Discussion for article #231558
I’m deeply offended that Michelle Obama stole my idea to eat healthy foods.
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Califano may be suffering from dementia. My jaw dropped just reading that article the other day. How he could believe what he says is “unbelievable”.
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I just read the transcript of the January 15, 1965 phone conversation between Johnson and King. Califano’s commences spot on.
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I just read the transcript of the January 15, 1965 phone conversation between Johnson and King. Califano’s comments seem spot on.
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Link?
http://millercenter.org/presidentialrecordings/lbj-wh6501.04-6736
Its in Califano’s original article.
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Thanks- I was reading it when you replied. I don’t see anything in it to support Califano’s contention that Selma was Johnson’s idea; do you? And the second link leads you to a series of reports that Califano wrote to Johnson about the progress of the march, and make no suggestion that the march was organized or being advised in any way by the Johnson administration. Look, I give Johnson a lot of credit for what he did in getting the VRA and CRA passed, but the suggestion that Johnson was somehow scripting events that King & Co. were leading is absurd.
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The point was that Johnson wanted King to find the worst example of the denial of voting rights and make a huge issue of it. The point was not that Johnson picked Selma.
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Further, the point was that Johnson and King were working together.
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I think the problem is some people want to deify their heroes. In this case I think it’s Califano.
Johnson did many good things, even a few great ones, but he sure wasn’t perfect.
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Nobody disputed that they may have worked together, but Califano is wrong in saying it was Johnson’s idea.
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I listen to that tape and I hear Johnson trying like hell to convince King that he (Johnson) is doing a great job on civil rights. I hear King being appreciative but in no way letting Johnson in as some sort of direct participant in the movement. Believe me, King and Co. did not need Johnson to tell them about where and whether they might go somewhere to underscore an egregious example of inequality in the country; they’d been doing it for years at that point.
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President Johnson: The two things you do for us, now. You find the most ridiculous illustration you can on voting and point it up and repeat it and get everybody else to do it. Second thing is please look at that labor committee in the House and Senate. Please look at that health committee. Please look at that immigration committee. And let us try to get health and education and poverty through the first 90 days.
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From Califano’s piece:
¨In fact, Selma was LBJ’s idea…¨
And in fact, there’s nothing I can see in the transcript Califano links to that even suggests that Johnson originated even indirectly the March on Selma.
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Are you suggesting that this quote somehow leads to the conclusion that LBJ is responsible for the March on Selma?
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Califano, who actually was around for the history, makes his case with recordings and documents. As I understood him on NPR yesterday, he wasn’t trying to give Johnson credit for Selma, he was disputing an assertion in the movie (which I haven’t seen) that LBJ was working with Hoover to obstruct it.
Meanwhile, DuVernay engages in all the intellectual rigors of Twitter to defend her film, including this gem “LBJ’s stall on voting in favor of War on Poverty isn’t fantasy.” Umm, the president doesn’t have a vote and despite his many great flaws, Johnson probably did more for the poor than any president other than his hero, FDR.
Guess I’ll skip this movie and read “Pillar of Fire” instead.
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That’s not really true actually. Comments about this (here and elsewhere) have frequently waxed towards Johnson just being a “bystander” or “taking advantage” of what King and the movement was doing or just making it look like he was uninvolved but supportive. Heck, you even just qualified your attempt at mollifying someone by saying “may have worked together” instead of just admitting that they did in fact do so. You can even hear in this director’s tweets her desire to claim sole ownership of it all.
As I commented before, I personally see this is a real problem, this fight over whose mythology and romanticization of history gets to “win” and who gets to essentially claim “ownership” over societal progress. It absolves accountability on the issue, it excuses personal responsibility for what was and is said and done and it ignores credit where it’s due. When it comes to race relations I think both sides have some real blinders on that get highlighted in a debate like this. Any attempt to give a portioning of credit to Johnson (in this particular instance) is becoming viewed as an attempt to take ownership of the civil rights movement and the change it achieved away from the black community, as if lessening them and taking away their “agency”, perhaps belittling their efforts and making their progress sound dependent on white people. Except it doesn’t do that if the facts are simply the facts. Similarly, some people tend to be a bit too romantic about Johnson, his involvement and his role, forgetting he was a political beast who frequently did things for reasons other than altruism, even though those things were sometimes overall for the better. The reality is that progress got made because black AND white people, some of each very much in positions of power, collaborated and coordinated the effort to get it done and thus there is joint ownership of that progress. Yay? Ignoring or deliberately lessening that fact in order to cling to whatever ownership possible leaves a schism that’s pretty hard to breach without one side or the other or both turning resentful at what they feel is being taken from them.
Here, after thinking about it some more, what I’m sensing at the core of the argument is some real semantic bitchery from everyone. Califano seems to want to give credit to Johnson for some vague suggestions on strategy, ones that clearly were meant to help himself politically as well as the movement, that can be interpreted as suggesting that MLK find an example to make, but maybe not mentioning Selma explicitly. Others want to ignore that component completely and argue against Califano by pointing out that Johnson never specifically suggested Selma or saying things that evince the resentment I’m talking about, like “whatevs, MLK didn’t need Johnson to tell him what to do” (which of course is a bit of a straw man compared to what Califano seems to really be arguing after you strip away the reductionist click-bait headlines that painted him as saying Johnson deserves all the credit). It’s all fucking silly and delays progress if you ask me…and sort of pre-emptively ruins the movie for me, so I probably won’t bother to watch it right away.
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From Califano’s piece:
¨In fact, Selma was LBJ’s idea…¨; if that isn’t trying to give credit to Johnson for Selma, I don’t know what is.
I haven’t seen the movie yet, so I can’t comment on what the movie implies, but I do know that the FBI, among other things, sent a letter suggesting suicide to King at the end of '64, and that government surveillance and harassment of King continued to the end of his life. While I don’t think Johnson was directing Hoover to do this, he certainly didn’t stop him.
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The problem with Hoover is that he raised the question of whether anyone could stop him.
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