There’s an interesting discussion in the thread downstairs about whether or not the movie “Selma” portrays LBJ fairly — and if bringing up historical inaccuracies in the film is even a valid point for discussion rather than an attempt to derail the film. One of LBJ’s domestic advisors, Joseph A. Califano Jr., took issue with the portrayal of his old boss in the film. In a WaPo op-ed, he said this, among other things:
In fact, Selma was LBJ’s idea, he considered the Voting Rights Act his greatest legislative achievement, he viewed King as an essential partner in getting it enacted — and he didn’t use the FBI to disparage him.
The assertion that Selma was LBJ’s idea understandably pissed off a lot of people, who consider it a whitewashing of a historical event that properly belongs to MLK and the activists who put their lives on the line. Via valued commenter Lamh36, here’s how the film’s director, Ava DuVernay, responded to the criticism:
Every filmmaker imbues a movie with their own point of view. The script was the LBJ/King thing, but originally, it was much more slanted to Johnson. I wasn’t interested in making a white-savior movie; I was interested in making a movie centered on the people of Selma. You have to bring in some context for what it was like to live in the racial terrorism that was going on in the deep south at that time. The four little girls have to be there, and then you have to bring in the women. So I started adding women.
This is a dramatization of the events. But what’s important for me as a student of this time in history is to not deify what the president did. Johnson has been hailed as a hero of that time, and he was, but we’re talking about a reluctant hero. He was cajoled and pushed, he was protective of a legacy — he was not doing things out of the goodness of his heart. Does it make it any worse or any better? I don’t think so. History is history and he did do it eventually. But there was some process to it that was important to show.
I haven’t seen the movie yet, so I don’t know what the truth of it is. “Selma” isn’t a documentary and doesn’t claim to be, so anyone who sees it should expect some artistic license, as DuVernay notes. But I’ve wondered sometimes how much fealty writers and directors owe to the truth (as best we can determine it) when portraying real events and historic figures.
The first film that made me wonder about this was Oliver Stone’s “JFK,” which compellingly portrayed a crackpot theory about JFK’s assassination as the gospel truth and was controversial for convincing a lot of people that it went down that way. Whose fault was that — Stone’s, the movie goers who uncritically swallowed the plotline, a crappy education system that fails to provide historical context and research skills?
I honestly don’t know. But film is a powerful medium: People are more likely to credit events they’ve witnessed with their own eyes — albeit a fictionalized account they see on a screen while eating popcorn in the dark with strangers — than dry facts they’ve read in a history book. So does that mean artists have a responsibility to be, if not 100% accurate, at least fair to the historical figures they portray and not transform an ally into a villain when depicting an important event?
Again, I haven’t seen “Selma” yet, so for all I know, the critics are overreacting to how LBJ was portrayed. DuVernay’s comments indicate she doesn’t regard LBJ as a villain but rather a reluctant hero. But if LBJ is depicted in the film as siccing J. Edgar Hoover on MLK in an attempt to stop the march, that makes him out to be pretty damn villainous, doesn’t it? Does that matter?
larrybob
charlie pierce had something to say about this subject: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/LBJ_At_The_Movies
dedc79
From what I’ve heard about the new Turing movie, it sounds like some people are finding the fictionalization of historical events problematic in that film too.
As for Selma, I haven’t seen the film, but for people who have, did LBJ need to be in there at all? If the idea was, as the director claims, to take the focus off the president and to focus instead on the civil rights leaders and the people of Selma, then why not just leave LBJ out?
HinTN
The Imitation Game was a great movie. If you want historical truth, go read all sides and imagine it for yourself.
Nick
To me, yes, it is an interesting question.
Also, I don’t care for the frame that people who criticize its interpretation are derailing the movie. It’s a work of art, and everyone gets to have their own response to it, and Selma’s interpretation of events. Saying that one line of criticism is ‘derailing’ it is basically accepting that Selma is propaganda, produced for a specific purpose, and if you don’t get behind that, you are missing the point in a nasty way.
Of course, it’s fiction — and if making it required LBJ to be portrayed as a villain, maybe that’s a limitation of Selma’s fiction. Should that bother people with a better understanding of LBJ’s role? I guess that depends on what you want to get out of your fiction.
raven
Fuck LBJ.
” “We are not about to send American boys 9 or 10,000 miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves,””
Gin & Tonic
@dedc79: I saw the Turing film, and while there were aspects of it that bothered me, and some that were obviously fictionalized, I wore my “I’m watching a Hollywood movie” glasses. On balance, I think more good was done by that film than harm, because it told a compelling story that many people would not have otherwise known. I suspect there were people who have watched that movie who were only vaguely aware of who Alan Turing was; I’m certain I was the only one in the (surprisingly) fairly crowded room who’s read any of his work.
I have not seen the Selma movie yet, but I have read every volume so far of Robert Caro’s biography of LBJ, and to call him a complex and conflicted character is a hopeless simplification. But, again, is there a compelling story that needs to be told to people who might not otherwise be very familiar with it? I suspect there is.
raven
Hearts and Minds is a 1974 American documentary film about the Vietnam War directed by Peter Davis. The film’s title is based on a quote from President Lyndon B. Johnson: “the ultimate victory will depend on the hearts and minds of the people who actually live out there”. The movie was chosen as Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature at the 47th Academy Awards presented in 1975.
Music
Tynan
@raven: LBJ was wrong and terrible and stupid about Vietnam, but that doesn’t impact what he did or did not do domestically.
Bringing up Vietnam every time LBJ is mentioned is no different that all of the people who want to invalidate everything Obama has done domestically because drone strikes.
mai naem mobile
I was going to say there’ll be tape recordings of phone calls clarifying this and ofcourse Charlie Pierce has gotten there already. If it wasn’t for Vietnam, LBJ would be in the automatic list of the four best presidents along with Washington, Lincoln and FDR.
gene108
@dedc79:
Not seen the movie yet.
From my understanding of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, King and other Civil Rights leaders said the 1964 Civil Rights Act was not enough to insure protections for blacks, because they would not be able to vote.
LBJ was not sure of their claims about voter suppression post-CRA.
Then the 1964 election happened post-1964 Civil Rights Act and voter participation by blacks was still low.
So a voting rights act was also needed.
LBJ, I think, at some point understood the need for it, but he did not have the political pull to get it done.
King mobilized people to make sure the politicians had no choice but to pass voting rights legislation.
