The Armor of Achilles: Lyndon Johnson, Ajax, and the Tragedy of Deserving

There is a moment in the Iliad that tends to pass without much comment because Homer, in his characteristic way, presents it as a simple fact of the battlefield and moves on, and the moment is this: when Achilles is sulking in his tent, when the greatest warrior of the Greek camp has removed himself from the fighting out of wounded pride, the man who holds the line is Ajax. It is Ajax who carries the wounded Odysseus out of danger; Ajax who stands over the body of Patroclus and fights off the Trojans attempting to strip the corpse; Ajax who, in passage after passage of the middle books of the poem, does the grueling, unglamorous, absolutely essential work of keeping the Greek army from collapsing while the man who was supposed to be doing this work sits by the ships and plays his lyre. Homer tells us that Ajax was the greatest warrior in the Greek camp after Achilles, and the qualifier "after Achilles" is the hinge on which the entire tragedy turns, because Ajax was great enough to sustain the war and never great enough to transcend it, powerful enough to do the work and never luminous enough to receive the glory, and when the armor of Achilles was finally awarded after Achilles' death, it went to Odysseus, the clever one, the one with words, the one who could make a room full of men believe that eloquence and cunning mattered more than the blood and sweat and thankless constancy that had actually kept them alive.

Ajax went mad. Sophocles gives us the full arc of it in his play: the humiliation of losing the armor, the descent into a rage so total that Athena had to intervene and turn his fury toward a flock of sheep so that he would slaughter livestock rather than the Greek commanders who had wronged him, and then the awful clarity that follows, when the madness lifts and Ajax sees what he has done and understands that he has been made ridiculous, that the greatest warrior remaining in the camp has been reduced to a man standing in a field surrounded by dead animals, covered in blood that is not even human. It is at this point, in this unbearable lucidity, that Ajax kills himself, and Sophocles presents the suicide as something more complicated than despair; it is a refusal to continue existing in a world that has demonstrated, beyond any possibility of further argument, that deserving the thing is not the same as receiving it.

I have been thinking about this for months, in the particular way that one thinks about mythological parallels when the news keeps supplying fresh material for them, and what I keep arriving at, the figure who keeps resolving into focus when I hold the Ajax template up against the American political tradition, is Lyndon Baines Johnson.

The case for Johnson as Ajax begins with the work.

There is a tendency, especially among those who came of age during or after Vietnam, to treat Johnson as a kind of cautionary tale, a figure whose ambition outran his judgment and whose presidency collapsed under the weight of a war he could not win and could not abandon. This reading is not wrong, exactly, in the same way that a summary of the Ajax that focused exclusively on the madness and the suicide would not be wrong, exactly; it would merely be radically incomplete, missing the entire middle of the story in which Ajax was the indispensable man.

Johnson's legislative achievement, considered on its own terms and without the shadow of Vietnam falling across it, is staggering in a way that I think we have lost the ability to fully appreciate because the programs he created have become so thoroughly woven into the fabric of American life that we have forgotten they were not always there. Medicare. Medicaid. The Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Voting Rights Act of 1965. Federal aid to education. Head Start. The National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. The Immigration and Nationality Act that dismantled the racist quota system that had governed American immigration policy since the 1920s. The list continues well beyond what I have named here, and what is remarkable about it is the sheer velocity of the accomplishment; Johnson rammed through more consequential domestic legislation in less time than any president since the early Roosevelt, and he did it through a mastery of the legislative process so total, so granular in its understanding of which senator needed what and when and why, that Robert Caro has now spent the better part of his life writing about it and has not yet reached the end.

This is Ajax's work. This is the work of holding the line, of standing over the body, of doing the thing that has to be done in the way that it has to be done with a relentlessness that is more physical than intellectual, more endurance than inspiration. Johnson did not inspire the civil rights movement; the movement existed before him and would have continued without him, and the moral vision belonged to King and to Fannie Lou Hamer and to John Lewis and to the thousands of unnamed people who had bled for it in the years before Johnson ever turned his attention to it. What Johnson did was take the moral energy that the movement had generated and translate it, through an act of legislative violence so skilled and so ruthless that it still astonishes, into law. He knew where the votes were. He knew who could be persuaded and who could be threatened and who needed to be given something and who needed to have something taken away. He knew the rules of the Senate better than anyone alive, because he had been the most effective Senate Majority Leader in the history of the institution before he ever became vice president, and he used that knowledge with an intensity that left people around him physically exhausted and, in some cases, genuinely frightened.

