The Fierce Urgency of Now

by Julian E. Zelizer

  So the vote was delayed. This only heightened the tension between what Republicans were doing in the Senate and what Goldwater was saying on the campaign trail. Nevertheless, Goldwater won the California primary, and some northern Democrats fretted that his victory would encourage conservative Republicans to break ranks with Dirksen out of fear that their constituents would punish them for supporting the liberals’ bill.

  A VOTE ON CLOTURE, FOLLOWED BY A VOTE ON CIVIL RIGHTS

  Before the longest filibuster in Senate history—sixty days—was finally choked off, West Virginia’s senator Robert Byrd delivered one final speech. With the end in sight, he started speaking at 7:38 p.m. on June 9 and finished the next morning at 9:51. The speech had lasted fourteen hours and thirteen minutes. More than 150 people, including former senators and House members, stood along the walls of the chamber to witness this crucial step toward racial equality and justice in America—the final defeat of the southern filibuster against civil rights. It was standing room only in the press gallery.91

  Preceding the cloture vote, all eyes turned to the senator from Illinois, who wanted to make a speech. Despite having spent a relaxed morning on his Virginia farm, during which he ate a light breakfast and picked flowers from his garden to bring to his office, Dirksen was worn down from the sixteen-hour days he had spent working on the compromise bill. A Senate page handed the senator two pills before he started to talk. The speech he held in his frail hands was twelve pages long.92

  There was near-total silence in the chamber as everyone leaned forward to hear what Dirksen said. The senator, known by many as the Wizard of Ooze, got right to the point. He held nothing back in defending the legislation that would now be a major part of his legacy. He called civil rights a “moral” issue that “must be resolved. It will not go away. Its time has come.” To make his point clear, Dirksen quoted Victor Hugo’s words: “Stronger than all the armies is an idea whose time has come.”

  At 11:00 a.m., after the bell rang to call senators to the chamber, the roll call began. “Mr. Aiken,” called the clerk. “Aye,” the Vermont Republican responded.93 The senators, according to one reporter, “bent over their desks, like schoolboys doing their sums, recording the votes of their colleagues.”94 They scribbled down each man’s vote beside his name, and vote by vote got closer to sixty-seven. The administration’s plan seemed to have worked. Dirksen, and the pressure from religious organizations, had persuaded Hickenlooper to vote for cloture, though the Iowa senator still planned to vote against civil rights. The next to vote was the New Hampshire Republican Norris Cotton, who had insisted to Republican leaders that he would not vote for cloture unless the Senate adopted his amendment to limit the employment commission to dealing with companies of a hundred workers or more. The amendment had failed, but Dirksen had gotten to Cotton. The senator voted aye. As the roll call proceeded, Roger Mudd stood outside the Capitol and reported on the votes as they were relayed to him. A scoreboard tracked the cumulative totals. A little later, all eyes turned to the Nebraskan Carl Curtis, a stalwart Republican and ardent Goldwater supporter, who had said for months he would vote against cloture. When the clerk called his name, he voted aye. It was an acknowledgment of how much times had changed.

  The most dramatic event in the roll call occurred when the clerk reached California’s senator Clair Engle, a liberal who had recently been through two operations for a brain tumor and was unable to speak. Engle was a strong civil rights supporter who was often called Congressman Fireball for his boundless energy. On this historic day, the senator had come to the Capitol in an ambulance and was rolled into the chamber in a wheelchair. The sight of Engle, slouched in his wheelchair with his arm in a sling and a visible hairpiece covering the two surgical scars on his head, was a shock to his fellow senators.95 The senator lifted his quivering hand and motioned toward his right eye to express his approval of the cloture motion.

  Fifteen minutes after the vote began, Senator John Williams, who had focused most of his efforts in Congress on fighting corruption and cutting federal spending, offered the decisive sixty-seventh vote. One senator yelled out, “That’s it!” Carl Hayden, who had remained in the cloakroom to await the moment when he might have to keep his promise to Johnson and vote for cloture, breathed a sigh of relief. When the voting was finished, Humphrey put his tally sheet in his mouth so he could wave both hands in the air in celebration. Mansfield’s body seemed to sag with relief. Richard Russell kept his tearing eyes down on a yellow piece of paper, on which he seemed to be scribbling.96 Most of the southerners were somber.

  The vote for ending the civil rights filibuster was decisive, 71 in favor of cloture and 29 against. Twenty-seven Republicans had joined 44 Democrats in favor of ending the filibuster. Only 6 Republicans, including Goldwater (the others were Wallace Bennett of Utah, E. L. Mechem of New Mexico, Milward Simpson of Wyoming, John Tower of Texas, and Milton Young of North Dakota), had voted against cloture, along with 23 Democrats, mostly southerners, a few from border states, and a few westerners. Nine of Goldwater’s most ardent Republican supporters voted for cloture.

