CHAPTER 2

FUNDING THE GREAT SOCIETY AND THE WAR ON POVERTY

THE FIRST ITEM ON LBJ’S LEGISLATIVE AGENDA WAS AN $11 BILLION tax cut proposal he inherited from the Kennedy administration. Although popular memory of the 1950s sees the decade as bathed in prosperity, the economy Kennedy inherited from Eisenhower had obvious problems. There had been three recessions in Ike’s eight-year tenure (the last of which was still in progress when Kennedy took office), inflation had slowly but surely reared its ugly head, and annual growth rates had decreased significantly during the second half of the decade. For the Keynesian economists who had acted as an informal network of advisers for Kennedy’s presidential candidacy, the economy was suffering from persistent stagnation and chronic slack because it could no longer deliver full employment at the peak of the business cycle. That was the message Kennedy received from the trio of economists he appointed to his Council of Economic Advisers (CEA)—Walter Heller of the University of Minnesota as chair, James Tobin of Yale, and Kermit Gordon of Williams College.¹

Kennedy’s CEA economists had entered the academy during the Great Depression. They had absorbed Keynesian doctrine during their stint in graduate school and, like the famous Briton, considered economics a tool of public policy rather than just an academic discipline. John Maynard Keynes was a man much misunderstood in the United States, most often used by conservatives to discredit New Dealers specifically and liberals in general. He was portrayed as a rigid ideologue, a virtual socialist who would use big government to regulate every aspect of the economic life of a nation. Nothing could have been further from the truth. Though he started out firmly rooted within traditional, classical economics, Keynes moved away from it because of what he perceived to be its often erroneous economic assumptions and policies and its antisocial consequences. Laissez-faire theory would work only under conditions of full employment, but in a truly free, capitalist society there would always be unemployment. He devoted a good part of his time to proving that governmental acceptance of more responsibility for the smooth working of the economy could increase human freedom and choice.²

To combat the Great Depression, Keynes advocated countercyclical deficit spending, that is, during periods of recession the national government should stimulate the economy by funding public works and subsidizing business and agriculture. The temporary deficits that resulted over time would be eliminated by increased tax revenue from a recovered economy. FDR had reluctantly accepted countercyclical deficit spending but had rushed to restore a balanced budget in 1938. During World War II, the federal government had cast caution to the winds and run up huge deficits. The war economy demonstrated that the government could engage in planning, production, and consumption and that national debt could be used to finance economic expansion without bringing about the collapse of capitalism or creating runaway inflation, Keynesians argued.³ The conservative coalition and “classical economists” held sway beginning in 1946, however; Truman and Eisenhower, during his second term, would not go beyond the countercyclical model.

Heller and his colleagues wanted to transcend temporary stimuli to combat downturns and use the budgetary power of the federal government to maximize prosperity when the economy was not in recession. This was the essence of the “new economics.” Instead of responding to fluctuations in the business cycle, the members of Kennedy’s CEA sought the continuous expansion of productive output and the closing of the gap between productive output and the economy’s expanding potential. They estimated a performance gap of almost $50 billion between potential gross domestic product (GDP) at full employment and actual output in the economy that Kennedy inherited.⁴ “What we seek,” declared Heller, “is an increase in the total demand in the economy, a removal as it were of the fiscal drag on spending in the country.” The chief source of the fiscal drag was taxation—as the economy emerged from recession, its potential growth was hindered by the automatic rise of tax receipts that took away a growing portion of private income before the economy was operating at full employment. To the Kennedy economists, a tax cut would turn the fiscal drag into a fiscal dividend and would be a far more efficient, fast-acting stimulant than public-spending increases. In early 1961, therefore, they urged the president to propose a temporary personal income tax cut of $9.5 billion in the belief that this would deliver a further $20 billion in GDP growth.

For a number of reasons, JFK was initially resistant to a tax cut. There was the prevailing notion that unbalanced budgets inevitably led to inflation. A tax cut seemed to contradict the president’s inaugural call for sacrifice in the national interest. Strongly pro-business at the outset of his administration, JFK feared that an unbalanced budget would undermine business confidence and send the economy into a spiral.⁵ Over time, however, the president changed his mind. Heller and his colleagues proceeded to update his economic education and repair the damage from a major falling out with the business community. By the summer of 1962, JFK was publicly extolling the virtues of a tax cut. The administration introduced legislation to enact an across-the-board reduction, but it became entangled with various vested interests in the House Ways and Means Committee, and Kennedy was assassinated before Congress could act.

Heller was aboard a plane carrying various cabinet members to Japan when Kennedy was paying his ill-fated visit to Dallas. Upon hearing news of the assassination, the delegation immediately turned the aircraft around and headed back to Washington. When they landed at midnight, Heller went directly to his office where he and his lieutenants drafted a memo for LBJ on the tax cut and its projected impact on the budget. Tax relief was not needed, they argued, to prevent disaster or to rescue a nation poised for an economic tailspin. Rather, it was needed to prolong prosperity. The United States was entering its eleventh consecutive quarter of expansion. Wages were moving upward and prices appeared stable. Nevertheless, the unemployment rate stood at 5.5 percent, and the outmoded tax structure left over from the Korean War would eventually drag the economy down. If Congress passed the tax bill, it would produce an immediate $12 billion increase in the gross national product (GNP) and $30 billion the year following. The economic activity generated would so increase the tax base that revenues collected by the Treasury would actually increase rather than decrease.⁶

On November 25, LBJ met with the “Troika,” the economic team that Kennedy had relied on to develop policy—Heller, Secretary of the Treasury Douglas Dillon, and Budget Director Kermit Gordon—to discuss the tax bill and budgetary matters in general. The first thing Johnson did was to tell Heller to call off his liberal friends who were already proposing new or expanded programs that could be funded by tax revenues expected from a full-employment economy: “Tell them to lay off, Walter. Tell them to quit lobbying. I’m for them. I know they have good programs, and that the economy needs to have that money pumped in. I want an expanding economy. The budget should be $108 billion.” But an increase in expenditures would have to wait until 1965. Dillon, more conservative than Heller, had been talking with Senator Harry F. Byrd, the hoary-headed reactionary from Virginia who chaired the Finance Committee, and had told the president that the administration could not expect approval of a budget for fiscal year 1964 of more than $100.6 or $100.7 billion.⁷ The conservative coalition was not going to accept a tax cut without cuts in federal expenditures. It had flatly rejected Heller’s argument that the object of federal fiscal policy should be to balance the economy, not the budget. Johnson observed that if they expected to get the tax cut, the budget could not be a cent above $100 billion. If it is, he said, “You won’t pee one drop.” Dillon observed that they would have to pay the price for the tax bill, but “then when you have it, you can do what you want.” Right, said Johnson, “like Ike did—talked economy and then spent.”⁸

In the days that followed, LBJ met with leaders of organized labor and big business, lobbying for a tax cut. He closeted himself with individuals and groups. He telephoned Wall Street bankers and agribusinessmen. And he met almost continuously with Byrd. The Virginian remained adamantly opposed to a reduction in taxes. It would unbalance the budget and lead to economic and financial chaos, he protested. At the same time the president conferred with Budget Director Gordon. At first, Gordon recalled, he thought his mission was to get the budget down to $100 billion, which would not be difficult, but then Johnson began to press for more cuts. And more cuts. Farm programs suffered; so did education and space. Gordon and Heller became worried, concerned that they were dealing with a Herbert Hoover in Roosevelt clothing.

