Lyndon Johnson's civil rights achievements ought to be placed on history's balancing scale along with Vietnam, former White House counsel Lee White says.
DON WALTON / Lincoln Journal Star | Posted: Sunday, May 11, 2008 7:00 pm
Lyndon Johnson’s civil rights achievements ought to be placed on history’s balancing scale along with Vietnam, former White House counsel Lee White says.
“In a sense, the civil rights legislation was so significant that it’s almost impossible to evaluate it,” White said during a weekend interview in Lincoln.
“It was an enormous achievement.”
In the wake of President Kennedy’s assassination, Johnson pushed through the 1964 civil rights act originally proposed by the slain president.
In 1965, the Johnson administration added the voting rights act, even at the cost of forfeiting the previously dependable Democratic stronghold in the South.
Those achievements, White writes in a recently published memoir, assure that ultimately Johnson’s presidency “will be credited with doing more for civil rights than any other administration except that of President Lincoln.”
White, 84, an Omaha native and graduate of the University of Nebraska and its law school, was featured speaker Saturday at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln College of Law graduation ceremonies.
“It’s a tough time to graduate,” White said, with the nation in economic recession.
“But you’ve got to play the hand you’ve been dealt.”
His best advice in life, he said, is “be lucky.”
White served as a White House counsel in both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.
In the Kennedy White House, he was a deputy to Ted Sorensen, whom he had known since they were in law school together in Lincoln.
In Johnson’s White House, his portfolio included civil rights.
His book, “Government for the People,” is a lively recollection of people and events during a turbulent time in the nation’s history.
White is a gifted storyteller.
During an interview in his room at the Embassy Suites, he said Lincoln is “a very happy city” in his life. He received his degree in electrical engineering here in 1948, adding a law degree in 1950.
“I was at the Sammie (Sigma Alpha Mu) house in Lincoln on Pearl Harbor Day,” he recalled.
All but two of the 43 members of his fraternity at the time served in World War II, he said. One was killed in combat in Europe.
The stories about Johnson and Kennedy come with easy prompting.
A “superb legislator,” Johnson was “very forceful, direct, sometimes very earthy,” White said.
“He could be ornery, vindictive, sometimes mean, but in a sense I did like him.”
Kennedy was “very bright, a quick mind,” White said. “He was very sure of himself whereas Johnson was not very sure of himself.”
White supports Sen. Hillary Clinton in this year’s Democratic presidential race but believes Sen. Barack Obama is on the verge of nailing the nomination.
Obama is “an extremely intelligent fellow and a great orator,” he said. “But he’s going to run into the Republican attack machine, and I hope he withstands it.
“This (Bush) administration has been so bad that it looks like it should be a Democratic cakewalk,” White said.
“But guess what? I don’t think it is.”
Will race, the issue White dealt with four decades ago, be a factor with an African American nominee in this year’s presidential contest?
“I hope it’s not a major factor,” White said. “But bias is insidious. It isn’t totally gone.”
Reach Don Walton at 473-7248 or dwalton@journalstar.com.