LBJ was an odd president. There’s his personal habits that are highlighted in the article, which were… strange. There’s his domestic policy, which was highly effective: he created medicare and medicaid, expanded civil rights, and caused the realignment of the Democratic and Republican parties to their modern state (before him, Democrats were more conservative than Republicans). He won the electoral college 486 to 52 and was overwhelmingly popular. And then there was his foreign policy, which was terrible: “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” was a common chant as the Vietnam War dragged on.
Unlike other commentators, I wouldn’t draw any conclusions about the presidency or the US from LBJ other than that sometimes very weird people win positions of power and proceed to do very weird things with that power.
Robert Caro dedicated the second part of his life writing a biography of LBJ. He started in the 70s and is apparently still working on the 5th (and last!) volume.
Yes, this article is borrowing liberally from Passage of Power (2012), the fourth book:
> Lucy’s father was not as pleased with his new quarters. Two days after the Johnsons moved in, he told West, “Mr. West, if you can’t get that shower of mine fixed, I’m going to have to move back to The Elms.”
> “He didn’t sound as if he were joking,” West was to say. And after the President explained that the water pressure was inadequate, and that he wanted the same elaborate, multi-nozzle arrangement that he had had at his former home, he repeated his threat to move out. Then, “without a smile, he turned on his heel and walked away.”
> A few minutes later, Mrs. Johnson asked West to come by the room she had chosen for her once, a small sitting room with one door. “I guess you’ve been told about the shower,” she said, with a smile, and repeated to West what she said to all Johnson employees. “Anything that ... needs to be done, remember this: my husband comes first, the girls second, and I will be satisfied with what’s left.”
> As he became acquainted with the Johnsons, West was to write, “I soon could see that had been her life’s pattern.” Nothing, he came to see, could “faze her.”
You might be interested in reading The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert Caro book series about him. It's incredibly well written and engaging, while also being academically rigorous, well researched and well documented. It's an (incomplete) 5 book biography-ish, maybe 4000+ pages - but also somehow a riveting page-turner.
Did he expand civil rights out of his own interest and volition or because there was pressure from the Civil Rights Movement? Wasn’t he a racist himself?
As for the Vietnam War: I guess it was easier for the US state to let the domestic population have civil rights compared to ending the Vietnam War and risking the “contagion” spreading. It’s easier to kill non-nationals on the other side of the world compared to continuing to violently crack down on domestic protests for civil rights.
(Kennedy didn’t have a nice record in Vietnam either, even though he is apparently the anti-deep state crusader if you listen to enough rock songs or whatever...)
I don’t know if "weird" is the right conclusion when you can factor in outside influences.
Was LBJ a racist himself? I expect so. Was he deeply committed to civil rights? Yes, without question.
Johnson regarded the war in Vietnam as something he had inherited from Kennedy. He regarded it as politically impossible to cut losses and pull out--the Republican Party beat on the Democrats for years over China, a more obviously lost cause.
Kennedy was younger, richer, and better looking. Then and since many Americans (and not only Americans) have confused their fantasies about him with history.
Johnson grew up poor and spent time teaching Mexican immigrant schoolchildren. He was from the South and far from flawless, but there are many anecdotes from throughout his life that showed that civil rights was a cause dear to him.
Okay. I’d rather give the credit to the nameless activists that forced the issue to the table and made segregation politically untenable. But I’m used to "leaders" getting credit for good things and the populace the stick for bad things.[1]
I'm doubtful that these leaders do these things because they are "listening" rather than because they are forced to. Or what, politicians are cynical power brokers (a common view, and correct) except on this issue? The leaders behind the State violently crack down on protests until they have a sudden epiphany and realize that demonstrating against segregation was good.
[1] Civil Rights was to Johnson’s credit, apparently, while the Trump Presidency was due to “stupid voters”
> [1] Civil Rights was to Johnson’s credit, apparently, while the Trump Presidency was due to “stupid voters”
People say Trump did X, Trump did Y, people don't say Trumps voters did X or Y. So I don't think so, the leaders gets most of the credit and the blame in the publics eye. In some cases the people on the ground gets credit and blame, but in most cases the leaders gets most of it.
