MARY GRABAR: Selma and the Sanctimony of Liberals: The film’s portrayal of LBJ has the left up in arms.

The historians quoted in articles praise Johnson. David Garrow was quoted in the New York Times and then re-quoted in the Post as insisting that Johnson fully supported the Selma march and as objecting to the depiction of Johnson ordering FBI surveillance tapes of King’s extramarital trysts. Naturally, responsibility for the surveillance is placed on LBJ’s predecessor President Kennedy, and even more so on FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. Garrow said, “If the movie suggests L.B.J. had anything to do with the tape, that’s truly vile and a real historical crime against L.B.J.”

Yet, in The FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr., Garrow reported on the delight Johnson took in listening to the surveillance tapes of King (whom Garrow approvingly presented as a radical and socialist). Garrow wrote, “When one aide attempted to defend King’s sincerity on the issue of [opposition to the Vietnam War], Johnson reportedly replied, ‘Goddamn it, if only you could hear what that hypocritical preacher does sexually.’” This is a milder term of abuse for King. Johnson was known for using the racial slur that is unprintable in our respectable publications or printable only with a trigger warning as was done in an MSNBC article.

That MSNBC article acknowledges that Johnson was “a reliable member of the Southern bloc, helping to stonewall civil rights legislation” for two decades, but gives Johnson a pass as a product of his times and does not charge him with political opportunism.

The response betrays a certain insecurity.