Many of you will live to see the day, perhaps 50 years from now, when there will be 400 million Americans four-fifths of them in urban areas. In the remainder of this century, urban population will double, city land will double, and we will have to build homes, highways, and facilities equal to all those built since this country was first settled. So in the next 40 years we must rebuild the entire urban United States. Aristotle said: “Men come together in cities in order to live, but they remain together in order to live the good life.” It is harder and harder to live the good life in American cities today. The catalog of ills is long: [T]here is the decay of the centers and the despoiling of the suburbs. There is not enough housing for our people or transportation for our traffic. Open land is vanishing and old landmarks are violated. Worst of all, expansion is eroding the precious and time honored values of community with neighbors and communion with nature. The loss of these values breeds loneliness and boredom and indifference.
—Lyndon Baines Johnson, Ann Arbor, “Remarks at the University of Michigan,” May 22, 1964
Traffic had stopped us on the usual route and we had detoured through Harlem, that much-talked-about district of New York. It looked like there had not been a trash collector in the vicinity for two months. It was the bleakest, grayest mass of concrete and bricks, refuse and crumpled papers. No sprig of grass or trees. I hate to think what I might grow to become if I lived there….I remembered the figure that this was the most concentrated area of population in the world. To look at it is to understand it better than you would from the newspapers.
—Lady Bird Johnson, White House diary, September 10, 1964
In the spring of 1964, while on the lecture circuit in Washington, Barbara Ward took up residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, sipped tea with Lady Bird, and dined with the presidential couple. A native of Yorkshire, England, the third-floor guest at the White House had studied as a teenager at the Sorbonne, in Paris, and in Germany before graduating from Oxford in 1935 with a degree in philosophy, politics, and economics. She then served as foreign editor for The Economist and organized Catholic anti-Nazi resistance during World War II. She became known as Lady Jackson after marrying Sir Robert Gillman Allen Jackson, an Australian civil servant and peripatetic administrator of large-scale technical assistance projects all over the developing world for the United Nations. In 1958, Ward became a visiting professor at Harvard and Radcliffe, where she collaborated with John Kenneth Galbraith, author of the seminal critique of American inequality, The Affluent Society, in his seminar on developing countries. From there, her relationships with American politicians blossomed: she considered herself an adviser and friend to JFK and shared an extensive correspondence with Adlai Stevenson, one that reveals a substantive intellectual bond over policy and politics.1 Ward became a regular on the D.C. speaking circuit, where her case for development assistance, her elaboration of nuclear strategy, and her advocacy on behalf of a trading model that would ultimately look much like the European Union were covered only in the “For and About Women” section of The Washington Post.
In 1962, Ward published her best-known work, The Rich Nations and the Poor Nations, in which, without coining the phrase, she identified the challenges of what came to be known as the North-South divide and also what today would be described as “megacities” in the global South. Ward argued that the concentration of populations in urban centers in the developing world had already begun to impose major stress on the use of resources—water, land, population, technology, and food.2 Having witnessed the positive impact after World War II of major foreign aid programs in rebuilding Western European cities, Ward argued for a similarly strong government role in America, a message that resonated with the Johnson White House. Over dinner with Ward and the First Lady, “Lyndon listened,” Bird recorded in April, “something he doesn’t always do, especially to women. But he is fascinated by her and so am I.”3 Referring often to Ward’s book as “the bible,” the president embraced her rallying cry. “It’s right here in one sentence,” he told Liz Carpenter. And quoting Ward, he read, “[T]he mission of our times is to eradicate the three enemies of mankind—poverty, disease, and ignorance.”4
Ward’s access to the Oval Office was unusual for a woman of her interests and training at the time: learned male policy wonks and wordsmiths were welcome, but it was not yet commonplace for women with Ward’s credentials to have the ear of an American president or of his advisers. But with Lady Bird’s encouragement, and White House aide Jack Valenti as her interlocutor, Ward played an informal role, drafting speeches and memos for the president—some solicited, some not—on civil rights; global finance; demographics; urban planning and suburban sprawl; India, Pakistan, and South Asian geopolitics; African postcolonial development challenges; foreign aid; peacekeeping; and Russian nuclear strategy. Although Ward was not a staff member, a man, or even an American, the First Lady had been right about her: Lyndon had indeed absorbed her ideas on urban renewal as he and his staff congealed around the concept of the Great Society to embody his domestic agenda. Valenti explained to Ward that
he has been using the term “the Great Society” to synthesize the themes you stated. He wants to seize the opportunity now to lay some hard foundations of the Johnson structure of imaginative and sensible government….But to repeat, he wants to build on the ideas of Barbara Ward’s—abolishing poverty, beautifying the land, giving medical assistance to the aged, giving jobs to the jobless, housing to the unsheltered, making available food to the unfed, assisting underdeveloped countries to find new pathways to prosperity, etc.—while at the same time keeping our defenses strong and our economy healthy.5
LBJ would echo many of these ideas for the American public in his Great Society speech in Ann Arbor: Ward was not the only influence on the speech—Richard Goodwin and Bill Moyers, LBJ’s aides; Tom Hayden, one of the founders of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS); and Michael Harrington, author of the 1962 book The Other America: Poverty in the United States, all could rightly claim to have shaped the president’s thinking or given words to the thoughts he would set forth that May.
