The Fierce Urgency of Now

by Julian E. Zelizer

  Johnson was an intelligent young man but not a disciplined student. He frequently missed classes and struggled to keep up with his schoolwork; he was more interested in following politics and playing with the neighborhood boys. His fondest memories were of accompanying his father to Austin and watching firsthand the exciting life of legislative politics. Then, in the 1920s, after having both prospered financially and enjoyed a long period of professional respect, Sam lost much of his money when drought and the boll weevil ravaged the cotton crop; cotton prices plummeted, and with them the value of Sam Johnson’s investments. When Sam retired from the state legislature in 1924, he was so deep in debt that he was forced to take such low-paying jobs as working on road construction crews. By the time Lyndon finished school, the Johnsons were living in poverty.

  Defying his parents, who wanted him to continue with his education, Johnson traveled to California, where he worked a number of makeshift jobs. After a few months on the road, he returned to Texas, where he found construction stints near Johnson City. One was dragging gravel on the highway for a road construction crew, a job that was physically brutal and emotionally unsatisfying. He didn’t earn much money and hated the job. “I’m tired of working just with my hands, and I’m ready to start working with my brain,” he told his mother.5 He took the college entrance exams in 1927 and passed. Lyndon enrolled in the Southwest Texas State Teachers College, an institution of higher learning intended for students who were planning to go into teaching as a vocation.

  The Johnson family could offer him little financial support, so Lyndon had to work his way through college. For a time he worked as a janitor to pay for his books, room, and board. He was not a star student at Southwest Texas State, though his classmates recognized his native intelligence and charisma. He took part in campus politics and did some reporting for the college newspaper.

  Short of money again, he left school and took a teaching job in a south Texas town called Cotulla. His students were the children of dirt-poor Mexican American farmworkers who couldn’t afford to send them to school with lunch. The town was rigidly segregated. Johnson saw a group of Mexican Americans desperately searching through piles of garbage in hopes of finding grapefruit rinds to eat.6 The white Texans in town, he recalled, treated the Mexicans “worse than you’d treat a dog.”7 Johnson threw himself into his teaching; he was highly effective in the classroom and went out of his way to offer extracurricular help to his students. After he returned to college and finished his degree in 1930, he worked at several other teaching jobs.

  The lure of politics was strong. Congressman Richard Kleberg, who was elected in 1931, hired Johnson as his secretary in Washington. The position proved to be an exceptional opportunity; the wealthy Kleberg was profoundly uninterested in the job of legislating and spent little time in his office. Johnson seized the opportunity; he took over as much responsibility as possible and developed contacts throughout the House. Acting like a party leader, he organized a “Little Congress” of staffers who met regularly, plotted strategy, and gained the attention of key members of the Texas delegation, which included the populists Maury Maverick and Wright Patman, and also Sam Rayburn, who would become Speaker of the House in 1940. Johnson had an affinity for the New Deal; he saw the federal government embracing the same ideals his father had promoted as a politician back in Texas and addressing the same chronic economic problems he had confronted as a child, a teacher, and a worker. Johnson lobbied Kleberg to vote in favor of the Agricultural Adjustment Act even though the congressman was predisposed to vote against such federal interventions in local affairs. When Johnson was offered a highly paid position as a lobbyist for General Electric, he turned it down; he committed himself instead to the pursuit of higher political office.

  In 1935, Sam Rayburn, who was then a rising congressman in the House Democratic caucus, recommended Johnson to President Roosevelt to serve as director of the National Youth Administration (NYA) in Texas. Roosevelt had created the NYA by executive order that year to provide unemployed young Americans with education and vocational training. The program offered young men and women public jobs that paid about $30 a month. Johnson quickly earned a reputation in Washington and Texas as an effective administrator with shrewd political skills. The head of the NYA, Aubrey Williams, informed the president that Johnson was running the best of all the state operations. Johnson displayed intense compassion for the impoverished communities that the NYA was assisting. He worked hard to bring federal assistance to Mexican American children who lived under the same conditions as those he had once taught, and to African American children too. He created an informal advisory council of African Americans to make sure assistance money was reaching young African Americans, and he also boosted the level of financial assistance that went to African American college students for their tuition. He went so far as to stay overnight at African American colleges, at a time when public accommodations were strictly segregated throughout the South, in order to monitor firsthand how his programs were working.8

  In 1937, the same year Roosevelt was under attack from conservatives in Congress over his effort to pack the Supreme Court, Johnson won a special election to represent the Tenth District of Texas in the House of Representatives. As a congressman, he dutifully followed the wishes of the president and the party leadership. When disaffected southern Democrats joined with Republicans in a conservative voting bloc, Johnson remained a strong defender of the national party agenda—federal development programs for farmers, rural electrification, and federal jobs. Fully committed to the overall vision of the New Deal, Johnson worked tirelessly to bring funds back to his district. He was loyal to FDR and voted in favor of all his New Deal legislation, even when his southern colleagues broke with the president on such controversial measures as the establishment of a federal minimum wage and the reorganization of the executive branch. One of FDR’s most influential assistants said that the Texan had proven to be a “perfect Roosevelt man.”9

