Much of the corruption during the Johnson years revolved around the Vietnam War. For example, soon after Johnson became president, the fortunes of one of his closest corporate associates, Texas construction firm Brown & Root (now known as KBR and a onetime subsidiary of Halliburton), magically and dramatically improved.
National Public Radio, an outlet hardly known for being critical toward progressives, reported that Brown & Root “won contracts for huge construction projects for the federal government” during the Johnson administration, which, by the mid-1960s, had the press and political opposition suggesting “that the company’s good luck was tied to its sizable contributions to Johnson’s political campaign.”
Brown & Root was also part of the notorious “Vietnam Builders” consortium of companies hired by the U.S. government under Johnson to build the military and logistical infrastructure for the United States’ rapidly growing role in South Vietnam.
In 1966, a young congressman from Illinois named Donald H. Rumsfeld charged the Johnson administration with allowing contracts that were “illegal by statute” and “urged investigation into the relationship” between Johnson and the Vietnam Builders, particularly the “infamous ‘President’s Club,’ to which Brown & Root, one of the principal Vietnam contractors, had given tens of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions.”
Johnson also showed incredible favoritism and provided significant largesse to another company with which he also had close ties: a helicopter manufacturer named Bell Corporation. After Bell supported Johnson in his 1948 U.S. Senate campaign, the company went on to make huge profits from the Vietnam War. These profits were shared with one of the company’s big shareholders. You guessed it: Lady Bird Johnson.
Some analysts and historians believe that Johnson’s escalation of the Vietnam conflict was driven at least in part by his desire to “pay back” supporters in both the defense industry and the military itself. Before winning reelection in 1964, Johnson promised these groups that if he was victorious, “you’ll get your war.”
If it sounds like corruption, that’s because it is. But progressives don’t view it that way. They justify the self-dealing and cronyism because it provides resources for them to serve the country and the “greater good.” It’s an age-old “ends justify the means” argument; the Johnsons’ millions in side deals were a small price to pay for building the Great Society.
Dewey (whom Johnson affectionately referred to as “Dr. Johnny”) was the intellectual godfather of cultural progressivism; Johnson was the ambitious architect who brought his ideas to life.
All of this came at great cost to the country. Not simply in the way that Americans’ relationship with the Founders was forever changed but in actual dollars. According to a Heritage Foundation analysis, President Johnson’s agenda led to the government “expanding the non-defense budget by 14 percent per year,” and “tax increases and economic stagnation followed.”
In the end, the Great Society has cost American taxpayers more than $22 trillion in today’s dollars. That’s “three times the amount of money that the government has spent on all military wars in its history, from the Revolutionary War to present,” according to the Heritage Foundation’s Robert Rector. Each year, we add another $1 trillion to the costs of the Great Society, with more than eighty federal programs doling out dollars to fight the “War on Poverty.”
But costs hardly matter to progressives; the ends always justify the means.
THE CIVIL RIGHTS MYTH
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History books say that Johnson played a pivotal role in the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. No argument here—he was definitely pivotal. But the real story is far more complicated, interesting, and revealing about the progressive mind-set than anything you’ll read in a history book.
Like his idol Wilson before him, Johnson was an abhorrent bigot and sexist. And at the heart of his bigotry and misogyny was his own overweening sense of self, his elitism and narcissism, which drove Johnson’s political and societal views. This is all in keeping with progressive ideology, which envisions the creation of the perfect human, a human who, in progressives’ minds, clearly doesn’t include anyone with dark skin.
Johnson’s Herculean sense of personal entitlement—like an overgrown, spoiled teenager—only exacerbated his legendary racism. Johnson deployed the term “nigger” on a near-daily basis. In fact, according to MSNBC reporter Adam Serwer, he was something of a “connoisseur of the word.” Preeminent Johnson biographer Robert Caro explained that LBJ would “calibrate his pronunciations by region, using ‘nigra’ with some southern legislators and ‘negra’ with others.”
Johnson’s racism, which was not confined to African-Americans (he once described East Asians as “hordes of barbaric yellow dwarves”), was the perfect combination of his personal cruelty with his racial disdain. He once asked his African-American chauffeur Robert Parker if he would prefer to be called by his name rather than some pejorative term such as “boy,” “nigger,” or “chief.” When Parker had the temerity to say he preferred to be called by his own name, Johnson reportedly responded: “As long as you are black, and you’re gonna be black till the day you die, no one’s gonna call you by your goddamn name. So no matter what you are called, nigger, you just let it roll off your back like water, and you’ll make it. Just pretend you’re a goddamn piece of furniture.”
Johnson’s devotion to civil rights was, to put it mildly, tepid. Really, it was just a matter of political expediency. He saw the way the winds of history were blowing, and he wanted to smell good when he was upwind of future historians. His hostile views toward racial equality make sense once you remember that he spent most of his career as part of the segregationist Southern bloc of Democrats. Caro wrote that Johnson, until 1957, “had never supported civil rights legislation—any civil rights legislation.”
