May 10, 2012--What the Hell It's For?

In his epic biography of Lyndon Johnson, in the just-published 4th volume, The Passage of Power, Robert Caro writes--

But although the cliché says that power always corrupts, what is seldom said, but what is equally true, is that power always reveals. When a man is climbing, trying to persuade others to give him power, concealment is necessary: to hide traits that might make others to be reluctant to give him power, to hide also what he wants to do with that power; if men recognized the traits or realized the aims, they might refuse to give him what he wants. But as a man obtains more power, camouflage is less necessary. The curtain begins to rise. The revealing begins. 

When Lyndon Johnson [as Senate Majority Leader] had accumulated enough power to do something--a small something--for civil rights in the Senate, he had done it, inadequate though it may have been. Now suddenly [after John Kennedy had been assassinated], he had a lot more power, and it didn't take him long to reveal at least part of what he wanted to do with it. On the evening of November 26, the advisors gathered around the dining room table in his house to draft the speech he was to deliver the following day to a joint session of Congress were arguing about the amount of emphasis to be given to civil rights in that speech, his first major address as President. 

As Johnson sat silently listening, most of these advisors were warning that he must not emphasize the subject because it would antagonize the southerners who controlled Congress, and whose support he would need for the rest of his presidency--and because a civil rights bill had no chance of passage anyway. And then, in the early hours of the morning, as one of those advisors [Abe Fortas] recalls, "One of the wise, practical people around the table" told him to his face that a president shouldn't spend his time and power on lost causes, no matter how worthy those causes might be. 

"Well, what the hell's the presidency for?" Lyndon Johnson replied.

In that speech, just five days after Kennedy's assassination, Johnson said--

"No words are strong enough to express our determination to continue the forward thrust of America that [John Kennedy] began. This is our challenge . . . to continue on our course. . . . No memorial oration or eulogy could more eloquently honor President Kennedy's memory than the earliest passage of the civil rights bill for which he fought so long. We have talked long enough in this country about equal rights. We have talked for one hundred years or more. It is time now to write the next chapter, and to write it in the book of laws."

This is what the presidency's for.