Orville Freeman, Kennedy’s liberal secretary of agriculture who had agreed to stay and serve LBJ, encountered Gordon at a January 1964 cocktail party and found him beaten down and depressed. They decided that they would have to have faith for the time being, but only for the time being. “I agreed,” Freeman wrote in his diary, “that if a year from now we were going through the same thing after a successful election, I for my part would be happy to go back to practicing law. He said he would be happy to go back to the University.”⁹

The president’s principal ally in his budget-cutting campaign was, surprisingly enough, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. In various meetings McNamara insisted that the United States possessed two-and-a-half to three times the number of missiles, submarines, and airplanes as the Soviets and that the Soviets would never catch up.¹⁰ With McNamara’s blessing, the president sent letters to seventy-five hundred defense contractors demanding economies and cost reductions. And, in fact, despite the fears of liberals, most of the reductions came in Defense ($1 billion), in Space ($600 million), and in Atomic Energy ($300 million).¹¹ “I am not going to produce atomic bombs as a WPA project,” LBJ declared.¹²

At the crucial moment, LBJ invited Byrd to a private luncheon at the White House. Jack Valenti remembers it as the only time LBJ ever ate in the small room off the Oval Office. Johnson “personally . . . supervised the setting and the menu.”¹³ If he could get the budget below $100 billion, would Byrd let the tax bill out of his committee? “We might be able to do some business,” the Virginian replied. Johnson subsequently called Byrd and told him that the administration would come in with a $97.9 billion budget. Byrd congratulated the president on his frugality: “I’m going to have to vote against the bill, [which he did both in committee and on the floor of the Senate] but I’ll be working for you behind the scenes.”¹⁴ As the dates for the decisive votes approached, Johnson pulled out all the stops, personally calling every congressional waverer. “It looks like to me that you are not being very wise in your southern strategy,” LBJ told Richard Russell, a member of the Senate Finance Committee. “It is not up to me to tell you how smart you are, for the son to tell the father. But looks like you and Harry Byrd and Albert Gore [D-TN] ought to let that damn tax bill come on out. . . . What you will do is you will have every businessman in the country messing with your civil rights.”¹⁵

Students of the Johnson presidency have speculated why the president proposed a $97.9 billion budget rather than the $100 billion that Byrd apparently would have been satisfied with. Competition with Kennedy, some said. Johnson noted in his memoirs, “A recent poll had indicated that the most unpopular aspect of the Kennedy administration was what the public considered fiscal irresponsibility. I knew that we had to turn that feeling around.”¹⁶ No doubt, Johnson was looking ahead to the 1964 presidential contest and was determined to prove to fiscal conservatives that they could trust him. Talking to George Brown, the Houston construction tycoon and LBJ supporter, after reaching the $97.9 billion figure, LBJ exulted that “Eisenhower and Oveta [Culp Hobby, publisher of the conservative Houston Post] are going to have to vote for me now.”¹⁷ LBJ believed that Bobby Kennedy would probably challenge him for the Democratic nomination. RFK might be able to attract the support of the left wing of the labor movement and liberal intellectuals. As had so often been the case in Texas politics, the business community, nominally Republican, might hold the balance of power.

LBJ spent his first six weeks in office courting big business, primarily by cultivating members of the Business Advisory Council, the private body established in 1933 to help ensure that the policies of federal agencies were acceptable to Wall Street and large manufacturers. In early January 1964 he had the entire membership—which included W. B. (Bev) Murphy of Campbell Soup Company, Albert Nickerson of Mobil Oil, and Frederick Kappel of AT&T—to the White House for dinner. “It’s the first time in our history,” one executive remarked, “that we’ve been invited to dine at the White House—it didn’t even happen under Ike.”¹⁸ At that dinner LBJ told his audience of executives that he was going to cut future federal spending far below the levels projected by the Kennedy administration. One by one, cabinet officers rose to tell the corporate leaders exactly where the cuts were going to be made.¹⁹ He also hinted at the moves he was going to make in the areas of civil rights, education, medical insurance, poverty, and area redevelopment. “President Johnson really gave the business guys the treatment,” Orville Freeman recalled approvingly in his diary.

            He emphasized more than anything else Civil Rights and told the story of his Negro cook. Later on in the week Bob McNamara said to me it was an amazing performance—then he kinda grinned and said, can you imagine John F. Kennedy telling these businessmen that the Negro cook had to stop along the road to relieve herself because there was no place to go to the bathroom, and yet he said, and he knew many of these people, that they were much more enthusiastic and much more convinced by Lyndon Johnson than they would have been by John Kennedy.²⁰

Addressing the five thousand delegates to the national Chambers of Commerce convention in May 1964, LBJ declared, “If you don’t remember anything else that I tell you here today, I want you to remember this: ‘If peaceful change is impossible . . . then a violent change is inevitable.’” He accused them of having “a martyr complex.” And he told them that they had a bigger stake than any other group in fighting poverty and ignorance. His talk was punctuated with waves of applause.²¹ “Your mixture of dedicated concern for the nation’s welfare and the welfare of human beings,” John T. Connor of Merck and Company subsequently cabled LBJ, “coupled with your realistic appraisal of the federal government’s fiscal responsibilities seemed just about right to me and many others with whom I talked. In spite of the difficulties ahead you will certainly receive strong support for your program in the business community.”²² “Understanding businessmen, their problems and their role in our economy,” editorialized the conservative Dallas Morning News, “he seeks their aid and support and treats them as valued partners in the task of building a better America.”²³

Economically, the tax cut of 1964 was a stroke of genius. Month after month, quarter after quarter, the major indices of growth moved upward. Gross national product rose from $569.7 billion in the first quarter of 1964 to $631.2 billion in the last quarter of 1965. Disposable personal income shot up from $423 billion in the first quarter of 1964 to $486.1 billion in the last three months of 1965. The number of poor families in America, defined as earning less than $3,000 per year in 1965 dollars, dropped from 8.5 million in 1963 to 8 million in 1965. The number of people out of work fell sharply from 4.1 million in January 1964 to 3.1 million in December 1965. Moreover, by the first half of 1965 government revenues had actually increased $7.5 billion over the last pre-tax-cut year. “If we continue to advance at a rate of 4.1% for the remainder of this decade,” the CEA reported to the president in April 1965, “our real output in 1970 will be 51% above 1960.”²⁴ It was a president’s dream—lower taxes and additional funds for new and existing domestic programs. The primary goal of the Kennedy-Johnson tax program was not ingratiation with the well-to-do, per se, but creation of the political and economic capital to fund measures of health, education, and welfare.

The prosperity created by the tax cut of 1964 would have a profound impact on Lyndon Johnson and his crusade to create an American Utopia. By 1964, John Kenneth Galbraith, who like Walter Heller was an interpreter and exponent of Keynesian thought, was hard at work on a new book, The New Industrial State. Taking up where he had left off in his The Affluent Society, Galbraith discussed the evolution of the modern corporation, demonstrating how in cooperation with government and labor, it had acted effectively to minimize risk, protect itself from the vagaries of the free market system, and ensure its survival. What had resulted was not stagnation but greater efficiency and productivity so that it had become possible to use the energies of the economy for nonindustrial purposes—“the expansion of public services, the assertion of the aesthetic dimension of life, widened choice as between income and leisure, the emancipation of education.” What Galbraith proposed was that the emerging science and education elite be harnessed to this purpose by the will of the federal government.²⁵

The scientists, engineers, and social scientists who had played such an important role in the development of American industry and finance were more than ready to oblige. “The universities, the academies, the think tanks, . . . had a sense that there were important problems to which there could be solutions,” recalled Charles Haar, White House adviser on urban development and the environment, “that resources could be applied to them, that they were capable of being handled.”²⁶ Galbraith’s ideas were echoed by other public intellectuals, such as Walter Lippmann. “An affluent society is not simply a rich society,” he wrote, “it is one which has mastered the new art of controlling and stimulating its own economic growth . . . we have a sufficiently promising start to justify our thinking that we have seen a breakthrough—that we are escaping from the immemorial human predicament of the haves and the have-nots.”²⁷

LBJ had known and respected Galbraith for years. He read Lippmann’s columns religiously, had had him to the Texas ranch when he was vice president, and consulted with him shortly after the assassination.²⁸ Although he was largely on the outside looking in during the Kennedy presidency, Johnson had become aware of the present and future significance of the emerging science-education elite during the vice-presidential years. Shortly after he assumed office, LBJ instructed Bill Moyers and Eric Goldman to go out into the highways and byways of academe and assemble task forces that would address the great social and economic problems of the day and suggest policies to remedy them.²⁹ Johnson then embraced the “politics of productivity,” to use historian Charles Maier’s phrase. Given the affluence and technical expertise then existing in America, the federal government could care for those who could not care for themselves, provide education and opportunity to the disadvantaged, and ensure social justice for all without taking from one group of citizens and giving to another. All could be invited to the table and all could be served. For Johnson, the class-based politics of the 1930s that had given way to the interest-based politics of the 1940s were now about to give way to the consensus-based politics of the 1960s. A reformer’s dream was about to come true—justice and equity without conflict.