The Caro biography claims that LBJ basically rescued the civil rights bills with his ability to get things through the senate. Kennedy had been on a path to failure because he didn't pass a budget first.
Then how on earth was his home shower constructed?
It doesn't make any sense that it took the White House workmen five years to figure out how to replicate his home shower setup.
What happened to the guy he hired to install his home setup? Just get him.
(The whole story is particularly unbelievable because implementing such massive pressure and throughput of hot water would have been an equivalently large engineering problem in his home.)
Maybe that's the problem. Maybe that for a variety of reasons, what could be done at home couldn't be done in the White House, and that pissed him off.
Maybe the people who installed his home shower couldn't do it at the White House for national security reasons (using foreign parts and labor, maybe). Maybe it interfered with other systems at the White House, or maybe some of the arrangements would be inappropriate in a historical building. Maybe his home shower was deemed too unsafe. Or maybe the White House workmen were just incompetent, at least compared to the ones hired for his home setup. Or LBJ was just abusive.
And in some of the scenarios, I kind of understand the frustration. You are the most powerful person in the world, you can decide the fate of millions and lead a country that can put people on the moon, but when you ask for the same shower you have at home, you don't get what you asked for.
That's a rather common theme. Workers (from chefs to software engineers) assume the customer doesn't know what he is talking about and try to reinterpret the requirements. Often, they are right, but sometimes, the customer really wants what he told you he wants.
It would appear that the source is “The Residence: Inside the Private World of the White House”, which appears to be the type of sensationalist tell-all that would grace the average tabloid next to the latest story about how prince harry has embarrassed himself this time.
I don't think they were trying to replicate it exactly, and were given vague and contradictory advice.
Even rereading that section about having a switch to turn from hot to cold, never warm makes no sense to me. Unless you want a single-pole double throw knob, and have the mother of all water-hammer any time you change the temperature.
> Back at the White House, Johnson would howl through the halls, “If I can move ten thousand troops in a day, the plumbers can certainly fix the bathroom the way I want it!”
Considering the fact that this is essentially true, I find it extremely dubious that it took them 5 years to solve the problem. Surely just making a carbon copy of his shower at home wouldn’t take more than a month or two.
It's a fair question. I originally assumed that the White House might have much older plumbing, but it was completely gutted and renovated about 10 years before LBJ took office, and I have to imagine the plumbing was designed to commercial standards, if not better.[1]
The description of LBJ in the article makes him sound like a narcissist, or at least a manipulative person, and a common technique is for the manipulative person to claim that they've personally witnessed (or in this case, own) something superior to what they've asked someone else to create. He probably really did have a very fancy shower head arrangement in his home, but I doubt very much that it had the kind of pressure and temperature he insisted on for the White House. He probably just wanted something even more extreme, and his approach worked.
Many decades ago I read a book which had an anecdote of some military officer taking an important message to the White House and he was told to take it right to President Johnson in his bathroom. The President came out of the shower to accept the message and the officer noticed the shower shooting water from several angles.
The President saw the officer staring at the fixtures and asked, "Son, do you have a shower like that?"
The officer replied, "No, sir!"
President Johnson said, "Then, boy, you got a dirty ass!"
> It turned out that the Elms had a shower faucet like nothing the staff had ever seen. Water from multiple nozzles sprayed out in every direction with needle-like intensity and astonishing force. One nozzle was directed at Johnson’s most private part. He called it “Jumbo.” Another, to his delight, shot straight at his back side. This, he demanded, is what he wanted in his White House bathroom … a shower head with the intensity of a fire hose. Additionally he wanted a temperature gauge that would immediately change the water from hot to cold. Never just warm.
There is just no way, that's crazy. This reads like one of those stories that slowly devolves into a Kafka-esque story and finishes with some kind of bang, leading you to understand that, somewhere in there, the real story ended.
Sadly, with this one, no bang. Real use of tax money.
