the real hillary/johnson story

i have just finished reading the final book in the taylor branch triology about the civil rights movement (At Canaan's edge), which I highly reccomend. these thoughts largely stem from reflections on that book.

despite the misleading subject line of this message, i am not about to write some defense of hillary's comments about johnson and the success of the civil rights movement. while i do think her meta point was valid - that johnson's skill as an insider in washington helped achieve some key goals of the civil right's movement, i think there is actually a more important comparison between hillary and johnson that i suspect she would not as readily point to proudly.

johnson is a complex political figure who accomplished great things domestically but ultimately was undone by a war he didn't really start but unquestionably chose to escalate. besides landmark leadership on civil rights, johnson passed huge and positive reforms on health care (medicare), immigration (changed the laws so that northern europeans didn't get 90% of all allotted spaces), education for the poor (headstart, etc) to name just a few. But all of these reforms foundered on his misguided war policy in vietnam. why? finances for one. he had huge plans for anti-poverty efforts to really bolster civil rights legislation, but ended up having to seriously underfund that to pay for large escalations in vietnam. he was also undone by the political dynamics of an escalating war policy. king, for instace, was a solid supporter for johnson's landslide victory in '64, but as the war effort grew larger, king increasingly had to stand up for nonviolence in all things, which put him at odds with Johson which ultimately contributed greatly to their joint agenda on poverty and race falling apart.

so what is the "real" hillary/johnson parallel? to me, it's that i see hillary following the johnson path of a strong domestic agenda and a hawkish foriegn policy. i don't have a lot of strong evidence on this, but there's something in hillary's character, in her past statements and votes on iraq/iran, and in the way she is such a political creature that leads me to believe that she is more likely to fall into the same trap LBJ did than either of her main rivals for the nomination.
Johson and all his advisors knew very early on - before any real escalation took place - that at best they were looking at a protracted stalemate . We know this because johnson recorded all his phone calls and you can hear him committing troops and simultaneously admitting that it won't do anything. So why did he do it? And what leads me to believe that hillary has the capacity to do the same? We know something about why he did it - he was despearately concerned about looking weak in confronting the threat of his era. and while he knew it would not go well in vietnam, he calculated that this was better than backing down. he probably assumed that he wouldn't be able to win in '68 if he was weak on communism, and that the negative political impacts of an escalation could be safely dealt with in his next term. In retrospect, it seems clear this was a bad choice both politically and progrmatically. Vietnam hurt him so badly he didn't even run for president in 68. and the war itself turned into one of the bigger foreign policy disasters of the late 20th century.

The more relevant question today is whether there is a parrell for hillary and iraq and whether we could expect her to take the hard choices that might make her look weak in the short run but prove wise in the long run. while impossible to predict, i'd say the facts point to her following johnson's misguided path. i would love feedback on this either way, since it is a critical question and i know many of you on my list here are hillary supporters and more keen observers of history than I.

Anyway, i think hillary made a valid point about the civil rights movement needing a powerful and effective leader in DC and i think the press and obama's camp are taking it out of contex to punish her. And in some ways I believe that she is right in believing that she would be a better political insider when it comes to accomplishing the hard fight ahead on domestic policy. but the lesson of johnson is instructive in that it illustrates how all things are connected for a president and that bad choices on foreign policy can bankrupt (both morally and financially) the most agressive and well laid domestic agenda. too bad the press is so focused on the horse race elements of who said what about whom and not enough on the tough analysis about who would actually lead this country more effectively in the very challenging times ahead.