On LBJ's Reputation

In this week's Chronicle Review political scientist Michael Nelson of Rhodes College has a compelling assessment of "LBJ's Waxing and Waning Reputation." Three authors in particular, Robert Caro, Robert Dallek, and Randall Woods, feature prominently. There is lots of inside dish on the petty politics of historical scholarship but also a serious argument calling for more interpretations of LBJ, and especially for interpretations that do not tend to skew liberal.

I am pleased to see something of a revisionism of rehabilitation emerging in Johnson scholarship. Vietnam will forever be a blotch on his escutcheon, but in my assessments of the presidency, I at least try to place Vietnam within the context of the Cold War while considering that Johnson ranks with Lincoln in terms of his concrete accomplishments for black Americans and ahead of Lincoln when one takes into account his intent. Whatever failings one might find in some of Johnson's Great Society programs, even those were, on balance more good than bad -- the War On Poverty, for example, saw poverty halved, a happenstance that may not be causal but that surely is correlative.