THE notion of Lyndon Johnson as a latter-day Lorenzo de Medici, patron of the arts, is ludicrous on its face. He was a Texas hill country philistine. There is no evidence that he ever read a poem or a novel of his own choice. His interest in painting seems to have been confined to the noted western artist Peter Hurd for the portrait of Johnson, which he hated. Music, the theater, opera, ballet held no attraction. At the Kennedy White House parties for artists, writers, and musicians he stood about with his hands in his pockets and a sour expression on his face. He had a country boy’s healthy suspicion of these artistic types and, with Vietnam, grew to distrust them intensely. He never ceased venting his distaste for the people he called “the Harvards.” While he had an insatiable appetite for the media, particularly TV, it was for political news and particularly for coverage of himself. Yet Lyndon Johnson became a noted patron of the arts and the media.1
Following World War II the performing arts in America enjoyed a solid expansion as measured by both the number of performances and the size of audiences. This was especially marked for opera, ballet, and off-Broadway and outside New York theater. Broadway and symphony concerts grew more modestly. In many cities this demand led to construction of new or refurbished theaters, concert halls, and opera houses. New York and Los Angeles, the nation’s leading cities in the performing arts, moved a step further by joining facilities into a unified performance center.
Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts on Manhattan’s West Side above Columbus Circle, fully operating by 1970, was architecturally spectacular, took 13 years to build, and broke all records for cost, $186 million. This was, Martin Mayer wrote, “a little more than double the entire annual box office income of all the nation’s professional symphony orchestras, opera and ballet companies, and repertory theaters put together.” Lincoln Center consisted of Avery Fisher Hall, the home of the New York Philharmonic, with 2,836 seats; the New York State Theatre, 2,729 seats, the house for the New York City Opera; the Vivian Beaumont Theatre, 1,060 seats, for repertory; the Metropolitan Opera House, seating 3800; Alice Tully Hall, 1,096 seats, for chamber music; the Juilliard School, including a theater; and a library and museum.
The Los Angeles Music Center was located downtown on a rectangular site with handsome walks, fountains, sculpture, and reflecting pools. Its three units opened between 1963 and 1967. The Dorothy Chandler Pavilion at the south end had 3,250 seats, was the home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and was available for opera, ballet, musical comedy, and recitals. The Ahmanson Theatre, with 2100 seats, was at the north end and provided drama, ballet, and musical comedy. The Mark Taper Forum was in between, with a circular theater with 750 seats arranged around a thrust stage.
Washington had never attained standing in the performing arts and many felt that this deficiency in the nation’s capital should be remedied. In 1951 President Truman asked the Commission of Fine Arts to investigate ways in which the government could assist the arts. The agency made a comprehensive survey and reported to President Eisenhower on May 15, 1953. Among its recommendations was the establishment of a music center for the performance of opera, symphony, and ballet.
Historically the mainstream Republican party held the view that the arts should be financed by private markets or by private philanthropy, that government must not provide subsidies. Eisenhower, whose main leisure time activities seem to have been golf and bridge, had no interest in the performing arts. Nevertheless, he did not object to the construction of a handsome arts building in Washington as long as the government did not pay for it. On September 2,1958, therefore, he signed the National Cultural Center Act. The site would be the rise overlooking Roosevelt Island and the Potomac. The National Capital Planning Commission would acquire an additional acre to add to the land already owned by the government. The center would come under the administrative control of the Smithsonian Institution.
A board of trustees was formed with Roger L. Stevens as chairman. The noted architect Edward Durell Stone was chosen and he came up with an original idea quite unlike Lincoln Center and the Los Angeles Music Center. Everything would be housed in one enormous oblong structure, 630’x 300’. Side by side would be a 2800-seat concert hall, a 2300-seat theater for opera, dance, and musical comedy, an 1,150-seat theater for drama and musicals, a 550-seat film theater convertible to a thrust stage for drama and musicals, a pavillion for meetings and band concerts, an art gallery, and eating facilities. The estimated cost was a whopping $66.4 million.
When Kennedy became President, he immediately changed the relationship between the government and the arts. John and Jacqueline Kennedy, their friend William Walton observed, were “susceptible to the comfort of the arts. They couldn’t live without them—it [was] woven into the pattern of their lives.” The President was deeply interested in literature, paid great attention to architecture, and had some knowledge of painting and sculpture. More important, according to Arthur Schlesinger, was Kennedy’s “conviction that the health of the arts was vitally related to the health of society. … Excellence was a public necessity, ugliness a national disgrace.”
At the inauguration Robert Frost read a poem and the audience by invitation included many of the nation’s most distinguished writers, composers, and painters. The Kennedys converted the White House into a national stage for performances and dinners for musicians, artists, and writers. The Presidential Medal of Freedom was rehabilitated and awarded to leading artists. More important, Kennedy started on the development of a national arts policy and enthusiastically backed the National Cultural Center.
He pushed the site overlooking the Potomac. He brought the trustees and the advisory committee to the White House for a concert and urged them to proceed with their important task. He proclaimed November 26 to December 2, 1962, National Cultural Center Week and on November 29 spoke on closed circuit television to groups in 75 cities to back the $30 million campaign Stevens had organized to fund the center. The program ran for two hours, Leonard Bernstein was master of ceremonies, and there were performances by Pablo Casals, Marian Anderson, Van Cliburn, Robert Frost, Frederic March, Danny Kaye, Bob Newhart, and Harry Belafonte.
