a piece at The Atlantic discusses how Hollywood and theater productions have gone fairly easy on Lyndon Johnson's legacy

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/10/lbj-in-popular-culture/542982/

 

 

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Historians have not been as kind to LBJ as Hollywood when assessing his impact on America’s role in the world. Foreign-policy historians have produced important work in recent years showing how Vietnam was neither an inevitable mistake nor a military operation pushed on an unknowing president by advisers. Rather, a cohort of outstanding scholars has used archival records, particularly the White House presidential recordings, to show that Johnson very much knew the risks he was taking by accelerating this war, and repeatedly ignored the warnings of multiple advisers and colleagues who told him that a war in Vietnam was unnecessary and unwinnable. The most important work on this subject, Fredrik Logevall’s Choosing War, brilliantly recounts how Johnson understood all of the risks associated with sending troops into this battle and heard repeatedly from southern hawks, liberal Democrats, and foreign leaders that a negotiated settlement would be better.

 

But as a result of both his machismo and his desperate efforts to prevent Republicans from attacking him as weak on defense, the same sort of baldly political calculation that brought him success on domestic policy, Johnson decided to escalate the American military presence in the deadly jungles of the region. Vietnam, according to Logevall, was the result of poor presidential decision making, mistaken calculations, and a commander in chief who fully understood the problems with this operation but moved forward anyway.

 

The time has come for a good film that captures this other side of LBJ: not the tragic leader but the culpable commander in chief, the president who sought to protect his political standing through disastrous decisions. Americans need to see a talented actor portray Johnson reading Vice President Hubert Humphrey’s famous 1965 memo, in which he wrote that “politically, it is always hard to cut losses. But the Johnson Administration is in a stronger position to do so than any Administration in this century. 1965 is the year of minimum political risk for the Johnson Administration. Indeed, it is the first year when we can face the Vietnam problem without being preoccupied with the political repercussions from the Republican right.” Cut to the next scene: Johnson kicks Humphrey out of his inner circle of advisers and only gives the hawks a seat at the table.

 

This Hollywood story of Lyndon Johnson’s failure is needed more urgently today than ever before. There is still a strong tendency to believe, against all odds, that the “political system” or the so-called “adults in the room” will somehow protect the United States from the worst instincts of a president when it comes to war and peace. Somehow, Americans say to themselves, democracy will survive dangerous presidential bluster, the emasculation of diplomacy, and constant militaristic threats.

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A couple of years ago I proposed a unified theory to explain franchise nostalgia for sci-fi dystopian and utopian tales in American cinema, whether we're talking about Planet of the Apes and Star Trek from the 1960s or Star Wars, Terminator, Alien or Robocop from the 1980s (1979 for the Scott film, but it's conventional to "round up" for some films on the cusp of a new decade).  The proposal was simple, that we find clusters of franchises get rebooted in Hollywood that exemplify the dystopian or utopian concerns of two epochs that are retroactively considered blue state and red state political golden ears--the blue utopia is Camelot and the LBJ continuation thereof, while the red utopia is Reagan.

 

http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2016/01/nostalgia-and-anxieties-of-empire.html

 

Neither of these were really utopian except as grist for myth-making of a partisan sort.   I've written about my belief that Star Trek as an entire half-century spanning franchise can be thought of as a type of cultural imperialism.

 

http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2016/09/star-trek-as-both-propaganda-and-art.html

 

But it tends to not be recognized as cultural imperialism by people who embrace secularism and liberalism.  It's thought of as imagining a better future. The idea that Star Trek level technology is feasible, let alone that it would be manifest in a USS Enterprise rather than developed by a region in Africa or China and that its captain would be from Ohio still imagined that the future of the ideal world would originate in some fashion from the culture of the United States.  Conversely, dystopian narratives in which human life is nearly wiped out "can" be thought of as the bromide that it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism but I would suggest the problem is that bromide is too abstract and forgets that nationalism is still alive and well--it's more plausible to say that it's easier for Americans and the entire "first world nation" set to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the world moving forward without the United States or without the first world nations somehow being the "leaders" of all that is known as high culture in the West. 

But just because the JFK/LBJ era seems like a golden age in popular memory for the entertainment industry doesn't mean it was thought of being that at the time. 

One of the more pernicious side effects (or possibly goals?) of such a mythology of Camelot has been imagining that the JFK years were not as hawkish as they were and that on account of civil rights legislation the Johnson years could be defined more by that than military adventurism.  Another way of putting it is that perhaps thanks to the way Nixon handled the Vietnam conflict it's been easy for Democrats to imagine that Republicans are the war-mongers.  Republican administrations became adept at military adventurism that didn't require formal declarations of war but the war-declaring administrative eras have been staunchly Democratic in the history of the United States going back as far as Woodrow Wilson, who campaigned on not getting us into war when he planned to get us into war.  In that sense hawkish Republicans at least had the honesty to admit they were hawkish, dubious honor though that may be.