CHAPTER 18

CAMELOT MEETS MR. CORNPONE

THE1960ELECTION WAS ONE OF THE TIGHTEST IN history, the closest since the disputed Hayes-Tilden contest of 1876. On election night, Lyndon and Lady Bird settled in at the Driskill Hotel in Austin, the stage on which their marriage drama had begun twenty-five years earlier, to await returns. Johnson conferred over the phone with JFK several times. “I see you are losing Ohio,” he said to Jack during one of the calls. “I am carrying Texas and we are doing pretty well in Pennsylvania.”¹

Finally, at 7A.M. on November 9, television anchors called the election for Kennedy-Johnson. The margin of victory in the popular vote had been razor thin: 112,881 out of nearly 67 million cast. In the electoral college the Democratic lead was more comfortable, at 303 to 219. In the South, Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, North and South Carolina, and Texas had gone Democratic. Florida, Tennessee, and Virginia voted GOP, with Mississippi casting its electoral votes for an independent segregationist.

In the Texas Senate race, Johnson bested John Tower by 46,233 votes, a surprisingly small margin. That was almost precisely the number of votes by which Kennedy beat Nixon in the Lone Star State. Republicans would subsequently claim that the contest there and in Illinois was rife with fraud, but nothing came of it. Bobby Kennedy telephoned Johnson at the Driskill shortly after the election was called. “Well,” he said, “Lady Bird carried Texas for the President.”²

Lyndon was not amused. Moreover, the victory seemed to fill him with fore-boding rather than anticipation. “The night he was elected vice-president,” journalist Margaret Mayer recalled, “I don’t think I ever saw a more unhappy man … There was no jubilation. Lyndon looked as if he’d lost his last friend on earth.”³

 

 

THE DAY OF THE ELECTION,Tommy Corcoran, the New Dealer who had brought LBJ into Roosevelt’s inner circle in 1937, wrote Lyndon and Lady Bird urging them to look on the bright side. “I know you didn’t like what I said to you [several months earlier] about escaping from the cage of Texas,” he began, “but your subconscious knew even then it was true … No matter how the votes fall today, you are a free force in the world, free to be right, free to be a national statesman, free to be a world statesman, free to free the greatness that FDR saw in you.”⁴

At Lyndon’s insistence, Jack Kennedy paid a visit to the ranch on November 16, just eight days after the election. Before a crowd of reporters and local residents, the mayor of Stonewall welcomed the president-elect and presented him with a Stetson. Despite the urging of photographers, Kennedy steadfastly refused to don the hat.

The next morning, LBJ awakened his guest for the customary deer hunt. Jack later told Jackie how much he “loathed” the prospect of shooting what amounted to an animal in a zoo. Jack and Lyndon departed the ranch house in a white Cadillac convertible. In a nearby pasture bordered by woods, ranch hands drove two deer into the hunter’s path. Johnson subsequently told theNew York Times that the president-elect had brought down his animal with a superb shot at four hundred yards. Actually it was 250 yards, and rumor had it that LBJ had played his old trick of firing simultaneously with his guest to ensure a kill. According to William Manchester’sThe Death of a President , Kennedy “looked into the face of the life he was about to take … He fired and quickly turned back to the car,” but “he could not rid himself of the recollection. The memory of the creature’s death had been haunting, and afterward he had relived it with his wife, vider l’abces, to heal the inner scar.”⁵

Inner scar indeed, LBJ told his staff after the book was published. Jack Kennedy had jumped up and down and shouted like a schoolboy after the kill and insisted that the carcass be draped across the hood for all to see.⁶When LBJ subsequently shipped the president-elect his deer’s head handsomely mounted, JFK remarked to Jackie, “The three most overrated things in the world are the State of Texas, the F.B.I., and mounted deer heads.”⁷

 

JOHNSON’S ELECTION-NIGHT DEPRESSIONdid not let up. At the inauguration, in icy cold temperatures following a snowstorm, LBJ appeared glum and distracted. He sat somberly through Marian Anderson’s rendition of the “Star-Spangled Banner.” Johnson’s closest friend in Congress and perpetual supporter, Sam Rayburn, administered the oath of office. Despite its simplicity, Lyndon stumbled over the words. He was in fact almost completely overshadowed by JFK’s rousing call to arms in his inaugural speech. The oath-taking proceedings were a portent of things to come.⁸

The Texan had won election to a powerless job. In late December, prior to the inauguration, Lyndon had summoned Bobby Baker with a strange proposal: “Bobby, I’ve been thinking about where I can do Jack Kennedy the most good. And it’s right here on this Hill, the place I know best … All those Bostons and Harvards don’t know any more about Capitol Hill than an old maid does about fuckin.’” He would help Mike Mansfield, the quiet, enigmatic Montanan whom JFK had selected to be majority leader, pass the Kennedy program, and Baker could continue to serve as his righthand man.⁹

Baker tried to warn his former boss that he could not continue to act as majority leader. But Johnson would not listen. Inexplicably, Mansfield agreed to support the idea before the Democratic caucus. The sixty-four Democratic senators gathered on January 3 and, after glowing tributes to LBJ’s past leadership, unanimously elected Mansfield majority leader. The pipe-smoking Montanan rose, accepted the call to leadership, and then proposed that Lyndon preside at future meetings. The suggestion was greeted with stunned silence; then five senators rose to voice their opposition. “We might as well ask Jack Kennedy to come back to the Senate and take his turn at presiding,” said Albert Gore.¹⁰

By threatening to resign, Mansfield managed to secure a forty-five to seventeen vote in favor of his proposal, but it was clear that the majority of those present thought the whole thing was a bad idea. LBJ attended the next caucus, when he turned over the gavel to Mansfield, but none thereafter. He took the affair hard. His colleagues had humiliated him in public, he later told Baker over drinks. “Now I know the difference between a caucus and a cactus,” he said. “In a cactus all the pricks are on the outside.”¹¹

LBJ and his advisers could only try to wring power out of the notoriously powerless office of the vice presidency. Jokes alluding to the impotency of the office were legion. “There is the old story about the mother who had two sons,” Hubert Humphrey told aides shortly after he himself came to occupy the second-highest office in the land. “One went to sea, and the other became vice-president, and neither was heard of again.”¹²

Thomas Marshall, Warren Harding’s vice president, compared the holder of the office to a cataleptic: “He cannot speak; he cannot move; he suffers no pain; yet he is perfectly conscious of everything that is going on about him.”¹³In an interview with Judith Martin in 1968, LBJ summed up the vice presidential dilemma: “Everyone wants to talk to the President, get his quotes … and you sit there like a bump on a log, trying not to get in the way. You have no authority, no power, no decisions to make, but you have to abide by the decisions another man makes. If you’re independent, you’re disloyal, and if not, you’re a stooge and a puppet.”¹⁴

 

“BUILT NOT ON IDEOLOGYor a clear-cut sense of where they wanted to lead the country,” historian James Hilty has written, “the Kennedys’ ambition for office was personal.”¹⁵That isn’t completely fair; Kennedy was a strong anti-communist and he did have a moderately liberal vision of domestic affairs. Arthur Schlesinger and John Kenneth Galbraith, two of JFK’s most influential house intellectuals, had been arguing since the 1950s that liberals must move beyond the language and politics of class conflict that had sometimes characterized the New Deal era. By concentrating on ensuring increased production and reducing barriers to international trade, the Kennedy administration could lift all boats, avoid polarizing the country, and prolong their political reign.

Still, the great contest, John and Robert Kennedy believed, was between communism on the one hand and capitalism on the other. JFK had ordered speechwriters working on his inaugural address to drop the “domestic stuff.” “Who gives a shit about the minimum wage?” he asked rhetorically.¹⁶“Kennedy liberalism,” Hilty writes, “was more a political strategy than a set of beliefs, less a scheme for social and economic change than an approach to resolve conflict and to maintain economic and social stability.”¹⁷

More than the Kennedys’ lack of fervor and commitment to the cause of social justice, their inexperience and ineptitude would hamstring their legislative program. Nowhere was their lack of insight more vividly demonstrated than in the choice of Mike Mansfield to be majority leader. “Mike Mansfield is a monk,” Harry McPherson observed in 1972. “He has no desire to impress his imprint on legislation, no desire, really, to be the Leader of the Senate … He is a passive man except on a few things almost entirely in forging policy … I used to get absolutely enraged because he would not do things which cried out for doing.”¹⁸Depending on Mansfield to whip Congress into shape was like wielding a noodle to lash an ox.

In the domestic arena, Kennedy began his presidency by focusing on what he termed five “must” bills: an increase in the minimum wage, health insurance for senior citizens, federal aid to education, housing legislation, and aid to depressed areas. Only the last, the area redevelopment bill, ever made it through Congress.

The fight over medical insurance for the aged was typical. The American Medical Association declared that Kennedy’s proposal would introduce “compulsion, regulation and control into a system of freely practiced medicine.” The bill, introduced in February, would have levied a 25 percent increase in Social Security payroll taxes to pay hospital and nursing costs incurred by individuals eligible for Social Security old-age benefits. The White House mounted a public relations campaign which featured a televised address by Kennedy to a throng of senior citizens in Madison Square Garden.

Despite opinion polls that showed a majority of Americans favoring the concept of Medicare, the Senate defeated the administration’s proposal by a vote of fifty-two to forty-eight. The result revealed an emerging pattern that would characterize congressional action throughout the New Frontier period: only five Republicans voted for the measure, and twenty-seven Democrats, mostly from the South, cast their ballots in opposition. “By mid-1963 the deadlock between Congress and the White House was so unyielding that a real constitutional crisis existed,” one observer has written. “Congress was not merely balking at the President’s proposals for new action; it was refusing to pass the appropriations bills to pay for running the executive departments.”¹⁹

Johnson was unable to break the logjam over Medicare in 1961; he had lost all of his leverage. First, whatever power he had would come from the president. George Reedy observed to his boss that he was first and foremost under-study to JFK. “The Vice President must be a man who can step into the President’s shoes tomorrow prepared immediately to make such decisions as dropping the atomic bomb,” he memoed LBJ.²⁰Second, he presided over the Senate, but was not of the Senate. The vice president was a national officer with no vote and no constituency. He had nothing to trade with members of the upper house and could only hope to influence them as a member of the executive. Third, the vice president represented the president on various foreign policy missions. The key word was “represent.” He could make no commitment that was not specifically authorized. Fourth, the second man on the ticket accepted special assignments from the president, and here was the area of opportunity. In his backstairs meeting with Sam Rayburn the night before asking Johnson to be his running mate, Kennedy had allegedly promised the speaker that there would be significant tasks assigned, that his vice president would not be a political eunuch. If this turned out to be the case, the vice presidency held out the possibility of enabling LBJ to overcome his chief image problem, that of a skilled political manipulator with no philosophy and no substance.²¹The key then, would be to take what the president gave his second in command and make the most of it.

Unfortunately, the vice presidency bound LBJ to a body of men and women whose attitude toward him ranged from venomous hatred to mild, amused contempt. Bobby, of course, occupied the far end of the continuum; figures like John Kenneth Galbraith were situated at the near. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, who as president of Ford Motor Company had proven himself a genius at running large corporations, believed Johnson to be a second-rate man. Though LBJ would keep him on in his cabinet and tout him as his vice presidential running mate in 1964, McNamara observed that “Johnson lacked the education in history, philosophy, and political science which would have better prepared him to deal with extraordinarily complicated relationships among nations, and, as a matter of fact, with complicated relationships between the executive branch and the legislative branch, and between the government and the people of the United States.”²²Moreover, Johnson was perceived by the men and women of Camelot as socially unacceptable. McPherson observed that his boss wasn’t someone whom one “would invite to get thrown in the Hickory Hill swimming pool or go to a fashionable party in New York.”²³

Of all the people in the new White House, JFK was most favorably disposed toward him, Johnson believed. He was wrong. The president thought his second in command was a boor. Jim Rowe was present when both JFK and LBJ attended the opening game of the Major League season in 1961. “I was watching Johnson talk incessantly to Kennedy,” Rowe remembered. “[He] never bothered to look at the ball field all the time, and Kennedy was trying to watch the game. A year later they had Dave Powers sitting in between them.”²⁴Jack Kennedy supposedly had great respect for Johnson’s political skills and regarded him as the most effective majority leader in the nation’s history. Perhaps so, but he never saw fit to consult LBJ on legislative matters, much less use his vaunted skills to ram key measures through the House and Senate. Kennedy considered his vice president fundamentally dishonest. “Always remember,” he told Jackie in 1963, “Lyndon is a liar.” For the president, LBJ was a problem to be managed. “I can’t afford to have my Vice President who knows every reporter in Washington going around saying we’re all screwed up,” he told his chief of staff, “so we’re going to keep him happy. You’re going to keep him happy.”²⁵“You’re dealing with a very insecure, sensitive man with a huge ego,” JFK told O’Donnell. “I want you literally to kiss his ass from one end of Washington to the other.”²⁶

JFK had duties in mind for LBJ, but before he could assign them, the vice president seized the initiative. His staff drafted an executive order for the president’s signature. It would give the vice president direct control over a host of important government agencies, including NASA. The order would have agency heads report directly to LBJ. The president would simply rubber-stamp the vice president’s recommendations in these designated fields. Half amused and half angry, JFK chose to ignore Johnson’s proposal. But his staff leaked its contents to the press, and a number of columnists compared LBJ’s move to a similar power grab initiated by William H. Seward, Abraham Lincoln’s notoriously ambitious secretary of state.²⁷

Nevertheless, Kennedy perceived that if he were to keep the frenetic Texan from dreaming Macbeth-like dreams, he would have to keep him busy. Jack and Bobby realized that, like it or not, civil rights was going to dominate the domestic scene for the next four years and play a role in Jack’s plans for reelection. Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference were then pulling in uneasy harness with the student protesters and sit-in demonstrators of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to arouse the indignation of the black masses and the conscience of middle-class, white America. The White House believed that executive rather than legislative action would be the order of the day.

Jack, Bobby, and their congressional strategist, Lawrence O’Brien, were not anxious to take on the southern Democrats, who were still exceedingly powerful, especially in the Senate. On March 6, 1961, the president signed an executive order creating the Committee on Equal Employment Opportunities (CEEO), with the stated goal of removing “every trace of discrimination” from government employment and from work performed by the federal government by private contractors. Vice President Johnson was to chair the committee, which included Bobby.²⁸

JFK also named Johnson to head the president’s Space Council, the body that would oversee America’s evolving space program and make recommendations for its sustenance and enhancement. The space issue was similar in kind if not degree to civil rights. Kennedy had made the cold war Project Number One, and in lieu of Armageddon, the focus would be on peaceful competition. Both Johnson and Kennedy had worked hard during the dying days of the Eisenhower administration to convince the public that the measure of competition between the capitalist and communist systems was the space race. The diversion of billions of dollars into missiles and satellites was bound to be controversial: there would be a struggle between the military and civilian agencies for control of the program, and failures would not sit well with either Congress or the voters. If the drive for equal employment opportunity on the one hand, and dominance of outer space on the other, went well, Kennedy could take the credit; if not, LBJ could take the blame.

 

LIVING ACCOMMODATIONSwere not a problem during Johnson’s tenure as vice president. Senate Majority Leader Mansfield allowed Lyndon to continue to occupy the “Taj Mahal,” the green-and-gold-decorated, seven-room suite opposite the Senate chamber. There was also the six-room suite on the second floor of the Executive Office Building next to the White House.

