Wednesday morning I was at the LBJ Library in Austin. I meant to ask about Lady Bird’s health. She had been sick for a while, and suffered a stroke in 2002. She had lost her sight, and most recently her ability to speak. A few weeks ago she was back in the hospital due to a fever, so I did want to see how she was. I didn’t get a chance to, and then learned Thursday that she passed away.
I met Lady Bird, Bill Moyers, Jack Valenti, Liz Carpenter and other members of Lyndon Johnson’s inner-circle while I was an undergraduate. As an undergraduate history major and as a graduate student, I did most of my research on Johnson, and spent quite a bit of time at the Library. I see Liz Carpenter every year at the Texas history convention I go to and always asked her about Lady Bird. I only met Lady Bird once, and only briefly, but she exuded warmth and kindness.
The Johnsons were products of a time when the Democratic Party was on top. They followed the Kennedy’s, and although many people did not expect much from LBJ, he changed America. He fought discrimination and racism, promoted education, and sought to end poverty. He was also a Cold Warrior, and his efforts to continue the battle against Communism-for better or worse-were influenced by a generation that saw the horrors of dictatorial governments during World War II and wanted to prevent them. It was at the same time, the best years of the Democratic Party, and some of the worst.
Lady Bird was one of the last living legacies of that period, and a strong woman in her own right. As State Senator Rodney Ellis said yesterday, Lady Bird was a strong influence at a time when women weren’t expected to play an active role in presidential politics, yet she was one of the first to make the preservation of the environment an important issue, and fight against littering.
Since then, we Americans and those of us who call ourselves Democrats have backed off from the idealism of the 1960—the idea that as a nation we COULD end poverty and human suffering; the idea that affirmative action was a way of fighting discrimination and injustice; that we needed a level playing field to start from so that people could have a more equal opportunity to succeed or fail….but at least they had the opportunity! We have become more conservative in our approach because we think that will attract more voters. I don’t think the Johnsons would have approved. When LBJ signed Civil Rights legislation into law, he KNEW it would lose the party voters—but he did it because he knew it was RIGHT and he convinced Senators and Representatives and Southern governors that they should do the RIGHT THING…not because it was politically popular, but because it would benefit Americans. Surely he made mistakes. He was no saint. But, LBJ was a STATESMAN.
We need those in our party today.
