Working

by Robert A. Caro

  The books of law. A law. That was what Johnson felt mattered. An executive order, as we’re all learning now to our sorrow, is just a piece of paper and can be repealed by another piece of paper. But to write it in the books of law—once you succeed in that, it’s not so easy to change. When you look at the newsreels of that speech, you see that the southerners, the committee chairmen: Russell of Armed Services, Byrd of Finance, Ellender of Agriculture, Robertson of Banking, Eastland of Judiciary, Hill of Labor, Johnston of Civil Service, Jordan of Rules, McClellan of Government Operations—are sitting in front of him, looking up at this man whom they had considered their protégé, who they thought believed the same way. He had convinced them for twenty years that he believed the same way that they did on civil rights.

  So I asked the dying Herman Talmadge, How did you feel when you heard that line—“It is time to write it in the books of law?” And again my notes say, “long pause.” And then Talmadge said, “Disappointed. Angry. Sick.”

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  WHAT MOMENTS OF DRAMA there are in the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act! As you’re writing them, you’re constantly thinking: are you making them too dramatic, more dramatic than they were? More than the facts will support? But the facts are plenty dramatic.

  I wrote the scenes when he’s inviting the civil rights leaders to the Oval Office. There are five great leaders: there’s the oldest, and most venerable and to me the most courageous of all of them, because he had been fighting for civil rights for forty years before this: A. Philip Randolph of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. And there were Roy Wilkins of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Whitney Young of the National Urban League, James Farmer of the Congress of Racial Equality, CORE, and of course Martin Luther King, Jr.

  So Johnson’s secretary, Marie Fehmer, says, Should I bring them in as a group? Well, George Brown once said to me in explaining Lyndon Johnson’s genius: Lyndon Johnson was the greatest salesman one-on-one who ever lived. No, Johnson tells Marie, not as a group, schedule them one by one. And he doesn’t just talk to each of them. He gives them a focus, not a vague statement of principle, but a specific goal: to pass a discharge petition, a procedural device that the Republicans are opposing ostensibly on procedural grounds but in reality to cover their opposition to civil rights. And he explains to these leaders what has to be done: that without the petition there isn’t going to be a vote on the bill. We’ve got to make people understand somehow that they either sign the petition or they’re against civil rights. In this meeting, Johnson is in his rocking chair, Roy Wilkins on one of the sofas in the Oval Office. And Johnson pulls the rocking chair over to Wilkins, knee to knee.

  Wilkins had dealt with Lyndon Johnson for years, decades, in fact. And he says in his autobiography that he had felt that “with Johnson, you never quite knew if he was out to lift your heart or your wallet.” Wilkins doesn’t feel that way anymore. How do we know that? We know because we can hear the tape of another telephone conversation. It’s a conversation from December 23, 1963, 10:30 at night. Johnson is still in the Oval Office working. He calls Roy Wilkins, asks him for suggestions about the State of the Union Address, which he has to give in three weeks. He asks Wilkins whom to appoint to a civil rights commission, he says he needs a Mexican-American, we don’t have enough Mexican-Americans in positions here, do you know one that we can trust? Wilkins gives him some suggestions. Johnson says good night. But Wilkins doesn’t let him hang up. Wilkins says, “Now Mr. President, may I say just a word to you?…Please take care of yourself.” Johnson says, “I’m going to. I’m going to.” Wilkins says, “Please take care of yourself. We need you.”

  The Civil Rights Act of 1964 is not only a story of heroism on the barricades, it’s also a study, a case study, of presidential leadership, it’s a case study of presidential power, of how a President can be a force for social justice, of how a President can be a creator of social justice.

