11.03.2005
Lyndon Johnson and the Cult of Sentimentality
[Posted 9:10 AM by James Piereson]
Lyndon Johnson was one of the larger than life figures from the 1960s, a man with a super- sized ego and ambitions and appetites to match. He was, as both allies and adversaries agreed, a cunning politician with a Machiavellian instinct for acquiring and using political power. He wasted little time with sorrow or mourning when his predecessor was murdered before his eyes in his home state, but quickly gathered to himself the powers of the presidential office as if they were rightfully his all along. He seemed most unlike those sentimental figures of the time — politicians like Robert Kennedy, Hollywood celebrities like Shirley MacLaine, or hippies like Jerry Rubin or Abbie Hoffman — who spoke of peace, love, and universal understanding as solutions to age-old problems of conflict and war. Johnson, while certainly a liberal, was old school all the way.
This is why we were stunned to review once again the infamous “Daisy Girl” television ad that Johnson ran during his 1964 campaign for the presidency. Johnson had portrayed his opponent, Barry Goldwater, as a crazed militarist who, if elected president, might lead the world into a nuclear war. The campaign ad, which ran just once before it was pulled, made this point to devastating effect.
The ad is brief, running just 30 seconds in length. It shows a small girl, perhaps 6 or 7 years of age, in a meadow counting the petals on a daisy. She counts from one to ten, and when she is finished a harsh voice in the background begins a reverse countdown: 10,9, 8, 7, etc. This coundown concludes with a nuclear explosion which obliterates everything in sight, most visibly the little girl with the daisy.
The ad ends (with the nuclear cloud in the background) with a voice over from Lyndon Johnson, who declares ominously: “These are the stakes: to make a world in which all God’s children can live, or go into the darkness. We must all love one another, or we must die.”
Wait a second! Did he really say, “We must all love one another, or we must die?” That does not sound like the kind of thing that would come from the lips of such a rough and tumble politician. DId he really mean to say that there was no middle ground between love and death, that it was necessary to love the communists and for them to love us, or else we were bound to annhiliate one another? Does the doctrine of deterrence require that we love our adversaries? Can it be true that universal love is a requirment for peace? Goldwater was belittled for holding to the far more conventional view of “peace through strength” as opposed to Johnson’s idea of “peace through love.” Indeed, Johnson’s statement sounds suspiciously like the sentimental baloney that the peace and love crowd peddled during the 1960s. “All you need is love,” said John Lennon and the Beatles. And so, apparently, said Lyndon Johnson.
It is true that the New Testament commands us to “love one another,” yet even here the commandment is not posed in such starkly catastrophic terms. And it is true as well that the various Christian churches through the generations have accomodated themselves to the fact that peace and justice in this world may have to be achieved on grounds that fall well short of perfection.
Needless to say, Lyndon Johnson did not believe for a second the foolishness he uttered in the campaign ad against Goldwater. He certainly did not waste any love on his Republican opponent, whom he was eager to demolish in the election. Johnson recognized sentimental humbug when he heard it, and he was known to despise the hippies when they arrived on the public scene a few years later. He reckoned, in good Machiavellian fashion, that a sentimental appeal to love would be effective in a culture that, in the wake of the assasination of President Kennedy, was being overtaken by sentimental platitudes of all kinds. The surprising thing is that Johnson, perhaps guided by his advertising men, saw this culture emerging in 1964 a few years before it really came into open view.
It is perhaps too easy to draw the lesson from this that sentimentalists are destined to be ruled by Machiavellians who know how to exploit their attachment to sentiment and emotional expressions like “We must love one another, or we must die.” Yet, just as Johnson sought to exploit the emerging culture of sentimentality, he was also brought down by it because he was so obviously ill-suited to the role of pied-piper to the young and sensitive. The sentimentalists were hard-headed enough to see (leaving Vietnam aside) that Johnson was not one of them. Johnson, no matter how hard he tried or how much liberal legislation he passed, was simply not convincing as an exemplar of peace and love.
No, the growing army of sentimentalists of the time preferred to march behind Robert Kennedy — a far more Machiavellian figure because Kennedy, unlike Johnson, understood that a politician in a sentimental age must not only say sensitive things, but must also appear authentically to be sad, mournful, and burdened by the tragedies of the world. Robert Kennedy appealed to this emerging culture because he looked like the real thing, a man broken by the tragic but senseless death of his brother. Yet, if this was the case, as to come extent it was, it did not stop Kennedy from exploiting it in his own quest for power and high office. Perhaps the only lesson to be learned from this bizarre period is that, in the end, sentimentality can never answer nor succeed in putting aside the permanent questions of politics, namely: conflict, ambition, and the pursuit of power.