After the assassination a number of members of Congress introduced bills to rename the National Cultural Center after Kennedy. President Johnson not only embraced this idea enthusiastically, he worked out a critically important funding scheme. The campaign had raised $15.5 million by private subscription. Now the government would match that figure and, in addition, the center would be authorized to borrow a similar amount from the Treasury to be repaid by revenues produced by the underground parking garage. Congress quickly enacted the bill and Johnson signed it on January 23, 1964.
Thus, the project became the John F. Kennedy Center and later the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. It was completed in 1971 at a final cost of $71 million. The Kennedy Center immediately joined Lincoln Center and the Los Angeles Music Center as one of the three great architectural monuments to the performing arts in the United States.2
While the center was a glittering monument in the nation’s capital, the Kennedy administration never removed its eye from the bigger goal: a national policy for the arts. Max Isenbergh, a State Department lawyer who was musical, wrote a discussion paper for an interested group of officials entitled “Issues Bearing upon National Cultural Policy.” Secretary of Labor Goldberg, whose wife was an abstract painter, arbitrated the salary dispute between the Metropolitan Opera and the Musicians Union, caused by the fact that the Met was broke. In his award in December 1961 Goldberg added a section written by his assistant, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, recommending “community responsibility” for the performing arts.
Arthur Schlesinger and Pierre Salinger urged Kennedy to bring in August Heckscher as a special consultant to inventory the points at which the government intersected with the arts and to recommend a policy. Heckscher had written the essay on the arts for the Eisenhower Commission on National Goals and was director of the Twentieth Century Fund, which was sponsoring the first serious study of the economics of the arts by the Princeton economists William J. Baumol and William G. Bowen, published as Performing Arts—The Economic Dilemma. Heckscher became the two-day-a-week Special Consultant on the Arts and made his report,The Arts and the National Government, on May 28, 1963. While Heckscher’s report dealt with many topics, its main thrust was to create a National Arts Foundation as “the logical crowning step in a national cultural policy.”
President Kennedy sent up a bill to enact Heckscher’s recommendations, including the foundation. In December 1963, a month following the assassination, the Senate adopted it by voice vote. But the Rules Committee of the House blocked action. President Johnson sent up the bill again in 1964, a rule was issued, and the House passed it 213 to 135. The Senate reaffirmed its earlier action. Johnson signed the National Council on the Arts and Cultural Development Act on September 3, 1964, a toothless statute. It merely created a 25-member council and gave it a pittance to organize itself. There was neither a granting agency nor a fund to support the arts.
Meantime, a new idea had emerged. The academic disciplines loosely known as the humanities had for years envied the enormous financial support that the federal government had poured into the hard sciences, since 1950 largely through the National Science Foundation. Now the arts seemed on the verge of receiving similar federal largesse. The humanities wanted to come in out of the cold.
The American Council of Learned Societies, the Council of Graduate Schools, and the United Chapters of Phi Beta Kappa joined to form a Commission on the Humanities under the chairmanship of President Barnaby C. Keeney of Brown University. It reported on April 30, 1964, recommending legislation to create a National Humanities Foundation patterned after the National Science Foundation.
In his presidential election swing through New England on September 28, 1964, Johnson spoke at Brown on its 200th anniversary. He said, “I look with the greatest of favor upon the proposal of your own able President Keeney’s Commission for a National Foundation for the Humanities.” It sounded like a promise and Johnson won the election. In the first week of the 89th Congress in January 1965, 76 bills were introduced to establish a humanities foundation. Thus, the humanities joined the arts; one program became two.
By this time the Democratic chairmen of the House Education and Labor committee and the Senate Labor and Public Welfare Committee were vigorous spokesmen for legislation of this sort. Frank Thompson, Jr., of New Jersey had been the leading champion in the House for years. More recently Claiborne Pell had won a Senate seat from Rhode Island and had persuaded Senator Lister Hill of Alabama, chairman of the parent committee, to create a new Subcommittee on the Arts, which Pell took over.
On March 10, 1965, the President sent his bill to create the National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities to the subcommittee chairmen. The measure was quickly passed by the Senate on June 10. Johnson had to put firm pressure on the Rules Committee to spring the bill out of its clutches. The House adopted several secondary amendments and passed it on September 15. The Senate immediately adopted the House changes and the President signed the statute on September 29, 1965. At a large ceremony Johnson, with characteristic hyperbole, promised a National Theater, a National Opera, a National Ballet, and an American Film Institute, along with many other cultural goodies. “What this bill really does is to bring active support to this great national asset, to make fresher the winds of art in this land of ours.” But the White House seemed to have forgotten the humanities.
The administrative system was cumbersome. At the top, theoretically, was the Federal Council on the Arts and Humanities, designed to coordinate the activities of the endowments with other federal agencies. S. Dillon Ripley, the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, became chairman of this council. But it does not seem to have played a policy role of any consequence.
The two working structures were identical: a National Council on the Arts/Humanities, each with a chairman and 24 members to select projects for support and a National Endowment on the Arts/Humanities to administer the grants. The jurisdictions were broad. The arts program included, but was not limited to, music, dance, drama, sculpture, photography, graphic and craft arts, industrial and fashion design, movies, television, radio, tape recording, and other arts related to them. Humanities included, but was not limited to, languages, linguistics, literature, history, jurisprudence, philosophy, archaeology, the history, criticism, theory, and practice of the arts, and aspects of the social sciences with a humanistic content. Roger Stevens headed both the arts council and endowment. Barnaby Keeney was chosen to chair the humanities council and endowment but was unable to leave Brown until 1966. Meantime Henry Allen Moe of the Guggenheim Foundation filled the position. The arts council included a number of stars—Leonard Bernstein, Isaac Stern, David Brinkley, Agnes de Mille, Ralph Ellison, and Gregory Peck. The humanities council was manned mainly by academics. Both groups, evidently, were very serious about their undertaking.