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  NOW IT’S 1965. And “We Shall Overcome” is being sung again, and this time it wasn’t being sung just in the South or just in churches or in synagogues. This time it was being sung in front of the White House. I wrote about that: You know at that time Pennsylvania Avenue was not closed off as it is now, so the protesters could come and march and sing right up against that black iron fence in front of the White House. And they’re singing it in front of the White House in March, 1965, because that was the month of Selma, Alabama, the March on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. I wrote, “If it was a hymn of demand and defiance, the demands the civil rights movement was making could, its leaders felt, ultimately be met only through the power and the leadership of the President, Lyndon Baines Johnson, who, at the same time, was a target of their defiance.” Although Johnson had passed the civil rights bill in 1964, it didn’t include what they most wanted, it didn’t include what they felt was crucial: a strong provision for voting rights. It’s four days after a clergyman, the Reverend James Reeb, was clubbed to death. Still no one has been sent to protect the clergymen who had come from all over the country to take Reeb’s place and to protect the marchers. And they didn’t believe in Lyndon Johnson. They didn’t trust him. They remembered the twenty-year record, they heard his southern accent. He had said that now he would address a joint session of Congress, but the expectation was, it wasn’t going to be what they wanted. They didn’t think that whatever he was going to ask for was going to be much stronger than the 1964 law.

  So outside the White House they are singing “We Shall Overcome.” And they’re chanting. Remember some of the chants? “Hey, hey, LBJ/How many kids did you kill today?” “LBJ, just you wait / See what happens in ’68.” There is an aspect of that scene which I find poignant. You can’t hear what’s being shouted on Pennsylvania Avenue in the Oval Office, but you can hear it in the mansion, in the family quarters, in the bedrooms, in the family dining room, where Johnson would be sitting with his wife and his daughters. You can hear the chants and the songs there. Just think: How horrible it must be to be sitting there with your daughters, and they’re hearing “Hey, hey, LBJ.”

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  Interviewing: if you talk to people long enough, if you talk to them enough times, you find out things from them that maybe they didn’t even realize they knew. Take the evening of March 15, 1965. Johnson is going to address a joint session of Congress and he comes out of the White House and gets into the backseat of the limousine for his ride to Capitol Hill. Three of his assistants, Richard Goodwin, Horace Busby, and Jack Valenti, were sitting on the limousine’s jump seats facing him. I never got to talk to Jack Valenti about that ride, but I talked to Goodwin and Busby, and I also interviewed George Reedy, who talked to all three of them the next day, and I asked Reedy what they had told him. I kept asking Goodwin and Busby, What was the ride like? “What did you see? What did you see?” My interviewees sometimes get quite annoyed with me because I keep asking them “What did you see?” “If I was standing beside you at the time, what would I have seen?” I’ve had people get really angry at me. But if you ask it often enough, sometimes you make them see. So finally Busby said, Well, you know Lyndon Johnson was really big. And sitting on that backseat, the reading light was behind him, so he was mostly in shadow, and somehow that made him seem even bigger. And it made those huge ears of his even bigger. And his face was mostly in shadows. You saw that big nose and that big jutting jaw. I didn’t stop. “Come on, Buzz, what did you see?” And he finally said, “Well, you know—his hands. His hands were huge, big, mottled things. He had the looseleaf notebook with the speech open on his lap, so you saw those big hands turning the pages. And he was concentrating so fiercely. He never looked up on that whole ride. A hand would snatch at the next page while he was reading the one before it. What you saw—what I remember most about that ride—were the hands. And the fierceness of his concentration—that just fi
lled the car.” So thanks, Buzz. Now I had more of a feeling of what that ride was like.

