TODAY'S DATE

Posted at 8:22 p.m. ET

Today is November 22nd.  

That date may not have the resonance of December 7th, or, for the young generation, September 11th, but of course it is the date that President Kennedy was assassinated some 45 years ago. 

A vast amount has been written about that event, and President Kennedy himself.  I can add little.  But not enough has been written about the aftermath, particularly the treatment of Lyndon Johnson by the press, by the Kennedys, and by the northeast liberal establishment.  That is a subject worth mentioning.

One of the great myths about the sixties - one of many, many myths - is that Lyndon Johnson was hated because of the Vietnam War.  That is not quite correct.  Lyndon Johnson was hated from the moment he took the oath...because he wasn't Jack Kennedy.  He hadn't gone to the right schools, he wasn't eloquent, his wife didn't go to classical concerts, and, worst of all, he was from Texas.  Well, wait.  Maybe that wasn't worst of all.  Worst of all was the fact that he was an effective legislator, a dealmaker, and that didn't go down well with the pure-of-heart northeastern crowd, which had convinced themselves that the Kennedys were godlike and above mere politics.   

Johnson had always been resented by that clique, and his selection as Kennedy's running mate in 1960 had stunned them.  He wasn't "one of us."   He didn't talk like "us."  He was from south of Boston.  When Johnson became president upon Kennedy's murder, the clique loathed him, and gathered around Bobby Kennedy.  Johnson got very little credit for shepherding through the 1964 civil rights legislation that Jack Kennedy could probably not have gotten passed.  He got very little credit for anything. 

We recall these things because George W. Bush is despised by the same crowd that despised Johnson, and for the same reasons.  It's a cultural thing.  You must be a member of the club.  You can do business with a machete during the day, but, as long as you go to the Philharmonic at night, you're forgiven.  So now, as the Bush years reach their end, we might reflect on the treatment of Lyndon Johnson, and recognize that we've just seen it again.  It is hurtful to American politics, and hurtful to the country, but the practitioners of this socially acceptable form of hate never seem to care.

November 22, 2008.