It was obvious to Lyndon and Lady Bird that the white brick house on Thirtieth Street was not a suitable abode for a vice president. While they looked for something grander, they lived in a four-bedroom apartment in the Sheraton Park Hotel. Then, in April 1961, they bought The Elms, a large French-style house situated atop a hill in Washington’s fashionable Spring Valley. The home, complete with parquet floors in the library and Viennese paintings in the dining room, had belonged to Perle Mesta, a Johnson intimate and one of the city’s most famous hostesses.²⁹A restrictive covenant limiting ownership to whites was attached to the deed, but LBJ made the purchase with the explicit written understanding that he not be bound by it.³⁰

 

THE WEEKS FOLLOWING THE INAUGURATIONwere ones of despair for Johnson. He felt trapped, useless, ridiculed. The vice president was by law a member of the National Security Council, and Kennedy invited Lyndon to attend cabinet meetings, meetings with House and Senate leaders, and pre?press conference briefings, but it soon became obvious that the president expected LBJ to be seen and not heard. Sometimes he wasn’t even seen. JFK supposedly gave Kenny O’Donnell explicit instructions that the vice president was to be included in all important White House meetings, but the head of the Irish mafia “forgot” with increasing frequency, a strange omission for a man so scrupulously doglike in his devotion to JFK.

The Johnsons were rarely invited to the Kennedys’ small, informal parties, which featured the McGeorge Bundys, the Schlesingers, and Ken Galbraith and his wife; worse, Lyndon and Lady Bird were frequently the butt of jokes at such gatherings. “Really, it was brutal, the stories that they were passing,” said Kennedy friend Elizabeth Gatov, “and the jokes, and the inside nasty stuff about Lyndon. I didn’t protest. It was a pretty heady period and they were young people mostly, and they were going to run the country for the next decade.”³¹

George Reedy recalled that Johnson started drinking more heavily, and he would spend entire days in bed at home staring at the ceiling. His sense of humiliation was “like a demon in him,” Reedy said.³²

“I cannot stand Johnson’s damn long face,” JFK told Georgia Senator George Smathers. “He comes in, sits at the cabinet meetings, with his face all screwed up, never says anything. He looks so sad.”³³Why not make him a kind of ambassador-at-large? Smathers suggested. He could be received as a visiting head of state; all of the pomp and circumstance would provide more than enough nourishment for the Johnson ego. “A damn good idea,” Kennedy responded and dispatched LBJ on trips to Africa and Asia in the spring of 1961. These would be the first of eleven sojourns to thirty-three foreign lands for the vice president.

The trips would show Lyndon at his best and his worst. In Africa, India, and Scandinavia he was almost buffoonlike, taking every occasion to outrage conventional manners, farting, belching, wolfing food and drink, making outrageous demands on the staffs of American embassies. On other occasions, he was an effective ambassador for the American values he held dear, particularly a commitment to social justice. In Vietnam and Berlin he was serious, businesslike, primarily because he had been given a real mission with consequences.

 

LBJWAS FULLY IN TUNE with the activist foreign policies of the Kennedy administration. Unfortunately, Camelot’s approach to international affairs suffered from a basic contradiction. The president and his advisers insisted that they were out to make the world safe for diversity, that under their leadership the United States would abandon the status quo policies of the past and support revolutionary movements for social justice and democratic self-determination, especially in the developing world. The Kennedy people did not object to Eisenhower’s intervention into the internal affairs of other nations—only to the ineptness with which it was done. In a special address to Congress in May 1961, the president declared that “the great battleground for the defense and expansion of freedom today is … Asia, Latin America, Africa and the Middle East, the lands of the rising peoples.”³⁴

According to Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Kennedy fully understood that in Latin America “the militantly anti-revolutionary line” of the past was the policy most likely to strengthen the communists and lose the hemisphere. He and his advisers planned openings to the left to facilitate “democratic development.” Specifically, the administration projected an ambitious foreign aid program that would promote social justice and economic progress in the developing nations and in the process funnel nationalist energy into pro-democracy, anticommunist channels. Modernization through American aid would ensure that the newly emerging nations would achieve change through evolution rather than revolution.

At the same time, the administration saw any significant alteration in the world balance of power as a threat to American security. Kennedy, McGeorge Bundy, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, and McNamara took very seriously Khrushchev’s January 1961 speech offering support for “wars of national liberation”; it was, they believed, evidence of a new communist campaign to seize control of anticolonial and other revolutionary movements in economically underdeveloped regions.

In Cuba, John F. Kennedy had had to confront the classic dilemma that faced all cold war presidents: What was to be done when anticolonial, nationalist revolutions embraced Marxism-Leninism? Despite his oft-repeated sympathy for anticolonial movements and socioeconomic justice in the developing world, Kennedy placed anticommunism at the top of his priorities and waged undeclared, mostly secret war on the Cuban Revolution. He made similar choices in regard to two other third world, cold war hot spots: the Congo and Vietnam. “Our first great obstacle,” Kennedy said, “is still our relations with the Soviet Union and China. We must never be lulled into believing that either power has yielded its ambitions for world domination.”³⁵When confronted with a choice between communist-influenced revolutions and autocratic prowestern government, JFK would invariably choose the latter.

Determined to deal with the Kremlin from a position of strength, Kennedy and McNamara announced that America’s nuclear arsenal would increase until it contained one thousand intercontinental ballistic missiles. “We dare not tempt [the Soviets] with weakness,” the president declared.³⁶

The nuclear buildup frightened Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev; as he well knew, the Soviet Union already lagged far behind the United States in delivery vehicles. Instead of stability, the Kennedy-McNamara buildup touched off an arms race that brought the world to the brink of nuclear war in 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and saddled the United States with a massive $50 billion annual military budget by 1963. But for Kennedy, McNamara, and Rusk, the nuclear arms race was just one aspect of the multifaceted contest with the communist powers.

Kennedy instructed the Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, to train a new type of soldier capable of fighting communist guerrillas on their own terms. In the 1950s, anticommunist forces in Malaya, the Philippines, and Greece had successfully employed guerrilla tactics to defeat insurgents, and the administration was convinced that these techniques were suitable for dealing with Khrushchev’s wars of national liberation. The special forces at Fort Bragg, the Green Berets, increased from fewer than one-thousand to twelve-thousand during the Kennedy administration.

In January 1962, the White House created a Special Group (Counterinsurgency) chaired by General Maxwell Taylor and including Attorney General Robert Kennedy. Along with civil rights, poverty, and labor racketeering, counterinsurgency had captured the younger Kennedy’s imagination. The Taylor group saw the special forces not only as a paramilitary unit capable of sabotage and counterterrorism but as a progressive political and social force that would assist local governments in winning the hearts and minds of indigenous peoples.

In the area of soft power, Kennedy proposed the Peace Corps. During a campaign rally at the University of Michigan in October 1960, the president asked ten thousand students if any of them would be willing to give two years of their lives working in Asia, Africa, or Latin America. Their enthusiastic response impressed him. Under its first director, Kennedy brother-in-law Sargent Shriver, the Peace Corps sent seven-thousand youthful volunteers to forty-four countries to teach English, train native peoples in the techniques of scientific farming and modern home economics, build hospitals, and combat disease. The stated objectives of the program were to provide a skill to an interested country, to teach other cultures about America, and to increase young Americans’ understanding of other peoples. “The whole idea,” declared one teenage volunteer, “was that you can make a difference … I really believed that I was going to be able to change the world.” But for Kennedy, the Peace Corps was more than an exercise in altruism. He spoke of halting communist expansion by helping to develop the resources of the third world.

