CHAPTER 27

A NEW BILL OF RIGHTS

THE INAUGURATION OFLYNDONJOHNSON INJANUARY1965 was most important perhaps as a precipitate for the Great Society, the details of which the president and his advisers had been mulling over since that sunny afternoon in Ann Arbor when the term was first articulated. Two weeks after his Michigan commencement address, Johnson had dispatched Bill Moyers and Richard Goodwin to Cambridge where they lunched at John Kenneth Galbraith’s house; there they met with about thirty academics from Harvard, MIT, and other area institutions. Out of this and subsequent meetings came some fourteen task forces composed of academics, government officials, and prominent citizens with instructions to devise recommendations for policy initiatives in the following fields: transportation, natural resources, education, health, urban problems, pollution of the environment, preservation of natural beauty, intergovernmental fiscal cooperation, efficiency and economy, antirecession policy, agriculture, civil rights, foreign economic policy, and income maintenance policy. Johnson insisted that the task forces operate in secret so that debate on the issues would not start prematurely in the media and in Congress. He wanted the members to be free, he said, to make recommendations without political considerations and without regard to cost. When the reports were duly received at the White House on November 10, 1965, they were sifted through by Goodwin, Moyers, and the rest of the White House staff, to see which were workable from a political and fiscal point of view. “If we had adopted all their ideas,” said one bemused assistant, “we would have had to come up with a budget of over $300 billion.”¹There was, for example, $3 billion for a 200-mph, tube-encased, rocket-powered railroad line linking Boston to Washington.

Moyers and his team delivered a twelve-hundred-page, condensed list of programs to Johnson, who read them over during his stay at the ranch in November and December. He then summoned his advisers. As he lay in his hammock soaking up the Texas sun, the aides made their presentation. “I thought I was being especially articulate,” Moyers recalled, “but when I looked over at the hammock, the President appeared to be asleep. So I stopped speaking, and for five minutes we sat in silence. Then bang, bang, bang, the President spoke—he had obviously heard everything that had been said—and he told us precisely why the recommendation would not work and how it should be repackaged.”²Some of the programs envisioned in the Great Society were going to have a price tag—potentially an enormous one—such as federal aid to education and Medicare, but others, such as a voting rights bill and immigration reform, would not, although their impact on American society promised to be just as great. And as time would reveal, LBJ had his priorities.

The State of the Union address delivered at night, for the first time since 1936, to a joint session was an inspirational rally in behalf of the Great Society rather than a detailed outline of program. Not surprisingly, the speech emphasized both change and continuity. The Great Society would mean a new day for the 8 million American children who had never finished the fifth grade and the 54 million who had not finished high school. It would mean a new day for the millions of elderly Americans who had no health insurance. It would mean a new day for those black Americans so long denied the right to vote.³The Great Society was not a dramatic departure but the fulfillment of dreams first dreamed when Columbus came to the Americas. “A President does not shape a new and personal vision of America,” LBJ told the senators and representatives. “He collects it from the scattered hopes of the American past. It existed when the first settlers saw the coast of a new world, and when the first pioneers moved westward … It shall lead us as we enter the third century of the search for ‘a more perfect union.’” His early years, he said, had been ones of witness to men and women turning a howling wilderness into a land of milk and honey. “It [the Hill Country] was once barren land. The angular hills were covered with scrub cedar and a few large live oaks. Little would grow in that harsh caliche soil of my country. And each spring the Pedernales River would flood our valley. But men came and they worked and they endured and they built. And tonight that country is abundant with fruit and cattle and goats and sheep, and there are pleasant homes and lakes and the floods are gone.”⁴

The Great Society would be an attempt—halting, limited, constrained, but groundbreaking—to change the status quo, a status quo that had embedded within it racial discrimination, insensitivity to social and economic injustice, and a self-serving attachment to laissez-faire. At one level, by seeming to ram through Congress the programs that constituted the Great Society, LBJ would be flying in the face of the American creed, which, as Samuel Huntington has observed, is pervaded by an “anti-power ethic.” All of its basic tenets—equality, liberty, individualism, constitutionalism, democracy—are “basically antigovernment and antiauthority in character calling for the placing of limits on the institutions of government. Individualism stressed freedom from government control and egalitarianism emphasized the right of one individual to be free from control by another.”⁵Thus could all of those with a vested or emotional interest in the status quo invoke hallowed American principles: segregationists who saw the Great Society as a conspiracy to foist integration on the South, manufacturers who saw the poverty program as a plot to rob America of its cheap labor force, physicians who perceived Medicare as a government scheme to prevent them from charging all that traffic would bear, employers who feared having to pay for a national health care system, Catholic and other faith-based groups that viewed federal aid to education as a scheme to crush parochial schools.

In addition to invoking the concept of modern individualism, Johnson’s stratagem for combating conservatives wielding the American creed was to clothe his mandate with the rhetoric of consensus, a profoundly conservative term. “ ‘Consensus’ is a word designed to conceal,” a British political commentator noted inThe New Republic. “What it tries to imply is that nothing exceptional is happening: that what has been achieved by precise (possibly new; possibly revolutionary) political methods, has, instead, ‘just growed’—out of the goodness of heart, one is left to suppose, of big business and labor, of the cities and the countryside, of rich and poor.”⁶Using the language of consensus as cover, LBJ, the newly, overwhelmingly elected, popular sovereign, intended to move the nation down the road of reform and social justice more quickly and more dramatically than it had ever been moved before.

