The Democrat who launched the War on Poverty

"The personal experiences that [Lyndon B.] Johnson and Robert Kennedy had with race in the sixties were completely different. Kennedy began visiting the ghettos early in his brother's presidency and continued to do so for the rest of his life, but Johnson had relatively little contact with blacks. His favorite story about his own experience with the horrors of segregation had to do with the time his servants, Helen and Gene Williams, transported his dog by car from Washington to Texas and were unable to stay in motels or eat in restaurants. He felt uneasy with civil-rights leaders to the left of Roy Wilkins, of the NAACP, and Whitney Young, of the Urban League- including Martin Luther King, Jr., whom Johnson considered to be vain, preachy, Communist-influenced, and, when King began to oppose the Vietnam War, a man who cared more about posturing than helping his own people. (Robert Kennedy didn't especially like King either.) Up close, Johnson had a hard time treating the many civil-rights landmarks of his administration with the dignity they deserved. He summoned Louis Martin, his closest black political adviser, to the White House for the announcement of the appointment of the first black Cabinet member by saying, "I was sitting in the toilet here and I got to thinking about you." Johnson never completely shed the racial language of his youth: he occasionally used the word "nigger" in private."

Atlantic, "The unfinished war," January 1989