CHAPTER 32

BALANCING ACT

AS OF THE FALL OF1965,THE BASIC OUTLINE OF American strategy for winning the war in Vietnam had not changed. It was clear that communist China was not capable of launching a nuclear strike at the American heartland, but because Washington continued to see Southeast Asia as “the first domino” and to assume the existence of a monolithic communist threat in East Asia, it felt compelled to fight to restore the status quo established by the Geneva Conference in 1954. “China, like Germany in 1917, like Germany in the West and Japan in the East in the late 30’s, and like the USSR in 1947—looms as a major power threatening to undercut our importance and effectiveness in the world, and, more remotely but more menacingly, to organize all of Asia against us,” McNamara observed to LBJ in November. Liberal democracy in one country was not possible. “Our ends cannot be achieved and our leadership role cannot be played if some powerful and virulent nation—whether Germany, Japan, Russia or China—is allowed to organize their part of the world according to a philosophy contrary to ours.”¹But there continued to be limits on what the United States could do and how far it could go in enforcing its will on Southeast Asia. Communist China had made it clear that if it were attacked directly or if North Vietnam were invaded, it would go all out. McNamara, Rusk, and Bundy continued to assume that the Sino-Soviet Treaty of 1949, in which the Soviets agreed to come to the assistance of China in the event it was attacked, was in force. There was still the likelihood that if confronted with the full force of the Chinese Communist Army, Washington would authorize the use of tactical nuclear weapons, thus risking a general nuclear exchange between the United States and the USSR.²

In the summer, the Johnson administration had authorized General William Westmoreland to abandon the restrictive enclave strategy and embark on a war of attrition the strategists named “search and destroy.” In terms of body count, territory liberated, and population pacified, this more aggressive approach showed immediate results.³But there were negatives. American forces became involved in a two-front war: against regular North Vietnamese Army formations in the northern part of South Vietnam and against Vietcong guerrillas everywhere else. The last week in November 1965, U.S. troops fought a bloody battle with NVA regular units in the shell-scarred Ia Drang Valley near the Cambodian border. American forces claimed fifteen hundred communist dead, with 175 lost on their side. During the action, a battalion of the First Cavalry was ambushed and one entire company wiped out. Vietcong scoured the battlefield after dark, bayoneting and shooting wounded GIs while enraged Americans shot NVA prisoners in cold blood.⁴

U.S. forces found the Vietcong to be dedicated, tough, resourceful, flexible, elusive, and ruthless. The guerrillas refused to wear uniforms and hid among the civilian population, or rather, were indistinguishable from the civilian population. Plantation workers, landless peasants, students, refugees driven from their land by the war, veteran nationalists, the VC were experts at terror, indoctrination, and persuasion. They came into the villages of South Vietnam after dark, slitting the throats of government-appointed officials and collaborators. The Army of the Republic of Vietnam claimed to have killed more than seventy-five thousand since 1960, but their number was estimated at over one hundred thousand in 1965, and they controlled territory that included more than 50 percent of the country’s inhabitants. When they targeted an outpost, the VC usually bribed or threatened a local worker or soldier to inform them of the layout. They approached silently in small groups and then attacked. In one assault, about one hundred VC dressed only in swimming trunks and sneakers, with hand grenades strapped across their chests, crept up to the high barbed-wire fence surrounding a government encampment. Catapulting each other over the fence by twos and threes, the sappers dashed into the defending fox-holes and blew themselves up along with the defenders. On patrol, ARVN and U.S. troops were liable to crash through a light covering of twigs into a deep pit, impaling themselves on sharpened bamboo stakes, or trip over a vine bringing down a rotten log embedded with poisonous snakes.⁵

It was the willingness of the locals to support, tolerate, or acquiesce in the insurgency that caused the most difficulty. When government troops appeared ready to lay down fire on a village suspected of harboring VC, local mothers with babes in arms would come out and beg the soldiers not to attack. Sometimes they succeeded, earning them the sobriquet “the cannon spikers.”⁶Frustrated, angry, ARVN and subsequently American soldiers began shooting and burning indiscriminately. In August, a CBS news correspondent narrated as a detachment of marines conducted a sweep through the village of Cam Ne looking for VC. “The marines,” reported Morley Safer, “had orders to burn the hamlet to the ground if they received so much as one round.” They did, and replied by laying down a rocket barrage that killed an infant and wounded three women. Then they moved into the village and proceeded, “first with cigarette lighters, then with flame throwers to burn down an estimated 150 dwellings. Old men and women who were pleading with the marines to spare their houses were ignored … The operations netted about four prisoners—old men.” The filmed report was aired during the primetime news and shocked many Americans. “On the one hand,” observedNewsweek , “the incident at Cam Ne raised a moral question as old as war itself: can the punishment of a whole population for the activity of only some of its members possibly be justified? On the other hand, what happened at Cam Ne was an inexorable result of the U.S. decision to change the nature of its commitment in Vietnam from an advisory role to that of a no-holds-barred combatant.”⁷

For a week Cam Ne was the talk of the West Wing. “Multiply that a thousand times and we will lose whatever good will we have in Viet Nam and become instead the white terrorists whose presence is death in the countryside,” Harry McPherson observed to Bill Moyers. “The effect on Americans is no less negative.”⁸Johnson complained that once again he and his soldiers were being unjustly vilified by a biased media.⁹So distraught was the president over the incident that when a North Carolina clergyman returned from Vietnam to report that the CBS presentation was “badly distorted” and that GIs were regularly delivering babies, helping with surgery, and doing everything they could to aid the local populace, he invited the man and his wife to spend the night at the White House.¹⁰

By the fall of 1965, press reporting from Vietnam had become a major concern to the president and his advisers. David Halberstam and other journalists published widely read books that did not question the rationale for U.S. involvement in Vietnam, that is, anticommunism, but denounced the military-political regime in Saigon as unworthy of support and the tactics being employed against the VC as counterproductive of U.S. goals. “In my two weeks in Saigon,” Edward P. Morgan, a sympathetic journalist, reported to White House aide Douglass Cater, “I found the relationships between the press corps and the U.S. government establishment shockingly tense and full of mutual distrust. The daily 5 o’clock press briefings … verged on farce. Briefers were contemptuous of reporters and refused to provide the most mundane information. Arthur Sylvester [press officer for the American Mission] held a backgrounder that was apparently beyond belief … This was not a backgrounder but an angry argument, insulting at times on both sides, that lasted for hours.” Some of the correspondents heckled and baited in response to official stonewalling. “Most of this baiting seems to come from a flock of very junior reporters,” Morgan observed, “quite young and edgy but monstrously ambitious.” Despite the grief dealt the administration by reporters in Vietnam, LBJ and his advisers never considered censorship. “The official guidelines for newsmen in Vietnam are minimal and only concern the handling of information that could, if prematurely publicized, be detrimental to the safety of our forces there,” Bill Moyers wrote NBC chief Frank Stanton.¹¹Indeed, Vietnam was the most censorship-free war in American history. For better or worse, the American public was treated to daily reports of bloody combat and suffering refugees from the battlefronts in the print media and on nightly TV broadcast.¹²

Mounting cynicism in the Saigon press corps was accompanied by increasingly insistent dissent within Congress. There were those like Rivers, Eastland, Ford, and Dirksen who were arguing that the United States was not doing enough militarily and those such as Fulbright, McGovern, Morse, and Church who argued that it was doing too much. And then there was Russell, “a cross between Curtis LeMay and Fulbright,” as LBJ put it. As the fall progressed, McGovern, Morse, and Fullbright challenged the administration publicly, the former two over Vietnam, the latter over the Dominican Republic, while behind the scenes Mansfield spoke for a score of other senators who had grave doubts about the course the United States was following in Vietnam. “I am afraid that eventually, Mr. President,” the Montanan opined, “some government in Saigon is going to have to enter into negotiations with the Viet Cong.”¹³

Congressional doves were echoed by a variety of groups in the general population. Traditional pacifists such as A. J. Muste and the organizations they headed, the Fellowship of Reconciliation and the War Resisters League, spoke out against the carnage in South Vietnam because they were against all wars. The taking of human life, no matter what the reason, was immoral. Antinuclear activists who had organized the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE) in the mid-1950s opposed the war in Vietnam because they feared it would lead to a nuclear confrontation between the United States and the communist superpowers. Student activists who, energized by the civil rights movement, formed the Students for a Democratic Society in 1960 enlisted in the antiwar movement as part of a larger campaign to fundamentally alter American society. SDS members and their academic mentors formed what came to be known in intellectual circles as the New Left. Building on the economic determinism of Charles Beard and Fred Harrington, New Leftists insisted that because it was a capitalist society, America was dominated by financiers and manufacturers who, having subdued the American proletariat and exploited the nation’s resources in the nineteenth century, set out to establish their economic hegemony throughout the rest of the world in the twentieth. Because politics always follows economics, the government and military were permanently and primarily committed to Wall Street’s cause. Liberals of a more moderate stripe, concentrated in one wing of the Americans for Democratic Action, had become convinced by the end of 1965 that the war in Southeast Asia was a perversion of the liberal internationalism that they had espoused since the end of World War II. In its quest to protect democracy and liberty from communist totalitarianism, the United States was allying itself with brutal military dictatorships and facilitating the murder of thousands of innocent people. Finally, the Quakers and elements within the other major religious denominations began denouncing the war in Vietnam, some because they thought the whole enterprise unjust, some because they deplored the indiscriminate and brutal taking of civilian life, and some because they were appalled at the spectacle of the richest, most powerful nation in the world attempting to bomb into submission a tiny, fourth-rate power situated halfway around the world. In October 1965, the Reverend Richard Neuhaus, Rabbi Abraham Heschel, and Father Daniel Berrigan formed Clergy Concerned about Vietnam.

On the evening of November 2, while attending a meeting at the Pentagon, Robert McNamara was drawn to the windows of the conference room by a commotion below in the parking lot. There an agitated crowd had gathered around something that was burning. An ambulance arrived and covered the object with blankets. Shortly thereafter, McNamara was shocked to learn that a thirty-one-year-old Quaker pacifist, a husband and father, had drenched himself in kerosene and burned himself to death to protest the war.¹⁴Later that month, Sanford Gottlieb of SANE persuaded a group of prominent liberals to call a march on Washington for the 27th to agitate for a cease-fire, a unilateral bombing halt, and negotiations among all warring parties. The organizers were careful to coordinate with the White House beforehand, and they rejected plans for civil disobedience, repudiated communist participation, and insisted that marchers carry only flags and banners that had been approved by the sponsors. The event was massive but peaceful and dignified.¹⁵The bitterest dissent was reserved for the president himself. Writing in 1965, Norman Mailer declared, “If the Lord of the Snopes [President Johnson] went to war in Vietnam because finally he didn’t have the moral courage to try to solve an impossible mix of camp, red-neck, civil rights, street violence, playboy pornography and all the glut which bugs our works … well, what he didn’t realize was that the war in Vietnam was not going to serve as a cloaca for our worst emotions but instead was going to up the ante and give us more camp, more police society gone ape, more of everything else Lyndon was trying to ship overseas.”¹⁶

A natural target for the antiwar movement was the draft, designed by Selective Service Director General Lewis B. Hershey as a system for effectively managing human resources, but in its administration seemingly discriminatory and unfair. College students received deferments; so did married men. The very poor and unskilled could not qualify, leaving the war to be fought by the sons of the American working class. If they could mobilize and convert this traditionally conventional and patriotic sector of society, opponents of the war realized, they would have struck a mighty blow at the Vietnam consensus. In Michigan in the fall of 1965, thirty-one students staged a sit-in at the Michigan Draft Board headquarters. A number of New York pacifists held a major draft card-burning ceremony in Manhattan’s Foley Square on November 10.¹⁷

Infuriated, General Hershey authorized Michigan draft authorities to revoke the deferments of the students who had burned their cards and induct them immediately into the service. “Getting a deferment is a privilege,” he told theWashington Star. The White House moved immediately to stifle the general. “[HEW Secretary John] Gardner believes that this kind of loose talk is bound to stir up tremendous reaction in the university community,” Doug Cater advised the president.¹⁸What kind of signal was Hershey sending, George Reedy asked LBJ: that military service was some kind of punishment? “The Government should think very carefully before it equates Pleiku with Alcatraz,” he told the president. “Even a hard shell conservative will sense an uneasy suspicion that a weapon employed against pacifists today can be swung against Republicans tomorrow.”¹⁹

