Bill Clinton is keenly interested in how history will judge him.
He began his administration with John F. Kennedy as a model and now compares himself to Theodore Roosevelt, a president who made a great mark on the White House and the country, though there was no war during his administration. However, it is a president Clinton almost never mentions whom he resembles most closely – Lyndon B. Johnson.
The men and their administrations have much in common. Their domestic agendas and failings, even their backgrounds, are surprisingly similar. Both men grew up in small Southern towns in relatively deprived circumstances, with an appreciation for the suffering of the disadvantaged. But the Clinton-Johnson connection is most evident in their personalities.
Johnson was, and Clinton is, the product of large appetites for recognition and fame through politics. Like Johnson, Clinton’s vocation has always been using public affairs to make a personal mark that would echo through history. Johnson was an especially grandiose character. “I understand you were born in a log cabin,” German Chancellor Ludwig Erhard told Johnson. “No, no!” Johnson replied.
“You have me confused with Abe Lincoln. I was born in a manger.” Clinton is not quite as grandiose. But he is intensely preoccupied with his likely historical standing. A poll of historians in late 1996 that ranked him as a below-average president sent him into a snit. He still obsesses about his place in history, expressing hopes that he will ultimately be seen as at least a near-great leader.
A need for public affection has echoed through the careers of both men. Johnson couldn’t stand to be criticized. Every negative comment was a deep wound because he wanted everyone to love him. He saw his War on Poverty and Great Society programs as almost personal gifts to the country, for which he expected unqualified praise. The inner-city riots of 1965-68 were thus regarded as an expression of ingratitude.
Johnson’s rage toward liberals who opposed him over the Vietnam War was palpable. “What’s the difference between cannibals and liberals?” he asked some of them. “Cannibals don’t eat their friends.” Like Johnson, critics, especially in the media, enrage Clinton. Clinton seems to despise the journalists who beat on him unmercifully, as he sees it, over everything from Whitewater to Paula Corbin Jones and the alleged campaign-finance scandal.
He cannot understand why a president so intent on righting historic wrongs and meeting current challenges should constantly have to defend himself against attacks on his character. Never mind that every president has been fair game for his critics. To Clinton, like Johnson, negative assessments, political or otherwise, are experienced as personal assaults. Clinton, the acknowledged womanizer, cannot separate himself from Johnson as a sort of political primitive. When told about Kennedy’s conquests, Johnson would shout: “Why, I had more women by accident than he ever had by design.” Despite a sea change in public mood from Johnson’s times to now, Clinton is in sync with Johnson’s views on racial and other domestic issues. Both men emerged from racist societies as champions of equal rights.
Johnson was never more passionate about political and social change than when he fought for the civil-rights and voting-rights reforms of 1964 and 1965. Or when he urged affirmative action as a means of overcoming a long national history of discrimination and deprivation. At a Johnson Library symposium, just weeks before his death, he declared advances toward equal rights for blacks his greatest political achievement. Thirty years later, few would disagree. Clinton’s transparent commitment to racial equality is reflected in his insistence on “one America,” and his creation of the commission led by historian John Hope Franklin to seek solutions to enduring racial divisions.
Johnson’s groundbreaking laws providing federal aid to primary, secondary and higher education are echoed in Clinton’s interest in broadening education opportunities at every level. Clinton’s failed attempt at national health-care reform and recent triumph in extending health insurance to millions of children are legacies of Johnson’s pioneering Medicare and Medicaid laws. The Clinton-Gore interest in environmental protection is an extension of Johnson’s efforts on behalf of clean air and clean water and the conservation of the country’s natural resources. Clinton’s battles to preserve the national endowments for the arts and the humanities underscore his commitment to some of Johnson’s most cherished cultural reforms. Though the GOP congressional majorities and an anti-tax-and-spend mood reflected in diminished regard for federal authority and regulation inhibit Clinton’s affinity for social engineering, there seems little question that another period of liberal activism such as Johnson enjoyed in the 1960s would have made Clinton’s presidency a more obvious imitation of Johnson’s Great Society. There is an even more direct line of political continuity between Johnson and Clinton than the current White House seems inclined to acknowledge.
Johnson’s presidency combined with earlier New Deal programs and national defense spending to bring the South and the West into the mainstream of the country’s economic and political life. As such, it opened the way to the South’s renewed influence on national political life and, more specifically, to opportunities for Southerners to win the White House. Since Johnson left office in 1969, three of the next six presidents – Jimmy Carter, George Bush and now Clinton – have been from the South. The end of segregation and the transformation of the South from economic basket case to a region of substantial opportunity opened the way to national political participation by Southerners comparable to the earliest years of our history.
No president contributed more to this transformation than Johnson. Clinton’s presence in the Oval Office is a direct legacy. LBJ and Clinton bear a resemblance on foreign affairs as well. Johnson saw overseas issues as a distraction from his first love – domestic reform.
“Foreigners are not like folks I’m used to,” he said half jokingly. He wished the outside world, especially Vietnam, which caused him so much grief and ultimately ruined his presidency, would have gone away. Clinton, likewise, is at sixes and sevens over foreign affairs. Nothing as disastrous as Vietnam has intruded on his administration, but sorting out the problems of Bosnia, the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to Eastern Europe, Palestinian relations with Israel, and U.S.
dealings with China have been more a frustration than a source of satisfaction to Clinton. Like Johnson, Clinton is primarily a domestic leader, with a surer feel for the needs and concerns of his fellow citizens than the confusions and difficulties abroad. As he heads into the last three years of his term, Clinton might do well to imitate Johnson’s affinity for grand designs. Unlike Johnson, Clinton, in this period of diminished expectations, has enunciated no large, coherent purpose such as the Great Society.
Though he has plenty of ideas and periodically announces government initiatives that will carry us into the 21st century, his pronouncements do not add up to a broad program of change. Instead of focusing on his place in history, Clinton should sort out what he wants to do with his last years in office and, like Johnson, his unhailed mentor, mount a crusade that strives to fulfill the promise of American life.