Before he presented to Congress the sweeping program he had in mind, LBJ realized that he would have to identify the funds that would be needed to pay for them. First, he anticipated steady increases in tax revenue through natural growth in the economy. “Since the economy began its current expansion in the first quarter of 1961,” the Council of Economic Advisers reported to him, “GNP has increased nearly $150 billion or 30% … the growth in our ‘real output’ has been 22%, or an annual rate of 5.1%. This represents a substantial step up from the long-term historical performance … which has run about 3%. If we continue to advance at a rate of 4.1% for the remainder of this decade, our real output in 1970 will be 51% above 1960.”⁷In addition, Johnson intended to squeeze every dollar he could out of the budgets of existing agencies and programs. “The Great Society will require a substantial investment,” he told the cabinet two weeks after the election. “This means that as a nation we cannot afford to waste a single dollar of our resources on outmoded programs, which once may have been essential, but which time and events have overtaken.”⁸

First and foremost among governmental entities to be squeezed was the Department of Defense. In this endeavor, Robert McNamara proved to be a willing ally. In the spring of 1964, he had made a formal, chart-laden presentation to his new boss “to show the President how I anticipated the percent of GNP devoted to defense should drop between 1964 and 1965 and subsequent years. I pointed out this should permit, by the saving in percent of GNP going to defense, a financing of both additional public and private goods.”⁹“The point I want to make,” LBJ told reporters at the ranch in January 1965, “is that every congressional district in this country that has a defense installation must understand that they are going to be reviewed from time to time. We want to save every penny we can every place we can so that we may have some much needed funds to fill unfilled needs—educational needs, health needs, poverty needs, needs generally.” During 1964-1965, the Johnson administration closed more than four hundred military bases, naval yards, and air stations, creating an annual saving of $250 million.¹⁰Defense was not alone. Agriculture, Labor, and NASA, to name a few, experienced significant budget cuts.¹¹

The effects of the Kennedy tax cut would eventually wear off, and to avoid a recession, the economy would require further stimulation either through another tax cut or through increased government spending.¹²What course would LBJ follow? Financial journals debated throughout early 1964 whether the president was a Keynesian, that is, whether he valued a balanced budget over all else or would be willing to use a variety of devices—tax cuts, increased government expenditures on public works, or manipulation of the interest rates—to keep profits and wages up and unemployment down.¹³Keynes had long been the punching bag of conservatives, portrayed as a rigid ideologue committed to permanent systems of public works, redistributive tax policies, public competition with the private sector, and expensive welfare programs. In reality, the economist advocated only temporary state intervention and manipulation to deal with unusual downturns in the economy. At different times in his life he had advocated protection and controls and free trade. As one jokester put it, “Where five economists are gathered together there will be six conflicting opinions and two of them will be held by Keynes.”¹⁴Johnson denied that he was “a doctrinaire follower of any particular economic theory,” meaning he was not necessarily a Keynesian, and in so doing ironically identified himself with the British economist, the ultimate pragmatist.¹⁵Clearly, LBJ was a Keynesian. He would not stand by and watch a recession overwhelm the economy in order to maintain a balanced budget and high interest rates.¹⁶He had cut his teeth on the New Deal, which was willing to create public works projects like the Works Progress Administration and National Youth Administration as temporary palliatives to shore up employment, which looked to plentiful energy provided by regional development programs like the Tennessee Valley Authority, and which sponsored government guarantees of loans and credit to create the conditions for prolonged prosperity. The wisdom of such an approach had been obscured by the impact of massive government spending during World War II, which had given the economy a huge shot in the arm and provided conservatives an out.¹⁷

Reasonably sure that the money necessary to launch the Great Society would be available, LBJ next turned his attention to Congress. He believed that he had a window of opportunity similar to that FDR had enjoyed in the wake of his sweeping victory in 1936. “He called me into the Yellow Room of the White House one late February or early March evening [in 1964],” remembered Bill Moyers.

Mrs. Johnson was sitting there … He was working with a white paper pad … He had written “November 22, 1963,” and then a column of months that went to January 19, 1965, and then another from January 20, 1965 to January 19, 1969, and from January 20, 1969, to January 19, 1973 … Out to the side there was a scrawl which said “1964, win,” “1965, P&P”—that means propose and pass … and then for 1967 it said “hold gains.” He said, “Bill, I’ve just been figuring out how much time we would have to do what we want to do. I really intend to finish Franklin Roosevelt’s revolution … In an ideal world … we would have about 110 months to his 144 months … I’ll never make it that far, of course, so let’s assume that we have to do it all in 1965 and 1966, and probably in 1966 we’ll lose our big margin in the Congress. That means in 1967 and 1968 there will be a hell of a fight.”¹⁸

Johnson believed that he had approximately twenty months to pass Medicare, reform the immigration laws, pass a voting rights bill, dramatically expand the federal nature conservancy, and do approximately nine hundred other things that had or would come to mind. For this to happen, Congress would have to be a lean, mean, bill-passing machine, not the stifling logjam it had so often been since those halcyon days of the Second New Deal.