 

IN THE LATE1950S, LBJ had made common cause with JFK and other Democratic aspirants for the presidency in attacking the Eisenhower administration’s overreliance on atomic weaponry and its neglect of conventional forces. He respected hard-line balance-of-power proponents like Dean Acheson and Paul Nitze (Truman’s secretary of state and chief policy planner, respectively, who were urging Kennedy to confront the communist superpowers directly) and Arthur Schlesinger and Walt Rostow who were urging the White House to emphasize democracy and social justice in third world areas as well as bases and alliances.³⁷

Military preparedness and realistic diplomacy, LBJ believed, would contain communism within its existing bounds. To keep up morale among America’s allies and satisfy hard-line anticommunists at home, the United States must hold fast in Berlin, oppose the admission of communist China to the United Nations, and continue to confront and blockade Cuba. He was aware of the growing split between the Soviet Union and communist China, and the possibilities inherent in it for dividing the communist world. The United States must continue its “flexible response” of military aid, economic assistance, and technical÷political advice in response to the threat of communism in the developing world while nurturing its military alliances and maintaining its nuclear arsenal, but there was nothing wrong with negotiating with the Soviets at the same time in an effort to reduce tensions.

Insofar as Latin America was concerned, Johnson was an enthusiastic supporter of the Alliance for Progress; as a progressive Democrat he was drawn to the Schlesinger-Goodwin [presidential adviser Richard] philosophy of seeking openings to the democratic left. He did not buy into the concept of a monolithic communist threat. “Our real problem is not that governments go communist,” as George Reedy put it, “but that they become part of the Soviet bloc. If Rumania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria were genuine independent nations, we would regret the fact that they were communist but it would not be such great cause for concern.”³⁸Johnson was a cold warrior, but a flexible, pragmatic one.

The great difference between Kennedy and Johnson was that the Texan believed that idealism ought to be the driving force behind U.S. foreign policy, whereas the Kennedys saw social justice and democracy as tools with which to defeat Sino-Soviet imperialism. “To a considerable extent, our foreign policy has failed because it has been based on the assumption that we must do things simply to counter the Soviets,” as George Reedy put it. “We have advertised to the whole world that we are willing to help India because we don’t want India to go Communist. We have advertised to the world that we will help in the Middle East because we don’t want Western Europe to lose the oil resources of Iraq, Iran and Saudi Arabia. This has, naturally, led to a great deal of skepticism among the uncommitted people.” Instead, U.S. foreign policy ought to be based on the concept that “we do things because they are right.”³⁹America helps India because its people are starving, and it is incumbent upon the rich to help the poor. The United States offered aid to the nations of the Middle East because for generations they had labored under the yoke of foreign oppression and deserved help in their bid for economic and political independence.

As a number of historians have pointed out, the Kennedys were comfortable with elite politics, uncomfortable with mass politics. Jack and Bobby were of the elite and most adept at manipulating traditional elites, not unlike the tradition-bound U.S. foreign service. Johnson could manipulate legislative elites, but he was a firm believer in mass politics. The key to winning hearts and minds in the third world was to build personal, individual ties. Though a rural aristocrat of sorts, he was convinced, like that other great rural aristocrat, Franklin D. Roosevelt, that American leaders could and should articulate the needs and shoulder the burdens of the disadvantaged abroad as well as at home. “About all the average fellow wants is a chance to work from daylight to dark … to provide some food for the stomachs of his children, some clothes for their backs and a roof over their heads and a place for them to worship in, maybe a little recreation, and to maintain the freedom and dignity of the individual,” LBJ declared in a speech to the Advertising Council in June 1961. “I believe all those people that I saw in Africa and Asia want the same thing and I think the average father and the average mother wants it, and I think they’re going to get it.”⁴⁰

No sooner had LBJ returned from Africa than the president dispatched him on a goodwill tour of Asia to include stops in Laos, South Vietnam, Thailand, India, Pakistan, and the Philippines. By 1961 American policymakers, if not yet the American people, had become deeply concerned about the fate of Southeast Asia.

Throughout the 1950s, the Eisenhower administration had poured economic and military aid into Vietnam. Head of state Ngo Dinh Diem, a principled, patriotic man, briefly attempted land and constitutional reforms, but he proved unsuited to the task of building a social democracy. A devout Catholic and traditional mandarin by temperament and philosophy, he distrusted the masses and had contempt for the give-and-take of democratic politics. Increasingly, he relied on his family and loyal Catholics in the military and civil service to rule a country in which 90 percent of the population was Buddhist. His brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, used the government-sponsored Can Lao Party, a thoroughly intimidated press, and the state police to persecute and suppress opponents of the regime.

As corruption increased and democracy all but disappeared, a rebellion broke out in the South against the Diem government. In 1960 Ho Chi Minh and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam decided to give formal aid to the newly formed National Liberation Front, the name assumed by the anti-Diemist revolutionaries.

A variety of factors prompted President Kennedy to view South Vietnam as the place where the leader of the free world would make his stand. He classified the conflict in South Vietnam as one of Khrushchev’s wars of national liberation, a test of his administration’s resolve just as much as Berlin or Cuba. Kennedy and his advisers fully accepted the domino theory. Following the administration’s agreement in 1961 to the neutralization of Laos, a landlocked nation wracked by communist insurgency, Kennedy and his advisers believed that they had to hold the line in South Vietnam.

Experts in the State and Defense Departments and in the intelligence agencies were aware of the burgeoning Sino-Soviet split, but they believed that the communist superpowers would present a common front in any international crisis and that they were committed to promoting Marxism-Leninism in the developing world. In the fall of 1961, as the guerrilla war intensified, Assistant Secretary of State Walt Rostow and the president’s military aide, General Maxwell Taylor, returned from a fact-finding trip to South Vietnam to recommend the dispatch of eight thousand combat troops. Kennedy decided against direct military intervention, but he ordered an increase in aid to Diem and the introduction of additional military advisers. The number of American uniformed personnel grew from several hundred when Kennedy assumed office to some sixteen thousand by 1963.

Johnson’s 1961 Asia sojourn took him to several countries, including India. The focus, however, was Saigon and Diem’s regime. Bribes and intimidation by civil servants and military officials had alienated peasant and urban dweller alike. Law 10÷59, which the government pushed through the rubber-stamp national assembly, gave Ngo Dinh Nhu’s police and special forces the power to arrest and execute South Vietnamese citizens for a wide variety of crimes, including black marketeering and spreading seditious rumors about the government. Nhu, Diem’s brother and his minister of the interior, was a brilliant, erratic mandarin who catered to Diem’s paranoia and elitism.

When JFK first suggested the Asian trip, LBJ was reluctant. He sensed the contempt in which he was held by State Department careerists, particularly foreign service officers serving abroad. “These State Department people think I’m going to go out there, and pat a little guy on the head and say, ‘Little man, do this,’” he complained to a staffer. “They don’t give me any credit for having any sense about how to treat people.”⁴¹His fears were allayed somewhat when he learned that the president’s sister, Jean, and her husband, Stephen Smith, were to go along. He rather liked the Kennedy women, and the presence of presidential kin would insulate him from the embassies’ obsession with protocol. Nevertheless, when the party departed on May 5, aides noted that he seemed apprehensive and on edge. Over the Pacific he blew up at aide Horace Busby over some transgression and ordered him off the plane. “But we’re over the Pacific,” Busby protested. “I don’t give a fucking damn!” Johnson replied.⁴²

Upon landing in Saigon, the party made its way by motorcade from the airport to the presidential palace downtown. The vice president ordered the procession halted frequently so he could shake hands with some of the thousands who lined the route. He passed out pens, cigarette lighters, and gold and white passes to the U.S. Senate gallery. At the palace he made an arm-waving stump speech, calling Diem the “Winston Churchill of Asia.”⁴³

The next evening, following a dinner given by Diem for the vice president, the two men met privately for several hours. “Johnson decided to talk,” journalist Sarah McClendon remembered. “[He] had one of those long line talks with Diem … Nobody could leave … and then they went into a room and decided that they would draft something … These diplomats still couldn’t leave, and they didn’t get away until one-thirty.”⁴⁴