In fact, it’s not just that Johnson didn’t support civil rights legislation; he abhorred it, referring to the 1964 Civil Rights Act and its predecessors as “the nigger bill.” When he appointed African-American jurist Thurgood Marshall to the Supreme Court, he reportedly told an aide, “Son, when I appoint a nigger to the court, I want everyone to know he’s a nigger.” Even while making history in race-equality efforts, Johnson couldn’t help his racism.
Speaking of making history, perhaps the most important side note from the entire 1964 Civil Rights Act saga, one that seems to have been lost by history, is that the only reason the act passed into law was that it had the overwhelming support of Republicans in Congress.
According to CNN, “more Republicans voted in favor of the Civil Rights Act than Democrats.” Progressives, as we’ll soon see, make a great deal of noise over their supposedly exclusive advocacy on behalf of minorities, but the truth is that issues around equality (whether race, sex, or anything else) don’t seem to matter much to them unless they also happen to advance a political agenda.
Johnson’s support for civil rights should be seen for what it really was: an opportunistic game of high-stakes identity politics. All progressives don’t share Johnson’s overt racism, but they do all support policies that ultimately take a paternalistic view of racial minorities as groups of people who can’t make it on their own.
After consistently blocking civil rights legislation as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate—and then, as vice president, strongly urging Kennedy to slow down his planned actions on civil rights—Johnson did an about-face when he became president himself.
While his reasons for doing so are complicated, they boil down to one tactic in support of two goals: to secure the far-left wing of the Democratic Party so that he could both escalate the war in Vietnam and prevent Robert F. Kennedy—brother of and attorney general to the late president (and heir presumptive to the Kennedy legacy)—from running for the Democratic nomination in 1964.
Johnson, who was ultimately successful in both endeavors, also wanted to secure his own presidential legacy, but there wa
s a complicating factor between his newfound dedication to civil rights and his ardent desire to keep the Oval Office and fight a major war in Vietnam: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Although Johnson and King would be forced to work together on civil rights, King was an ardent opponent of the U.S. presence in Vietnam in general and especially of escalating America’s role in the conflict.
LBJ figured that King, like his chauffeur, had to be reminded of his place in society—and that place wasn’t to be publicly challenging a sitting commander in chief. Given his obvious lack of consideration of ethics or morals, it’s no surprise that LBJ chose to send his message to King by wiretapping and extorting the civil rights leader.
Johnson’s partner in wiretapping crime was FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover. During the Johnson administration, the FBI spent enormous resources following, photographing, and wiretapping King and other antiwar activists, including gathering evidence of his marital infidelities. (All of this was despite the fact that Johnson had publicly declared his opposition to wiretapping American citizens except on the basis of “national security.” Johnson ordered broader surveillance of civil rights advocates at the 1964 Democratic National Convention.)
The Johnson FBI was not hesitant to put the fruits of these efforts into coercing King into submission. They used the information from wiretaps to try to split King from his wife, and they also sent him an unsigned letter claiming that the writer would expose King’s unfaithfulness unless he committed suicide:
No person can overcome the facts, not even a fraud like yourself. Lend your sexually psychotic ear to the enclosure. You will find yourself and in all your dirt, filth, evil and moronic talk exposed on the record for all time. . . . Listen to yourself, you filthy, abnormal animal. You are on the record. . . . King, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is. You have just 34 days in which to do it (this exact number has been selected for a specific reason, it has definite practical significance). You are done. There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation.
LBJ AND THE PROGRESSIVE VISION FOR NATIONAL HEALTH CARE
In July 1965, President Johnson flew from Washington, D.C., to Independence, Missouri, home of the Harry S. Truman Library. There, with the bespectacled Truman looking on proudly, LBJ signed legislation enacting Medicare into law. Truman had been the first president to endorse a national health insurance program, although Teddy Roosevelt included government-backed health care in his 1912 “Bull Moose” platform.
“It all started with the man from Independence,” Johnson said in his thick Texas drawl. He had “planted the seeds of compassion and duty” in the citizens of America.
Then, with one swipe of a pen, the near-century-long progressive dream of beginning the nationalization of health care was realized. Covering the elderly would be the first step in expanding taxpayer-funded health care. Next would be the poor (Medicaid), children (the Children’s Health Insurance Program, CHIP), and, eventually, everyone else (Obamacare).
Truman was the first person to receive a Medicare card, number one, and his wife, Bess, received card number two, thereby making the Trumans the first Americans to take part in the nation’s greatest Ponzi scheme.
Here’s how the scheme works: Because people are living longer than ever before, most Medicare recipients receive far more in benefits than they pay in during their lifetimes. In fact, over a lifetime, beneficiaries receive between two and six dollars in benefits for every dollar they pay in.
Free money, right? Of course not. The benefits paid to today’s elderly are funded by those who are currently working and paying into the system. In 1965, six working-age people paid for one Medicare recipient. Today only four workers do, and it’s projected to continue getting worse as the population ages and people live longer.