At first glance, the national legislature would seem to have posed little or no problem. The Democrats enjoyed two-to-one majorities in both Houses. Despite this Democratic dominance and his 16 million vote mandate, however, LBJ insisted that the Great Society was in for rough sledding. “I’ve watched the Congress from either the inside or the outside, man and boy, for more than forty years,” he remarked shortly after the election, “and I’ve never seen a Congress that didn’t eventually take the measure of the President it was dealing with.”¹⁹And he was right. During the first session of the 89th Congress, as more than one hundred administration-backed bills passed, the average margin of victory in the House was only 235 to 200. The bulk of the support was provided by 213 Democrats who supported the president at least 70 percent of the time and 22 Republicans who supported him at least 55 percent of the time. “A shift of a mere 18 votes—just half of the Democrats’ net gain in 1964—would have meant the failure of much of the program,” White House staffer Douglass Cater later noted.²⁰LBJ realized that if he approached Congress with a mandate on his hip, threatening, talking tough, showing up representatives and senators, he would get exactly nowhere. In his State of the Union address, consequently, the president was almost obsequious. “I am proud to be among my colleagues of the Congress whose legacy to their trust is their loyalty to their Nation,” he intoned.²¹After one proposal, he ad-libbed, “And I welcome the recommendations and constructive efforts of the Congress.” Democratic Senator Vance Hartke noted the passage approvingly and observed, “He told us in effect that there was room for difference without difference of principle.”²²“The most important people you will talk to are senators and congressmen,” Johnson told Jack Valenti. “You treat them as if they were president. Answer their calls immediately. Give them respect. They deserve it.”²³

Every cabinet department, every agency was to have its own liaison team to work with Congress, the overall effort to be coordinated by Larry O’Brien and his staff. Johnson insisted that the liaison personnel get to know members as he had during his congressional heyday. And they did. “It’s not something that you can put in a computer and get out an answer,” said Wilbur Cohen, who headed the Social Security Administration and who was one of the administration’s most effective lobbyists.

Every man is different and every woman is different … Again, a man is very different if he’s the bottom man of a committee or he’s the chairman … [If] he wants to run for the United States Senate in five years—he’s obviously going to do different things than if he isn’t … Russell Long has, for instance, a certain heritage from his father Huey Long; and while there are many things that Russell Long is in favor of that would make his father turn over in his grave—he stands with the oil interests in preventing an amendment of the depletion allowance—Long still has a strong, strong, populist, radical, share-the-wealth attitude … And you’ve got to understand that Wilbur D. Mills comes from a little town of 2,500, which is a small, rural town but he nevertheless is a Harvard Law School graduate.²⁴

LBJ would court members of Congress, flatter them, drink with them, above all, pay attention to them; it was not unusual, for example, during crucial periods in the battle over a major component of the Great Society for LBJ to talk to twenty members in a single day. At the same time, there was a subtle warning to the House and Senate in his State of the Union message: “You will soon learn that you are among men whose first love is their country, men who try each day to do as best they can what they believe is right.”²⁵

Late in February, LBJ presided over a meeting of key members of the House and Senate in the State Dining Room. He singled out the effective for praise and chided the recalcitrant. “There was this great range of emotions displayed,” D. B. Hardeman recalled, “from near anger to ribald humor, to history—appeals to history; it was a very fascinating intellectual and dramatic display … It was an evening that held you on the edge of your seat.”²⁶“In some ways,” Johnson confided to a friend, “Congress is like a dangerous animal that you’re trying to make work for you. You push him a little bit and he may go just as you want but you push him too much and he may balk and turn on you. You’ve got to sense just how much he’ll take and what kind of mood he’s in every day. For if you don’t have a feel for him, he’s liable to turn around and go wild.”²⁷

The order in which the components of the Great Society were presented to Congress would be extremely important. Federal aid to education, the antipoverty program, voting rights, Medicare, welfare reform, area redevelopment, and aid to urban areas would all be voted on by the same representatives and senators who were politically, emotionally, and÷or ideologically attracted to or repelled by a particular proposal. The task, as Johnson viewed it, was to prevent the coalescing of Republicans and southern Democrats into an antireform bloc.

Labor constituted an absolutely crucial element of the Great Society coalition. Since the passage of Taft-Hartley, unions and their lobbyists had been obsessed with securing repeal of Section 14b, the provision authorizing states to pass right-to-work laws, which in turn undermined the unions’ prerogative to organize and bargain collectively. LBJ told UAW head Walter Reuther that if labor insisted on forcing an early congressional showdown on 14b, “that will wreck everything. We oughta do it but the first thing we ought to try to put through, if we can, is medical care. The second thing is the excise taxes to put a little soup in this economy. The third thing is unemployment insurance. The fourth thing and simultaneously if we can ought to be Appalachia and maybe some ARA [area redevelopment] to end these distressed areas … If we bring that other other thing up first that’ll drive the South and the Republicans together in an old bloc again.”²⁸Reuther was persuaded, and during the first year of the Great Society, organized labor worked strenuously for Medicare, voting rights, and area redevelopment while waiting patiently for revision of Taft-Hartley.

 

THEANGLO-TEXANSwith whom Lyndon Johnson grew up worshipped at the shrine of education. None more so than his own family. The Germans who settled the Hill Country emanated from a culture known for its accomplishments in science, philosophy, and music. For Rebekah Baines, education was one of the joys she shared with her beloved father and the key to her elevated social status, real and imagined, in Johnson City. One of the reasons Lyndon was so rebellious in school, a notorious truant at times, was that his home was a school. Lessons, recitations, and discussions of public affairs were never-ending. Central and south-central Texas produced more teachers than any other area of the state; San Marcos was a teachers college. “I came from a family that is interested in public life and in education,” LBJ told the National Conference on Educational Legislation in 1965. “My mother was a teacher and my father was a teacher. My great grandfather, my mother’s grandfather, was the second president of Baylor University when it was located down at Washington on the Brazos.”²⁹And LBJ was a teacher, the only profession he had ever known besides politics.