LBJ REALIZED THAT HE NEEDED A SLOGAN FOR THE BROAD PROGRAM that was then germinating in the federal agencies and task forces under his command. In early 1964 he began badgering Richard Goodwin, a Kennedy aide who had decided to stay on and write speeches for Johnson, to come up with a catchy phrase like New Deal or New Frontier. Although only thirty-two years old, Goodwin was already a prominent prowler of the halls of power. A Bostonian, Goodwin had graduated first in his class at Tufts and Harvard Law School and then clerked for Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter. He was a brilliant and arrogant youth with wide-ranging interests and tastes, a self-proclaimed Renaissance man who already knew many of the leading artists and writers of his day. Devoted to John and Robert Kennedy, he had dabbled in Latin American affairs, the Peace Corps, and various cultural activities. A regular on the Georgetown cocktail circuit, Goodwin had by the time he succeeded to the Johnson staff acquired a reputation for ruthlessness and an ability to subsume means to ends.

Realizing that he was too close to the Kennedys to ever completely win LBJ’s trust, Goodwin seduced Bill Moyers and used him as a bridge. Moyers, still in his mind very much the naïf from Marshall, Texas, found Goodwin irresistible. “Here was a former aide to the illustrious Felix Frankfurter,” Eric Goldman wrote in his White House memoir, “a connoisseur of the latest in literature and art, who, at the age of thirty-two, last week’s soup stain on his suit, puffing his cigar and twirling his gold chain enigmatically, talked of power and policy with a faintly weary smile.”³⁰ Goodwin would spend his nights ridiculing LBJ and his days working to shape the policies of the man who had usurped JFK.

In February 1964 LBJ summoned Goodwin and Moyers to the White House pool. As was his custom, the president was swimming in the buff. Goodwin was struck by the scene and, with the knights and ladies of Camelot in mind, subsequently described it: “We entered the pool area to see the massive presidential flesh, a sun bleached atoll breaching the placid sea, passing gently, sidestroke, the deep-cleft buttocks moving slowly past our unstartled gaze. Moby Dick, I thought. . . . ‘It’s like going swimming with a polar bear,’ Moyers whispered.”³¹ The president had the two young men strip and join him. Johnson suddenly stopped and began talking as if to some invisible audience in the distance. He wanted to build on Kennedy’s accomplishments and dreams but go beyond them. America could be a land of plenty but also one with a social conscience and an eye to excellence in all things public: education, conservation, beautification, cultural activities, and technological innovation. Despite himself, Goodwin was inspired. LBJ assigned his two assistants the task of drafting a speech that would outline his vision and, more important, inspire the nation to support that vision.

Goodwin met with Eric Goldman, who had taken up the post of resident intellectual at the White House following Arthur Schlesinger’s departure. Goldman had come to the White House’s attention through an aide to Moyers, Hayes Redmon, a former Goldman student. Goldman had reinforced Johnson’s commitment to consensus politics, social justice at home, competitive coexistence abroad, and an emphasis on improving the quality of life for all human beings. In his first interview with the president, the Princeton academic, overcoming initial nervousness, had dared to outline his vision of the future. Confronted with death and division, Goldman declared, past presidents had drawn the country together by invoking the national interest. Avoiding partisanship and ideology, they had thrown their weight behind a broad domestic and diplomatic program that represented what a variety of significant groups could agree upon or could be persuaded to agree upon. Theodore Roosevelt had brought the country out of the divisiveness of the 1890s by posing as the “steward” of the needs and aspirations of the general population. A too-sharply divided nation was an immobile and potentially self-destructive one. Domestically, the president could clean up essential, unfinished business, such as action directed toward education needs, the legitimate restiveness of the African American community, and the dangerously mounting costs of medical care. Johnson, Goldman recalled, was entranced. “His long face was fixed on me and he would interject an occasional ‘Yes.’”³²

Throughout March and April, Goodwin worked on a speech, focusing particularly on a title for the Johnson program. Goldman suggested “The Good Society,” the title of a book written by Walter Lippmann some years earlier. Eventually, after consulting with Moyers, Valenti, and the president, Goodwin came up with “The Great Society,” the title of a 1919 book penned by Graham Wallas, who, not coincidentally, had been one of Lippmann’s mentors.³³ Wallas, a London School of Economics professor and Fabian socialist, used the term “Great” to refer to large and complex. He was a pioneering social psychologist writing about human nature, intelligence, and the tasks of organizing modern industrial societies in ways that contributed to the greater good. (Lippmann’s book—he was trying to impress Wallas—was mostly psycho-socio babble.) Despite its socialist origins, “the great society” was also an expression that had been used by conservative publishing magnate Henry R. Luce in a 1939 speech to the Economic Club of Detroit. Similar in tone and theme to FDR’s Commonwealth Club address of 1932, Luce’s speech urged his fellow businessmen to assume greater social responsibilities and “take part in the creation of the Great Society.”³⁴

Goodwin recalled that he wanted the speech to go beyond the unfulfilled promises of the New Deal and reflect the burgeoning movements of the sixties. “My objective—my mandate as I understood it—was not to produce a catalogue of specific projects, but a concept, an assertion of purpose, a vision . . . that went beyond the liberal tradition of the New Deal,” Goodwin observed in his memoirs.³⁵ The speechwriter claimed that he read manifestos of the civil rights movement such as Martin Luther King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” as well as Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, Ralph Nader’s indictment of the auto industry, Unsafe at Any Speed, and the Port Huron Statement—the manifesto of the New Left—in preparation. (Unsafe, however, was not published until 1965.)

There was in truth a ghost coauthor of the Goodwin version of the Great Society speech—Arthur Schlesinger Jr. In 1956, the historian had written an essay in The Reporter titled “The Future of Liberalism,” which anticipated the Great Society. Schlesinger had been one of the cofounders of the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), an organization composed of political liberals who were at the same time Cold War hawks. During the McCarthy era, Schlesinger and the ADA had waged an ongoing battle against Republican charges that Truman and the Democratic Party as a whole were “soft on communism.” Government loyalty investigations, both federal and state, had put those suspected of communist sympathies on public display and helped conservatives portray all collectivist theories calling for a larger, more active government as “socialist” or, worse, “communist.” This became the political mantra used to indict one liberal program after another, from national health insurance to public housing proposals.³⁶

“Liberalism in an age of abundance must begin shifting its emphasis,” Schlesinger wrote in his Reporter article. “Instead of the quantitative liberalism of the 1930s, rightly dedicated to the struggle to secure the economic basis of life, we need now a ‘qualitative liberalism’ dedicated to bettering the quality of people’s lives.” The battle for the necessities of life had been won, and it was time for liberals to “move on to the more subtle and complicated problem of fighting for individual dignity, identity, and fulfillment in a mass society.”³⁷ Hopefully, Schlesinger’s call for a new individualism would both appeal to the various movements of the sixties and blunt the ongoing campaign to portray liberals, in general, and Democrats, in particular, as advocates for a collectivist, mass society.

When Valenti, Busby, and George Reedy read Goodwin’s draft, they were appalled. How were these “quality-of-life” issues to be achieved? How exactly was the federal government going to enable individual Americans to realize their potential beyond providing them with Roosevelt’s positive rights? What did “individual dignity, identity, and fulfillment in a mass society” mean? It would be like legislating transcendentalism. These were men of the New Deal: environmental concerns, consumer protection, women’s liberation, and the youth rebellion had not yet appeared on their radar screen. The president should stick to bread-and-butter issues, they insisted, and Valenti rewrote Goodwin’s draft to that end. Instead of the Great Society, Busby suggested “A Confederacy of Excellence.”³⁸

Moyers and Goodwin fought back. In mid-May the two wrote to Johnson, urging him to resuscitate the original version of the speech, appealing to the president’s ambition and his desire to be taken as seriously as had been John Kennedy—to be anointed a man of ideas. The bold version of the address, Moyers and Goodwin declared, was “designed to make people like Reston and Lippmann . . . sit up and say: ‘This President is really thinking about the future problems of America.’”³⁹ Johnson agreed.

