JFK, LBJ changed America

Opinion: November 30, 2011 at 12:00a.m.

This time of year, around the anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, my thoughts turn to the slain leader and a time when our country was enduring such agonizing turmoil and undergoing remarkable change simultaneously.

As I expressed in my oral history on file at the Sixth Floor Museum in Dallas, Kennedy was the personification of hope for people like me who long had been denied America’s promise of “liberty and justice for all.”

It is during this period that I most reflect on the civil rights movement, give thanks for the heroes who gave their lives for my deliverance, pause in honor of brave men and women who risked their political careers for the right cause and pray for a country that I sometimes think would rather move backward than forward.

My seasonal ritual also usually includes a visit to the grave of Lee Harvey Oswald — why, I’m not really sure.

It’s not out of reverence for him, but probably more out of deference to his tormented mother who, until shortly before her death, always treated me with the utmost respect.

But more often than not when I think of that moment in American history, my mind focuses on that fellow Texan who was sworn in as president aboard Air Force One after Kennedy’s death.

An enigma

Lyndon Johnson, who was Senate majority leader before being selected as Kennedy’s running mate in 1960, was an enigma for many in the country who understood his deft command of power but sometimes questioned his intelligence, sense of loyalty and commitment to civil rights.

The other day my memories of Johnson’s legacy were reignited when I came across a copy of a magazine I kept for decades.

It was the Dec. 14, 1963, edition of The Saturday Evening Post.

In it was a thoughtful, meticulous analysis by Post writer Stewart Alsop that was titled, “The New President,” with an overline that read: “An extraordinarily complex man — proud, tough, shrewd — he will be master in his house.”

Alsop, in what had to have been a short time to collect his thoughts before publishing, really captured Johnson, the political climate of the country and what had been an evolving relationship between the new president and his predecessor.

Looking back, I still see the piece as historically accurate and absent any obvious or distorted bias of an opinionated writer.

Alsop begins by describing a scene in Kennedy’s Senate office as the young senator ate lunch and talked about his potential rivals for the highest office in the land.

This was long before he announced his candidacy for president.

The author quotes Kennedy: “‘I know all the other candidates pretty well,’ he said, ‘and I frankly think I’m as able to handle the Presidency as any of them, or abler — all except Lyndon, and he hasn’t got a chance.”’

‘Oddly humble’

In the next paragraph, Alsop describes Johnson as “an extraordinarily complicated and remarkably fascinating human being — proud, excessively vain and oddly humble; tough as a whole hogshead of nails and sentimental to the point of corniness; long-headed, shrewd, even foxy, and yet in some respects surprisingly naive; rude and amazingly sensitive; a tough, time-battered politician who is still in part a boy.”

After becoming president, Johnson would use most of those sometimes-paradoxical qualities to lead the country into a new day, helping to sculpt an amazing transformation.

He championed the nation’s most comprehensive civil rights legislation since passage of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution, and his “social agenda” — from Head Start to Medicare — brought sweeping change that still affects millions of Americans to this day.

Kennedy brought us hope of a better tomorrow; Johnson actually ushered it in.

We should give thanks to them both.

And, unlike in seasons past when I constantly complained that Fort Worth had not built a fitting memorial to Kennedy, I take solace in the fact that by this time next year there will be a spectacular monument to the president’s life on the downtown site where he spoke outside to a large crowd in the early morning of Nov. 22, 1963.

Sadly, it took 48 years to do that.

Bob Ray Sanders is a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.