But there was more to Johnson’s commitment than the Anglo-Texans’ respect for education, and more than the American pragmatist’s belief that education was the gateway to a better material life for oneself and humankind in general. LBJ was a man who was acutely aware of the vastness of the American republic and the centripetal forces—race, religion, region, class, ideology, and national origin—that continually threatened to tear it apart. In an extensive republic like the United States, which had no established religion and which was flooded periodically with immigrants, an integrating educational system was not important—it was crucial. It was not surprising that the “common school” envisioned and championed by Horace Mann originated during the 1830s and 1840s in the midst of one of these tides of influx. Systems of public education could not eliminate prejudices, eradicate differences; indeed, racial and ethnic minorities traditionally received unfair, even brutal treatment at the hands of textbook authors, who not so subtly held up white Christianity as the ideal. But the teaching of mathematics, science, logic, rhetoric, which were universal, together with respect for the Constitution, democracy, republicanism, and the other tenets of American political culture, would unify and integrate.³⁰Johnson, the democratic nationalist, the prophet of pluralism, shared Horace Mann’s faith, stripped of its New England prejudices.

By 1964, elementary and secondary education for both public and parochial students was in a woeful state. There was a shortage of teachers, who were grossly underpaid, classrooms were overcrowded, many school buildings were rundown and dilapidated, and textbooks were worn and outmoded. The post-war baby boom had flooded public and private institutions with students that they simply did not have the resources to handle. It was worse in some areas than others—much worse. Mississippi spent $241 per student per year compared to New York’s $705.³¹Nearly all monies for public education came from local property taxes and state subsidies; the federal government provided only 3.5 percent of the funds spent on elementary and secondary education. “Millions of students,” social historian Irving Bernstein writes, “were denied a proper education because they lived in states too poor to provide one, or in central cities in which the schools were beggared, or suffered from physical or emotional handicaps in localities which offered no or, at best, inadequate special education.”³²

Federal aid to education, championed by both Robert Taft and Harry Truman, had foundered on a number of rocks. Segregationists had fought it, seeing it as a weapon wielded by on overweaning federal authority to force integration on the South. Conservatives like Howard Smith continued to denounce the concept as an unwarranted interference with states’ rights that would lead to federal dictation of everything from dress to curricula. But the real sticking point for federal aid to schools was religion. Protestants and Jews were enthusiastic supporters of federal aid to education, but only to public school systems. If Catholics, and for that matter fundamentalist Christians and orthodox Jews, wanted to send their children to private schools, let them and their churches pay the bill. Over the years, the National Education Association, the powerful teachers union, the National Council of Churches, which included the major Protestant denominations, and the principal Jewish organizations had adamantly opposed federal aid if any was to go to parochial schools.³³Conversely, Catholics, who operated 85 percent of the nation’s parochial schools for some 5 million pupils, insisted that the “free exercise” of religion guaranteed by the Constitution included the right to religious education and that it was unfair for Catholic parents to pay taxes to support schools that their children would not attend.³⁴

The Kennedy administration had submitted to Congress a federal aid to education bill that provided funding to public but not private schools under a formula weighted to give disproportionate help to systems in the poorest states and in inner-city ghettoes. As a Catholic, JFK felt he could not afford to champion aid to private institutions. Yet, led by James Delaney, a Catholic congressman from New York, parochial school forces in the House managed to block passage.³⁵Thus did it fall to LBJ’s task force on education to find a way around the impasse. LBJ and his advisers knew that there would be no federal aid to education bill if parochial students were not somehow included. The key, the task force realized, was to focus on the child and not the institution. In 1947, inEverson v. Ewing Township , the Supreme Court had approved the use of state funds to provide bus transportation to parochial schoolchildren; the benefit was going to the individual pupil, not the institution, the Court ruled. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) that was introduced into Congress in January 1965 was based on a rather simple formula. The federal government would provide each state funds in the amount of the number of children in the state from low-income families (less than $2,000 a year), multiplied by 50 percent of the state’s average expenditure per pupil.³⁶Title I provided funds to public institutions to help the children of low-income families, but services in these institutions would be available to public and parochial students alike. Title II funded textbooks and library materials that state agencies could distribute to both private and public institutions. Title III would create supplementary educational centers to provide physical education, music, languages, advanced science, remedial reading, television equipment, and teaching innovations for both public and private schools.³⁷It was estimated that private school children would receive between 10.1 and 13.5 percent of the dollars appropriated under ESEA, slightly less than their per capita ratio.

It was time for Johnson the evangelist. “Nothing matters more to the future of our country,” he declared of the education bill. If Congress did not act for the 30 million boys and girls slated to enter the job force during the forthcoming decade, 2.5 million would never see the inside of a high school; 8 million would never earn a high school diploma; and more than 1 million qualified to attend college would never go.³⁸He envisioned, he said, a doubling of federal spending on education from $4 billion to $8 billion, with $1 billion going to elementary and secondary students. Eric Goldman and Horace Busby were assigned to draft the president’s special message to Congress on education. When they ended with a quote from Lincoln, LBJ suggested that he use the famous “Lamar” quote instead. After some digging, Goldman discovered that Lamar was Mirabeau B. Lamar, the Republic of Texas’s second president, famous for his hard-line approach to Indians and Mexicans and for his expansionist vision. In an effort to persuade the Texas legislature to fund a public school system in 1838, he had exclaimed to its members, “The cultivated mind is the guardian genius of democracy. It is the only dictator that free man acknowledges. It is the only security that free man desires.”³⁹

In his quest to pass a landmark education bill, LBJ was able to count on a number of assets. As noted previously, passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act had drawn some of the venom from the segregationists. The energy mobilized in behalf of the poverty bill would spill over into the fight for ESEA. It was framed in part as an antipoverty measure, and who could be in favor of poverty? Moreover, some of the anti-Catholic prejudice that at one time had been as strong as anti-Semitism in the United States was waning. There were signs that both public and private school advocates were coming to the conclusion that if they did not compromise, the very thing they professed to be serving would continue to deteriorate. That is, by demanding equal treatment for parochial schools, Catholics were getting no help at all; by insisting on nothing for religious schools, non-Catholics were getting nothing for themselves.

The bill was introduced in the House on January 12, 1965, by Carl Perkins of Kentucky, chair of the General Education Subcommittee, and in the Senate by Wayne Morse, chair of the Education Subcommittee. The Senate had always been more favorably inclined toward federal aid to education, and so O’Brien, Cater, and their troops concentrated on the lower house. All seemed well when the measure was referred to the House Labor and Education Committee, chaired by Adam Clayton Powell of New York. A cleric and a fiery crusader for civil rights, Powell had previously insisted that any federal aid to education measure include a compulsory school desegregation proviso. With passage of the equal accommodations provision of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, there was no longer any need to single out education. Powell was certainly a supporter of public funding for schools, but he had personal needs that had to be met. A strikingly handsome and charismatic man, Powell was a notorious playboy, making frequent trips to the Caribbean with one beauty or another. “The Abyssinian Baptist Church was the biggest organization and the largest black church in the country,” Louis Martin, Jonhson’s liaison with the black press, remembered. “Adam was absolutely as handsome as a man could be. He was also almost white … He was olive … he was also amiable. You know, smiling, and when he walked into a room, the lights go on … Mrs. Kennedy even talked about how good-looking the son of a bitch was.”⁴⁰The Powell lifestyle required money. When the House refused to increase his committee’s expense account from $225,000 to $440,000, Powell retired to Puerto Rico and refused to take phone calls. Holding his nose, LBJ lobbied key congressmen to give the reverend his money.⁴¹Pointing out that Powell had been key to passage of the poverty bill, Johnson observed that the chair of Labor and Education was like Bob Kerr; “He always took something out of every pot but he by God put more into it than he took out.”⁴²His coffers now overflowing, Powell returned from self-imposed exile to lead the charge. He announced that the committee would meet all day, every day, including Saturday, until the bill was passed.

In the Senate, Morse drove the measure through in a matter of days. He saw to it that there were no amendments, thus obviating the need for a potentially contentious conference committee. There were cries of “railroad” and paeans to the Force Acts of Reconstruction days. Senator Winston Prouty of Vermont declared, “The principal issue facing the nation today is not education. It is the future of the Senate as a co-equal partner in the legislative process.” The final count was seventy-three to eighteen.⁴³In a mere eighty-seven days, Eric Goldman noted, Congress had acted on legislation that had been pending for twenty years and had established a federal-state partnership in one of society’s fundamental activities.

LBJ decided to hold the signing ceremony in Texas in front of the one-room schoolhouse at Junction, a mile and a half down the road from the ranch. He picked the spot because it was a reminder of his own origins and journey, and he hoped it would become to LBJ what the log cabin was to Abraham Lincoln. The structure had been bought by an Oklahoma couple for a vacation home, but they readily agreed to let the president use it. The White House arranged for former students from Houston and Cotulla to be bused in. Gene Latimer and Luther Jones, LBJ’s former star debaters, both came. So did Mrs. Katie Deadrich Looney, Johnson’s first-grade teacher. Liz Carpenter found some old desks of World War I vintage and had them arrayed in the front yard. There were picnic tables for a barbeque. “It was an accurate, warm, corny setting,” Lady Bird wrote.⁴⁴The president’s remarks were as much a reminiscence as a speech. “In this one-room schoolhouse Miss Katie Deadrich taught eight grades at one and the same time,” he told the more than three hundred that had gathered. “Come over here, Miss Katie, and sit by me, will you? Let them see you. I started school when I was 4 years old, and they tell me, Miss Katie, that I recited my first lessons while sitting on your lap.”⁴⁵

Back in Washington, he presided over a more formal ceremony attended by all the big names in education and politics. “I will never do anything in my entire life,” LBJ said, “now or in the future, that excites me more, or benefits the nation I serve more, or makes the land and all of its people better and wiser and stronger, or anything that I think means more to freedom and justice in the world than what we have done with this education bill.”⁴⁶He quoted Thomas Jefferson: “Preach, my dear sir, a crusade against ignorance; establish and improve the law for educating the common people.”⁴⁷

ESEA was only the first of a two-pronged attack on the nation’s educational problems. The second was the Higher Education Act of 1965. The nation’s twenty-three hundred institutions of higher education were straining to accommodate the children of the World War II generation. Libraries at 50 percent of the four-year and 82 percent of the two-year institutions failed to meet minimum standards of books per student. Qualified children from poor families could not afford to go to college, or if they did, they could not afford to stay. As of 1960, 78 percent of high school graduates from families with incomes over $12,000 attended college; only 33 percent from families with incomes under $3,000 did so. Twenty-two percent of college students dropped out during their first year; the overriding reason was financial distress. There would be no public-parochial debate during deliberations on the higher education bill. Most of the nation’s colleges and universities had begun as private, faith-based entities, and in 1960, 41 percent still were. It would make no sense at all to starve one and feed the other when all were bulging at the seams and the United States was involved in a cold war with the forces of international communism.

