“He Saw No Value in Glorious Defeats”

Motivated by a good student question and Paul Waldman’s post about the fundamental irrelevance of motives in evaluating politicians, I have a post at the Prospect arguing that for great politicians you can’t meaningfully separate principle and practicality. Lincoln and slavery is a classic example, and so is LBJ. While Caro is right in some respects to argue that there is a light and a dark Johnson, on civil rights I think this misses the boat; it was always the same Johnson:

And one can say the same thing about Johnson. Johnson—as Robert Caro’s often brilliant ongoing biography makes clear—always believed that it was never a politician’s job to stand on principle as an end in itself. But Caro’s schematic of a “light” and “dark” LBJ fails him when it comes to evaluating LBJ’s civil rights record. The “dark” LBJ, Caro reminds us many times, had a perfect record of voting against civil rights legislation before 1957. But the apparent paradox vanishes if we more usefully amend this to say that LBJ had “a perfect record of casting (politically beneficial) votes against civil rights legislation (that had a 0 percent chance of passing because LBJ wasn’t yet a powerful Senate majority leader.)” The LBJ who voted against no-hope anti-lynching legislation was the same LBJ as the one who signed the Voting Rights Act—the Johnson who was never a white supremacist despite growing up in Texas Hill Country in the 1920s. He was a politician who had no use for noble losses, but when he had actual power in the Senate he passed the best civil rights bill that was possible, and as president he did far more for civil rights than could have been expected when he took office (and far more than his martyred predecessor.)

Does this mean that the civil rights record of the “good” LBJ had pure motives? Of course not.

Early in the new book, Caro quotes LBJ’s adviser Bobby Baker as saying that “Pyrrhic victories were not Lyndon Johnson’s cup of tea…he saw no value in glorious defeats.” Essentially, when it comes to public officials (as opposed to other political actors) I’m with him.