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Hendrik Hertzberg moderated the 1968 panel with speakers Luci Baines Johnson, Chris Matthews, Lawrence O’Donnell and Dan Rather at The Texas Tribune Festival on Sept. 29. Photo by Stephen Spillman for The Texas Tribune

Johnson describes her father’s turmoil in discussion of 1968

Texas Tribune Festival
Wednesday, October 10, 2018

“It was an earthquake under everything,” journalist and author Lawrence O’Donnell said about the year 1968. “... The society, beyond our politics, was just rolling and rocking with surprises.”

O’Donnell, fellow journalists Chris Matthews and Dan Rather, and Luci Baines Johnson, youngest daughter of former President Lyndon Baines Johnson, participated in a 2018 Texas Tribune Festival panel on the year 1968 and the politics and social changes that occurred during one of the most tumultuous years in recent memory. Hendrik Hertzberg, staff writer and senior editor for The New Yorker, served as moderator.

An ‘edgy’ atmosphere

The panelists discussed their perspectives on the events of 1968, including the Democratic National Convention, the anti-war movement and other hallmarks of American society and politics from 50 years ago.

Matthews said he was in college at that time and described the atmosphere on college campuses at the time as having an irreplaceable “zest.”

“Almost every guy was facing the draft. … We all knew the draft was waiting for us,” he said, noting that the women on campus knew their boyfriends and brothers could be drafted to go fight in Vietnam. “It was incredibly edgy. It was great. It was great to be alive, because you were really alive.”

Matthews said when he learned of Robert Kennedy’s assassination, he thought it was a replay of a recording from President John F. Kennedy’s assassination.

“I turned on the radio at 3 o’clock in the morning to see who had won the California primary,” he said. “I heard what I thought was a reprise of a recording of Dallas. I thought they were playing an old record.”

Matthews also noted that in 1968, the anti-war movement included “a lot of nuns, young families with baby carriages, a lot of really innocent people who had turned against the war or who were always against the war.” 

But by 1971, he said, the anti-war movement had changed.

“It was different. It was bitter, it was angry. … Something broke about it.”

Rather, who was serving as the chief White House correspondent for CBS News at the time, said that he had been a combat correspondent in Vietnam for a year and often had dreams about it.

“There was a certain surrealistic quality to 1968 because of that,” he said.

Rather said he was a father of two young children, politically independent and trying to figure out what it was that he would become known for in the midst of the tumult of 1968. 

Luci Baines Johnson, youngest daughter of former President Lyndon Baines Johnson. Photo by Stephen Spillman for The Texas Tribune

Johnson’s inside perspective

Of the insights shared during the panel, it was Johnson’s perspective that was the most emotional as she talked about her father and what it was like for her family during the war.

“So many people, when they think of the Vietnam War, they say it’s LBJ’s war. I’m here to tell you no one in the world wanted that war less than Lyndon Johnson,” she said. 

Johnson mentioned that her husband at the time and her sister’s husband had both enlisted to go fight, and she said she wanted to talk about the time she spent living in the White House and  “what it’s like to lie in bed at night, not knowing if your husband or your brother-in-law was alive or dead, and the last thing you heard before you went to sleep was, ‘Hey, hey, LBJ, how many boys did you kill today.’”

Johnson said the protests put immense strain on the Johnson family and on the president, and she spoke about the first time she heard her father mention that he was going to announce that he would not run for re-election.

“His health was failing. He had a heart attack when he was 47, on my ninth birthday … and so we had lived under that umbrella of not knowing how long my father had to live. And every male member of his family had died before their 65th birthday,” she said. “And Daddy was scared, desperately scared, that all the pressure – by the way, he was told not to take a job with any pressure … he knew the risks were great that we could have two presidents die, back to back, in office, and he thought that was just too much to ask of the American people. So that weighed on him.”

Johnson said that on one hand, she wanted her father to come home and be with his family, but on the other hand, as her husband’s deployment date drew closer, she began to recognize and trust her father as commander-in-chief. Then, in late March, the president told the family that he intended to announce that he would not run for re-election.

“My world was in total upheaval,” Johnson said, growing emotional “... I think that was happening in so many families – from one perspective you felt one thing, and from another perspective you felt another thing, and what you felt most of all was that you had no control over anything.”

Johnson said that when her father announced his decision not to run, he hesitated in the middle of his speech, and she briefly thought that meant he had changed his mind.

“And then of course when he began to speak again ... the decision had been made,” she said. “And as he spoke, I literally could see the weight of the world lifting off of his shoulders so that part of me who loved him and wanted him home … was comforted, and the part of me that was scared silly about the fact that my husband was about to go to war was terrified.

“... It was such a traumatizing time for all of us,” she continued. “But if I had the chance to let the world know how much Lyndon Johnson did not want that war, how much he wanted to bring all the men and women home safely, that would mean the world to me. Because that’s how strongly he felt. When he came home, he grew his hair long, and he said to anybody who would listen, ‘I wanted them to know, I hated it, too.’ Because it was affecting his domestic policy so very much and pulling our people apart, which is the last thing in the world that he wanted.”

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