November 22; How Much Damage Can Be Done When Love Is Lost?
MANAGEMENT BY THE BOOK:
365 Daily Bible Verse &
One-Minute Management Lessons For The Busy Faithful

22 November

A wise son heeds his father’s instruction,

but a mocker does not respond to rebukes.

Proverbs 13:1

Disrespect

His dad, a state legislator, was not re-elected and so the son despised him for being an embarrassment, a loser.

Father and son looked alike and the boy took after the elder’s mannerisms—putting a long, lankly arm around a constituent’s shoulder and smiling and persuading. When the boy was young they were inseparable.

But the father’s change in fortune changed the son. The young man swore he would never be like his dad (that unsophisticated, back-country hick).

The schoolboy did not honor, did not love his father – he despised him for being a near-do-well; a failure.

He did follow his father’s example and pursued politics rising to Vice President. He was out of real power, as he felt, for some three years as the VP.

But on November 22, 1963 at “approximately one o’clock,” he became president of the United States when John F. Kennedy was declared dead from an assassin’s bullet. (Caro, 2012). As the new President there were Big Things he wanted to do.

What he wanted was The Great Society and The War on Poverty.

What we got was the Vietnam Memorial.

***

Charmaine was doing research on Lyndon Baines Johnson, LBJ, the 36th president of the United States. He wanted to be known by his initials. Like FDR.

We traveled to the Johnson Library in Austin, Texas to learn more on power and leadership and failure. We learned little. There are two interesting biographers on Johnson, two Roberts. Dallek, said to be sympathetic; and Caro, not so much.

Only the Dallek book was sold in the Library.

But even Dallek would write that Johnson bragged of having “had more women by accident than Kennedy had on purpose.” (Dallek,1990)

LBJ is a study in Insecurity, Power and Deceit.

Dallek writes that the,

Lack of money had been the cause of so many of the insecurities of his youth…he talked incessantly about how his father…had ended up as a state bus inspector, and had died penniless; he didn’t want to end up like his father, he said.

The Johnsons were, for the rest of Lyndon’s boyhood, the laughingstocks of Johnson City. (Caro, 2012).

LBJ’s relationship with his father was,

[C]old— hostile, in fact— with Lyndon refusing his father’s requests and orders, defying him so blatantly that, legislators say, “He wouldn’t pay attention to anything his father wanted.” (Caro, 2012)

Caro writes, “His brother, Sam Houston, says that ‘the most important thing for Lyndon was not to be like Daddy.’”

LBJ knew only the use of power and nothing of accountability.

***

On the Vietnam Memorial on the Mall in Washington, DC are the names of the 58,286 who died.

Would it be so if LBJ loved his father?

A wise son heeds his father’s instruction, but a mocker does not respond to rebukes. Proverbs 13:1

###

Caro, Robert A. (2012-05-01). The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson IV (Kindle Locations 8782-8783). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Dallek, page 189, Robert A. Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Means of Ascent, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf 1990), p. xxxiv.

Caro, Robert A. (2012-05-01). The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson IV (Kindle Locations 334-336). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Caro, Robert A. (2012-05-01). The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson IV (Kindle Locations 752-753). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.