'All is not lost, all has not been in vain' — Lyndon Johnson's last speech

LBJ delivered his last public words at a Civil Rights Symposium at the LBJ Library 40 days before he died. If you watch the YouTube, he's clearly weak and his speech is slow.

There are accounts of LBJ that are highly unflattering. A four volume Robert A Caro masterpiece of a biography portrays him as power hungry bully with a genius for the cut and thrust of politics who was truly relentless as he climbed the rungs of political life. This included behaviour that seems unusual and depraved (then and now) as outlined in this Guardian review of Caro’s Volume 3 —

He sucked up to his superiors and kicked down on his inferiors. A favoured device to embarrass subordinates was obliging them to take his orders while he defecated. He liked to pee in the washbasin in his office in front of female secretaries and then wave his member about. Inordinately proud of his sexual apparatus, Johnson was given to bragging: ‘Jumbo had a real workout tonight.’

Whatever his personal failings, Lyndon Johnson could pass legislation using the force of personality and any aces up his sleeve to bend the will of people. As both a senator and a president, he pushed through civil and voting rights legislation that had stalled in the states chamber for generations. From the same Guardian article by Andrew Rawnsley:

Thanks to the Senate, no meaningful progress against racial discrimination had been made since the Civil War. Not only did the Senate resist all attempt to give the vote to blacks in the South; it would not even pass laws against lynching.

The Senate was, as one observer put it, ‘the South’s unending revenge upon the North for Gettysburg’. Lyndon Johnson’s triumph, the more sensational because he was a southerner himself, was to mould the reactionary Senate into the creature of his will and then wield it as an instrument for progress.

The speech above is LBJ’s last speech. He was justifiably proud of what he achieved in the civil rights era. If you listen to the tone, laboured as it is as Johnson traverses his last days, you might lament for a time when even problematic political personalities had a democratic vision of a greater good, when there was a sense of the world getting better.

Johnson says this near the start of his last speech:

I believe that the essence of government lies with unceasing concern for the welfare and dignity and decency and innate integrity of life for every individual. I don’t like to say this and I wish I didn’t have to add these words to make it clear, but I will: Regardless of color, creed, ancestry, sex, or age.
…
Up on the second floor of this library in a special exhibit designed especially for this occasion, you will see the original Emancipation Proclamation by which our great President Abraham Lincoln ordered that the slaves should be freed of their bondage. A decade ago, in year 1963, we observed the 100th anniversary of that proclamation signing. On Memorial Day of that fateful year, I was called upon as the last President to speak at Gettysburg Cemetery where a century before, words had been spoken which all of us have long remembered, and on that occasion, I said this: “Until justice is blind to color, until education is unaware of race, until opportunity is unconcerned with the color of men’s skin, emancipation will be a proclamation but not a fact. To the extent that the proclamation of emancipation is not fulfilled in fact, to that extent, we have fallen short of assuring freedom to the freed.”

It’s an interesting speech, and even has a section where LBJ plumbs for compulsory voting. Most of us Australians are fans of our compulsory voting system. Certainly, it forces candidates to pitch towards the centre, because we’re all going to hit the polls. Is having a centrist political tendency a good thing? Arguably, Trump doesn’t win either of his elections in Australia because he’s too unappealling to the apathetic middle, who aren’t caught in the cult, but who might not vote if they’re not forced to.

Here’s what LBJ says about compulsory voting:

Black Americans are voting now, where they were not voting at all 10 years ago, but let me say quickly that not enough are voting. Little more than half of all eligible Americans voted in the last national election. I don’t know how many of those that didn’t vote were Black, but I do know this, we have to come up with some kind of plan or incentive to perfect our democracy by seeing that more of our people do vote and I certainly mean to include more of our Black people.

Now, I don’t know how to do it. I don’t want to get into it from the hip, with compulsory voting, but we ask our young men, we require them by law to all go and register for the draft. We require all of our children to go to school. We require our people, under the great laws of privilege, to have a Social Security Number. I have no doubt but what this would be a better country and a purer democracy if 95% of our people voted and the 5% that didn’t had an exemption because of illness or whatever it might be, but when the hand of government reached out to them, if they had to reach in their purse or pocket book and show a stamp that they had voted, for the party of their choice and the individual of their choice, this would be a better land.

Interesting stuff. Full transcript below.

Best wishes

Tony Wilson

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Lyndon Johnson: ‘I am confident we shall overcome’, Civil Rights Symposium, LBJ’s last speech - 1972

12 December 1972, LBJ Library, Austin Texas, USA

Mr. Middleton, esteemed former Chief Justice, and Miss Warren, and all of you wonderful people who have come here to try to make life better for your fellowmen:

I sat in the adjoining room and watched the panel this morning and got great satisfaction and compensation in my own way in feeling that all is not lost, all has not been in vain. All we have to do is kind of reorganize, reevaluate; and Rome wasn’t built in a day and we can’t overcome all the injustices or make this a perfect world overnight. But we are on our way in. We are going to do just that before it is over.