The first piece about national politics in the first edition of Texas Monthly, dated February 1973, related the story of a civil rights summit that had convened two months earlier at the Lyndon Baines Johnson presidential library, in Austin—a gathering much like the one President Joe Biden will address this coming Monday. The story described one of Johnson’s last public appearances, to commemorate the opening of the administration’s papers on civil rights. In his remarks, he grappled with the unfinished and possibly fragile nature of what he had done to advance equality under the law. He was physically fading, unsteady onstage, and mindful that the nation had entrusted itself, for four years, to Richard Milhous Nixon. The story was short and understated. It was also one of the most remarkable pieces of writing this magazine has published.
Penned by legendary Texas writer Billy Lee Brammer, “Part Way With LBJ” is a poignant piece made more remarkable by the relationship between author and subject, and by its timing. When Brammer wrote it, Johnson was still alive; he died on January 22, 1973, as the issue was hitting mailboxes and newsstands. The piece served as an unknowing epitaph.
Brammer was saying goodbye to a kind of father figure with whom he’d never fully reconciled. After writing for the venerable Texas Observer early in his career, he worked in Johnson’s U.S. Senate office in the late 1950s. He wasn’t there long, but his time with Johnson clearly stuck with him. Brammer went on to write The Gay Place, the best novel ever produced about the Texas Senate, in which a thinly disguised version of Johnson appears. Johnson hated the book—or maybe only his wife did; accounts vary. That might not have mattered much to Brammer at the time, because the novel was published in 1961, when Johnson was serving as second fiddle to President John F. Kennedy. But when Kennedy was assassinated and Johnson became top dog, Brammer didn’t join the administration. The White House wouldn’t even give him press credentials.
On that day at the LBJ Library in 1972, Johnson knew he was saying goodbye. Brammer didn’t know that he was, too. He would be dead a little more than five years later of a drug overdose, having written little during that period. In his first, and third-to-last, piece for Texas Monthly, his feelings about Johnson seem unresolved, just as the nation’s were. Johnson “was a giant,” he wrote, already speaking in the past tense. “What he did wrong, he did royally wrong; what he did right, he did royally right.” The nation now seemed “fated to be led by less imaginative, less colorful, less real people.”
Few of the most consequential presidents have lived long enough to get a clear sense of how their exertions would work out. Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and Ronald Reagan either died in office or were mentally diminished by the time they left. Johnson was an outlier—a loud, brash, profane cracker from the Texas Hill Country who did more to advance the cause of civil rights than any president since Lincoln. He made the extraordinary decision not to run for reelection largely because of his concerns about his health and his ability to serve for four more years. That gave him some time to reflect on his legacy.
In his 1973 story, Brammer depicted a man who expressed more optimism than his fellow speakers at the conference but was still uncertain. About Nixon, Brammer wrote, Johnson expressed the “comradeship the commander of a navy destroyer might feel toward the commander of the enemy submarine on which he was dropping depth charges.” Julian Bond, cofounder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and a former critic of Johnson, was feeling more sentimental when he took to the stage, and more pessimistic. Johnson had been “a human man” in office, when the nation needed it. “By God, I wish he were there now.”
Johnson (then 64) took the stage as Biden (now 81) likely will on Monday: “slowly, attentive to each step,” as Brammer wrote. “His wife kept a sharp eye out for every move and sign.” When Johnson worked himself up into a frenzy, Lady Bird came to stand by the podium, just in case. His day in the sun, he told the audience, was done. But he’d help out if he could. “I can’t provide much go-go anymore, but I can provide hope and encouragement—sell a few wormy calves now and then—to see that we continue.”
Another leader would have run down the laundry list of his legacy, praised his own wisdom and perspicacity, and then gone to have a drink. But Johnson’s harsh internal critic could only let him frame his achievements in terms of what he had failed to do. “I’m kind of ashamed of myself that I had six years and didn’t do more than I did,” he said. “But of all the records housed here, it is the record of this work that holds most of myself within it, and holds for me the most intimate meaning.”
Johnson urged his fellow speakers—civil rights activists facing down Nixon after the success of his “Southern strategy,” which saw white Southerners defect to the Republican Party—to stop complaining and start organizing. “All is not lost, all has not been in vain,” he said. Americans had to keep the faith and make the country they wanted to have. If Nixon and his administration were “going to dismantle all of this work we’ve done, why, then we need to bring it to the attention of the nation.”
