CHAPTER 14

The Great Society: In Ascent

IN EARLY DECEMBER 1963, less than two weeks after John F. Kennedy was buried, presidential press secretary Pierre Salinger placed a telephone call to Rowland Evans. “Rowly,” he said, “you should know that things have changed, and you better get used it. You used to have a pipeline over here, but you don’t anymore.”

That was not the good-natured “Lucky Pierre” whom Rowly and I knew as a Kennedy aide. Salinger later confirmed our assumption that his call was on orders of President Johnson, who had retained Salinger as his press secretary. Salinger sounded so stilted that Rowly was sure Pierre was reading from a script (in future years called “talking points”).

Salinger complained in his own name, not Johnson’s, about the Evans & Novak column of December 6 in which I reported “a typically Johnsonian attempt to embrace all of President Kennedy’s liberal economic programs while maintaining an exterior conservative enough to keep the business community happy.”

Johnson had assured liberal economist Walter Heller, the column continued, that he not only would be retained as chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers but that LBJ would push Heller’s brainchild, the massive Kennedy across-the-board tax cut. (In those days slashing income taxes was considered liberal rather than conservative.) I also wrote that Johnson had told Heller and the rest of the JFK economic team that “he never had been afraid of high federal spending for a good cause.”

We reported less than we knew. Heller gave Rowly what the economic adviser called “highly confidential notes” of his meeting with Johnson at the White House on Saturday night, November 23, the night after the assassination. The notes quoted the new president as saying:

I want to say something about all this talk that I’m a conservative who is likely to go back to the Eisenhower ways or give in to the economy bloc in Congress. It’s not so, and I want you to tell your friends—[Arthur] Schlesinger, [John Kenneth] Galbraith and other liberals that it is not so…. If you looked at my record, you would know that. I am a Roosevelt New Dealer. As a matter of fact, to tell the truth, John F. Kennedy was a little too conservative to suit my taste.

A few days later, Johnson met with his old friend, Wall Street financier and fellow Texan Robert Anderson. In the column, I described Anderson as “the high priest of balanced budgets and hard money” while serving as Secretary of the Treasury during Eisenhower’s second term. Anderson spread the word around town that Johnson had told him the free-and-easy spending days of the liberal Kennedy gang were over.

Which was the authentic LBJ, the Walter Heller liberal or the Bob Anderson conservative? Both, I think.

Read forty years later, my column does not seem particularly tough on Johnson. But Salinger later told us Johnson was infuriated. LBJ detested this kind of analysis, and complained that Evans & Novak never had taken Jack Kennedy through this wringer (and, indeed, we had not).

I think Johnson’s misuse of Salinger—and not just in this case—may have stemmed from his desire to push around Kennedy aides who he felt had treated him with disrespect when he was vice president. I am sure that the telephone call to Rowly had less to do with the substance of the offending column than the delight in having a Kennedy aide tell a Kennedy intimate that his day at the White House was done.

         

WHEN THE Evans & Novak column started in May 1963, Rowly asked the vice president’s office whether Johnson could see us. We got no response. Then, late on a Friday afternoon in September, Rowly was called at about five o’clock by one of the vice president’s secretaries to tell him he would see us immediately. “He’s waiting for you,” we were told.

That resulted in a poor decision on our part. We were running late that Friday on two columns due for Monday and Tuesday, and a predictable long session with Johnson would make us hours late. So Rowly called the vice president’s office to say, politely of course, that we were on deadline and, very sorry, but we just could not get up to the Hill right now, adding we sure would like a rain check (that never came). We learned Lyndon regarded our performance as a coldly calculated snub. In truth, it betrayed stupidity and, yes, a little arrogance by us.

Two weeks before the assassination, I wrote a rare column about the vice president—one that did not make him happy. It came about because of a conversation I had with a Texas pal of Geraldine’s, Larry L. King, the future playwright and novelist.

King was a liberal and no Johnson fan. But he had to make a living and was working as an aide to the LBJ protégé Congressman Jim Wright. King told me Johnson was secretly imploring Wright to run against liberal senator Ralph Yarborough in the 1964 Texas Democratic primary and promised him all-out money support. That displeased President Kennedy, who did not want an attempted purge of the one senator from the old Confederacy who solidly supported New Frontier legislation.

