindly, Harry Reid is no LBJ. In six months as majority leader, he has consistently misspoken and mismanaged Democratic efforts to win over enough Republicans to change policy in Iraq, culminating in this week’s disastrous all-nighter.

It takes a unique set of mismanagement skills to help propel the Democratic-controlled Congress to lower approval ratings than Bush. To be fair, Reid has had to navigate differences about how to end the war in his own party and the ambivalence of Republicans who want to stay loyal to their President but fear for their electoral skins next November. Even so, his performance has been dismal.

In April, David Broder in the Washington Post called Reid “the Democrats’ Gonzales” for his gaffes, and liberal bloggers gang-tackled the venerable columnist. Three months later, Reid, looking more like Bush’s Brownie of FEMA fame, is turning out to be the polar opposite of Lyndon Johnson.

In 1966, Robert Novak of Valerie Plame fame was co-author of a book that described Johnson’s ways as a majority leader who worked with a Republican President, Eisenhower, to pass the first civil rights bill of the century. LBJ, knowing where every Senator stood on every issue and what it would take to win him over, would then go into action:

“The Treatment could last ten minutes or four hours...Its tone could be supplication, accusation, cajolery, exuberance, scorn, tears, complaint and the hint of threat...Interjections from the target were rare. Johnson anticipated them before they could be spoken. He moved in close, his face a scant millimeter from his target, his eyes widening and narrowing, his eyebrows rising and falling. From his pockets poured clippings, memos, statistics. Mimicry, humor, and the genius of analogy made The Treatment an almost hypnotic experience and rendered the target stunned and helpless.”

No one expects Reid to be another LBJ, but some semblance of parliamentary and negotiating skills would go a long way toward building some real legislative pressure to end this miserable war. Then, if Democrats win next year, they will need effective leadership to start undoing the damage Bush has done. They can do better than Harry Reid.

Wiping Away Bush's Grin

Peggy Noonan, who used to write for George Bush’s father and now writes for the Wall Street Journal, has had enough. She wants to fire the President. One of the reasons is that he’s in too good a mood.

At yesterday’s press conference, she notes: “There was the usual teasing, the partly aggressive, partly joshing humor, the certitude. He doesn't seem to be suffering, which is jarring. Presidents in great enterprises that are going badly suffer: Lincoln, LBJ with his head in his hands. Why doesn't Mr. Bush?”

When Lincoln lost an election, he remarked that he “was too old to cry, but it hurts too much to laugh.” Not Bush, and his “What? Me Worry?” grins are driving former supporters like Noonan up the wall.

“President Bush,” she writes, “was hired to know more than the people, to be told all the deep inside intelligence, all the facts Americans are not told, and do the right and smart thing in response.

“That's the deal...If you are a mid-level Verizon executive who lives in New Jersey, this is what you do: You hire a president and tell him to take care of everything you can't take care of--the security of the nation, its well-being, its long-term interests. And you in turn do your part...You work, pay your taxes...become involved in local things--the boy's ball team, the library, the homeless shelter. You handle what you can...and give the big things to the president.

“And if he can't do it, or if he can't do it as well as you pay the mortgage and help the kid next door, you get mad. And you fire him.

“Americans can't fire the president right now, so they're waiting it out. They can tell a pollster how they feel, and they do, and they can tell friends, and they do that too. They also watch the news conference, and grit their teeth a bit.”

So do we all.

Farewell to a Lady

"My mother," Lynda Bird Johnson once told me, "thinks well of everybody. She's even sure the Devil's been maligned. Just got a bad press.”

I got to know the First Lady during the time her daughter worked for me when I was editor of McCalls.

She was womanly in a way that has gone out of style. Without the chic of Jacqueline Kennedy or the country-club cool of Laura Bush, Claudia Taylor Johnson devoted most of her life to herding a bull-in-the-china-shop husband from the Texas panhandle to the White House.

When he had a massive heart attack in 1955, she slept for a month on a cot in his hospital room.

"I never turned over in the night," LBJ later recalled, "that I didn't hear Lady Bird's feet hit the floor coming to see what I needed." After that, she changed his diet, subdued his frantic schedule and kept him alive with her positive outlook.

She will be remembered for her dedication to beautifying America with wildflowers, but Lyndon Johnson was her life’s work. She never stopped.

Not long before he died, I spent a weekend at their ranch as she was managing his life down to the last millimeter to keep him from sliding into despair.

At dinner I watched Lady Bird covertly sliding serving dishes out of reach and subtly signaling the server to remove them before he could ask for more and keeping the conversation cheerful, making sure to focus on him so he would be forced to respond. She surrounded him with friends and grandchildren and, as always, kept him within bounds by softly saying, “Now, Lyndon...”

History will have mixed feelings about a President who changed race relations in America forever by pushing through Congress against all odds the Civil Rights Act of 1964 with the rallying cry of the movement, “We shall overcome,” and then damaged the country with his stubborn refusal to end a disastrous war.

But whatever he achieved would never have been possible without the loving woman who died today at 94.

The Panic of the Least Political President

In my lifetime of observing 12 American Presidents, none has been as politically incompetent--or to be more accurate, uninvolved in the process--as George W. Bush. He is highly partisan, but not political.

So it comes as no surprise that insiders are admitting the White House “is in panic mode” over defections of Senate Republicans from their four years of unwavering support for the President’s Iraq policy.

On CNN last night David Gergen, who worked in several Administrations, expressed bewilderment at Bush’s failure to engage directly with legislative leaders of his party, instead sending his National Security Adviser on a “scouting trip” rather than attempting personally to keep his troops from breaking ranks.

From the extreme of Lyndon Johnson, who twisted arms, to Dwight Eisenhower, who believed in “reasoning” with legislators, every President has worked hard as an advocate, cheer-leader and horse trader to get Congress to do what he wanted.

Bush seems to disdain all that. Perhaps his life experience explains why. Unlike others who had to strive and struggle to get there, Bush came to the White House after a lifetime of getting what he wanted through family connections.

In 2000, he was practically anointed as the Republican nominee by name recognition and massive early fund-raising that came with it. When John McCain became a potential road block after winning in New Hampshire, Rove and his gang of Bush family retainers blasted him out of the way.

Now, perhaps for the first time in his life, the scion of the Bush line is facing a challenge that hired hands can’t handle for him. Will he have the instincts and the guts to meet it? Or will he become the lamest Lame Duck of all time?