1. It has even been suggested, to take a recent example, that "LBJ's decline in credibility [ . . . and] Vietnam's spiraling costs ultimatelyundidboth his Presidencyand the Great Society" (emphasis added). Brian VanDeMark,Into the Quagmire(New York, 1995), 214. The part about the Great Society is hard to square with the great civil rights reforms of 1965-1968, or the host of other civic institutions we now take for granted that were created under Johnson's leadership: Medicare/Medicaid, Head Start, Food Stamps, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the Freedom of Information Act, the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities, the Environmental Protection Agency. . . . The list goes on and on.
2. "Lessons in Power: Lyndon Johnson Revealed: A Conversation with Robert Caro ," Harvard Business Review, 84 (2006 ).
3. Historians polled by C-Span in 1999 ranked Johnson second only to Lincoln among forty-one presidents in "pursuing equal justice for all." In "international relations," they ranked him thirty-sixth. A year earlier, fifteen of thirty-two historians thought Johnson a "near great" president; twelve thought him "average," and five "below average to failure." Although understanding the "failures," Johnson would have hated being thought average. "How do you strike an average between voting rights and Vietnam?" he might have grumbled. He disliked the Great Society label, but it stuck. (I have not tracked down the poll, but it's a fair bet that no other president rated near great by so many also drew a lot of failures.)For Daniel Schorr, see the Harvard Shorenstein Center booklet,The Theodore H. White Lecture with Robert A. Caro, 2003, 60; for Robert Dallek,Flawed Giant(New York, 1998), 87. The assertion has become dogma. According to Maureen Dowd, writing about the Michael Beschloss edition of the Johnson telephone tapes, "Beschloss says that we might have avoided Vietnam if Lyndon Johnson had been as secure in foreign policy as he was on domestic policy. He might not have been as easily swayed by misguided Kennedy holdovers like Robert McNamara." And George Stephanopoulos, also on the Beschloss tapes: "Dealing with domestic policy he [Johnson] gives orders; on foreign policy he seems to take them." Or Eric Foner in hisNew York Timesreview (May 8, 2005) of Philip Zelikow, Ernest May, and Timothy Naftali, eds.The Presidential Recordings(New York, 2005): "Johnson came into the White House with little experience in foreign relations, and listened primarily to those who agreed with him." Or James Reston inDeadline:A Memoir(New York, 1991), 305: "Paradoxically [Johnson] failed in Vietnam in large part because he followed the advice of the intellectuals he inherited from Kennedy." An article in a recentHarvard Crimsonabout Berkeley law professor John Yoo-newly notorious for his 2002 Justice Department memoranda on the treatment of prisoners and on the "unitary executive"-quoted Yoo's undergraduate thesis: "Johnson . . . conscious of his ignorance [in foreign affairs] decided to rely on his advisors."The hypothesis that sheer ignorance of foreign affairs made Johnson go wrong in Vietnam is peculiar on its face. There are too many counterexamples: people knowledgeable about foreign policy but mistaken about Vietnam before the fact, and vice versa. (Even statistically, would members of the Council on Foreign Relations, or Foreign Service officers, or professors of international relations, or journalists specializing in foreign affairs have been smarter about Vietnam in 1965 than members of an age/income/education/party affiliation-adjusted control group drawn from the population at large? I don't suppose there exist appropriate polling data for a statistically competent young historian or political scientist to try to answer the question.)
4. To test my recollections and opinion, six years ago I studied the files and wrote a detailed description of Johnson managing policy toward Europe and the Soviets. I believe that the evidence confirms not merely that those policies were notably successful (on Soviet relations, see fn. 55), but that LBJ's active involvement and good judgment made them so. Francis M. Bator, "Lyndon Johnson and Foreign Policy: The Case of Western Europe and the Soviet Union," inPresidential Judgment: Foreign Policy Decision Making in the White House, ed. Aaron Lobel (Hollis, NH, 2001), 41-78.
5. Thomas A. Schwartz,Lyndon Johnson and Europe(Cambridge, MA, 2003).