The politician and the preacher

I was eleven years old when John F. Kennedy was elected president. Like many African American households at that time my family was buoyed by JFK's election. I remember my grandmother saying that he would work with Dr. King to make things better for all of us.

My family was not so excited about President Kennedy's choice for Vice President. Lyndon Baines Johnson was a former Texas legislator with a deep southern drawl and a questionable civil rights voting record. We did not know what to expect when JFK was assassinated in 1963 and LBJ ascended to the presidency. But we were not optimistic.

Of course, LBJ turned out to be a prolific advocate and defender of civil rights. He respected King and worked with him. He was also masterful at getting legislation passed and did more for civil rights in that regard than any other President. I think what may be surprising to a lot of people is that he did it with more passion than either John or Bobby Kennedy. The political relationship that developed between King and Johnson was unlike any before or since.

I'm not a big fan of political history, but Nick Kotz's "Judgment Days: Lyndon Baines Johnson, Martin Luther King Jr., And The Laws That Changed America" is a terrific book. Re-reading it is great way to remember Dr. King as we observe the anniversary of his assassination. It shows the absurdity of the "debate" that erupted between Barack Obama and the Clintons over whether MLK or LBJ was more responsible for the civil rights successes of the 60s. Success was achieved because King and Johnson respected one another and shared the same moral compass.

The former director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference Andrew Young may have stated it best when he said "Seldom has democracy worked as efficiently to resolve a major crisis as under the leadership of Martin Luther King Jr. and Lundon Baines Johnson." They also had a pretty good supporting cast.

Social synergy. (GW)

'Judgment Days': How They Overcame

By Samuel G. Freedman
New York Times
February 6, 2005

LESS than a week before his inauguration to a full term as an elected president, Lyndon Baines Johnson placed a telephone call from the Oval Office to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The ostensible agenda was to wish King a happy 36th birthday, and even at that superficial level the gesture marked the distance Johnson had traveled from his predecessor. Held at a cautious, wary distance during John F. Kennedy's thousand days, King was not even invited to the slain president's funeral, watching the caisson instead from a Washington curb.

By this time in January 1965, Johnson had already driven through Congress the most important civil rights legislation since emancipation. Now, he told King, their work was only beginning. When Congress reconvened, he intended to introduce a voting rights bill, one that would bring justice to the segregated South, creating a vast new pool of loyal Democratic voters even as it would surely alienate multitudes of whites. ''The president and the civil rights leader -- the politician and the preacher -- were bouncing ideas off each other like two old allies in a campaign strategy huddle, excited about achieving their dreams for a more just society,'' Nick Kotz writes in his narrative history of the two men's alliance. ''As always,'' he continues, ''Johnson did most of the talking. As always, King was polite and deferential to the new president. But there was a shared sense of new possibilities, new opportunities for cooperation to bring about historic change.'' This carefully etched scene serves complementary purposes. It captures Johnson and King at the apex of their collaboration, a snapshot of an optimistic peak that only magnifies the friction and tragedy to come. And it typifies the meticulous research, restrained prose and deep appreciation of motivation and character that make ''Judgment Day'' a stirring, indeed heartbreaking, book.

To have that powerful an effect on a reader is no minor feat for a writer covering such well-trod ground as the civil rights movement and the lives of Johnson and King. After David Garrow and Taylor Branch, after Robert Caro and Robert Dallek, after Diane McWhorter and Doris Kearns Goodwin and Michael Beschloss, after the epic documentary series ''Eyes on the Prize,'' what else could we learn? What memories and archives have not yet been denuded of all relevant detail?

Kotz, the author of four previous books on politics and on civil rights, responds to this implicit challenge less by excavating fresh material -- though he makes excellent use of the president's tapes and Lady Bird Johnson's candid and perceptive diary entries -- than by shifting the angle of vision. Forgoing the panoramic, he telescopes into the relationship between King and Johnson, bracketing his story with Kennedy's assassination in November 1963 and the week in the early spring of 1968 when Johnson announced he would not seek re-election and King was shot down. This narrow time frame still gives Kotz more than enough room to inscribe a dramatically satisfying arc, from the arm's-length introduction of King and Johnson through their fruitful if bumpy partnership on civil rights legislation to their bitter falling-out over the Vietnam War.

