Praise for The Fierce Urgency of Now
“Insightful . . . Zelizer briskly dispels nostalgia for a time when politics were supposedly easier, asserting that ‘this period of liberalism was much more fragile, contested, and transitory than we have usually remembered.’ . . . His intelligent, informative book certainly contributes to that understanding.”
—The Washington Post
“Clearly written and brimming with telling historical details and sharp insights, The Fierce Urgency of Now is essential reading not only for those who want to understand the Great Society but for everyone concerned with how it might be preserved or expanded.”
—The Washington Spectator
“The Fierce Urgency of Now, Julian E. Zelizer’s account of wins and losses in the Johnson years, combines history with political science, as befits our data-happy moment. The information comes at us steadily—there are useful facts on almost every page. . . . This patient no-frills approach offers illuminations that a more cinematic treatment might not. And if Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton, at times betrays the head-counting instincts of a House whip, well, head-counting is the nuts and bolts of congressional lawmaking.”
—Sam Tanenhaus, The New Yorker
“A smart, provocative study.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Zelizer paints Johnson as a flawed—opportunistic, domineering, ambitious—yet impressive leader, who took advantage of a perfect storm of legislative and governmental conditions to push through an unprecedented number of projects and achievements; a president who gambled greatly while his party and a liberal majority were in ascendancy and won accordingly. . . . Zelizer writes with an expert’s deep understanding of the subject.”
—Publishers Weekly
“From the diverse campaigns for civil rights to those for enacting and implementing the War on Poverty, Zelizer presents a solid narrative of the politics high and low that empowered the grand liberal moment of the ’60s. Indeed, he does a truly splendid job of weaving together presidential, congressional, and movement politics—and thankfully, he never fails to tell us not only who did what and when, but also why they held the views they did, and why, in the face of dramatic events and historic opportunities, many of them were willing or unwilling, to do the right thing.”
—The Daily Beast
“The Fierce Urgency of Now expertly illustrates both the breadth and the limitations of presidential power.”
—Chicago Tribune
“Anyone who wants to understand how the Great Society legislation came to be and why the heart of it remains intact will want to read this important book.”
—BookPage
PENGUIN BOOKS
THE FIERCE URGENCY OF NOW
Julian E. Zelizer is the Malcolm Stevenson Forbes, Class of 1941 Professor of History and Public Affairs at Princeton University and a fellow at New America. He is the author and editor of numerous books on American political history. He is also a weekly columnist for CNN.com and a regular guest on CNN, MSNBC, and NPR.
ALSO BY JULIAN E. ZELIZER
Governing America: The Revival of Political History
Jimmy Carter
Conservatives in Power: The Reagan Years, 1981–1989 (coauthor with Meg Jacobs)
Arsenal of Democracy: The Politics of National Security—from World War II to the War on Terrorism
On Capitol Hill: The Struggle to Reform Congress and Its Consequences, 1948–2000
Taxing America: Wilbur D. Mills, Congress, and the State, 1945–1975
PENGUIN BOOKS
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First published in the United States of America by Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, 2015
Published in Penguin Books 2015
Copyright © 2015 by Julian E. Zelizer
Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.
Photograph credits are here.
ISBN 978-1-101-60549-3
Cover photograph: Steve Schapiro/Corbis
Cover design: Darren Haggar
Version_2
For Meg
We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy.
—MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.,
August 28, 1963, at the Lincoln Memorial, Washington, D.C.
