CHAPTER 31

A CITY ON THE HILL

THEWAR ONPOVERTY REMAINED AT THE VERY COREof the Great Society. It was perceived to be the key to social justice, vitiating class animosities, giving substance to the civil rights movement, quelling urban unrest, and demonstrating to the world that capitalism was superior to communism. By 1965, Sargent Shriver and the Office of Economic Opportunity were getting help to millions of poor Americans. Local antipoverty programs were already under way in forty-four states; fifty-three job corps centers, many of them at converted military bases, were processing sixty hundred applications a day. Some twenty-five thousand welfare families were receiving employment training, and ninety thousand adults were enrolled in adult education programs. Neighborhood Youth Corps were operating in forty-nine cities and eleven rural communities, and some 4 million Americans were receiving benefits under AFDC. In March, LBJ submitted a $1.5 billion request to Congress to continue and expand these programs. One of the most significant increases was for Operation Head Start, “pre-school programs primarily for inner city children designed to compensate for cultural disadvantages” and get them up to speed for the first grade.¹

As the House and Senate took up the administration’s 1965 poverty bill, the campaign against want was receiving mixed reviews. Complaints came pouring in from the poor that bureaucratic red tape was preventing mass access to OEO and other antipoverty offices. “The pipeline is getting clogged up,” Connecticut Senator Abraham Ribicoff, a supporter of the poverty program, told LBJ. “And we are going to have indigestion in the country; you have oversold the program … This is going to start kicking back in everybody’s teeth within the next year.”²When a riot erupted at the Job Corps Center at Camp Breckenridge in Kentucky over discriminatory hiring practices at the facility, conservatives denounced the camps as no more than breeding grounds for urban revolutionaries.³Mayors and governors complained with increasing shrillness about Shriver’s willingness to give control of poverty funds to private organizations that circumvented local political machines. Welfare had long constituted the base of political power for big-city organizations and they were loath to give it up. Leading the charge was the powerful mayor of Chicago, Richard Daley, and Adam Clayton Powell, whose HARY-YOU project in Harlem was one of the major relief projects in New York City. “What in the hell are you people doing?” Daley asked Bill Moyers. “Does the president know he’s putting money in the hands of subversives … to poor people that aren’t a part of the organization?”⁴Southern governors joined northern mayors in clamoring for control. Their motives, Shriver and his staff suspected, were not of the purest. Initially, OEO stuck to its guns, insisting that the poor constitute a majority on local Community Action Program boards and removing segregationists from positions of power in the poverty program in Louisiana and other southern states. The perennially tanned and energetic Shriver came under increasing attack as a result. In an effort to appease critics, he agreed to give up the Peace Corps to concentrate on poverty, but the criticism continued.

Not surprisingly, LBJ preferred to work through established political authority. Ribicoff, an increasingly influential voice in matters of poverty and urban unrest, argued to LBJ that for the War on Poverty to succeed, “you have to have the political establishment, you have to have labor, you have to have industry, you have to have civil rights and the poor. Now setting up what they [OEO] are doing now, setting up a new power base with the poor is absolutely dynamite because it has to lead to anarchy when the vicious men who have never been able to achieve power, seek power through the poor. Now you have to start with smart mayors and work all of them in together.”⁵The problem was that “the poor” and many urban civil rights leaders sided with Shriver and the OEO radicals. Labor was split, with Meany supporting the establishment and Reuther and the UAW working to set up local nonprofits outside the existing power structure. Meanwhile, representatives of the National Governors Conference attached amendments to the Economic Opportunity Act of 1965 providing for a gubernatorial veto of all poverty program decisions in their respective states.⁶

Inevitably, the War on Poverty had to address the thorny issue of birth control. Economists and demographers estimated that over a generation, 1 million poor women practicing contraception meant five hundred thousand fewer poor children. Under existing guidelines, the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare could provide federal funds for family planning, but only if states requested and administered such aid. Anthony Celebrezze, the secretary, was a Catholic and insisted that federal activity in the area of birth control ought to go no further. Shriver, also a Catholic, violently disagreed. He, along with Harry McPherson and Bill Moyers, believed that the federal government through the OEO ought to undertake an aggressive campaign of education and provide free contraceptives not only to married poor women but to unmarried as well. Indeed, it was unmarried women and women not living with the father of their children who were responsible, biologically, for the population explosion. “If the purpose of our policy is to slow down the making of babies in conditions of squalor and intellectual degradation,” McPherson observed to Moyers, “the choice seems clear.”⁷Johnson was leery. The subject was a minefield. As McPherson pointed out, the great mass of Catholics would prove acquiescent, but if the Vatican chose to make an issue of the matter, there would be trouble, particularly if it allied with white religious fundamentalists who would see federal birth control programs as attempts to subsidize immorality. Finally, there would be those in the Black Power movement who would cry genocide. Nevertheless, the OEO proceeded to make grants to private nonprofits to distribute information and contraceptives among both inner-city and rural poor.⁸Early in 1966, John Gardner, the new HEW secretary, issued a directive to his army of agency heads, informing them that they had the authority to render family planning assistance to their clients immediately.⁹In May of that year, Congress passed legislation authorizing specific HEW grants to state and local agencies and private nonprofits for family planning, including the distribution of free contraceptives.¹⁰

 

IN LATEJULY,the president took time off from lobbying for the poverty bill to secure long-time friend and confidant Abe Fortas’s nomination to the Supreme Court. Johnson knew how groundbreaking and controversial his Great Society programs were and, to ensure that they would be upheld on judicial review, he needed the liberal majority on the Warren Court to remain intact. Moreover, he knew he could depend on Fortas to keep him abreast of the changing mood of the Court as it responded to new personalities and changing circumstances. Fortas had always insisted that he did not want to leave his lucrative practice for the high court. Ever since LBJ had become president, Fortas, egged on by his wife and fellow attorney, Carol Agger, had deflected talk of an appointment. She wanted him to wait five or six years until the couple had ensured their financial security; then Abe could enjoy the ermine of the bench in his declining years. On July 28, LBJ summoned his friend to the White House and told him that in minutes he was going to address a press conference announcing that he was sending an additional fifty thousand troops to Vietnam, and that he was nominating Fortas for the vacant position on the Supreme Court.¹¹Faced with a fait accompli, the lawyer dutifully—and gratefully—accepted. Carol Agger was furious, hanging up on LBJ when he called to explain why he had to have her husband on the bench. “She would not talk to Johnson for the next two months, and her relationship with her husband during that period was also tense,” Fortas biographer Laura Kalman writes.¹²Eventually, she forgave both.

During Fortas’s confirmation hearings in August, some senators expressed worry that his close relationship with the president might compromise his judicial independence. “There are two things that have been vastly exaggerated with respect to me,” Fortas declared with some disingenuousness. “One is the extent to which I am a Presidential adviser and the other is the extent to which I am a proficient violinist. I am a very poor violinist but very enthusiastic, and my relationship with the President has been exaggerated out of all connection with reality.” Despite the fact that members of the John Birch Society and other right-wing groups flooded Washington with telegrams urging rejection of the nomination on the grounds that Fortas was a Jew, a liberal, or even a communist, he was approved unanimously.¹³

As Congress debated the 1965 poverty bill during the summer and early fall, LBJ stepped up the pressure, calling members of congress, goading labor leaders and civil rights organizations to enter the fray, and subtly threatening conservatives with the specter of urban revolution.¹⁴On October 9 Congress passed the Economic Opportunity Act Amendments of 1965. The OEO was only 20 percent of what had become nearly a $20 billion War on Poverty that included Social Security, direct relief, food stamps, Department of Education aid to slum schools, federal expenditures for public housing, and area redevelopment.¹⁵

There was always a sense of fevered urgency surrounding any project LBJ chose to back, but in 1965 poverty had been a special case. In the wake of Watts, Martin Luther King had advised the president that the antidote to urban rioting as far as the federal government was concerned was the OEO and its attendant programs. While publicly mouthing the rhetoric of law and order, LBJ and his staff worked frantically behind the scenes to forestall Watts-like eruptions in other urban centers. Not only did the White House lobby intensively for passage of the 1965 EOA general amendments bill, but they focused poverty programs on south Los Angeles in an effort to convince potential rioters elsewhere that there was hope. On August 26, LBJ announced that the federal government was going to immediately spend between $200 million and $300 million in Watts for a special employment program, establishment of pilot child care centers, creation of a small business center to foster black-owned enterprises, a vigorous back-to-school program, construction of low-income housing, and an expanded surplus food distribution initiative.¹⁶But Abe Ribicoff, Walter Reuther, and others advised the president that special programs beyond OEO and AFDC were needed to address the complex problems facing the nation’s cities, problems such as mass transit that would bring the poor to available jobs and slum clearance that would do more than simply replace tenements with middle-class housing that the poor could not afford.¹⁷

Independently, Walter Reuther attempted to sell the White House on a “pilot cities” program in which business, labor, and the federal government would cooperate “to carve out significant portions of decayed areas of center cities and rebuild them with rehabilitation, new housing, new commercial buildings, new workers, professional people, Negroes, Whites, etc.”¹⁸LBJ was sympathetic, despite his dislike of Reuther; he confided to an aide that whenever he sat across from Reuther in the Oval Office, “I’m sitting in my rocker, smiling and thinking all the time, ‘How can I get that hand out of his pocket [Reuther had been maimed by a would-be assassin’s bullet] so I can cut his balls off!’ ”¹⁹It was no accident that Watts simultaneously demonstrated the highest population density, the highest disease rate, the highest unemployment rate, and the highest rate of narcotic use in the country, he commented to network executive Al Friendly. “If we don’t face up to the problems [that we have now] ultimately [we will] not only have to face up to the ones we got now, but we [will have to] face up to a bunch we have created that flow from failure to face up to the ones we got.”²⁰Standing in the LBJ Ranch swimming pool at the beginning of August, Johnson proclaimed to his new domestic adviser, Joe Califano, “I want to rebuild American cities. I want a bill that makes it possible for anybody to buy a house anywhere they can afford to.”²¹The upshot was that LBJ proposed a new cabinet-level department, Housing and Urban Development (HUD), to Congress. On September 9, 1965, both houses overwhelmingly approved legislation to create the new agency.

Although the president was required to name a director for HUD no later than November 1, he agonized for more than three months before announcing his choice. Ever since his accession to the presidency, LBJ had made noises about naming the first black Supreme Court justice and the first black cabinet officer. He was aware of the tremendously symbolic importance of appointing a black cabinet officer. He knew “how many little Negro boys in Podunk, Mississippi,” would be uplifted by it, he told Roy Wilkins. “Now I am very anxious, in the limited time the Good Lord is going to give me, to just not talk but to do and to do by example and to put the coon skins on the wall and not just talk and promise and then make big speeches.” Nearly everyone anticipated that the president would name Robert Weaver, the administrator of the Housing and Home Finance Agency and an African American, to head HUD. But as he confided to Wilkins, he had serious misgivings. He liked Weaver, but he feared that racism in Congress and within the urban power structures would prevent him from getting the job done. “I rather think that a white man can do a hell of a lot more for the Negro than the Negroes can for themselves in these cities,” he observed to Wilkins. “I think having a Negro heading up housing is just every time they take any kind of step creates a problem.”²²“In my judgment you are liable to get yourself in the same shape you did after the Reconstruction and it will take you another hundred years to get back,” the president confided to Katzenbach. “I doubt that this fella can make the grade and he will be a flop and he will be exhibit number one.”²³

LBJ had other reasons for delaying. He wanted to use Weaver’s appointment with civil rights leaders to compel them to follow the moderate path he had chosen, and he wanted to impress upon Weaver the importance of his appointment and the debt he would owe to the president as a result of it. In his conversation with Wilkins, he indirectly chided the leadership of the traditional civil rights organizations for not anticipating urban unrest and acting to prevent it, for fostering demonstrations that contributed to the white backlash, and for not getting out to register black voters. Significantly, Wilkins told LBJ that he and the blacks that he knew would abide by whatever decision he made. “I can criticize you and will,” he told LBJ, “but I still believe in your heart.”²⁴

As the weeks passed, Weaver became more and more anguished. He twice threatened to resign his existing position. “Yesterday I think he decided not to resign,” LBJ said to Wilkins, “then last night he said he was going to put it off another day and I haven’t heard what he has done this morning. My judgment is he is not going to resign. He is a damned fool if he does and if he doesn’t have any more sense than that, he should not be in the Cabinet.”²⁵Of the incident, Joe Califano later wrote, “He [LBJ] gave me a glimpse of the trait that sometimes drove him to crush and reshape a man before placing him in a job of enormous importance, much the way a ranch hand tames a wild horse before mounting it. To Johnson, this technique helped assure that an appointee was his alone.”²⁶All the while LBJ kept Weaver and the black community in suspense, he had been running interference for him with Richard Russell, Russell Long, other southern senators, and, surprisingly enough, with Adam Clayton Powell. “I am a little worried about Powell,” LBJ confided to Roy Wilkins. “He has told me that under no circumstances should I name Weaver.” Wilkins advised him to ignore the reverend. “I feel, if I may say so,” Wilkins said, “Powell’s opposition goes back to the fact that Weaver is Harvard and high in an appointed position, out of the reach of Powell as an operating Congressman.”²⁷When LBJ finally sent Weaver’s name up in January, the Senate took a mere four days to give it unanimous consent.

A month later, LBJ let it be known that he was going to nominate Andrew Brimmer, a black Harvard-educated economist, to fill a vacancy on the Federal Reserve Board. William McChesney Martin, the conservative head of the Fed, opposed Brimmer’s appointment for ideological reasons. Martin was an advocate of tight money; fighting inflation came before everything—jobs, wage levels, politics—whereas Brimmer, like Johnson, believed in maintaining the lowest possible interest rates for as long as possible. When Martin put out the word that he would have to resign if he found himself in a minority on the board, LBJ exploded. “I don’t think anybody is indispensable and goddamn these fellows that say I am going to be on a board of seven members and if you don’t appoint anybody I want I am going to quit. I had a cabinet officer tell me one night I just feel like I will be called upon to resign if this policy that you announced is carried out and I said, ‘Do you want to do it orally or in writing?’ He is still working for me effectively.”²⁸Johnson appointed Brimmer, and Martin did not resign.