Though constructed as a ''two-hander,'' to use a term of art from the theater, ''Judgment Day'' achieves its greatest impact in its revisionist portrait of Lyndon Johnson. He emerges in Kotz's account as a man of moral courage and political acumen, at his zenith the equal of Roosevelt during the Depression and Churchill during World War II. In public speeches and private conversations, Kotz's Johnson speaks with unfeigned passion and disregard for partisan consequences; he pursues civil rights laws that he knows perfectly well will deliver the South to the Republican Party. Even as he indulged in racist epithets, even as he disapproved of King's style of direct action, even as he fielded J. Edgar Hoover's surveillance reports and bigoted speculation about King's political and sexual activities, Johnson persisted in speaking intolerable truth to his fellow white Southerners, at the same time preaching that the truth would set them free.

''It is difficult to fight for freedom,'' Johnson declared in a radio address after signing the Voting Rights Act of 1965. ''But I also know how difficult it can be to bend long years of habit and custom to grant it. There is no room for injustice anywhere in the American mansion. But there is always room for understanding those who see the old ways crumbling. And to them today I say simply this: It must come. It is right that it should come. And when it has, you will find that a burden has been lifted from your shoulders, too. It is not just a question of guilt, although there is that. It is that men cannot live with a lie and not be stained by it.''

To such examples of the public Johnson, Kotz adds equally forceful scenes of the private Johnson. After the first civil rights march in Selma, Ala., ended in a brutal assault by police and state troopers, the president summoned Gov. George Wallace to the White House. Recognizing that federalizing Alabama troops would generate even fiercer backlash and potentially greater violence, he needed to persuade Wallace to ask for the assistance. Reminding Wallace that long before the governor had ridden segregation to power, he had been a populist, Johnson said: ''You came into office a liberal -- you spent all your life trying to do things for the poor. Now why are you working on this? Why are you off on this Negro thing? . . . What do you want left after you, when you die? Do you want a great big marble monument that reads 'George Wallace -- He Built?' Or do you want a little piece of pine board lying across that harsh caliche soil that reads, 'George Wallace -- He Hated.' ''

For all Kotz's admiration of Johnson, his account is not naïve. Kotz traces the waxing tensions between Johnson and King during episodes like the Selma march and the controversy over seating an integrated delegation from the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party at the 1964 Democratic convention. Concomitantly, Kotz shows King straining to reconcile Johnson's pressure for patience and younger activists' push for militancy. Virtually every achievement was met almost instantly with violence -- the Watts riots broke out five days after the Voting Rights Act became law, the civil rights volunteer Viola Liuzzo was murdered the night the second Selma march ended peacefully -- and Johnson often took these setbacks as personal betrayals. And, of course, his valiant efforts on civil rights coincided with his escalation in Vietnam, a time bomb ticking in the background of the narrative.

The many virtues of Kotz's book become especially apparent when it is read beside another effort to reshape our understanding of the civil rights movement, Gilbert Jonas's Freedom's Sword: The NAACP and the Struggle Against Racism in America, 1909-1969 (Routledge, $29.95). Jonas has undertaken a worthy cause in writing an institutional history of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. He maintains that the N.A.A.C.P. has been stinted in historical literature that centers on King and groups like the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. He has a point. And Jonas has lived a good deal of this saga himself, as a veteran of 50 years as a volunteer and then staff member of the N.A.A.C.P. Perhaps he would have served his goal better in a memoir. Indeed, the best pages of the book, depicting the punctilious and principled Roy Wilkins, rely greatly on firsthand observation. Otherwise, while ''Freedom's Sword'' contains valuable facts and details for scholars, general readers may be frustrated by its poor organization and boosterism about the book's heroes.

On the subject of heroes, specifically tragic heroes, Nick Kotz has reset the terms of debate on Lyndon Johnson. Robert Caro's ''Means of Ascent,'' the second book in his multivolume biography, showed Johnson stealing the 1948 Senate election. After experiencing the Johnson of ''Judgment Days,'' one can't help thinking that maybe, every once in a while, there's something to be said for election fraud.

Samuel G. Freedman, a professor of journalism at Columbia University, is the author of ''Upon This Rock: The Miracles of a Black Church'' and other books.