The Passage of Power

by Robert A. Caro

  THE TAX CUT, of course, was his predecessor’s tax cut, and while President Kennedy’s name was invoked only three times during the forty-three-minute speech, the invocations were couched in terms—Sorensen’s terms—so stirring (“Let us carry forward the plans and programs of John Fitzgerald Kennedy—not because of our sorrow or sympathy, but because they are right”) that the theme of continuity could still be heard in the address.

  And then, about thirteen minutes into the speech, Lyndon Johnson introduced a new theme.

  “Unfortunately,” he said, “many Americans live on the outskirts of hope—some because of their poverty, and some because of their color, and all too many because of both. Our task is to help replace their despair with opportunity.” His voice as he spoke those sentences was low, almost soft, reasonable in tone, but the next sentence rang out, with its Texas twang, across the big Chamber: “This administration today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America.”

  Retaining the words in Sorensen’s draft, Johnson had added four words to them: Lyndon Johnson words. “Today. Here and now.” So hard did he pound them in as they rang out across the rows of upturned faces before him that they might have been underlined in the air.

  “It will not be a short or easy struggle,” Lyndon Johnson said, “no single weapon or strategy will suffice, but we shall not rest until that war is won. The richest nation on earth can afford to win it. We cannot afford to lose it.”

  Although a few lines of attack were mentioned—“a special effort,” an effort begun under President Kennedy, “in the chronically distressed areas of Appalachia”; enactment of new “youth employment legislation,” reminiscent of the NYA, “to put jobless, aimless, hopeless youngsters to work on useful projects”—the speech was short on specific strategies for the war’s prosecution. While the community action concept was endorsed, the endorsement came in terms too vague for its implications to be immediately apparent. “Poverty is a national problem, requiring improved national organization and support. But this attack, to be effective, must also be organized at the state and local level and must be supported and directed by state and local efforts,” was what Johnson said on that subject. The war’s causes—the reasons it was necessary—were made clear, however, as were, in general terms, the weapons that would be deployed, and the enemies at which he was aiming. “To help that one-fifth of all American families with incomes too small to even meet their basic needs,” he said, “our chief weapons … will be better schools, and better health, and better homes, and better training, and better job opportunities to help more Americans, especially young Americans, escape from squalor and misery and unemployment rolls.”

  “Squalor.” “Misery.” “Unemployment.” As Lyndon Johnson named those targets, his eyes, behind the thick glasses, narrowed, and his lips, set already in that grim, tough line, tightened and twisted into an expression close to a snarl. And he continued with words that, while none of them applied specifically to the circumstances of his own life, might nevertheless have had a special resonance for someone who had grown up in poverty, and who knew it was only because he hadn’t been given a fair chance.

  “Very often a lack of jobs and money is not the cause of poverty, but the symptom,” he said. “The cause may lie deeper—in our failure to give our fellow citizens a fair chance to develop their own capacities, in a lack of education and training, in a lack of medical care and housing, in a lack of decent communities in which to live and bring up their children.” He paused. “But whatever the cause, our joint federal-local effort must pursue poverty, pursue it wherever it exists—in city slums and small towns, in sharecropper shacks or in migrant worker camps, on Indian reservations, among whites as well as Negroes, among the young as well as the aged, in the boom towns and in the depressed areas.”

  And the aim of the war was made clear, too—and, as he enunciated it, it was titanic, nothing less than the unconditional transformation of a nation to eradicate a great injustice. “Our aim is not only to relieve the symptoms of poverty, but to cure it and, above all, to prevent it,” he said.