This is what Ajax does. He does the work that nobody else can do, in conditions that nobody else could endure, and the work is essential and the work is real and the work saves lives, and yet somehow the work does not produce the thing that Ajax actually wants, which is to be recognized as what he is, to have the armor placed on his shoulders and to be seen, finally and publicly, as the man who deserved it.

Johnson wanted to be loved. I state this flatly because the sources are unanimous on the point and because the flatness of the statement is part of its meaning; there is something almost unbearable about a man of that much power wanting something that power cannot provide, and the wanting was so raw and so visible that it embarrassed people who witnessed it. Doris Kearns Goodwin, who knew him in his final years, describes a man who would call aides in the middle of the night to ask if they had seen a favorable news story, who tracked his approval ratings with the obsessiveness of an addict monitoring his supply, who needed constant reassurance that what he was doing was recognized, appreciated, valued, loved. The word keeps recurring in the accounts of people who worked with him and the word is always "love"; he wanted to be loved by the country in the way that Roosevelt had been loved, in the way that Kennedy had been loved, and the bitter knowledge that gnawed at him throughout his presidency was that he could do more than either of them, could accomplish more, could deliver more, and still not receive what they had received, because the thing they had and he did not was not competence or effectiveness or results; it was something else, something closer to grace, something that could not be earned through work no matter how prodigious the work was.

This is the armor of Achilles. The armor does not go to the man who did the most; it goes to the man who speaks the best, the man who presents the best, the man who embodies something that the audience wants to see in itself. Odysseus gets the armor because Odysseus can articulate what the armor means. Ajax carried the war on his shoulders and could not articulate what that carrying meant, could not translate his labor into a narrative that made the Greeks feel noble about themselves, and so the armor went to the man who could.

Kennedy is the Achilles of this analogy, and I want to be careful here, because the parallel is structural rather than moral; I am not making a claim about Kennedy's character, which was considerably more complicated than his public image suggested, and I am not making a claim about the relative merit of Kennedy and Johnson as presidents, which is a question that admits of multiple reasonable answers. What I am saying is that Kennedy occupied the Achilles position in the political mythology of the early 1960s: the young, beautiful, doomed warrior whose death transformed him into something larger than he had been in life and whose legacy became a kind of sacred object, an armor of reputation and symbolism that could be worn by a successor and would confer on that successor the legitimacy and love that Kennedy had possessed. Johnson understood this. He explicitly framed his early presidency as a continuation of Kennedy's work, invoked Kennedy's name in pushing the civil rights legislation that Kennedy had proposed and failed to pass, wore the Kennedy legacy like armor that did not quite fit a body shaped so differently from the one it had been made for.

And here is where the parallel begins to cut, because Ajax's tragedy is precisely the tragedy of the man who does the work that the dead hero left undone and receives no credit for it, or rather receives credit of a specific and insufficient kind; people acknowledged that Ajax had held the line, that he had carried the body, that he had done what needed doing, in the same way that historians acknowledge Johnson's legislative record and note its extraordinary scope, and yet acknowledgment is not love and recognition is not glory and the armor went to someone else.

Vietnam is the madness.

I want to be precise about this, because the easy version of the parallel is too easy and misses what I think is actually going on. The easy version would say that Johnson went mad with power, that Vietnam was an act of imperial hubris, that he was destroyed by his own arrogance. This is the reading that most of Johnson's critics advanced at the time and that has become something like the default interpretation, and it captures something real about the escalation, about the systematic deception of the American public, about the grotesque gap between what the administration was saying and what was actually happening on the ground. But it misses the specific texture of Johnson's relationship to the war, which was not the relationship of a man drunk on power; it was the relationship of a man trapped by his own understanding of what strength required.