The venue selected for the Great Society’s coming out party was the commencement exercises at the University of Michigan scheduled for May 22, 1964. On the appointed day, LBJ rose to the appreciative applause of the eighty thousand who filled the Michigan football stadium at Ann Arbor. It was sunny and mild, and those in attendance were in a festive mood. “For a century,” Johnson began,

            we labored to settle and to subdue a continent. For half a century we called upon unbounded invention and untiring industry to create an order of plenty for all of our people. The challenge of the next half-century is whether we have the wisdom to use that wealth to enrich and elevate our national life, and to advance the quality of our American civilization. Your imagination, your initiative, and your indignation will determine whether we build a society where progress is the servant of our needs, or a society where old values and new visions are buried under unbridled growth. . . . For in your time we have the opportunity to move not only toward the rich society and the powerful society, but upward to the Great Society.

An end to poverty and racial injustice was only the beginning. The search for a more perfect civilization would require a massive effort in behalf of slum clearance and urban renewal, new and improved systems of mass transit, and the creation and preservation of urban green spaces. In the countryside, the federal government would have to join with state and local polities to conserve, preserve, and enhance: “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.” Quoting Aristotle—“Men come together in cities in order to live, but they remain together to live the good life”—the president declared that increasingly that was proving impossible. The central cities were in decay, the suburbs “despoiled,” and there was a severe shortage of housing and transportation. Noting that eight million adult Americans had no more than a fifth-grade education and that a hundred thousand qualified high school graduates annually were barred from college for financial reasons, LBJ hinted at a massive federal effort to support education at every level.

“There are those timid souls who say this battle cannot be won,” the president concluded, “that we are condemned to a soulless wealth. I do not agree. We have the power to shape the civilization that we want. But we need your will, your labor, your hearts, if we are to build that kind of society.”⁴⁰

The Great Society speech was interrupted by applause twenty-nine times. Those in attendance were, of course, euphoric at the prospect of graduation, but there was more to it than that. LBJ had offered an inspiring vision of the future, had reassured the nation that it still harbored the seeds of greatness, had asserted that in the future lay more than assassination, racial turmoil, and the possibility of a nuclear holocaust. One of the reasons JFK had been elected, albeit by the narrowest of margins, was that he had issued a call to arms, had promised especially young people sacrifice and hard work on behalf of a noble cause, a breath of fresh air after the complacency of the Eisenhower years. The Great Society speech recaptured that mood and re-kindled those fires.

Americans did not necessarily take LBJ literally. When a Gallup poll subsequently asked whether people thought poverty would ever be eliminated from American society, only 9 percent answered in the affirmative.⁴¹ Nevertheless, the new president’s idealism, his competence and impatience to do the right thing, and his faith in the nation were balm to postassassination America. Johnson himself was caught up in the euphoria of the moment. “When we got back on the plane,” Charles Roberts, a member of the press pool, remembered, “he was sweating and exuberant. He violated his old rule and had himself a drink, a Scotch highball, and came back to our press pool. . . . Then he took the script from Jack Valenti and read, with emphasis, portions of the speech to us. He wanted to make sure we got the story. He’d say, ‘Now did you get this?’”⁴²

Arthur Schlesinger, the men around Kennedy, and a number of public intellectuals were anxious to attribute the speech to Richard Goodwin and hence to the Kennedys. In a speech delivered to the eighteenth annual convention of the ADA in the spring of 1965, Schlesinger would attribute the concept of the Great Society entirely to New Frontiersman Richard Goodwin. All of LBJ’s men—Valenti, Busby, Reedy—were against the idea, arguing that the “dreamy vague proposals would be interpreted as a hangover from the Soviet Union’s series of unsuccessful five-year plans.” Warming to his audience, Schlesinger hailed the triumph of Goodwin’s proposals as “a clear victory of the liberal cause of American politics over the messianic conservative complex of the President’s Texas mafia.”⁴³ In an interview with journalist Hugh Sidey, LBJ insisted that Barbara Ward’s The Rich Nations and the Poor Nations, which he kept on the nightstand by his bed, had been the chief inspiration for the Great Society address.⁴⁴

There were those who would argue that Johnson was creating a political order in which he did not fit, that he, like Reedy and Valenti, were men of the thirties and forties, of a time of class-based politics and meat-and-potato legislation like the minimum wage measure, social security, and federally supervised collective bargaining. The women’s movement, consumer protection, the environmental movement, the youth movement were phenomena that transcended party and were beyond the reach of traditional politics, unsuited to horse trading. But Johnson would stick to his guns, at least for the time being. As the president subsequently remarked to the 1964 convention of the Communications Workers of America, “In Franklin Roosevelt’s time there was a sense of crisis, of desperate danger, of threatening disaster. The need for action was plain.” In contrast, LBJ warned, the Great Society summoned the country to address problems that were virtually invisible—“like some giant iceberg.” The government’s most important task during the 1960s was not to close the gap between rich and poor, to prevent class warfare; the greatest challenge was to alert an “indifferent” nation that ignored subterranean but potentially fatal social ills tied to excessive self-absorption. The contest today, Johnson declared, was not “so much between the oppressed and the privileged, as between the farsighted and those without any vision.”⁴⁵ This semimystical call to utopian community was Camelot and Port Huron, but it was also Johnson. One could almost hear the mystical voices of Charles Marsh, the wealthy Texas newspaperman who had advised LBJ during the first part of his career, and Henry Wallace, FDR’s left-leaning vice president.

IF THE TAX CUT OF 1964 WAS THE FIRST BUILDING BLOCK IN JOHNSON’S utopia, the second was the War on Poverty. Intertwined as it was with issues of race, public morality, and the proper role of government in society, it would come to define the administration in the minds of the public and press as much as civil rights and Vietnam.

The notion that civil society was responsible for those of its members who could not or would not care for themselves was a relatively new concept in Anglo-America. Britain in the mid-nineteenth century, in the midst of industrialization and the enclosure movement, was home to a burgeoning population of chronically poor people. In 1849 journalist Henry Mayhew began chronicling their lives collectively and individually, and in the process pricked the consciences of the middle class. Hard upon his heels came novelist Charles Dickens, who in Oliver Twist, Hard Times, and Our Mutual Friend brought to life the pickpockets, street children, and prostitutes of Britain’s underworld. Gradually, the British were sensitized to the deep division in their land between the haves and have-nots.

In the United States, mass awareness of the existence of a more or less permanent underclass grew out of the Progressive movement of the early twentieth century. Jacob Riis, himself a Danish immigrant, produced a score of books and articles, the most notable of which was How the Other Half Lives, describing the plight of those New Yorkers who struggled to eke out an existence in the city’s tenements and sweatshops. Meanwhile, Jane Addams and other social activists were attempting to mobilize local governments and political parties as well as philanthropists in a movement to alleviate not only the material but also the spiritual plight of the poor. Persons of faith like LBJ’s mother, Rebekah Baines Johnson, were reading C. M. Sheldon’s In His Steps, which argued that if Christians would live the lives to which Christ had called them, it would be impossible for millions to walk the streets in search of food and for thousands of children to die each year from lack of adequate health care.