King put a lot on the line to make sure the movement to attract attention for voting rights gained popular support.
I think from my understanding of the Civil Rights Movement, King did not actually pass any laws, therefore the subject of who did the “heavy lifting” in Washington, DC to get the laws passed was done by the politicians of the time, so some folks want to focus on the “burden” and “risk” politicians took to do the right thing.
Whereas King literally put his life on the line to make them do the right thing and without King and his effort there would not have been any action by the politicians of the day.
There’s one way to view the CRA and VRA from a purely “sausage making” perspective about what could get done in Congress, which excludes King and other Civil Rights leaders.
But to get the complete picture of what was happening at the time and what was done to get the VRA passed, the real mover behind getting it done was King and the other Civil Rights leaders, whose story probably has not been completely told to sink into the popular consciousness like it should have.
Marc
Propaganda is propaganda. The movie didn’t need to make LBJ a villain (by having him do things that there is clear evidence that he didn’t do). They could have put him in the background and put the people first. The heroic things that they did don’t need the “help” of smearing someone who did enormous good for civil rights. Instead it’s (properly) making people question what else the movie isn’t telling truthfully.
BGinCHI
Any film that claims to offer objective truth about history is a fiction and a fantasy. Period.
Beyond that the question is whether the interpretation is knowledgeable and convincing in terms of what others have said/written about events.
The “you can’t just make it Vikings who bombed Pearl Harbor” argument is bullshit. It’s never either/or.
BGinCHI
@mai naem mobile: “If not for Vietnam”??
Holy shit I’m not even going to hit that softball out of the park.
jl
@larrybob: As I said in thread below, I think that saying that the general idea LBJ put out there, and Selma as it actually unfolded in history, are two such different things that Califano saying ‘Selma was LBJ’s idea’ can be called simply false.
And from other places in the transcript, LBJ was clearly talking about publicizing outrageously discriminatory literacy tests, and finding distinguished and very literate blacks who had been denied the right to vote. Those were good ideas, but that was not planning Selma.
And BTW, just because LBJ talked about it, that doesn’t mean that others were not thinking the same thing.
I’ll wait to see the film before I make my mind about that, but I think what Califano wrote was silly. Looks like I disagree with Pierce on this, too.
raven
@mai naem mobile: What did Charlie say abut his phony ass wearing a fucking silver star?
He was a scumbag opportunist, fuck him twice.
dedc79
@Gin & Tonic: Yeah, I think it really comes down to how people approach these films (as Betty was discussing in reference to JFK). One would hope that someone who was learning about Turing for the first time would be prompted by the film to explore the larger (and more historically accurate) story.
But why not mention polish contributions to the code breaking at all? Are the Brits (and americans) still so ashamed of how they sold Poland out at the start and the end of the war that we can’t acknowledge their contributions to the war effort?
raven
@BGinCHI: Yea, I need to bow out of this one.
Brian R.
@raven:
Good point. We should totally make up lies about LBJ’s accomplishments on civil rights because he lied about Vietnam.
Christ. Someone wake me when the last of the fucking boomers die off so the rest of us can get some peace from the Long Wars of Woodstock.
raven
@Brian R.: I was in Vietnam during Woodstock fuck face. I’ll wake your butterfly ass up.
BGinCHI
@raven: Deep breaths. Go order some BBQ and relax.
Marc
@raven: And he passed the Civil Rights Act, Medicare, Medicaid. While the people who hated him managed to get Richard Nixon elected. Vietnam is a blot, and it was the collective policy of both parties basically from the defeat of the French in 1954 to 1973.
BGinCHI
@Marc: I think the point here is that making heroes and making sausage are both activities in which all of the ingredients are not listed on the label.
Cacti
LBJ also spent the majority of his public life as a reliable, pro-segregation Dixiecrat.
He got it right in the end, but the man has probably the most complicated legacy of anyone to hold the office of POTUS.
Napoleon
DuVernay is full of shit. The film is borderline libel against LBJ. If she wanted to make a movie about MLK and the movement, fine (in fact that movie was long overdue), but no need to smear LBJ in the process. If you wanted to do that there are plenty of things to do it with legitimately.
mai naem mobile
@BGinCHI:
I knew i was going to get crap for saying that. The man got an incredible amount of progressive legislation passed of which any single piece would be an incredible achievement. I admit I probably would feel different if I had close friends/family lost or injured in Vietnam which I don’t.
Bobby Thomson
@BGinCHI: the Vikings?
Forget it, he’s rolling.
Cervantes
… was poorly worded.
A few years ago, two academics — Alvin Tillery and Hanes Walton — looked at editorials that had appeared 1900-2012 in five “black newspapers.” Among other things, their research showed that:
(1) Compared against Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Nixon, the five editorial boards ranked LBJ the highest; and
(2) The five boards collectively wrote thirty-four editorials on LBJ’s civil rights record 1963-1968 and fully 100% of those editorials approved of his actions.
Read that again: in real time, five leading African-American editorial boards approved wholeheartedly, 100%, of LBJ’s record on civil rights.
Shana
@Gin & Tonic: I’ve read all the Caro LBJ books too. Has he weighed in on this? Has he made any comments about the film? I’d love to hear his take on this.
Gin & Tonic
@Shana: I have seen no public comment, and since Vol 4 ended in March of 1964, I suspect we will have to wait until Vol 5.
Has Bill Moyers weighed in?
TR
Hi, actual historian here.
I saw Selma and, while the acting is great, the history is horrible. The specific campaign in Selma wasn’t LBJ’s idea but he was long urging King to focus on voting rights, and worked well with him, not against him.
The film also slights the younger activists in SNCC, giving a wildly distorted picture of Bevel, Nash and Lewis.
Josh Zeitz had a great piece outlining the many flaws (in Politico of all places, but still) and it’s worth checking out.
tl;dr: Good film, garbage history.
TR
@BGinCHI:
It’s not a softball, it’s actually one of the main historiographical debates in modern political American history.
Napoleon
@Shana:
I have read everything I can find and amazingly have not seen anything from him. Those are great books (I may start his Moses book next).
Mandalay
@mai naem mobile:
Johnson’s policies needlessly killed ten times more American soldiers than GWB. Put that in your pecking order pipe and smoke it.
Post #14 nails it.
Napoleon
@TR:
I read David Halberstam’s book on the movement. What a fascinating cast of people behind it.
SatanicPanic
Someone hit up those Epic Rap Battles of History guys to have LBJ face off against Darth Vader, it’s the only way to settle this.
