Book Review: JFK and LBJ - The Last Two Great Presidents

JFK and LBJ: The Last Two Great Presidentsby Godfrey HodgsonYale University Press, 2015Simple bluster splays all over the floor, but fatuousness always has an agenda. When former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton grandstands before a Congressional committee over he role in some disaster at a far-flung diplomatic outpost, for instance, she was not really outraged – she was attempting to divert attention away from herself. When odious Senator Ted Cruz asked the Administrator of NASA what the space agency's main job is, he wasn't looking for information but rather for an excuse to lecture all present about how NASA should be sending men to Mars rather than educating schoolchildren about that well-known liberal media lie, global warming. Simple bluster can serve almost any purpose, but fatuousness is as fatuousness does.So when former British White House correspondent Godfrey Hodgson titles his latest book JFK and LBJ: The Last Two Great Presidents, we seek an agenda even before we build an assessment, and in this case the agenda isn't exactly hard to find: our author, a Distinguished Fellow at the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford, is a man in his eighties. Kennedy and Johnson are not “the last great presidents” - they're the presidents of Hodgson's youth. He himself calls them his heroes, and he asserts periodically that the passing of those heroes marked also the passing of an era that's rightly to be missed.It's not a particularly subtle premise (far less so, for instance, than this author's masterful, sparkling 2000 book on Daniel Patrick Moynihan, The Gentleman from New York), and it gives rise to a little book that's fatuous at its heart, though chatty and endlessly readable, as is everything Hodgson writes. He starts, inevitably, with Carlyle and the whole idea of the great man, and he follows up with 200 brisk pages of Kennedy and Johnson administration highlights, most seen through the viewpoint of the in-the-trenches journalist Hodgson was half a century ago, attending press conferences and three-martini lunches and wine-soaked Georgetown dinner parties.His claim that his two heroes were great presidents because they dreamed big and worked effectively to make their dreams reality, despite encountering major obstacles. And the major obstacles tend to be twofold: racial unrest and the Vietnam War, which trip up the two presidents in paradoxical ways:

The paradox is elegant in its simplicity. Kennedy was a foreign policy president forced to confront the unavoidable domestic issue of civil rights. Johnson was a domestic agenda president brought down by the necessity, as he saw it, of matching and completing Kennedy's foreign policy.

But the Kennedy sections of the book are thin even for an inherently thin work like this book; the real hero these pages, the real great man, is Lyndon Johnson. At one point Hodgson recalls the aged former president's appearance at an LBJ Library conference in Austin in 1972, and he surveys the audience. “Most of the company at the LBJ Library that night (though not this writer),” he writes, “were recruited from those who had taken his shilling, who had ridden with him in his great venture to make America whole and healthy, and had shared first his triumphs, then his failure and humiliation.”This writer might not have taken Johnson's shilling, but in this book he does a very good approximation of doing the work pro bono. To him, Johnson, despite his many flaws (Hodgson very accurately gives us a priceless term, LBJ's “skinless pride”), is a great man:

Many suspected him when he came to the White House of being conservative, racist, even corrupt. He proved that he was none of those things. Crass he certainly could be, and manipulative, determined enough to use whatever weapon lay to hand to win. He was a prey to self-doubt and pessimism. He was also magnificently brave, confident, and, if tactically crafty and well used to equivocation, he was also, like Bunyan's pilgrim, valiant for truth.

To put it mildly, there are a few elements of that description that will seem ever so slightly amiss to a great many people who've studied Johnson or even, God forbid, remember him. But the amazing thing about the description itself – and there are many such passages throughout the book (indeed, the book is practically one long such passage) – isn't how convincing it is but how convinced it is. Hodgson is a passionate and wonderfully articulate defender of the legacy of President Johnson, very much to the point where many readers will wish this were the sole point of the book, that instead of fooling around with this untenable business quantifying great men and then setting JFK and LBJ ahead in that quantity than any of their successors in the Oval Office (about the obvious rival candidate, Ronald Reagan, Hodgson dismissively remarks that he was “limited by ideological rigidity and in the end by fading powers”). If this book weren't The Last Two Great Presidents but instead, say, Give LBJ a Chance, it would have done the author a good deal more credit.