It was a terrific story, but King was worried that the Wright angle—which was its big exclusive nugget—would be traced to him. Larry asked whether I could get to Texas any time soon and write the column with a Texas dateline so that it would seem my sources were there. By coincidence, Geraldine and I were ending my three-week reporting trip to Latin America in October 1963 by visiting her parents in Hillsboro, Texas. King was delighted and soon presented me with an “Evans & Novak column” entitled “Johnson vs. Kennedy” and carrying a Hillsboro dateline.

I informed Larry that we did not use ghostwritten columns, but thanked him for the help. I did borrow heavily from King’s draft while rewriting it, retaining the “Johnson vs. Kennedy” title and changing the dateline from Hillsboro to Dallas, where our plane from Mexico City would land. The column, published November 8, described “a blood feud between Johnson and Yarborough that transcends ideology.” LBJ hated publication of intraparty feuds involving him, but what really antagonized him was publication of his secret overture to Wright. The messy political situation in Texas prompted Kennedy’s late November visit to Texas. (Once he became president, Johnson shifted completely and successfully prevented any primary challenge of Yarborough.)

         

BY THE TIME Lyndon Johnson entered the White House, his relations with Rowly and me had reached a low. Robert Kintner, the former NBC News president, was an old friend of Johnson’s who came into the White House to advise him on news media relations. Kintner advised the president that there was no point feuding with Evans & Novak. He talked Johnson into inviting Evans (not me) into the Oval Office for a chat.

It was just Johnson, Evans, and Kintner—no aides, no stenographer—for an unhurried conversation. It failed. Rowly told me Lyndon was in his “Ah-ain’t-gonna-tell-you-nothin’ mood,” and as arrogant as he could be. The meeting was not repeated. Neither Evans nor I ever sat down with Lyndon again during the five years of his presidency.

I did experience one social contact with him when I received an invitation for Geraldine and me from the White House for a black-tie state dinner on June 30, 1964, honoring Costa Rica’s President Francisco Orlich. Johnson kept a pretty close tab on who got such favors, but I don’t think he was courting me. I guessed some of Geraldine’s old pals on the president’s secretarial staff decided she ought to get a taste of the high life.

As usual, I had a little too much to drink, and as a nondancer joked and gossiped with Congressman Charles Weltner of Georgia, who was exiting from elective politics in his state by supporting Johnson’s civil rights bill (and going on to a long career on the Georgia Supreme Court). Weltner and I, both fortified by drink, thought it hilarious that the president’s younger daughter, then seventeen years old, had just changed the spelling of her name from Lucy to Luci. We both decided the way to pronounce her new name was Loo-si, with a ridiculously heavy emphasis on the second syllable.

As a cocky thirty-three-year-old nationally syndicated columnist, I thought this would be the first of many White House state dinners that I would attend. It wasn’t. It was the last.

President Johnson did not like the critically analytical tone of our columns, but his real problem with us was Rowly’s intimacy with LBJ’s archenemy Robert F. Kennedy. Not until more than three decades later when Bobby’s papers were unsealed and Lyndon’s surreptitious White House tapes were released was it realized how much these two strongmen despised each other.

Johnson envisioned a cabal of socially prominent journalists aligned with Bobby Kennedy trying to sink his presidency from the start, and he regarded Evans as a co-conspirator. I was only Rowly’s accomplice. I did not realize how adamantly Johnson viewed us as foot soldiers in Bobby’s army and did not realize how close Rowly was to the attorney general. I did not know Rowly was part of the “Hickory Hill Gang”: administration officials, politicians, and journalists, plus their wives, who gathered at Hickory Hill, Bobby’s estate across the Potomac in Virginia. I did not even know such a gang existed.

Rowly’s oral histories reveal tidbits about Bobby that did not find their way into our column and that he never confided to me. However, Evans & Novak columns, under careful inspection today, betray no bias in the LBJ versus RFK death struggle.

         

EVANS DID NOT need the Johnson-inspired telephone call from Pierre Salinger to understand that his White House connections would soon be gone, because the tenure there of his old Kennedy friends would be short. Rowly took it as a challenge to penetrate the Johnson inner circle. He had a candidate: Bill D. Moyers. In the week after the assassination, he invited Moyers and his wife, Judith, to “supper” on Friday night, November 29, at the elegant Evans home in Georgetown, with the Novaks the only other guests.

Moyers arrived in Washington early in 1960 as a twenty-five-year-old Baptist minister and new staffer for Majority Leader Johnson. By the time of the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles that summer, Moyers was indispensable to LBJ. After the election, Moyers became deputy director of the only significant Kennedy addition to government, the Peace Corps. Moyers happened to be in Texas on November 22, 1963, and returned with Johnson to the White House—to stay there as a senior aide, never returning to the Peace Corps.