Cervantes
@BGinCHI:
Elaboration is forthcoming? Thanks if.
priscianus jr
Stone never claimed his film to be “the gospel truth” nor do I know of anyone who considers it such. It’s fiction. As for the “crackpot theory”, I’m still scratching my head over that one. Since you evidently have a “serious” theory of who killed JFK, I hope you’ll share it with us some time.
SiubhanDuinne
This is not precisely about Selma, but it is about a filmic portrayal of a seminal time in African-American history, the forthcoming CBC-BET miniseries The Book of Negroes. The Maclean’s article, linked below, provides good background and context, and an explanation for anyone who may be put off by the word “Negroes” in the title.
I have read the book straight through three times, and bits and pieces of it even more frequently. Disclaimer: I am privileged to call the author, Lawrence Hill, a personal friend. When his novel was first published in the US (under the title Someone Knows My Name), I arranged a weeklong, multi-state author tour for him, and drove him all over the South, from small-town libraries to huge universities to conferences on the Atlantic slave trade (I was working for the Canadian Consulate General at that time, hence the fortunate duty). During that week (and other encounters in years before and since), I came to know Larry as a funny, thoughtful person and of course a terrific writer.
The novel is really extraordinary — the deserving recipient of numerous awards, including the 2008 Commonwealth Best Book Prize, one of fiction’s most distinguished and coveted honors. A year later, it was selected as the CBC’s “Canada Reads” selection. Everything I’ve seen about the forthcoming miniseries promises that it will be equally memorable. I urge you to watch on CBC or BET, and to read, or re-read, the book.
It’s likely that Canadian Juicers will be more familiar with this than USians, and I’d love to hear your thoughts. And do check out the Maclean’s article.
http://www.macleans.ca/culture/television/blood-and-belonging-in-the-book-of-negroes/
Brian R.
@raven:
Thanks for making my point for me — we will never have an accurate discussion of the ’60s til all of you are gone.
raven
Ha, Tweety wants to know, “what’s all this trashing of LBJ”? Ya’ll are in great company.
raven
@Brian R.: Fuck you Brian.
priscianus jr
@mai naem mobile: I admit I probably would feel different if I had close friends/family lost or injured in Vietnam which I don’t.
Is that the only criterion? Do you have any inkling of how much the Vietnam war fucked THIS country up? Not just the people who were there, whether you know them personally or you don’t. The whole country. And it’s still doing it.
I do think there is some substance to your comment, though, it just was poorly expressed. The fact that a president, or anybody, has some black marks against them, doesn’t mean that they couldn’t have done something positive in other areas.
Anyway, the motivating force behind the Vietnam war was not LBJ, he was just a necessary tool. He knowingly allowed himself to play that role, and that’s the shadow over his legacy that will never go away.
tybee
@Brian R.:
that’s quite a load of horseshit you’re hauling.
Mandalay
@jl:
Looking at his claim in the kindest possible light, it can’t be shown to be true (AFAIK). I really can’t understand why Califano chose to make it without having any evidence to back it up – he’s surely savvy enough to have anticipated the blowback.
Even putting that aside, he did LBJ a real disservice by choosing to adopt such a shrill and confrontational position about the film in his Post article. Bummer.
Tynan
@raven: You can certainly make the argument that doing something significantly awful enough (and Vietnam certainly qualifies) kills any claim a person might have to being considered good or decent or anything else. And yeah, anyone subjected to Vietnam is going to feel a hell of a lot more strongly about that, and should. But that doesn’t change what else he may have done, even if those things don’t even come close to redeeming him for that giant, awful decision.
Cervantes
@Brian R.:
Not lying is a good thing, I agree, but this generalization and that generalization about this generation and that generation are … tiresome.
Anniecat45
I understand that some things don’t work in movies. And that sometimes you need to fill in details you don’t know, or tinker with small details you do know. But if you’re going to completely mis-state historical truth, why bother to base a movie on history? Why not just make a move that’s fictional, or places fictional characters into a historical setting?
Example: Braveheart, in which William Wallace was depicted as more virile than Edward II of England (getting Princess Isabelle pregnant) and outsmarting Edward I. Mel Gibson may have intended to make some point about the feeble, underhanded and ineffective English versus the tough, virile Scots (standing in for Australians). Unfortunately for that idea, the historical Edward I was often successful as a military commander. He defeated Wallace in battle, and had him executed, several years before Isabelle ever came to England. (In fact, Edward I died before she came to England; she married his son when he was already Edward II.)
Second example: Elizabeth with Cate Blanchett, for example, depicts her as firing William Cecil and learning how to be Queen from Francis Walsingham. First: nobody ever had to teach her to be Queen. And she chose William Cecil as her principal minister upon her accession, and he held the job til his death. Distorting the relationships in this way added nothing to the movie.
Cervantes
@Tynan:
A good point. Glad you made it explicit.
Tynan
@Anniecat45: Oh god, Braveheart is the poster child for terrible history / good movie.
If you want to tell a story, make something up. If you’re going to use historical figures, make at least some modicum of an effort towards accuracy.
Gopher2b
@raven:
I’ll sign that petition.
Mandalay
@Brian R.: Well that was the dumbest BJ post of 2015 so far. Congratulations.
I suspect you will still be a contender at the end of the year.
sharl
I vaguely recalled arguments like this taking place 25+ years ago over the film “Mississippi Burning”, so I did some cursory digging.
Here is a relatively recent post (Feb. 2014) over at HuffPo from the screenwriter for M-B, Chris Gerolmo, offering a history of his relationship with that movie and the subsequent controversy that took place after its release. AFAICT he isn’t offering a rousing defense of the facts of the movie so much as defending the value of the work as cinema (more than accurate history), and – as the final paragraphs of his article demonstrate – its positive social value. Don’t trust my view, though: read it yourself to see if you get the same thing out of it as I did.
Mr. Gerolmo referenced an op-ed in the LA Times by Coretta Scott King that harshly criticized M-B. I couldn’t find it at LAT’s website – bad Google-fu, maybe? – but here is the text of that 13-Dec-1988 op-ed (formatting is a bit messed up, but it’s still readable I think). Ms. King hadn’t seen it at the time she wrote her editorial, but she clearly had talked to a number of folks who had seen it prior to writing her opinion piece. Her op-ed is an indictment of the treatment of AAs in the Hollywood of that time, which probably still resonates from what I’ve occasionally read on other occasions (Hollyweird is far more Mnem’s turf than mine, and in any event, I rarely even see movies these days).