Lady Bird didn’t attend Lyndon’s Ann Arbor commencement speech, but its emphasis on the nature of cities and its soaring rhetoric resonated with a First Lady who yearned to find that “love of her own”—a policy agenda that, as Liz Carpenter recalled, “wasn’t separate so much, but underlining the President’s dreams and goals and purposes.”6 The Great Society speech gave Bird an opening for an agenda she could own: the environment. Speaking to many graduates who would go on to work for his Great Society programs or against his war in Vietnam, or both, LBJ warned, “We have always prided ourselves on being not only America the strong and America the free, but America the beautiful. Today that beauty is in danger. The water we drink, the food we eat, the very air that we breathe, are threatened with pollution. Our parks are overcrowded, our seashores overburdened. Green fields and dense forests are disappearing.” Where once Americans worried about “the Ugly American,” the president now called on them to “prevent an ugly America.”7 Clean water, air, and food; affordable leisure amid natural beauty protected from deforestation, overfishing, and clear-cutting—these concepts formed the foundation of LBJ’s environmental agenda.
Ward also fundamentally shaped Lady Bird’s thinking about the role of government in exacerbating or alleviating poverty and inequality, and protecting the environment, in the American urban landscape. When traveling across the country, Lady Bird noted, “I find myself now whenever I go to a city looking to see what they have done in urban renewal”—by which she meant the increasingly controversial postwar boom in public housing and urban freeways that destroyed poor (and often brown or black) neighborhoods—“and looking at it either with a criticizing or approving eye, but certainly a more alive eye” thanks to Lady Jackson.8 Indeed, Ward’s ideas filtered into Lady Bird’s own speeches, at Radcliffe, at the YWCA in Cleveland, and in Detroit before the Home Economics Association. In Cleveland, Bird drew from Ward’s emphasis on the strain placed on the human spirit from urbanization, and she pointed to LBJ’s War on Poverty and the role of women in mitigating both. In Detroit, she somewhat subversively pressed the case for the whizzes of home economics seated before her to get out of their homes and become community activists. The goal she articulated of “[m]aking our cities clean, functional and beautiful” recognized the need for an alternative to the Metropolis-scaled, people-displacing, tower-in-plaza model envisioned by the modernist Le Corbusier and infamously implemented in Manhattan (by Robert Moses), in New Haven and, later, Boston (by Edward Logue), and in Washington.9 In the nation’s capital in the 1950s, albeit on a smaller scale, city planners (with Congress and the Supreme Court behind them) undertook to eliminate slums of considerably decrepit conditions, bulldozing streets, buildings, and landscapes and displacing residents and businesses in a five-hundred-acre sliver of Southwest Washington, D.C., south of the National Mall, along the Anacostia River.10 But those slums were also communities.
What sounded on the surface like a paean to middle-class domesticity, the phrase “clean, functional and beautiful” that the First Lady had often used actually hinted at a broad debate among the leading lights of American architecture, landscape design, and public policy in the 1960s.11 By then, some eight hundred American cities in nearly every state had used federal housing funds to finance new private and public housing. Few outcomes could be considered triumphs, or even modest successes, in engineering social, racial, and environmental harmony. But there was one private housing complex that replaced some of the demolished communities in Southwest Washington that did stand out as an exception for Washingtonians and for Lady Bird. River Park was a 1962 cooperative of townhouses and apartments sited on eleven acres of grass, greenery, and trees. Designed by the midcentury architect Charles Goodman, the space was marketed as “open-occupancy,” meaning desegregated, to attract both black and white families. Liberal Washingtonians like Lady Bird saw River Park as a successful outcome in the nation’s capital. Near the water, economically accessible, aesthetically pleasing, and somewhat funky, the modern three-story, barrel-roofed townhouses and window-filled apartment buildings had been constructed with public subsidies by private developers.12 She would return to its example when thinking about D.C. as a potential model for the rest of the country.
