George Packer wants Democrats to give Johnson his due:
Whenever Democrats gather to celebrate the party, they invoke the names of their luminaries past. The list used to begin with Jefferson and Jackson. More recently, it’s been shortened to F.D.R., Truman, and J.F.K. The one Democrat with a legitimate claim to greatness who can’t be named is Lyndon Johnson. The other day I asked Robert Caro, Johnson’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning biographer and hardly a hagiographer of the man, whether he thought Johnson should be mentioned in Denver. “It would be only just to Johnson,” Caro said. “If the Democratic Party was going to honestly acknowledge how it came to the point in its history that it was about to nominate a black American for President, no speech would not mention Lyndon Johnson.”
Caro is now at work on the fourth volume of his epic biography, about
Johnson’s White House years. “I am writing right now about how he won
for black Americans the right to vote. I am turning from what happened
forty-three years ago to what I am reading in my daily newspaper—and
the thrill that goes up and down my spine when I realize the historical
significance of this moment is only equaled by my anger that they are
not giving Johnson credit for it.”
