Why “Selma” Is More Than

Fair to L.B.J.
By Amy Davidson Sorkin January 22, 2015

There is a scene in “To Kill a Mockingbird,” an otherwise

outstanding film, that has not aged as well as it might
have. It comes just after Atticus Finch, played by Gregory
Peck, has seen his client, a black sharecropper named
Tom Robinson, unjustly convicted of rape, despite Finch’s
impassioned defense, and he is left to pack up his
papers. The main, whites-only section of the courtroom
has emptied out, but the people in the “colored balcony”
are still seated, all in a posture of weary resignation. Little
Jean Louise Finch, or Scout, has snuck up there, too, to
watch. Then, as her father turns to go, the black
spectators slowly rise. An older man, Reverend Sykes,
played by William Walker, nudges Scout:

Miss Jean Louise? Miss Jean Louise, stand up! Your

father’s passing.

The reverend says it without anger; his expression, on

which the camera lingers, is one of sadness redeemed by
awe at Atticus Finch’s courage. Peck later said that, when
Walker delivered the “your father’s passing” line, “he
wrapped up the Academy Award for me.” (Peck won for
Best Actor; Walker was not listed in the film’s credits.) For
Scout, it is a moment of revelation. She glimpses what
the scene suggests is the essential transaction of the
civil-rights struggle: black Americans’ bestowal of loving
gratitude on sympathetic white Americans who are willing
to recognize their rights.

There is no scene like that one in “Selma,” the new film

about a voting-rights campaign in Alabama in early 1965,
during which three protesters were murdered, dozens
more were badly beaten, and Martin Luther King, Jr., and
other black leaders were imprisoned. Perhaps that
cinematic absence helps to explain why, in certain circles,
“Selma” has been greeted with outrage. The complaint is
that the film is unfair to Lyndon B. Johnson—that it is a
scandal, an insult, a lie. Joseph Califano, a former
Johnson aide, in a particularly furious attack in the
Washington Post, asked if the film’s director, Ava
DuVernay, and her colleagues felt “free to fill the screen
with falsehoods, immune from any responsibility to the
dead.” Califano wrote that “The movie should be ruled
out this Christmas and during the ensuing awards
season.” And, despite nominations for Best Picture and
Best Song, neither DuVernay nor David Oyelowo, whose
performance as King is an act of utter alchemy, are up for
an Academy Award. (My colleague Richard Brody wrote
that he had considered a nomination for Oyelowo “a well-
deserved lock.”)

Califano’s charge, in short, is that the film

 falsely portrays President Lyndon B. Johnson as being
at odds with Martin Luther King Jr. and even using the
FBI to discredit him, as only reluctantly behind the
Voting Rights Act of 1965 and as opposed to the
Selma march itself.

In fact, Selma was LBJ’s idea, he considered the

Voting Rights Act his greatest legislative achievement,
he viewed King as an essential partner in getting it
enacted—and he didn’t use the FBI to disparage him.

Califano, though, misrepresents “Selma” the movie and

Selma the history. The movie does not, for example,
portray L.B.J. as “only reluctantly behind” the Voting
Rights Act, which would indeed be a gross distortion.
(See Robert Caro’s work for the best analysis of
Johnson’s stealthy passion for the cause of equality.) It
does portray him as disagreeing with King about the
timing of the bill—which, to be fair, he did. On other
points, though, Califano is simply rewriting history.

How, one might ask, was the Selma campaign, whose

origins within the civil-rights movement are well
documented, “LBJ’s idea”? Exhibit A, for Califano, is the
transcript of a phone call between L.B.J. and King on
January 15, 1965. The conversation, Califano claims,
shows that it was Johnson who revealed the importance
of voting rights to King (“There’s not going to be anything
though, Doctor, as effective as all of them voting”);
“articulated the strategy” for him; explained that it would
be helpful to “find the worst condition that you run into in
Alabama, Mississippi or Louisiana or South Carolina”; and
then “seal[ed] the deal” with a final exhortation about
how much they could accomplish. King, in Califano’s
telling, then hurried off to fulfill this brief, and returned,
like a dutiful messenger, with Selma.