The coming of the Great Depression spawned a new wave of revelatory and reform literature. John Steinbeck, LBJ’s favorite author, stirred the souls of millions with his Grapes of Wrath. The photographic record of rural poverty produced by the Farm Security Administration during the Dust Bowl years reinforced Steinbeck’s literary images. The 1940s and 1950s witnessed a mass migration of some three million blacks from the rural South into northern, southern, midwestern, and West Coast cities, where they were segregated into slum-infested ghettoes. From the day in 1944 when the first mechanical cotton pickers were tested in Mississippi, African American farm workers were doomed to move or starve. Birmingham, Atlanta, and Houston in the South, New York, Philadelphia, and Newark in the North, Chicago in the Midwest, and Los Angeles and Oakland in the West became the homes of a new urban underclass. Jobs were scarce to nonexistent, city services such as water and sewage were substandard, education was strictly segregated, and escape, virtually impossible.

In 1961 anthropologist Oscar Lewis published The Children of Sanchez, a study of a fictional Mexico City slum-dwelling family. He found a “culture of poverty” characterized by high rates of alcoholism, suicide, and violence; female-headed, fatherless families; high levels of drug use; and high rates of infant mortality. Members of the underclass were cynical about the church, fatalistic, superstitious, and distrustful of authority. Not only were they under-educated, they lacked respect for education. What Lewis found was that families born to urban poverty passed on their beliefs, characteristics, and habits from generation to generation. In 1962 Michael Harrington, a Catholic idealist and socialist, popularized Lewis’s ideas and Americanized his book’s images in The Other America. That same year CBS ran Edward R. Murrow’s “Harvest of Shame,” a powerful indictment of poverty among migrant farm workers in America. And Harry M. Caudill published Night Comes to the Cumberlands, depicting the abject poverty of the half million whites who lived on the Cumberland Plateau in the Appalachian Mountains.⁴⁶

Liberal economists like Galbraith and Heller believed that the economic boom of the 1950s and 1960s had produced the largesse to alleviate poverty in America, but they worried that there did not exist the mechanisms of distribution necessary to do the job. Although Heller had been instrumental in selling Kennedy on the tax cut, stressing growth and efficiency as the objectives of economic policy, he had been trained in the Economics Department of the University of Wisconsin, which, since the days of John R. Commons, had been concerned with distributional objectives, namely, social justice and economic equity.⁴⁷ Using Social Security Administration data, Heller posited the conservative figure of $3,000 for a family of four as the poverty line. He found that although those in poverty had declined in number by 10 percent from 1947 through 1956, that figure had dropped to only 2 percent between 1956 and 1961. As of 1962, thirty-three million to thirty-five million Americans—one-fifth of the entire population—were living in poverty.⁴⁸ JFK was aware of the problem and sympathetic to Heller’s pleas that something needed to be done. Among other things, how could capitalism argue convincingly to the inhabitants of the Third World that it was superior to communism when one-fifth of America’s citizens lived in poverty? Under Heller’s direction, the Council of Economic Advisers set to work eliciting and coordinating plans from Health, Education, and Welfare as well as Labor and other departments.

Economists, sociologists, and psychologists studying poverty during the 1950s advanced three basic solutions. First, Keynesian aggregationists emphasized the productive capacity of the postwar economy, and these economists exhibited a boundless confidence in the ability of the federal government to manage that growth in such a way that it would offer ever larger slices of the American pie to all citizens, reducing poverty in an absolute sense and eliminating class conflict over scarce resources. Heller and his colleagues proposed dealing with poverty by altering tax policies to ensure that actual productivity increased to match potential productivity. The result would be perpetual full employment.

Second, structuralists noted the limits of economic growth, as evidenced by people left behind during the period of economic boom during the 1950s and early 1960s. Social scientists emphasizing this view, such as sociologist Gunnar Myrdal and economist John Kenneth Galbraith, perceived persistent structural limits in the economy that were based on race, place (“depressed areas” such as Appalachia), or vocational education deficits. Structuralists proposed government programs to deal with unemployment, low wages, racial integration, job training, and local and regional economic development. Income redistribution was also a structuralist goal, to be secured through social welfare spending and progressive taxation.

Third was the culture of poverty thesis advanced by Lewis, Harrington, and others. The environments that bred and perpetuated poverty had to be altered in ways that countered the social disorganization and self-defeating ethos of those families who had known nothing but poverty for generations.⁴⁹ Eventually, culture of poverty advocates would shy away from the extreme social engineering schemes that their analysis implied and embrace income supplements and mandatory wealth redistribution.

The trigger for poverty planning in the Kennedy administration had been mounting public concern with the problem of juvenile delinquency. In May 1961, JFK established the President’s Commission on Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Crime (PCJD). The commission subsequently submitted a report that predicted a coming juvenile crime wave and proposed solutions that grew primarily from a 1960 book, Delinquency and Opportunity, written by Lloyd Ohlin and Richard Cloward of the Columbia School of Social Work. Their approach was labeled “opportunity theory.” Delinquency was admittedly a separate subculture, but the two social theorists maintained that delinquents held mainstream values and aspirations; they simply lacked the means to attain them. Frustration and despair mounted, Ohlin and Cloward argued, when the decline of urban institutions such as public schools, political machines, and organized crime eroded social controls and blocked legitimate as well as illegitimate avenues of advancement. Violence and delinquency thus resulted when middle-class goals collided with lower-class reality. The commission employed the two as consultants and made opportunity theory its guiding intellectual premise. “We cannot control delinquency by building new institutions,” the PCJD proclaimed. “We must prevent it by building new opportunities for underprivileged young people to find a useful place in the mainstream.”⁵⁰ This relic of Progressivism with its emphasis on environmental engineering would become a conceptual mainstay of the Great Society. It should be noted that by 1963 the Justice Department’s delinquency program had begun to view delinquency as shorthand for urban poverty and, by extension, racial discrimination.⁵¹

Several days following the Kennedy assassination, Johnson invited two of his oldest friends from his New Deal days, social worker Elizabeth Wickenden and her husband, Arthur Goldschmidt, to the Elms for Sunday supper. “I have a very difficult problem,” Johnson confided. “I feel a moral obligation to carry on the things that Kennedy proposed, but I have to have issues I can take on as my own. I have to get reelected in a year.” Johnson told them that he was considering making poverty his headliner.⁵²

Plans to eradicate poverty excited Johnson’s imagination, but he knew that government programs dedicated to closing the inequality gap would be controversial. As Sargent Shriver, whom LBJ would select to command the antipoverty effort, later observed, LBJ was attempting something revolutionary: “the only national effort ever conducted by the majority for the benefit of the minority.”⁵³ The Roosevelt revolution had taken place during a time when a huge proportion of middle-class white people were in dire straits and race was not conspicuously involved. The Johnson administration would be attempting to use the federal government and taxpayer money to eradicate poverty during a period of rising prosperity and growing racial tension.

Heller understood this, and at the LBJ ranch during the Christmas holidays he, the president, Kermit Gordon, Moyers, and Valenti discussed ways and means. The administration’s commitment to the cause would have to be loud and clear. “One thing I did know,” LBJ later told journalist Douglas Cater. “When I got through, no one in this country would be able to ignore the poverty in our midst.”⁵⁴ Johnson and Heller also agreed that if white middle-class Americans were going to join the war, they would have to be assured that the campaign would destroy—not subsidize and perpetuate—the culture of poverty. Heller’s argument that “poverty was not only wrong, it was something we could not afford” was music to Johnson’s ears.⁵⁵ His goal, as the president subsequently told conservatives such as Richard Russell, Harry Byrd, and Everett Dirksen, was to “make tax payers rather than tax eaters” out of the disadvantaged.⁵⁶

“This administration today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America,” LBJ proclaimed in his State of the Union address on January 8, 1964. The tax cut would create jobs, but the federal government must go beyond mere monetary policy. “Very often a lack of jobs and money is not the cause of poverty, but the symptom,” he said. “The cause may lie deeper—in our failure to give our fellow citizens a fair chance to develop their own capacities, in a lack of education and training, in a lack of medical care and housing, in a lack of decent communities in which to live and bring up their children.” He envisioned area redevelopment programs, youth employment legislation, a National Service Corps paralleling at home what the Peace Corps was doing abroad, a broader food stamp program, Medicare for the elderly, and special education for children living in the most depressed areas.⁵⁷