  And then you also ask—another question that over the years has gotten more people angry at me than I could count—“What did you hear?” And Buzz and Goodwin say, Nothing. He didn’t say one word of hello to us when he got into the car, and he didn’t say one word the whole ride up there. No one said a word. You would have thought the ride to Capitol Hill was made in complete silence. I remember asking Horace Busby over and over. Oh, Buzz used to get so angry at me. “Listen, Caro, you’ve asked me that how many times already?” But Buzz was my friend. He was a great friend to have. His name has now been just about completely lost to history, but he was the assistant who for many, many years was closest to Lyndon Johnson. He worked for him ever since he was a student at the University of Texas, and Johnson in many ways regarded him as the son he never had. I had twenty-two separate interviews with Buzz. Formal interviews. But in addition I used to call him day after day as I was writing to ask him if he remembered some detail I had forgotten to ask about. My typed single-space notes on our interviews are 142 pages. Buzz was one of the smartest analyzers of politics and people I ever met. We became great friends and we used to go out to dinner together. Buzz had quite a crush on Ina. Once he had a stroke, and when he got out of the hospital, he wrote Ina a letter. He wrote that, when he was afraid he was going to die, he thought, “It will be hard on Robert, nobody else can tell him about the vice presidency.” The letter was typed; he could still type. But when he tried to sign his name in ink, he could only make a scrawling, shaky “B.” Ina cried when she saw that. I may have teared up a little, too. But Buzz recovered, and was a help to me until the end.

  When I was asking him about what the three aides heard on the ride to the Capitol, Buzz at first—and second, and third, etc.—replied, Well, nothing. He didn’t say anything. So I said something like, So the ride was in complete silence? And then he finally said, “Well, I guess except for when the car passed out through the gates.” He meant the gates of the White House onto Pennsylvania Avenue to turn right and go to Capitol Hill. The pickets were there. And Buzz said, Well, they were singing “We Shall Overcome.” And they sang it as we came out, “as if,” I wrote, “to tell Lyndon Johnson to his face, ‘We’ll win without you.’ ” Busby and Goodwin said Johnson never looked up as they passed the pickets. But Busby knew Johnson, and he knew his expressions. So I said to Busby, Well, did he hear them? And Busby said, He heard them.

  And of course the speech that Johnson gave is one of the greatest speeches, one of the greatest moments in American history. I watch it over and over. I’m thrilled every time. He said, “Their cause must be our cause too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.”

  There are a number of testimonies to the power of that speech. One is that Martin Luther King was listening to it in the living room of one of his supporters in Selma. His aides were there, and when Johnson spoke that line, they turned to look at Martin Luther King, and he was crying. And that was the only time they ever saw Martin Luther King cry. Another proof of the speech’s power I got from Busby and Goodwin: when the limousine was coming back to the White House and turned in to the White House gates, the turn was made in silence. The pickets were gone.

  In that year Lyndon Johnson passed Medicaid, Medicare, a slew of education bills, Head Start, the immigration bill, many War on Poverty bills.

  So how do you write about the Sixties? You could say that if you were just going up to July, 1965, it was a decade of great strides toward social justice. That it was sort of a decade of hope, and of the song that embodied that hope, “We Shall Overcome.”

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  BUT THAT WAS NOT all the Sixties were. And as I said, that’s not the only song that evokes and defines the Sixties. The other song is a very different song, a song not of hope but of despair. It symbolized some other, very different aspects of America. By the time this song was written, in 1967, a lot had changed. Actually, it had been changing all during the time that Lyndon Johnson was passing those bills, because he had managed to keep the country from focusing on the fact that he was preparing to escalate the Vietnam War. All the time that he was passing those bills, the preparations for the escalation were going on. Just about the time he had the last one passed, in July—a Medicare bill on July 30, 1965—he escalated the war.

  There were 23,000 American troops in Vietnam when Lyndon Johnson took office. By the end of 1965, there would be 184,000 there. By the end of his presidency, there would be 586,000 there. There were before the war ended 58,000 American dead, and that’s the figure you keep hearing when people talk, 58,000 dead. But what of the others? The number of seriously wounded, defined as seriously wounded Americans, was 288,000. Blinded, for instance, amputations, for instance, young men waking up in a hospital and looking down at the place where their legs used to be. Plus the Vietnamese dead. I’ve been trying for years to get accurate figures on that: the South Vietnamese civilians, South Vietnamese soldiers, North Vietnamese civilians, North Vietnamese soldiers, who died in that war. I don’t yet have figures that I regard as reliable, but I’m going to get them. I can say now that the number is more than two million. We dropped more bombs on Vietnam than we dropped on Germany in all of World War II. And we dropped some of them on little villages, where the B-52s that were bombing them flew so high that not only were they invisible, but you couldn’t hear them from the ground, so these villages never knew they were being bombed until the bombs actually hit.