Rowly considered Moyers as more approachable than Horace Busby, Jack Valenti, and the even more stereotypical Texans who soon joined Johnson. Behind his boyish appearance, Billy Don Moyers was fiercely ambitious, shrewd, and occasionally duplicitous. He was our best LBJ source, and I believe the best LBJ source for many other reporters.

Rowly began predinner cocktails by asking Bill and Judith where they lived. When he learned their home was in an unfashionable Virginia suburb, he told them that “you must move to town.” By “town,” Rowly did not mean Capitol Hill, where Geraldine and I lived, but one of the socially upscale neighborhoods, such as Georgetown. “It makes it so much easier to get around,” Rowly explained. What he meant was that it would be easier for Moyers to get on the dinner circuit that Evans traveled.

I sat in admiring silence at Rowly’s audacity. The purpose of the dinner party was to inject Evans (and me) into a new White House power structure where we had no foothold. Now Rowly had turned this on its head by offering Moyers and his wife entrée into Washington’s special social circle. He made it appear that he was doing Bill a favor, instead of the other way around.

Moyers carried his own agenda to O Street. He could not wait to enter the Evans dining room for the meal before he sent his message. When he did, Rowly and I exchanged excited glances. The rest of the evening was informative and entertaining, but I was anxious for Moyers to leave so that Rowly and I could exchange notes on what he had told us.

We had already written and teletyped to New York our columns for Monday and Tuesday. That Friday night we decided that Moyers’s information was so important that we had better come into the National Press Building Saturday morning to write a new Monday column. I wrote the first draft, and Evans did the rewriting and heavy editing. The title for the new December 2 column was “Shriver for V.P.”:

The leading prospect for the Vice-Presidential nomination in President Johnson’s own mind is Sargent Shriver, President Kennedy’s brother-in-law and Director at the Peace Corps….

[A]t this early date, Shriver is the President’s first choice….

As a relative but not a blood-relative of the murdered President, Shriver would bring the Kennedy glamour and vote appeal to the ticket without opening the way to charges of dynasty building.

Evans and I were certain Moyers would not dare accept Rowly’s dinner invitation without Johnson’s approval. We were equally certain the Shriver message came straight from Lyndon. If our column seems recklessly unequivocal in identifying “the President’s first choice,” it was because his messenger to us was so unequivocal.

We interpreted this as a trial balloon by Johnson, and we were willing to hoist it without caveats about the defects of a Johnson-Shriver ticket (as we surely would have done in the years to come). Our balloon was promptly shot down by Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley. Robert Sargent Shriver had been conscripted into the family business when he married Eunice Kennedy and was sent to Chicago to run Joe Kennedy’s Merchandise Mart. He was not part of the Daley Machine, and the mayor was not going to tolerate a non-Daley Chicagoan on the national ticket.

So why did Johnson authorize Moyers to inform Evans and Novak, as I am sure he did, that Shriver was his “first choice” when surely he had Senator Hubert Humphrey in mind from the start? Partly to provoke Bobby, using both his brother-in-law and a personal friend, Rowly, to do so. But I also am convinced that the ersatz Shriver trial balloon was intended to send Robert F. Kennedy a clear message: Under no conditions will you be my running mate. Although that was Johnson’s clear determination, Kennedy did not fully grasp its finality for months to come.

         

ON THE SECOND day of the 1964 Democratic National Convention at Atlantic City, the Evans & Novak column of August 25 was titled: “The South in Space.” Under an Atlantic City dateline, it began:

As Lyndon Johnson’s Southern loyalists gather here for the Democratic National Convention, they have one lethal weapon to save Dixie from Barry Goldwater: the old Federal pork barrel, with some space-age trimmings.

One shrewd Southern Democrat puts it this way:

“These bright young Republican boys think they can shout nigger, nigger, nigger and run all over us. Well, they’re going to learn there are other things the South cares about.”

The “other things” are goodies from Uncle Sam, including some particularly valuable Federal pork from the moon shot program. Southern voters will be told incessantly from now to Nov. 3 that a vote for a budget-balancing, penny-pinching Goldwater administration would shut off the Federal spigots.