Medicare cannot be sustained, but that hasn’t stopped most Republicans from embracing it as a permanent fixture of modern society. President George W. Bush, for example, didn’t fight to make Medicare sustainable; he fought to expand it via Medicare Part D, a new prescription-drug benefit plan.
“If you’re a low-income senior, the government’s going to pick up a significant portion of your tab. . . . If you’re an average-income senior, you’re going to see your drug bills cut in half,” Bush said.
What he didn’t say was who would be picking up that tab. It isn’t going to be you or me; it’s going to be paid for by our children and grandchildren. And that tab is going to be at least $100 trillion, or about the price of some eighty Iraq wars. Your personal share of that $100 trillion comes out to about $330,000, or $1.3 million for a family of four. Perfectly manageable, right?
King wasn’t the only person the Johnson administration (or the FBI) wiretapped and harassed in its efforts to increase and secure America’s role in the Vietnam War. In 1967, Johnson ordered the CIA to undertake a domestic espionage campaign—Operation CHAOS—to spy on antiwar activists and other dissidents.
Eventually, CHAOS grew to include more than four thousand informers within the antiwar movement, leading to hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens being placed on watch lists. Thousands of others had wide-ranging files collected on them by the government.
Other Johnson-era domestic spying efforts included the National Security Agency’s monitoring of numerous American citizens—including King, as well as members of Congress, reporters, actress Jane Fonda, folksinger Joan Baez, and pediatrician Benjamin Spock. Johnson followed the progressive playbook by realizing that ultimate control had to be an essential element of his agenda—and that can only come with total information. It was the only way to keep the revolution on track.
THE RECKONING
* * *
One of the worst things about the progressive approach to governance is the improvisational manner in which massive societal changes are implemented. As the late Democratic iconoclast Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who had a front-row seat to the Great Society as part of Johnson’s administration, wrote in Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding: “A program was launched that was not understood, and not explained, and this brought about social losses that need not have occurred. . . . The government did not know what it was doing. It had a theory. Or, rather, a set of theories. Nothing more.”
And what were the consequences of all this experimentation with our lives and bedrock principles? The counterculture of the 1960s, social breakdown, racial violence, corruption of youth, and cultural nihilism. Not to mention the creation of domestic terrorists, such as Barack Obama’s friend Bill Ayers and his Weather Underground, which bombed public buildings in the name of communism and anti-imperialism.
Consider, for example, a young lady from Chicago named Hillary Rodham. In 1964, she was an honest-to-goodness “Goldwater Girl” who supported the Arizona senator against Lyndon Johnson. As late as 1968, she attended the Republican National Convention. But by 1972, she was on her way to being fully radicalized and working on George McGovern’s disastrous presidential campaign.
CHILDREN OF THE SIXTIES
Bethel, New York
August 17, 1969
The crowd—dirty, tired, higher than the clouds. The ground—muddy, covered with garbage, and swimming with excrement. Food is scarce, water tainted, and bathrooms nearly nonexistent. The rains aren’t cleansing; they just made the muck and feces fluid and easier to spread. Traffic getting in was awful; getting out would be almost impossible.
The “Aquarian Exposition: 3 Days of Peace & Music,” otherwise known as Woodstock, was coming to an end. And with it two lives: one dead from a heroin overdose, one from being run over by a tractor.
Surveying the dwindling, dirty crowd late that Sunday morning, Jimi Hendrix wearily swayed with his guitar. He was nervous, and it showed. Despite his massive fame, he hated performing before large crowds.
But he did his job, giving the audience what it wanted, including a tortured, butchering solo guitar version of “The Star-Spangled Banner” that put th
e exclamation point on the end of the 1960s.
With the set over, Hendrix collapsed backstage, unable to hold himself up by his own power. Awake for nearly three days by that Sunday morning, he was exhausted.
Like the counterculture movement that had elevated him to nearly unprecedented fame, he was a spent force. His body desiccated by drug and alcohol abuse, his soul empty from meaningless sex, and his mind turned away from all that was good by both, his collapse signaled the end of an era.
He’d be dead a year later.
Woodstock was the embodiment of the hedonistic, consequence-less, do-whatever-you-feel-like society that progressivism unleashed. It was sex in the mud, drugs, rock ’n’ roll, no values, no morals, no rules.
The revolt against the old white men of our founding and their outdated, rigid rules and Constitution had morphed into a rebellion against all rules whatsoever. By the 1960s, academia had embraced moral relativism and rejected the classical ideas of virtue and right and wrong. Right and wrong were just abstract ideas; what was right for you was whatever you thought it was.
At the time, few saw the coming danger of this worldview. Most people just saw some crazy kids running around in the mud and the rain. “They’ll grow out of it,” they thought to themselves. The problem was, many never did.
The children of the sixties, kids who were shaped by this fundamental shift in American values, did not stay children forever. They grew up, and while they may have eventually put on suits and gotten jobs and embraced at least the trappings of mainstream society, their moral relativism never left.