Lyndon B. Johnson is discussed in The Bob Zadek Show chiefly as the president under whom two developments the program treats as consequential occurred: the 1965 federal education legislation associated with the Great Society, and the prosecution of the war in Vietnam. The excerpts do not present a biography of Johnson; they invoke him as a dividing line between a pre-1965 order and the federal role that followed.
Education and the 1965 legislation
In an episode on federal involvement in education, Bob Zadek argues that the decisive figure in the federal takeover of American schooling was not Johnson but Lee Harvey Oswald. Had Oswald not killed John F. Kennedy, Zadek says, Johnson would not have become president, and it was Kennedy’s death that created the 1965 legislation — described by Zadek as the first real meaningful federal foray into education. Zadek characterizes Kennedy as a moderate who would be a Republican by contemporary standards and Johnson as a flaming liberal. He quotes Johnson’s remark at the signing of the first federal education bill, that it was a new day of greatness in the American society, and adds that the country is still waiting for that greatness End the Unconstitutional Federal Involvement in Education (2009).
Guest Andrew J. Coulson responds to the quotation by describing charts of the performance of seventeen-year-old students on tests administered to nationally representative samples going back to 1970. He says the results are flatlines, and that the specific aims of the Great Society education programs — narrowing the achievement gap by race and by income — also failed. He reports that the children of college students and the children of high school dropouts are about as far apart academically today as when the Great Society programs were enacted, though closing that gap was a central aim of those programs. Coulson concludes that the justification for the laws, the General Welfare Clause, cannot be sustained on its own terms, since the programs are not promoting anyone’s welfare End the Unconstitutional Federal Involvement in Education (2009).
The constitutional argument framing the discussion is Coulson’s. He says that before Franklin D. Roosevelt the overwhelmingly upheld interpretation of the General Welfare Clause treated it as a general preamble to the enumerated powers, but that after Roosevelt a new interpretation held sway under which the general welfare was its own power, leaving effectively no limit on what the federal government could do. On that reading, Coulson says, a federal Department of Education, the No Child Left Behind Act, and Race to the Top — which he identifies as the current proposal by Obama and his Education Secretary Duncan — would not be legal but for the reinterpretation End the Unconstitutional Federal Involvement in Education (2009).
Zadek adds a fiscal and localist objection. He describes living in Sausalito, a town of 7,000 where nothing escapes scrutiny and where citizens can act within about 48 hours if the city council does something they dislike, including on schools. Coulson supplies the figure that since Johnson’s Great Society education legislation was passed, the federal government has spent $1.85 trillion on education. Zadek closes the exchange by saying the system has deteriorated over that period while the remedy proposed is more federal money spent the federal way, and that losing local control breaks his heart End the Unconstitutional Federal Involvement in Education (2009).
Vietnam and the memory of presidents
Johnson returns in a later episode on Afghanistan, where Zadek raises him in a break-time monologue on how presidents are remembered. Zadek says the memory of presidents Johnson and Kennedy is tarnished by starting and prosecuting the war in Vietnam, while Nixon — tarnished though he may be — has as one of his bright spots that he ended the war. Nixon, Zadek says, is not thought of as the president who surrendered or disgraced the country. He draws the lesson that the next president will be remembered favorably in history if all he does is end the war or wars in the Middle East Rethinking Afghanistan with Jonathan Bydlak (2020).
The Vietnam reference also structures the guest’s argument. Jonathan Bydlak, described by Zadek as the director and creator of the Institute to Reduce Spending, argues that the United States is not obliged to engage in nation-building, and that people do not join the military to engage in nation-building endeavors but to protect the citizens of the United States. He says the United States should not insist that it will not leave until things are perfect, because things will never be perfect and then it will never leave. Vietnam, in his view, is the operative example: a hard-fought conflict whose outcome was perhaps not what the United States wanted, yet the United States left regardless. Roughly forty-something years later, he notes, the United States trades with Vietnam and its economy is doing very well, a situation he argues is better than if troops were still on the ground forty-five years on. He acknowledges differences in Afghanistan that may prevent that outcome but says the idea that values can be spread at the point of a gun is very flawed, and that soft power techniques sometimes produce better outcomes Rethinking Afghanistan with Jonathan Bydlak (2020).
Zadek’s own framing of the Afghanistan question is more restrictive than Bydlak’s. He tells Bydlak that he does not really care that much about the Afghani people, what they think, or what is best for them, and that what is best for the Afghani people is not relevant — it is what is best for Americans, and it is American money Rethinking Afghanistan with Jonathan Bydlak (2020).
Across episodes
The two episodes do not develop a common argument about Johnson; they use him for different purposes. In the education episode he is the president whose 1965 legislation Zadek and Coulson treat as the origin of federal schooling policy and whose Great Society aims Coulson measures against flat test scores and an unchanged achievement gap. In the Afghanistan episode he is one of two presidents whose memory Zadek says is tarnished by Vietnam, cited to support a lesson about how a later president should end wars. The earlier treatment is about domestic legislation and the General Welfare Clause; the later one is about war and presidential reputation. No excerpt shows either speaker revising the other episode’s characterization of Johnson.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts say nothing about Johnson’s life before or after his presidency, his congressional career, or the domestic programs apart from the 1965 education legislation and the Great Society education programs. They do not name the 1965 bill, describe its provisions, or give the date of its signing beyond the year. No excerpt states which state Sausalito is in, what the No Child Left Behind Act or Race to the Top provided, or how the Vietnam War ended.