Finally, here is a 1989 Letter to the Editor of NYT; the first part of that follows:
Brian R.
@tybee:
A fucking boomer complaining about someone else’s horseshit. Priceless.
Right, right, go listen to CSNY sing about how they were “a half a million strong at Woodstock” some more. Sure, it was really half that, but it’s all about what you felllllllttt, maaaaan. I think there’s a teenager out there who hasn’t been told that he needs to swear allegiance to your beloved “classic rock” so get moving on that.
You’re all dying out, Boomers, and no one will fucking miss you and your endless goddamn navel-gazing and hyperbolic mythologizing when you’re gone. We’ll still have to suffer through the shitty Millennials you raised to be equally self-centered, but that’s another matter.
Brian R.
@Mandalay:
What was dumb about it?
Baby Boomers are self-centered bloviating assholes. Please prove me wrong.
Cervantes
@SiubhanDuinne:
Thanks.
And re the unacceptability of the original title in the US, here is the author himself.
Major Major Major Major
@Brian R.: ah, I take it you’re one of those lazy shiftless gen x’ers then.
Cervantes
@Brian R.:
Be careful so as not to prove they aren’t the only ones.
Tynan
@Brian R.: Stop digging. I get as tired of the “kids these days” scolding from older generations as anyone, but you’re just being a colossal ass.
Three-nineteen
On the upside, this controversy may cause some right-wingers to do some research and find out what actually happened. Learning!
sharl
Here is the Wikipedia link for Mississippi Burning, and therein was a link to Howard Zinn’s discussion of the FBI in his “History Is A Weapon”, with the following excerpt addressing this movie in particular:
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@Brian R.: What kind of pie do you enjoy most?
kc
Hell, yes.
kc
@Cervantes:
Yes, well, many leading Twitter celebs in current time disagree.
Belafon
Yay. A bunch of people can’t get past LBJ.
@Major Major Major Major:
So am I. Growing up watching my dad have seizures – you should be five and the only person who knows what to do – due to Vietnam has left me with the feeling that LBJ was just another president. (Yep, I appealed to authority in my own tiny way, just like everyone else.)
Betty Cracker
@priscianus jr: Stone absolutely stands by the depiction of the conspiracy in the movie. He reiterated it on the recent 50th anniversary of the assassination. As for what really happened, I don’t care to go down that particular rabbit hole.
@Brian R.: On behalf of my Boomer parents as well as my Millennial offspring, fuck you.
Major Major Major Major
@Belafon: I just wanted to make sure this thread was being equally baselessly accusatory to all the involved generations.
tybee
@Brian R.:
yes, we can certainly tell how much better a special little snowflake you have turned out to be.
MomSense
Are people really trying to minimize Vietnam?? Fuck that shit!!
No, just fucking no.
Cervantes
@kc:
Like you, I am in awe of Twitter.
It has completely changed — revolutionized — the way I think.
SiubhanDuinne
@Cervantes:
Yes, I remember reading that piece. Thanks for the reminder. During the book tour I mentioned, just about every place we went where Larry spoke or did a reading, almost always the first audience question had to do with the different titles in Canada and the U.S. I should have mentioned that some audiences were almost entirely AA (at historically black colleges, for instance), some were primarily white, and most were mixed. This was before Barack Obama’s election as POTUS and our elevation to a post-racial society (/snark), so the “race conversation” was even rarer then than it is now.
Baud
Everyone who wasn’t born within two minutes of me sucks balls.
Cervantes
@MomSense:
Who is? And how?
Ecks
@priscianus jr: Old joke: How do you know it wasn’t the FBI that killed JFK?
Well he’s dead, isn’t he.
heckblazer
@MomSense:
I think it’s important to note that a big reason why Vietnam was so bad is that Nixon deliberately sabotaged the 1968 peace talks.
The Thin Black Duke
Because Dr. Martin Luther King was a proud African-American man in White America who tried to do The Right Thing, he was brutalized by racist cops, wiretapped by the FBI, and finally, assassinated. But I’m supposed to feel sorry for LBJ because he wasn’t properly deified in a fucking Hollywood movie?
Brian R.
Hooray, the Boomer Elders have spoken. Never shall anyone else be able to express an opinion that differs, ever again.
Again, thank you all for proving my point. Enjoy your lemon party.
kc
@Cervantes:
Are you being facetious?
Twitter can be fun, but it’s a little scary. False information spreads like wildfire on there.
Cervantes
@The Thin Black Duke:
True enough.
Are you supposed to? I didn’t know.
Steeplejack (tablet)
@Baud:
Finally something I can agree with!
Liberty60
@BGinCHI:
Quoted for truth, and a damn good turn of phrase.
Ecks
@Three-nineteen:
HA HA HA.
Oh you. Never change.
tybee
@Brian R.:
and you’ve proven my point yet again. thanks, snowflake.
Cervantes
@kc:
Me being facetious?
Well, if that’s what they’re saying on Twitter …
mai naem mobile
This is a serious question. Is there another US president who passed as much good legislation as LBJ did who had as big a screw up as Vietnam on the other side? There’s the Japanese internment with FDR but it doesn’t measure up to Vietnam. There’s Jackson with his Indian “resettlement” garbage which was also awful but I don’t think he has enough positives on the other side.
Hungry Joe
@Brian R.: You’re right about Boomers: Individuals born between 1948 and 1964 are, indeed, “self-centered bloviating assholes,” every man jack of them — and BJ is teeming, just TEEMING with the scum. Frankly, I don’t see how you can stand it here. Now, I’m (by definition) a self-centered, bloviating asshole, so I feel right at home, but you’re a regular fish-out-of-water guy, is what you are. Must be tough.
Tynan
@The Thin Black Duke: No, but I’d think we should all be offended at anything that’s in opposition to known fact. If you asked me if LBJ was a good president I would say that his Vietnam policy makes him irredeemable. If you would also ask if most people hating him because of Vietnam is reason to use him as a villain and portray him doing ugly things he never did, I’d disagree.
I think I used this phrase about Bush a few years back, but it applies: there’s enough to hate LBJ about without having to make things up. Simplifying things by making him always the asshole is convenient but it’s still a disservice.
gogol's wife
@Tynan:
That’s my bottom line. I haven’t seen Selma, so I don’t know about it, but I hated JFK. Make up your own damn people.
gogol's wife
@Baud:
LOLOLOL
Cervantes
@gogol’s wife:
Someone forgot to tell Shakespeare.
