Алистер Смит - The Spoils of War - Greed, Power, and the Conflicts That Made Our Greatest Presidents

By March 29, 2003, speaking at a National Security Counsil meeting, the president, on the brink of military victory, reiterated the political objectives. “Only one thing matters: winning. There’s a lot of second-guessing regarding the post-Saddam world. Our job is to speak to the American people, tell them how proud we are of the soldiers; to the world, to tell them that we will accomplish this mission; to our European allies, thanks for your help; the Iraqi people, we will be coming to liberate the entire country. Don’t worry about the carping and second-guessing. Rise above it, be confident, remember your constituencies .”33

“Remember your constituencies”! Bush was himself focused, and asked others to focus, on the political reception of his actions. And in fact, he gained a political advantage by taking them. He achieved reelection in 2004, despite a worsening security situation in both Afghanistan and Iraq.

In Pursuit of Equality or Inequality: Why LBJ Failed and Bush Succeeded

FROM A POLITICAL STANDPOINT, PRESIDENT BUSH’S PROSECUTION OF the war was expertly conducted. He declared victory even as the situation on the ground suggested otherwise. He ensured, as we will now demonstrate, that the war imposed few if any costs on the majority of his supporters. Instead, his opponents disproportionately paid the costs of fighting, in both financial and human terms. Further, when opponents protested, he chastised them for their lack of patriotism and accused them of being anti-American. Bush managed the politics of the war skillfully. He achieved reelection by keeping those upon whom he depended happy and by imposing the bulk of the costs on others. Bravo, George—James Madison could not have done it better.

Lyndon Johnson, like Franklin Roosevelt before him, was reluctant to fight but did so nevertheless. He came to the presidency unexpectedly, but once there he was determined, as had been FDR, to achieve a bold agenda. In pursuing greater equality in America, LBJ pursued the war with fairness to all Americans in mind, meaning he alienated his core base of support by making them pay for the war in every sense every bit as much as he made his political opponents pay for the war. Bush capitalized on favoritism and Johnson sacrificed himself on the altar of equal treatment.

To understand why one disastrous war ended a political career while another disastrous war ended in the ultimate in political success—reelection—we need to understand the agenda that each president sought to achieve and the strategy each adopted to advance those agendas.

Johnson’s Agenda: Equal Treatment

FOR JOHNSON, THE PRESIDENCY AFFORDED AN OPPORTUNITY TO FULFILL A well-formulated policy agenda, the so-called Great Society. Jack Valenti describes Johnson’s first night in the White House, on the day of JFK’s assassination, as intense and as reflective a time as the new president was ever likely to have. Johnson invited three advisers to his bedroom:

LBJ began to ruminate. . . . He was simply giving voice to the torrent of thoughts pouring through his mind. “I’m going to pass that civil rights bill that’s been tied up too damn long in the Senate. I’m going to get that bill passed by Congress, and I’m gonna do it before next year is done. And then I’m going to get a bill through that’s gonna make sure that everybody has a right to vote. You give people a vote, and they damn sure have power to change their life for the better. . . . By God, I intend to pass Harry Truman’s medical insurance bill. He didn’t do it, but we’ll make it into law. Never again will a little old lady who’s sick as a dog be turned away from a hospital because she doesn’t have any money to pay for her treatment. It’s a damn disgrace. . . . We are going to do something about education. We’re going to pass a bill that will give every young boy and girl in this country, no matter who they are, the right to get all the education they can take. And the government is going to pay for it.”

Before he was president for a full day, LBJ had laid out for the three of us in his bedroom what later became the design for the Great Society! It was a stunning display of LBJ’s gifts as a visionary, as well as the political instincts without which no leader ever achieves greatness.34

Johnson saw his presidency as an opportunity to advance his Great Society programs and help people at every station of American society. Earlier in his career he had accumulated power and gained personal advancement, often by opposing civil rights legislation as was a political necessity for his Texas constituents. Once in the office of president, however, he personally was no longer beholden to a local constituency. With the power of the presidency in his hands, he was ready to pursue the policy ends he sought, even if those ends harmed the prospects of his party. Johnson wanted to make amends: “Very few people have a chance to correct the mistakes of their youth, and when you do, do it, and I have that chance and I’m going to do it now.”35

Lyndon Johnson has been described as a political genius.36 It is inconceivable that he was ignorant of how his pursuit of fairness jeopardized his presidency. He clearly wanted to retain office and regretted it when political realities forced him to step aside. But he is rare in the extent to which he suppressed the desire to retain office in favor of accomplishing his policy goals. His choice to desegregate the South is telling in this regard, as was his decision to make the burden of the Vietnam War as fair as he could. As Valenti tells it,

Under terrible time pressure, Lyndon Johnson had to make a choice, one whose implications he understood with clear-eyed certainty. Should he push forward with his revolutionary agenda of civil rights and human justice, or should he deploy his considerable energies to fortify the Democratic Party for the next election and possibly for a generation of elections? He didn’t hesitate. No president in the twentieth century had ever mounted such an all-out attack not just on one or two barriers, but on every obstacle to social and political equality. He took on racism, discrimination, and bigotry, with an eye to writing freedom into law and revising civic conduct. LBJ recognized the political hazards of unleashing the agents of such radical change, no matter that his central goal was to set right what was so cruelly wrong. He knew that if he waged war on segregation in the only way he knew how—without fatigue, hesitancy, or doubt—it would tear the South apart. And it would drive a spear into the heart of the Democratic Party.37

Johnson’s civil rights legislation did indeed surrender the South to the Republican Party, a situation that persists until today. LBJ desegregated knowing that this would happen, as an account of a private meeting at the White House with Senator Richard B. Russell of Georgia, who had been instrumental in Johnson’s career, makes clear:

“Dick, I owe you, and I love you. If you hadn’t made me leader, I would never have been vice president, and if I hadn’t been vice president, I wouldn’t be sitting here today. So, I owe you, Dick. I wanted to see you today to ask you not to get in my way on my civil rights bill. If you do, I will have to run you down.” His voice was gentle and warm. There was no rancor and no hostility, only one old friend discussing a difficult matter with another. Russell hunched his shoulders. He said in those rolling accents of his beloved Georgia countryside: “Well, Mr. President, you may well do that, but if you do, you’ll not only lose this election, you will lose the South forever.” In all the years that followed, I was never prouder of Lyndon Johnson than I was that morning. He put his hand on Russell’s in a gesture of respectful affection and in a quiet voice said, “Dick, if that’s the price I have to pay, I will gladly pay it.”