Kanlaon

Self is still slogging through Leadership in Turbulent Times. Nothing Doris Kearns Goodwin writes can be dull. But there is a formula in this one: each section has to show how the subject truly deserves the descriptor “great.” And that makes the sections feel a little predictable.

Nevertheless, there are some surprises. She did not know that the four presidents written about — Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson — were Republicans. Ha!

Theodore Roosevelt’s wife and mother died within a day of each other. Subsequently, he turned on his baby daughter, because her birth hastened her mother’s demise.

Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt married for love.

Lyndon Johnson built “a substantial fortune.”

Of the four presidents, self is most interested in Lyndon Johnson, because of the crucial role he played in the civil rights movement.

The Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision prohibiting racial segregation in public schools had quickened the civil rights movement, incited a violent reaction in the South, and prompted the Eisenhower administration to send a bill to Congress expanding federal authority to protect black citizens in a wide range of civil rights, including voting rights.

Johnson, according to Goodwin, grasped at once that “if the South accepted the inevitability of small, incremental progress on civil rights, it might well become one of the most prosperous regions in the country. If it refused to move forward, it would remain an economic backwater.”

When the civil rights bill came along, Johnson was Senate majority leader. He cannily saw that the civil rights movement could not be stopped, and therefore he worked to build coalition among his peers, adding amendments to greatly soften its sting. He worked at blunting “extreme statements” on the Senate floor, “preventing the conflict from being cast in irreconcilable terms.”

Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.