LBJ and the NRA
On the day Robert Kennedy died in a Los Angeles hospital from a pistol wound to the head, President Lyndon Johnson urged Congress to approve legislation “to bring the insane traffic in guns to a halt.”
That alone would not be enough to stop gun violence, LBJ said. However, it would “slow it down” and save “many innocent lives.”
In the midst of the political turmoil and social upheaval of 1968, the result of the war in Vietnam and civil rights and anti-war unrest at home, the president called on Americans “to purge hostility from our hearts and let us practice moderation with our tongues.”
Fifty years later, these are words and actions Americans would do well to heed.
But now, like then, some things stand in our way. One notable, visible obstacle is the National Rifle Association. The fight over LBJ’s gun legislation helped to spawn the NRA we know today — a fierce and effective lobby for the unfettered ownership of high-powered, military-style weapons in the hands of just about anyone.
In a truly remarkable article in The Washington Post by Frances Stead Sellers and in a new book “LBJ’s 1968” by Kyle Longley, we get a glimpse of the early days of the NRA’s rise to pre-eminence in the bitter, half-century-long debate over the role of guns in civil society.
We also see a beleaguered president trying valiantly to grapple with crisis layered on crisis. Literally driven from office by an angry nation spilt by Vietnam and the rise of a counter-culture, LBJ today is looking better and better, especially when placed beside the current occupant of the White House.
Sen. Kennedy died in LA’s Good Samaritan Hospital in the early hours of June 6, 1968, less than 48 hours after winning the California presidential primary. His victory put him in a position to challenge that year’s presumed frontrunner for the Democratic nomination for president, Vice President Hubert Humphrey.
LBJ’s withdrawal from the contest on March 31, following a strong showing by Sen. Eugene McCarthy in the New Hampshire primary, was the first of a series of political upheavals engendered by Vietnam, where the U.S. was mired in a war seemingly without end and where American casualties were peaking at around 325 dead a week.
Following Kennedy’s death, the president asked Congress to approve legislation that would require the licensing of gun owners and gun registration.
The NRA initially backed the measure. Founded in 1871, the organization had a long history of moderation. When Congress banned civilian ownership of racketeer-style submachine guns in the 1930s, it went along.
But 1968 was different. The nation seemed on the verge of a nervous breakdown if not revolution. Militant Black Panthers entered the California statehouse with rifles slung on their shoulders. Young white protesters were flooding America’s streets as well as its college campuses.
The NRA turned away from its moderate past to its militant future, despite the views of conservatives like California Gov. Ronald Reagan, who a year earlier had said, “There is no reason why on the streets today citizens should be carrying loaded weapons.”
Once omnipotent in the legislative arena, the Johnson of 1968 was a shadow of his former self. When Congress finally acted on guns in October of that year, it sent Johnson a weak, watered-down bill.
The president responded, “The voices that blocked these safeguards were not the voices of an aroused nation. They were the voices of a powerful gun lobby.”
In December 1968, the NRA formally registered as a Capitol Hill lobby. Johnson, who died in early 1973, could not have imagined the overwhelmingly powerful role the NRA would play in future gun debates.
By his last full year as president, LBJ was an easy man to dislike.
Yet the president who was widely vilified in 1968 appears today in a much different light, thanks in part to telephone conversations he secretly recorded. When Congress refused to approve his nominee for chief justice of the Supreme Court in the summer of 1968, he refrained from sending another name up to Capitol Hill, citing the need to “avoid injury to our Constitutional system.”
In the fall of 1968, during a remarkable conference call with that year’s candidates for president, LBJ said, “Don’t think you’re going to be tricked or deceived” by him about negotiations then getting underway in Paris to end the Vietnam war.
It has only recently been confirmed that one of those candidates would shortly try to undermine the talks through deception and trickery in order to facilitate his own election. That candidate was Richard Milhous Nixon.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown and is the author of two books — Grand Salute: Stories of the World War II Generation and Our People. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com