For inauguration zeal, LBJ '65 may be the precedent for Obama

WASHINGTON - Louise White Cashin, a young Democratic activist from Southern California, arrived in Washington on the eve of Lyndon B. Johnson's 1965 inauguration to find "just more black people than anyone would have been able to imagine together."

The scene reminded her of the March on Washington in August 1963 that culminated in Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech. Then, she had joined other African-Americans from around the country filling the National Mall to goad the capital to action on civil rights. When they lined up along Johnson's parade route a year and a half later, it was to express their personal gratitude.

"It was a totally different feeling. It was a feeling of 'Yes, we are on our way,' " said Cashin, who traveled to both events.

The 1.2 million spectators who mobbed Johnson's inauguration - still a record - are remembered today as little more than a trivia question and a crowd-control model. But as Barack Obama prepares to be sworn in Jan. 20 on Abraham Lincoln's Bible to inherit Franklin D. Roosevelt's economy - while facing inevitable comparisons to John F. Kennedy's style and Ronald Reagan's rhetoric - the 1965 event has begun to look like its own precedent: The only inaugural to compare to this one for sheer enthusiasm and participation by often-disaffected citizens.

Then, as now, triumphant Democrats - especially African-Americans who played crucial roles in both sweeping victories - came to Washington both to welcome a new president and to enshrine a new coalition many of them imagined could permanently realign American politics.

"It was an extraordinary moment for liberals: They had what they believed was a mandate for pretty sweeping change," said Thomas J. Sugrue, a University of Pennsylvania historian and author of "Sweet Land of Liberty," about northern civil-rights activism. "The expectation of an extraordinary presidency played into Johnson's hubris."

In political terms, Johnson's inauguration was anticlimactic. He had assumed office on a Dallas tarmac in November 1963 following Kennedy's assassination, and within months signed the Civil Rights Act, effectively abolishing Jim Crow laws and ending legal discrimination. In 1964, Johnson was elected to a full term with the largest share of the popular vote in modern history. Early the following January, he delivered a State of the Union address laying out his ambitious "Great Society" agenda.

"People viewed the federal government as a positive force in American society," said Randall B. Woods, a University of Arkansas historian and the author of the biography "LBJ: Architect of American Ambition." "That election and this election served as bookends to a long period of conservatism and distrust of the federal government."

Despite constant reminders of how Johnson had first ascended to the presidency - the Secret Service kept the president from traveling down Pennsylvania Avenue in a convertible - there was little melancholy in African-American communities preparing to celebrate their new mutual-loyalty pact with the Democratic Party.

"It was sort of an empowerment issue," said assistant US Senate historian Betty Koed. "Particularly in the Washington, D.C., area a lot of people turned out that didn't usually come to presidential inauguration ceremonies."

As King reminded Johnson in a phone call a week before the inauguration, blacks contributed to the scope of his unprecedented landslide, voting Democratic in near-unanimous numbers for the first time for president. "It would be this coalition of the Negro vote and the moderate whites that will really make the new South," King promised, to Johnson's assent, according to a transcript.

"The level of black enthusiasm for Lyndon Johnson was not comparable to Obama, but he was greatly appreciated for his commitment to civil rights," said Ofield Dukes, an administration aide who served on Johnson's inaugural committee. "Already in 1965, they felt he exceeded Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John Kennedy in terms of what he had done on civil rights. And that was really only the beginning."

In the black press nationwide, the inauguration was treated as a major social and cultural event. For weeks before the swearing-in, society columns covered the celebrities who would participate (jazz legends Lionel Hampton, Count Basie, and Louis Armstrong all performed at inaugural balls), and listed local elites planning to attend and even previewed some of the sheath dresses they would wear.

"Many colored citizens will view this as the beginning of his 'Great Society' in which they look to the president for action to bring closer to them the American promise of first class citizenship," The Afro-American in Baltimore ("You Know Because You Read the Afro") reported on its front page on the eve of Johnson's inauguration.

Unlike Kennedy, who had delivered a Cold War call to arms in his 1961 inaugural address, Johnson made hardly any mention of geopolitics. (The Soviet news agency TASS covered his 22-minute address in only 26 words.) Instead, he spoke about renewing the "American covenant" for liberty and justice while embracing "change," arguing for massive domestic reforms and a new era of civil rights, in both legal and moral terms.

"When any citizen denies his fellow, saying, 'His color is not mine,' or 'His beliefs are strange and different' - in that moment he betrays America," Johnson said, as civil rights figures Ralph Bunche and Marian Anderson looked on from VIP seats. (King spent the day in Selma, Ala. - where two days earlier he had been punched as part of a hotel-lobby melee - working to free dozens of civil-rights activists who had been arrested as part of a voting-rights drive.)

"Johnson was the king of the oversell - he had ambitions that far overreached the realities of the programs his administration was putting into place - but that gave him a real sense of buzz in 1965," said Sugrue.

Wearing a dinner jacket in place of his predecessors' white tie and tails, Johnson was reportedly the first president since George Washington to dance at his own inauguration. At one ball, he changed partners nine times in 13 minutes - and elsewhere he sought out a black couple on the dance floor. A photo of the encounter - Lady Bird dancing with a White House aide, Hobart Taylor, and Johnson dancing with the aide's wife, Lynette - appeared quickly in Jet magazine.

When, after visiting all five inaugural balls, the first couple retired for the night, Johnson offered a word of caution to his fellow partiers. "Don't stay up late," the president said, according to one biographer. "We're on our way to the Great Society."

Such a joyous sense of purpose was short-lived. Within two years, Johnson's liberal reforms had sputtered, leading Democrats to lose seats in the 1966 midterm elections. Two years after that, Alabama's former governor, George Wallace, a desegregation opponent who was booed on Johnson's inaugural parade route, ran a third-party campaign for president as the champion of working-class whites alienated by what they saw as the overreach of the Great Society.

"In some ways, it was the zenith of liberalism," Sugrue said of the inauguration. "Many liberals did not see looming on the horizon the growing backlash and discontentment within parts of the Democratic coalition."

Sasha Issenberg can be reached at sissenberg@globe.com.