  There are a lot of songs written about Vietnam, of course. “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” “Where have all the young men gone, Gone for soldiers every one.” But there is, for me, another song: “Waist deep in the Big Muddy / And the big fool says to push on. Waist deep in the Big Muddy, and the big fool says to push on.”

  I picked that song because I learned, from books, from articles, from interviews, the story behind the song, and to me that story tells quite a bit about America. When it was sung on television for the first time, in 1967, on the hugely popular Smothers Brothers show, by Pete Seeger, the fact that Seeger was singing it was notable in itself, because it was the first time that he had been allowed to appear on broadcast television, or on any national radio show either, for seventeen years. Because in 1950, seventeen years earlier, Seeger had refused to name names before the House Un-American Activities Committee, or to tell them whether or not he was then or had ever been a member of the Communist Party, or whom he had voted for in the 1948 election. Because, he said, it was no one’s business what party he belonged to, or whom he had voted for. He was, of course, blacklisted, he lost all his bookings, and as I say, he hadn’t appeared on TV or national radio for seventeen years. During that time he supported himself by lecturing at colleges, by giving banjo lessons. He and his wife, Toshi, were broke. They bought some very cheap land in the Hudson Valley and with his own hands he built a place for them to live. For years they didn’t even have running water or a bathroom.

  But sometime in 1967, he remembered, he was watching the nightly newscast, and he saw American troops in Vietnam waist deep and holding their rifles over their heads, trying to wade through the Mekong River. And, Seeger says, It just struck a chord in me, and he wrote this song. “Waist deep in the Big Muddy / And the big fool said to push on. / Waist deep! Neck deep! / And the big fool said to push on.” The big fool is a captain, in the song anyway, but a captain was really not who Pete Seeger was talking about. And in the song the captain keeps telling the soldiers to keep coming, and then there’s a shot, and a few seconds later, the captain’s helmet floated by, and “the Sergeant said, ‘Turn around men! / I’m in charge from now.’ / And we just made it out of the Big Muddy / With the captain dead and gone.” And he sang—“Every time I read the papers / That old feeling comes on; / We’re waist deep
in the Big Muddy / And the big fool says to push on.”

  In 1967, Tommy Smothers remembers, “We stuck our heads all the way out and told CBS we wanted to put Pete Seeger on our show.” CBS said yes. When they taped the show, Seeger taped four songs. Now it’s Sunday night, and the Smothers Brothers are watching it, and there are only three songs. CBS has cut out “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy” because the network felt, as of course was true, that the song was very hostile to Lyndon Johnson. So there’s a lot of publicity, a lot of headlines: “CBS Bans Seeger Song for Anti-LBJ Slant.” A lot of headlines. CBS eventually relents, the show is shown again, this time with the song in.

  And of course Pete Seeger goes right on singing about Vietnam with other songs. “Bring ’em home, bring ’em home”—he’s singing to Middle America, which keeps saying how much they love their boys in Vietnam. He sings, “If you love our boys in Vietnam / Bring ’em home, bring ’em home.”

  By 1968, America is a very different place than it was at the start of the Sixties. It’s a place of riots, assassinations; it’s a decade of assassinations. John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X. Lyndon Johnson doesn’t run again in 1968. Four years earlier, he had won by the largest landslide—the largest plurality—in American history. But he doesn’t run again. A lot happened during the 1960s to give hope, a lot happened during the 1960s to give despair. They were the years that changed America.

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  So as I’m writing now: on the one hand there’s this absolute fascination with how Lyndon Johnson gets these bills passed. Getting some of them passed required his unique political genius. On the other hand, during his presidency, you have a society falling into disorder. Riots in the cities. Fires and riots within a few blocks of the White House. Troops all over Washington.