Ecks
Why do people seem so committed to the idea that LBJ must be either good or bad? He achieved some of the best things of any American president (in terms of programs started, largely), and was complicit in one of the many worst. You can try to sum that up as one summary score, but that doesn’t really make sense. I mean, you can do this with food (great flavour, terrible texture, just a bad food), but not so much with people.
It’s like my brother whose official IQ score was listed as “not applicable” – he scored in the top percentiles of somethings, and the bottom percentiles of others, so to average it out as one number was a hollow and meaningless activity.
Napoleon
@mai naem mobile:
No, no one comes close to LBJ.
gwangung
@Brian R.: Nah, you’re just a really stupid asshole.
EVERYONE can see that.
eemom
Came across this the other day in an article re “surprisingly” racist modern presidents:
The Thin Black Duke
@Tynan: Except my point is that rarely do African-American people get to be the stars of their own movies (Cry Freedom anyone?), and while I’m not minimizing LBJ’s enormous contribution to civil rights, the fact remains that King did the heavy lifting, and that’s what Selma is really about.
SiubhanDuinne
@Ecks:
Right, like that thing about if Bill Gates and I were in the same room, the average net worth of the people in that room would be $40 million.
Ecks
@Hungry Joe: Well Boomers are bad, granted. But not as much as Virgos. SCREW THOSE GUYS BORN BETWEEN SEPTEMBER 17 AND OCTOBER 17! I DON’T KNOW HOW THEY CAN LOOK AT THEMSELVES IN THE MIRROR EACH MORNING! WHAT EXTREME DEFECT OF CHARACTER DOES IT TAKE TO EMERGE FROM THEIR MOTHER ON THOSE PARTICULAR DATES?
Virgos, pah. THEY’RE THIRD ONLY TO FASCISTS, AND TO PEOPLE WHO FAIL TO PROPERLY USE THE OXFORD COMMA. Boomers are a distant fourth, in comparison.
RAAAAGE! [breaks things]
TR
Wow, the mob is out in force tonight. Delightful.
Omnes Omnibus
@The Thin Black Duke:
To be fair, Cry Freedom wasn’t about African-Americans. Unless you know something about Stephen Biko that the rest of us don’t.
/pedant
Ecks
@SiubhanDuinne: Quite a lot higher than that, actually.
Cervantes
@Ecks:
You let split infinitives slide, do you?
Cervantes
@Ecks:
You don’t know that. She did not say they were the only two people in the room.
Cervantes
@TR:
Sorry, what mob?
The Thin Black Duke
@Omnes Omnibus: To be fair, the movie wasn’t really about Stephen Biko but the white South African journalist, right? And I know that Biko got to live longer than Dr. King did. Accidents happen, I guess.
Omnes Omnibus
@Cervantes: A man’s got to know his limitations.
Omnes Omnibus
@The Thin Black Duke: I know that. The /pedant tag was there for a reason.
Hungry Joe
@Cervantes: It’s better to split an infinitive than to force an unstable one to stay together; see Fowler and/or Garner.
SiubhanDuinne
@Ecks:
You have no idea how much I’m worth :-)
Ecks
@Cervantes: Lousy faux English rule made up by Victorianists with a hard on for latin. Infinitives were made to boldly by split.
@Cervantes: It’d have to be a pretty big and crowded room to get it down to 40 mil
Tynan
@The Thin Black Duke: Oh I agree, but then just leave LBJ out or relegate him to the background, don’t lie about what happened.
The Thin Black Duke
@Omnes Omnibus: Sorry, man. I’m not in the mood.
Cervantes
@Hungry Joe:
@Ecks:
It may well have been a joke. See what the celebs are saying on Twitter.
Omnes Omnibus
@The Thin Black Duke: FWIW I always thought that Cry Freedom was a really shitty way to tell Biko’s story. Biko deserved to be the hero of what purported to be a movie about him.
Ecks
@SiubhanDuinne: That’s a great question. What’s the biggest single debt that one person has? I mean, in theory debt could be nearly limitless, but at some point people stop lending you money.
TR
@Cervantes:
The Boomer Defense League.
Cervantes
@Omnes Omnibus:
Was that the movie with Denzel Washington in it?
If it’s the one I’m thinking of, it was … awkward, to say the least.
Cervantes
@TR:
As tiresome as the attack, I agree.
Han
@SiubhanDuinne: Good lord, how much do you owe?
Roger Moore
@Brian R.:
Of course that’s always true. We can never have an accurate discussion about history until all the people whose reputations might be affected by honesty are long dead and gone.
Omnes Omnibus
@Cervantes: Yes, it was. Denzel played Biko and could easily have carried a movie that was actually about Biko.
Cervantes
@Omnes Omnibus:
Yes, I remember feeling that.
Thanks for the confirmation.
Mike in NC
If anybody wants to see a good movie about LBJ, check out “Path to War” starring Michael Gambon (2002).
catclub
ha, ha. Ask Bill Shakespeare about that.
The Thin Black Duke
@Omnes Omnibus: But again, that’s my point: until African-American filmmakers were able to tell their own stories, Cry Freedom wasn’t an anomaly, it was business as usual in Hollywood. Which is why it was so important when the director of Selma made the courageous decision to pivot away from the “white savior” narrative. Which, of course, is making some white people uncomfortable. Which is good. Sometimes you have to step outside of your comfort zone to find the truth.
Peale
Would we have the same debate if the movie had portrayed him as anti-Vietnam?
catclub
@Mike in NC: ooh. Michael Gambon is great. The Singing Detective.
Yes, great writing too.
Han
@Ecks:
Tell that to Donald Trump
Gin & Tonic
@Ecks: Infinitives were made to boldly by split.
Don’t you just hate those times when you move to make a snarky grammar joke and misspell a word in it?
Cervantes
@The Thin Black Duke:
Why?
Do “some white people” care more about truth than, say, you?
gogol's wife
@catclub:
Okay, this same response was used against me, but I don’t think this is a good analogy. We’re talking about events that are still in living memory (that goes for Oliver Stone too), and film is not theater — it has a documentary feeling to it. (Again, I am making no statement about Selma, which I have not seen.)
