A Man for All Seasons

If Hollywood names and accolades don’t earn your vote, consider going “All the Way” with LBJ as just the drama for an anxious electoral season. Perhaps the nation is now only ‘mildly concerned,’ compared to the grief it experienced after President Kennedy’s horrific assassination. Ninety-eight minutes after the confirmation of his death, Lyndon Baines Johnson, aboard Air Force One, was sworn in to assume an awful responsibility. “All I have, I would have given gladly, not to be standing here today,” he said in his first address as president. But as Cranston proves, he was just the man to (respectfully) tell a grieving nation to move on, to move forward.

A number of unsolved problems loomed large, including a war in Vietnam, racial conflict in the South, and a growing demand for more expansive social programs. With no mandate from his party or the people, it is miraculous Johnson accomplished anything at all, much less the passage of the historic Civil Rights Act.

With less than a year until the 1964 general election, why didn’t LBJ play it safe? Why die on such an unpopular hill? All the Way gives us insight into the overlooked peculiarity of that decision. Johnson was a professional politician and, regardless of Oswald, would have eventually sought the Oval Office. “What does Johnson really want?” asks Martin Luther King, played by Anthony Mackie. The Dixiecrats, Republicans, his closest staff, and Lady Bird are equally confused. Johnson, in all his largess, defies an easy explanation.

The legislative history of the Civil Rights Act is presented in a way that will interest both policy wonks and viewers like you, but its purpose in the movie is to demonstrate Johnson’s complexity and inner contradictions. There’s his profane side, and the fact that he mistreated his long-suffering Lady Bird. Did Washington or Lincoln direct his staff from the bathroom? Certainly not, but Johnson did. Then there’s the humanitarian, who remained burdened and motivated by the crippling poverty he witnessed while he was a teacher to migrant farm children in Texas, the father who wished he was closer to his daughters, and the friend who was hurt by the betrayal of political friends. “It’s politics, Dick, it’s not personal,” he tells a much-abused colleague, though he personally acted otherwise. “I do not have the hide of a Rhinoceros,” he moans, “I could drop dead tomorrow and there wouldn’t be ten people who’d shed a tear,” refusing to get out of bed and the presidential pajamas. There’s also a humorous Johnson, a naughty story-telling jokester who made memorable use of the Southern idiom. The way Cranston seamlessly condenses Johnson’s multitudes speaks to his mastery.

All the Way shows us, above all, Johnson was a doer. Perhaps no other president in American history was so successful in bending Congress to his bidding, and most of the movie’s drama centers around his efforts to whip the needed votes into place. Johnson’s unlimited stamina, intimate knowledge of federal procedure, and a shrewd awareness of when to bellow and when to inspire helps explain his impressive achievements. He was a politician in every sense of the word, and it’s amazing what he accomplished with old fashioned horse-trading. Instead of a pen, he used the phone. (Nobody slammed down a rotary phone like LBJ.) Some of the best scenes in the movie are the close one-on-one conversations, either intimate or intimidating, between Johnson and some poor senator foolish enough to resist. “I’m coming for you, Dick,” he quietly tells his old mentor, “I love you more’n my own daddy, but if you get in my way, I’ll crush you.”

Four decades later, this remains the central mystery of Johnson’s presidency: Did he ram the Civil Rights Act because he was morally convicted it was the right thing to do, or was he acting for his own political gain? All the Way answers . . . “yes.” Johnson’s motives were as complex as his character, and he was guided by his heart as much as by his ego. He was both principled and practical, large-hearted and criminal, insecure and larger-than-life. And it’s because of these contradictions, not in spite of them, that LBJ got everything he wanted—the passage of the Civil Rights Act, and an overwhelming victory against Barry Goldwater in 1964. In passing the act, the man guilty of tax fraud, voracious sexual affairs, and constitutional oversteps, succeeded in doing a good thing where Americans had failed for 100 years. It’s appropriate, then, that understanding Johnson, the master politician, be all about contradiction and, ultimately, compromise.

“Everybody wants power,” says Johnson, perhaps in a moment of personal insight, “Everybody. If they say they don’t they’re lying. But everyone thinks it ought to be given out, free of charge, like Mardi Gras beads, especially to them because they’re gonna do good with it. Nothing comes free. Nothing. Not even good. Especially not good.”