  Lyndon Johnson was on the stage at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, about to give a commencement speech to twenty thousand students and their families, when an aide scrambled onto the platform and whispered to him. The president smiled broadly. “We are going ahead in our country to bring an end to poverty and racial injustice,” Johnson said to the students a few minutes later, with a strong emphasis on the final two words of the sentence. “In the last 10 minutes we made progress. The Senate voted 71 to 29 for cloture.” The crowd erupted into applause.97

  On June 19, a year after Kennedy had introduced his civil rights proposal to Congress, the Senate was ready to vote on a bill. Before the vote, Dirksen made another dramatic speech, this one aimed not at history but at Barry Goldwater, whose nomination Dirksen believed would lead his beloved Republican Party down a path of extremism and reaction. The Illinois senator said that the federal government had adopted a number of laws over the century, including food safety regulation and prohibitions on child labor, that had once been called radical but were now viewed as reasonable enforcement of constitutional purposes. He reiterated his view of civil rights as a “moral force” that would “not be denied, it will not be stayed.” Goldwater stared straight ahead as his colleague indirectly castigated him. Dirksen then read the names of twenty governors who had written to him in support of the bill; he emphasized the name of the Arizona governor.

  At 7:49 p.m. on the eighty-third day after debate had begun, the Senate passed the civil rights bill in a nine-minute vote, 73 to 27, with 46 Democrats and 27 Republicans voting in favor. The southern senators stood firm in their opposition. After the vote was tallied, the African Americans and clergy sitting in the galleries couldn’t help violating the rules of the Senate. They applauded. “We have fought the good fight,” Senator Russell said, “until we were overwhelmed and gagged.”98

  On the evening of July 2, the beginning of the long Independence Day weekend, Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 at 7:00 p.m. in the East Room of the White House. The law ended segregation in public accommodations, strengthened the federal government’s power to investigate and report employment discrimination, prohibited the distribution of federal money to government programs that practiced segregation, and banned gender discrimination in employment.

  After signing the bill, Johnson proclaimed, “We believe that all men are created equal. Yet many are denied equal treatment. We believe that all men have certain unalienable rights. Yet many Americans do not enjoy those rights. We believe that all men are entitled to the blessings of liberty. Yet millions are being deprived of those blessings—not because of their own failures, but because of the color of their skin . . . But it cannot continue. Our Constitution, the foundation of our Republic, forbids it . . . Morality forbids it. And the law I will sign tonight forbids it.” Martin Luther King c
alled the passage of the civil rights bill “the dawning of new hope.”99

  But beneath the euphoria, there were concerns in the White House. While passing civil rights instantly placed Johnson’s presidency in the history books, the short-term political consequences of this successful outcome were not immediately clear. Johnson had always known going into this battle that the electoral costs to him and his party could be very great.

  On the night the president signed the legislation, Bill Moyers walked into his boss’s bedroom and found him looking forlorn. Surprised that Johnson would be sad after such a historic victory, Moyers asked him what was wrong. “I think we have just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come,” Johnson said. While the president could also imagine the benefits that would accrue to him and to his party from greater support among African Americans and liberals, the loss of the South—the longtime electoral base of the Democratic Party—to Republicans would have disastrous consequences.

  The future of the rest of Johnson’s agenda remained in doubt. While the victory over the Senate filibuster meant the end of the legislative veto the conservative coalition had held over domestic policy since FDR’s second term, the progress was limited to one very specific area; there was no pressure available in other areas comparable to what the civil rights movement had exerted on Congress.

  The next question would be whether Johnson could use the momentum from the civil rights victory to break the back of the conservative coalition on other issues—health care, education, poverty—where the numbers on the floor still didn’t add up. Without the social pressure from outside the political system, it seemed unlikely. This was why the upcoming election would be so important; Johnson hoped that Democrats could claim a majority that would allow him to move major legislation in the absence of a social movement as strong as the one that had made civil rights possible.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  HOW BARRY GOLDWATER BUILT THE GREAT SOCIETY

  President Johnson hoped that his victory over congressional resistance to civil rights had positioned him for more legislative successes. While he was signing the Civil Rights Act, his staff, at his behest, was frenetically developing new proposals for the “Creative Period” he envisioned, during which the federal government would solve many of the biggest problems that faced the nation.1 He had assembled thirteen task forces, staffed by some of the most brilliant experts from government, universities, and think tanks, to develop proposals he would introduce to Congress after the election. They focused on a broad range of issues—education, health care, the preservation of the country’s natural beauty, income maintenance, among others.

  Johnson knew that his success of the moment didn’t guarantee more victories. His power was not unchallenged, and he wouldn’t have the fervor of the civil rights movement to create the same level of pressure for every ambitious piece of liberal legislation he wanted to pass through Congress. He would need a decisive electoral mandate in the upcoming November election to establish liberal Democratic dominance over Republicans and southern Democrats in Congress.