The burgeoning antiwar movement was profoundly disturbing to the White House generally and the president specifically. He was angst-ridden under normal conditions; criticism, organized criticism, criticism from people whom he believed were his philosophical bedfellows, drove LBJ nearly to distraction. The first week in August, he and Lady Bird asked a group of friends to Camp David for the weekend. The invitees included columnist Marianne Means and her date, soon-to-be-named USIA chief John Chancellor, Cissy Morrissey ofLife , and the Johnsons’ new acquaintances, Arthur and Mathilde Krim. Krim was a wealthy New York attorney whose clients included the Motion Picture Association of America. His wife was beautiful, elegant, and discreet—just Lyndon’s type. “After dinner we went into a meeting that I will never forget,” Krim recalled. “It started with a rather casual discussion about a whole variety of things … Along about nine or ten o’clock Lady Bird went to bed … that left in the room Marianne Means, Cissy Morrissey, John Chancellor … Vicky McCammon … and me. The meeting lasted until six in the morning. It was an extraordinary window into much of the President’s subliminal frustrations.” What set Johnson off was Chancellor and Means making light of Jack Valenti’s “I sleep better at night” tribute to him. LBJ launched into a lecture on the value of loyalty. “He did a lot of drinking that night, fixed the drinks himself, must have had ten or twelve Scotch and soda[s].” Means, Chancellor, and Morrissey persisted that such a gushy tribute was inappropriate and counterproductive. “The President was very strong in his characterizations of the press, spoke of the fact that the three networks were dominated by communists. He attacked one of his own cabinet members as a pinko. Bobby Kennedy was nothing more than a wire-tapping law breaker.” He talked about Vietnam: “He did say that he was following the Kennedy program in Vietnam, and that he couldn’t have come in after the assassination to be the president that would abort the operation there … He talked about his prediction that he would die at the age of sixty … At the time he was talking he was fifty-seven … I remember that I was absolutely and completely bewildered by the fact that he did that with three members of the working press in the room.”²⁰

LBJ’s personal sensitivity aside, he and his advisers were worried that the demonstrations would convey to enemies and allies alike a lack of unity and commitment.²¹Johnson recognized that fighting a limited, prolonged war was absolutely foreign to a noncolonial power (at least in its own mind) like the United States. “I think that in time it is going to be like the Yale professor said,” he confided to McNamara. “That it is going to be difficult for us to very long prosecute effectively a war that far away from home with the divisions we have here and particularly the potential divisions. That really has me concerned … and I am very depressed about it.”²²Moreover, the movement would have consequences that reached beyond foreign policy. The participation of King and other civil rights leaders was adding to the white backlash initiated by urban rioting. The white middle class and, to a lesser extent, the white working class were key to the success of the Second Reconstruction, the former because of its overt support and the latter because of its acquiescence. To the degree that whites identified the civil rights movement with the antiwar movement, the campaign in behalf of civil rights could become stalled.²³

To make matters worse, doubts about the war were growing within the administration itself. “The more I study and learn,” Henry Cabot Lodge reported from Saigon in late October 1966, “the more impressed I am with the savage and thorough way in which the Viet Cong has destroyed the political structure of this country. Everything that I have read about successful counter-guerilla activity says that one must start in each hamlet by picking out a good man to be chairman of a committee of up and coming young men. In this country the ‘good man’ all too often has had his head cut off, the grade B people have been driven out and what is left are the old and the weak and the children … I thought the war veterans would be a likely nucleus but I now learn that 80 percent of the war veterans are afraid to live out in the country and have gathered in the cities.”²⁴McNamara kept repeating that the objectives of bombing the North were to cut off infiltration into the South, weaken the enemy’s will to fight on, and force the DRV to the negotiating table. But at the same time, he was advising the president that the communists’ will seemed to be increasing rather than decreasing, and the amount of men and matériel flowing into the South from the North was growing rather than shrinking. From the State Department LBJ was hearing that Hanoi was not likely to attend a general peace conference, or if it did, not negotiate in good faith. The lesson that Ho and his colleagues had learned from the 1954 Geneva Conference was that the great powers, even the communist ones, would willingly sacrifice North Vietnam’s interests to their larger concerns.²⁵“I don’t see how we have any way of either a plan for a victory militarily or diplomatically,” Johnson complained to McNamara. “And I think that is something you and Dean [Rusk] have to sit down and try to see if there are any people that we have in those departments that can find us any program or plan or hope.”²⁶

LBJ’s intelligence sources on Vietnam were unbelievably bad. Neither the CIA, the National Security Administration, nor the intelligence divisions of the military branches were able to give him any reliable information about the dynamics of the decision-making process within the DRV, NLF, or Mao’s regime. Frustrated, LBJ dispatched Clark Clifford on an intelligence-gathering mission in early November. “Mr. Clifford,” reported Edward Rice, a consular official in Hong Kong who was present at a secret meeting of regional intelligence officers, “said that the President spends much of his time on Vietnam, and feels forced to make a great many decisions on the basis of inadequate information. What we lack and what he wants is … definite information about the Viet Cong. What about their attitudes? Are they re-evaluating their position? Are their attitudes softening or hardening? … What is the thinking in Hanoi? Are the leaders there determined, or are they ‘seeking a way out’?” The response of the gathering after much hemming and hawing was that they could not with any authority say.²⁷At a meeting with his principal advisers at the ranch the first week in December, LBJ blurted out, “What makes it so tough: I’ve had little real sympathy with Fulbright, but I don’t see any light down that barrel. We’re getting deeper and deeper in … Where we were when I came in—I’d trade back to where we were.”²⁸At a subsequent meeting with the same individuals: “Then, no matter what we do in the military [field], there is no sure victory?” To everyone’s shock, McNamara agreed: “That’s right. We have been too optimistic. One [chance of victory] in three or two in three is my estimate.”²⁹

Confronted with mounting dissent in and outside of Congress, LBJ attempted to reach out to the Republican party, to use bipartisanship as a political backstop for the Vietnam consensus. He found the GOP a prickly partner, to say the least. Nixon, Dirksen, and Ford were not about to be outflanked on the right. While “supporting” the administration on the war in Vietnam, the GOP kept up a constant drumfire of criticism that the Defense Department was not getting weapons and ammunition to troops in the field in a timely manner, that “politicians” were intruding into decision making that properly belonged to the military, and that the war ought to be fought more aggressively, particularly against the North. Eisenhower agreed to be part of Johnson’s Vietnam team—but only up to a point. In August, LBJ went to the well once too often, citing a 1954 agreement with the Diem regime as justification for U.S. involvement in the war. Pressured by Republican leaders, Eisenhower told reporters that his commitment to the government of South Vietnam had been economic and not military. “Military Pledge to Saigon Is Denied by Eisenhower,” headlined theNew York Times. He and Johnson subsequently made up, but Ike and the GOP had put the president on notice that the current decisions on Vietnam were his and his alone, and he would be held responsible.³⁰

Beginning in October 1965, the Johnson foreign policy team began debating the wisdom of instituting an extended, unilateral bombing pause. There were a number of pros. The Russians had made it clear that Hanoi would never agree to talks while American aircraft were strafing and bombing its territory. The DRV would look upon discussions during the bombings as “a plea from a position of weakness,” Soviet Ambassador Andrei Gromyko told Rusk.³¹In November, Barbara Ward, LBJ’s favorite historian, reported on a trip to New York, where she surveyed opinion within “the ‘Establishment’—Council on Foreign Relations, Commonwealth Fund trustees, Wall Street bankers and lawyers.” She described a “general malaise” over the Vietnam War. “These were almost without exception moderate men supporting the President,” she told Jack Valenti. “Yet they all in one way or another seemed to express the same fear—that mounting casualties coupled with some popular uncertainty about the purposes of the war could erode away the whole of the middle ground upon which the President stands.” The solution: an offer to the North Vietnamese to negotiate without precondition.³²Then there was the international arena. Johnson and Rusk believed that in the wake of a bombing halt, the Soviet Union might seize the initiative from communist China and pressure Hanoi to sit down at the negotiating table.³³

The Joint Chiefs were adamantly opposed; indeed, they wanted to expand the bombing to include oil storage facilities and industrial targets in and around Hanoi and Haiphong. Lodge and the U.S. mission in Saigon were also against a halt, arguing that the conflict was not going to be resolved through a negotiated treaty: “The communists do not like to sign papers in which they admit that they were defeated,” Lodge observed. The goal should be to control the coastal plains, eliminate the VC from the Saigon-Delta area, and continue to hold the forty-three provincial capitals. Then, as was the case with the Philippines and Malaysia, the communists would just melt away.³⁴Johnson himself expressed serious doubts concerning the efficacy of a bombing halt. The chiefs were insisting that a unilateral halt without precondition would allow the NVA to pour men and supplies into the South without inhibition, and he believed that was true. Moreover, a halt would have a very negative impact on morale in Saigon and among the ARVN and U.S. troops. And what if a halt did not produce results? The pressure on the administration to resume, and resume with a vengeance, would be overwhelming. The doves would be in full retreat and the hawks in charge. “That is the most dangerous aspect,” LBJ told his advisers. “Don’t we know a pause will fail? If we are in worse shape then, won’t we be bringing a deadly crisis on ourselves?”³⁵By December, McNamara, both Bundys, Ball, and others had come down on the side of a unilateral pause to last roughly from Christmas Eve to the end of January 1966, coupled with an offer to Hanoi of direct negotiations.³⁶But ultimately, it was not his advisers’ input that convinced LBJ, but the results of various opinion polls taken in November and December.

“It is evident that the American public has supported the military increases made during the past year,” White House staffer Hayes Redmon advised Bill Moyers. “Yet, if the public supports our military increases to date, they are even more overwhelmingly in favor of attempts at negotiated settlement … During the past year every negotiating proposal that has been put to the public has had overwhelming approval.” Citing the Korean conflict, during which public support for the war slipped from 65 percent in August 1950 to 38 percent in January 1951, Redmon warned of the threat of mounting frustration and war-weariness. “If we are to have public support for our policies—if we are to blunt mounting frustration,” he told Moyers and through him LBJ, “it is absolutely essential that the public be constantly assured that we are doing all we can to get an honorable negotiated settlement. A majority does not now believe it.”³⁷

On Christmas Eve 1965, the constant pounding of NVA positions between the seventeenth and twentieth parallels that had been going on since May suddenly stopped. Immediately, a small army of diplomats headed by Ambassador-at-large Averell Harriman departed for various European and Asian capitals with much-publicized instructions to leave no stone unturned in its quest for a negotiated settlement. Four days after the pause went into effect, Rusk cabled Lodge: “For your own personal guidance, a major factor in the decision [to halt the bombing] is the action which will have to be made public in January. The prospect of large scale reinforcement in men and defense budget increases of some twenty billion for next eighteen month period requires solid preparation of American public. A crucial element will be clear demonstration that we have explored fully every alternative but that aggressor has left us no choice … We do not, quite frankly, anticipate that Hanoi will respond in any significant way.”³⁸

It is ironic that LBJ would allow public opinion, or at least the White House’s estimation of it, to largely determine his decision on a bombing pause. He was permitting strategy in Vietnam to be set by a political entity with which he had consistently refused to be candid. Johnson was much impressed with the way FDR had handled events leading up to American entry into World War II during the 1940-1941 era. Roosevelt had perceived that war was inevitable and believed it to be in America’s interests to join the struggle in Europe, but he did not seek a vote of Congress beforehand; rather, he let events take their course, trusting that Congress and the American people would approve after the fact. “Pleiku was a little Pearl Harbor,” Moyers remembered Johnson saying.³⁹But Pleiku was not Pearl Harbor. There was no catharsis. In a sense, administration policy never moved beyond the 1940-41 analogy.⁴⁰

 

AS THE THIRD YEARof the Johnson presidency began, the White House staff had experienced some important changes, important because, in the world of LBJ, individuals were far more significant than organizations. Johnson was never able to find a replacement for Walter Jenkins. Several months after the 1964 election, the president had named Marvin Watson to be his appointments secretary, with the title of special assistant to the president. The Huntsville native had worked his way through Baylor, served as a marine in the Pacific, and then returned to Texas, where he rose to become the righthand man of E. B. Germany, the reactionary president of Lone Star Steel Company. He was not a proto-fascist like his boss, but a parochial Texan with limited experience who still clung to the rural political values of a bygone era. He was loyal, hardworking, and unimaginative. He was also literal-minded and tactless. When LBJ told him to do something, he did it no matter how outrageous or counterproductive. Where Jenkins had been solicitous and attentive to all with the slightest bit of influence or importance to his boss, Watson was frequently brusque and dismissive.⁴¹Shortly after coming to the West Wing, Watson angered other staffers, the Washington press corps, and pundits in general by ordering White House switchboard operators to record the name, business affiliation, and office telephone number of all callers. McGeorge Bundy and others protested, and Joe Alsop denounced in print “the curious espionage system to which members of the White House staff are subjected.”⁴²More ominously, Watson served as a tacit ally of J. Edgar Hoover in his effort to instill in LBJ an anticommunist paranoia.⁴³

The new year saw Jack Valenti still on board, but he was wearing out. Ever since that fateful day in November 1963, he had been constantly at LBJ’s side. “Jack Valenti performed a function that has been described as ‘valet,’ ” Harry McPherson observed, “but it was a hell of a lot more important than that. Because of his proximity to the President and because he is an almost hyper-active man, he was into all kinds of things, especially in the daily doings of the President, what the President said, who the President saw. Jack would be there early in the morning and late at night.”⁴⁴Valenti found Watson to be his exact opposite in personality and philosophy. Moreover, his stint at the White House, his constant intimacy with the president, was taking its toll on him psychologically.

Staffers talked of “the Valenti syndrome,” the tendency to judge oneself by LBJ’s prevailing appraisal. When you were in favor, you were on top of the world; when you were not, you were in absolute despair.⁴⁵In May, Valenti departed to become president of the Motion Picture Association of America at $150,000 per year, four times his White House salary. “I feel like I’m tearing out my heart and leaving it here on the floor,” he toldNewsweek’ s Charles Roberts. “I love this man, and let me tell you, he has eaten me up with love.”⁴⁶

Following his foot surgery, George Reedy had returned to the White House as “a sort of resident, long-range idea-man,” particularly on civil rights and labor. He, too, departed in May to take a lucrative job as vice president of a New York public relations firm. The man who had been with LBJ the longest, Horace Busby, had already withdrawn to Texas. He had resented particularly Bill Moyers’s instant intimacy and influence with LBJ. Busby viewed Moyers as a bureaucratic imperialist and a secret ally of Bobby Kennedy.⁴⁷There was much truth in the first perception and a bit in the second. John Roche, who had replaced Eric Goldman as the resident White House intellectual, observed that Moyers had more allies in more departments and agencies than the president himself. He frequently knew what was going on before a cabinet officer or agency head did. His critics murmured that in briefings with the White House press corps, Moyers frequently confused his views and persona with those of the president.⁴⁸And as his ongoing relationship with Arthur Schlesinger and his habituation of the Georgetown cocktail circuit indicated, he found the heirs of Camelot extremely seductive. But Moyers worked tirelessly and loyally for LBJ. He was intelligent, principled, pragmatic, and shrewd. He was absolutely committed to what the president was trying to do at home and initially abroad. “Bill contributes a certain quality of brilliance, of wit, and a mixture of aloofness from us,” Lady Bird wrote in her diary, “with yet enough devotion to us that Lyndon needs. I could not bear to lose him.”⁴⁹

The vacuum that was left by the departures of Valenti, Reedy, and Busby was partially filled by Joseph A. Califano Jr., who had come to the White House in the fall of 1965 to replace Moyers as chief domestic adviser. The thirty-three-year-old Brooklynite was the son of an Irish American mother and an Italian American father. After graduating from Holy Cross and Harvard Law School, he landed a job with the New York law firm headed by Thomas E. Dewey. Califano, who, like Pat Moynihan, was a member of the Catholic social work movement and a liberal Democrat, and the former GOP presidential candidate were strange bedfellows. Thus, when the opportunity to become one of McNamara’s Department of Defense whiz kids opened up, Califano jumped at the opportunity.⁵⁰He took over the task forces from Moyers and began building relationships with those departments and agencies most concerned with domestic affairs. He proved to be devoted to the Great Society and to his boss, and was ruthless in defending both. Moynihan once asked Califano how one acquired power in the White House. “You take it,” he replied. “There are vacuums everywhere, and if you do it, if you take it and seize it and run with it, it’s yours, and you develop a certain right of adverse possession.”⁵¹

A major shakeup among LBJ’s foreign policy advisers also occurred in 1966. On February 28, McGeorge Bundy departed as national security adviser. Bundy had grown tired of LBJ’s pettiness and his absurd insistence on staff anonymity. He realized that Vietnam was going to be a long, protracted conflict. He might have stayed the course for Jack Kennedy, but not for Lyndon Johnson. His wife had been against the conflict from the beginning. And there was the constant tension generated by the Bobby-Lyndon feud, with both the president and the Kennedys alluding to Bundy’s disloyalty.⁵²In April, Bundy was named to head the Ford Foundation. The man who succeeded him as national security adviser was Walt Rostow. Contemporaries remembered Rostow exhibiting a genial but stubborn certainty on the cold war and the conflict in Southeast Asia. Communists were “scavengers of the modernization process,” and the communist attempt to overrun South Vietnam was as sure a test of American resolve and principles as the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and Hitler’s drive to overrun Europe. In truth, LBJ did not expect startling new insights from his new national security adviser. “I think Rostow would probably give us a little more protection [than Robert Komer, whom Johnson was also considering] from the intellectual and the college crowd,” he remarked to Dean Rusk. “I believe he would be loyal and he seems to be very friendly with you and me.”⁵³Tom Mann resigned as the State Department’s chief Latin American expert, to be replaced by career diplomat Jack Hood Vaughn. It was Tweedle-dum and Tweedle-dee. As one critic of the changes observed, “This is a triumph of the curators … of past policies.”⁵⁴The only appointment out of the ordinary was LBJ’s selection of Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach to replace George Ball as undersecretary of state. Ball was a team player, but his misgivings concerning Vietnam were real. Some viewed Katzenbach’s transfer as a demotion, but he had wearied of civil rights and particularly the frustrations associated with the growing urban unrest and the Black Power movement. Even before his move from Justice to State, he, along with Komer and Rostow, had with LBJ’s approval constituted themselves as a “kitchen cabinet” on Vietnam.⁵⁵

Almost unnoticed by the press—much to LBJ’s gratification—was the growing influence of Harry McPherson, the literate, open-minded Texas liberal who became counsel and then special counsel to the president. From the summer of 1966 on, he was the chief architect of all of Johnson’s speeches. McPherson’s humanity, his Christian realism, his political experience and sensitivity, his independence of mind, and his loyalty would serve LBJ well as he descended into the paradoxes of America in the 1960s.

Conspicuously absent from Johnson’s inner circle was Hubert Humphrey. When the president learned that Joe Califano had asked Humphrey to participate in the planning for Phase II of the Great Society, he exploded. “You are never, never to let the Vice President attend any meeting on the legislative program,” he roared at Califano. “He has Minnesota running-water disease. I’ve never known anyone from Minnesota that could keep their mouth shut. It’s just something in the water out there.” It turned out that Humphrey had alluded in several speeches to Reuther’s suggestions for the creation of demonstration cities and Whitney Young’s ideas for a Marshall Plan for urban areas. Johnson told Califano to tell the vice president to shut up. “The President will talk about what he wants to do in the State of the Union message and he doesn’t need the Vice President to try to commit him to some crazy, Goddamned expensive idea that Congress will never approve anyway.”⁵⁶

Obviously, Johnson approached the 1966 State of the Union address with a troubled mind. He would have to rally the country to stay the course in Vietnam. At this point, he still held out hope that if things went fairly well on the battlefield, at the negotiating table, and in the political arena in South Vietnam, the United States could begin withdrawing troops in 1967. But a number of his advisers warned him that the economy would not be able to produce enough largesse in 1966 for both guns and butter.⁵⁷Budget Director Charles Schultze pointed out that budget requests and appropriations did not match the amounts authorized when various Great Society bills were passed. “States, cities, depressed areas and individuals have been led to expect immediate delivery of benefits from Great Society programs to a degree that is not realistic.”⁵⁸There was no question about funding existing programs, but, for a variety of reasons, LBJ also opposed a moratorium on new ones. He would still have liberal majorities in both houses of Congress in 1966, something he could not count on after the midterm elections. Many Great Society programs were also civil rights programs. To back away at that point would be to undercut moderate leaders like Whitney Young and Martin Luther King and open the way for a takeover of the movement by Stokely Carmichael, Floyd McKissick, and other advocates of Black Power. That would in turn exacerbate the white backlash, fueling racial tensions in the nation’s cities and giving encouragement to segregationists everywhere.

During a nose-to-nose conversation with Joe Califano in the pool at the ranch in July 1965, LBJ had been emphatic about the two things he wanted, in addition to a Department of Transportation. “I want to rebuild American cities,” he had told the frantically dog-paddling Califano. “I want a fair housing bill. We’ve got to end this goddamn discrimination against Negroes. Until people whether they’re purple, brown, black, yellow, red, green or whatever [he jabbed his besieged aide hard on the shoulder as he enumerated each color]—live together, they’ll never know they have the same hopes for their children, the same fears troubles, woes, ambitions.”⁵⁹Most important, LBJ continued to believe that it was his moral and religious duty to bring a better life within reach of as many people as possible. During the early months of 1966, LBJ carried around two quotations from Scripture in his pocket. The first was from Acts: “Then Philip went down to the city of Samaria, and proclaimed unto them the Christ. And the multitude gave heed … when they heard and saw the signs which he did. For some of those that had unclean spirits that came out crying with a loud voice and many that were palsied and were lame were healed. And there was much joy in that city.” The second was from Second Peter: “And besides this, giving all diligence, add to your faith virtue; and to virtue knowledge; and to knowledge temperance, and to temperance patience; and to patience godliness; and to godliness brotherly kindness; and to brotherly kindness love.”⁶⁰That April, the president delivered a speech on the bicentennial of American Methodism in which he proclaimed “The Social Creed of the Methodist Church,” written in 1940, to be the “perfect description of the American ideal [and] the American commitments in the 1960s.”⁶¹

During the summer and fall of 1965, Joe Califano had set up a series of new task forces to plan the second phase of the Great Society. Government officials and distinguished citizens (from Kingman Brewster, president of Yale, to Walter Reuther to John Kenneth Galbraith and Barbara Ward) focused on pollution control, transportation, urban renewal, population control, education, housing, foreign aid, and civil rights. On December 29 at the ranch, Califano walked LBJ through the proposed program. Johnson was particularly taken with a vast international health initiative, which, among other things, aimed at a complete eradication of smallpox by 1975. LBJ also wanted to expand a proposal to enrich kindergarten and summer programs for poor children by making free lunches available to those who could not afford them. The idea had come to the White House through aide Larry Levinson, whose friend, Father Charles Woodrich, a Denver priest, had experimented successfully with the notion as part of the local antipoverty program. The lower-priced meals had been served in one secondary and three elementary schools; immediately attendance improved, attention spans expanded, and dropout rates and disciplinary problems declined.⁶²

LBJ knew what he wanted to ask Congress to support, but he seemed unusually tentative. Aides remembered that the 1966 State of the Union speech preparation process was the wildest, most hair-raising to date. Valenti (he would not depart until May) suggested bringing Richard Goodwin back onboard to draft the domestic portions. To Goodwin’s intense irritation, LBJ insisted on editing every line, and he refused to meet in person with him. At 4A.M. on January 12, the day of the speech, Goodwin, Califano, and Valenti sent what they anticipated would be the final draft to the president’s bedroom for approval. Instead of giving them the go-ahead, he summoned six aides, excluding Goodwin, and told them to rewrite the whole thing, reducing it by a third. Work on the address continued until just an hour and a half before delivery.⁶³

More than half of the final speech dealt with Vietnam. The president began well enough, with an uncompromising call to arms. “We will not permit those who fire upon us in Vietnam to win a victory over the desires and the intentions of all the American people,” LBJ declared. “This Nation is mighty enough, its society is healthy enough, its people are strong enough, to pursue our goals in the rest of the world while still building a Great Society here at home.” Then, uninspiringly, he simply ticked off the goals of his domestic policy: continuation of “the great health and education programs,” including the antipoverty program enacted the previous year; more money for foreign aid “to make a maximum attack on hunger and disease and ignorance in those countries that are determined to help themselves”; “a program to rebuild completely, on a scale never before attempted, entire central and slum areas of several of our cities”; a clean water act; a measure prohibiting discrimination in jury selection; a new Department of Transportation; a fair housing measure; consumer protection laws; repeal of Section 14b of Taft-Hartley; and a constitutional amendment “extending the terms of congressmen to four years to match that of the President.”⁶⁴Johnson admitted that the war in Vietnam would create budget constraints, but by economizing in government, holding down inflation through restraining prices and wages, and maintaining the pace of growth, the nation could have both guns and butter.

In truth, the recommendation for LBJ’s second hundred days differed from those of the first almost as much as FDR’s did for the so-called first and second New Deals. The emphasis of Phase II of the Johnsonian program would be on regulation and reform rather than relief. Demonstration cities and, to a lesser extent, transportation were big-ticket items, but the rest were not. Consumer and environmental protection, fair housing, and nondiscriminatory jury selection were largely regulatory proposals designed to improve the quality of life for Americans by preventing encroachment on their rights as traditionally defined.

LBJ and his lieutenants spent an inordinate amount of time during 1966 in efforts to preserve the economic space that would make guns and butter possible. LBJ lashed NASA, Agriculture, Interior, and Defense (in non-combat-related areas) to trim their budgets. When conservatives began to threaten funding cuts for Great Society programs, he let them know that he might veto their favorite pork barrel projects and leaked to the press that it was Congress and not he nor the war in Vietnam that was unbalancing the budget.⁶⁵“It came through,” Orville Freeman recorded in his diary, “that he was rather enjoying the position he had Congress in which he could contend that he was being so frugal and careful and that Congress was not going along with these cuts … but insisting on increasing all of them … At the same time this protects some of the other programs such as rent subsidy, poverty program, [and] teachers corps that he is bound and determined to hold regardless … He could be dramatized himself as being frugal and could answer those who holler, which he knew they would with the Vietnam war on, to cut these new programs. He has never said this; he is too smart to let anyone know because it might leak.”⁶⁶

As spring turned into summer, the economy continued to grow at a healthy pace and unemployment remained low, but the rate of inflation crept steadily upward. A fight broke out between the White House and organized labor over the minimum wage. David Dubinsky of the ILGWU and Jacob Potofsky of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers were struggling with industries who were taking their union shops from the high-wage North to the low-wage South. Speaking for them, Meany insisted that the administration propose legislation that would establish a $1.60 minimum wage beginning immediately and moving to $1.75 or $1.80 by 1968. Califano and Gardner Ackley, who had replaced Walter Heller as Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, advised the president that such legislation would be grossly inflationary. Johnson agreed. “I don’t see how I can break [my own] guidelines,” he remarked to Califano.⁶⁷To Johnson’s vast irritation, Labor Secretary Willard Wirtz seemed to have abandoned the administration for an open alliance with Meany. In 1966 the labor secretary had begun to press for an increase in the minimum wage from $1.25 to $1.40 by the end of 1966 and $1.60 by the fall of 1970.⁶⁸LBJ let it be known that he agreed to $1.60, but it would have to be phased in over a four-year period. Dubinsky, Potofsky, and other labor leaders denounced the administration in the press, and a confrontation with Meany followed. “I don’t mind telling you that I’ve got a very unhappy bunch of boys here,” Meany said. “Well, I am unhappy too,” LBJ replied. “I have worked and fought and bled and died for them, and am still ready to do it, but I don’t want my motives questioned and I don’t want my sincerity questioned.”⁶⁹The 1966 amendments to the Fair Labor Standards Act passed on September 23 raised the minimum wage to $1.60 an hour by 1971 and expanded coverage to include seven hundred thousand federal employees.

Public unrest over the steadily rising rate of inflation grew apace during 1966. “Rising Prices: How Long, How High?” aNewsweek headline asked.⁷⁰In August pollster Lou Harris called the White House to report “a crisis of major proportions” for the president. An informal survey of corporation heads and investment bankers revealed a total lack of confidence in LBJ on the issue of inflation. The latest poll gave LBJ a 90 percent unfavorable rating on his handling of the economy.⁷¹LBJ understood that inflation had destroyed more governments in modern history than any other issue. Nevertheless, he persevered. No let-up on the domestic front or in Vietnam, and no tax increase. “I think it is as important to take care of our poor that are on social security or on relief as it is to meet our commitments under some treaty,” he told congressional leaders in September. “Because I don’t think we can do those things [enforce collective security agreements] if we neglect the health and the education and the economic well being of our people. I think that in an economy that is running 750 billion dollars a year, gross national product, I think that we can do what we are doing in Vietnam and do these other things without taking it out of the hides of the poor, or the head start kids, or the education bill.”⁷²Johnson began carrying a new Bible verse in his pocket, one from the Seventy-second Psalm: “He shall deliver the needy when he crieth; the poor also, and him that hath no helper.”⁷³

With Vietnam, inflation, and the need for a surtax converging, and conservatives waiting in the wings to take an ax to the budget, LBJ perceived that he had a narrow time frame in which to realize Phase II of the Great Society. As his support of beautification indicated, Johnson was committed to improving the quality of life for all Americans, not just the poor and infirm. His vision of Utopia was solidly middle class. To the degree that the peoples of the earth were able to experience enough social and economic security to be able to raise their families, live independently, and look forward to a better future, to that extent would there be social stability and international peace. Moreover, there was the political angle. During the fifteen years following the end of World War II, the vast majority of Americans had joined the middle class. Without their support, Johnson realized, there could be no civil rights campaign, War on Poverty, or commitment to hold back the communist tide in Southeast Asia. This awareness had as much as anything to do with measures such as Medicare and the various education bills. And now, with transportation.

 

BY1966THE NATION’S TRANSPORTATION SYSTEM was in danger of being overwhelmed by a tangle of conflicting authority and bureaucratic red tape. For a century and a half Congress had provided funds to construct a system of roads and canals linking the East with the trans-Appalachian West, for subsidizing the construction of a national rail system, and finally for establishing a national network of highways. As of 1966, more than thirty agencies and bureaus attempted to regulate the trucking, airline, and railroad industries, to oversee the merchant marine, and to build and regulate airports, harbors, and inland waterways. Transportation, so vital to the domestic economy and to any foreign conflict in which the United States might find itself, cried out for a central authority to direct it.

In March LBJ sent a dramatic Special Message on Transportation to Congress, asking it to bring together under one cabinet-level Department of Transportation the almost one hundred thousand employees and almost $6 billion then allocated to transportation in the federal government. Pointing out that nearly fifty thousand Americans had died in traffic accidents the previous year, he also proposed creation of a National Transportation Safety Board under the new secretary of transportation as well as passage of the Traffic Safety Act of 1966 that would, among other things, set safety standards for motor vehicles operating in the United States.⁷⁴LBJ and Joe Califano had spent endless hours with the constituencies involved—railroad executives and unions, truckers, auto manufacturers, shipbuilders, airline industry executives—getting them onboard. It was a gargantuan task that perhaps only a person of Johnson’s energy and drive could have accomplished.

After the White House reluctantly agreed to exclude the Maritime Administration from the new department—labor and management had joined forces to lobby for its exclusion, fearing that LBJ would find it easer to reduce federal subsidies for shipping than would Congress—the transportation bill passed the House. In the Senate, the principal obstacle would be the hard-drinking, conservative senior senator from Arkansas, John McClellan, who headed the Commerce Subcommittee that would conduct hearings on the bill. McClellan’s pet scheme was the Kerr-McClellan Navigation Project, which had transformed the Arkansas River into a major inland waterway. He objected to the transportation bill’s demanding standards for the construction and operation of such navigation systems. During the early stages of the hearings, “Big John” refused to even meet with Califano. Upon hearing of the Arkansan’s intransigence, LBJ proposed that his aide leak a story to the press to the effect that McClellan was holding up the bill because he wanted the Corps of Engineers to build a dam on property he owned, enabling him to realize a huge profit when the government condemned and bought the land. Califano asked if this was true, and LBJ responded by telling him a story from his earliest days in politics. “The first time Mr. Kleberg ran for Congress,” LBJ said, “he was back home making a tub-thumper campaign speech against this opponent. I was sitting on the steps at the side of the platform, listening. Mr. Kleberg said: ‘It isn’t easy, but I guess I can understand why the good citizens of the hill country might let themselves be represented in Washington by a man who drinks too much. It isn’t easy, but I guess I can even understand why the good citizens of the hill country might let themselves be represented by a man in Washington who carouses with city women while his wife and children are back here working the land. But, as God is my witness, I will never understand why the good people of the hill country would let themselves be represented by a man who takes female sheep up into the hills alone at night!’ ” Well, the president said, “I jumped up and shouted, ‘Mr. Kleberg, Mr. Kleberg, that’s not true.’ He just looked down at me and said, ‘Then let the son of a bitch deny it!’ ” According to Califano, they did not have to resort to the leak; the president instead talked directly to McClellan and convinced him to at least agree to a dialogue.⁷⁵

Over the next two weeks, Califano and McClellan negotiated standards for the Corps of Engineers water projects. Upon reaching an agreement, the aide returned to the West Wing and proudly presented it to his boss. After scanning it, LBJ told his aide to stand up and unzip his pants. Califano smiled nervously, not because he took Johnson literally but because he suspected he had erred. “Unzip your fly,” LBJ said again, standing up, “because there’s nothing there. John McClellan just cut it off with a razor so sharp you didn’t even notice it.” LBJ had the White House operator get McClellan on the telephone. “John,” he said, “I’m calling about Joe Califano. You cut his pecker off and put it in your desk drawer. Now I’m sending him back up there to get it from you. I can’t agree to anything like that.”⁷⁶Eventually the Transportation Bill cleared a House-Senate conference committee almost as it had originally been received. LBJ was so mad at the leaders of the maritime corporations and unions that he did not invite them to the signing ceremony.