As he had been instructed, Johnson praised Diem for his valiant struggle against the communist insurgency, but pressed him to undertake social, political, and fiscal reforms, especially to give his countrymen a greater say in the running of their country. Diem was friendly but remote when it came to specifics.⁴⁵The South Vietnamese leader made it clear that he did not want American combat troops at that time, but did not rule out the possibility if the security situation deteriorated further.⁴⁶“I don’t know about this fellow, Diem,” LBJ remarked to an aide at the time. “He was tickled as hell when I promised him forty million dollars and talked about military aid, but he turned deaf and dumb every time I talked about him speeding up and beefing up some health and welfare projects. I spent two hours and forty-five minutes with him; tried to get knee-to-knee and belly-to-belly so he wouldn’t misunderstand me, but I don’t know if I got to him.”⁴⁷

In Bangkok, where LBJ violated protocol by plunging into crowds and im-politely pressing the flesh, an early shot was fired in what would become Johnson’s ongoing war against the press. He became irritated with the journalists accompanying him, so he called a press conference at 2:30 in the morning to “correct a misperception.” Johnson then had George Reedy announce that there would be a tour of the Klongs, the famous water market in Bangkok. Journalist Carroll Kilpatrick remembered being awakened in the middle of the night and told that the event had been canceled. Then, at six in the morning, he was awakened again and informed, “You missed the trip because you didn’t get there in time.”⁴⁸

Later, in Iran, when the corps skipped an afternoon village tour to file their stories, LBJ berated them: “What kind of bunch of goddamn pansies have I brought sixteen thousand miles only to have them sit around in airconditioned rooms drinking whiskey while I am out meeting the people? No wonder we are not getting anything in the newspapers back home.”⁴⁹

Then, in Ankara, after visiting a bazaar, he flew into a rage because reporters and photographers were allegedly crowding him so much that he could not touch the people.⁵⁰During his first press conference, he attempted to embarrass Carl Rowan, the black State Department information officer who was acting as his press secretary. Following the first probing questions, LBJ turned to Rowan and said loud enough for all to hear, “And you’re the dummy who told me to submit myself to this?” As Rowan later put it, “Johnson wanted badly to be respected, even loved, by the press and couldn’t understand that his personality was suited perfectly to rubbing the press the wrong way.”⁵¹

Ambassador to India John Kenneth Galbraith and his wife, Catherine, flew to Bangkok to escort the Johnson party to New Delhi, the next stop on the trip. Before leaving to meet the vice president, Galbraith had written JFK, “Lyndon … arrives next week with two airplanes, a party of fifty, a communications unit, and other minor accoutrements of modern democracy. I … will try to make him feel good that he was on the ticket. His trip may not be decisive for the peace of Asia. The East, as you know, is inscrutable.”⁵²

After stopping in New Delhi, Johnson and company flew to Karachi, the capital of Pakistan. This stop echoed previous venues, with a few twists. On the trip into the heart of the city, LBJ jumped out of the car and jogged along shaking hands and distributing trinkets. When the motorcade approached an intersection, the vice president spied a shirtless camel driver with a particularly appealing face waiting to cross. Johnson halted the procession and jumped a muddy ditch to shake the man’s hand and invite him to visit the United States. A cameraman and reporter for a Karachi daily captured the scene, and the next day Johnson and the camel driver, whose name was Ahmad Bashir, were featured on the front page. The vice president had invited the humble man to visit him in the United States and to stay at the Waldorf Astoria, the accompanying story declared. Johnson proceeded to hold his ceremonial conversation with President Ayub Khan, whom he took an immediate liking to, and then prepared to depart. By then, the invitation to Bashir had become front-page news across the globe.

State Department staff advised the vice president that his and his country’s credibility was on the line. On his return, LBJ arranged for the Conference of Mayors to pay for a Bashir visit, but plans hit a snag when it was discovered that the Pakistani government had picked up Bashir and secluded him, fearing that this illiterate peasant would prove an embarrassment. LBJ appealed personally to Ayub Khan, and Bashir was released to make the trip.

Before proceeding to the ranch, the camel driver stopped in New York. Accompanied by a skilled interpreter, Bashir came off as a charming innocent. LBJ sent him back to India with a pickup truck donated by Ford Motor Company. All in all, the Bashir episode had proved something of a public relations coup for LBJ and America’s crusade in the third world.⁵³

 

PRESIDENTKENNEDYno doubt laughed with Ken Galbraith at LBJ’s antics abroad. As his exclusion of Johnson from most diplomatic decision making indicated, he did not take the Texan seriously as a foreign policy analyst. But as his sponsorship of the Alliance for Progress, foreign aid in general, and the Peace Corps indicated, JFK did not believe that treaties, alliances, and power politics alone were going to win the cold war. Though he was no New Deal missionary like LBJ, Kennedy understood that America’s demonstrated commitment to social justice was fundamental to winning hearts and minds in the third world. Hokily expressed though it might be, Johnson’s sincerity was sure to make its mark.

Moreover, despite the skepticism of State Department officials and foreign service officers, LBJ had the confidence of Secretary of State Dean Rusk. “I want you to make sure that he sees the heads of state personally and alone,” Rusk instructed one of the officers assigned to accompany the vice president. “There is no person in America that can equal Johnson in knee-to-knee conversation with another man.”

LBJ’s report to the president, submitted immediately after his return, argued that the free nations of Asia regarded the neutralization of Laos as nothing less than a sellout. American participation in this scheme had shaken confidence in the United States. There was no doubt, Johnson observed, that America must hold the line in Southeast Asia “or the United States, inevitably, must surrender the Pacific and take up our defenses on our own shores.” Because getting troops and supplies into them would prove so very difficult, Laos and Cambodia were not the places to make a stand. The government of Thailand was so rigidly authoritarian that U.S. prestige would suffer by too close an association. The government of South Vietnam was problematical: “Diem is a complex figure beset by many problems. He has admirable qualities, but he is remote from the people, is surrounded by persons less admirable and capable than he.” A decision to support Diem “must be made with the knowledge that at some point we may be faced with the further decision of whether we commit major United States forces … I recommend we proceed with a clear-cut and strong program of action.”⁵⁴

On Sunday, May 28, five days after delivering his report to President Kennedy, LBJ mounted the auditorium stage at Southwest Texas State to make the commencement address. He discarded his prepared text and for the next twenty minutes delivered a stem-winding, impassioned appeal to the assembled graduates to share the fruits of democracy, “to love freedom and liberty so much that you want everybody to have a little bit of it.” All Americans had a “very special responsibility to your system—the system that produced you, the system that made it possible for you to have a trained mind and sound body … The three greatest friends that communism has are illiteracy, poverty and disease,” Johnson declared. “And they’re the three greatest enemies that our democratic system has.”⁵⁵

“Johnson was drinking a lot of Cutty Sark in those days, and the more he drank the meaner he got,” remembered Carl Rowan. “He abused his staff verbally in ways that I could not believe. Yet, when sober or in one of his better moods, he spoke with greater eloquence and understanding about the economic and social needs of the poor nations, and about injustice in the United States, than any individual I ever knew in my life.”⁵⁶

JFK’s determination to use Johnson as an instrument, if not a maker, of American foreign policy was demonstrated again in August 1961, when the president sent his understudy to Berlin in the midst of another of that belea-guered city’s cold war crises. By the time JFK entered office, four thousand East Germans, most of them students, technocrats, and professionals drawn by the freedom and prosperity of West Berlin, had been crossing into the noncommunist sector of the city each week. The outflow not only gravely weakened East Germany but was a propaganda disaster for international communism. On Sunday, August 13, 1961, Soviet occupation authorities began construction on a barbed-wired and concrete wall that would eventually divide the city in two and serve as a symbol not only of the separation of East Germany from West but of a polarized world.

