By David M. Shribman

What if President Joe Biden opened his upcoming State of the Union address this way:

On this Hill which was my home, I am stirred by old friendships.

Though total agreement between the executive and the Congress is impossible, total respect is important.

I am proud to be among my colleagues of the Congress whose legacy to their trust is their loyalty to their nation.

I am not unaware of the inner emotions of the new members of this body tonight.

Fifty-one years ago, I felt as you do now. You will soon learn that you are among men and women whose first love is their country, men and women who try each day to do as best they can what they believe is right. 

Would this opening change the country? There’s a slim chance that it might. Would this opening explain the country? There’s a big chance that it would. 

I’ve changed five of the 108 words above, all in the final paragraph. I’ve changed “28” years ago to “51,” and taken the word “men” and made it “men and women.” Otherwise, it’s an exact rendering of the opening of Lyndon B. Johnson’s State of the Union address to Congress 59 years ago.

A lot has changed since 1965. Those changes explain our politics. But some things have not changed. They explain what our politics might be.

The speech was written by Richard Goodwin, a master of the genre. Next month, his widow, the writer Doris Kearns Goodwin, will publish “An Unfinished Love Story,” an account of their marriage and a look at some of the work of her husband. In that volume, Goodwin examines that 1965 speech and says to her husband, then in his 80s, “What an unusual opening. Emotional, sentimental, so flagrantly flattering to the assembly.”

His reply is illuminating. “Of the many proposals Lyndon made during that speech, the most important was his marriage proposal to the Congress. He told me he wanted to make love to the Congress.”

Later, while shaping his 300 boxes of notes, drafts and reminiscences into a book, Goodwin reflected on her husband’s remarks:

“The full-blown courtship of Congress — an appeal deeper than partisanship, beyond camaraderie and nostalgia — was propelled by Johnson’s profound insight into the political process. It was his golden ticket to board an express train that would become known as the 89th Congress.”

These days, the 118th Congress is laboring in Washington. There are many profound differences that have taken form in the 29 Congresses since then. 

We live in a changed world today. When Johnson spoke, Winston Churchill and Malcolm X had not yet died. No one had made a spacewalk. Muhammad Ali had not yet knocked out Sonny Liston in a famous heavyweight boxing match in Lewiston, Maine. Pope Paul VI had not yet declared that Jews bore no responsibility for the death of Jesus Christ. All that would occur in the next several days and weeks.

The Vietnam War — hardly mentioned in the president’s address, an unusual omission — had not yet become controversial, though it was deadly, with the Operation Rolling Thunder bombing offensive of North Vietnam less than two months in the future.

But the speech, delivered while Biden was in his final semester at the University of Delaware and Donald Trump was a second-semester freshman at Fordham, still offers us some lessons. 

Johnson said the country’s task was “to establish a unity of purpose and interest among the many groups which make up the American community.” That work is unfinished.

The 36th president said that evening that “we were never meant to be an oasis of liberty and abundance in a worldwide desert of disappointed dreams,” arguing, “Our nation was created to help strike away the chains of ignorance and misery and tyranny wherever they keep man less than God means him to be.” That notion is part of the great debate of our time, nearly two-thirds of a century later.

But here is a passage that no one would consider uttering today, 116 years after Lyndon Johnson was born: 

“Most important of all, in this period, the United States has reemerged into the fullness of its self-confidence and purpose. No longer are we called upon to get America moving. We are moving. No longer do we doubt our strength or resolution. We are strong and we have proven our resolve.”

Today, we lack self-confidence and purpose. The country doesn’t seem to be moving, except in a very perilous direction. We doubt our strength and resolution. And the following notion, which Johnson shared with Ms. Goodwin as the two of them — the president and the recent graduate of Colby College enlisted to help him shape his memoirs — walked around the president’s ranch and had a look at his Hereford cattle:

“If it’s really going to work, the relationship between the president and the Congress has got to be almost incestuous. He’s got to know them even better than they know themselves.”

We’ve come a long way. Much of that journey — Vietnam deaths and protests, Watergate prosecutions followed by a presidential resignation and pardon, crises with Iran and Iraq, three presidential impeachments (plus a Cabinet one), a credibility gap that Johnson created and that Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton and Trump enlarged, a riot at the Capitol — has been difficult. 

But unless our leaders seek to lessen the gap between Americans rather than enlarge it, we face crises that no one listening to that 1965 speech could imagine. One sentence, aimed at a foreign audience rather than a domestic one, might light the way:

“If we are to live together in peace,” Johnson said, “we must come to know each other better.” His successor sought detente with the Soviet Union. Our own leaders need to seek detente amid our own people. As Johnson said in the opening of his address, “total respect is important.”

David M. Shribman is the former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.