CONTENTS
Praise for The Fierce Urgency of Now
About the Author
Also by Julian E. Zelizer
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
CHAPTER ONE
THE CHALLENGES OF A LIBERAL PRESIDENCY
CHAPTER TWO
DEADLOCKED DEMOCRACY
CHAPTER THREE
NEW PRESIDENT, SAME OLD CONGRESS
CHAPTER FOUR
LEGISLATING CIVIL RIGHTS
CHAPTER FIVE
HOW BARRY GOLDWATER BUILT THE GREAT SOCIETY
CHAPTER SIX
THE FABULOUS EIGHTY-NINTH CONGRESS
CHAPTER SEVEN
CONGRESSIONAL CONSERVATISM REVIVED
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE TRIUMPH OF AUSTERITY POLITICS
CHAPTER NINE
THE ENDURANCE OF THE GREAT SOCIETY
Photographs
Acknowledgments
Notes
Illustration Credits
Index
CHAPTER ONE
THE CHALLENGES OF A LIBERAL PRESIDENCY
Lyndon Johnson hated being vice president. He was at heart a legislator who had been relegated to the sidelines of legislation. For almost three years he had watched John F. Kennedy fumble most of the big domestic issues of the day, either because the president was unwilling to take on the toughest challenges of the moment, or because he was too afraid of the political fallout, or because he knew he lacked the ability to win the legislative battles he faced on Capitol Hill. At the time of Kennedy’s death, most of his major domestic initiatives—including civil rights, a tax cut, federal assistance for education, and hospital insurance for the elderly—were stalled in Congress or had not yet been introduced there. Kennedy and his advisers had made a conscious decision to keep Lyndon Johnson out of their inner circle, despite his extensive experience on Capitol Hill, for fear that his well-known thirst for power would cause problems for the president.1
At 4:00 a.m. on November 23, 1963, the day after Kennedy’s assassination gave him the presidency, Johnson reclined on his bed, his top advisers arrayed around him for an impromptu meeting. He mapped out a grand vision for his team. The new president told Jack Valenti, Bill Moyers, and Cliff Carter, with “relish and resolve,” according to Valenti, “I’m going to get Kennedy’s tax cut out of the Senate Finance Committee, and we’re going to get this economy humming again. Then I’m going to pass Kennedy’s civil rights bill, which has been hung up too long in the Congress. And I’m going to pass it without changing a single comma or a word. After that we’ll pass
legislation that allows everyone anywhere in this country to vote, with all the barriers down. And that’s not all. We’re going to get a law that says every boy and girl in this country, no matter how poor, or the color of their skin, or the region they come from, is going to be able to get all the education they can take by loan, scholarship, or grant, right from the federal government.” After pausing to catch his breath, almost as if exhausted by his own ambitions, the president concluded, “And I aim to pass Harry Truman’s medical insurance bill that got nowhere before.”2
Jack Valenti’s recollection of that moment perfectly portrays the Lyndon Johnson who had suddenly become the nation’s leader. He was a creature of Congress, a legislator by character and long experience, who was determined to push through a transformative body of laws that would constitute nothing less than a second New Deal.
Though many liberals had long doubted that Johnson was anything but a southern racist conservative who sometimes pretended to be one of them, he was, when he became president of the United States, truly determined to expand the role of the federal government in domestic life far beyond what his hero Franklin Roosevelt had accomplished. Johnson had started in politics as a New Deal liberal, and over the years he had grown ever more determined to deal with issues FDR had ignored and on which Johnson himself had been ambivalent at best during his own political career, most notably civil rights and health care. He wanted to use the presidency to build legislative majorities behind the ideas that liberals had been discussing and deliberating—but not enacting into law—for more than a decade.
Lyndon Johnson’s vision of a presidency that would spearhead major liberal legislation faced enormous obstacles, however. Historians have often failed to understand how the Great Society—President Johnson’s agenda of big domestic programs—was enacted, because they have accepted two myths about the nature of the political challenges the Great Society had to face.
The first myth presents the 1960s as the apex of modern American liberalism, the culmination of those forces that arose in the Progressive Era at the turn of the twentieth century when the federal government came to be seen as a positive good, when social movements leaned toward the left, and when conservatives were marginal and irrelevant.
A recent generation of historians has shattered this portrait of the liberal era in politics. They have rediscovered the enormous influence of conservative activists, philanthropists, organizations, and politicians in the decades that directly followed the New Deal. Shifting attention away from the White House and toward the U.S. Congress is one of the most effective ways to gain a very different perspective on the dynamics of American politics before the age of Reagan. Though many of the nation’s presidents had embraced liberal ideas, Congress was a powerful institution dominated by a conservative coalition of southern Democrats and Republicans who rejected liberalism. During the 1930s, as the political scientist Ira Katznelson has shown, FDR was already forced to compromise his New Deal to appease southern Democrats and Republicans by agreeing to federal legislation that protected the racial order of Dixie and made it difficult for organized labor to gain a foothold in that low-wage nonunion region.3
After the 1930s, Congress was a graveyard of liberal legislation. At the time of President Kennedy’s death, the record for liberal reform was meager. The spirit of the New Deal seemed a distant memory. It had been two and a half decades since any significant social legislation had been passed. President Truman lacked the skills of his predecessor, and he spent much of his political capital advancing the nation’s involvement in the cold war. Congressional conservatives killed most of his marquee domestic proposals, including national health care, and even turned back one of the hallmark achievements of the New Deal, the Wagner Act, which had guaranteed the right of workers to organize into unions and created the National Labor Relations Board to supervise union elections, by passing the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, which allowed states to enact “right to work” laws that made it more difficult for unions to organize workers. The Republican president Dwight Eisenhower, though he accepted the permanence of the New Deal, had limited domestic policy aims and spent much of his second term pushing back against liberal Democrats in Congress who were demanding that the government do more, and spend more, to tackle social problems. President Kennedy, a hard-nosed pragmatist who continually rebuffed liberals who he believed had unrealistic expectations of what could be accomplished through legislation, saw his fears confirmed when he was soundly throttled by the conservatives in Congress on a number of proposals. As Kennedy pointed out in an interview in 1962, “I think the Congress looks more powerful sitting here than it did when I was there in the Congress.”
