Childhood President

[Fuzzy Bear]

I knew all of the Presidents in order when I was 6 years old.  That was in 1963.  I also learned that year that 3 of our Presidents were assassinated.  About 6 months after learning that, JFK was assassinated.  I remember not seeing this as a remarkable event, but as something that happens to Presidents over the course of time.  I knew Abraham Lincoln was a Republican, that the Republicans were the party against slavery, and that he was a great man.  I knew that JFK was a Democrat, and that "we" (my mother, father and grandmother) were Democrats.  Lincoln was my hero as a little kid, but "ending slavery" was the only thing I really understood Lincoln did.

LBJ was the first President I remembered in the sense that I understood what he was doing in office.  My parents were the kind of anti-Communist liberals that made up the Democratic Party.  I remembered that LBJ signed laws that would make the lives of black folks fairer, and that was a good thing.  (I grew up in Long Island, not in the South.)  But I also knew that LBJ was doing what he needed to do to keep us protected from the Communists in Vietnam that would take our freedom away if they could.

I really looked up to LBJ.  When I was 10 and 11, I came to know more of what was going on, and I didn't understand why hippies and such were demonstrating against our country, rooting for our troops to lose.  And I remember news clips where people in Congress were criticizing LBJ on the war. I didn't know who they were or what they were doing, but it looked as if they were cowards, too afraid to protect "us".  Gradually, I came to view LBJ as the only man in Washington who would be strong on our behalf.  When I heard on March, 31, 1968 that LBJ opted out of running again, I felt scared; the only President with stones was packing it in.  (Such was my thought process at age 10 and 11.)

Four (4) months after LBJ packed it in, my Uncle Tom (my late father's brother) came to visit.  There was a political discussion, and he explained that the Vietnam War was undeclared and we had no business being there.  I forget his reasoning, but my mother and grandmother were convinced, and I thought I'd been had.  We're getting all of these folks killed for nothing?  LBJ came off his pedestal and never went back on it for several years.  By this time, I was a pretty confirmed Democrat.  (Research shows that party identification often begins as early as 6 years old; my childhood friends pretty much knew thy were Republicans in my Republican home town.)  There was redemption, in my mind, for LBJ.  He grew his hair long (as I did) in retirement, and I thought this super cool, given how much grief he got from hippies.  As LBJ died less than 4 years after leaving office, all of my impressions of him occurred before I was an adult. 

More importantly, LBJ was the force in the Establishment that rammed through the Civil Rights bills of the 1960s.  This was redemptive in my eyes.  I'm old enough to have seen, live on TV, black folks demonstrating for the right to vote on TV, and, to quote Mike Royko, "the worst elements of Southern Beer-Belly Manhood (being) allowed to provide the response".  I knew LBJ was from Texas, and that Texas was a slave state, so this was even more redemptive; he did what was right at the expense of the approval of his own people.  That took guts, and I knew that, even as a kid.

I will share this memory as well:  I grew up in a liberal Democratic household, where my parents voted for LBJ in 1964 for President and Nelson Rockefeller in 1966 for Governor of NY.  My best friend's dad was a founding father of New York's Conservative Party; they supported Goldwater in 1964 and Paul Adams, the Conservative Party's nominee for Governor in 1966.  (Nelson Rockefeller was the whole reason the Conservative Party was formed; to bring the GOP in line with conservatism in NY State.)  Yet I NEVER saw folks vilify those who voted for the opposition the way I have seen in the new millenium.  I NEVER saw ordinary Republicans react to LBJ the way Republicans of this era reacted to Obama, and I NEVER say ordinary Democrats react to Nixon the way Democrats today react to Trump, or even to Bush 43.  People were more mature back then; they didn't root for the country to lose in order that their party can win.  Sadly, I can't say that of today's electorate.