Johnson did not want Vietnam. The tapes and the private conversations make this clear in a way that his public posture did not; he agonized over the escalation, understood that the war was likely unwinnable in any meaningful sense, foresaw with a clarity that now reads as almost prophetic that the war would consume his presidency and destroy the Great Society programs that he cared about infinitely more than he cared about Indochina. And he escalated anyway, because he believed, with a conviction rooted in the lessons he had drawn from Munich and from the fall of China and from the whole architecture of Cold War strategic thinking, that a president who allowed a country to fall to communism on his watch would be destroyed politically, that the right wing would do to him what it had done to Truman after China, and that everything he had built, every piece of legislation, every program, every element of the Great Society, would be swept away in the backlash.

This is what makes it a tragedy in the Sophoclean sense rather than merely a catastrophe in the colloquial sense. Ajax does not go mad because he is weak; he goes mad because he is strong in a way that the situation has rendered irrelevant, because the virtues that made him great, his endurance, his physicality, his refusal to yield, are precisely the virtues that destroy him when the contest shifts from the battlefield to the assembly. Johnson's strengths as a legislator, his relentlessness, his refusal to back down, his conviction that any problem could be solved through the application of sufficient pressure in the right places, were precisely the strengths that failed him in Vietnam, where the problem was not legislative and could not be solved through pressure and where relentlessness was indistinguishable from stubbornness and where the application of force produced nothing except the need for more force.

Sophocles understood that the most terrible form of destruction is the form that proceeds from a person's own virtues rather than from their vices, because virtue-driven destruction cannot be corrected through moral improvement; the thing that is destroying you is the same thing that made you worth watching in the first place, and to give it up would be to give up the self entirely. Ajax cannot stop being Ajax. He cannot become Odysseus, cannot learn to be clever and flexible and willing to retreat, because to become those things would be to become someone other than the man who held the line, and the man who held the line is the only self he has. Johnson could not stop being Johnson; could not withdraw from Vietnam without becoming, in his own mind, the man who lost a country; could not accept the failure of force because the application of force was the only method he knew, the method that had carried every fight he had ever won from the Senate cloakroom to the Oval Office, and to abandon it in Vietnam would have been to admit that the thing he was best at was no longer sufficient, which is to say it would have been to admit that he was Ajax in a contest that required Odysseus.

The slaughter of the sheep, in Sophocles, is the moment when the hero's strength turns inward and becomes self-destruction, when the rage that should have been directed at the real enemy is misdirected toward targets that cannot fight back and whose destruction accomplishes nothing except to make the hero ridiculous. I think about this when I read about the credibility gap, about the administration's systematic misrepresentation of the war's progress, about the body counts and the optimistic briefings and the ever-receding light at the end of the tunnel. The Vietnamese were not sheep; they were human beings dying in enormous numbers; and the analogy is not meant to diminish their suffering, which was real and which was monstrous. The analogy is about the structure of the misdirection, about a great man's strength being turned toward a purpose that it cannot accomplish, producing devastation that serves no one and that makes the man who ordered it, in the eyes of his own people, something other than what he was, something diminished and grotesque and impossible to take seriously as the figure he once was.

Johnson's withdrawal from the 1968 presidential race is the suicide of Ajax.

Again, I want to be precise. Johnson did not kill himself; he made a political decision; the parallel is structural and mythological, operating at the level of narrative meaning rather than literal correspondence. But the resonance is, I think, extraordinary, and it deepens the more closely you look at it. Ajax kills himself because he cannot live in a world that has demonstrated that deserving the thing is not the same as receiving it, that the armor goes to the eloquent and not to the strong, that the work of holding the line will be forgotten or taken for granted or attributed to others while the clever man walks away wearing the prize. And Johnson, in his announcement of March 31, 1968, withdrew from a race he might well have won because he could not bear to continue seeking the approval of a country that had decided it did not love him, that had looked at everything he had done and everything he had built and had judged him, finally, by the war rather than by the legislation, by the body counts rather than by the civil rights, by the credibility gap rather than by Medicare.