  Improved medical care was tied in with the war, he said. “We must provide hospital insurance for our older citizens financed by every worker and his employer under Social Security … to protect him in his old age in a dignified manner … against the devastating hardship of prolonged or repeated illness.” Civil rights was tied in with it. While he had been in Texas, reporters in Washington, discussing with Mansfield, Dirksen and other Senate leaders the prospects for the civil rights bill, had concluded that its passage in its present form was all but impossible. The heroism on the streets of the South hadn’t changed things. “The tumultous [sic] events of recent months have not altered the nose count in the Senate on civil rights,” Marquis Childs wrote. “At most, 43 or 44 of the 67 Democrats will vote to shut off a filibuster. That is grim arithmetic.… It means that no fewer than 25 Republicans must vote for clo[t]ure.… Those 25 will be hard to come by.” And because of that arithmetic, what the New York Times called “persistent reports” had begun circulating in Washington that in order to secure more votes, Johnson “might permit the [bill’s] public accommodations section … to be eliminated or watered down.” The State of the Union address laid that speculation to rest.

  “Let me make one principle of this administration abundantly clear,” Johnson said. “All of these increased opportunities—in employment, in education, in housing, and in every field—must be open to Americans of every color. As far as the writ of federal law will run, we must abolish not some, but all racial discrimination. For this is not merely an economic issue, or a social, political, or international issue. It is a moral issue, and it must be met by the passage this session of the bill now pending in the House.

  “All members of the public should have equal access to facilities open to the public. All members of the public should be equally eligible for federal benefits that are financed by the public. All members of the public should have an equal chance to vote for public officials and to send their children to good public schools and to contribute their talents to the public good.

  “Today,” Lyndon Johnson said, “Americans of all races stand side by side in Berlin and in Vietnam. They died side by side in Korea. Surely they can work and eat and travel side by side in their own country.”

  IN SHARP CONTRAST to John Kennedy’s State of the Union addresses, only about a quarter of Johnson’s speech was devoted to foreign policy, and it was the last quarter. None of that portion was newsworthy, or even particularly significant, although its reference to Khrushchev’s threat to “bury” the United States (“We intend to bury no one, and we do not intend to be buried,” Johnson said) received, predictably, the loudest applause of any line he delivered. Vietnam was mentioned in this portion of the speech only once, when Johnson said America must be “better prepared than ever before to defend the cause of freedom, whether it is threatened by outright aggression or by the infiltration practiced by those in Hanoi and Havana, who ship arms and men across international borders to foment insurrection.” In fact, the only other mention of Vietnam in the entire speech was the statement that Americans of all races stand side by side there.

  POLITICALLY, THE SPEECH WAS a triumph. Clustering around Republicans as they left the Chamber, reporters found the expected hostile reactions muted, pro forma, a little lame. “He’s proposing a cut-rate Utopia,” was the best one GOP representative could come up with. The furthest Dirksen would go was to say that the message “seemed almost like a blueprint for the kind of paradise devoutly to be wished by everyone. But how do you all these things, and with less money?” And the press understood why. The House Republican whip, Leslie C. Arends of Illinois, said that Johnson “promises something for everyone.” But if that was indeed what he had done, “everyone”—voters—might not be disposed to object. Saying that “Republicans found the speech hard to get at,” the Washington Post quoted a Democrat in explanation: “It’s the Sermon
on the Mount. How can anyone attack it?” The Post said that “both his fellow Democrats and Republicans knew they had heard a consummate political artist at work,” and that he had created a tour de force that was hard to criticize. JOHNSON MANAGES TO TOUCH ALL THE BASES IN A SHOW OF POLITICS AND STATESMANSHIP, a Post headline said, the analysis underneath it concluding that “There was something for everybody: economy for the conservatives; an anti-poverty program for the depressed one-fifth of our partially affluent society; a joyous tax cut [that will] give the economy a juicy shot by summer and fall.… In short, Mr. Johnson had his arm around the shoulder of so much of the Congress—and so many of the voters—yesterday that he didn’t leave the Republicans much of a spot to take hold.” No wonder senators and House members had sat like pupils being given “the lesson for tomorrow,” the Post said. No wonder “they hung onto his every whisper” and applauded so often; “he took the high road of statesmanship and they knew he was making hay politically.”

  “Remarkable” was an adjective used in editorials and in columns like Arthur Krock’s (“remarkable for its bold sweep and the bold idealism of his programs, for its eloquence in composition and the masterly manner of its delivery”). “President Johnson’s first State of the Union message today was a classic political document,” the Times said.

