themostliberalpresidentofthe20thcentury.docVIP

The most liberal president of the 20th centuryNick Kotzs new book about the civil right years argues convincingly that the true hero of the American left is LBJ. - - - - - - - - - - - -By Charles Taylor Feb. 2, 2005 ?|? Toward the end of Nick Kotzs Judgment Days: Lyndon Baines Johnson, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Laws That Changed America comes a startling bit of information about the disastrous 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. Barely noticed during violent clashes between police and antiwar demonstrators, Kotz writes, the proud integrated delegation from the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party was seated in place of the Mississippi regulars. Fannie Lou Hamer, now an official delegate at last, received a standing ovation from the convention as she took her seat. That such an event could happen merely four years after the 1964 Democratic Convention in Atlantic City, N.J., where the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party was denied recognition in favor of the Mississippi delegates who were chosen via a system that prevented blacks from voting, is a mark of how far and how fast the civil rights movement had come. That it could be so little noticed is a measure of how quickly the movement was being eclipsed by Vietnam. Fannie Lou Hamer -- who had led the charge for the MFDP in 1964, testifying before the credentials committee about the violence faced by blacks who tried to register to vote, and then dismissing the compromise the party offered the MFDP with We didnt come all this way for no two seats -- was a living presence at a convention that, for all the turmoil both inside and outside the hall, was haunted by ghosts. Absent was Lyndon Baines Johnson, who in 1964 had found Hamers televised testimony so damning of the Southern Democrats he needed to gain the partys nomination that he convened a press conference to knock her off the air. Five months earlier, depressed by the growing reaction against the Vietnam War, convinced the war was unwinnable but una