Omnes Omnibus
@The Thin Black Duke: I wasn’t suggesting that Cry Freedom was an anomaly or disagreeing with your original point in any way. I was just attempting a bit of gentle mockery. I regret having done so as it appears to have struck a raw nerve. Mea culpa.
The Thin Black Duke
@Omnes Omnibus: Hey, no worries, man. I respect your opinion and I apologize for coming across harsher than I meant to. I guess neither of us realized that when it comes to this particular subject, There Be Dragons Here.
gwangung
@Cervantes: I’m not sure discomfort is the right term in my viewpoint.
But I think it’s safe to say that a lot of white people aren’t used to seeing black people as heroes of their own stories and aren’t used to empathizing with them without a white intercessor (e.g., Branch Rickey to Jackie Robinson……).
Ecks
@Han: True. Though I don’t think he ever owed billions. To do that, you have to have one pretty catastrophic fuck up I think.
@Gin & Tonic: It’s the wurst.
TR
@Cervantes:
The mob response also sidestepped his original point, which was a good one.
LBJ was a considerable factor in the success of the civil rights movement. To applaud a film for suggesting he was on the other side — solely because of lingering outrage over his separate role on Vietnam — well, that’s just childish.
Cervantes
@gogol’s wife:
Used against you? You wound me.
You know, the Tsar appeared in some of your husband’s stories.
Maybe it should not be viewed that way.
Cervantes
@TR:
Could not agree more.
(Assuming someone did such applauding and suggesting and for that reason, of course.)
Anne Laurie
@Ecks:
Nah, at the higher levels (lowest moral depths) of “financing”, where mere fiat currency has become as abstract as the physists’ particles, Donald Trump and/or Lehman Bros are always capable of finding another sucker.
And I think there’s a metaphor for Hollywood history related to the ongoing prosperity of Trump and the Lehman Board of Directors, somewhere…
ETA: Han got there first.
Although I could (continue to) argue that “Hollywood” is more of an agglomeration, like Lehman Bros, than a solitary individual, like a director or Donald Trump.
Cervantes
@gwangung:
I’m sure you’re right, and it is an awful thing, but the point can be made without blindly insinuating that every critic of the film is a racist.
Marc
@TR: There is a hell of a lot of “the ends justify the means” going on in this thread. I would ordinarily be in the audience for this film – but turning someone who was on the right side of the civil rights struggle into a villain isn’t just a minor detail. And if they care so little for truth, why the hell should I trust them on anything else in the movie?
This is the mindset that gives us creationists and climate change deniers. Whatever makes you feel good and all that. And I find it to be toxic. Things don’t have to be literal, but they shouldn’t be Orwellian (up is down, freedom is slavery…)
kc
@Marc:
It may not be true, but it’s truthy.
Hungry Joe
@Anne Laurie: In “Trump” (I read a review, not the goddam book) the man himself explains what to do when you’re deeply in debt: “You don’t pay!”
It’s that simple.
mai naem mobile
I thought Cry Freedom was a movie about Donald Woods. I read the book before the movie and, while it definitely talked about Biko, Donald Woods’ story about being arrested as a newspaper editor, being put under house arrest and then escaping dressed in disguise as a clergyman was a pretty cool story in itself.
Cervantes
@mai naem mobile:
I agree, but coming when it did, it was awkward, I felt.
Omnes Omnibus
@mai naem mobile: Based on the trailers I saw and the hype at the time, I went to the theater to see a movie about Biko.
gwangung
@Omnes Omnibus: Which goes back to an earlier point that it’s very hard for black people to be heroes in their own stories in this culture, and many white people aren’t used to empathizing with non-white protagonists.
BobS
I apparently watched a different cut of Oliver Stone’s movie than you did — what was the “crackpot theory” he represented as the “gospel truth” in the version you saw? Also, would you mind sharing your more credible theory of the JFK assassination and investigation?
Omnes Omnibus
@BobS:
This is the obvious one.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Brian R.: Do you even know what a boomer is? Your comment about them being dead in 20 years makes me think you don’t. The oldest boomers are 68 and the youngest 50.
Omnes Omnibus
@BillinGlendaleCA: We 1964ers tend not to culturally identify as boomers.
Cervantes
@BillinGlendaleCA:
Maybe he doesn’t know what 20 years is?
Maybe he’s planning a massacre in 2035?
OK, OK, I’ll be nice.
Easily, as I’m off to bed now.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Omnes Omnibus: I wasn’t dropping acid at Woodstock either, 1960’er.
JG
To anyone who is interested in the JFK assassination truth and opening of more records still withheld, Stone is a hero and patriot. His movie agitated the powers enough that a law was created requiring records review and releases.
Although the AARB has closed, many thousands of records have been released and new “details and questions” come to light everyday. The theories encaptured in JFK are not crackpot – but the media falls-back to that common description of anyone or anything hypothisizing anything differing to “lone nut” — although accusing the “mafia” gets a few harrumps here and there…
There is more “assassination” truth in JFK than the entire volumes of the Warren Report (fairytale). Of course Oswald’s 1957-1962 W-2s, & tax returns are still considered top secret (as well as those of his mother -Marguarite). Marina, Oswald’s wife, has granted approval for the tax records release but still nothing. And this is but one example of thousands of common-sense questions that go ignored.
It is a rabbit-hole. But it’s the ultimate murder-mystery. Hell, even LBJ commented during interviews at his ranch b4 he died that Oswald couldn’t have done it all by himself.
I wont see Selma in the theaters. Maybe netflix. LBJ had a part in everything that happened (imo) and fortunately his better-angels prevailed. There were so many villians – I prefer to concentrate on the heroes. Like many above have sd – it’s not a documentary.
Peace.
TR
@Cervantes:
Quoth the Raven.
TR
@Marc:
Precisely.
Omnes Omnibus
@TR: Nevermore.
TR
Here’s the Josh Zeitz piece I mentioned above:
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/12/selma-martin-luther-king-113911.html#.VKp9FfO9LCQ
A must read.
rikyrah
Lyndon Baines Johnson was an excellent Senator.
He was a good President.
But, this whole thing of him not being pushed into doing the CRA and VRA is bull.
MLK led the troops that moved the needles in the Congress to get it passed.
MLK went into the belly of the beast of American Apartheid. Put his life on the line everyday. Led defenseless troops, who were beaten and slaughtered at every turn.
Betty Cracker
@BobS: I don’t find Garrison’s theory credible. YMMV.