Ok, funny and quirky, but the "punch line" is lamentable. "Your tax dollars at work" suggests this is one of the reasons everything is terribly wrong in this country! It must be changed! This will not do! And, as usual, a suggestion for improvement doesn't follow. "I'm just asking questions."
Anyone from Scandinavia at least would be horrified by this story. It makes the US presidency look like a 3rd world dictatorship.
If it's OK for a president to behave in this way, then you better believe this goes all the way down (and every person is abusing public funds to various extents).
It's generally accepted that each president gets to redecorate and install/convert various amenities, whether it's a bowling alley or a basketball court.
There's nothing third world about it -- for security and logistical reasons it's not like the president can just hop over to the YMCA to shoot some hoops.
So because the president's family is so "trapped" in the White House, special accommodations get made. And remember, this is their home for 4–8 years.
This isn't building palaces with gold sculptures of themselves or anything. And improvements get kept for the next president.
This particular story, however, seems presumably greatly exaggerated for comedic effect (if there's any truth to it at all).
Italian politicians are not exactly known for their frugal lifestyle, but this story makes them pale in comparison. For example, a few days ago the minister of agriculture merely had a train (running late, besides) take an unscheduled stop so he could get out earlier and attend a public event. This made the headlines as an outrageous abuse of priviledges.
> a few days ago the minister of agriculture merely had a train (running late, besides) take an unscheduled stop so he could get out earlier
Wtf, a politician is allowed to do that? How was the politician able to convince the train to stop? Are there laws enabling politicians to reschedule trains at any point?
Look what brazilian politicians do and you will be shocked how this train endevour is so tamed it would not even be news around here. The brazilian president spend R$773 millions this year on travelling alone ($157.6 millions in US dollars)
How do you even manage that? If you fly first class every hour of every day that would still be impossible. So I guess the man charters entire airplanes?
They fly a official plane and bring a lot of people with it. There was a plan to replace the place, but for the time it got backlashed so hard they put the idea aside, for now at least.
I kind of find it hilarious when I see the absolutely massive amount of security that surrounds the US president, and then look at our own prime minister, who takes the bike through the city to work every day.
How many of your country's prime ministers have been assassinated, and when was the last attempt? What would be the global effect of a sudden large swing in your country's policies?
Johnson became president when JFK was assassinated. This was within forty years of an attempt on FDR's life--the bullet got the mayor of Chicago instead.
"I think you're some kind of deviated prevert. I think General Ripper found out about your preversion, and that you were organizing some kind of mutiny of preverts."
LBJ was a shrewd political operator, and it's interesting that Nixon (no stranger himself to dirty tricks) said that LBJ was his most feared political opponent for all the kind of dirt he could throw.
There was a story about when LBJ was first running for political office, that he started rumors that his opponent had done some reprehensible act with a pig. LBJ's retort to some staffer who told him to stop repeating this rumor was that he knew it to be untrue, but wanted his opponent to have to deny it all the same.
The New Yorker Magazine, I believe, did a story based on people who knew LBJ from back home. He wasn't exactly loved by the home folks, his father was a bully and so was LBJ.
For me, it was unforgivable turning away from JFK's plan to get out of Nam, instead bombing the hell of the area and killing many more. Oh, and sweeping JFK's assassination under the carpet.
Bergholt Stuttley, aka Bloody Stupid was a prolific inventor. If memory serves, his character was inspired by several Rube-Goldbergesque figures, LBJ doesn't appear to be in the mix.
>Upon moving in, the president immediately let it be known how unhappy he was with the water pressure and temperature of his shower. Johnson summoned a solicitous workman to meet him “right now” as he had a pressing problem to discuss. “If you can’t get that shower fixed,” he sternly warned, “I’m going to move back to the Elms,” (Johnson’s Washington DC mansion). Then he walked away.
>It turned out that the Elms had a shower faucet like nothing the staff had ever seen. Water from multiple nozzles sprayed out in every direction with needle-like intensity and astonishing force. One nozzle was directed at Johnson’s most private part. He called it “Jumbo.” Another, to his delight, shot straight at his back side. This, he demanded, is what he wanted in his White House bathroom … a shower head with the intensity of a fire hose. Additionally he wanted a temperature gauge that would immediately change the water from hot to cold. Never just warm.