Many of the southern Democratic committee chairmen, who, with their Republican allies, dominated Congress, opposed the changes Johnson hoped to pursue. These long-serving southern Democrats were dead set against racial integration in public accommodations and believed that a proposal to provide insurance to cover the hospital stays of the elderly was socialized medicine. They believed in the right to vote in principle but didn’t support giving the attorney general any power to ensure that African Americans could exercise that right. These conservatives vehemently opposed the idea that the federal government would provide financial assistance to the schools that educated the nation’s children, and they claimed that communists were pulling the strings of all the grassroots movements that were seeking racial equality and economic justice.
The committee chairmen were shocked but not moved by Kennedy’s assassination. When Johnson called on the nation to fulfill Kennedy’s agenda in order to honor the life of the martyred leader, congressional conservatives responded with stolid indifference. When Johnson took office, liberalism was in bad shape, fragile and ineffective, beset on all sides by powerful enemies. If Johnson was going to persuade Congress to pass his policy wish list, he would have to change the power structure that reinforced the conservative stranglehold on the legislative process.
Despite the nostalgia many feel today for the Congress of the 1960s—wishful memories of an institution where it was easier to pass legislation—the truth is that until 1964 Congress was seen as a dysfunctional branch of government, where southern Democrats and Republicans regularly brought the legislative process to a complete standstill.4 The short period in which Congress enacted most of the Great Society programs was more an aberration than the norm in those years.
The second myth about the 1960s has to do with presidential power. Much of the history written about the Great Society in this period presents it as the product of Lyndon Johnson’s brilliant legislative prowess—how he wielded the power of the presidency to force legislators to vote for legislation they had long vehemently opposed. “Johnson left huge footprints wherever he stepped,” wrote the historian Bruce Schulman, “overwhelming nearly everyone who crossed his path and achieving more than nearly any other American politician.”5
The central image of the myth is Johnson as practitioner of “the Treatment”—this imposing man, six feet four and whose fluctuating weight crept up to 240 pounds, literally leaning on his colleagues, physically and verbally bullying, cajoling, lobbying, and threatening until they had no way out but to give him what he wanted. In photographs of the Treatment we see Johnson, having barged into the personal space of his target, putting his hands on the man’s shoulders or inching his nose right up to his face as he bends the man to his will. “The Treatment,” wrote the columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, was “an almost hypnotic experience and rendered the target stunned and helpless.”6 Although the physical dimension was gone when Johnson tried to convince over the phone, he used the same bullying techniques to win people over with his voice. The Treatment could be seductive or terrifying, or usually a little of both.
Yet Johnson did have an uncanny command of the legislative process, which he had perfected as Senate majority leader in the 1950s. He employed powerful strategies for scheduling debates, manipulatin
g arcane parliamentary rules, learning the background and personality of every legislator and using all this information to his advantage, conducting votes on legislation, and using pork barrel politics to build voting alliances on the floor. His mastery of all these tactics has been used to explain how, as president of the United States, Johnson changed the way Americans lived their lives.
Johnson remains a central figure in the debate about the triumph of presidential power in these decades of the twentieth century—the so-called rise of the “imperial presidency.” In this context, Johnson is the essential clue to how presidents can make Congress work by handling legislators and the legislative process in the right way.
When health-care and financial regulation bills were stuck in Congress in late 2009 and early 2010, Democratic senators were reading Robert Caro’s most recent volume about the Senate majority leader Lyndon Johnson to figure out how President Obama could get his troubled bill through an obstructionist Congress. “A few of us joked that we should just get Robert Caro’s book on Lyndon Johnson, highlight a few pages, and leave it on the president’s desk,” one White House aide recalled. “Sometimes a president just needs to knock heads. It’s kind of what the combatants secretly want. [Johnson] twisted their arm, they had no choice—he was going [to] defund them, ruin ’em, support their opponent, whatever the fuck—and the deal was cut. It lets them off the hook. They had no choice. I mean, for fuck’s sake, he’s the goddamn president.”7
But all the political savvy in the world has never been enough to move a Congress where the legislators who controlled the chambers fundamentally opposed the proposals that were coming from the White House. The veneration of the Treatment obscures how politics works; it overemphasizes the capacity of “great men” to effect legislation by force of personality and undervalues the more complicated and significant effects of the political environment in which a president must operate—congressional coalitions, interest groups, social movements, and voting constituencies. In 1963, Johnson understood this better than most, given his extensive experience on Capitol Hill. Political scientists correctly remind us that the institutional rules and procedures of Congress play a huge role in determining what kinds of opportunities presidents have in office because they structure the incentives and behavior of legislators on Capitol Hill.8
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