‘Selma’ did wrong to smear LBJ

The film Selma has generated controversy which is not going away with explanations by Hollywood that creative license justified misrepresentations in the movie regarding President Johnson and civil rights.
 
The 1965 march in Selma was a truly significant event with sufficient drama to be told truthfully.  The film not only does an injustice to Johnson but further feeds a false narrative of civil-rights history which is being peddled by present-day media and political figures to serve their own interests.
 
{mosads}The filmmaker says she was tired of accounts of white leaders helping black people.  And so Selma depicts LBJ as pressing for passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act only after being confronted by Martin Luther King Jr. and other black leaders.  This is nonsense.
 
As Vice President Humphrey’s assistant I attended a White House meeting, shortly after Johnson’s 1965 inaugural, attended by the Democratic chairs of House and Senate committees.  At the meeting Johnson exhorted his party’s congressional leaders to act promptly on the guts of his Great Society program.  He specifically emphasized Medicare, Medicaid and a Voting Rights Act.  The committee chairs knew that the Civil Rights Act of the previous year would hurt Democrats in Dixie.  But Johnson characterized the Voting Rights Act, as the CRA, as a moral imperative demanding action.  The committee chairs rose cheering.
 
A few days later I accompanied Humphrey during a brief Oval Office conversation with Johnson regarding the legislative agenda.  The Voting Rights Act again got prime attention.
 
A few weeks earlier, as Humphrey was in transition to the vice presidency, he had asked me to review a number of his papers.  Among them was a long correspondence with Johnson.  In his letters LBJ left no doubt of his commitment to civil rights.  A Texan, he saw an opportunity to take an historic decision other southerners had shunned.  He wanted to complete his hero Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.  Most of all, he wanted to make right an historic American wrong.
 
Johnson has been shorted in other recent accounts of the 1960s.  LBJ, it is said, ordered J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI to gather damaging information on King.  That never happened.  President John F. Kennedy authorized wiretaps on King. When Johnson became president, Hoover gave him recordings of King’s extramarital hotel-room adventures.  LBJ aide Jack Valenti listened to the tapes and told me what they contained.  LBJ, he said, could not have been less interested. Mainly, he said, the tapes made him wonder about Hoover.  
 
A New Yorker writer last winter, in a long piece on the era, characterized the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as “the Kennedys’ bill,” downplaying LBJ’s role.  Fact is, Kennedy was quite cautious on civil rights and, at the time of his death, was under fire by black and liberal leaders for moving too slowly.  His attorney general, Robert Kennedy,
was more avid.
 
The Civil Rights Act was the product of two decades of effort by a remarkable collection of pragmatic-idealist
black, labor, religious, business, academic, and political leaders.  Its principal sponsor was Senate Whip Humphrey (D-Minn.), who had changed the Democratic Party’s stance on civil rights forever with his historic speech and platform plank at the 1948 Democratic national convention in Philadelphia.  The Act survived a filibuster by southern Democrats (it took 67 rather than 60 votes then to break a filibuster and force a vote).  It gained passage only after Humphrey and Majority Leader Mike Mansfield (D-Mont.) persuaded Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen (R-Ill.) to lend his active support.
 
Johnson, in calling for the bill’s passage, said it would honor the memory of President Kennedy.  There is little doubt that, had Kennedy lived, a Civil Rights Act would have become law, but not as soon as 1964.
 
After Martin Luther King’s 1968 murder I accompanied Humphrey to Memphis, where King had gone at the time of his assassination to help Jesse Epps and members of his striking garbage workers’ union.  I met with Epps and other strike leaders.  They offered information that Memphis Police Department officers had been complicit in the killing.

Attorney General Ramsey Clark was unable, however, to secure hard evidence.  Epps at the time was a nationally recognized civil-rights hero in his own right.
 
In 1993 I traveled to Memphis to participate in a meeting of Southern black state legislators (most elected because of the Voting Rights Act).  When I mentioned Epps, I saw blank faces in the audience.  Finally someone said: “Who was Jesse Epps?”
 
I have much the same reaction now as I hear civil-rights history being distorted by people who played no role in it and, moreover, appear completely undisturbed by their distortions.
 
The America of 2015 is a far more open and just society than the one which existed when the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts became law.  Yet highly visible modern-day personalities continually paint a picture of today’s America, when it comes to race, as like 1950s America.   A long CNN discussion last week emphasized
lynchings of a century ago and modern-day police discrimination and brutality against African American men.  Federal reparations were suggested for present-day black citizens.  No mention was made of the need for all Americans to address the crime, drug dealing, illegitimacy, school dropout rates, and unemployment which plague many black neighborhoods today. 
 
Attorney General Eric Holder began his service by scolding Americans as “cowards” when it came to civil rights.
So cowardly that they had elected a black President who, in turn, appointed a black attorney general.
 
Al Sharpton, best known previously for his tawdry roles in New York’s Tawana Brawley case and Crown Heights
black-Jewish conflict, has somehow emerged as President Obama’s go-to guy on civil rights issues.  He preaches
racial resentment in his MSNBC broadcasts and has made civil rights a money machine for himself.  He nonetheless owes $4 million in unpaid federal taxes, a matter of no apparent concern to the White House.
 
Civil-rights history is being Oprahfied by people who see political or monetary capital to be gained by convincing black Americans that they are victims.   

Not among the revisionists is Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), who sometimes is interviewed in connection with the Selma film.

Lewis is the real thing.  He risked his own life and safety in helping organize and lead the march.   You don’t hear him knocking LBJ.  He led a brave group of men and women of all races, ethnicities, genders, and religions.   Just as Lewis led at Selma, Johnson led nationally at political risk for himself and his party.

Lyndon Johnson was a difficult, complex man.  He deserves criticism for continuing and expanding a mistaken Vietnam War.  But his achievements in domestic policy, and especially in civil rights, mark him as our greatest civil rights president next to Abraham Lincoln.  No film can take that away from him.

Van Dyk was Vice President Hubert Humphrey’s assistant in the Johnson White House and involved in national Democratic policy and politics over 40 years.  He is the author of “Heroes, Hacks and Fools,” U. of Washington Press.