A most peculiar editorial by the New York Times

Today's New York Times includes an extraordinarily peculiar editorial titled "Unite, Not Divide, Really This Time," which includes the following paragraphs:

In Mrs. Clinton’s zeal to make the case that experience (hers) is more important than inspirational leadership (Mr. Obama’s), she made some peculiar comments about the relative importance of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and President Lyndon Johnson to the civil rights cause. She complimented Dr. King’s soaring rhetoric, but said: “Dr. King’s dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. ... It took a president to get it done. ”

Why Mrs. Clinton would compare herself to Mr. Johnson, who escalated the war in Vietnam into a generational disaster, was baffling enough. It was hard to escape the distasteful implication that a black man needed the help of a white man to effect change. She pulled herself back from the brink by later talking about the mistreatment and danger Dr. King faced....

I find this astonishingly ignorant and, indeed, almost offensive. Speaking as someone who opposed the Vietnam War and published (with Doris Kearns) an article in The New Republic suggesting that the left organize a third party in order to assure the defeat of President Johnson should he run again in 1968, I have no problem describing the war in Vietnam as "a generational disaster." That being said, I also believe that Lyndon B. Johnson was, by a large measure, the greatest domestic policy president in our history, at least as significant as FDR as an agent of "change" (the mantra of the day). Indeed, he gave the single greatest speech of any president in my lifetime, the "we shall overcome" speech when he introduced the Voting Rights Act in1965 following the Selma debacle and, more to the point, accepted the death of the Democratic Party in which he had thrived precisely by pushing for the full inclusion of African-Americans in the polity. Those who believe that the Supreme Court is unique in being a "forum of principle" might ask themselves if anything other than principle is a better explanation of Johnson's willingness to jettison the Democratic Party as it then existed.

Perhaps the Times' editorial writer is simply appallingly ignorant of that aspect of the Johnson presidency. There is a lot of nostalgia being expressed these days for JFK. He didn't hold a candle to Johnson as an agent of genuine domestic change. Why can't the Times recognize that, even if it wants, altogether properly, to go on to say that the tragedy of LBJ was his inability/unwillingness to accept American defeat in Vietnam (perhaps itself based on "principle," which proves, among other things, that "principled" commitments are not necessarily worthy of support)?

Secondly, even if one must obviously recognize the immense importance of the Civil Rights Movement (and many similar movements before that, going back to the days of slavery), it is incredibly stupid to describe as "distasteful" the "implication that a black man needed the help of a white man to effect change." Did courageous black resisters against slavery not "need" the help of the thousands upon thousands of whites who gave their lives to defeat the Confederacy, or of Abraham Lincoln? Histories that ignore the agency of African-Americans in their own liberation are incomplete, but is it sensible to make that agency the exclusive explanation for liberatory change?

Perhaps the editorial writer doesn't remember that the word "we" in "we shall overcome" indeed referred to blacks and whites together. JFK would never have been influenced to pick up the cudgels for civil rights were it not for the courage of African-Americans, including young children, in Birmingham and elsewhere. But surely no sane person could believe that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or the Voting Rights Act of 1965 would have taken place without the "help" of a number of "white m[e]n to effect change."

Needless to say, I generally agree with the editorial page of the Times. That's what makes it all the worse that they chose to publish such a monumentally stupid editorial, especially when purporting to emphasize the importance of a "unified" instead of a "divided" America.