I am SO not interested in discussing the magic bullet, grassy knoll, etc., but here’s my shorter take on what happened: Oswald was the lone shooter. In their rush to close the books and cover up their incompetence, investigators were sloppy with evidence, thus making themselves look like they were covering up a conspiracy.
BobS
@Omnes Omnibus: You misunderstood- I meant a theory more credible than whatever “crackpot” one Betty Cracker took away from “JFK”, not more credible than the Warren Report.
Omnes Omnibus
@BobS: I suggest that you may have misunderstood my point.
eemom
@rikyrah:
Nobody seemed interested in my comment at #93, but I did not know before I read that article what a vile racist civil rights hero LBJ was in his private comments. Maybe I’m naive, but I found it a little disturbing.
Omnes Omnibus
@eemom: LBJ was a crass, redneck asshole.
askew
Sort of related to Selma, I watched The Good Lie yesterday. It was sold as another white savior movie with Reese Witherspoon playing the savior to some Lost Boys/Girl of Sudan who became US refugees. The movie itself had Reese playing a very, very minor role and the Sudanese refugees saving themselves. I was actually really impressed with Hollywood for not falling back on their usual white savior nonsense.
For the Selma controversy, it pisses me off too much to even talk about. Selma got snubbed for a PGA nomination today and I’d bet it has a lot to do with the controversy. There are so few movies that have a minority cast with minority directors that are even Oscar worthy. To see the media tear down Selma and ignore all the crap biopics out this year about white men just makes me ill.
mai naem mobile
I was listening to an interview with the first black guy on the presidents secret service detail. He’s written a book. Anyhow,it was during JFK’s time. He said there was a lot of racism and a lot of dissing of JFK. Also, lots of drinking and carousing. He apparently went to a big supervisor to let them know that the SS was putting the president’s life in danger and nothing was done. Also listened to an interview with the military service guy who was in charge of the military piece of JFKs funeral and looking after the body etc. He said Jackie insisted the body stay at Bethesda until the funeral. The undertakers had to come to Bethesda with all their equipment to do the embalming. He thought Jackie didn’t trust anybody.
TR
@rikyrah:
All true. But those civil rights workers were just as brave and just as bloodied during the Kennedy administration and nothing was done. Hell, they were more so — the sit-ins, the Freedom Rides of 1961, the Albany campaign, Birmingham and Bull Connor were some of the most dangerous drives of the movement — and little changed because JFK cared little about the cause.
LBJ did bad that made a vital difference, one that made MLK a frequent visitor to the Oval Office. In Jan 1965, LBJ urged King to focus his energies on voting rights — a cause he’d previously left to others, like SNCC — and to find a place to dramatize the problem. King had just begun looking into Selma and decided to make that his next campaign. When he did, LBJ used the Selma events to push through the Voting Rights Act, the pinnacle of legislative success for the movement.
Yes, activists on the ground deserve the lions share of the credit. But to pretend the president was a bit player or, as Selma does, accuse him of being such an enemy that HE was the one who sent Hoover’s suicide threat to King is ludicrous if not contemptible.
Goblue72
@eemom: it’s pretty widely known the LBJ had a propensity for some pretty rough and bigoted language. He’s a guy who conducted meetings while shitting on the toilet.
Omnes Omnibus
@TR: JFK was pushing the CRA hard in the time leading up to his assassination. As for the rest, rikyrah has it right IMO, King, the SNCC, and the individuals who risked their asses in the streets are the hroes in this story. The politicians are are at best people who did the decent thing when faced with the choice of doing the decent thing or tacitly siding with virulent racist assholes.
eemom
@Omnes Omnibus:
@Goblue72:
IOW, a “complicated and contradictory man” as the article says, I suppose.
Further to rikyrah’s comment: did he support civil rights because he believed in it, or for political reasons?
Omnes Omnibus
@eemom: Since he saw the Democrats losing the South for a generation over it but still pushed it, I tend to think he believed in it.
BobS
@Betty Cracker: I’m not particularly interested in discussing “the magic bullet, grassy knoll, etc.” either. What I’m more interested in is the ‘deep politics’ that Stone suggests lies behind the JFK assassination. By the way, Oliver Stone didn’t buy all of Garrison’s theories either, but he did recognize Garrison as an authentic American hero who brought his search for the truth inside a courtroom (where Clay Shaw perjured himself when he denied his employment by the CIA).
@Omnes Omnibus: I hope I can sleep tonight.
Omnes Omnibus
@BobS:
I am pretty sure your sense of humor isn’t going to keep you awake.
Kylroy
@The Thin Black Duke: @The Thin Black Duke: “Which, of course, is making some white people uncomfortable. Sometimes you have to step outside of your comfort zone to find the truth.”
So focus on LBJ’s pre-presidential racism. Focus on FDR cutting black Americans out of the New Deal. There’s plenty of horrible racist things that even leftist American presidents did that got papered over by history. But don’t *make up* things about politicans who were allies to the civil rights movement, especially when there’s enough horrible things that actually happened.
Stepping outside of your comfort zone may be necessary to find some truths, but making people uncomfortable doesn’t guarantee that you’re speaking truth.
BobS
@Omnes Omnibus: I suggest that you may have misunderstood my point.
Kylroy
@Omnes Omnibus: Which is why he deserves some credit. Change as sweeping as the civil rights movement needs allies both in and outside the halls of power, and I don’t see why all the credit must be given to one side.
Speaking of, can you imagine *any* politician of the past generation signing something knowing it will cost his party a quarter of the country for the next 30 years?
Mnemosyne (iPad Mini)
@larrybob:
Yes, and what Pierce says is that HE HASN’T SEEN THE FILM. He’s basing his opinion on public statements by the director and what other people have said.
I have seen way too many people seriously misinterpret films to take Pierce’s second-hand opinion of what he thinks might be in it. I’ll see and judge it for myself, thank you.
Omnes Omnibus
@Kylroy: I don’t deny that LBJ is due some credit, but he doesn’t get to be cast as a hero of this struggle.
Mnemosyne (iPad Mini)
@Kylroy:
The problem is that there is a long history in Hollywood of only one side getting the credit — the white side. Other have mentioned the spate of movies about South Africa from the 1980s that were all about apartheid from the white population’s point of view. Or “Mississippi Burning,” which is all about white FBI agents.
You could argue that this film’s corrective goes too far in the opposite direction, but you can’t argue that a corrective wasn’t necessary given the long and ugly history in Hollywood of only looking at civil rights through the eyes of white people. The last movie specifically about MLK that has him as a central character that I can think of is “Boycott,” which was an HBO cable movie. And … that’s it.