Like those crusaders against poverty who preceded him, LBJ would be swimming against a strong tide of individualism in American society, an ethos that prized self-reliance and condemned government largesse to the poor as counterproductive. Classical economists such as the Reverend Thomas Malthus, who in 1798 had penned a scathing indictment of the English Poor Laws, insisted that the best antidote to poverty and unemployment was an unregulated free market system. Only the pain of poverty coupled with visibility of wealth and the possibility of gain, however slight, could motivate the masses to work. Americans from the Puritans of New England to the robber baron capitalists of the Gilded Age insisted that aid to the poor was morally corrupting, reinforcing the selfish and sinful aspects of human nature. Well into the twentieth century, many Americans accepted the conservative truism that poverty was the fault of the poor themselves, the product of character flaws beyond the reach of legislative remedy. Of course, even the most hardened disciples of laissez faire admitted that there were in society those who could not care for themselves. The sick, the lame, widows with dependent children could not work and must be supported—they were the “deserving poor”—but the undeserving, the lazy, the venal, the improvident, could not claim support by right and must rely on private charity. Even after World War II, the idea that poverty was the penalty for people who had not tried hard enough remained strong. Those who had framed the New Deal’s chief welfare program, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), had had in mind a mother and wife of a West Virginia coal miner killed in an accident.⁵⁸

Poverty was primarily a Democratic issue, one that Republicans were more than willing to let them have. Welfare was of great benefit to the GOP in its never-ending struggle to taint the Democratic Party and liberalism in general as soft, emotional, and even anti-American. Campaigning for president in West Virginia in 1960, Richard Nixon denounced his Democratic opponent’s assertion that seventeen million people went to bed hungry every night. Such assertions only provided “grist for the Communist propaganda mill,” he said, and he repeated Eisenhower’s reaction to Kennedy’s claim: “Now look, I go to bed hungry every night, but that’s because I’m on a diet.”⁵⁹

WHEN LBJ ADDRESSED THE NATION AND ISSUED HIS CALL TO ARMS in the War on Poverty, neither he nor his advisers had a clear picture of the strategy and specific programs that would constitute the campaign. Johnson’s mind turned first to the selection of a person who would supply the energy and vision to make an antipoverty program work. Robert Kennedy, who as attorney general had taken a special interest in juvenile delinquency, let it be known that he would like such an assignment, but Johnson had no intention of giving aid to an enemy who was already trying to position himself to be the Democratic Party’s vice-presidential candidate in 1964. Galbraith suggested Moyers, but he was too young and inexperienced. Besides, Johnson needed him to be available for a variety of assignments. But Moyers’s former boss in the Peace Corps, Sargent Shriver, would be perfect.⁶⁰ Shriver, the husband of Eunice Kennedy, was associated with the Kennedys but was not a member of the tribe. Following the assassination, he had let the White House know that he was his own man and would very much like to be considered for the vice presidency. Though Shriver was financially secure himself, his family had suffered during the Depression, and that experience had made an indelible impression on him. A Catholic, he had worked with the poor as part of the Catholic Worker Movement in New York. Shriver was a disciple of Saint Francis of Assisi and an active member of the Saint Vincent de Paul Society in Chicago. As president of the school board there, he had concentrated on improving ghetto schools.⁶¹

RFK’s brother-in-law had made the Peace Corps into one of the most successful of the New Frontier initiatives. Looking back on the program, Shriver observed that in the beginning, “many were worried that it would be a tutti-frutti organization, a lot of kids bouncing around the world in Bermuda shorts.”⁶² But it was hardly that. The students who volunteered went out into the highways and byways of the Third World, exposing themselves to hunger, disease, tribal conflict, and political oppression. They taught English, hygiene, modern farming techniques, civil administration, and a hundred other subjects without expecting anything in return, in hopes of shielding the program from communist charges of Yankee imperialism. And Shriver proved to be a shrewd politician. He and the Peace Corps were perhaps the only two aspects of the New Frontier that were genuinely popular on the Hill.

Johnson recruited Shriver in typical whirlwind fashion. On the morning of February 1, 1964, the phone rang at Sarge and Eunice’s home in Washington. Shriver had just returned from a Peace Corps trip to Europe.

“Sarge?” the president said.

“Good morning, Mr. President. How are you?”

“I’m gonna announce your appointment at that press conference.”

“What press conference?”

“This afternoon.”

“Could you just say that you have asked me to study this?”

“Hell no. They’ve studied and studied. They [the press] want to know who in the hell is going to do this.”

Shriver asked for a week’s delay so that he could put some plan together. It would serve neither his, the president, nor the program’s interests if it appeared that he did not know what he was talking about. No, said Johnson, we’ll announce you as head and tell newspeople that you are putting together a team that will devise a workable program in the immediate future. Breathless, resigned, Shriver gave in.⁶³

In the weeks that followed, Johnson made it clear that the administration’s antipoverty program would encompass neither welfare in the form of direct relief nor a government jobs program that would compete with the private sector. During a cabinet meeting in February, Secretary of Labor Willard Wirtz had proposed a massive jobs program similar to the Work Projects Administration (WPA), costing $3 billion to $5 billion and financed by an increased tax on tobacco. Johnson wanted none of it. “I have never seen a colder reception from the president,” a staffer in attendance said. “He just—absolute blank stare—implied without even opening his mouth that Shriver should move on to the next proposal.”⁶⁴ Nor was LBJ interested in direct relief. “Smith [House Rules Committee Chairman Howard Smith, a reactionary] has got to understand that I want these people taken off relief and trained to do something,” he told Congressman Carl Albert [D-OK] . . . we’re spending $8 billion on relief now. . . . But I’m gonna cut down that $8 billion, if he’ll let me, and put ’em to work.”⁶⁵ Indeed, Johnson’s War on Poverty might have accurately been termed a war on welfare. “Our American answer to poverty is not to make the poor more secure in their poverty,” Johnson would say later that year, “but to reach down and to help them lift themselves out of the ruts of poverty and move with the large majority along the high road of hope and prosperity. . . . The days of the dole in our country are numbered.”⁶⁶

It was not that LBJ was opposed to government jobs programs or direct relief; he had supported both vigorously during the Depression. But the economic and political climate was far different in the 1960s than it had been in the 1930s. The vast white middle class was prosperous, not impoverished. Keynesianism, specifically the tax cut, would create additional space in the private sector, but the disadvantaged must be educated and trained to take advantage of the resulting opportunity. In addition to the political problems that relief and public sector jobs would create, Johnson sensed that they were not the answer to the culture of poverty that had taken root in the rural South, Appalachia, and the nation’s urban centers.

Despite his protestations to the contrary, Johnson saw the poverty bill very much as civil rights legislation. Moyers recalled that shortly after he assumed the presidency, LBJ had one of his secretaries dig up a flyer published widely in Mississippi, Alabama, east Texas, and northern Georgia in 1959 by the White Citizens Council. “We intend to see that no Negro who believes in equality has a job, gets credit, or is able to exist in our communities,” it read. He kept it in his desk in the small office adjoining the Oval Office throughout the first year of his presidency. During the spring of 1964, the White House was bombarded with statistics showing that poverty was concentrated disproportionately among blacks. There was discrimination in hiring and discrimination in pay for those who were hired. In December 1963, Johnson met with Roy Wilkins, head of the NAACP, and convinced him that the poverty program was a civil rights bill and a necessary complement to the pending public accommodations and voting rights legislation.⁶⁷

Hammering out the specific programs that would comprise the administration’s poverty bill proved a painful process. There was hardly a department or agency in the federal government that did not have an interest in or program bearing on the struggle to eliminate poverty: Labor; Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW); Agriculture; the CEA; Bureau of the Budget; even the Pentagon, which worried about the tens of thousands of young men who could not qualify for military service; and the Department of Justice, which faced the task of combating juvenile delinquency. At first, “the walls dripped with blood as the empire-builders clashed with the empire-wreckers,” as one participant put it.⁶⁸ To Shriver’s credit, he was able to impart to the 137-person task force he had convened a sense of mission and purpose that transcended their parochial bureaucratic objectives. There was chaos, but it was exhilarating, “a beautiful hysteria,” as one participant described it.