By 1964, the concentration of Americans living in cities had grown from just under 40 percent of the population in 1900 to over 70 percent. By 1965, one of every seventeen dwellings in American cities had been bulldozed to make way for new housing or new freeways under the new federal laws. Some two-thirds of the people displaced as a result were Americans of color, and of these, the majority moved not to better housing, but into conditions equally as bereft as the dwellings they had left, or worse. When the Johnsons moved into the White House, the racially disproportionate displacement in New York, New Haven, Boston, and San Francisco was being roundly condemned by voices as diverse as the novelist and critic James Baldwin and the conservatives in Commentary magazine.13 That so many of the communities most directly and negatively affected by massive urban renewal programs were black, poor, or often both added urgency to the intellectual and policy ferment of the time—and spoke directly to the necessity of LBJ’s civil rights agenda.
In addition to Ward’s tutorial on cities, Lady Bird was steeping herself in the thinking of urban policy critics and planners of the day. She mentions them often in her diary: of reading their work, studying staff memos about them, speaking of them in speeches, and working with many of them during her tenure in the White House. These included Lewis Mumford, critic and author of the 1961 bestseller The City in History, which topped the stack of books on the coffee table in the family’s sitting room; Louise Bush-Brown, founder of Philadelphia’s City Beautiful Movement; Victor Gruen, the Vienna-born architect and designer of the first American mall; Ian McHarg, Philadelphia-based landscape architect and author of the landmark Design with Nature; and Lawrence Halprin, a San Francisco landscape architect and author of the 1961 book Cities who designed and led the repurposing of Ghirardelli Square in Fisherman’s Wharf from abandoned chocolate factory to a mixed-use public and commercial space. Halprin, in particular, would strike a chord.
With different matters of emphasis, these architects and planners shared the belief that to bring a measure of functionality, beauty, and aesthetic and social peace to American cities, government (municipal, state, and federal) had to play a major role in urban planning, with funding, regulation, and services. As important, they agreed on one core lesson of the failure of postwar urban renewal: community participation in decisions affecting that most intimate of environments, the home, was essential. Because the relationship between the built and natural environment in American cities was inextricably linked to poverty, race, and class, trying to solve the urban crisis in America through architecture, landscape, or even the most constructive of criticism meant climbing a mountain of complexity. When the Johnsons moved into the White House, none of these individuals could know that in the First Lady they would find an open mind, a champion for the social content of their profession and the values they advocated, and a direct line to the president of the United States.14
Out of the ferment of debate over urban life, and with her interest in giving a White House platform to professional American women, one woman in particular caught Lady Bird’s eye. In 1961, Jane Jacobs, a self-taught architecture critic, had published her landmark The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which argues that American cities must reconcile the basic values of humanity and nature with the strain wrought by urban life. By 1964, Jacobs had become a superstar and a vocal opponent in New York of “master builder” Robert Moses. Her work stressed the organic choreography of the city and challenged the inflated perception of urban planner as God, capable of designing and building spaces that anticipated, resolved, and imposed upon city dwellers some omniscient understanding of their fundamental needs. Jacobs’s influential book praised the semi-anarchy of city life, the messiness and unpredictability of diverse, accidental communities, and offered a sharp critique of the meticulously designed aesthetic that had dominated many American cities, including Washington, D.C.
By Jacobs’s telling, Liz Carpenter called her one day and said, “Mrs. Johnson would really appreciate, honey, a nice, nine-minute talk on beautification” for one of the Doers Luncheons the First Lady had begun to convene.15 Jacobs was initially dismissive of the First Lady’s plans, associating them with Band-Aid flower planting to make poor people feel better about their dreadful living conditions. She expected an audience of garden lady beautifiers. She agreed to speak, but with a wider lens, telling feminist journalist Susan Brownmiller that her goal was to “talk sense to those women” and avoid the “inspirational stuff about tulips.”16 With the Doers gathered in the White House State Dining Room, the First Lady framed the discussion far more broadly than Jacobs had expected, with references to Thomas Jefferson, Carl Sandburg, and Walt Whitman. Lady Bird thought of herself as a country girl—she leaned more toward Jefferson’s concern about the city’s corrupting influence on the spirit than toward Whitman’s and certainly Jacobs’s embrace of cities’ chaotic, organic vitality. “The question now,” she raised in introducing Jacobs to her White House guests, “is how to keep size from smothering the individual into an impersonal and uncomfortable mold, and how to make a city beautiful. This is a question which writer, planner and citizen must answer. And one of the front-runners with the possible answer is Jane Jacobs, who is all three.”17
With both women delivering their remarks seated at their tables rather than from a lectern, to ease their shared discomfort with public speaking, the atmosphere lent itself to a more conversational give-and-take. Jacobs spoke to what she regarded as the downside of government meddling and spending to bring nature into cities.18 She argued for “the profound need we have for character, convenience, visual pleasure and vitality,” what she called, in the vernacular of her field, “amenity.”
