The president's left hand

In response to those who paint Richard Nixon as a master of liberal domestic policy, Elizabeth Drew cites his approach to formation of the Environmental Protection Agency:

He’s given credit for signing into law several bills to improve the environment, including establishing the Environmental Protection Agency. But in fact, Nixon wasn’t very interested in the subject and he fobbed it off on his aides to handle, saying at one point: “Just keep me out of trouble on environmental issues.” He privately called the then-rising environmental movement “crap” for “clowns.” 

That jogged a memory.  according to Nick Kotz in Judgment Days: Lyndon Baines Johnson, Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Laws that Changed America, shortly after the Kennedy assassination, LBJ met with U.S. ambassador to Vietnam Henry Cabot Lodge and told him, "I am not going to lose Vietnam."  Afterward,

LBJ before Selma: wait -- no, go

After seeing Ava DuVernay' Selma a few weeks ago, I bought Nick Kotz's Judgment Days: Lyndon Baines Johnson, Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Laws that Changed America (2005). It's a digest of LBJ and King's interactions, beginning in fruitful if sometimes tense collaboration and ending in tragic enmity.  I can't say how central a source this book itself was for the movie, but the encounters it records indicate that those who claim that Johnson was more supportive of the voting rights campaign than their early encounter in the movie implies and those who claim that the scene is an accurate depiction of a pre-Selma encounter are both right.

LBJ and King had exquisitely attuned political antennae -- King with a genius for staging and calibrating confrontations to move public opinion, Johnson for how and when to move Congress. In the early stage of Johnson's presidency, sometimes their antennae were attuned, and sometimes they were in tension. Following his landslide reelection in November 1964, LBJ did ask King to ease up on the voting rights campaign so he could first get his antipoverty program passed. But within a few weeks, he began to think that the time might also be ripe for voting rights legislation, and he alternately tapped the gas and brake as the campaign gained momentum.

LBJ met King alone a week after King had been awarded the Nobel Prize, on December 18, 1964 -- less than three months before the first march on Selma on March 7, 1965 and LBJ's speech introducing the Voting Rights Act to a joint session of Congress on March 15. The upshot, as described in Judgment Days, is the basis of the LBJ-King White House meeting dramatized in Selma: