IN LATE MAY, two months after the voting rights speech, Johnson summoned me to his office. As I entered, he was standing before the wire service teletype machine, installed so he could personally monitor press commentary on its way to a thousand city desks, and have his press secretary issue a rejoinder or correction that would arrive even before editors could digest and rewrite an offending report. He could not control the press — a secret yearning of all presidents — but he could compel the simultaneous publication of “his side” (usually referred to by all high officials as “the truth”). The president motioned me to a chair, then, with some slight reluctance, left the machine and sat behind his desk — our conversation accompanied by the unpleasant clicking of the mechanical printer.
“You did a good job on that voting rights,” he began. It was his first overt acknowledgment of my authorship. (The White House staff had been instructed to assert that the president had penned it himself, presumably on the back of an envelope of incredible dimensions.) “A fine job.”
“Thank you, Mr. President,” I replied.
“Now, voting rights are important. But it’s only the tail on the pig, when we ought to be going for the whole hog. During the depression I ran an NYA [National Youth Administration] project in Texas. All the boys, white and Negroes, were poor. But the poor Negroes were kept separate over in Prairie View, and always got the short end. They didn’t even have a decent place to sleep. Now, the whole country’s like one big Prairie View. Not everywhere, but most places. The problem’s not just civil rights. Hell, what good are rights if you don’t have a decent home or someone to take care of you when you’re sick? Now we’ve got to find a way to let Negroes get what most white folks already have. At least the chance to get it. As I see it, the problem isn’t so much hatred as fear. The white worker fears the Negro’s going to take something away from him — his job, his house, his daughter. Well, we ought to do something about that.” (About what? I thought — doctors, jobs, prejudice, terror?) “Now, we can’t do everything at once, but we can make people feel a little guilty about not doing it. We’ve got the biggest pulpit in the world up here, and we ought to use it to do a little preaching. Why don’t you see what you can do. You’re my regular alter ego.”
“I’ll give it a try, Mr. President,” still uncertain exactly what I was going to try.
“Fine.” Then in a gesture of dismissal the president rose and returned to the endless fascination of the news ticker.
Clearly Johnson wanted to go beyond the traditional issues of civil rights — the subject of a multitude of protests, marches, and demonstrations — to discuss the denial of economic and social opportunity. Over the next few days, I discussed the substance and occasion for such an address with Bill Moyers and Jack Valenti. The president’s scheduled commencement speech at Howard University on June 5 was, we agreed, the appropriate event. Research materials were accumulated and, late in the afternoon of June 4, I began to write, completing the draft just as the eastward-facing windows of the adjacent Executive Office Building began to mirror the dawn light. I did not often wait until the last minute to draft a speech, but deliberate delay was one of the tactics I occasionally used to keep other staff members, even cabinet officials, from trying to substitute their literary judgment for mine.
After writing a covering memorandum for the president, I took the draft to the mansion so that an attendant could show it to Johnson when he awoke. In the memo, I informed Johnson that I had shown drafts of the speech to Jack Valenti, Bill Moyers, and “Pat Moynihan of Labor,” that Moyers and I felt it would be a “pathbreaking speech … will put us ahead of the trends,” not merely a response, as were all previous civil rights initiatives, to the crisis of the clash between black demands and white resistance. “Coming now,” we felt, “it could have a beneficial effect on the likelihood of violent demonstrations this summer.” (A serious underestimation of the growing frustration within the northern ghettos.) Finally, spurred by a self-indulgent pride which was swollen by fatigue, in a brief thrust of grotesquely exaggerated rhetoric, I wrote: “You received almost all the Negro vote. You have fulfilled the expectations of that support. But both Bill and I agree that a speech like this might well help toward making you ‘The Great Emancipator’ of the twentieth century.” Yet despite my present disclaimer, it might have gone a long way toward that end, had it been a prelude instead of an epitaph.
When I arrived at the second floor of the mansion with the draft and memo, I found Johnson already in the midst of breakfast. I entered his bedroom and handed him the speech, which he read silently, making occasional penciled amendments and inserts. Then, extending the manuscript toward me: “That’ll do just fine, Dick.”
“Don’t you think I ought to check it out with black leaders?” I asked. “It goes a lot further than even the civil rights movement has gone, and I’d like to make sure it doesn’t get us into trouble.”
“If you’d like to,” the president replied, turning toward his television sets. I took the draft and left. Johnson was unconcerned. It was what he wanted to say. Being more cautious or, perhaps, less attuned to the temper of the black movement, I spent the next hour or two reading the draft to King, Roy Wilkins of the NAACP, Whitney Young of the Urban League, and A. William Randolph of the Railroad Workers. They were all enthusiastic. (Stokely Carmichael, Rap Brown, and Malcolm X were not on my calling list; the establishment hadn’t come that far.)
Later that day I accompanied the president on his ride across Washington to the campus of Howard University.
Standing at the foot of the temporary platform that had been constructed for the president’s speech, I scanned the gathering of almost five thousand — nearly all black — faculty, visitors, and graduating seniors who occupied the spacious quadrangle facing the rostrum behind which hovered the large stone building named in honor of the heroic nineteenth-century leader Frederick Douglass. Johnson was introduced, acknowledged the applause, opened his notebook in a silence perturbed only by the gentle breeze rippling through the mild June air. The black faces were impassive, waiting. In many, especially the young, I thought I could discern a hint of skepticism. It may have been my imagination, but I didn’t think so. For despite all he had done and said, despite the accolades of black leaders for the response to Selma, he was still a white man — the honkie intruder on black ground. What would it take, I thought, how many years of struggle and purgation before they could fully trust a white leader?
Johnson sensed it too, must have sensed it — an awareness bred of the experience of a southern lifetime — as he began to speak:
“… American Negroes have been another nation: deprived of freedom, crippled by hatred, the doors of opportunity closed to hope.
“In our time change has come to this nation too,” the president professed, citing the civil rights laws of recent years, including the voting rights bill then before the Congress. But these laws, he said, paraphrasing Winston Churchill, are only “the end of the beginning.”
Admittedly “the barriers to freedom are tumbling down.… But freedom is not enough.… You do not,” he explained, “take a person who had been hobbled by chains, liberate him, bring him up to the starting gate of a race and then say, ‘You are free to compete with all the others’ and still justly believe you have been completely fair.… It is not enough to open the gates of opportunity. All of our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates.… Men and women of all races are born with the same range of abilities. But ability is not just the product of birth. Ability is stretched or stunted by the family you live with … the neighborhood … the school … and the poverty or richness of your surroundings. It is the product of a hundred unseen forces playing upon the infant, the child and the man.”
I thought I could detect a turning of mood, respectful attention gradually charged with expectant intensity, the ritual applause gaining in vigor. Johnson looked sternly toward the capped-and-gowned graduates, acknowledged the achievement implicit in the growing number of black college graduates, but then reminded them that their accomplishments “tell only the story of a growing middle-class minority.… [F]or the great majority of Negro Americans … there is a much grimmer story. They are still another nation … for them the walls are rising and the gulf is widening.” (They needed no reminder, but his words were addressed to a larger audience.)
The president recited the statistical litany, which revealed the mounting disproportions between white and black America, the staggering decline in relative employment, income, poverty, infant survival; the increasing isolation “as Negroes crowd into the central cities and become a city within a city.”
Although the causes of this inequality are “complex and subtle,” the president admitted, two are undeniably clear: “First, Negroes are trapped — as many whites are trapped — in inherited, gateless poverty — shut in slums, without decent medical care,” where “private and public poverty combine to cripple their capacities.” The eradication of these devastating conditions, Johnson said, was an objective of the War on Poverty and the Great Society.
“But there is a second cause … the devastating heritage of long years of slavery; and a century of oppression, hatred and injustice. Negro poverty,” the president proclaimed, “is not white poverty” nor are the differences “racial,” but “solely … the consequence of ancient brutality, past injustice, and present prejudice,” which must be “overcome if we are ever to reach the time when the only difference between Negroes and whites is the color of their skin.”