This is an age when we talk more and more about city amenity and produce it less and less. Many outrages are committed in its name. Poor people, Negroes, and businesses on which many livelihoods depend are tossed out of their neighborhoods in the name of somebody’s idea of amenity. Here and there our cities are given a slick, artificial mask….The amenity of cities cannot possibly be planned or bought wholesale. It is so much more complicated and quicksilver than a choice between wall-to-wall pavement and wall-to-wall grass.19
The First Lady found in Jacobs a “forceful, articulate, salty[,] somewhat controversial speaker.”20 Having clocked several hours that spring over meals and tea and walks around the White House grounds absorbing Barbara Ward’s urgency about the ravages of urban renewal, Lady Bird found that her consciousness largely aligned with Jacobs’s analysis.21 What she found controversial in thinking about how to redress those recent wrongs was how strongly Jacobs objected to the allocation of massive municipal, state, or federal resources to those very ends.
The women the East Wing had assembled to listen to Jacobs—many of whom were journalists, writers, economists, or veterans of the New Deal—had lived, worked for, or documented the positive effects of public support for rural and urban poor, and they challenged Jacobs’s allergy to similar programs. While Jacobs had wrongly assumed the room would be filled with the garden club set, she was correct that her audience held a strong bias in favor of dealing with the failures of government-sponsored, midcentury urban renewal with more, albeit better, government programs, planning, and spending. Jacobs did advocate for jobs and job training for city residents to take care of their parks and gardens. But she warned that a “great unbalance has developed in cities between money for building things and money for running things,” meaning too much of the former and not enough of the latter.22 She cautioned Lady Bird’s guests about programs that would throw out “the good with the bad, the beautiful with the ugly, and the productive with the unproductive. We see,” she said, “the paradox of cities actually impoverishing themselves by capital improvements,” a phenomenon under way across the country and one caused in part by the requirement under the 1949 and 1954 federal housing laws that for every new unit constructed with federal dollars, one unit had to be destroyed.23 Lady Bird and Lyndon had spent their entire adult lives believing in the moral case for government intervention to advance human progress—from rural literacy and electrification programs in the 1930s to the legislation now in Congress for civil rights and economic opportunity at home and foreign aid abroad. Jacobs’s “salty” argument that when it came to cities, less could very well be more, may well have challenged their first principles about the fundamental role of government in the American social contract. But Jacobs’s counterintuitive logic in fact aligned with the values LBJ had recently articulated. Bringing the good life to American cities, the president said, distilling the argument, meant serving “not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community.”24
Race played a role in the women’s discussion as well: Were pretty parks and flower boxes really enough to redress the profound inequities faced by black communities in the housing projects of New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia? What to do about the lack of fair-market mortgage financing for black families? On the eve of the first race riots of the Johnson presidency, and as LBJ pushed his civil rights legislation through Congress, the gap between Jacobs and Lady Bird’s Washington policy pundit posse was not in fact so yawning. The very programs Jacobs did advocate (pilot efforts at community involvement in neighborhoods and the establishment of cultural and other institutions to address local needs) would emerge at the center of Lady Bird’s work in the District of Columbia, where beyond monuments, tourism, and the federal government lay one of the most segregated cities in the United States. But in the middle of 1964, not six months into Lady Bird Johnson’s White House tenure, the potential for the Great Society zeitgeist to resonate in residential Washington, D.C., remained inchoate.