Each of the endowments received a basic appropriation of $5 million annually for grants to individuals and groups. In addition, arts got funds for matching grants of $50,000 to each state for the establishment of a state arts program and humanities received an equal amount to match private grants.
Stevens had his council meeting before the legislation was signed. During the first three years the arts endowment, among many others, made the following grants: American Ballet Theatre, an American exhibit at the Venice Biennale, establishment of the American Film Institute, individual choreographers to create new works for dance, production of plays by professional and university theaters, and classical theater for secondary schools (42,000 New Orleans students, for example, saw Arthur Miller’s The Crucible). Programs were launched in virtually all the states and territories.
A problem that the arts endowment foresaw and inevitably was compelled to confront was occasional attack from the extreme right on the projects it supported for alleged subversion or pornography. This was already evident in the House when the bill was before it. Republican Representative Harold R. Gross of Iowa introduced the “belly dance” amendment by inserting after “dance” the following: “including but not limited to irregular jactitations and/or rythmic contraction and coordinated relaxation of the serrati, obliques, and abdominis recti group of muscles—accompanied by rotary undulations, tilts, and turns timed with and attuned to the titillary and blended tones of synchronous woodwinds.” When his amendment was defeated, Gross offered to include baseball, squash, pinochle, and poker as art forms eligible for support. It received the same fate.
The humanities endowment supported less controversial projects: editing and publishing the papers of great Americans; editing and publishing definitive editions of great American writers; archaeological excavations; training programs to improve the quality of the publications of university presses; computer research in the study of foreign languages and in preparing concordances; and assistance to learned societies.
The establishment of the endowments in 1965 was a dramatic new development in American public policy. Never before had the government systematically supported the arts and humanities. The public and the Congress must have concluded that these programs were successful because they endured, throve, and grew over time.3
In 1964 Joseph Hirshhorn at 66, having had a heart attack, was feeling the weight of mortality. He had begun to take soundings for the relocation of some of his valuable property that would outlive him.
Hirshhorn had been born in 1900 in Latvia, the twelfth of thirteen children in a Jewish family. His father died when he was a child. His mother then took most of her family to New York between 1905 and 1907, where she worked twelve hours a day, six days a week, in a pocketbook factory for $12.50 a week. “Poverty has a bitter taste,” he would say. “We ate garbage.” As a child he had no toys.
Hirshhorn dropped out of high school after three months. At 14 he became an office boy on Wall Street. At 17 he went into the Curb Market as a broker and within a year ran $225 up to $168,000. “I’m not an investor,” he said. “I’m a speculator.” At the end of World War I he lost everything but $4000 and started over. Before the 1929 crash, at 28, he sold out for $4 million.
After World War II Hirshhorn bought land in Blind River, Ontario, and mined for metals. He discovered gold and an enormous uranium deposit at a time when the construction of nuclear weapons and atomic power plants was mushrooming. By the sixties he was said to be worth $140 million. He had a magnificent 24-acre estate in Greenwich, Connecticut, houses in Cap d’Antibes and Beverly Hills, an apartment in New York, two offices in New York and another in Toronto.
Hirshhorn discovered modern art in the twenties and was immediately hooked. He became an obsessed collector. He developed, Abram Lerner wrote, “that inspired greed for art which has dominated so much of his life.” In 1945 he came to the AC A Gallery in Manhattan, where Lerner was working, quickly bought four paintings, and left. Lerner had been an artist, was a veteran of the federal arts project, and had studied fine arts at New York University. They became warm friends, shared similar tastes, and Hirshhorn increasingly relied on Lerner’s artistic advice. In 1956 Lerner came on board as curator of the Hirshhorn collection and the latter continued to buy furiously. Lerner spent much of his time keeping an inventory of the works, which were variously housed in Greenwich, in an office on 67th Street in Manhattan, in a warehouse on 10th Avenue, or on loan to museums around the world.
By the sixties the collection was immense and had became hard to track, and Hirshhorn and Lerner began to talk about making it publicly available. The former said, “I want my own museum.” Lerner agreed. They started with the city they knew best, New York, but could not find a proper location. There were discussions about the Doheny estate in Beverly Hills, but that fell through. The British government offered to build a museum in Regents Park in London. There were soundings from Baltimore, Zurich, Florence, and Jerusalem. More interesting, Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York, himself a collector of modern art, offered a museum built by the state at the new state university campus in Purchase, only a short drive from Greenwich.
S. Dillon Ripley, who had become secretary of the Smithsonian Institution in February 1964, entered the bidding. An ornithologist, he had been a professor of biology at Yale and director of the Peabody Museum of Natural History. His mother had helped found the Museum of Modern Art and had imbued him with a passion for contemporary works. The Smithsonian was the administrative parent of the federal art museums in Washington—the National Gallery, the Freer Gallery, the National Collection of Fine Arts, and the Renwick Gallery. The notable gap in the nation’s capital was a museum of modern art. For Ripley the obvious and efficient solution to this problem was the Hirshhorn collection. He searched the legislation of earlier bequests and found that Congress in 1938 had accepted Andrew Mellon’s gift for the National Gallery and his collection of old masters and had also established a $7000 prize for a plan for a modern museum. A competition was held and Eero Saarinen had won, but the Capital Planning Commission had disapproved because it wanted nothing modern on the Mall. Ripley made indirect contact with Hirshhorn through Roger Stevens.
On June 15, 1964, Ripley wrote Hirshhorn of his dream and said that he hoped to “explore the concept” with him. He went to Greenwich to view the art and open discussion. He concluded that he needed help. He informed the President that he hoped to bag Hirshhorn’s collection, “valued then at $40 million.” That was the kind of art discussion Lyndon Johnson could understand.
Early in 1965 Sam Harris, Hirshhorn’s lawyer, with Max Kampelman, a partner in his Washington office, came to see Ripley. The latter asked whether the collector would consider giving his art to the Smithsonian. Harris said, “He would want his name on the museum.” “That,” Ripley replied, “is simply the identification of a building. … “ Harris continued, “On the Mall.” “I don’t see why not.” Harris was astonished. “You mean a Hirshhorn Museum on the Mall?” Ripley answered deliberately, “This is 1965 and I think America has grown up.”
Ripley was concerned about the competition. He suggested to Abe Fortas, a friend of Hirshhorn’s, that a White House luncheon would help. Knowing of Lady Bird Johnson’s strong interest in having a Thomas Eakins painting in the mansion’s collection, Ripley notified Liz Carpenter, her secretary, that Hirshhorn owned 32 of the painter’s works. Ripley wrote Hirshhorn that the collection under Smithsonian guardianship would be assured of independent identity and that it would have more viewers than in any other place in the world, some 12 million annually.
Ripley, Stevens, Hirshhorn, and Harris met to discuss the site. Stevens would have preferred the bank of the Potomac adjacent to his baby, the Kennedy Center. But the others insisted on the Mall at Constitution Avenue and 9th Street.
Ripley was carried away by his enthusiasm. He informed the White House that the collection would be “frightfully important for the cultural growth of Washington.” It could do for the city what the Museum of Modern Art had done for New York. “My mother was on the first women’s committee of the Museum of Modern Art, when it was four rooms with a police dog as a guard in the Heckscher Building in New York in 1932.” He was impressed by the precedents. James Smithson gave his fortune to the United States to establish the Smithsonian Institution. Charles Freer gave his oriental art collection and provided funds for construction of the gallery (cost in 1922 was $2 million, now equivalent to $9.5 million), and an endowment for operation. Andrew Mellon gave his magnificent collection of old masters and $15 million for construction of the National Gallery (current equivalent $45 million) along with an endowment.
Mrs. Johnson held a luncheon for the Hirshhorns at the White House on May 21, 1965. In anticipation, the collector wrote a long letter to the President and his wife on May 17:
I have had a number of conversations with Dr. Dillon Ripley and Mr. Roger Stevens concerning my art collection. Both of these gentlemen have seen a portion of my collection and have urged that I donate it to the Smithsonian Institution. Their thought is that my collection would be housed in a modern museum to be named the Joseph H. Hirshhorn Museum, which would be erected on the plot of land on Constitution Avenue between 9th and llth Streets … ; that the collection and museum would be maintained, preserved and developed in perpetuity by the Smithsonian Institution under my name; and that the museum would be operated by a Board of Trustees on which I have appropriate representation. …
My collection has been built up over … more than 40 years and I believe … that it is one of the finest collections of modern sculpture and paintings in the world.
I own more than 1,500 pieces of sculpture, produced by such world famous sculptors as Rodin, Bourdelle, Maillol, Manzu, Degas, Daumier, Sir Henry Moore, Lipschitz, Brancusi, Sir Jacob Epstein, Renoir, Picasso, Calder, Giacometti, Marini, Matisse and others. My collection includes 63 works by … Moore, generally acknowledged to be the greatest living sculptor. … My Giacomettis and Matisses constitute the largest holdings in a single collection in America. Rodin is represented … by 16 works, including a major cast of the Burghers of Calais.
[There are] … over 4,800 paintings and drawings by scores of American and European artists. I have always sought to encourage young artists—particularly American … by purchasing their works. … [There is] a thorough representation of the realists, the expressionists, the romantics, and the abstractionists.
… the better known painters who are represented: Picasso, Eakins, Hassam, Munch, Bellows, Sloan, Kuhn, Hopper, Sawyer, Wyeth, Beckmann, Marin, Weber, Ben Shahn, Jack Levine, Maurice Prendergast, Dali, Francis Bacon, Larry Rivers, Eilshemius, Kline, de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Kuniyoshi, Milton Avery, Philip Evergood, Stuart Davis, Feininger, and Hans Hofmann. …
I would be pleased to contribute my entire collection to the Smithsonian Institution under the conditions mentioned above. In addition to my collection, which is worth many millions of dollars, I would be prepared to contribute $1 million towards the construction of a museum on the indicated site. …
Lady Bird Johnson asked the Hirshhorns to come half an hour early for a tour of the White House. She much admired Eakins and hoped he would put one of the painter’s works in the mansion. She had invited Ripley, Stevens, Harris, and Fortas with their wives. At the luncheon Stevens estimated the cost of the museum at $10 million and architect Nathaniel Owings was said already to be at work on the design. Ripley called the gift the greatest to the nation since Andrew Mellon’s.
In the middle of the luncheon, Mrs. Johnson wrote, “Lyndon came in, met everybody, thanked Mr. Hirshhorn, and boldly said what I had been wanting to say and couldn’t—that it was wonderful that the people of the United States were going to be able to enjoy art works, but that it would be downright selfish if the White House itself didn’t get an example.” She received the Eakins, a portrait of a little girl, in 1967.
The President, Fortas later recalled, “had a selling job to do and he did it magnificently.” He put his arm around Hirshhorn and said, “Joe, you don’t need a contract. Just turn the collection over to the Smithsonian and I’ll take care of the rest.” The collector almost succumbed. “Once the President puts his arm around your shoulder, you’re a dead cookie. … I knew then there was going to be a deal.” But he turned to Harris and said, “What do you think, Sam?” Harris said, “We ought to think about it.”
After the President left, Fortas said, “You don’t have to worry about this, Joe. Just do as the President says.” Harris was angered. “To hell with that, Abe!” Although Johnson had just won a great election victory, Presidents lose power, become ill, or die. “Over my dead body are you going to get this collection without the conditions written into the contract and a statute passed.”
The negotiation of the agreement took about a year. Lerner had to prepare a precise inventory of all the works that would be turned over, and Ripley carefully reviewed the Freer and Mellon contracts. During this period Fortas was named to the Supreme Court and Harry McPherson replaced him for the White House.
The agreement was signed on May 17, 1966, by Hirshhorn, Harris, and Ripley. The significant terms were as follows: Congress would enact and the President would approve “no later than ten days after the close of the 90th Congress” [January 1969] legislation providing: The site bounded by Seventh Street, Independence Avenue, Ninth Street, and Madison Drive would be occupied solely by the museum and sculpture garden and the existing structure would be torn down. The new edifice would be called the Joseph H. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, would be free to the public, and would be administered by the Smithsonian. The United States pledged to provide funds for “upkeep, operation, and maintenance.” The museum would be administered by a board of trustees of ten members, two ex officio, the Chief Justice of the United States and the secretary of the Smithsonian, and eight named by the President from lists of four nominated by Hirshhorn and four by the Smithsonian.
Hirshhorn and Ripley jointly would select the architects and would approve their plans. The $1 million gift would be used for the acquisition of art. The first director would be chosen by Hirshhorn and approved by Ripley. (Abram Lerner would hold that position.) In the event that the legislation was not enacted in time or the museum was not built within five years thereafter, “this Agreement shall be null and void and the proposed gifts … shall not be consummated.”
On November 7, 1966, the Congress by resolution accepted the Hirshhorn gift and approved the site on the Mall. The time requirements fixed by the agreement and their potential sanctions put pressure on the Johnson administration. It had to remove two large obstacles before construction could begin. The first was the red-brick Victorian monstrosity called the Armed Forces Museum of Pathology, which McPherson considered “a strong candidate for ugliest-in-Washington.” It was at 7th Street and Independence Avenue, smack inside the Hirshhorn site. It had been built in 1887 and for many years had been the headquarters of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, a medical library, and a museum. The headquarters had moved to Walter Reed Hospital in 1955 and the library to the Public Health Service in 1956. Only the museum remained on the Mall and it occupied half the building; the remainder was used for offices. Ripley thought the collection almost worthless except for a notable group of microscopes, which many museums would be glad to have. The Bureau of the Budget considered the pathology specimens of “morbid interest only.”
But the pathologists refused to move, rejecting several attractive offers the White House made, including three buildings at the Bureau of Standards. They generated a big letter-writing campaign that seriously damped support for the Hirshhorn in the House. The long-range plan was to give them a new museum-laboratory at Walter Reed and they demanded that Congress package it with the art museum. The price for construction was $7.5 million. Due to the budgetary slowdown on construction, McNamara was reluctant to act, but the White House pushed him to ask for an appropriation. In October 1967 the House Appropriations Committee made life more difficult by eliminating the Hirshhorn appropriation. The administration asked for its restoration. McPherson wrote to Budget Director Schultze, “I’ve talked to the boss about this. He is determined that nothing be left undone that will help us secure the Hirshhorn bequest.” The President and Mrs. Johnson talked to Appropriations Committee chairman George Mahon of Texas and he agreed to restore the funds. McPherson’s summary: “The arithmetic is that in exchange for a $30 million art collection, we build a $10–12 million gallery and a $7.5 million museum-laboratory at Walter Reed that we would have in any event constructed in a few years.” He thought the deal a bargain for the government.
The other problem was the constriction of the federal budget resulting from the Vietnam War and the Great Inflation, which threatened the funds for the Hirshhorn. Ripley had little trouble lobbying through an appropriation of $803,000 for the architects in the fiscal 1968 budget. The contract was awarded to Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, with Gordon Bunshaft as principal architect. His bold and striking design gained the approval of the Commission of Fine Arts and the National Capital Planning Commission. The plans were ready for construction in July 1968. But the cost with inflation had now risen to $14,197,000. Hirshhorn agreed to amend the agreement to defer the date of completion.
The congressional subcommittees, Ripley wrote, are “very nervous about defending this on the floor” because it would represent a 66 percent increase in the Smithsonian’s budget. It would look “horrendous” in an “appallingly austere year.” He had another idea: the installment plan. Since construction costs in the first year would be lower than they would become later, he suggested limiting the fiscal 1969 request to $2 million, “a very attractive reduction.” The Bureau of the Budget approved and he persuaded Congress to go along.
Ground was broken on January 8, 1969, in a ceremony featuring Chief Justice Warren, President Johnson, and Dillon Ripley, all very large men, and Joe Hirshhorn, barely more than five feet tall. The photographs show that all enjoyed themselves, particularly the donor.
The museum and sculpture garden opened on October 1, 1974. Hirshhorn was now 75. Lyndon Johnson was no longer alive. The dignitaries present at the ceremony were Lady Bird Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, Senator Fulbright, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the ambassador to India. Bunshaft’s radical design was encased in a four-story hollow concrete cylinder sheathed in pink granite. The galleries opened onto a central court. The museum was set in a garden filled with sculpture. Many considered the structure stunning and a fitting showplace for modern art. Others were critical because it deviated markedly from the nearby neo-classical National Gallery and the red brick of the Victorian Smithsonian. Critics called it a “gargantuan bagel” or the “world’s largest doughnut.”