Noting that the South “swallowed the lion’s share” of federal expenditures for the Kennedy-Johnson program to put a man on the moon, the column itemized space spending in Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida. The conclusion was that “the fight for the South boils down to this question: What are Southerners most interested in, segregation or pork?” The way I wrote the column implied that the answer was “pork.”

For students of Washington cryptology, the “shrewd Southern Democrat” quoted in the column’s second paragraph was identified in the fourteenth paragraph. I wrote that space program dollars in the South “are going to be driven home with regularity this fall by Rep. Hale Boggs of New Orleans, House majority whip and a leading Southern loyalist.”

Thomas Hale Boggs Sr., then fifty years old, was a leading congressional power broker. In 1964, he already had spent twenty years in the House, had been elected to the third-ranking party position of majority whip at the early age of forty-eight, would move up a notch to become majority leader in 1971, and appeared certain to become Speaker of the House. (While Boggs campaigned for a colleague in Alaska in the autumn of 1972, the four-passenger plane carrying him was lost in that state’s trackless wastes.)

Boggs was the archetypal Southern Democratic “loyalist” of that era, still voting against civil rights legislation but dedicated to preserving the Solid South for the Democrats—preservation essential to the party’s perpetual majority in Congress. That was Boggs’s real goal on August 19, 1964, when he invited Rowly and me for a typical Capitol Hill luncheon of that era (whiskey highballs followed by steak and red wine). He handed us memos and tables showing how federal pork would throttle Goldwater in the Deep South. Boggs was close to LBJ and made clear he was giving us the president’s views.

Looking back I consider this column important in debunking the myth that Lyndon Johnson committed a noble sacrifice by passing major civil rights bills and assuring the right to vote to southern blacks at the cost of southern domination by Democrats. In truth Johnson and the southern Democratic establishment felt the end of segregation actually would liberate their region and their party from racial demagogues while remaining solidly Democratic because, as Boggs bluntly informed us, southerners were addicted to federal pork. Just as LBJ thought he could fight communism in Vietnam while building the Great Society at home, he envisioned civil rights attained without political upheaval.

         

SOON AFTER LBJ was elected in November 1964, I left with Geraldine on a four-week reporting survey to the Southern Cone of South America. The trip got off to a bad start on the Pan American Clipper’s famous overnight flight from New York to Rio de Janeiro. Geraldine became deathly ill, and lost her breakfast before we landed. Geraldine blamed her malady on eggs served by Pan Am, but she experienced continued nausea throughout our ten days in Brazil.

When we arrived in Buenos Aires, the aroma of the justly famous Argentine beef cooked on outdoor grills wafted through the air of the southern hemisphere summer as we rode to our hotel from the airport. I loved it, but it made Geraldine sick to her stomach. When we ordered steak in a Buenos Aires restaurant, Geraldine—normally an enthusiastic meat-eater—barely touched hers.

Geraldine finally told me she suspected she might be pregnant, which was promptly confirmed by a visit to an Argentine clinic. We were 5,218 miles from Washington at the most distant point of our month-long journey. Geraldine’s first pregnancy had ended in a miscarriage the previous year, and it seemed prudent for us to return home forthwith. But I had two weeks of scheduled appointments in three countries. Geraldine said we should stick it out on the road.

On the evening of the day we learned of the pregnancy, we had dinner with a friend of Geraldine’s from her days in Austin: Frank Manitzas, an Associated Press reporter in Texas who now worked in the AP’s Buenos Aires bureau. Manitzas had to cover a demonstration (manifestation) by a Peronista labor union in the Buenos Aires working-class district of Avellaneda. Often, he said, such demonstrations ended in violence—a sign of Argentina’s internal conflict that might be useful for me to observe as a columnist. I suggested to Geraldine that I go alone. She said she would rather go with us.

I chatted with several workers at Avellaneda. They detested their employers and their government, yearning for the return of exiled strongman Juan Domingo Peron. A hero to his country’s working class (the “Shirtless Ones”), Peron had forced extravagant wage increases that fueled Argentina’s economic miseries.

Shirtless Ones hoisting banners prepared to march that beautiful December evening when suddenly khaki-clad, well-armed police, some mounted, appeared a block away. In Caucasian Argentina, these police were of Indian stock and contrasted vividly with the all-white demonstrators. The demonstrators started marching. The police told them to halt. The demonstrators kept marching. The police opened fire with tear gas canisters—fired at point-blank range to do bodily damage. The demonstrators heaved large stones at the police. The police retaliated with water cannons. When the demonstrators threw more stones, saber-wielding mounted police launched a ragged cavalry charge. Geraldine and I were in the cross fire between tear gas and stones, pinned against a building. Was that any way to treat a pregnant lady? The little war was over in less than ten minutes.

