Who was more important, the president or the preacher?
WHO IS more responsible for all those New England Patriots touchdowns this season - Tom Brady or Randy Moss? To argue this question would strike many as silly. The answer, of course, is that both men, and other team members, played essential but unique roles in their team's success.
A similar and equally pointless question has emerged in the contest for the Democratic presidential nomination: In the long struggle for civil rights, who was more important, the preacher or the president?
That question surfaced last week when Senator Hillary Clinton seemed to suggest that Lyndon Johnson's impact on the passage of civil rights legislation was greater than that of Martin Luther King Jr. Democratic rival Barack Obama and some civil rights leaders have taken umbrage at her remarks, interepreting them as a denigration of King's role in the passage of the civil rights laws of the mid-1960s.
Clinton's point is nothing new. More than a half-century ago, the social philosopher Eric Hoffer observed that "the readying of the ground for a mass movement is done best by men whose chief claim to excellence is their skill in the use of the spoken or written word; that the hatching of an actual movement requires the temperament and the talents of the fanatic; and that the final consolidation of the movement is largely the work of practical men of action."
Does Clinton's contrast of King's idealism versus Johnson's effectiveness withstand historic scrutiny?
The answer is yes and no.
While clearly a powerful speaker, King was also a masterful politician. It was King who organized and led the Montgomery, Ala., bus boycott in 1955-56 that not only sparked the modern civil rights movement, but achieved real results: the desegregation of the city's transportation system.
The 1963 protests that King and others led in Birmingham, Ala., not only focused national attention on the plight of southern blacks - and forced Kennedy to finally offer a civil rights bill - but resulted in integrated lunch counters and more employment opportunities for blacks.
The violence sparked by King's march in Selma, Ala., in 1965 not only shocked the nation and shifted public sentiment toward voting rights; it forced Johnson to ask Congress for a voting rights bill long before he would have otherwise done so.
Yet, for all he did and for the many millions he inspired and persuaded, King's power was limited. He had the influence to start a movement, but little or no power to finish it. To quote Clinton, "it took a president." And, I might add, a Congress.
Even had King been elected president, or been given a seat in Congress, it is doubtful he would have been nearly as successful as Johnson, Senator Hubert Humphrey, and others who raised to adulthood the movement that King had fathered.
Speeches that inspire millions rarely involve discussion of compromise. Lofty rhetoric is rarely specific or policy oriented. Congressional speeches, of course, are full of such language. Perhaps this is why longtime members of Congress rarely get elected president and why, because he is new to Congress, Obama's language is so distinctly un-congressional.
But Congress is where the hard work of enacting laws gets done. And to enact the civil rights laws, it took men of considerable legislative and legal skills who were willing to abandon the podium for the backroom and negotiate, compromise, and argue over arcane provisions of law. Negotiating over the details is rarely the work of a charismatic leader. To a skilled legislator, it is the essence of the job.
"Your speeches are accomplishing nothing," Johnson told Humphrey when they served together in the Senate in the early 1950s. Humphrey, the eventual Senate floor manager of the 1964 civil rights act, said he quickly learned that "liberals were always out speaking while the conservatives were in[side] legislating."
Even someone of John F. Kennedy's impressive rhetorical skills found it impossible to persuade members of Congress to go along with his civil rights proposal. But for a wily, ruthless leader like Johnson (with Kennedy's martyrdom as his tailwind), passing the civil rights act was not so much a process of inspiration, but a passionate exercise in private persuasion, negotiation, and implementation.
Civil rights leaders and devotees to King's memory should not be offended when Johnson is given his due on civil rights. They each played a vital role.
What's true in football is also true in politics: While the momentum is usually created by the charismatic leader (the quarterback), more often than not it's a president and the legislator (the wide receiver or the running back) who gets the ball across the goal line.
Robert Mann is author of "When Freedom Would Triumph: The Civil Rights Struggle in Congress, 1954-1968." 