  A DEFINING WAR ON POVERTY

  The first big effect of the election came well before November 3, as Johnson looked forward to creating an issue that would distinguish him from his Republican opponent, who was expected to be Senator Barry Goldwater, and show liberals that he was truly devoted to New Deal principles. He was also looking backward. As an accidental president, Johnson wanted to distinguish himself from his predecessor and legitimate himself and his presidency. Because he believed the true measure of a president was his legislative record, looking ahead to November, he wanted to embellish his record for the day when voters would evaluate him as the nation’s leader. Shortly after taking over the presidency, he had told two of his friends, “I have a very difficult problem. I feel a moral obligation to finish the things that JFK proposed. But I also have to find issues I can take on as my own . . . I have to get reelected in a year and a half, so I have to have something of my own.”2

  The something of his own was the War on Poverty.

  The idea had grown out of policy research and discussions conducted by the economist Walter Heller for John Kennedy. Heller and other liberals were frustrated with the inadequacy of existing programs to help Americans who were living in poverty. The federal government had been providing assistance to the poor throughout much of the twentieth century, as Washington took a stronger role over state and local governments and charitable institutions.3 But it had become clear in the 1950s that Aid to Dependent Children, which had been created in 1935, and other federal programs for the poor were not working. With almost forty million Americans living in poverty in the best economic times, there seemed to be an urgent need for more robust government action. The same liberal legislators who were pushing for civil rights and health care—the Illinois senator Paul Douglas and others—had been calling for legislation to address the problem. Campaigning in the 1960 West Virginia primary, Kennedy had been struck by the severity of the economic hardship he encountered. In 1962, Michael Harrington published The Other America, in which he analyzed the two nations he said coexisted in the United States, the affluent America and the “other America.”

  No one was satisfied with how the problem of poverty was being addressed. For liberals, the issue was that existing benefits were inadequate, primarily because federal bureaucrats didn’t know what services the poor really needed. For conservatives, it was that the poor were becoming dependent on welfare programs. In 1962, Kennedy had proposed and Congress had passed the Public Welfare Amendments, which funded “rehabilitative services” to help the unemployed enter the job market and provided more money for training social workers. For liberals, it was a good start; for conservatives, it was more of the same problem.

  Heller had briefed Johnson about the poverty issue and the programs Heller and his interagency working group had come up with to deal with it. Johnson liked what he heard. Heller told him that his team had rejected expensive plans to create public jobs and instead settled on a more modest proposal that would allocate federal money to local governments and citizen-run organizations so they could design plans they believed would best help their impoverished communities. Heller’s group had also discussed a work-training program for young men.

  Heller’s approach to a war on poverty made sense to Johnson. The programs would tackle a social problem that had concerned him since he was a young man in Texas. “That’s my kind of program,” Johnson told Heller. “I’ll find money for it one way or another.”4

  Johnson sent a proposal for the Economic Opportunity Act (EOA) to the House of Representatives in April, while southerners were still filibustering civil rights. The proposed legislation comprised assistance for those living below the poverty level and for those who were not self-sufficient. Rather than placing the poverty program under the control of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare or another existing government agency, Johnson proposed creating the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) to administer and coordinate the various pieces of the policy. The idea was that establishing an independent agency would allow the director of the program to be more aggressive when launching new initiatives, because he would not be working for a cabinet official who was responsible for handling many other programs as well, and would centralize decision making under one administrative body so that the programs could be coordinated. Johnson selected John Kennedy’s brother-in-law Sargent Shriver, the energetic and charismatic director of the Peace Corps, to head the OEO. Although Shriver initially resisted on the grounds that he preferred to stay with the Peace Corps, he succumbed to Johnson’s intense personal pressure.

  The central program in the War on Poverty would be the Community Action Program (CAP), which was based on experimental grants similar to those President Kennedy had authorized to combat juvenile delinquency. The CAP would rely on local Community Action Agencies (CAAs) that would be established by local com
munities and staffed by local officials and local activists to direct the allocation of federal antipoverty funds. The OEO would provide financial and technical support to the CAAs that put forth the best comprehensive plans to coordinate the funds from federal, state, and local agencies to target poverty. The CAAs would also use funds from the OEO to promote local government reforms to improve the responsiveness of the government to the poor.

  The idea of community action was rooted in the cutting-edge social science of the period—the principle of “maximum feasible participation”—that poor people should be empowered to participate in designing the programs that would assist their communities rather than having anonymous bureaucrats do this for them. Funds would be spent most effectively if individuals who had firsthand knowledge of the problems in specific communities had a role in deciding how the money would be used. The principle was a response to a concern on the part of younger liberals that federal bureaucracies had not appropriately served the interests of the poor.5

  The proposed legislation also included the Jobs Corps—a work-training program primarily for people between sixteen and twenty-one years of age from dysfunctional living environments to spend time in camps, where they would receive education and vocational training. The program would also provide loans to poor rural families and small businesses. There would also be a domestic Peace Corps—Volunteers in Service to America, or VISTA—that would train young people and send them around the country to work on projects to improve living conditions in poor communities.