  Sam Rayburn thought so highly of Johnson that when he became Speaker of the House in 1940, he invited him to participate in his “Board of Education,” a group of Democrats who were invited to join the Speaker in a twelve-by-twelve-foot room on the ground floor of the Capitol where “board” members regularly drank bourbon, played cards, and plotted political strategy and tactics. As a member of this elite inner circle, Johnson learned Rayburn’s political philosophy, including such famous axioms as “You cannot be a leader, and ask other people to follow you, unless you are willing to follow too,” and “Any jackass can kick down a barn, but it takes a good carpenter to build one.” The sayings were simple, but they guided many legislators in making sound political decisions.

  In 1941, Johnson ran for a vacant Texas Senate seat. His campaign emphasized his commitment to New Deal liberalism, particularly the programs that benefited farmers and the unemployed, but he also emphasized the intensity of his opposition to legislation that supported unions and civil rights—a shift away from his previous support for the minimum wage and other legislation that helped organized labor. He was hoping to appeal to the great majority of voters in his state who opposed civil rights and unions, but the shift to the right didn’t work. Johnson was devastated when he lost to the brutal and corrupt campaign of a thoroughly conservative opponent, but he had learned a great deal about the underside of electoral politics.

  A frustrated Johnson vowed that he would never again allow himself to be defeated by vote manipulation and fraud. He had been a liberal with sympathy for the disadvantaged, but now he was also determined to be a ruthless politician. He would do whatever he thought was necessary to win higher office. In that spirit, he volunteered to serve in the war, well aware that the experience would become a vital part of his portfolio in his next electoral run. His service mainly consisted of fact-finding missions for General MacArthur in the Pacific. When he volunteered for a bombing mission and his plane came under fire, he was awarded a Silver Star, even though
others on the mission, who had much greater responsibilities, received nothing. MacArthur knew Johnson was close to the president; he even suspected Johnson of spying on him for FDR.

  In 1942, when FDR asked legislators who had been serving in the military to resume their political jobs, Johnson eagerly returned to Washington, where he faced a challenge from a right-wing Democrat in the 1944 election. Major victories in the European war bolstered popular support for all of Roosevelt’s political allies, and Johnson won reelection to the House.

  After the war’s end and Roosevelt’s death, Johnson took aim at the unions, in an effort to improve his right-wing credentials. In 1947, he voted in favor of the Taft-Hartley Act, which undercut the ability of workers to unionize. The legislation allowed states to enact right-to-work laws, which meant that workers did not have to pay union dues in those states but could work in a unionized plant and benefit from wages and other terms negotiated by a union without paying to support the union. The opposition to unions in the South was as intense as the animosity toward civil rights. Many southerners feared that unionization would destroy the one competitive advantage their economically underdeveloped region had over northern industry—cheap labor, much of which came from the African American community. Because of such opposition, unions had largely failed in their efforts to organize southern workers. The white South also hated the Congress of Industrial Organizations for its racially diverse vision of industrial unionism. No southern legislator, including Johnson, believed he could survive politically if he supported organized labor.

  Johnson’s next opportunity to advance came in 1948, when the incumbent senator Lee “Pappy” O’Daniel announced he would not run for reelection. This time Johnson mounted a ruthless campaign and defeated Texas’s former governor Coke Stevenson, a staunch opponent of racial equality and critic of America’s growing role overseas. The tactics on both sides were controversial, as was the vote count; the key to Johnson’s victory was a town in south Texas where adjusted ballots gave him a statewide victory by an unlikely eighty-seven-vote margin. Stevenson decided not to challenge the results in state court because a full investigation would have revealed that his campaign had also tampered with ballots. A federal court granted Stevenson an injunction that would prevent Johnson’s name from appearing on the ballot in the general election. Desperate to reverse what could be a devastating decision for his candidacy, Johnson sought the assistance of the brilliant lawyer Abe Fortas, who directly petitioned the Supreme Court associate justice Hugo Black to end the injunction. Black ruled in Johnson’s favor. Though Johnson won the election, his opponents, and some supporters, always believed that Johnson had stolen the election, and he was forever after derided by his Texas political enemies as “Landslide Lyndon.”

  Johnson thrived in the Senate. He loved the wheeling and dealing that took place there, and he earned the respect of the Georgia senator Richard Russell and other senior southern leaders. Johnson was loyal to these powerful men; he worked Russell’s will on civil rights, though he was allowed to remain publicly neutral on the issue to burnish his acceptability as a potential candidate for national office, and he defended powerful Texas oil interests against proposed federal regulations. In 1953, Russell orchestrated Johnson’s election as Senate minority leader after Republicans retook control of the White House and Congress in a devastating election for his party. When Democrats won back control in the midterm elections of 1954, they elected Johnson as their majority leader, making him one of the most powerful people in Washington.

  As majority leader, Johnson struggled to balance the demands of the growing cohort of liberal Democrats and the southern committee chairmen who controlled the chamber. His strategy was to find issues where Senate Democrats could ally with the Eisenhower administration against factions of the GOP that opposed the president. Hence, Johnson led Democrats to embrace a strong internationalist stance, support tough policies against the Soviet Union, and tag Eisenhower’s Republican opponents, primarily the Ohio senator Robert Taft and Indiana’s senator Homer Capehart, as isolationists. He defended many federal programs against conservative attacks, both older New Deal programs and newer ones—funding for scientific research at universities, for the space program, and for interstate highway construction. He moved bills through the Senate that raised the federal minimum wage and provided federal support for housing; these liberal initiatives had been dormant in the upper chamber until the majority leader threw his weight behind them. Johnson earned the respect of liberal legislators, among them Senator Humphrey, who agreed to work as a liaison between the majority leader and northern Democrats, who still didn’t fully trust him.

  The most difficult issue for Johnson was civil rights. Like other southern liberals and moderates, he was visibly conflicted. In his private conversations and correspondence, he regularly expressed the racist beliefs common in Texas that African Americans were intellectually and physically inferior to whites. At the same time, though almost no politician anywhere in the South could support civil rights legislation and get reelected, he displayed genuine concern about racial injustice and expressed support for alleviating the terrible conditions under which African Americans suffered in the United States. He said of his time teaching Mexican American kids in south Texas, “I could never forget seeing the disappointment in their eyes and seeing the quizzical expression on their faces—all the time they seemed to be asking me, ‘Why don’t people like me? Why do they hate me because I am brown?’”10 His work at the NYA and his support for the minimum wage and public housing were early evidence of his support for policies that indirectly alleviated racial inequality. Like many Americans, he was moved by the bold actions of civil rights protesters. He believed that chronic racial tensions in the South undermined the national position and prerogatives of southern politicians and regional business leaders. Senator Russell’s mentoring of Johnson and acceptance of his relatively moderate position on racial issues were calculated to get Johnson into the White House, where, presumably, he would hold the line against any extreme concessions on civil rights, or so Richard Russell believed, and he would defend government policies that benefited the region—primarily high levels of defense spending and generous farm subsidies. In 1956, Johnson was one of only three southern legislators who did not sign the “Southern Manifesto,” a virulent denunciation of the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision.

  Though he personally expressed racist sentiments, Johnson had a genuine belief, born out of his father’s work in Texas politics and the New Deal and out of his own, that the government had a responsibility to alleviate social problems. He knew poverty and its effects from his own experience, and he had genuine sympathy for the poor, regardless of the color of their skin; he identified with them personally, and it was this that gradually moved him toward supporting major federal civil rights legislation, including the 1957 bill.11 The legislation offered a modicum of protection for the voting rights of African Americans but was so weak that it actually protected southern political and economic institutions. Johnson’s work on the bill, along with his support for anti-union legislation, did little to dispel abiding liberal suspicions that he was a conservative southern wolf in ill-fitting sheep’s clothing.

  In 1960, Johnson was furious when John Kennedy, who was younger and less experienced, won the Democratic presidential nomination, but he agreed to be Kennedy’s running mate because he believed it might improve his chances of succeeding Kennedy in 1964 or 1968. Their victory awarded Johnson the job worth less than a bucket of warm piss and took him from being a powerful figure in the Senate to being the butt of vice presidential jokes.

  Despite his ambivalence about civil rights and unions, the man who became President Johnson on November 22, 1963, was and had always been a New Deal liberal. He was hesitant and sometimes fearful of the demands the younger liberals were making on Washington, but he was and had always been sympathetic to the concerns that drove them. He had grudgingl
y and cautiously moved toward supporting civil rights legislation, and by the time he became president, he sensed that the time had come to move decisively for civil rights. He was prepared to take big steps in that direction, but first he had to deal with another piece of President Kennedy’s unfinished business.

  STARTING THE GREAT SOCIETY WITH BUDGET CUTS

  Like so much of Kennedy’s agenda, his tax bill, first proposed in his 1963 State of the Union address, was stalled in Congress. In September, the House had passed a version of the legislation that lowered individual and corporate taxes by about $13 billion, but the issue of spending was left unresolved. A number of southern Democrats voted for the bill after Wilbur Mills, the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, assured them the Senate would secure an agreement for a stringent budget. Now the bill was lying inert in the Senate Finance Committee, chaired by the deficit hawk Senator Harry Byrd of Virginia.

  Johnson knew he would face the same obstacles as Kennedy had faced if he tried to move the bill. To get it passed, he would have to make a deal with Byrd that would include the serious budget cuts he and the other conservatives were demanding. It was not an auspicious way to begin a drive to pass the massive amounts of social welfare legislation Johnson had in mind, but he figured he could turn the situation to his advantage if he handled it right. He could ask for more money for programs later.