  And the triumph was also on a level above the political. “Masterful” as it was politically, Time said, “it was much more” as well. An editorial that may have proved particularly gratifying to Johnson, coming as it did in the New York Post, codifier of liberal opinion, said that the speech had “reinforced the image of a man who has risen resolutely to the tragic occasion under which he assumed office.” It praised his budget. “The arithmetic of his argument may be subject to complicated dispute,” its editorial said. “But even the most ritualistic ‘budget balancers’ cannot fail to be impressed by the boldness with which he and Defense Secretary McNamara have attacked the problems of waste in the military establishment. Military budgets have long been treated as politically untouchable.… President Johnson … has served notice that a day of real reckoning for the Pentagon has arrived.” And then it added that “If excessive sums allocated for ‘overkill,’ obsolescence and other forms of military extravagance can be applied to positive social outcomes, the country can only be fundamentally stronger. And that seems to be Mr. Johnson’s grand design.”

  “It was an address from which Americans could derive pride and inspiration,” the Post said.

  THE CHORUS OF PRAISE focused at first not on the anti-poverty program but on the budget reduction. This was “the stunner” in Newsweek’s account, a “near miraculous achievement” in the Washington Post’s. The key word in headlines across the country was not “poverty” but “economy.” JOHNSON VOWS ECONOMY was the Chicago Tribune’s banner, PRESIDENT—ECONOMY VOW the New York Herald Tribune’s. The announcement that the budget was lower than Kennedy’s was “the new President’s most dramatic passage,” the New York Daily News said. “No one had expected that,” the Times chimed in. “The fact that it is lower is regarded as a considerable political coup for Mr. Johnson.” The scope of the anti-poverty proposal took a few weeks to sink in, in part because there had been little preparation for it. “At least one public-spirited lobbyist in Washington who had been working long and hard to stir up a fight against poverty in the United States was caught by surprise to learn that President Johnson was declaring ‘unconditional war’ on the ancient enemy,” the Washington reporter Douglass Cater wrote in The Reporter magazine in February. Despite his own longtime interest in the subject, Cater wrote, he himself had heard none of “the usual bureaucratic rumblings to indicate such a major governmental initiative in the making.” By the end of those few weeks, however, the scope—the revolutionary ambition—of the proposal had begun to be understood. “The concerted effort at federal, state and local levels for which President Johnson is calling could inject government into social planning on a scale never before attempted,” Cater wrote. Cater knew there was need for such an effort. “There is every reason why government cannot ignore the people who, in Johnson’s phrase, are living on ‘the outskirts of hope.’ ” Yet, he noted, “poverty has so far lacked a power base in Washington capable of sustaining its claims.”

  “Will Johnson show the perseverance to keep his program on target?” Cater asked. “Though his activities to date are largely on the propaganda side, there are some promising signs.” And, despite the efforts of Kennedy adherents, who hurried to explain to columnists and reporters that the poverty program was really Kennedy’s program, the program was accepted as Johnson’s. “In launching a campaign against poverty President Johnson is carrying on what President Kennedy was intending to do,” Walter Lippmann wrote. “I am told that the basic policy was Kennedy’s, and that its translation into a program is Johnson’s.” But, Lippmann made clear, that quibble had little significance to him. The new President “knows about the hidden and forgotten American poor.… In style and in substance the President’s message is an intimate and personal display of the political gifts for which Lyndon Johnson is celebrated. He shows himself to be a passionate seeker with an uncanny gift for finding, beneath public issues, common ground on which men could stand.”

  THE NEW PROGRAM he announced, combined with the demeanor with which he announced it, had achieved another of his purposes. “Once before, during the nightmare that was November, Lyndon B. Johnson stood at the Speaker’s rostrum and addressed himself to Congress, but while the voice was the prairie drawl of President Johnson, the words echoed the program of the fallen President Kennedy. There was no mistaking either voice or words last week,” Newsweek said. “This was President Johnson speaking, very much his own man in his first State of the Union Message, forcefully determined upon a program of his own making.… His own Administration had clearly begun.”