The “we” is remarkable. Our work. Our duty. At the end of his long life, LBJ had transcended his various mud-bound reputations—Johnson the horse trader, the schemer, the baby killer, the election rigger, the sociopath—and had somehow cleansed himself. He had come to sound like a bleeding-heart community organizer who might have marched with the SNCC. He knew that the forces of progress he had tried to champion never entirely win or lose, and he desired only that the fight continue. The burden passes to the next generation, and the trial never stops.
The Democratic president who will come to the LBJ Library on Monday—who first held a Senate seat on January 3, 1973, weeks before Johnson’s death—has a different message, and a different understanding of politics. It was best summed up by his rival Donald Trump in 2016 when Trump vowed: “I alone can fix it.”
For years, the Biden administration has been warning that the health of the republic is in danger if Trump becomes president a second time. It has argued, with much supporting evidence, that Trump is a petty authoritarian who would come to office with vengeance in mind, and that the system is not equipped to contain him as well as it did during his first term. Many Democrats and independent voters believe this argument and believe that this election is an existential matter for the country.
Does Joe Biden believe it? As the president has shown again and again—sometimes on live TV—that he is physically and mentally deteriorating, he has invented a new corollary to the old formula. The nation is in danger if Trump wins, and only Joe Biden can beat Donald Trump. The natural conclusion, in Biden’s account, is that anyone who fails to support Joe Biden is an existential danger to the country.
“I’ve beaten him before, and I’ve done more than any president has,” Biden said in a press scrum on an airport tarmac in Wisconsin last week. I, not we. He believes himself to be indispensable. Though in 2020 he vowed to be a “transition candidate” who would serve as “a bridge” to the next generation of leadership, he now dismisses the possibility that anyone around him could do his job or win an election.
Last week, I wrote about Johnson’s shock decision to abandon his reelection campaign in 1968—usually credited in the popular memory as a retreat forced by others, but a choice that actually stemmed first from his concerns about his personal health and family history of heart problems. Possessed of an extraordinary command of self and a relentless inward scrutiny, Johnson realized that he simply wasn’t up for another term, and he made the almost unprecedented decision to pass the torch.
The natural rejoinder from Biden’s stalwart defenders: after Johnson stepped down, his vice president, Hubert Humphrey, lost the election in 1968. Johnson thought he would have beaten Nixon, but few observers agreed. A majority of voters, tired of the war in Vietnam, fearful of crime and integration, and wary of expensive new social welfare programs, saw Nixon as a savior.
Like Johnson in 1968, Biden today faces abysmal polling numbers, a problem he had even before the debate. He is getting crushed in the seven key battleground states, and Democrats are now panicking about states typically considered strongholds, like Minnesota, New Hampshire, and New Mexico. Seventy percent of voters doubt his cognitive ability. Two-thirds of Americans and more than half of self-identified Democrats want him to leave the race. The potential for other disastrous performances in the next four months looms in the minds of the party’s strategists, and each attempt Biden has made to fix the problem has been disastrous in a new way. While it can be argued whether another candidate would do better, Biden’s terrible prospects for turning the race around cannot seriously be debated.
But electability is only one of the qualities we should seek in our leaders. We have a right to ask for other virtues. The best presidents have sought power in order to accomplish something important. At their best, like Johnson, they have seen themselves as part of a cycle of reform, reaction, and incremental progress—a stagger-step forward. Biden cannot articulate what he would do with a second term because he cannot really articulate anything. He has only enemies to beat and doubters to prove wrong, most of them now within his own party. He has sought the presidency his entire adult life, and now that he has it, he cannot give it up. As a result, it looks likely to be taken from him.
Brammer’s 1973 story, after evoking the pathos of a diminished man with an unresolved legacy in a moment of national crisis, ends on a hopeful note: “The only person throughout the two-day seminar who said ‘we shall overcome,’ ” the gospel chorus of the heyday of the civil rights movement, “was President Johnson. He seemed to believe it.” Johnson emanated a faith in the next generation that Biden clearly doesn’t share.
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