Frank Mankiewicz, Peace Corps director in Peru, introduced Shriver to Michael Harrington and took six weeks off to work on the poverty bill. But Shriver’s chief comrade-in-arms was Adam Yarmolinsky, a special assistant to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. He was, as Eric Goldman has observed, one of those activist intellectuals tailor-made to raise the hackles of conservatives, especially southern conservatives. He was brilliant and arrogant, short, dark, Jewish, and a native New Yorker. Yarmolinsky, a Harvard academic, was one of those aggressively liberal Charles River intellectuals who had come to Washington as a member of the Kennedy entourage. As a high school student he had attended several Young Communist League meetings, but the totalitarian, statist aspects of Soviet-style communism repelled him. At the Pentagon he had organized a commission to investigate racial discrimination in the armed forces and then headed the effort to implement its recommendations.⁶⁹ According to the scenario that Shriver envisioned, Yarmolinsky would draft the poverty bill, and he, Shriver, would maneuver it through Congress. Yarmolinsky would then head whatever administrative agency Congress approved to administer the poverty program. LBJ was enthusiastic about the Harvard academic’s participation, but he sounded a warning: “I think he’s very able,” he told Shriver, “and very fine . . . wonderful fellow . . . he’s a good friend of mine . . . you want to watch that background on the Hill though. . . . I’d be worried a little bit about that.”⁷⁰

THE ECONOMIC OPPORTUNITY ACT (EOA) THAT THE ADMINISTRATION sent to Congress in March 1964 combined several different approaches and philosophies. It proposed to spend $962 million, less than 9 percent of the estimated cost of eliminating poverty for one year. But Shriver and his lieutenants saw the EOA as a beginning, not the be-all and end-all. Title I appropriated $190 million to fund a youth jobs training program. The Job Corps would establish rural residential camps where trainees would receive basic and vocational training. In the cities, a Neighborhood Youth Corps would hire the same eighteen-to twenty-one-year-olds to work on minimum wage jobs for the city, county, or a nonprofit agency. In the process they would learn a skill—carpentry, bookkeeping, or welding, for example. The budget for it was $150 million. For students, there was a work-study program that would employ youths at an educational or other public institution for a maximum of fifteen hours a week. Title II established a community action program, Yarmolinsky’s favorite, and what would prove to be the most controversial of the administration’s poverty programs. The idea was for those who were caught in the culture of poverty to meet and design programs in education, employment, vocational rehabilitation, welfare, housing, and other fields that were particularly suited to their community. They would then apply to a new federal agency, the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), for funding. Community action would receive $315 million. In calling for “maximum feasible participation,” community action was supposed to benefit the disadvantaged materially but also psychologically by giving them a sense of empowerment.

Elizabeth Wickenden, a social welfare consultant who participated in the poverty task force, warned that community action would be controversial because local political machines would see it as an attempt to undercut them. Mayors and city councils would complain to their representatives in Congress that they should be given control of the funds.⁷¹ Yarmolinsky insisted it was a nonissue: “My conception of what it meant was that you involved poor people in the process, not put them in charge.”⁷² Apparently, that was how LBJ viewed community action as well. “Get your planning and development people busy right now to see what you can do for the crummiest place in town,” he told Chicago mayor Richard Daley, “the lowest, the bottom—and see what we can do about it and we’ll get our dough and then you’ll have your plan ready and we’ll move.”⁷³

After the poverty bill passed, Moyers and Shriver suggested using some of the money to subsidize nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). “I’m going to re-write your poverty program,” Johnson exploded. “You boys got together and wrote these things and I thought we were just going to have the NYA [National Youth Administration]. . . . Do you know what I think about the poverty program? What I thought we were going to do? I thought we were going to have CCC [Civilian Conservation Corps] camps and I thought we were going to have community action where a city or a county or a school district or some government agency could sponsor projects. . . . I am against subsidizing any private organization. . . . I would prefer Dick Daley do it than the Urban League. . . . I just think it makes us wide open and I don’t want anybody to get any grants.”⁷⁴

Because LBJ was by experience sympathetic to rural poverty, and because a number of congressmen and senators who would be voting on EOA represented farming areas, the administration’s bill contained something for the country-dwelling poor. Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman and his principal assistant for the poverty program, James Sundquist, were particularly worried about the disappearance of small farms. They wanted a provision “where significant quantities of land could be bought up, broken into family size farms, and sold at low interest on long term sales to Negroes, former sharecroppers and others, to rebuild these rural communities, and thus try and reverse the very damaging trend of people buying up big chunks of land and then operating it partly for pleasure, only partly for agriculture with hired labor, making virtually peons out of the displaced sharecroppers who have been driven North to the city slums.”⁷⁵ As a result, Title III provided low-interest loans of up to $2,500 to low-income families to purchase or improve small farms. The EOA would establish the Office of Economic Opportunity to review and fund proposals. Shriver was also authorized to recruit citizens to Volunteers in Service to America, or VISTA, whose participants would work with Native Americans, migratory workers, persons with mental illness, and those with developmental disabilities.⁷⁶

As LBJ, Shriver, and congressional liaison Larry O’Brien turned their attention to Congress and the struggle to see the EOA passed, they were daunted. Republicans under Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen and House Minority Leader Charles Halleck (he was not replaced by Gerald Ford until after the 1964 elections) were determined to depict the War on Poverty as the hare-brained idea of soft-headed liberals sure to bankrupt the nation. Southerners viewed the program as a civil rights Trojan horse, a federal program to empower blacks and further the cause of integration. When an administration official presented Arkansas congressman Wilbur Mills, the chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, with materials in support of the EOA, Mills threw it back at him, “said a few choice words about how he was not going to be involved in any program to help a bunch of niggers and threw me out of the office.”⁷⁷ Moreover, working-class whites everywhere were liable to buy in to the argument that the EOA was a mechanism to aid the unemployed in competing with them for their jobs.⁷⁸ Walter Heller of the Council of Economic Advisers remembered being taught at Wisconsin that unionists generally regarded the poor as competitive menaces.⁷⁹

The administration did not want the House and Senate to enter into extended debates on the merits or demerits of the components of the EOA. Rather, its strategy was to focus on the plight of the poor in order to arouse a wave of public sympathy that would overwhelm Congress. Most of the sixty witnesses who testified before the House committee that held hearings on the poverty bill talked about the moral depravity of a society as affluent as America permitting children to go hungry, bed down with rats, and suffer from diseases that could easily be prevented. To highlight the plight of America’s poor and to demonstrate that the EOA was intended to help whites as well as blacks, LBJ, accompanied by his wife Lady Bird, made two conspicuous tours of Appalachia in April and May.⁸⁰ He met with the governors of seven states and, with print and broadcast journalists in tow, visited some of the most depressed areas in the United States. One of Johnson’s secretaries recalled a particular appalling slum in Tennessee: “The stench was so unbelievable; it was like standing in the middle of a human feces pool . . . everyone was gagging. The President insisted on walking into a house of ill repute.”⁸¹

In speeches on those trips and in other venues, LBJ played the role of evangelist in the cause of the social gospel. “It is almost insulting to urge you to enlist in this war for just economic motivations,” he told the Advertising Council. “This is a moral challenge that goes to the very root of our civilization, and asks if we are willing to make public, personal sacrifices for the public good.”⁸² Never mind that the EOA would not require anyone to give up anything. “We are determined that this Nation is going to be strong enough to secure the peace,” he remarked to another audience. “This Nation is going to be prudent enough to be solvent . . . but strength and solvency alone don’t quicken the heartbeat. The thing that really makes a great nation is compassion. We are going to have strength and solvency and compassion, love for thy neighbor, compassion and understanding for those who are less fortunate.”⁸³

The Appalachian trip, or “Poverty Tour,” as the press dubbed it, offered Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman—a sophisticated, cultured, but unpretentious man—his first opportunity to experience the new president up close and personal. He initially found him brusque and insensitive. Chiding Freeman for not yet having guided the administration’s food stamp bill through Congress, the president walked away while the Minnesotan tried to explain. Freeman subsequently found himself excluded from picture taking with administration officials and the rural poor. And yet there was the president’s obvious commitment to the cause:

            We went into town [in North Carolina], and I must say that he [LBJ] performed magnificently . . . he made inside the Courthouse a rather impassioned and most effective plea which was repeated in substance out in the street to maybe 20,000 or 30,000 people. . . . I must say honestly that during the day a feeling for the people and effort to improve the lot of people, a dedication to the principles of the New Deal and Franklin Roosevelt. . . . He came through with strength and a sincerity and intentness of purpose that was really quite stimulating. And so, here we have it on the one hand you ride a lightning rod of intemperate, thoughtless, mean, hypercritical kind of insensitive uninformed criticism and on the other an enormous energy, a demand for action, and a humanitarian feeling . . . which makes one feel that whatever the personal abuse you might be subject to . . . the goals are worth taking it if you can contribute to doing something which needs to be done.⁸⁴

White House strategists perceived that in votes on the EOA, northern liberals and Republicans would cancel each other out. The balance would be held by southern Democrats. The outlook looked gloomy. When LBJ pressed Roy Wilkins of the NAACP to go up on the Hill and lobby for the poverty bill, he at first refused. “Mr. President,” he said, “going up there is like going to a KKK rally.”⁸⁵ That the chair of the House Committee on Education and Labor and the Subcommittee on the War on Poverty Program that would conduct hearings on the EOA was black—Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, the handsome, dapper, dissolute cleric who represented Harlem—did not help matters. In what Yarmolinsky considered “a great stroke,” LBJ persuaded conservative Georgia congressman Phillip Landrum, coauthor of the antiunion Landrum-Griffin labor bill, to sponsor the EOA in the House. The president convinced the Georgian that poor whites as well as blacks in his district would benefit.⁸⁶

Republicans were convinced that the race issue could be depended upon to sink the administration’s antipoverty program. When that possibility began to fade, they turned to religion. The GOP encouraged an amendment to the EOA ensuring that a portion of the funds made available would go to parochial schools. Sponsored by Congressman Hugh Carey (D-NY), the addendum provided for money to be given not only to local school boards but also directly to private institutions to conduct remedial reading and arithmetic courses. The National Education Association let the administration know that if it accepted the Carey amendment, it would “scuttle the bill.”⁸⁷ “[House Minority Leader] Halleck has got it going,” LBJ complained to Shriver. “He’s outsmarted you. . . . He tried the Negro thing and that didn’t get off the ground and now he’s got the religious thing.”⁸⁸

But there was yet another complication. Carey and Congressman Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill (D-MA) were up in arms because, as part of the administration’s economy drive, McNamara had scheduled a shutdown of the Brooklyn and Boston Naval Yards. Johnson refused to be blackmailed, but he was willing to give O’Neill some space. “I see O’Neill is giving out interviews about closing the base in his District and he’s got to answer all these letters so he hasn’t got time to work on the Administration team,” he remarked to House Speaker John McCormack (D-MA). “He oughtn’ to threaten me. . . . I can’t operate a WPA Navy Yard but I can put it [the closure] off until next year.”⁸⁹

On the parochial school issue, Johnson assured Catholics that Shriver, who would administer the program and who was a coreligionist, would not discriminate against parochial schools. To Protestants, he declared that as long as Bill Moyers, “a Baptist preacher,” was on the White House staff, the Catholic Church would not take over the poverty program, or as he put it, “we’ve got Moyers in on this program and he’s not going to turn it over to the Pope.”⁹⁰ Still, LBJ was far from confident. He asked Larry O’Brien, anxiously, if the bill were going to pass. “Yeah, I think so,” O’Brien replied, “if we can just keep the boys that should be sober, sober, and the ones that should be drinking, drinking.”⁹¹

On July 16, Shriver predicted to LBJ that the poverty bill would pass the Senate by a two-to-one margin, but the House would prove more difficult. A group of southern red-baiters headed by Congressman Harold Cooley (D-NC) had decided to compel the administration to sacrifice Adam Yarmolinsky as their price for voting for the measure. By 1964, Yarmolinsky had become something of an antihero to true-believing anticommunists and southern segregationists who had decided to use each other’s movements to further their own cause. General Edwin Walker, who had been forced to retire from the military for distributing John Birch Society material to his troops and who was the heart and soul of the right wing in Dallas, had been lambasting Yarmolinsky as nothing less than a communist mole in the Defense Department. His mother had been “a communist poet,” conservatives charged, and Yarmolinsky himself had been active in the communist youth movement. This was music to the ears of southerners who blamed him for the Defense Department’s drive to desegregate off-base facilities that catered to the military.

On August 6, Speaker McCormack summoned Shriver to a meeting in his office. Cooley and several other southern congressmen were there. Cooley informed him that if Yarmolinsky was given any role in administering the poverty program, he and his seven Carolina colleagues would not vote for the EOA. Shriver said that Yarmolinsky was extremely competent and his friend to boot, and he would not abandon him, but the decision was the president’s. After several painful phone calls to the White House, Johnson persuaded Shriver to relent. It was all a plot by the National Association of Manufacturers, LBJ observed: “it is all a lie” and you should not be expected to “denounce the man because somebody is starting to lie on him,” but keeping Yarmolinsky in Defense was a small price to pay for passage of the poverty bill.⁹² The president would not recommend Yarmolinsky for a position in the poverty program, Shriver assured Cooley. Subsequently, when conservative Congressman W. H. Ayres (R-OH) rose on the floor of the House to declare that Yarmolinsky, not Shriver, would be the real power in the poverty program, Phil Landrum cut him off: “So far as I am concerned, this gentleman, Mr. Yarmolinsky, will have absolutely nothing to do with the program.” Shriver later recalled: “That was the most unpleasant experience I ever had in the government of the United States. . . . I felt . . . as if I ought to just go out and vomit.”⁹³

But opponents of the poverty bill were not through. The conservative coalition offered an amendment to the measure requiring recipients to sign a loyalty oath: a pledge of allegiance to the United States and a promise that the beneficiary had never belonged to a “subversive organization.” The Senate had not included such an amendment, and if the House adopted it, the measure would have to go to conference. But to be referred to conference, the measure would have to have a rule from Congressman Howard Smith’s committee. LBJ did not intend for his pride and joy to fall into the hands of the House’s number one reactionary. Moyers and Shriver were opposed to the loyalty oath and wanted it to go to conference if the House adopted it. Johnson was determined that his advisers squelch their liberal impulses; if the bill that went to the Senate had to include a loyalty oath, so be it. “We’ll handle the communist thing,” he told his lieutenants. “We don’t give a damn about that, that’s professional liberals . . . but we’ll kill the whole bill if we have to rely on Smith for another rule.” Gradually, he worked himself up to near hysteria. Calling Moyers and Shriver “children” and “school kids,” he told them “learn this for all time to come so nobody’ll ever have to teach it to any of you again; you can never get a bill into conference without a rule or unanimous consent. . . . These amendments don’t amount to a tinker’s dam . . . everybody that goes on the payroll . . . says I’m not a communist.”⁹⁴

The loyalty oath amendment did not pass the House, and in the subsequent vote on the EOA, the administration won by a margin of 226 to 185. Southerners voted 60 to 40 against, but those 40, together with 22 Republicans, were enough to carry the day. In a signing ceremony at the White House, Johnson declared that “for the first time in all the history of the human race, a great nation . . . is willing to make a commitment to eradicate poverty among its people.”⁹⁵

LBJ UNDERSTOOD THAT THE POVERTY PROGRAM WAS A BEGINNING, that its architects were not at all sure where it was going or what the consequences of the policies it implemented would be. But it was a beginning. Hopefully, it would produce new instruments of social justice like Social Security, the minimum wage, and the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). Once in place, programs and agencies tended to develop a life and constituency of their own. One thing was certain: if something was not done to raise America’s consciousness concerning the problems of the nation’s inner-city poor, the nation would explode, and in the white backlash that followed, any hope that the civil rights movement might succeed would evaporate.