Three nights later, Lyndon was visiting Sam Rayburn in the speaker’s apartment. Rayburn had been complaining of back pain for months and had steadily lost weight. His friends suspected he had cancer, but he insisted it was just a spell of “lumbago” and refused to see a specialist. While Lyndon was fussing at the speaker for not caring for himself properly, the phone rang. It was President Kennedy. “Lyndon,” JFK said, “are you available to go to Berlin?” Kennedy asked him to come to a meeting the next day at the White House. The gathering included General Lucius D. Clay, commander in chief of U.S. forces in Europe and military governor of the American zone in Germany from 1947 to 1948, and former ambassador to the Soviet Union Charles “Chip” Bohlen. There was no discussion of an attempt to dismantle the wall by force, but all agreed that the West Berliners needed reassuring. That free city had become a symbol,the symbol, of America’s commitment to Western Europe.

In addition to sending Lyndon to Berlin to reassure its anxious inhabitants, JFK and Clay decided to dispatch some fifteen hundred U.S. troops from West Germany to West Berlin. Privately, Johnson had some misgivings about the trip. There was a chance that the West Berliners would be angry, that the visit would be filled with recrimination, and that the affair would demonstrate cleavage rather than unity in the ranks of noncommunist Europe. He was also aware that JFK himself did not go because neither the West German government nor U.S. military authorities could guarantee his safety. Nevertheless, Johnson accepted the assignment, and threw himself into the task with his usual gusto.

On the transatlantic flight, Johnson stayed up all night reading briefing memos and preparing his speech. He was intensely aware of the importance of the occasion, and the possibility that if anything went wrong, full-scale war would result.

LBJ flew from Bonn to Templehoff Airport in West Berlin. He then rode to the city center in an open car, stopping frequently to shake hands with some of the one-hundred-thousand cheering Berliners who lined his route. At the Ratshaus, or City Hall, Johnson first addressed municipal officials and then emerged to make an open-air speech to the three hundred thousand who had gathered to hear him.

It was an inspiring effort—of the prepared speeches Johnson delivered in his life, one of the best. “I have come to Berlin by direction of President Kennedy,” he declared. “To the survival and to the creative future of this city we Americans have pledged, in effect, what our ancestors pledged in forming the United States: ‘our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.’ This island does not stand alone.”⁵⁷Wave after wave of thunderous applause and cheers swept over the vice president, who was visibly moved.

The next morning, LBJ and General Clay were at the Helmstedt entrance to the city to greet the fifteen hundred troops who had made the 105-mile over-land trip from West Germany. Papers across Europe and America headlined LBJ’s mission and declared it to be one of the Kennedy administration’s greatest successes. It was perhaps the closest LBJ would come to being identified with his charismatic boss, whose earlier trip to Berlin and “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech had already become part of diplomatic folklore.⁵⁸

 

AMONG THOSE GREETINGLBJ at the airport upon his return was Sam Rayburn. “I hadn’t seen the Speaker in several weeks,” Lady Bird remembered, “and my heart was in my throat at the way he looked.”⁵⁹Rayburn had been in and out of Bethesda Naval Hospital, but nothing seemed to work. Days later, he departed for Texas, never to return.

Shortly before Rayburn died in November 1961, LBJ visited him at the tiny hospital in Bonham. He helicoptered in, landing in the schoolyard across the street from the medical facility. “There were a number of people in Rayburn’s room at that particular time,” D. B. Hardeman remembered. “Vice President Johnson went over to the bed, and he took Rayburn’s hand in his two hands, and he said, ‘Hello, pardner.’ A scene from his days as Dick Kleberg’s secretary flashed across Johnson’s mind. LBJ was in his room at the Dodge Hotel delirious with pneumonia when he had awakened to find Rayburn asleep in the chair beside his bed, cigarette ashes spilled down the front of his suit coat.”⁶⁰Now, Lyndon leaned close and said again into his ear, “Hello, pardner.” Rayburn showed no sign of recognition. “LBJ straightened up,” Hardeman said, “and he had the most grief-stricken look on his face … I never saw [it] at any other time in his life. But he was a shattered man. He sort of turned on his heel and walked out, got on the helicopter, and went away.”⁶¹That was the last time he saw the man from Flag Springs alive.

 

INAPRIL1961, the Soviets put a man into orbit around the earth. It was years afterSputnik , yet America still lagged behind. Three weeks after Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin’s dramatic flight, U.S. astronaut Alan Shepard survived a suborbital flight, but the shortness of his trip—fifteen minutes—and a “sloppy splashdown” seemed to make the American effort a pale imitation of Gagarin’s much longer flight.

On April 19, President Kennedy summoned LBJ to the White House and gave him his marching orders. “I would like for you as Chairman of the Space Council,” the presidential directive read, “to be in charge of making an overall survey on where we stand in space … Do we have a chance of beating the Soviets by putting a laboratory into space, or by a trip around the moon, or by a rocket to land on the moon, or by a rocket to go to the moon and back with a man?”⁶²

LBJ was ready. Before he left the Senate, he had arranged for his long-time intimate Senator Robert Kerr to be named to replace him as head of the Senate Space Committee. In the House, Texas Congressmen Overton Brooks and Olin Teague controlled the corresponding committee and Houstonian Albert Brooks headed Appropriation. Then, in February, LBJ succeeded in having Kerr’s business partner and protégé, James Webb, chosen to direct NASA.

A North Carolinian by birth, Webb had served in the marine corps reserve and on the board of directors of Sperry Gyroscope before acting as Harry Truman’s budget director. During the 1950s he had made his fortune with Kerr-McGee and landed a spot on the board of McDonnell Aviation. But Webb was more than just an engineer-businessman determined to make as much money out of technology as possible. Like LBJ, he was a visionary committed to public service. They embraced space as the new frontier where aeronautical technology would simultaneously advance the limits of knowledge, nourish the human spirit, and stimulate the national and global economies. “A Johnson or a Webb,” historian Walter McDougall writes, “did not see a conflict between technocracy and freedom, between the expansionist state and the striving individual.”⁶³In the vastness of space, government and the individual could coexist as partners just as they had on the vastness of the American continent.

LBJ huddled with Webb and his congressional space team. He consulted with Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and his staff as well as the country’s leading rocket scientist, Werner Von Braun. All concluded, with some reservations, that the focus of the American space program should be a lunar landing. They were fully aware that such an effort would cost $30 to $40 billion over the next ten years. “If America was to win control over … men’s minds through space accomplishments,” Johnson advised Kennedy, the United States should embrace “manned exploration of the moon.” His concluding sentence left Kennedy little wiggle room: “In the eyes of the world, first in space means first, period; second in space is second in everything.”⁶⁴Congress doubled NASA’s budget in 1962 and again in 1963.

Talk of a missile gap began to subside when, on February 20, 1962, Lieutenant Colonel John H. Glenn flew around the earth three times in his Mercury space capsule,Friendship 7 , and splashed down safely in the Caribbean. Suddenly, for the American people, all things seemed once again possible.

Perhaps more significant in the long run than the manned space flights was the launching on June 10 of Telstar, the experimental communications satellite developed by AT&T and Bell Laboratories. Soon it was relaying live television pictures from Andover, Maine, to France and Great Britain. A year later a secret military satellite released some 400 million tiny copper hairs into polar orbit, providing a cloud of reflective material for relaying radio signals from coast to coast within the United States.

To the surprise of no one, the site for the nation’s new Manned Spacecraft Center was Houston. By the mid-1960s the Apollo moon shot complex looked like a giant crescent moon running around the littoral of the Gulf of Mexico from Texas to Florida.⁶⁵As had happened so often in the past, a massive, federally funded project had been harnessed to the Johnson political wagon. Apollo was the newest and brightest jewel in the New South’s diadem.

