Lyndon Baines Johnson: Our "Statue of Liberty"

Lady Bird Johnson, 94, Still in Hospital

The Associated Press
Wednesday, June 27, 2007; 2:40 PM

AUSTIN, Texas -- Former first lady Lady Bird Johnson remained hospitalized Wednesday in stable condition nearly a week after she was admitted, a spokeswoman said.

"She's nice and stable and very comfortable," spokeswoman Elizabeth Christian said, adding that her family members are waiting to learn when she will be released. "They still are eager to get her home."

Johnson, 94, the widow of President Lyndon B. Johnson, was taken to Seton Medical Center last Thursday evening for treatment of a low-grade fever, which later subsided.

In 2002, she suffered a stroke that left her with difficulty speaking. She communicates through facial expressions and other ways.


Lady Bird's hospitalization brought to mind her husband, who is never far from my thoughts because my sense of gratitude would not allow me to forget him.

I consider Lyndon Baines Johnson to be the greatest U.S. president of my lifetime. The fact that we are all here today and have been spared a half century of tyranny at home is attributable directly to him. From other U.S. presidents we received and continue to receive nothing but lip service when it comes to Cuba. Johnson could not liberate Cuba because Kennedy had tied his hands in the Kennedy-Khruschev Pact, so he did the next best thing and freed 2 million of us piecemeal.

It was Johnson who signed the original Cuban Adjustment Act (CAA) (1966), the most immigrant-friendly legislation ever passed in the history of this nation of immigrants, the likes of which we shall never see again in these xenophobic times. In fact, the Cuban Adjustment Act was essentially gutted by Clinton when he implemented by presidential fiat the nefarious "Dry Foot/Wet Foot" policy which Bush has upheld longer than Clinton did. The original CAA didn't require Cubans to set foot on U.S. land to be free (at the end of their unimaginable travails at sea) but actually saved the refugees' lives on the high seas (at the beginning of their travails) and brought them to freedom here. Of course, it was unthinkable to Johnson or any American then that a Cuban freedom-seeker would ever be returned by the U.S. to Castro's island hell, as unthinkable, in fact, as dropping a rescued baby back into a well or placing a trampoline on the western side of the Berlin Wall. But times have changed. It is now the U.S. which is building a Berlin wall along its border with Mexico and deports even motherless children to Castro's tender mercies.

It was the Rev. Ralph Abernathy, I think, who said that Johnson was the greatest president for the poor and blacks. Well, for what it's worth, he was also the greatest president for Cuban refugees. The fact that most of us are here today and have had lives worth living was his doing. He was our "Statue of Liberty."

Johnson, moreover, understood the real nature of Communism, which his dilettante predecessor did not. If he had been president in 1961, or Nixon, for that matter, the freedom fighters would not have been betrayed at the Bay of Pigs and all Cubans and the world would have been spared the predations of Fidel Castro.

Something else: As confirmed to his biographer Doris Kearns Godwin, LBJ always personally believed that Castro was responsible for Kennedy's assassination. He no doubt saw the definitive proof which has been concealed from the American public for 46 years because of "national security" reasons.

Johnson was as complicated and multi-facetted as Abraham Lincoln, a man writ large, with titanic flaws and titanic virtues, bigger than life except that he actually lived. He was also a deeply compassionate man who loved mankind in all its diversity, whether the poor white sharecropper or the descendent of slaves still kept in legal fetters; the Vietnamese fighting for freedom and civilization or the Cuban fleeing from Communist barbarism because that option had been closed to him.

His widow, Lady Bird Johnson — of Mexican-American ancestry, incidentally — is still with us and currently hospitalized. She was also this county's best first lady and a worthy wife to such a man.

I have always wondered why Cuban-Americans have never expressed their gratitude to Johnson through his widow; for I should think that no man is more deserving of our gratitude and remembrance than Lady Bird's husband. Instead, we are forever extolling Reagan, who did absolutely nothing for us or Cuban freedom. Just like Pope John Paul II. They managed to free all the Western world of Communism except Cuba. Johnson's efforts to combat Communism at least benefitted us also.

Perhaps next year, which will mark the centenary of his birth, Cuban Americans will join their voices with those of the poor and blacks to praise him. Perhaps some day all Americans will realize that Lyndon Baines Johnson was the greatest American president of the latter-half of the 20th century.