>Teams of plumbers then went to not only the Elms, but also to the Johnson Texas ranch to study the showers. There they found the hot water was nearly scalding.
So yes, LBJ did have a reference shower that was studied.
Go spend a few years in the military in any country, I promise this won't be that surprising of a "tax dollars at work" story.
In the US military, if you want to keep your budget, you have to spend your budget. If you spend less than your budget, your budget will shrink because you don't need it. So, you have some very strong incentives to spend as much money as you possibly can without going over your budget, otherwise the next year you might actually need that money but not have the budget for it.
I'll let you use your imagination on what kinds of things were purchased (because they probably were if they were available to be purchased and the unit was under budget that year).
Many corporations work like this also. First time I experienced this was some 15 years ago or so when a client (a brand owned by Kraft Foods) reached out and said they had x amount of money and needed a project to spend it on, lest they'd lose that money in next year's budget. So we got to work for 2-3 months on a project that was never planned. Can't recall what happened to it, but it was rather fun. I've only experienced it once or twice since, but hear about it happening all the time right around this time of year.
When I was doing freelance training a company asked me how much it would be for a week's C++ course for X people, and when I told them they said that wasn't high enough. Yep, budget spend time. So I asked them, theoretically of course, how much they were expecting to pay (and then said that I was prepared to accept that figure, but only this once ;-)
Fortunately Kraft were later bought by 3G, a fund notorious for zero based budgeting, meaning instead of rolling forward budgets you start from zero every year and have to defend every item.
One of those things that are widely true, but rarely admitted to. It seems to be very much a maturity thing. The older,larger and more governed an org is, the more likely such a pattern is.
Habits become precedents. Precedents become rules. A pattern emerges is everyone operates within rules. Staying within the ruleset, represents known safety. Even if something is dubious.. as long as it's within the rule set you are safe.
Is shaky principle tentatively applied once.. it doesn't have that kind of safety. That means it's less likely to be stretched and made absurd.
There is a logic to trimming unused budgets. not perfect, but it wouldn't surprise me if it worked well enough, often enough. If a department keeps going over budget, well.. they need more budget.. or maybe less work. Where is that budget going to come from? Departments without enough budget.
It's hard to get more legible, than last year's expenditure as the starting point for the next years budget. Nothing very notable about birthing this "principle."
I'm sure it makes sense, often. At least in the sense that it's the easiest, good enough method.
If there's a new management, using old methods is helpful. They don't know enough.. and this just gets the job done. If budgets become contentious, sticking to "principles" helps smooth things.
That is the point though.. whether it's a big-hype management method like agile.. or some unofficial budgetary principle that happened to work before these are principles. We like to be principled, especially when we don't really know what to do.
There's a literary trope of a bone casting seer. It takes a wise person to cast bones. It's an art and science. Sure, you have to know what all the bones mean. But, you also have to figure out it's a good idea to fight to fight this particular battle, build a town in that particular place... And also to understand the role bone casting plays in this particular case.
Bones must be cast, because we like external validation. It helps to bring everyone together, and calms underconfident, overwhelmed, or underunited leadership.
Knowing when to cast them, why, all the different implications.. how to define the question, how to approach the answer.. those are jobs for the seer, not the bones themselves.
Things are better when soldiers watch the stones, and chieftains watch the seer. If and when that flips, the paradigm is not at its best.
My first computer was in the 1980s, bought for my Dad by Shell so he could work from home, despite not having any work that could be done remotely. His manager had a huge stationery budget.
It seems so perverse to a layman, so why is it apparently so widespread? Are there contexts in which it's the best system (ie. better than any reasonable alternative)?
You are a manager over two departments. A has 1 million left, B has 1 million deficit. What do you do? Easy answer: Move 1 million of A's budget to B!
It isn't more complicated than that, it is very hard to motivate not reducing A's budget in that case. It does create perverse incentives, but at the same time what are you supposed to do as a manager in that situation?
