Things Worth Remembering: ‘We Shall Win the Tomorrows Before Us’ Six days after JFK was assassinated, LBJ brought hope to a broken nation with a powerful Thanksgiving address. Douglas Murray
We are fast approaching Thanksgiving, and many Americans, no doubt, are wondering what they have to be thankful for.
There’s the skyrocketing cost of pretty much everything. Rising crime. Endless wars. And perhaps worst of all, this fear that we’re falling apart—that Democrats and Republicans can’t work together, that in the middle of the turkey and stuffing a brawl might break out between the “communists” and “fascists.” (There were no communists or fascists on the ballot this year, the partisan smears notwithstanding.)
Over the past year, there has been much talk about America being more divided than ever. It’s easy to forget, in the midst of all the emotion and politicking, that this is an exaggeration—to say the very least. There was the Civil War. And, of course, the Civil Rights struggles of the 1960s.
In the 1960s, political violence—including assassination—became an unavoidable fact of life in America. The first devastating and consequential assassination of the decade took place on November 22, 1963, when Lee Harvey Oswald murdered President John F. Kennedy in Dallas.
That single act of violence has spawned countless conspiracy theories; fueled suspicion of the “military-industrial complex” (a suspicion that has morphed into antipathy toward the “deep state”); and driven what seems, at times, a permanent wedge between the government and the governed.
But, as always, events throw up remarkable people. And sometimes even people who do not seem all that remarkable become remarkable when history throws them into the fiercest fire.
Lyndon Baines Johnson was such a man.
The Kennedy clan—aristocratic, with their Harvard pedigree and penchant for playing football at the family compound in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts—despised him. Johnson—born into a poor family in Texas Hill Country—despised them right back. JFK had tapped Johnson to be his running mate in 1960, because he needed a Protestant and a good old boy to hold the Democratic coalition together. Johnson, a masterful politician first elected to Congress in 1937, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt was president, was mostly cut out of the very insular Kennedy inner circle. The relationship between the two men was purely transactional.
On the day of the assassination, Johnson was with Kennedy in Dallas—riding two cars behind the president alongside his wife, Claudia “Lady Bird” Johnson.
Oswald shot Kennedy at 12:30 p.m., local time. By 1 p.m., doctors had pronounced him dead. A little over an hour and a half later, LBJ, who was by then on Air Force One flying back to Washington, D.C., was sworn in as the nation’s thirty-sixth president.
Six days later, seated in the Oval Office, he delivered what must have been an impossibly difficult speech.
JFK’s funeral had just taken place, his flag-draped coffin had just been buried at Arlington National Cemetery, and there were already fears, whisperings, that the KGB might have killed him, or the Cubans, or—unimaginable as it sounded to many Americans—the FBI or CIA working alone or in cahoots with the mob. (That nightclub owner Jack Ruby fatally shot Oswald two days after the Kennedy assassination, making it impossible for the FBI to get answers to any number of questions about the assassination, only added fuel to the proverbial fire.)
Nonetheless, the new president had a job to do, and that was to pull the country together, to push ahead—to lead.
And on November 28, 1963, he made it clear that he intended to do just that.
“My fellow Americans, on yesterday,” Johnson began, somewhat awkwardly, “I went before the Congress to speak for the first time as president of the United States.” He seemed somber and staid, and a little unsure of himself, glancing down at his speech and then back up at the camera.
Then, he continued: “Tonight, on this Thanksgiving, I come before you to ask your help, to ask your strength, to ask your prayers, that God may guard this republic and guide my every labor.”
He added: “All of us have lived through seven days that none of us will ever forget. We are not given the divine wisdom to answer why this has been, but we are given the human duty of determining what is to be, what is to be for America, for the world. For the cause we lead. For all the hopes that live in our hearts. A great leader is dead. A great nation must move on.”
Johnson was already thinking, not surprisingly, about the many things he wanted to accomplish—starting with the stalled Civil Rights Act. Kennedy had introduced the bill over the summer, but it had been filibustered in the Senate.
Now, the new president grasped, was the moment to forge ahead with this bill that, he hoped, would lead America out of the Jim Crow era and establish a new equality.
But before he could do that, Johnson had to bring everyone together. He had to establish a rapport with the nation. He had to make Americans feel that he was their president and they were moving forward together.
“Yesterday is not ours to recover,” Johnson said. “But tomorrow is ours to win or to lose. I am resolved that we shall win the tomorrows before us. So I ask you to join me in that resolve, determined that from this midnight of tragedy, we shall move toward a new American greatness.”
Then he reminded Americans that, despite the tragedy of Kennedy’s assassination, “more than any generation before us, we have cause to be thankful, so thankful.”
America, Johnson noted, was prosperous and safe and secure. “The goodwill of the world pours out for us,” he said.
But he was not blind to the manifold dangers ahead. He seemed to worry most of all, reasonably enough, about the nation tearing itself apart. Kennedy had been loved by millions of Americans, irrespective of their political bent. He had about him an almost mythological quality. The puncturing of that mythology had dealt an incredible blow to the nation’s psyche. At that moment, on that Thanksgiving evening in 1963, it seemed unsure of itself, or what might come next.
“In each administration, the greatest burden that the president had to bear had been the burden of his own countrymen’s unthinking and unreasoning hate and division,” Johnson said, observing that he had worked closely with five presidents, Democrats and Republicans, and considered them all friends. (That might have been a bit of a stretch, but it was what the nation needed to hear.)
“So, in these days,” he went on, “the fate of this office is the fate of us all. I would ask all Americans on this day of prayer and reverence to think on these things.”
It should be noted that, a little more than seven months later, on July 2, 1964, Lyndon Johnson rammed through the Civil Rights Act, persuading large bipartisan majorities in both houses of Congress to support him, and ushered in a new era in America.
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