Responding to the subtle racism of those white politicians and social theorists who righteously invoked the successful upward climb of other American minorities, Johnson rejected the comparison: “The Negro, like these others, will have to rely mostly on his own efforts. But he cannot do it alone. For [other groups] … did not have a cultural tradition which had been twisted and battered by years of hatred and hopelessness, nor were they excluded because of race or color — a feeling whose dark intensity is matched by no other in society.”
He had said it. I could feel, standing there, looking across the barrier of my own color toward the black multitude, a slight chill — not of pleasure, it was not a subject that permitted pleasure — but something like gratification. An American president — a white, southern American president — had acknowledged that racism which had joined the earliest colonists in their Jamestown settlement — the original sin of the American paradise — and which had endured, a dark stream etched along the margins of a white current, for over three centuries.
The disabling differences in the black experience, the president said, “are a seamless web” which “cause each other … reinforce each other.” The achievement of Negro equality requires that we understand the mingled “roots of injustice”: the isolation of Negroes in our cities, “a world of decay, ringed by an invisible wall … which can cripple the youth and desolate the man”; the “burden that a dark skin” adds to the search for productive employment — “eroding hope, which once blighted breeds despair.” Added to this is the breakdown of “the Negro family structure” for which “white America must accept responsibility, having imposed the long years of degradation and discrimination which have attacked the Negro man’s dignity and assaulted his ability to provide for his family.
“There is no single answer to all of these problems,” the president admitted. But there are some answers, partial perhaps, but within our capacity to provide: “Jobs … decent homes in decent surroundings … an equal chance to learn … social programs better designed to hold families together … care of the sick … an understanding heart.”
To these ends, Johnson pledged, “I will dedicate the expanding efforts of the Johnson administration.” And because the problems and the means of resolution were not fully comprehended, Johnson announced his intention “this fall … to call a White House Conference of scholars, experts … Negro leaders … and officials of government. The … theme and title will be ‘To Fulfill These Rights.’”
Old Tom Jefferson would have approved, I reflected, at this obvious play on phrases he had penned almost two centuries earlier. “To secure these rights” — the inalienable rights of man — was not only the purpose, but the soul of government. Jefferson had assumed that, given freedom, an abundant, unmastered continent would provide ample opportunity for fulfillment. And it had. For white men. Now the land was crowded, and strewn with new, unforeseeable obstacles to fulfillment by new claimants to the gifts of “the Creator.” But Johnson’s theme was always implicit in Jefferson’s declaration — rights without opportunity were hollow deceptions, and to compensate the inadequacies of nature, governments were also “instituted among men.”
From the Howard assembly I could detect an obscure modulation of mood: Surprise? Certainly. Hope? Perhaps.
“For what is Justice?” the president concluded. “It is to fulfill the fair expectations of man.… We have pursued it to the edge of our imperfections, and we have failed to find it for the American Negro.
“It is the glorious opportunity of this generation to end the one huge wrong of the American nation … to find America for ourselves with the same immense thrill of discovery which gripped those who first began to realize that here, at last, was a home for freedom.”
After the final enthusiastic applause had died down, Johnson turned and departed the rostrum, enveloped by blue-suited agents of the Secret Service, while I ran rapidly toward the gate and the waiting limousines. This time there would be no anecdotes and whiskey. It was midday and we both had work to do.
The next morning, the president received a telegram from Reverend King which crowned the almost universally favorable press comment. “Never before has a president articulated the depths and dimensions of the problem of racial injustice more eloquently and profoundly. The whole speech evinced amazing sensitivity to the difficult problems that Negro Americans face in the stride toward freedom. It is my hope that all Americans will capture the spirit and content of this great statement.”
That next month, July, the first American combat troops landed in Vietnam.
The August, the Watts ghetto in Los Angeles was set aflame by rioting black youths.
The conference “To Fulfill These Rights” was convened that fall, and, a few days later, adjourned — a total and irretrievable failure.
“It isn’t the war,” Johnson later said. “We’re the wealthiest nation in the world.… We need to appeal to everyone to restrain their appetite, to stop running around after everything like dogs chasing their tails. We’re greedy but not short of the wherewithal to meet our problems.”
But Lyndon Johnson was wrong. That understanding of men and events, at whose spaciousness I had so often marveled, had reached its limits.
It was the war.