In our next stop in Chile, Geraldine experienced morning sickness and a dinner hosted by local journalists at a Santiago restaurant proved too much for her. I ordered a Chilean mixed grill with goat’s meat, a pig’s innards, and other unspeakable items producing a heady aroma that sent Geraldine racing to the ladies’ room, never to return to the table.

The last South American country on our trip was Bolivia, the poorest on the continent, where Andean altitudes posed health challenges even for nonpregnant North Americans. La Paz, with an altitude of 11,913 feet is the world’s highest capital. U.S. embassy staffers met us at the airport with an oxygen tank, but could not prevent Geraldine from becoming sicker than at any previous stop.

The Bolivian doctor who came to our hotel room was a young, fair-skinned Caucasian (in the continent’s most heavily Indian country) who spoke flawless English and informed us he was a graduate of Harvard Medical School. He told us this was no place for a pregnant woman and Mrs. Novak had better leave La Paz on the next flight to save her baby. I told him I had important meetings here. Well then, he said, send Mrs. Novak down to the Peruvian capital of Lima immediately so that she could be near sea level while Mr. Novak finished his business in the mountains.

“Doctor,” I said, “I notice a lot of Bolivians in Bolivia. That means women are able to have babies in this country at this altitude.” “Mr. Novak,” he replied, “perhaps you also noticed the way our Indian women in Bolivia are built—all torso, very short legs—caused by natural selection during centuries in the Andes and enabling them to breathe in this thin air.” He glanced at my long-legged, willowy wife. “Obviously, Mrs. Novak is not built that way.”

I had a breakfast appointment two mornings later with the president of Bolivia, my only scheduled visit with a head of a state during the four-week trip. Air Force Major General Rene Barrientos had just seized power in a military coup, the familiar Latin American process that President Kennedy had labeled unacceptable. I was anxious to hear the new Bolivian military dictator’s views.

We had three options. First, cancel the appointment and leave immediately. Second, send Geraldine to Lima while I kept my date. Third, keep our schedule and pray no harm came to Geraldine and our unborn baby. I suggested the second option, but Geraldine insisted on staying with me in La Paz. Not for the first or last time, she was self-sacrificing and I was selfish.

Our first child, Zelda Jane Novak, was born August 2, 1965. She enjoyed a short but successful career as a political aide and journalist before becoming a wife and fabulous mother of four. She is a beautiful, intelligent, and feisty woman, whose personality I like to think was influenced by her prenatal travels through South America, a riot in Buenos Aires, and the thin air of the Bolivian Andes.

         

LYNDON JOHNSON WAS blessed with the biggest congressional majorities since 1936–37 thanks to the 1964 Goldwater election disaster. The president was intent on legislating the “Great Society” that he had promised during the campaign. In January 1965, Johnson called middle-level officials he had appointed into the Fish Room at the White House for a lecture. They included John Sweeney, federal co-chairman of the Appalachian Regional Commission, a Democratic political operative from Michigan who was my longtime friend. He kept careful notes that he gave to me but not for use in our column. LBJ began:

I have watched Congress from either the inside or the outside, man and boy, for forty years, and I’ve never seen a Congress that didn’t eventually take the measure of the President it was dealing with…. I was just elected President by the biggest popular margin in the history of the country, fifteen million votes. Just by the natural way people think and because Barry Goldwater scared hell out of them, I have already lost about two of these fifteen and am probably getting down to thirteen. If I get in any fight with Congress, I will lose another couple of million, and if I have to send any more of our boys into Vietnam, I may be down to eight million by the end of this summer.

So what should he do with his Great Society program? The LBJ answer: Pass it all now, before he lost all his public support.

At first, Johnson’s success dwarfed even FDR’s New Deal thirty years earlier, easily passing measures that had eluded Democrats for the two decades since the end of World War II: Medicare, federal aid to schools, black voting rights, and much more.

Bryce Harlow, the Republican wise man who had served in the Eisenhower White House and would be a Nixon aide, told me that Johnson was “stockpiling adversity” in cramming so much legislation down the throat of Congress. The “adversity” began September 29, 1965, when the House defeated home rule for the District of Columbia—just to repudiate LBJ. There was much worse ahead for Johnson, as racial turmoil and Vietnam loomed.