There are problems with this account, both textual and

contextual. The transcript does not match the story
Califano tells—not unless one is deaf, as he and his
former boss may well have been, to what King was
actually saying. Did it embarrass Califano at all, when he
played the recording, to notice how often Johnson
interrupted King, or talked over and past him? For that
matter, did it occur to either of them that King, in 1965,
two years after his “I Have a Dream” speech—where he
shared the stage with the widow of Herbert Lee, who had
been murdered for his efforts to register voters—might
have been well aware of the importance of voting rights,
and might have been able to “articulate a strategy” for
Johnson? It would be hard to find a purer example of
what might be called POTUS-splaining.

And then there is the context. In “At Canaan’s Edge:

America in the King Years,” Taylor Branch writes about
the same phone call, and where it fits in the relationship
between King and Johnson. “Johnson in the White House
was intensely personal but unpredictable—treating King
variously to a Texas bear hug of shared dreams or a
towering, wounded snit.” In an earlier call, just after John
F. Kennedy’s assassination, L.B.J. had told King “how
worthy I’m going to try to be of all your hopes.” But then,
Branch writes,

Johnson had turned suddenly coy and insecure.

Having consciously alienated the century-old
segregationist base of his Democratic Party, he
refused to see King, pretended he had nothing to do
with his own nominating convention, and lashed out
privately at both King’s Negroes and white
Southerners.

“Just as suddenly,” according to Branch, came the

January 15th phone call, in which “Johnson had rushed
past King’s congratulations to confide a crowning
ambition to win the right for Negroes to vote…. King, on
his heels, had mumbled approval. He did not mention that
he was headed to Selma for that very purpose—knowing
that Johnson would not welcome his tactics of street
protest.” In other words, at the time of the conversation in
which Johnson, in Califano’s telling, came up with the
“idea” for Selma, King was already on his way to the city;
other organizers were already there. Soon afterward,
Branch writes, “Johnson’s mood had turned prickly
again,” and, in a subsequent meeting, “he insisted on his
prerogative to choose the content and moment for any
voting rights bill.” (Karen Tumulty, citing Branch in a piece
on the controversy in the Post, writes that he “has his
own film project in the works,” and had declined to
comment.) As Louis Menand wrote in The New Yorker
last year, “He asked King to wait.”

Other critics of “Selma” have been offended by the idea

that Johnson wanted King, and a voting-rights bill, to wait
in line behind the President’s other legislative priorities.
But that’s exactly what the historical record shows,
including the January 15th transcript. In it, Johnson tells
King that he wants his “people” to lobby “those
committee members that come from urban areas that are
friendly to you” in support of Medicare and Johnson’s
education and poverty bills. Those were the priorities;
they needed to get through without any filibuster. After
those bills are passed, Johnson says, “then we’ve got to
come up with the qualification of voters.” It was the
protesters’ attempts to cross the Edmund Pettus bridge
that changed Johnson’s timetable. Their first attempt
ended with a brutal assault by local law enforcement—
Bloody Sunday. The White House sent John Doar, an
official in the Justice Department (who had earned the
protesters’ trust), to try to talk King out of making the
second attempt, urging him to abide by a federal
injunction blocking the march. (This is the legal mess
behind the exquisitely filmed moment in “Selma” when
Oyelowo, as King, leads protesters to the middle of the
bridge, only to turn them back.) It is ahistorical to insist
that a film show how civil-rights leaders ought to have
experienced Johnson, given his fine intentions, and not
how they did. There is no question that Johnson was
deeply, viscerally committed to civil rights—no question
historically, and, again, no question in “Selma.” It is also
the case that the White House waited several days after
Bloody Sunday before making an official statement about
the violence, and that it did not, in that interim, respond
to urgent requests for federal protection, including sit-ins
at Administration offices. Sending in federal marshals or
troops, at that point, might have been politically risky; it
might have played into the hands of segregationists. One
way or another, by the time either of those things
happened, another man, a minister from Boston, was
dead, and Johnson had set his staff scrambling to write a
draft of a speech, and to assemble a voting-rights bill
that he’d send to Congress sooner than he had planned.