The speech itself has a quality that I can only describe as Ajacean, a kind of terrible dignity that comes from a man who knows he is ending himself, or ending the version of himself that mattered to him, and who is determined to do it on his own terms rather than allowing others to do it for him. "I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President." The sentence is plain and the plainness is the point; there is no eloquence in it, no Kennedyesque flourish, no soaring rhetoric that might redeem the moment through the beauty of its expression. It is Ajax falling on his sword, choosing the end over the diminishment, choosing silence over the humiliation of campaigning for the love of a country that has already decided to give its love elsewhere.

What followed confirmed the parallel. Robert Kennedy, the brother of the dead Achilles, entered the race and received the adulation, the ecstatic crowds, the sense of historical redemption, the feeling that the golden age might return; he was the armor of Achilles made flesh, the possibility that the Kennedy magic could be recovered and worn again. And then he too was killed, and the armor shattered, and what the Democrats were left with in 1968 was Hubert Humphrey, who was nobody's Ajax and nobody's Odysseus and who went down to defeat against Nixon in an election that felt, and still feels, like the closing of a door that Johnson's withdrawal had opened.

Johnson retired to his ranch and grew his hair long and smoked and ate in a way that his doctors told him would kill him and that did, in fact, kill him, on January 22, 1973, two days after Nixon's second inauguration, as though he had held on just long enough to see the full arc of what his withdrawal had produced and then let go. He was sixty-four years old. The Great Society programs were already under assault. The war continued for two more years after his death. The love he had wanted never came, and the work he had done, the holding of the line, the carrying of the body, the standing in the breach while the beautiful hero sulked and the clever hero schemed, was being slowly dismantled by the very political forces whose rise his withdrawal had made possible.

There is a passage near the end of Sophocles' Ajax that has stayed with me since I first read it as an undergraduate and that I have returned to repeatedly in thinking about Johnson, and it is the passage where Teucer, Ajax's half-brother, argues that Ajax deserves honorable burial despite his madness and his disgrace. The argument Teucer makes is simple and devastating: whatever Ajax became at the end, whatever the madness made of him, the work he did before the madness was real, and the Greeks are alive because of it, and to deny him burial is to deny the reality of the work that saved them.

This is, I think, the argument that history has been slowly and reluctantly making about Johnson for the past half-century. The madness was real. Vietnam was real. The destruction was real and the dishonesty was real and the suffering was immense and the moral reckoning is ongoing and will not be settled in my lifetime or perhaps in anyone's. And the work was also real. The Civil Rights Act was real. The Voting Rights Act was real. Medicare is real in the specific, tangible, daily sense that millions of Americans rely on it to see a doctor, to fill a prescription, to survive an illness that would have bankrupt them or killed them in the world before Johnson's legislation existed. The work of Ajax is real even after the madness, and the refusal to acknowledge it, the insistence on reducing Johnson to Vietnam and nothing else, is a version of the same injustice that the Greeks committed when they gave the armor to Odysseus: it denies the man who did the work the recognition that the work deserves, because the man who did it was not beautiful enough, not eloquent enough, not graceful enough to be loved.

Johnson knew this about himself. That is the unbearable part. He knew that he was Ajax, knew that the work would not be enough, knew that the country wanted Kennedy and got him instead, knew that the armor would never fit because it had been made for a different body, a different man, a different kind of hero. And he did the work anyway, with a ferocity that was indistinguishable from desperation, cramming legislation through Congress as though he could, by sheer volume of accomplishment, force the country to love him the way it had loved Kennedy, the way it would later love Reagan, the way it loves its Achilleses and its Odysseuses and never quite loves its Ajaxes, the ones who hold the line, the ones who carry the dead, the ones who do the work that saves the army and then watch the armor go to someone else.

Sophocles does not resolve the tragedy. Ajax dies. The burial is contested. The play ends with Teucer's argument prevailing, with Ajax granted the honor of a proper funeral, and this is presented as a kind of justice, a partial and inadequate justice that acknowledges the work without undoing the wrong that produced the madness. It is the best that the Greek dramatic tradition could offer, and it is the best that the American political tradition has offered Johnson: a slow, grudging, still-incomplete acknowledgment that the man who held the line deserved something more than what he received, even if the thing he deserved was never quite the thing he wanted, which was the armor, which was the love, which was the recognition that he was, in his own brutal and graceless and indispensable way, the greatest of them.