The Higher Education Act of 1965 provided funds to colleges and universities to develop programs focusing on housing, poverty, health, and other public interest areas. It proposed to pump millions of dollars into long-neglected libraries. The heart of the bill, however, comprised scholarships, low-interest loans, and work-study programs for lower-income students. In addition, any student enrolled full time in an accredited postsecondary institution would be eligible to borrow without regard to need up to $1,500 per academic year to a limit of $7,500. President Johnson signed the Higher Education Act in the Strahan Gymnasium at Southwest Texas State College in San Marcos on November 8, 1965. “I shall never forget the faces of the boys and girls … [at that] little Welhausen Mexican school … and the pain of knowing then that college was closed to practically every one of those children because they were too poor.”⁴⁸

ESEA and the Higher Education Act were universal in design, but Johnson had one group chiefly in mind. “It’s the Negroes,” he had exclaimed to Hubert Humphrey. “Now, by God, they can’t work in a filling station and put water in a radiator unless they can read and write. Because they’ve got to go and punch their cash register, and they don’t know which one to punch. They’ve got to take a check, and they don’t know which one to cash. They’ve got to take a credit card, and they can’t pull the numbers.”⁴⁹But of course, federal aid to education did not end poverty, and it did not prove to be the escape route for children born in inner-city ghettoes. The culture of poverty was too complex. The ESEA did not wind up helping poor students exclusively or even overwhelmingly. Historian Allen Matusow quotes a 1977 study showing that “nearly two-thirds of the students in programs funded by Title I were not poor; more than half were not even low achievers; and 40 percent were neither poor nor low achieving.”⁵⁰

Nevertheless, ESEA was a historic piece of legislation and of monumental importance to the nation. Education took its place alongside national defense as an overriding concern of the federal government. The measure facilitated desegregation and helped make America’s colleges and universities the envy of the world and its population the most educated in history. By 1970, one out of every four college students in the United States was receiving some form of financial assistance provided by the Higher Education Act.⁵¹In 1993, 36 percent of Americans between the ages of twenty-five and sixty-four held college degrees.

 

AGAIN,Johnson chose a general program to help build broad support for the Great Society as a whole. The next jewel in the diadem would be Medicare, a system of health insurance for elderly Americans. Of all the advanced industrial democracies in the 1960s, only the United States did not have in place a government program to protect the elderly from the often catastrophic costs of health care. Britain, France, Sweden, and Denmark all boasted either a nationalized health system or national health insurance. There were no federally or state-supported nursing homes, no help for aged Americans afflicted with cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and stroke who did not have private means. In 1934, FDR had suggested including a program of national health insurance in the Social Security Act but had backed off in the face of opposition from the American Medical Association. In 1939, liberal Democrats had sponsored legislation to create a system of national health insurance, but it had gotten nowhere. Harry Truman included plans for a national health insurance program in the Fair Deal, but Robert Taft and the conservative coalition sided with the AMA and private insurance companies, and the man from Missouri was stymied.⁵²

In 1959, George Reedy had warned his boss that the absence of government-supported health care for the aged was a national disgrace and would only get worse. “In 1900,” he noted, “there were three million people in this country over sixty-five. Today, the number is close to fifteen million, and in ten years there will be about twenty-one million … Somehow, the problem must be dramatized in some way so that Americans will know that the problem of the aging amounts to a collective responsibility. America is no longer a nation of simple pioneer folk in which grandmother and grandfather can spend their declining years in a log cabin doing odd jobs and taking care of the grandchildren.”⁵³LBJ was innately empathetic with the afflicted, particular those who were dependent. Memories of his paralyzed and wheelchair-ridden grandmother who had had to live with him and his family still haunted him. More than this, however, LBJ wanted to define health care—like education, a healthy diet, and adequate shelter—as a basic right. He remembered discussing education and the Constitution in a college theme; he received an F, he recalled. The Constitution said nothing about education—or health care. But they were implied, Johnson would insist. Like trial by jury and freedom of speech, he told aide Harry Middleton, adequate health care ought to be a federal guarantee: “A person who comes into birth in this country ought to have those rights, whatever the price is.”⁵⁴In November 1964, on the eve of the election, when a reporter asked if a health insurance bill for the aged would be a priority if he were elected, LBJ replied, “Just top of the list.”⁵⁵

In 1961, JFK had asked Wilbur Cohen, long-time administrator of the original Social Security System, who was then teaching at the University of Michigan, to head his task force on health and Social Security. What Cohen and his colleagues came up with was a scheme of contributory medical insurance for the nearly 14.8 million Americans receiving Old-Age Survivors and Disability Insurance—Social Security. The AMA responded by launching the biggest and costliest lobbying campaign in American history. Seventy publicists toiled away at the organization’s Chicago office, and no fewer then twenty-three lobbyists patroled Capitol Hill. The AMA spent more than $50 million on the effort. In their campaign, doctors were ably and liberally assisted by the private insurance industry. While they eyed their incomes and profit statements nervously, physicians and insurance executives cried that Medicare would undermine individual initiative and open the door to socialized medicine, another fateful step in the liberal drive to convert America into a welfare state. The third roadblock in Medicare’s path was Congressman Wilbur Mills (D-Arkansas), chair of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, who opposed the legislation for his own reasons. Thus was Medicare still languishing when LBJ came to the presidency that day in late November 1963.