 

THE FIRST WEEK INOCTOBER,the nation was reminded that racism was alive and well in the South. The previous August, in Lowndes County, Alabama, Thomas A. Coleman, a highway engineer and unpaid deputy sheriff, had emptied his shotgun into two civil rights workers, Jonathan M. Daniels, a twenty-six-year-old white Episcopal seminarian, and Richard Morrisroe, a black Catholic priest of the same age, killing the former and gravely wounding the latter. Coleman’s trial took place in the slave-built, whitewashed courthouse in Haynesville. Circuit Judge T. Werth Thagard refused to allow Alabama Attorney General Richmond Flowers to direct the prosecution, and he refused to delay the trial until Morrisroe was well enough to testify. The clerk of the court was Coleman’s cousin; the local football field had been named for his father. Lowndes County prosecutor Arthur E. “Bubba” Gamble dominated the proceedings. Joyce Bailey, a slight, nineteen-year-old black woman took the stand and described the scene at the Cash Store, which a mixed group, including Daniels and Morissroe, was trying to integrate. She repeated Coleman’s order to Daniels: “Get off this property, or I’ll blow your goddamn heads off, you sons of bitches.” Gamble joined the jury and spectators in prolonged laughter. She described the blast at Daniels: “He caught his stomach and then he fell back.” With Father Morrisroe, she started running. After the priest was shot down, she testified, “I was still running.” More laughter; then from the gallery somebody yelled, “Run, you niggers.” More laughter. Coleman was duly acquitted.²⁹

The White House was as repelled as the rest of the nation. Reedy, who had rejoined the LBJ team as special adviser, and his cohorts mulled over various options, including reviving the Force Acts, federal legislation to reform the jury system, and a sub rosa campaign to convince southern officials that if they did not put a halt to these courtroom farces, the civil rights movement would be driven underground, “where it is likely to act like the Viet Cong.” But there was little in the short run that the administration could do.³⁰In November, the Justice Department did intervene in behalf of Charles Morgan Jr., a Birmingham lawyer who had filed suit in federal court charging discriminatory jury selection in Haynesville.³¹

In his Howard speech in June 1965, LBJ had called for the convening of a massive White House Conference, “To Ensure These Rights,” to be held in the spring of 1966. In November, some two hundred civil rights leaders gathered at the Washington Hilton to plan for the spring meeting. By this point, the black backlash against the Moynihan report was in full swing. If Negroes had a family problem, declared black intellectual and civil rights activist Bayard Rustin, “it is not because they are Negro but because they are so disproportionately a part of the unemployed, the underemployed, and the ill-paid.” Honorary chairman A. Philip Randolph, seventy-six, the courtly president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, called for a “100 billion dollar ‘freedom budget’ to be spent on eradicating ghettos.”³²Actually, Moynihan agreed. Harry McPherson recalled, “Pat’s answer was rather simple—a family allowance plan. He was very disturbed from the very beginning about community action. He said, ‘You realize what you’ve done, don’t you? You’ve ruined the poverty program … effort with community action. It’s wild; these people are out to destroy you.’ He took the position that all the remedial programs in the world were for naught unless there was an income base in the family. You could build on that; they would stay home and you’d have an interacting family. This was a Catholic middle-class view.”³³ Given LBJ’s commitment to consensus, his determination to sell antipoverty and civil rights to conservatives as well as liberals, and the mounting costs of the war in Southeast Asia, such an approach, which could cost $11 billion to $12 billion a year, was impossible.³⁴

 

THROUGHOUT HIS PRESIDENCY,LBJ was obsessed with avoiding scandal, not only obvious corruption, but even the hint of wrongdoing. His obsession with public virtuosity morphed into a fixation on cost cutting. He lived in constant terror that his enemies, especially his Republican enemies, would charge him with excessive spending. Thus did he order lights at the White House turned off if they were not in immediate use. At one point, he attempted to cut his aides’ allowances for journals. The president complained constantly that the security measures taken by the military and Secret Service were too extensive and too expensive. Periodically, Lady Bird would have to put her foot down. One morning in August, she was summoned to the Oval Office to hear her husband’s complaints about the cost of protecting the girls in their modest travels and of advancing a trip Lady Bird was planning to the Grand Teton. She blew up. “I took the position that my few speeches, my few trips for Head Start, beautification, and so forth had to be advanced and ought to be paid for. My own personal ticket I would buy. And then I walked out, angry and hurt.” Shortly after returning from a beauty parlor appointment, she was told the president would like to see her in the Oval Office. “He put his arms around me and said, ‘You don’t have to worry about anything. You ought not to worry about money. I’ll get you whatever you need.’ I was speechless and closer to tears than I had been in four or five years. I hugged him and walked out, not trusting myself to talk. Poor man, trying to walk the tightrope between loving and wanting to please his family and make them comfortable, and wanting to live up to the ethics, a sort of thrift, for the private actions that could face public scrutiny.”³⁵Nevertheless, to the delight of political satirists, the lights stayed off. Harry McPherson later speculated on the source of this ostentatious frugality. “I think that he may have been spooked by impressions that I certainly know I heard in Texas in 1962,” he said, “when I would go down to see my family, that this was all just a big swimming pool party up here and a lot of whoring around and boozing and a lot of dilettantes having a ball. And he may have felt that the country felt that.”³⁶

 

TO SIMULTANEOUSLY FINANCE THE WARin Southeast Asia and the Great Society, it was imperative, LBJ believed, to hold prices and wages down lest runaway inflation ravage the economy. Beginning in August 1964, the Johnson administration had worked to persuade labor and management to adhere to an unofficial wage-price guideline of 3.2 percent. The first great challenge to this standard, which corresponded to the estimated annual growth rate in productivity, came from the steel industry.³⁷The United Steel Workers, headed by newly elected I. W. Abel, and the steel industry, represented by R. Conrad Cooper, had attempted to work out a new contract throughout the summer, but to no avail. The union demanded wage increases of approximately 5 percent, with steel offering half that amount. If it were forced to go above 2.5, industry spokesmen said, prices would increase well above the 3.2 percent guideline. Abel had been elected on a promise to achieve the same wage increase recently won by the can and aluminum workers, and he would not budge. Cooper, banking on White House intervention, also remained adamant. On August 17, LBJ summoned Abel to the White House to try a little persuasion. “I made commitments to the members who elected me,” Abel told the president defensively. “You’re starting to sound just like Dick Russell,” Johnson observed, cunningly. “He sat on that very couch talking to me about my civil rights bill in 1964. I asked him not to filibuster. ‘We’ve got to make a stand somewhere,’ he said. He sounded just like you.” Smiling, LBJ softened and repeated a favorite anecdote. “I told Dick Russell the story about the Negro boy in bed with the white gal, whose husband arrived home unexpectedly. ‘Hide! hide,’ she whispered. ‘He’ll kill you and then he’ll kill me.’ ” The president described how the black youth hid in the closet. “At this point,” recalled Joe Califano, who sat in on the conversation, “Johnson bolted from his rocker, stood upright, arms stiff at his side, legs straight, tight together, back and shoulders ramrod straight.” He described the enraged husband charging through the bedroom shouting that he knew someone was there, banging doors open. Finally, he came to the closet where the culprit was hiding. “ ‘What the hell are you doin’ here?’ this little white gal’s husband shouts, fire in his eyes. ‘Everybody’s gotta stand somewhere, boss,’ this Negro boy answers.” The group laughed. Johnson leaned into Abel and said softly, slowly, “Everybody’s gotta stand somewhere,” he repeated. “Just like that Negro boy he wanted to keep down, Russell stuck himself in a closet with nowhere to go on civil rights. Mr. Abel, I know you gotta stand somewhere. But you gotta stand where you can move around a little, not just pinned in the linen closet.”³⁸

In the days that followed LBJ met with both labor and management, appealing typically to both parties’ patriotism. A strike would end the nation’s fifty-five-month economic expansion. A price rise on steel would percolate throughout the economy, providing justification for price increases on thousands of consumer items. A recently conducted Harris poll indicated that 87 percent of America’s housewives were worried about inflation.³⁹Negotiators pushed LBJ to permit selective price increases that would allow a better wage offer to the union. “No price increase,” he told Califano. “None. Zero,” making a circle with his thumb and forefinger.⁴⁰

In fact, observers remarked on the enthusiasm, confidence, almost joy with which LBJ intervened in the steel dispute. He continued to pop in on union and industry negotiators, at the same time sending Clark Clifford, counsel to Republic Steel, to tell company executives that there would be no guideline-busting settlement, and dispatching Goldberg to union leaders to tell them the same thing.⁴¹On September 3 a gleeful Johnson was flanked by Abel and Cooper, neither of whom shared his mood, to announce that a settlement had been reached and that it was well within the administration’s 3.25 guideline. Comments in the press and among economists were generally laudatory. “ ‘Masterful’ is the word for the way you brought the steel crisis to a successful solution,” former Council of Economic Advisers head Walter Heller wrote him. “You struck a key blow for continued cost-price stability and the country’s economic health.”⁴²

In reality, LBJ’s ostentatious intrusion into the steel dispute ended his honeymoon with the business community. In the midst of the White House-brokered negotiations, conservative economist Milton Friedman wrote an article for theNational Review entitled “Social Responsibility: A Subversive Doctrine.” A businessperson’s first and overriding obligation must be to his or her stockholders. To introduce other factors into the decision-making process would be to subvert the free market system. It was his experience, Friedman wrote, that “the appeal to ‘social’ responsibility or ‘voluntary’ restraint has always occurred when the governmental agency which is responsible for the area of policy in question has been unable or unwilling to discharge its own responsibility.” Here was an attack on the whole notion of Johnsonian corporatism, the idea of business-labor-government cooperation to bring stability and predictability to the marketplace.⁴³Executives and business academics chastised LBJ for undermining the very system he was trying to save. George Shultz, dean of the Graduate School of Business at the University of Chicago and a prominent labor arbitrator, warned that “it undermines private collective bargaining to have the President and government come in so strongly.” Lawrence Harvey, president of California’s Harvey Aluminum, agreed: “Soon there will be no more unions, in effect, and no more collective bargaining. The government will control the terms of every contract.”⁴⁴What a classic dog in the manger, Johnson thought.

In the end, LBJ’s attempts to limit price-wage increases short of mandatory controls proved futile. In January 1966, John V. Lindsay, the newly elected liberal Republican mayor of New York, agreed to give striking transit workers a 6.3 percent pay raise. During the walkout that had paralyzed Manhattan, LBJ had considered a number of options, including asking Congress for a resolution authorizing the executive to impose a settlement. He tried to pressure Lindsay, but given that the mayor was not a member of his party, that proved difficult. Johnson called George Meany and threatened to sit on his hands when 14b came up for debate in Congress. But it was all to no avail. Everybody was in bed together in the New York situation, Willard Wirtz reported. “We are dealing with the most corrupt system for settling labor disputes in the country. That New York situation is rotten all the way through.”⁴⁵Then, in the summer, steel defied LBJ by increasing prices. A subsequent settlement between the International Machinists and Aerospace Workers and the country’s airlines gave the union a 4.9 percent raise, and in the words of the IMA president, “destroy[ed] all existing wage and price guidelines now in existence.”⁴⁶

 

AS THE GLORIOUS89th Congress neared its end, LBJ increasingly permitted himself the luxury of comparing the achievements of the Great Society with those of the New Deal and himself with FDR. As with his predecessor’s program, there was something for everyone, even the venomous and ungrateful intellectuals and artists who were then criticizing him for everything from his Vietnam policy to his haircut. The previous March the president had submitted to Congress legislation creating a National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities. The legislation sped through the Senate and bogged down briefly in the House. A little presidential prodding, however, freed the bill from the conservatives’ embrace. On September 29, LBJ signed the new measure and promised that a National Theater, a National Opera, and a National Ballet would follow. The legislation created two twenty-four-member bodies: a National Council on the Arts/Humanities to select projects worthy of funding and a National Endowment of the Arts/Humanities to administer the grants awarded. Thus was launched the first comprehensive effort by the federal government to materially support artists, historians, musicians, writers, critics, philosophers, sculptors, painters, and dancers. As chairman of the Arts Council, the White House chose Roger Stevens, playwright, art impresario, and, not coincidentally, chair of the Kennedy Center.⁴⁷

Stevens’s selection was part of LBJ’s intermittent campaign to reconcile with the Kennedys. Indeed, LBJ had Bob McNamara on continuous duty with the family trying to convince them that the president was really their friend. He was very fond of Jackie, LBJ told the defense chief during a conversation in August. He had stopped calling her for fear she was becoming annoyed. He was pleased, he said, to see that Bobby had attended several bill-signing ceremonies. You have so much power and prestige that you can afford to bend over backward, McNamara told his boss. But he could not expect the still grief-stricken Jackie to come to the White House. She would not come, and she would not have anything publicly to do with President and Mrs. Johnson. Both he and Lady Bird understood, Johnson said.⁴⁸But then, a week later, Jackie had her first coming-out party in New York. It began in her fifteen-room duplex apartment with a dinner honoring John Kenneth Galbraith. Kennedy in-laws held simultaneous dinners for other luminaries. Then the group, numbering about a hundred, took over the Sign of the Dove, a converted greenhouse-and-garden restaurant. Wearing a strapless, off-white evening dress, Jackie danced the night away with guests Truman Capote, Bob McNamara, and John Galbraith while Wendy Vanderbilt and Pierre Salinger looked on. New Frontiersmen Schlesinger, Goodwin, and Sorenson beamed at each other, while Bobby Kennedy and McGeorge Bundy were seen leaving the festivities arm-in-arm around 1A.M.⁴⁹

LBJ did not comment directly, but the coming out, the worshipful press coverage, and the obvious intimacy of some of his closest advisers with those who despised him, rankled. He again caved in to feelings of cultural and personal self-pity. Told thatLife wanted to do a pictorial feature on the ranch, LBJ reacted negatively. All the magazine cared about was running derogatory articles on him. It had published nonrevelations concerning his personal finances and all but libeled Lady Bird and the girls. “I know the utter contempt they and these sophisticated alleged intellectuals have for the people of Johnson City and that little town and they think it is dirty and nasty and uncouth and illiterate.” AllLife and the other publications were doing was commercializing the presidency for their own profit. When, however, Liz Carpenter told him that the person heading theLife team was a Texas boy, LBJ relented.⁵⁰

 

ON THE AFTERNOON OFOCTOBER3, at the base of the Statue of Liberty, LBJ signed the Immigration Act of 1965, thus putting in place one of the least-noticed but most important components of the Great Society. In theory, according to historian Philip Gleason, to be an American, “a person did not have to be of any particular national, linguistic, religious, or ethnic background. All he had to do was to commit himself to the political ideology centered on the abstract ideals of liberty, equality, and republicanism.”⁵¹ This was allegedly what set America off from the rest of the world. Citizenship was not to be based on blood, national origin, kinship, heredity, or color, but on a commitment to certain governing political principles. But, in reality, as particular ethnic, religious, or racial groups within the United States struggled to gain or maintain political and cultural dominance, they sought to identify American nationality as peculiarly white or Protestant or Anglo-Saxon. In turn, Congress passed citizenship laws that institutionalized those myths.⁵²Throughout most of the history of the United States, laws were on the books that declared the vast majority of the people in the world legally ineligible to become full citizens solely because of their race, original nationality, or gender. Even indigenous peoples were not immune from discrimination. Until the second half of the twentieth century, African Americans and Native Americans were considered beyond the pale. There was in the late nineteenth century a flurry of immigration from China and Japan, mostly manual laborers who were willing to work on the railroads, in the mines, and in the white households of the booming West. It was this influx that produced the first immigration law that discriminated on the basis of race or nationality, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.

By the turn of the century, the pseudoscience of eugenics (from the Greek, meaning “noble in heredity”) began to take root in the United States. Appealing alike to white southerners who were busily erecting Jim Crow statutes and to nativists who wanted to keep the impure from America’s shores, eugenicists such as Dr. Harry H. Laughlin were writing popular articles positing the existence of a chain of being, setting up racial classifications in descending order, with the whitest and hence most civilized and most intelligent at the top and the darkest and hence least intelligent and least civilized at the bottom. Others equated race with nationality. Thus Poles, Italians, Russians, and Jews were biologically different from the English, Scots, Germans, and Norwegians. The former, it came to be believed, were “inferior” and the latter “superior.” By the eve of the Great War a vast nativist movement had emerged, insisting that immigration to the United States had to be regulated on the basis of national origin.⁵³The Immigration Act of 1917, passed over Woodrow Wilson’s veto, assuming that Western Europeans were literate and southeastern Europeans were not, imposed a literacy test on would-be immigrants. When it turned out that most residents of southern and eastern Europe could indeed read and write, Congress passed the National Origins Act of 1924, which accorded nations immigration quotas based on their percentage of the U.S. population as of 1910. The annual British quota was sixty-five thousand, while those of Greece and China were one hundred, the minimum.⁵⁴The McCarran-Walter Act, enacted during the height of second Red Scare, reaffirmed the old quota system and established a bureau within the State Department to screen all would-be immigrants for ties to communism.

The leading proponent of immigration reform was Representative Emmanuel Celler of New York. The entire concept of quotas based on national origin was racist, he argued. Shortly after he became president, LBJ met with Celler, Myer Feldman, the White House aide who had handled immigration issues for Kennedy, and Abba Schwarz, a Jewish activist and expert on displaced persons. LBJ, who had helped smuggle European Jewish refugees into the United States before and during World War II, needed little persuading that change was in order. On January 13, 1964, he met with sixty representatives of church, nationality, and labor groups that supported immigration reform as well as congressional leaders and asked for prompt and positive action on the bill the Kennedy administration had devised and introduced in the House. But nativists kept the measure bottled up in committee until after the 1964 election. Then the large Democratic majorities elected to both houses broke the logjam. On September 3, 1965, Congress passed the Immigration Act Amendments of 1965. Under the provisions of the law, the national origins system, the central feature of U.S. immigration policy for forty years, was to be phased out by July 1, 1968. Thereafter, immigrants would be admitted by preference categories—family relationships to U.S. citizens and resident aliens, and occupational qualifications—on a first-come, first-served basis without reference to country of birth.

At the signing ceremony, LBJ proclaimed that the new law repaired “a very deep and painful flaw in the fabric of American justice.” The national origin system, he said, “violated the basic principle of American democracy—the principle that values and rewards each man on the basis of his merit as a man … It has been untrue to the faith that brought thousands to these shores even before we were a country.”⁵⁵The Immigration Act of 1965 did nothing less than ensure that America remained a land of diversity whose identity rested on a set of political principles rather than blood and soil nationalism. Since 1920 the percentage of foreign-born individuals residing in America had been declining. The census of 1980 showed the first reversal of that trend, and the percentages would grow gradually but steadily thereafter.⁵⁶

 

THERE WASin the Johnson program protection for the environment, consumers, and workers as well. “The water we drink, the food we eat, the very air we breathe are threatened with pollution,” Johnson told Congress in February 1965. “We must act … For … once our natural splendor is destroyed, it can never be recaptured.”⁵⁷As was true of much of the Johnson program, environmental protection had its roots in the Kennedy administration. In 1961, JFK had named Arizona Senator Stewart Udall secretary of the interior. Udall and Kennedy had become friends in the 1950s, and the Arizonan had played a key role in delivering his state to the Democrats in the 1960 presidential election. Udall and the environmentalists of the 1960s went beyond the narrowly gauged conservation movement that had characterized environmentalism since the Progressive Era. In line with the liberal philosophy being espoused by Schlesinger and Galbraith, they insisted that the goal was not simply to conserve pockets of beauty, wildlife, and natural resources but to preserve and enhance the “quality of life” in cities and towns as well as mountains, forests, lakes, and deserts. Udall declared, “No longer is peripheral action—the ‘saving’ of a forest, a park, a refuge for wildlife isolated from the mainstream—sufficient. The total environment is now the concern, and the new conservation makes man, himself, its subject. The quality of life is now the perspective and repose of the new conservation.”⁵⁸

The Kennedy administration had sponsored a White House conference on the environment in 1962 and pushed through Congress legislation creating the Cape Cod National Seashore, but it was not until publication of Rachel Carson’sSilent Spring (1962) that nationwide support began to build in behalf of the new environmentalism. A marine biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Carson had written a celebrated series of nature essays collected and published in 1951 asThe Sea Around Us. As the economy exploded in the years after World War II, she had become increasingly disturbed by the pollution of the nation’s rivers, lakes, and underground aquifers by DDT and other pesticides. Because it was used to eliminate malaria-carrying mosquitoes and insects that destroyed food and fiber crops, DDT had been hailed as a wonder chemical and used indiscriminately. InSilent Spring , Carson demonstrated through massive research that widespread use of toxic chemicals was poisoning the nation’s water supply and food sources, thus threatening the health of human beings and animals alike. Though pesticide manufacturers mounted a massive campaign to discredit Carson as a hysteric,Silent Spring became the text of the burgeoning environmental movement.

Environmentalists were initially pessimistic about LBJ and his commitment to their cause. They remembered him as the oil senator from Texas. But once again, reformers were pleasantly surprised. “You’ll recall this Rachel Carson book,Silent Spring,” Orville Freeman prompted his boss in mid-1964. “I think it’s very important politically that we be doing something about this because we’ve got to use pesticides in agriculture and in our forests … we’ve just got to go ahead and do the right thing.”⁵⁹Throughout his first year and a half in office, LBJ invoked the memory of Theodore Roosevelt and promised to take up where the Rough Rider had left off. “There is no excuse for a river flowing red with blood from slaughterhouses. There is no excuse for paper mills pouring tons of sulphuric acid into the lakes and the streams of the people of this country. There is no excuse—and we should call a spade a spade—for chemical companies and oil refineries using our major rivers and pipelines for toxic wastes.”⁶⁰

Under the Water Quality Act of 1965, all states were required to enforce water quality standards for interstate rivers, lakes, and streams within their borders. The following year, Maine Senator Edmund Muskie pushed through Congress the Clean Waters Restoration Act, authorizing more than $3.5 billion to finance a cleanup of the nation’s waterways and to block further pollution through the dumping of sewage or toxic industrial waste. From that point on, LBJ tended to take violation of his environmental standards personally. White House aide Lee White recalled that when the president received a series of complaints that sewage waste was being allowed to contaminate drinking water in a particular locale, he called Udall up. “I don’t know what the hell you guys are doing but that dirty-water program just ain’t working. I’ve got all kinds of complaints.” Udall replied, “Mr. President, that may be the case, but the truth of the matter is that that program is in the Health Service, in the Department of Health, Education and Welfare.” Incredulous, the president exclaimed, “What’s it doing there?” “That’s where it’s always been,” Udall answered. Johnson said, “Well, I think that’s outrageous. When I think of dirty water, I think of you.” He then turned to White and Califano, who had also been present during the conversation, and ordered them to use the president’s reorganization authority and get the clean water program transferred from HEW to Interior.⁶¹

It was a natural step for environmentalists to move from concern about water purity to a focus on clean air. President Johnson’s Task Force on Environmental Pollution, established in 1964, documented the damage being done to the environment by toxic emissions from coal-burning factories and auto exhaust systems. The nation was shocked to learn that air pollutants created “acid rain,” which fell back to earth, tainting food crops and further corrupting the water supply. On Thanksgiving Day 1965, New York City experienced an ecological catastrophe, an air inversion that concentrated almost two pounds of soot per person in the atmosphere. Eighty people died and hundreds were hospitalized. In the wake of the Third National Conference on Air Pollution in 1966, Congress passed the Air Quality Act of 1967, which set progressively stricter standards for industrial and automobile emissions. The polluting industries invested billions of dollars in lobbying for restrictive amendments, and in the end the legislation provided that standards were to be set jointly by industry and government. In 1969, Congress passed the National Environmental Policy Act, requiring, among other things, that federal agencies file environmental impact statements for all federally funded projects. The following year, the House and Senate established the Environmental Protection Agency. These were but the first shots fired in the ongoing battle to protect the public and nature from air- and waterborne pollutants.

On another environmental front, Udall joined Lady Bird to launch a preservation and beautification movement that would protect wilderness areas and make inhabited regions as visually attractive as possible. In 1889, John Muir had formed the Sierra Club in an effort to save the giant redwoods of California’s Yosemite Valley. During the years that followed, the Sierra Club and other wilderness preservation groups made some headway, but they were no match for the lumber companies and mining interests, which insisted on the unrestricted right of private enterprise to exploit the public domain. From the time LBJ had been director of the National Youth Administration in Texas, Lady Bird had taken an intense interest in preserving portions of the environment in their natural state and cleaning up the American landscape. During the 1930s she had cofounded a movement to establish a system of roadside parks. Along with her husband and Stewart Udall, she helped persuade Congress to pass the Wilderness Act of 1964, a legislative initiative the Sierra Club and Wilderness Society had been touting for ten years. The measure set aside 9 million acres of national forest as wilderness areas, protecting them from timber cuttings and strictly regulating public access. The following year, the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act extended federal protection over portions of eight of America’s most spectacular waterways. Mrs. Johnson was gratified by these successes, but she was determined to do something about populated areas as well.

At the first lady’s behest, in 1964 the president convened the Task Force on the Preservation of Natural Beauty. The national beautification movement focused first on Washington, D.C. Hoping to convert the nation’s capital into a model community, Mrs. Johnson worked through the National Park Service and private donors to beautify Pennsylvania Avenue and create a system of parks throughout the city. She and LBJ subsequently championed the Highway Beautification Act of 1965 in the face of stiff opposition from the Outdoor Advertising Association. Beautification was good business, the president insisted to the Chamber of Commerce. Tourism in Europe was booming, he observed, but it was declining in the United States. “Yet a few men are coming in and insisting that we keep these dirty little old signs up in these dirty little old towns,” he proclaimed to an environmentalist group, “and that this is going to affect free enterprise.⁶²The highway bill cleared the Senate but stalled in the House. LBJ sent word to the Hill that he considered a vote for highway beautification “a matter of personal honor” because his wife was involved. The day the measure came up for a vote, October 7, Lady Bird was to host a previously scheduled White House dinner. LBJ sent word that no member of Congress would be welcome at the executive mansion unless and until the highway bill was voted through.⁶³As finally passed, the compromise law banned or restricted outdoor billboards outside commercial and industrial sectors and required the fencing of unsightly junkyards adjacent to highways.⁶⁴

Critics of the administration dismissed leaders of the beautification movement as dilettante elitists, “the daffodil and dogwood” set. Rats, open sewage, and unsafe buildings were more of a problem than green space, advocates for inner-city dwellers argued. Mrs. Johnson responded by persuading Walter Johnson to head the Neighborhoods and Special Projects Committee, a body whose goal was to clean up and beautify the mostly black, poorer neighborhoods of Washington, D.C. Compared to racism, war, poverty, and social injustice, the beautification movement paled, but it was an authentic aspect of the larger environmental movement and important in part because it involved members of the American aristocracy.

That portion of the environmental movement that sought to protect human beings and the national habitat from polluting industries reinforced and was reinforced by the consumer protection movement. Congress’s enactment of a bill imposing the first federal standards on automobile emissions marked a victory for both groups. In 1965 Ralph Nader, a muckraking young lawyer who would become the guru of consumer advocacy, publishedUnsafe at Any Speed , an attack on giant automobile companies like General Motors, which allegedly placed design and cost considerations above safety. He played a key role in securing passage of the Fair Packaging and Labeling Act and the Automobile Safety Act, both passed in 1966. Near the close of Johnson’s term, Congress enacted the landmark Occupational Health and Safety Act, which imposed new federal safety standards on the American workplace.

Lady Bird’s decision to embrace national beautification was natural for her. As a girl, she had reveled in the outdoors, in the simple beauties and spirituality to be found in flowers, forests, rivers, and mountains. It was also a function of her determination “to be a useful First Lady,” to be identified with Eleanor Roosevelt rather than the high-fashion, decorative, uninvolved Jackie Kennedy. Indeed, Lady Bird dressed smartly and well but made no attempt to compete with her predecessor as a fashion icon. Whereas Jackie had been among the most photographed first ladies, Lady Bird was among the least. She moved to establish her own identity, setting up an office in the East Wing to accommodate her staff and the press that covered her. At state dinners, opera and classical music were replaced by Broadway stars and American music. Bird exchanged Jackie’s pretentious and high-strung French chef, Rene Verdon, with Zephyr Wright. She chose china with a native wildflower pattern and shopped at Garfinckel’s, Washington’s traditional department store. She made herself accessible to the press and treated its members with respect. As a result, in contrast to her husband, she enjoyed an excellent relationship with journalists and was depicted generally as a genuine, caring, intelligent, long-suffering woman, and a person altogether to be admired.

But immersion in the movement to clean up the nation’s highways and urban centers, to expand its national parklands, and to make aesthetic sensibility part of the national life was also an escape from her husband and the pressure of national affairs. As both LBJ and Lady Bird threw themselves into the roles into which they had been cast by JFK’s assassination, they grew apart. There was obviously much less occasion for intimacy. The best time was in the wee hours of the morning, before the day’s business began, but Vietnam, urban unrest, and the “vicious” media intruded even then. LBJ kept up a separate sexual life. There was not time for long-term affairs, but from 1965 on, the daily White House logs are full of notations of forty-five-minute and one-hour private sessions in the Oval Office between LBJ and a half-dozen women whom he bragged to others about having sex with. As usual, Lady Bird seemed to accommodate herself. In January 1964, she welcomed Alice Glass to the East Room of the White House to hear Robert Merrill of the Metropolitan Opera sing excerpts from Rossini’sBarber of Seville. The arrangement whereby she acceded to her husband’s affairs in return for being accorded a place of honor, influence, and respect by him remained intact.

There is no doubt that Lady Bird empathized with Lyndon in his trials and supported his policies. One wintry afternoon in February 1965, while greeting guests in the East Room, she spied a group of civil rights protesters kneeling in the snow outside singing “We Shall Overcome.” Suddenly she sank into a chair and began weeping.⁶⁵In June, just before the Festival of Arts was to get under way, she heard that writer John Hersey intended to read aloud portions from his book,Hiroshima , about the atomic bombing of Japan, as a protest against the war in Vietnam. She tried to get Eric Goldman to withdraw the invitation, but he convinced her that such a move would be a public relations disaster. Hersey did attend and did read. Throughout, Lady Bird sat in stony silence and refused to applaud at the finish. Vietnam—the deaths on the battlefield, her husband’s angst, and the increasingly strident antiwar demonstrations—drove her to distraction. “I couldn’t handle the war in Vietnam,” she later commented to her staff. “I wasn’t big enough.”⁶⁶

By the spring of 1965 her diary entries show increasing signs of depression. Nothing in her public or private life would be construed as a challenge to her husband; her existence was an exercise in subjugation. In this way, she was different from Eleanor Roosevelt. As Liz Carpenter put it, “Mrs. Roosevelt was an instigator, an innovator, willing to air a cause without her husband’s endorsement. Mrs. Johnson was an implementer and translator of her husband and his purpose. She was, first and foremost, a wife.”⁶⁷Within six months of her husband’s landslide election to the presidency, Lady Bird was fantasizing about retirement. Her diary entry from Sunday, March 7, read, “For some time I have been swimming upstream against a feeling of depression and relative inertia. I flinch from activity and involvement, and yet I rust without them. Lyndon lives in a cloud of troubles, with a few rays of light. I am counting the months until March 1968 when, like Truman, it will be possible to say, ‘I don’t want this office, this responsibility, any longer, even if you want me. Find the strongest and most able man and God bless you. Goodby.’ ”⁶⁸

Bird lived in constant dread that Lyndon would die in office. His health was more fragile than anyone but she and his doctors knew. “We came home Tuesday morning,” she recorded after a trip to the ranch, “and last night was not a good night. An old enemy returned. Lyndon sweated down two or three pair of pajamas. This has been a symptom of his illness for all the years I have known him, so I should have expected it.” He was still carrying a stone in his left kidney.⁶⁹By April 1965, Johnson had let his weight rise to 226, more than he had carried in 1955, when he had his heart attack. Lady Bird was disgusted. “I don’t know whether to lash out in anger or sarcasm,” she wrote. She did neither but instead issued strict instructions to those serving her husband his meals: one helping of oatmeal at breakfast, one helping of chili at lunch, and no more than one jigger of Cutty Sark before dinner. Late one night, after everyone else had retired, Lady Bird awoke to find herself alone in bed. She got up and went out into the hall, where she heard a strange metallic scraping sound. She followed it to the kitchen, where she found Lyndon wolfing down a bowl of tapioca pudding, his favorite desert. Silently she took the spoon and bowl from him. The next day Johnson ordered one of his Secret Service attendants to go out and purchase a wooden spoon.⁷⁰

In the fall, LBJ was compelled to enter Bethesda Naval Hospital for a gall bladder operation. For once, he seemed determined to provide full, advance information to the press. On October 5, he called a press conference at the ranch to announce the event.⁷¹He was mindful of the impact that his going under the knife and being anesthetized for an extended period, especially with his record of heart disease, could have on international affairs and the domestic stock market. He reminded everyone that Vice President Humphrey would be in charge and that matters would proceed as usual. “Thus began three days of tension and concern that no amount of reassuring pronouncements from the doctors could quite dispel,”Newsweek reported, “but which the President took in even larger stride than usual, combining the aplomb of a ringmaster with the bravado of a lion tamer, managing all the while to seem as pleased with himself as a small boy who has been promised a gallon of ice cream after he has had his tonsils out.”⁷²Three weeks later he was cleared to leave the hospital, but his physicians insisted that he spend most of the next two months recuperating at the ranch. Before leaving Bethesda, he lifted his sport shirt to show reporters the scar from his operation, a twelve-inch incision that appeared to be healing nicely.⁷³For Lyndon and for Lady Bird, the gall bladder operation was something of a disguised blessing. It was back on the diet, with Fresca instead of scotch in the evening.

At the same time that LBJ left the hospital, the “Fabulous 89th,” as the press labeled the sitting session of Congress, adjourned. Its record of achievement was unparalleled: Medicare, Medicaid, voting rights, federal aid to education, the NEH and NEA, a battery of antipoverty programs, highway beautification, a heart, cancer, and stroke bill that pumped new funds into the National Institutes of Health for research, area redevelopment, a new Department of Housing and Urban Development. LBJ was intensely proud of what he and Congress had done; he desperately wanted to be compared to his hero, FDR. It was not to be. “The President has been lucky,” Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield told reporters. “Don’t overlook that. If Clarence Cannon were still alive, he’d have plenty of headaches with his appropriation bills. But the House Appropriation Committee is headed by George Mahon of Texas who is a close friend of the President’s.”⁷⁴Others pointed out that every measure that Congress had passed had had the support of a majority of Americans. The one item that did not pass—repeal of Section 14b of the Taft-Hartley Act, the so-called right to work proviso—was voted down in both houses. The Republican National Committee estimated that the cumulative cost of the top fifty Great Society bills would be $112 billion. “Think of it!—$112 billion!” exclaimed National Committee Chair Ray C. Bliss. “This spending program dwarfs into utter insignificance all past spending programs, by all nations, all over the world.”⁷⁵Columnists who were willing to give LBJ the credit he felt he deserved for the legislative achievements of 1965 were careful to couple their praise with a critique of his foreign policies as aimless and reactive.⁷⁶

LBJ did not take these blows gracefully. He felt he should get credit for resolving some of the great issues of the twentieth century, resolving them in favor of the poor, oppressed, and disadvantaged without polarizing the nation and stoking the flames of class warfare. In the fall, he agreed to give an interview to political historian William Leuchtenburg. “Mr. President, this has been a remarkable Congress,” Leuchtenburg said. “It is even arguable whether this isn’t the most significant Congress ever.” LBJ responded, “No, it isn’t. It’s not arguable.” He then launched into a two-hour tirade against the press, liberals, and the inflated reputations of both JFK and FDR. Roosevelt, he declared, “was like the fellow who cut cordwood and sold it all at Christmas and then spent it all on firecrackers. Social Security and the Wagner Act were all that really amounted to much, and none of it compares to my education act.” Johnson was aware that his guest was the author of a laudatory account of the New Deal and that he was an admirer of the Kennedys. “No man knew less about Congress than John Kennedy,” LBJ followed up. Every press story he read was full of lies, the president added. “We treat those columnists as whores,” he shouted to Leuchtenburg. “Anytime an editor wants to screw ’em, they’ll get down on the floor and do it for three dollars.”⁷⁷

Johnson ordered his staff to put together a series of White House dinners that turned into tributes to LBJ and the Great Society. “A moment ago I left the White House at the conclusion of another of the President’s great circuses,” Orville Freeman recorded in his diary, “where the business community is be-guiled, seduced, enraptured and then coaxed into thunderous applause about the great God, LBJ. At my table a Mexican-American who started as a shoeshine boy made his statement of dedication to America and of course LBJ. Then two Negroes also spoke. There wasn’t a single critical note in the crowd. What does it mean? I really don’t know. On the one hand I feel a sense of purpose and direction, consensus, mobilization, and it’s good. The troublesome thing is, it is kind of enshrined in a kind of hero worship, exhibitionism.”⁷⁸

 

INOCTOBER, WHILELBJ was in the hospital recuperating from gall bladder surgery, John Kenneth Galbraith wrote urging him to take an extended vacation. “While no one who lives in the eye of the hurricane will ever think so,” he observed to the president, “historians will describe these as rather tranquil times. There is no depression; no fighting except for a minor jungle conflict with a fourth-rate power; no major legislative battle impending here at home.”⁷⁹If only you knew, LBJ thought. His advisers were telling him that the war was going to require at least another one hundred thousand troops. He was going to have to go to Congress and the American people and ask for an additional $15 billion to $20 billion to fight the war, a step that would knock the notion of a balanced budget into a cocked hat, raise the hackles of conservatives, and threaten present and future Great Society programs. Meanwhile, moderate civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King, increasingly driven to take more radical positions on public issues by the burgeoning Black Power movement, were speaking out against the war. The antiwar movement among blacks coupled with ongoing urban rioting would alienate working-class whites, thus shattering any hope LBJ had of fashioning a rainbow coalition that would ensure ongoing peaceful change in the United States. Something had to be done.

Earlier, on July 8, LBJ had Moyers summon the heads of the various task forces he had put together to design components of the Great Society. In the White House mess, LBJ thanked Robert Wood, John Gardner, and the other action intellectuals who had devised everything from Head Start to Medicare. “In an extraordinary evening lasting until after one the next morning,” Wood writes, “Johnson conveyed his appreciation, his determination to continue his domestic initiatives, and his conviction that guns for Vietnam and butter for the cities were possible simultaneously. Toward the end of the evening, several academics politely questioned that assumption.”⁸⁰But LBJ would have none of it. At that point, his economists were telling him that the American economy was more than robust enough to turn back the communists in Southeast Asia and feed the hungry, educate the ignorant, and train the unemployed in America.⁸¹

Then, on December 1, 1965, McNamara stunned his boss by informing him that in order to continue to fight the war in Vietnam at present levels, Defense was going to have to ask Congress for an $11 billion supplemental to the FY 1966 budget. And that was not the worst of it. If Phase II of the war was implemented—that is, more troops and more extensive bombing—the Defense request for FY 1967 would be $61 billion, putting the total budget over $115 billion.⁸²Told of the news, Gardner Ackley, chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, advised the president that such a budget would require a huge tax increase. The GNP for 1966 would have to grow 7.5 percent to pay the bill, and that was not going to happen. Such a tax increase could touch off a recession; to prevent inflation, there would probably have to be mandatory wage-price controls.⁸³

LBJ’s first reaction to this unwelcome news was to attempt to split money for Vietnam out of the regular budget.⁸⁴Told that such a tactic would not alter the impact that total federal spending would have on the economy, he turned to economies in existing programs. He summoned the cabinet heads to the ranch and ordered them to scour their departments for cuts. LBJ had no intention of abandoning his dream of a just and prosperous polity, but emphasis would have to be placed on quality of life programs that cost little or no money and on the problems of the inner cities.⁸⁵

As part of his effort to have guns and butter simultaneously, LBJ converted the Defense Department itself into an antipoverty agency. In late 1965, planning began on Project 100,000, a scheme to use “advanced educational and medical techniques” to qualify one hundred thousand of the approximately six hundred thousand young men who failed the Armed Forces Qualification Test each year.⁸⁶The scheme, which had its roots in the Kennedy administration, was designed simultaneously to increase the pool of individuals available for service in the military, to ensure that the number of nonwhites in the armed forces matched the number in the general population, to reinforce the poverty program by providing education, job training, discipline, and employment to impoverished young men, and to undercut discontent in inner-city ghettoes—40 percent of those who failed the AFQT were African Americans—by removing their most volatile populations.⁸⁷

The task force report, written largely by Pat Moynihan, was duly submitted to LBJ in January 1964.⁸⁸He was fascinated and excited by its recommendations. “I’ve seen these kids all my life,” he remarked in a cabinet meeting. “I’ve been with these poor children everywhere. I know that you can do better by them than the NYA or the Job Corps can. The Defense Department can do the job best.” Go to it, he told McNamara.⁸⁹The defense chief needed no convincing. Here was a program if ever there was one that could demonstrate his and the Pentagon’s commitment to the social justice goals of the Great Society, to the notion “that Defense Department operations can be shaped to support both military and social objectives without significant penalties to military readiness.”⁹⁰

LBJ believed that the black community would welcome a program to train disadvantaged young men through military service. Throughout the history of the republic, black leaders, aware that such service constituted the ultimate badge of citizenship, had fought for the right of their young men to wear the uniform of their country, and especially to serve in combat units. That seemed no less true during Vietnam. “The re-enlistment of Negroes is up 3% over whites,” the president noted in 1967. “We would have an all-Negro Army if we took them all, if we accepted all who want to re-enlist.”⁹¹Based on information that Moynihan supplied in 1965, Johnson and his advisers came to include the military among those American corporations who were doing a particularly poor job of ending job discrimination. “The single most important and dramatic instance of the exclusion of Negro Americans from employment opportunities in the United States is that of the Armed Forces,” Moynihan reported to the White House. “If there was a proportionate racial balance in the Armed Forces, the unemployment rate for young Negro men would be lower than that for whites!”⁹²Then came the skyrocketing budget projections of December. “I just hung up with Bill Moyers,” LBJ reported to McNamara. “I’m trying to get him to sit with Shriver and tell him if you’ll let Bob McNamara take 300,000 of your boys and take care of them in the service for their education and health … if you will just get along with what you had last year, we’ll give you the first supplemental when the war ends.”⁹³When the OEO chief and black activists protested, Johnson had Moyers threaten Shriver: “I’m ready to kill it [the poverty program] quietly through George Mahon [chair of the House Appropriations Committee] … and get the damn thing out of the way if the niggers are just going to be that mean to me and Shriver’s group is going to be disloyal.”⁹⁴

In August 1966, appearing before the Veterans of Foreign Wars, McNamara announced the launching of Project 100,000. He was, he said, going to uplift the “subterranean poor” by taking into the military each year one hundred thousand young men who would normally be rejected. As Clark Clifford put it, “Every man taken under this program reduces problems in the cities.”⁹⁵Unlike the Kennedy administration plan, which had called for an initial appropriation of $32.1 million, Project 100,000 could be accommodated within the existing Defense budget. Immediately, various branches of the service began accepting “New Standards” men, as they were called. Unfortunately for LBJ, Project 100,000 and other attempts to realize the goals of the Great Society on the cheap yielded only anemic dividends.