(I recommend “Boycott” a lot, BTW, because it’s a terrific little movie done in a semi-documentary style. It’s worth setting the DVR for because HBO still runs it occasionally.)
AdrianLesher
“Selma” is a great and gripping movie. Please see it before attacking it.
brantl
If you’re making a historical movie, everything in it, ought to be the facts, period. Don’t want something in the movie? Leave it out. Don’t put things in the movie that just aren’t true, that’s horseshit.
brantl
@Omnes Omnibus: That’s a self-contradictory statement, you realize that, don’t you?
Cervantes
@eemom:
His language spanned decades — plus the relationships among racism and politics and language are complex.
TR
@AdrianLesher:
I have. I’ve also read a dozen or so histories of Selma. The movie is gripping, but it’s wrong in many, many, many key ways.
Oliver Stone’s JFK had great performances and was really gripping too. Still a wholly unreliable history.
TR
@Mnemosyne (iPad Mini):
Yes, “Boycott” was not just well told, but stuck well to the actual, you know, facts.
TR
@Omnes Omnibus:
No one’s saying LBJ is the hero. But to cast him — as this movie insanely does — as an antagonist rather than an ally but, moreover, to state authoritatively that he was the ultimate author of the most scandalous thing that J Edgar Hoover ever did when there is ABSOLUTELY ZERO PROOF of that is just beyond contempt.
Put it this way: You saw Spielberg’s Lincoln, right? Imagine if Spielberg had decided, “for dramatic effect” to change Thaddeus Stevens from a Radical Republican leader who helped Lincoln bring about the end of slavery into a secret racist who was sending John Wilkes Booth a map to Ford’s Theater.
This movie is crap.
TR
@Omnes Omnibus:
No, no he wasn’t. The CRA was stalled in the HJC by Howard Smith and wasn’t going anywhere, and internal discussions show that the Kennedy DOJ was recommending they let it sit rather than risk alienating the Dixiecrats. When JFK was assassinated, LBJ worked with House liberals to beef up several titles and rammed it through.
Go read Clay Risen’s book, The Bill of the Century.
pika
This is a good, concise point-by-point that pushes back on the LBJ protectors and narratives who isolate King from the meticulous, methodological grassroots activism that predated him:
http://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/01/04/ten-things-you-should-know-about-selma-you-see-film
Cervantes
@TR:
I believe Howard Smith was ensconced at House Rules, not House Judiciary. He opposed not only the CRA but also every aspect of LBJ’s War on Poverty because he feared it might lead to integration or make integration easier.
If we feel a need to think of LBJ as a “vile racist,” what even more pungent term can we reserve for the Howard Smiths of the world?
Kylroy
@Mnemosyne (iPad Mini): There’s going too far, and then there’s making things up. If the movie never even mentioned LBJ, I’d be fine with it – the film’s called “Selma”, and whatever anybody says the president was a peripheral figure at best in the actual events on the ground. But they do bring him up, and have him do vile things he simply didn’t do in the historical record. I don’t see how slander is “corrective”.
Yes, we need stories about black people that are actually about black people. But we can do it without lying to punch up the drama.
Kylroy
@brantl: I don’t think it’s contradictory. One can contribute without being the central figure.
And if they want to ignore his contributions, that is fine, “Selma” isn’t his story. But bringing him in as an antagonist is both ahistorical and unnecessary – it’s not like there weren’t a legion of people *actually* working against King’s efforts in Selma.
Kylroy
@TR: JFK was pushing for Civil Rights as hard as an East Coast nouveau-riche Democrat could push his party in the early ’60s. LBJ had the Solid South racist bona-fides to drag as much of the party into supporting the CRA as possible.
Only Nixon could go to China, and only LBJ could get Democrats to decisively embrace Civil Rights.
Cervantes
@Kylroy:
Comparison to Nixon not precisely apt, as Nixon spent decades deliberately making it extremely difficult for anyone (else) to reach out to China.
Cervantes
@TR:
Not only that, what some of the film’s boosters, here and elsewhere, are saying is this: LBJ was not the hero of the story, and to prevent anyone from thinking that he was, he was cast as a villain.
Given this level of moral sophistication, further comment is hardly necessary.
TriassicSands
@Mandalay:
American historians seem to be remarkably forgiving of our warmongering presidents. There is no doubt that Vietnam does and should soil LBJ’s reputation and place in history. That said, once you accept that fact that most American presidents have been pretty cavalier about getting our young men killed for the greater glory of the homeland, LBJ’s accomplishments do merit a high ranking among American presidents. Of course, it is only fair to point out that the competition (that is the quality of most presidents being poor) isn’t much to crow about. We have had a handful of great to good presidents and then a long list of mediocrities. Then, there is George W. Bush.
Bush may have “only” gotten a tenth the number of Americans killed compared with LBJ’s toll, but medical advancements have made it possible to save a lot of casualties that would have been fatalities in Vietnam. In fairness to Bush, we have to consider the number of catastrophic injuries that resulted from his war of choice, and the terrible burden that is placing on families and the cost of a lifetime of medical care. Sadly, the VA health care system is — based on my own, admittedly limited, experience — wholly inadequate. The 2014 audit found the VA system is short 28,000 doctors, nurses, and other personnel. Right now the VA “single payer” system is a good example of what happens such a system is severely underfunded.
Back to LBJ. He could rank very high on both a list of our best presidents and one of our worst presidents. Vietnam was not a minor screwup.
TR
@Cervantes:
Yes, you’re correct — not enough coffee this morning apparently.
@Kylroy:
Precisely. All the commenters here who are holding LBJ’s casual racism and Dixiecrat background against him seem to be overlooking the fact that it was only because he came from that background that LBJ — just like Truman before him — could push so effectively for civil rights.
@TriassicSands:
That’s generally true, though LBJ’s role in escalating Vietnam is certainly a major blot that we hold against him when evaluating his presidency.
Original Lee
@BillinGlendaleCA: We 1962ers don’t really identify as Boomers, either. The original Boomer cutoff was 1960, but then around 1980, demographers discovered that the 1961-1964 cohort, while having fewer babies born, had more surviving adults, so the population curve for adults did not dip the same way the population curve did for births. Hence the relatively recent adjustment of the boundaries. I tend to define a Boomer as anyone born after 1945 who remembers hearing about the JFK assassination.