It's April 22, 2022. Today is Earth Day. It's also Friday, the day of the week when I pass along a quotation intended to be uplifting or educational. Today's words of enlightenment come from Lady Bird Johnson, whose 1960s-era national beautification project set the stage for the creation of Earth Day in the first April of the 1970s.
The former first lady's words come from a thoughtful speech at a restive Yale University campus in early October 1967.
By the autumn of 1967, visits by Lyndon Johnson -- or, it turned out, even the first lady -- to a major college campus would be viewed by students through the prism of the Vietnam War. Mrs. Johnson did not travel to Yale to defend her husband's foreign policy, but instead to discuss her signature issue, which was described in terms ranging from "highway beautification" to "conservation." Today, we would describe Lady Bird Johnson as a nature-loving environmentalist, which is certainly how she saw herself.
Arriving at Yale, she found a tense atmosphere which would require all her energy to penetrate. In her White House diary, Mrs. Johnson paints a picturesque New England scene of lunch in a roadside park along the road to New Haven. Pulling into the campus house of Yale president Kingman Brewster, however, she saw another sight: Student protesters had assembled with hostile placards. "Tell LBJ Withdraw Now!" and "Stop Beautifying North Vietnam."
She and her aides were escorted to Dr. Brewster's back porch where, despite the famed educator's outward cordiality, Mrs. Johnson got the distinct impression "that my presence here really was an imposition on him."
One can understand why. Vietnam was roiling Yale, and most major college campuses in the United States. One student, George Pataki, was remembered years later by his classmates precisely for defending LBJ and the war. "I bring him up," writer Charles McGrath noted in an essay when fellow Yalie George W. Bush was running for president, "because the Vietnam War was so much a part of our lives then and Pataki was one of the few supporters of the war."
"In my experience, especially during my senior year, the war was almost a full-time preoccupation," McGrath added. "We argued about it day and night. There was, first of all, the enormous question of whether the war was justified. (Most people on campus thought not, which is why Pataki was such an odd, almost heroic figure.) And then there was the almost equally pressing issue of what you were going to do about it -- because, good or bad, this war happened to be extremely inconvenient. We had fellowships to enjoy, law school or med school or business school to attend -- we had lives to live! And so we endlessly debated our options. Should we burn our draft cards, as we were openly urged to do by Yale's chaplain? Should we flee to Canada? What about the faked illness or insanity ploys?"
So, this was the mindset on campus when Lady Bird Johnson arrived to speak. Outside the hall, protestors' shouts ("Peace Now!" and "Hell No, We Won't Go!") formed Gregorian chant-like background music. Demonstrators were inside the building, too, but shouting down speakers wasn't yet a regular feature of American higher education, so those inside employed a silent vigil.
"If anything," Mrs. Johnson related, "It only added to the sense of adrenalin in my blood and the determination to make the best speech I was capable of."
After an introduction by Dr. Brewster that Mrs. Johnson described as generous and eloquent, ("He compared me to Mrs. Roosevelt, which I did not deserve"), Lady Bird took the floor. She talked from the heart about the issue she cared most about in hopes of forging a common purpose with her audience.
I spoke as directly as I could -- looking into the eyes of one young man and then the next and the next as I said to them, "If you are in the sciences, I hope you will apply their order to the environment. If you are in business or economics, I hope you will include beauty as part of the cost of doing business. If you are in the arts, I hope you express the insight in the environment around you, for the environment, after all, is where we all meet, where we all have a mutual interest. It is one thing that all of us share. It is not only a mirror of ourselves, but a focusing lens on what we can become."
And that's our quote of the week.
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics. Reach him on Twitter @CarlCannon.