The U.S. space program benefitted immensely from LBJ’s political sensitivity. The billions needed to explore and control the heavens was justified on military grounds alone, but advocates for the program should not leave it at that. Like others before him, Johnson compared the race for space with the competition among Britain, France, Spain, and Portugal to control the oceans of the globe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. “The point is that the ability of people to move in outer space and the ability to deny outer space to others will determine which system of society and government dominates the future,” he confided in a memo to JFK.

But military dominance as a rationale would not go over well with world opinion. Why not emphasize the many promising, enriching, constructive phases of space exploration: medicine, weather forecasting and control, communications? The United States should not only highlight these peaceful uses but offer to cooperate with the Soviets in advancing them. Thus could the United States have its cold war cake and eat it, too.⁶⁶

 

PERHAPS JUST AS IMPORTANTas his role in the space program was Johnson’s chairmanship of the President’s Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity (CEEO). Its significance lay not in the concrete achievements of the committee, which were substantial, but in the dramatic rapprochement between LBJ and the black community that occurred as a result of it. John and Robert Kennedy, at least while he was acting as his brother’s protector, could not really identify with the Second Reconstruction as a mass movement continually confronting the conscience of the nation. They were certainly not bigots themselves, but they were elitists. There was a certain amount of noblesse oblige in their commitment to civil rights, but they saw it primarily as historical inevitability.

Moreover, just as LBJ had when he was majority leader, the Kennedy brothers perceived it to be a problem to be managed. The Subcabinet Group on Civil Rights, chaired by Harris Wofford, was well aware that public opinion was running strongly against the civil rights movement in 1961. It was not a good time to challenge the Dixie Association in Congress.⁶⁷President Kennedy chose instead to address the issue of employment opportunity through executive action. “I have dedicated my Administration to the cause of equal opportunity in employment by the government or its contractors,” he announced in March. “I have no doubt that the vigorous enforcement of this order [creating the CEEO] will mean the end of such discrimination.”⁶⁸

LBJ was at first dubious about the assignment. “I don’t have any budget, and I don’t have any power, I don’t have anything,” he told JFK. The knowledge that Bobby, who had been named point man for the administration’s civil rights effort, would be on the committee also gave Johnson pause. He suspected that he was being set up.⁶⁹Whatever he and the committee did, they were bound to antagonize either northern liberals who felt he was not doing enough or southern segregationists who believed he was doing too much—or, more probably, both. He was aware that of all the Democratic party’s civil rights initiatives since World War II, the Fair Employment Practices Commission had been most offensive to white southerners (and a number of white northerners as well), and the CEEO looked very much like a resurrected Fair Employment Practices Commission. But JFK insisted that Vice President Nixon had headed a similar body, and it would look very suspicious if Lyndon, a southerner, did not follow suit.⁷⁰

There was no doubt that LBJ was committed to the goals of the CEEO: the elimination of racial discrimination in federal hiring and by contractors working for the federal government. Although blacks constituted 13 percent of federal employees, few held management positions. The Justice Department employed 955 lawyers, ten of whom were black.⁷¹

In one of its first actions, the CEEO surveyed companies under contract to the federal government and discovered that not a single African American was employed by twenty-five thousand of the thirty-five thousand contractors.⁷²LBJ, who helped draft the executive order creating the committee, insisted that it require all firms doing business with the government to sign pledges that they did not and would not discriminate. He also wanted to empower the committee to cancel contracts with those that violated their pledges. At the same time, Johnson and George Reedy, the vice president’s principal staffer on the committee, did not want the CEEO to turn into an enforcement agency, but a body seeking the voluntary cooperation of industry, labor, and civic leaders. The objective was nondiscrimination, not affirmative action.⁷³

Unfortunately, the power to appoint staff was not solely in Johnson’s hands. He shared that with the vice chair, Secretary of Labor Arthur Goldberg. The executive vice chair, the post that actually managed the mechanisms put in place by the committee, was Jerry Holleman, and his assistant was John G. Field, early Kennedy supporters with ties to the Texas and Michigan labor movements, respectively. They tended to be fairly hard-line, favoring a policy of mandatory rather than voluntary compliance.

No sooner was the committee organized and the staff up and going than Reedy was warning Johnson that Holleman and, to a lesser extent, Field were going to make an enforcer and thus a lightning rod of LBJ. As assistant secretary of labor, Holleman was Arthur Goldberg’s man, not Johnson’s. “He is not disloyal and is not an enemy,” Reedy observed, but “even with the best of intentions, [he] will never comprehend your problems and your approach to them.” If his philosophy prevailed, LBJ would “personally … have to become embroiled in every dispute concerning a Negro who felt that he had been discriminated against … You, personally, would have to become a cop with a nightstick running after hundreds of thousands of persons in arguments that you could never win.”

Shortly after LBJ called a meeting of the hundred largest government contractors to outline the CEEO’s plans and objectives, the committee received from the Georgia NAACP a list of complaints against the Lockheed Aircraft Company, headquartered at Marietta. Atlanta lawyer Robert Troutman was asked to investigate.⁷⁴An energetic, charismatic self-promoter, Bobby Troutman had been a college chum of Joseph Kennedy Jr. and was a political intimate of Georgia Senator Herman Talmadge. He believed that voluntary desegregation was the key to prosperity and progress for the South.

Before Troutman met with Lockheed officials, he consulted Martin Luther King, George Meany, and Walter Reuther. Determined to avoid sanctions by the Department of Defense, Lockheed readily agreed to practice nondiscrimination in hiring and to promote existing Negro employees to higher-paying positions. With this feather in his cap, Troutman persuaded the CEEO to authorize him to undertake similar initiatives with other government contractors. The initiative was given the Soviet-style name Plans for Progress.⁷⁵During 1962 Troutman persuaded some eighty-five corporations to sign voluntary pledges to end discrimination in hiring and to develop schemes for promoting black employees.⁷⁶

Johnson was enthusiastic about the concept that underlay Plans for Progress but not about Bobby Troutman himself.

Through the NAACP and newspapers like theWashington African-American , the black community quickly began to express discontent with Plans for Progress. It was all happy talk, wrote Charles “Chuck” Stone, the aggressive editor of theAfrican American. There were numerous plans but little or no real progress in hiring. “Under Robert Troutman,” Stone wrote LBJ, “the emphasis had been on voluntary compliance with a total absence of compulsion. Perhaps Mr. Troutman’s Georgia background has been the basic factor in deciding the pace of this program.”⁷⁷An investigator for the NAACP denounced Plans for Progress as nothing more than a “publicity stunt” and complained that Troutman was wasting money that should have gone into the compliance effort.⁷⁸Privately, Johnson and Goldberg learned that the Georgian was promising companies who signed up that they would have “an easy out” and would not have to comply with the requirements of the president’s executive order.⁷⁹

A minor controversy soon ratcheted up to a potential scandal. John Wheeler, a black member of the CEEO, confided that the Sibley Law Firm of Atlanta, of which Troutman’s father was a member, “is famous for infiltrating Negro causes and rendering them impotent by working from within.” Noting the huge amounts of his own money Troutman was spending on Plans for Progress, Wheeler voiced the suspicion that the corporations involved had created a secret slush fund to finance his operation.⁸⁰

Johnson would have forced Troutman out at once if it had not been for the objections of Bobby Kennedy.⁸¹Realizing that he was falling out of favor with the vice president, the secretary of labor, and the black community, Troutman attempted to insulate himself by splitting off the Plans for Progress program from the CEEO and giving it its own staff and budget. The new entity would report directly to the president. In Troutman’s scheme, LBJ would have been stuck with an even less happy mandate. “It is not only somewhat of an insult to you but would leave you with a Committee doing absolutely nothing but chasing down a bunch of nit-picking cases,” Reedy told his boss.⁸²