Lady Bird soon found the institutional ally she needed in order to make headway on her budding interest in the quality of life in American cities and in environmental conservation more broadly. Of the ten members of JFK’s cabinet, only four would remain with Johnson throughout his tenure in the White House. One of them was Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall, Arizona native and member of an extensive Mormon family. In Lyndon Johnson’s Southwest Texas sensibilities, Udall had seen early on an opportunity to advance the process he began under JFK of land, water, and natural resource conservation and the establishment of new national parks.25 He would soon awaken to the prospect that another resource, the new president’s wife, was primed to become his partner in advancing his ambitious environmental policy agenda. On the Sunday before Jacobs’s White House talk, Secretary Udall and his wife, Lee, joined the Johnsons for church, lunch, and a swim. The Udalls piqued Lady Bird’s curiosity: they spoke in a “detached and respectful way” about the role of the Mormon Church in American life; about their family—“their grandparents were polygamists!”—and about their embrace of the American West and its national park system as a source of beauty, family recreation, and treasure to be preserved. With passage of the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, the federal government had become the primary arbiter of disputes over where to build national highways. While some resisted a blanket policy to avoid building them through parks, preserves, national monuments, or “historic shrines like the Frank Lloyd Wright House,” Bird summarized, the “young and imaginative Stewart Udall” made himself a strong advocate for such a ban and “a loud voice for preserving the wilderness, the national parks, the shrines, many of the jewels of America.”26 Washington residents since 1954, when Udall was first elected to the House of Representatives, Stew and Lee packed their six children and their sleeping bags into the station wagon every summer for trips to national parks out west and to the Pacific Ocean—as Tom, the eldest of the kids, recalled, to “look at the sea anemones and the starfish.”27 In a matter of months, he morphed from the formal “Secretary Udall” to the familiar “Stew” in Lady Bird’s diary entries.
Udall was an amateur naturalist, a devoted conservationist, an effective policy advocate, and a serious intellectual. As JFK’s secretary of the interior, he assembled a working group at the Department of the Interior offices to help him write a book setting forth the historical and practical underpinnings of and rationale for placing environmental conservation at the center of twentieth-century American public policy. At first, it was a group of one: twenty-seven-year-old Sharon Francis, a Washington-born Mount Holyoke College graduate who worked for the Wilderness Society. An accomplished and record-setting mountaineer herself, Francis would become an essential liaison for Udall and Lady Bird’s environmental partnership, for their work around the country, within the federal government, and in the District of Columbia. Later in the Johnson tenure, she would move into the East Wing and become the key point person for the First Lady’s extensive environmental portfolio.
The book the working group produced—whose authors, besides Udall and his team, came to include Pulitzer Prize–winning historian and novelist Wallace Stegner—was published in 1963 as The Quiet Crisis. For an American public just awakening to the “New Conservation” (as opposed to the early-twentieth-century version that emphasized land preservation as the core of conservation), the book provided a history of American land use and abuse, rural and urban, and of the rise of a conservation consciousness. Native Americans, Thomas Jefferson, Daniel Boone, Henry David Thoreau, Teddy Roosevelt, John Muir, and Frederick Law Olmsted—all make an appearance, along with the politicians, philanthropists, and activists in whose hands the future of conservation and the environment would then lie. Echoing Jacobs, Udall’s Quiet Crisis also sounded the alarm about the destruction of urban life in the name of progress; about the blow to mental health from the lack of affordable housing and natural beauty in American cities; and about the “explosive pressure of expansion” from highways, cars, and traffic in and out of suburbia. It also helped further legitimize the criticism of the perils of DDT first leveled by Rachel Carson in her pathbreaking book Silent Spring, published in 1962.28 Written in language invoking the contrast between “natural beauty” and the specter of a future in which “ugliness” defined the American urban and rural landscape, Udall’s overarching message was that the “New Conservation” would not come about as an accident or afterthought, but required planning, a critical eye on the temptations of technology, responsible management of natural resources, coordination between business and government, and public support. In producing the book, Udall sought to push back against the political backlash brewing in his own and neighboring western states against federal involvement in national stewardship over parks and other natural resources.
During the first half of 1964, Udall sent LBJ a progressively urgent stream of memos on legislation and resource management, attempting to draw the West Wing’s eye to the intersection between politics and the environment. During this same period, the White House created fifteen task forces on various public policy issues, including on environmental pollution, urban problems, and the preservation of natural beauty. With LBJ focused on passing civil rights legislation, and thus unlikely to put his time into conservation before the November election, Udall began to press for Lady Bird, whose campaign chops were widely known, to travel with him across the country as Lyndon’s surrogate. Throughout the Johnsons’ tenure, Lady Bird and Stew would take several trips in support of the White House’s environmental agenda—from Wyoming, Montana, and Utah to Big Bend and coastal California. Flying, driving, and rafting together created a bond of friendship and mutual interest that neither anticipated in early 1964, but that also began to pay dividends in raising the public’s environmental consciousness as they paired the power of their offices to advance the Johnson environmental agenda.