Mills was a stocky man of average height, noted, like Robert McNamara, for his slicked-back hair and steel-rimmed glasses. He was the son of a small-town merchant and had attended Hendrix College, where he so excelled in his studies that he was able to gain entry to Harvard Law School. In 1934 he was admitted to the Arkansas Bar and four years later was elected to Congress to represent the Second District, which included the Ozark Mountain region in the north-west, an area of small farms in the north-central part of the state, and the Mississippi Delta to the east. His district was poor and thinly populated. Labor unions were virtually nonexistent.⁵⁶Sam Rayburn took young Mills under his wing, taught him the traditions and procedures of the House, and helped him land a seat on Ways and Means. The Arkansan was not a reactionary, but a conservative New Dealer. Despite representing a region that clung tenaciously to the nineteenth century, Mills believed that in a modern society, order and justice required that the federal government play an active role, protecting the defenseless, regulating the economy, and guarding the nation’s security. “Do not be misled,” he said in 1948, “economic policies of Government both at home and in international relations determine to a great extent these periods of prosperity and depression.”⁵⁷Yet Mills was obsessed with maintaining the fiscal integrity of existing government programs, especially Social Security. “In the Social Security field,” Wilbur Cohen observed, “Mr. Mills is probably the only man out of the five hundred and thirty five people in Congress who … is completely conversant with the basis for making the actuarial estimates and all of the factors that enter into it.”⁵⁸Mills was not opposed to the notion of health care for the aged, but he believed that the proposal under consideration would dis-credit and÷or bankrupt Social Security. Existing benefits under Social Security were cash payments based on payroll deductions and employer contributions. These payments could be predicted and controlled. Under the existing Medicare proposal, Social Security was to pay for medical services the cost of which could neither be predicted nor controlled. Experts told him that the most workers would agree to have withheld from their paychecks without rebelling was 10 percent. Mills could see Medicare producing costs that would spin out of control.

Throughout 1964, Wilbur Cohen barely left Mills’s side. He read the transcripts of the chairman’s speeches, quipped Cohen’s biographer, “the way that Sinologists studied statements from Mao.”⁵⁹On the surface, the two men seemed not at all compatible. Cohen, the son of Jewish immigrants, had attended the University of Wisconsin and its Experimental College. There he had read Lincoln Steffens and Henry Adams and flirted with socialism. “I come from a tradition of social reform in Wisconsin under the La Follettes and under Professor John R. Commons, which brought me into the New Deal,” he later said of himself.”⁶⁰Yet, both men had great respect for each other. “He is a man of great capacity and a man of great ability, and the most important part of that is that he has the respect of his colleagues in Congress,” Cohen said of Mills.⁶¹Despite their excellent working relationship, the two Wilburs were not able to put together a satisfactory Medicare compromise before the election. “Now they’ve [Republicans and the AMA] got us screwed on Medicare,” Johnson told House Majority Leader Carl Albert. “We’re screwed good.”⁶²

Then came the election of 1964, with LBJ’s sweeping mandate and the additions to the already large Democratic majority in the House. Public opinion polls were showing a two-to-one margin in favor of some type of national medical insurance for the aged. For many middle-class families, matters had reached the point where they had to choose between proper medical care for aged parents and college for their children. Johnson appealed to Mills. “If you can get something you can possibly live with and defend,” he told the chairman of Ways and Means, “that these people will not kick over the bucket with,it’ll mean more than all the bills we’ve passed put together and it’ll mean more to posterity and to you and to me.”⁶³The morning following the election, Mills informed reporters that he “would be receptive to a Medicare proposal in the upcoming session.”⁶⁴Desperate, the AMA backed a bill that it dubbed Elder-care. Persons over sixty-five could purchase Blue Cross÷Blue Shield or commercial insurance by paying all or none of the cost depending on their income. The expense would be borne by the states and the federal government. Then on February 4, 1965, Republican John Byrnes introduced “Bettercare,” a plan that would cover hospital and doctor bills as well as selected patient services. The government would pay two-thirds of the cost from the general fund and the remainder would be defrayed by premium payments scaled to income. To Wilbur Cohen’s horror, Mills told Byrnes that he liked the idea behind Bettercare.⁶⁵He then proposed what he called a “three-layer cake.” The bottom layer would be a plan to take comprehensive care of those without means. Medicare would be the middle layer, providing hospital care for those covered by Social Security. Topping off the confection would be Bettercare, a voluntary system to defray the cost of doctor bills. Cohen was stunned—and delighted. No sooner had Mills made his proposal than everyone in the committee room knew “that it was all over,” said one committee member. “The rest would be details. In thirty seconds, a $2 billion bill was launched, and the greatest departure in the social security laws in thirty years was brought about.”⁶⁶The subsequent “debate” in the House lasted one day. When Mills stepped to the podium to present his plan, he received a standing ovation from both sides of the aisle. The House passed the three-layer cake by a vote of 313 to 115.