The museum opened on a bright and warm autumn day. Only 900 of the more than 6000 works contributed were on display. It proved an immense success with the public. Within a year it ranked sixth in the nation in attendance. By 1976 it was drawing 25,000 visitors a day and had passed the Museum of Modern Art and the Chicago Art Institute, surpassed only by the Metropolitan, the National Gallery, and the Los Angeles County Art Museum. Joe Hirshhorn sold his estate in Connecticut and moved to Washington to be near “his” museum. “The intercession of President Lyndon B. Johnson,” Abram Lerner wrote, “made Mr. Hirshhorn’s choice inevitable.”4
On October 26, 1967 Chief Justice Warren in his capacity as chairman of the trustees of the National Gallery of Art wrote the President that in 1937 Andrew Mellon had given to the nation his collection and the funds to build the National Gallery. The congressional resolution of acceptance provided that an adjoining area bounded by Fourth Street, Pennsylvania Avenue, Third Street, and North Mall Drive shall be “reserved as a site for future additions to the National Gallery. … “ The trustees had now decided that this site should be used for a new building to provide for exhibition space, expansion of the gallery’s extension program, now serving 3000 communities in all 50 states, and educational and cultural programs. Mellon’s son Paul, who was president of the gallery, and Paul’s sister, Mrs. Ailsa Mellon Bruce, had just contributed securities and cash “to the value of approximately $20,000,000.” With other funds available, this would cover all costs. Legislation had been proposed for Congress to authorize the new building. The Chief Justice asked for the President’s support.
Douglas Cater of the White House staff called John Walker, director of the gallery, who said no federal funds would be needed until the building was completed, hopefully in 1972, and they would be for operating expenses. He suggested a small ceremony to express gratitude to the Mellons. But Paul Mellon was abroad.
Thus, the President merely issued a statement on November 6 expressing gratitude on behalf of the nation to the Mellons and urging Congress to authorize the addition. He pointed out that this structure would contribute to the “enrichment and beautification of the Nation’s Capital.” The architect, I. M. Pei, was widely acclaimed for his neo-classical design. The new wing, in fact, cost $94.4 million, all of it contributed by the Mellons, and opened in July 1978.
Walter Hopps, curator of the National Collection of Fine Arts, said, “Symbolically, I think, it’s marvelous that juxtaposed to Mr. Mellon’s institution there will be Mr. Hirshhorn’s. It is altogether fitting and proper. Both were great; both had the morality of the Great White Shark; and the only thing that differentiates them was their taste and sensibility.”5
In the 1930s radio was the sole medium of broadcasting and was dominated by three networks—the Red, the Blue—both owned by the National Broadcasting Company—and the Columbia Broadcasting System. During World War II the Federal Communications System ordered NBC to spin off one of its networks in order to increase competition. The Blue Network, the weaker, became the American Broadcasting Company.
Television broadcasting had become technically feasible on the eve of the war and the FCC issued transmission standards in 1941. NBC and CBS immediately established anchor stations in New York. But the war prevented development. In the U.S. in 1944 there were only 7000 receivers for six stations that broadcast four hours a week.
At the end of hostilities the FCC imposed a freeze on the industry to give itself time to study broadcast standards, particularly the use of very high frequency (VHF) as against ultra high frequency (UHF). It selected VHF. Since that part of the spectrum provided only 13 channels and 6 were reserved for noncommercial purposes, only 7 were available. This created a continuing shortage of stations. Nevertheless, the industry developed with phenomenal speed. By 1959 there were 50 million receivers in 86 percent of U.S. homes served by over 500 stations. Since the FCC multiple ownership rule limited an owner to five VHF and two UHF stations, virtually all outlets were owned by persons other than the networks. But almost all the stations became affiliates of one or several of the networks to gain access to national programming.
This system depended upon advertising for its income. The program attracted viewers who did not pay to watch it; the advertiser paid for the program in order to attract an audience for his commercial message. Thus, the bigger the audience, the more the advertiser shelled out to the network and the stations. The network was shaped to reach virtually every receiver in the U.S. and programs were produced to maximize audience size on the ridiculous assumption that everyone had the same tastes and that no part of the audience should be lost because it objected to the show. Thus, the programs became stereotyped and inoffensive—westerns, mysteries, sitcoms, and so on—and were “lowbrow” at best. Since TV was a very effective advertising medium, networks and stations became extremely profitable. Many members of Congress received FCC licenses for stations, Lyndon Johnson among them—he and his wife owned KTBC-TV, the only station in Austin, an affiliate of all three networks.
During the era of radio a number of universities, mainly land-grant institutions in the Midwest and the West, had established educational stations. But they had extremely limited funds, broadcast on very low power, and had difficulty surviving. In 1951, when there were 2200 AM stations, only 37 were educational. FM brought in another 170, which were also weak. They banded together in the National Association of Educational Broadcasters, which looked hopefully to a brighter future in TV. During the FCC freeze NAEB lobbied to reserve channels for noncommercial broadcasting and found a champion in Commissioner Frieda Hennock. In 1951 a financial savior appeared in the Ford Foundation’s Fund for Adult Education, which, as part of a comprehensive program to support noncommercial TV, pledged $12 million to provide equipment and programming for stations. The next year the FCC held aside parts of both the VHF and UHF spectrums for educational broadcasting.