The next source of offense is the film’s suggestion that

Johnson at least abetted J. Edgar Hoover, the director of
the F.B.I., in his vicious campaign against King. Perhaps it
is fair to give Johnson a pass when it comes to Hoover’s
dealings; Hoover may have technically worked for him,
but he was Hoover. At the same time, a recording of
another phone call between Johnson and Nicholas
Katzenbach, his attorney general, makes it clear that
Johnson knew that Hoover was tapping King—“that must
be where the evidence comes from … with some of the
women, and that kind of stuff.” Katzenbach tells the
President that the King wiretap was one that his
predecessor, Robert Kennedy, had authorized, and
“which I’ve been ambivalent about taking off.” DuVernay
artificially, and somewhat clumsily, crams a decade’s
worth of murkiness into the narrow time frame of the
Selma campaign. The character most compromised,
though, is not Johnson but King. The film is fairly
merciless when it comes to his infidelities, which harmed
both his family and his work. “Selma” is neither a
demonization nor a hagiography of either man.

Reading Branch’s account of that period, it is revealing

how distracted Johnson was by Vietnam. In the days
when the scenes of violence in Alabama should have
been his focus, he was in endless meetings with Robert
McNamara about a secret order to begin a bombing
campaign. “It was this crisis that had shortened his
patience for King’s visit from Selma,” Branch writes.
There is not much mention of Vietnam in “Selma”; in this,
the filmmakers did Johnson a kindness.

Indeed, after hearing all of the pro-L.B.J. complaints

about the movie, it can be disorienting to watch scenes
like the one in which Johnson tells off George Wallace,
the Governor of Alabama, saying that he isn’t willing to go
down in history paired with “the likes of you.” The climax
of the film is Johnson’s address to Congress, in which he
stunned the chamber with the ambition of his legislative
plan, his invocation of America’s soul and its destiny, and
his use of what had been seen as a slogan of the streets:
“We shall overcome.” In DuVernay’s staging, there is no
doubt that Johnson means it, and that what he has just
done is epochal. Her film is fair to Johnson; the portrayal
is multifaceted and respectful, and fully cognizant of his
essential commitment to civil rights. What “Selma” is not,
though, is cartoonish or deferential. Is that, again, the
problem?

Maureen Dowd, in the Times, wrote about seeing the

movie “in a theater full of black teenagers,” and worriedly
noted that, in the scenes with L.B.J. and M.L.K., the
young people “bristled at the power dynamic between
the two men.” They would now see Johnson “through
DuVernay’s lens. And that’s a shame.” None of the teen-
agers would want to stand up as L.B.J. passed. Indeed,
there is no moment in “Selma” where King really thanks
Johnson or, Hollywood-style, puts his hand on his
shoulder and tells him, “You’re a good man.” If that’s
what the “Selma” critics crave, there are plenty of movies
that offer it. (There is almost such a scene in “Selma”—it
takes place between two black characters, King and John
Lewis, played by the excellent Stephan James).

At the time of Selma, Johnson was fifty-six years old.

King was thirty-six; he was thirty-nine when he was
murdered. Taylor Branch, describing the night of
Johnson’s “We Shall Overcome” speech, describes the
frantic, late revisions—“the pale aides who raced
between typewriters … a motorcade waiting to transport
him to the Capitol.” In the limousine, on the ride over,
Johnson read over some late changes to the text, which
included “words of disapproval” for protesters who,
among other things, “block public thoroughfares to
traffic,” Branch writes. “Changing his mind, Johnson
struck the latter paragraph to avoid the misimpression
that marginal annoyance reflected his true feeling.” A few
minutes later, speaking to Congress and a national
television audience, a Southern President said, “The real
hero of this struggle is the American Negro.”*

*Correction: An earlier version of this post misidentified

Lyndon Johnson as the first Southern President since the
Civil War.