On the morning of March 26, after Mills’s committee had voted out the Social Security Amendments Act of 1965 (Medicare), LBJ summoned the congressional leadership of both houses to the White House for a discussion of the measure. Unbeknown to his guests, Johnson had arranged for television coverage. Before the cameras LBJ praised Mills and his three-tiered plan and then turned to the venerable Harry Byrd, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee and an archenemy of Medicare. “Senator Byrd, would you care to make an observation?” Startled, the conservative Virginian said he had not studied the measure but was prepared to hold hearings on it. “And you have nothing that you know of that would prevent that coming about in reasonable time?” “No,” said Byrd quietly. “So when the House acts and it is referred to the Senate Finance Committee, you will arrange for prompt hearings.” “Yes,” Byrd replied, even more quietly.⁶⁷As he was leaving, the congressman observed wryly to reporters that if he had known he was going to be on television, he would have dressed more formally. Byrd was as good as his word. Hearings proceeded without a hitch, and on July 9 the Senate approved the amendments to the Social Security Act of 1965 creating Medicare and Medicaid by a vote of sixty-eight to twenty-one.⁶⁸“Biggest Change Since the New Deal,” trumpetedNewsweek’ s headline.⁶⁹Johnson was ecstatic. “[This] gives your boys [in Congress] something to run on if you’ll just put out that propaganda,” he chortled to Larry O’Brien. “That they’ve done more than they did in Roosevelt’s Hundred Days.”⁷⁰

There was one final hurdle to be cleared. Some people feared that the AMA might refuse to participate in Medicare and Medicaid. The Ohio Medical Association, representing ten thousand physicians, had already adopted a resolution to boycott the new programs. When, subsequently, some twenty-five thousand doctors gathered in New York on June 20 for the annual AMA convention, the House of Delegates directed its officers to meet with the president to discuss implementation of the legislation. Shortly before the gathering was to take place, AFL-CIO president George Meany called to express his concern. Johnson asked him, “George, have you ever fed chickens?” “No,” Meany answered. “Well,” the president said, “chickens are real dumb. They eat and eat and eat and never stop. Why they start shitting at the same time they’re eating, and before you know it, they’re knee-deep in their own shit. Well, the AMA’s the same. They’ve been eating and eating nonstop and now they’re knee-deep in their own shit and everybody knows it. They won’t be able to stop anything.”⁷¹

On June 29, the AMA leadership assembled in the West Wing and were promptly given a large dose of the Johnson treatment. LBJ began by saying what wonderful people doctors were, recalling how the local physician in Johnson City had made numerous house calls to treat his ailing father. He stood and stretched; they stood. He sat. They sat. LBJ then delivered a moving statement about “this great nation and its obligation to those who had helped make it great and who were now old and sick and helpless through no fault of their own.” He stood again. They stood. He sat, and they followed suit, now perfectly clear as to who was in control.⁷²Suddenly Johnson brought up Vietnam. Would the AMA help in arranging for physician volunteers to serve for short periods in that country to help the civilian population gain a modicum of health? “Your country needs your help. Your President needs your help.” In unison, the AMA officials said that they would be glad to participate. “Get the press in here,” Johnson shouted to a lieutenant. To the journalists, the president announced the AMA’s commitment to help in Vietnam and praised their patriotism. One of the reporters asked if the AMA was going to boycott Medicare. Johnson piped up with mock indignity: “These men are going to get doctors to go to Vietnam where they might be killed. Medicare is the law of the land. Of course, they’ll support the law of the land. Tell him,” LBJ said, turning to the head of the delegation. That worthy nodded and said, “We are, after all, law-abiding citizens, and we have every intention of obeying the new law.” A few weeks later, the AMA announced its intention to support Medicare.⁷³

“The application of Medicare to twenty million people on July 1 was perhaps the biggest single governmental operation since D-Day in Europe during World War II,” Wilbur Cohen subsequently observed.⁷⁴By early May 1966, 16.8 million elderly, 88 percent of those eligible, had voluntarily enrolled for medical insurance. By that date, over 90 percent of the nation’s accredited hospitals and more than 80 percent of nonaccredited facilities had applied for participation. Over the years, Medicare and Medicaid transformed the lives of millions of American families. The impoverished, elderly, and dependent no longer had to go without health care; middle-class families no longer had to choose between college for their children and proper medical care for their grandparents. But Wilbur Mills had been right to be worried. There were no effective controls on costs. Hospitals and physicians were entitled to be reimbursed for reasonable costs, which were whatever hospitals and physicians said they were. Total Medicare expenditures amounted to $3.5 billion in the first year of the program; by 1993 total costs had risen to $144 billion, and Americans were spending approximately 15 percent of the gross national income on health care.⁷⁵

As was true of many of the Great Society measures, Medicare was a civil rights as well as a health care bill. In those hospitals and doctors’ offices that participated, “colored” and “white” signs disappeared from waiting rooms, restrooms, and water fountains. Harry McPherson remembered that in the days following passage of the Act, the White House was deluged with letters and telegrams from outraged southerners. Noting that federal law required hospitals and clinics not to discriminate and to desegregate to receive federal funds, one correspondent told the president, “And they won’t Lyndon. You know that. Do you want to be responsible for closing the St. Francis Hospital in Biloxi, Mississippi? That’s what will happen if you put this thing into effect … Doctors won’t treat the coloreds, and the nurses won’t treat them.”⁷⁶It was a great gamble, McPherson recalled. “Whatever he decided,” he said of the president, “thousands of people, either the elderly or the blacks, might have been deprived of hospitalization. It was an excruciating decision to make, but he made it. Comply. And they did.”⁷⁷