 

JOHNSON HAD ESTABLISHEDthe Department of Housing and Urban Development to solve the problem of urban blight, to give ghetto dwellers from Los Angeles to Newark hope, and to build a backfire against the urban rioting that loomed in 1966 and 1967. But he and Califano believed that HUD would have to do more than expand the programs and practices of the past. Despite his dislike and distrust of Walter Reuther, Johnson was enthusiastic about the labor leader’s demonstration cities plan. Up to this point, urban renewal had consisted almost exclusively of demolishing existing slums and replacing them with low-cost public housing, which inevitably turned into slums themselves. Demonstration cities proposed to create local action committees consisting of business, labor, government, and local residents, both blacks and whites, to improve not only housing but local education, health care, transportation, and recreation. “Instead of urban renewal programs that moved poor people out of their neighborhoods, and homes,” Joe Califano remembered, “he envisioned a program that would allow them to stay there, in remodeled or new dwellings, with jobs, police protection, recreation, and community health centers.”⁷⁷

In the wake of Watts, LBJ had instructed Califano to put together a task force specifically for the purpose of fleshing out Reuther’s ideas. Leading lights on that body were HUD Undersecretary for Metropolitan Development Charles Haar, Senator Abraham Ribicoff, and Ben Heineman of the Chicago & North-western Railroad. Haar wanted to focus on one city. Reuther had proposed six. LBJ settled on sixty-six—six with populations over 500,000, ten between 250,000 and 500,000, and fifty with fewer than 250,000. LBJ pointed out that to get demonstration cities through Congress, urban areas of all sizes and regions would have to be included. Estimated costs were $2.3 billion over five years, with the federal government providing 80 percent and local entities 20 percent. Federal funds would be concentrated in housing and in block grants to neighborhoods for specific projects.⁷⁸

Members of Congress reacted to the demonstration cities bill as if a dead fish had been thrown among them. Conservatives insisted that the nation could not afford such a costly experiment in time of war. Liberals complained that the funding was woefully inadequate. Mayors who were convinced their cities would not be picked weighed in. Those caught up in the white backlash seized on the project’s title, proclaiming that the measure was nothing more than a scheme to reward demonstrators and looters.⁷⁹In May theNew York Times declared the measure dead.

LBJ instructed Califano and Humphrey to line up the interest groups that would benefit from the bill and get them to mobilize their lobbyists on the Hill. Persuade the House subcommittee to bring their hearings to a close and report the measure out, he instructed his allies in Congress, but then have the House hold it up. In an election year, the House would not act unless the Senate was first committed. The Senate would be a problem. The chair of the Banking and Currency Subcommittee on Housing was John Sparkman of Alabama, a moderate segregationist who was up for reelection. Second in seniority was Paul Douglas of Illinois, who was an enthusiastic supporter of the bill but who was facing a tough reelection campaign against the popular Charles Percy. He would not have the time to give demonstration cities the attention that it required. That left Edmund Muskie of Maine, a rural state whose concern with urban decay was minimal at best. When Califano pointed out that Muskie did not have a single city in the state of Maine that would be eligible for the program, LBJ chuckled and replied, “Well, he has one now.”⁸⁰

Muskie labored mightily, but a head count showed that demonstration cities would fail in the subcommittee. The administration needed one more vote and settled on Senator Thomas McIntyre, a Democrat from New Hampshire who was up for reelection. Unfortunately, the Portsmouth Naval Base, which employed a large number of McIntyre’s constituents, was scheduled for closure. Moreover, New Hampshirites were renowned for their frugality. Nevertheless, after the White House promised to delay the base closing until after the election and allowed McIntyre to amend the bill reducing the amounts requested from $2.3 billion to $12 million for planning grants and $900 million for the first two years, he switched his vote, and demonstration cities cleared committee on August 19.⁸¹

Having run the conservative gauntlet, the bill now faced the wrath of liberals. A subcommittee of the Government Operations Committee headed by Abe Ribicoff examined the White House proposal for demonstration cities; for the rest of August, he, Bobby Kennedy, and GOP Senator Jacob Javits of New York took turns blasting the administration for not doing enough for the cities and especially the black ghetto dwellers who lived in their decaying cores. LBJ saw the “City Hearings,” as they were called, as a vehicle to promote Bobby’s presidential candidacy. As for Ribicoff, “Abe wants to be America’s first Jewish Vice President.”⁸²To divert public attention from the hearings, LBJ embarked on a three-day swing through the Northeast to gin up support for his urban renewal bill. Upon his return, he called Ribicoff. “Abe, if you want to eat from the cake, don’t piss on it,” he said.⁸³The Senate passed the bill on August 16, and the House followed suit on September 1. At the signing ceremony in the East Room on November 3, LBJ referred to the measure as the Model Cities Act and instructed administration officials to refer to it as such from then on. Leaving the ceremonies with Califano, Johnson turned to his aide and said with mock hostility, “Don’t ever give such a stupid Goddamn name to a bill again.”⁸⁴

Johnson and the framers of the Model Cities Act were determined that it not turn out to be just another pork barrel measure, but they were equally committed to seeing that it did not fall into the hands of irresponsible radicals. Guidelines were stringent: funded projects had to be integrated in terms of housing, education, health, jobs, and recreation; in terms of race; in terms of politics, bringing together local political establishments and marginalized neighborhood dwellers; and in terms of business-labor participation. For the first two years of Model Cities, all HUD did was process applications; by May 1967, the agency had received 193. Over the next year and a half, HEW Secretary Weaver and his lieutenants approved 108.

Model Cities was a noble dream. “Along with new buildings to replace the crumbling hovels where slum dwellers worried out their deprived existences,” Johnson wrote in his memoirs, “we needed to offer those slum dwellers a genuine opportunity to change their lives—programs to train them to jobs, the means of giving their children a better chance to finish school, a method for putting medical clinics and legal services within their reach.”⁸⁵But there was no flood of new jobs, no new health and transportation infrastructures, few new housing projects and parks, little or no immediate relief. There was only the beginning of local political/administrative structures that would, over the years, hone their skills as grant writers and win the support and trust of local residents and city halls alike.⁸⁶That a model cities bill passed Congress at all in 1966 was remarkable. In the summer of that year pollsters asked Americans whether they had a favorable or unfavorable opinion of the Great Society. Of all respondents, 32 percent answered favorable, 44 percent unfavorable, and 24 percent gave no opinion.⁸⁷