Both sides resorted to attempted blackmail. “Abe [Fortas, whom LBJ had inserted into the dispute to draft a satisfactory restructuring document] says that Troutman is carrying around with him figures on negroes employed by the government and negroes employed in private industry and they show that private industry is doing better than the government,” Reedy reported to Johnson. “Abe says the figures are ‘pure dynamite’ and Troutman implies that if he does not get pretty much what he wants the figures will be released. Troutman has the habit of flourishing them like a street peddler selling dirty pictures in Paris,” Reedy added.⁸³

But Troutman just as quickly lost the initiative when, after LBJ tried to force him to accept a black as chief of staff for Plans for Progress, the Georgian incautiously remarked to George Reedy that he could never get corporation presidents to talk to him in front of an African American. “If the word should circulate among negroes that a personal friend of the President has such an attitude,” Reedy told Johnson, “the effects upon the 1962 and 1964 elections would be most interesting.”⁸⁴

In the end, Johnson was not able to get rid of Troutman, but succeeded in having Plans for Progress reorganized so that its director reported directly to him. It also became subject to an advisory board created by the president. The members of that body, as it turned out, were mostly black.⁸⁵Finally, in late 1962, LBJ managed to secure the resignations of both Robert Troutman and Jerry Holleman. To head up the CEEO, including Plans for Progress, he selected a Texas-born black lawyer from Detroit, Hobart Taylor Jr.⁸⁶

 

DESPITE ALL THE TURMOIL,by mid-1962 the CEEO had made some progress. Johnson personally badgered department and agency heads, and as a result, blacks in top government jobs increased 35 percent. In midlevel government positions the increase was 20 percent. Of the 1,610 complaints of discrimination from those seeking federal jobs, 72 percent had been resolved in favor of the complainants. Of the 2,156 in the private sector, the rate was 40 percent.⁸⁷

Just as important were steps the CEEO took to end discrimination in labor unions. In most trades, workers could gain the necessary skills only by going through the union’s apprenticeship training program. Because skilled crafts were generally handed down from father to son, and unions looked for ways to limit the number of skilled workers to keep wages up, blacks were almost never to be found in apprenticeship programs. “In this whole field of civil rights, the really crying scandal and shame is one that is mentioned the least,” Reedy told Johnson, “the tremendous difficulties placed in the way of a Negro becoming a carpenter, an electrician, a plumber, or a railroad fireman.” It was almost easier for blacks to become doctors or lawyers.⁸⁸LBJ used Walter Reuther, an authentic liberal on civil rights, to apply pressure to the more conservative George Meany.⁸⁹As a result, 118 international and 338 directly affiliated local unions of the AFL-CIO signed “Plans for Fair Practices,” which committed them to abolishing segregated locals and segregated apprenticeship programs.⁹⁰

The more progress the CEEO made, the more critical of it and its chair Bobby Kennedy became. All the while he had been pressuring LBJ not to fire Troutman, the attorney general was denouncing Plans for Progress in meetings with his staff and the president. “There was an awful lot of propaganda put out,” he later recalled, “but when we started making an analysis, we found it really hadn’t accomplished a great deal.” The problem was Lyndon Johnson. “The CEEO,” Bobby declared, “could have been an effective organization … if the vice president gave it some direction.” When told of the CEEO’s lack of progress, the president allegedly “almost had a fit.” “That man can’t run this committee,” Bobby quoted him as saying. “Can you think of anything more deplorable than him trying to run the United States? That’s why he can’t ever be President of the United States.”⁹¹

In committee meetings, RFK began openly confronting Johnson, criticizing and ridiculing him in front of the other members. He delivered a brutal dressing down to Johnson protégé James Webb for NASA’s lack of progress in employing blacks.⁹²One administration official remembered Bobby treating Lyndon “in a most vicious manner. He’d ridicule him, imply he was insincere.”⁹³Lyndon reported one of these encounters to a friend: “Bobby came in the other day to our Equal Employment Committee and I was humiliated. He took on Hobart and said about Birmingham, said the federal employees weren’t employing them down there, and he just gave him hell.”⁹⁴

The real story of Lyndon Johnson and the CEEO, however, was the changed relationship between the vice president and the black community. When LBJ took the oath of office as vice president, he was regarded by most black leaders and opinion makers as, at best, a simple opportunist and, at worst, a power broker for white segregationists. Of Kennedy’s choice for second place on the ticket, James Farmer, bloodied veteran of the 1961 freedom rides, had said, “Frankly, I considered it most unfortunate, probably a disaster, because of his Southern background and his voting record on civil rights.”⁹⁵Farmer was not alone. “If my sampling of opinion in my rather extensive travels about the country has any validity at all,” Roy Wilkins, executive director of the NAACP, wrote an acquaintance in 1960, “most Negro citizens feel that … his background and identification with the most backward regions of the South bar him from consideration.”⁹⁶

By 1963, however, the opinion of many members of the black elite had changed dramatically. “One of the reasons I think I was sold on him,” said black journalist-politician Louis Martin, “[was that] he talked so much like Roosevelt about the problems of poverty and the problems that faced us … The question of whether he was a liberal or conservative faded into the background in the light of his seemingly real passion of [sic] these things that I was obsessed with.”⁹⁷In the same letter in which he wrote LBJ denouncing Robert Troutman and Plans for Progress, Chuck Stone had exclaimed, “Liberals we don’t need any more of. What we need are people of your intellectual and political ilk, of your almost psychogenetic restlessness for concrete achievement, of your concern for the real economic breakthroughs for Negroes.”⁹⁸Late in 1962, Whitney Young, head of the Urban League, confided to George Reedy that he had met “an increasing number of Negroes who wish that the Vice President were the President.”⁹⁹“I learned from the Los Angeles Director of CORE,” Hobart Taylor reported to LBJ in the summer of 1963, “that Jim Farmer, in a private meeting made a statement that you understood the problem better than any white man in America, and that he was ready to support you for anything that you might want.”¹⁰⁰

For their part, Johnson and Reedy, pragmatists though they were, came to understand the civil rights movement as a moral and even a spiritual phenomenon. “It is obvious that this country is undergoing one of its most serious internal clashes since the Civil War itself,” Reedy observed to Johnson in 1963. “The basic difference between the present situation and those in the past is that the Negroes are NOT fighting for limited objectives. In the past, the demonstrations involved swimming pools, or schools, or libraries, or city employment, or public parks. Today, they involve all of those things and something more—what the Negroes call ‘freedom’ but what actually means full status, full privileges, full dignity as an American citizen.”¹⁰¹

In previous years, LBJ had insisted that state poll taxes could be done away with only through constitutional amendments. In 1962, he crusaded in behalf of repeal in Texas through a simple majority vote. “I appeal to you in the name of Texas, America and in fairness, decency and equality to go to the polls Nov. 9 and repeal this shame of Texas, this poll tax,” he declared to a cheering audience in Beaumont.¹⁰²In January 1963, in a speech at Wayne State University in Detroit, he exclaimed, “To strike the chains of a slave is noble. To leave him the captive of the color of his skin is hypocrisy.”¹⁰³Later, in a commencement address at Tufts University, he insisted that the United States could not long remain divided. “If we cannot permit each man and woman to find the rightful place in a free society to which they are entitled by merit, we cannot preserve a free society itself.”¹⁰⁴

But typically, LBJ refused to abandon the white people of the South, to see America’s racial problems in the mid-twentieth century as merely an unresolved issue left over from the Civil War: “The settlement will be one that will try the souls and hearts of all men of all races and religions—North, South, East, and West. This is not a sectional problem because our society is unequal in every section. No part of our country is so without sin that it can cast the first stone … And somehow we must maintain our compassion … If we lose our compassion, we will merely substitute one injustice for another—and our agony will be in vain.”¹⁰⁵

“I do not think,” Reedy told Johnson, “that you are regarded any more, even among extreme Liberals, as a tobacco-chewing Southerner roasting Negroes for breakfast. In fact, I think you may well turn out to be the dominant person in holding the minority vote.”¹⁰⁶