Lyndon B. Johnson - God's Gift to the Oval Office

Out of all the passages I read in section four: Black and White and Other Politicians, Russell Baker’s was the most interesting for me. Unlike most of the book’s excerpts, Russell’s is told in the first person. Is satirical prose targeting the politics and life of Lyndon B Johnson was more than just another southern fictional humor excerpt. This narrative had meaning for the common reading, and it uniquely had some historical facts included.
Russell Baker wrote a column for the New York Times for thirty years. This specific entry of his book The Good Times, he describes Johnson’s personality as a cocky politician. Baker wrote in a time when newspaper and journalism were the main mediums for the public eye. In this time, if a politician running for president got a good vibe from the New York Times, he was nearly a shoe-in for the presidency. That’s how much weight Baker held as a columnist, and it is this power that makes Johnson look down right foolish.
Baker’s main theme focuses on Johnson’s admiration for John F. Kennedy. The president at the time, he is the apple of Johnson’s eye. Baker makes this connection seem almost like an obsession. Some other motifs that inspire Baker are Lyndon’s arrogance of Charles de Gaulle, to poverty in India, to his youthful career as a rural Texas schoolteacher. His criticism can not be appropriately understood without specific quotations. He ridicules Johnson in such a way that it is quite comical. Baker describes a day in the life, “You didn’t sleep through a time of glory and happiness as wonderful as this. You stayed up, enjoying it, talking about it. He talked about it one night with the handful of pool reporters assigned to his plane, telling them tat all the great leaders of the world were dead now, replaced by minor figures. He, Lyndon Johnson, was the last of the big men left on the international scene” (485). One of the writers challenges Johnson’s claims, and in response, Johnson denounces the man in question.
Johnson often sucks up to the reporters, calling them by their first names and befriending them only in hopes of a good review. It is this tactic that eventually bites him in the ass. After a long interview with Russell Baker, Johnson subtly asks his secretary, “‘Who is this I’m talking to?’”(484). The entry ends in quite a comedic fashion.
Because Russ criticizes Johnson’s policy in Vietnam (at the time of LBJ’s presidency) Johnson excludes him from a Presidential Scholars ceremony. It is just his luck that Baker still shows up, but Lyndon is unable to remember his name. During the course of five pages, they must have had a half dozen interactions, but in the end, “he still didn’t know me from Herb, Uncle Gene, or the Jolly Green Giant” (487).