Well, to meet an in-year shortfall it makes sense to move the money around.
But the implication seems to be that underspending departments are "punished" with a smaller budget in subsequent years. I would naively hope a good manager would ask for a justification of the spending of both departments, and allocate the forward budget according to reasonably-evidenced projections of value for money based on the organisation's priorities or goals. Perhaps the answer is that that is just too hard, or even more prone to being gamed.
having worked in various coporations i have seen these requests indeed: "where can we burn budget otherwise we get less next year"
but i have never seen budget cuts on this basis actually happening and i wonder how much of it is an urban legend that gets passed and ends up fueling inflation
I guess it never happens because the incentives are so strong not to let it happen. I had a boss who told me he would be in humongous trouble with his boards if he didn’t spend it all.
One of my most frustrating wasteful experiences was being “under” on the amount of M16 blanks we’d fired in training exercises. So, we loaded up magazine after magazine and fired them off, often on full auto (though the blanks would sometimes misfire on full auto).
The frustrating part wasn’t pointlessly dusting off training ammo; it was cleaning the weapon afterwards. The blank fire adapter that was needed to create the back pressure to cycle the weapon meant that none of the gunpowder residue left the barrel behind a round (as there wasn’t one), so all that residue was waiting for us at the barracks.
I don’t recall if we had to turn in the spent brass or just attest that it was fired during training. (I was an 18-year-old officer candidate being told to fire them off, not in charge.)
We would just ask the supply sergeant to "lose" them for someone else to "find" later (ammo would be the exception, for obvious reasons). I always loved taking over another unit in a war zone. We'd open containers and "find" all kinds of neat things no longer on the books: routers, switches, km's of networking cable, office supplies, etc.
Hearsay, but I think the done thing is to bury rounds somewhere still in their cans. I occasionally see people complaining about it online when one government department or another buys up a couple dozen million rounds.
I shared an office with a workforce training company. They said their big time is the end of the year as that's when departments in big companies realize in horror that they have unspent budget. Some of the more expensive and useless courses practically didn't sell at any other time of the year.
I've seen this happen when working in digital agencies towards the end of the tax year. Clients would reach out with budgets for projects purely because they wanted to spend the money on something so they could justify the budget for next year.
There was this legend in the French army that starting mid-November they would have lines and lines of trucks running around every base to burn the petrol before the next year. Not sure if it was true but it could be.
Another explanation besides budget would be that fuel has an expiration date; regular petrol 3-6 months, diesel up to a year, after which it becomes gummy. It can be extended a bit with a stabilizer though.
But yeah, I can imagine militaries have a huge challenge stockpiling fuel without it expiring.
Just a priori this does not seem very likely to me. If you have budget that needs spending, it is key to spend it inconspicuously because as soon as a higher-up finds out that you are just wasting it to maintain your yearly allocation, they will still conclude that you need less next year (and that perhaps you ought to be fired.)
You can order a training exercise that burns up a massive amount of fuel. You just have to make it seem plausible enough to only be considered incompetent, not malicious.
"driver training" -- "Yeah, I know it looks like they are just driving in circles, we almost had an accident from someone driving in a circle so we are practicing."
The only way to avoid this is to somehow let the employees share in any efficiency savings. But that comes with problems of its own, and is anyway incredibly ideologically unpopular.
It's a principal-agent problem. Imagine there is $100,000 in front of you. You are absolutely forbidden from taking any of it. However, if you set it on fire, and write a short memo inventing a plausible justification for doing this, your working life will be easier over the next year. A lot of people would do that with only very minor guilt.
From the employer perspective: there's no magic way to find out whether spending is "good" or not. You can add process and reviewers to check. But that also costs money, and slows down all the actual work. That's how you end up spending $1000 of staff time to have a meeting to approve purchasing a pen.
There is no justification except fear of not having enough money. The issue is whether you can meet your peak budget. If you can get by with $x * 0.80 most of the time, but every once in a while you really, really need the full $x then you spend $x/year. Because, if you don't, that extra $x * 0.20 will be cut (possibly even more). This leads to an increasingly tight budget (or it's feared at least) so it's "better" to be wasteful.