The first educational station went on the air in 1953; by 1966 there were 124, mainly VHF, but shifting increasingly to UHF. Of this number, 41 were community stations, 35 were run by universities, 27 by state boards of education, and 21 by school districts. These stations were linked together by National Educational Television, which supplied half the programming—five hours a week of cultural and public affairs shows either produced by NET itself or rented from abroad, largely from the BBC. NET duplicated programs and distributed them by mail. Electronic interconnection, which was far superior, was too expensive for simultaneous nationwide broadcasting, but was used locally in the Northeast, California, and Oklahoma. Despite a total Ford subvention of $120 million, supplemented by governments at all levels, as well as industry and subscriber support, the system was seriously underfunded and its future was in great doubt.6
In December 1964 a conference of the National Association of Educational Broadcasters in Washington unanimously proposed a presidential commission to study the financial needs of their system and recommend a national policy. Shortly NAEB leaders met with White House aide Douglas Cater, the HEW leadership—Gardner, Cohen, and Keppel—and FCC Chairman E. William Henry. They agreed on the desirability of a commission, but disagreed over whether it should be appointed by the President or by a private body, a responsibility the Carnegie Corporation was willing to assume. The President, because of his station in Austin, insisted that there should be no conflict of interest, real or apparent. Carnegie won by default.
Gardner handled the selection of the chairman and proposed James Killian, Jr., chairman of the MIT corporation. The secretary wanted the President’s approval. While Johnson would have preferred someone else, he did not oppose the choice. In fact, Killian did a masterful job. On October 28, 1965, the Carnegie Corporation announced the members of the Carnegie Commission on Educational Television: Killian, chairman; James B. Conant, former president of Harvard; Lee DuBridge, president of Caltech; Ralph Ellison, the noted black writer; John Hays of the Washington Post; David Henry, president of the University of Illinois; Oveta Culp Hobby, president of the Houston Post; K. C. Kellam, president of Texas Broadcasting; Edwin Land, president of Polaroid; Joseph McConnell, president of Reynolds Metals; Terry Sanford, former governor of North Carolina; Rudolph Serkin, the famed pianist; and Leonard Woodcock, vice president of the UAW. Carnegie would finance the commission to the tune of $500,000.
The commission’s study was comprehensive and thorough. It held 28 days of formal meetings and many others of smaller groups; it heard from 225 individuals and groups; it visited 92 stations in 35 states in addition to 7 foreign systems; and it employed Arthur D. Little, Inc., to prepare the cost estimates. Its report,Public Broadcasting: A Program for Action, was published in January 1967 and made a very big splash. Besides its recommendations, the title of the report transformed the discussion from the awkward and obsolete educational TV system to the new and exciting prospect for public television. Henceforth educational television would be narrowed to “instructional television, directed at students in the classroom.” Public television “includes all that is of human interest and importance which is not at the moment appropriate or suitable for support by advertising and which is not arranged for formal instruction.”
The commission’s vision of the new system differed fundamentally from the network-dominated commercial system. It assumed diversity over uniformity of tastes. This argued for program production from several sources—a central authority to be called the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the local stations, and independent producers.
The corporation would play the leading role. To avoid congressional intervention, it should be a federally chartered, nonprofit, nongovernmental institution, but with members appointed by the President. It would be the major recipient of government and private funds, disbursing them to national program production agencies, to local stations both to improve their facilities and to produce programs, and for electronic interconnection.
Interconnection could be used in two distinct ways—networking to transmit a single signal to all stations for simultaneous broadcast, as the commercial networks operated, or distribution of a program from a central point to stations which then had the option of playing it simultaneously or of recording it for later showing at the station’s discretion. On the diversity principle the commission anticipated that most programs would be broadcast at different times to fit the individual station’s schedule.
A national system so constituted would be expensive. The commission’s recommendation for financing was on the European and Canadian examples, an excise tax on television receivers of between 2 and 5 percent. The receipts would be placed in a trust fund upon which the corporation could draw. This would insulate the corporation politically against the annual congressional appropriations process.
Killian engaged Covington & Burling, the noted Washington law firm, to draft a bill. The Carnegie report was circulated widely within the government and received general approval. The key senators, John Pastore of Rhode Island and Warren Magnuson of Washington, were enthusiastic. The educational broadcasters, of course, were ecstatic. The Ford Foundation, now headed by McGeorge Bundy, was a strong supporter. So were the commercial networks, particularly CBS and NBC; ABC went along. In fact, Dr. Frank Stanton, president of CBS, promised a $1 million gift to the new system. He told Cater that he had concluded that the excise tax was the only way to go to get “reasonable insulation from Rooney’s world.” Thomas Hoving, director of the Metropolitan Museum, formed a citizens’ committee to back the report. But Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Stanley Surrey wrote that a tax on receivers would be “more regressive than any excise tax we have or have had, with the exception of the tax on smoking tobacco.”
On February 28, 1967, the President sent a special message to Congress in which he endorsed passage of the bill to create the Corporation for Public Broadcasting with a one-year funding of $10.5 million for construction and $9 million for operations. He said nothing about a tax on receivers, but he did establish an internal and secret task force to weigh long-term financing of the system. The only other significant deviation from the Carnegie report was the inclusion of public radio.7
Johnson’s decision to strip away the Carnegie recommendation for assured financing had a very important permanent result. It meant that the conservatives who dominated Congress in 1967 would control the corporation’s funding through the annual appropriations process; in addition, the Republicans among them expected to capture the presidency and perhaps the Congress in 1968. Thus, they felt little concern over a bill that would operate on a shoestring. This guaranteed its passage.