  The transition between the thirty-fifth and thirty-sixth presidencies of the United States, the period that had begun at the moment on November 22, 1963, when Ken O’Donnell had said of the thirty-fifth President, “He’s gone,” had been brought to an end with Lyndon Johnson’s speech on January 8, 1964. It had lasted forty-seven days, just short of seven weeks. Now it was over. “I’ve got to put my own stamp on this administration,” Johnson had known. In his State of the Union message he had done just that—had made the presidency his own, put a stamp, a brand, on it.

  He had done it with an announcement of a program with goals so new and ambitious that it was necessary to go back to Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal to find, perhaps not an equal, but at least a comparison.

  The ranch on which, during that Christmas vacation, he had created the program’s outline was just down the road from the Junction School, where, as a small boy, he had scrawled his name across two blackboards in letters so large that schoolmates become old men still remembered the huge “LYNDON B.” on one blackboard and “JOHNSON” on the other. The program he had announced in the State of the Union was of dimensions so sweeping that with it he was trying to write his name across the whole long slate of American history.

  *

  1 Sam Ealy and the gully: The Path to Power, pp. 87–89.

  2 Until 2008, when it endorsed Barack Obama.

  3 In the event, Barksdale would remain untouched.

  4 Jefferson said he felt the practice was too similar to the address a British monarch makes to Parliament and was therefore too regal for a democracy.

  5 See Master of the Senate, pp. 740ff.

  22

  “Old Harry” II

  AMONG THE HUNDREDS of representatives and senators crowded into the long curved rows of seats as Lyndon Johnson spoke of the state of the union was the one whose reaction was most crucial. From her front-row seat in the gallery above, Lady Bird Johnson was “searching for Harry Byrd every time the word ‘budget’ was mentioned.”

  The new President’s efforts to bring Old Harry over, to “get” him as he had sometimes gotten him in the past, had bee
n resumed before the speech, on the day following Johnson’s return from Texas. The Finance Committee chairman had made his cooperation on the tax cut bill contingent on Johnson’s promise not only to bring the budget in under $100 billion without gimmicks, but to show him and John Williams, Finance’s ranking Republican, written documentation of that; despite the acceleration in his committee’s processing of amendments, enough of them were being held in reserve to ensure that the Finance hearings could take whatever length of time the chairman desired. Knowing that the promise would have to be redeemed, Johnson’s response when, on January 6, Kermit Gordon finally reported that the budget was “locked up,” was to ask him, “When am I going to get the galley proofs” (of the final, printed version) and the “tally sheets” (the unofficial ledgers used by the Budget Bureau for its calculations)? “I’m going to have to show [them] to Harry Byrd sometime,” he said. As soon as the proofs and sheets were ready the next morning, a car was sent to the Senate Office Building for Byrd and Williams.

  “I’ve got a surprise for you, Harry,” Johnson said when the two senators arrived at the White House. “I’ve got the damn thing down under one hundred billion … way under. It’s only 97.9 billion. Now you can tell your friends that you forced the President of the United States to reduce the budget before you let him have his tax cut.”

  Not only was the budget indeed below Byrd’s magic figure, there was magic also in Johnson’s words, appealing as they did to an old man’s pride in his principles and in the victory he had won for them—and appealing also to his pride in his power. Harry Byrd could indeed know that he had forced a President of the United States to bow to his demands: The President himself was acknowledging that, admitting it to his face. Given Johnson’s hatred of losing, his feeling that any defeat was “humiliation,” there was a sacrifice in Johnson’s statement. He was admitting that he had lost, that he had been forced to bow to someone’s demands, and he was admitting it face-to-face to the man who had beaten him. It was still the early days of his presidency—less than seven weeks after Dallas; if the price of achieving governmental progress was such a face-to-face admission, it was a price he was still willing to pay. And not only had he paid it, face-to-face, graciously, he had put it, from this man looking always for words that would “touch,” in words designed to touch.