The filing out your buget so it doesn't get cut part is understandable. What makes less sense is cutting the max budget based on use wihout leaving any overhead to account for unexpected expenses. Why does that seem so common when it makes the incentives so obviously misaligned?
Except you are completely disregarding the obvious outcome: others wasting money to not have their buget cut. And the alternative could be even worse: departments running out of money and imploding because of unexpected costs without any budget headroom.
The point is not that investing the company's money wisely doesn't make sense but that looking hat how much each department used and then basing the next budget on that alone is the opposite of wise because those departments are run by humans that will be looking out for themselves first.
The justification is spending money more efficiently, which becomes even more important if you're a government entity and thus "your" money is actually other people's money gathered by taxation.
Put more bluntly, you cannot convince your bean counters to give you money you didn't spend, because if you didn't spend the money you didn't need it regardless your arguments for wanting/needing a seemingly extraneous budget.
Of course, this leads to the incentive of spending your entire budget no matter heaven or hell so you maintain your budget next year which can lead to actually wasting money rather than saving it.
One thing that people often don't get about spending. Agencies are supposed to actually spend the money they were allocated. If they don't that raises very uncomfortable questions. It's maybe worse than spending too much. Where you can come up with all sorts of BS to justify that. Not spending your budget is harder to justify.
This is a big reason I became disillusioned very quickly with US federal contracting and have distanced myself firmly from anything to do with it for the past several years. To a contractor the idea of saving the taxpayer money by accomplishing the contract goals early and/or under-budget is ludicrous — I was told in so many words by my management “the contract allows for up to X option years for a total of up to Y dollars, and we intend to get as many of those years and dollars as we can up to the full value, not leave them lying on the table. And our customer wants the same thing, because they need to fully spend their allocated budget.”
Basically large parts of US federal contracting run indistinguishably from a make-work program for contract firms and the COTRs and other contract-management staff working with them. It’s a major reason I’m certain that “modern IT” efforts like 18F or USDS or “groundbreaking” reforms like FITARA will never be allowed to amount to much (absent a Truman-style “integrate the military and I don’t give a shit what anyone thinks about it” mandate) — there’s too much money and too many staff wrapped up in the way things currently work, which is how they’ve worked longer than most of the people now in the system have been alive. None of the modernization or reforms will ever be completely terminated or repealed, because they’re too useful to point to as evidence that “see, we are aware of the problem and we are doing something about it”. Just as long as “something” never has any significant long-term impact on anybody’s budget, allocated FTEs, or revenue.
> if you want to keep your budget, you have to spend your budget
I don't understand why organizations haven't cottoned on to a rollover model instead. If you have unspent budget, you not only get the same budget the following year but also 10% of the surplus, subject to approval. And in subsequent years, increase the proportion of surplus you can tap. After all, you've clearly shown you can be trusted to spend company money honestly.
Yeah, I can confirm this. The people I know who are in the army told me that they just use all of their ammo and petrol at the end, to ensure that they get the same amounts and budget next time.
Is it in any way possible then and to what extent is it feasible to legislate that you must spend LESS than your budget or they'll make you cry even harder by taking away MORE money ;)
Why does that matter? The process of budgeting is the same in public and private organizations, including the unpredictable elements that result in overestimation and padding. The source of funding doesn't affect that. Federal government expenditures are only indirectly related to tax revenues in any case.
It matters because if it happens to a private organisation that does not affect the average Joe. It's when it happens to governmental organisations that it matters because it means increased taxes and/or decreased useful public services.
It does affect the average Joe, because Joe is buying the products or services the private organisation creates. If Walmart, to pick a random example, has this phenomenon and spends extra money wastefully at the end of their financial cycle, that would mean that every product Walmart sells has to cost a bit more to pay for that, and Joe's monthly grocery bill goes up.
Unlike other commentators, I wouldn’t draw any conclusions about the presidency or the US from LBJ other than that sometimes very weird people win positions of power and proceed to do very weird things with that power.