Magnuson, chairman of the Commerce Committee, introduced the bill, and Pastore, chairman of the Subcommittee on Communications, held hearings during April 1967. The administration, the foundations, and both the commercial and educational broadcasters testified in favor. In fact, there was no opposition. The Commerce Committee on May 11 reported it in almost exactly the form in which it had been introduced. The Senate adopted it by voice vote on May 17, 1967.
The House proved only a little more difficult. The Commerce Committee held hearings in July and listened to the same witnesses. It reported a bill amended mainly to assure political neutrality on August 21 by a vote of 15 to 6, all the latter Republicans. The House acted favorably on September 21 by a roll call of 265 to 91.
The conference resolved the differences between the bills in favor of the House on October 18. The House the next day and the Senate on October 26 accepted the report, and the President signed the Public Broadcasting Act on November 7, 1967, at the White House.
Title I extended the life of a 1962 law that subsidized the construction of TV station facilities for three years and increased coverage to public radio. It authorized appropriations of $10.5 million in 1968, $12.5 in 1969, and $15 million in 1970.
Title II created the nonprofit, nongovernmental Corporation for Public Broadcasting to funnel funds to the system, not as a network. The corporation was forbidden to own stations. It would assist stations with their operating costs to produce programs, finance program producers, and establish interconnection. CPB would be governed by a board of 15 directors. Stations were prohibited from editorializing or taking sides in elections. The corporation was banned from interference in the affairs of stations and was directed to adhere to objectivity and balance with controversial programs. CPB received an appropriation of $9 million for 1968 and nothing more for the future.
Johnson waited until after he signed the law before he appointed the internal task force on financing public broadcasting. It consisted of Califano, his assistant James Gaither, Budget Director Zwick, Schultze, Cohen, and Mel White of the Treasury. The task force made a careful study of financial needs on the assumption that funding must be insulated from the political process to the maximum extent possible. It proposed $30 million in 1969, rising swiftly to $135 million in 1973. There would be three possible sources: (1) either a tax on commercial broadcasters or a tax on TV and radio receivers; (2) federal matching of the funds raised by donations from other sources; and (3) general revenues of the Treasury deposited in a trust fund, as with Social Security. The President did not make a choice from these alternatives and made no financing proposal to Congress. By now, 1968, his standing on Capitol Hill, particularly on new taxes, had vanished.
Johnson’s final responsibility under the new law was to nominate the board of directors of CPB, which he announced on February 17, 1968. Frank Pace, Jr., became chairman. He had been Director of the Budget and Secretary of the Army under Truman, president of General Dynamics, and chairman of Eisenhower’s National Goals Commission. Killian and Hobby came over from the Carnegie Commission. The movie industry supplied Johnson’s former aide, Jack Valenti, now of the Motion Picture Producers Association, and Robert S. Benjamin of United Artists. Two were former governors—Joseph D. Hughes of New Jersey and Carl Sanders of Georgia. Milton Eisenhower had just left the presidency of Johns Hopkins and Frank Schooley was from Illinois and NAEB. Michael A. Gammino was a Rhode Island banker, a friend of Pastore; Saul Haas was a Seattle broadcaster and a friend of Magnuson. John D. Rockefeller III had been the main force behind Lincoln Center and Erich Leinsdorf was music director of the Boston Symphony and a friend of LBJ. Roscoe C. Carroll was a black attorney from Los Angeles and Joseph A. Beirne was president of the Communication Workers Union.
This able new board faced formidable difficulties. The recruitment of a staff moved slowly and CPB did not get a president until after Nixon’s election. John W. Macy, Jr., former chairman of the Civil Service Commission, took office in February 1969.
The funding problem was crippling. The new system needed a massive infusion of money at the outset to build up station equipment and operating capability, to provide interconnection, and to finance program production. Johnson’s task force had anticipated this need and had proposed a hefty increase in the appropriation. But Nixon distrusted public broadcasting and kept its funding very low. When he vetoed the 1973 appropriation, Macy and his top aides resigned. Between 1972 and 1987 the federal government’s contribution to public television ranged from a niggardly 16 to 28 percent of its actual expenditures. “The failure to provide adequate funding,” Bruce McKay wrote, “invalidated the conditions of the public broadcasting experiment at least as seriously as the denial of [political] insulation.”
Interconnection proved difficult, exposed internal division within the system, and consumed more than a year to resolve. CPB, supported by the Ford Foundation, urged creation of a new agency that would, like a network, both produce and distribute programs to its affiliates. But the stations, particularly the large ones, feared centralization of authority in such an agency. Intense and prolonged negotiations led to a compromise settlement. The Public Broadcasting System (PBS) was incorporated in 1969 with authority both to produce and to distribute programs, but the stations received five of the nine seats on its board of directors.
Despite these problems, the remarkable fact about the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 was that the system it created—CPB, PBS, and National Public Radio—survived and blossomed. In both television and radio the programming sought to fulfill the goals of the Carnegie Commission: service to substantial fragmented audiences with variable tastes along with a stress on public affairs, the arts, and culture to fill the virtual vacuum left by commercial broadcasting. While the initiative to establish this important system had come from the Ford and Carnegie foundations, Lyndon Johnson had responded at once when he received the Carnegie report. It is unfortunate that it did not arrive until 1967 when his control over Congress was so diminished that he could not get adequate funding, in fact, did not even try.8
On November 21, 1968, shortly before Johnson left the White House, he and Mrs. Johnson invited the National Council on the Arts to dinner. In introducing the President, Roger Stevens offered this assessment: “President Johnson has done more for the arts than any other President in the history of the United States.” Stevens could have added public television and radio. Odd, but true.9