The Fierce Urgency of Now

by Julian E. Zelizer

  The election was an impetus for Johnson to move as quickly as possible on the Economic Opportunity Act. He made it clear to every member of Congress that he considered this to be his bill and that its success, or failure, would be seen as a measure of his skill as president. “This is a party measure. This is party responsibility. If I lose this,” Johnson told George Mahon of Texas, chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, “it’s telegraphed around the world that, by gosh, the Republicans roll me and roll me good on the key measure, the only single Johnson measure that was sent up. Everything else was Kennedy.”6

  Johnson’s political and electoral motivations meshed with his sincere policy beliefs. Fighting against poverty had been central to what the Democratic Party had been doing since the 1930s. He believed the War on Poverty would help the communities of poor Americans whom he had been surrounded by as a youth. This really was his kind of program.

  A Democrat who launched a war against poverty would offer a stark contrast, in Johnson’s mind, to the man the Republicans selected as their nominee at their convention in the middle of July. When, during his acceptance speech at the convention on July 16, Goldwater issued his steely declaration “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice . . . Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue,” one reporter quipped, “My God, he’s going to run as Barry Goldwater.”7 The party was being driven to the right, pedal to the metal, by its resolute nominee, aided by a burgeoning network of conservative activists inspired by anticommunism, hatred for liberal Supreme Court rulings, and opposition to an expanded role of the federal government in domestic policy. Goldwater’s supporters had been working assiduously since 1960 to win the backing of grassroots organizations and party operatives by persuading them to take a chance on Goldwater rather than choose a centrist Republican who simply mimicked the Democrats and would have little chance of defeating the incumbent.8 Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York, Governor William Scranton of Pennsylvania, and Ambassador to South Vietnam Henry Cabot Lodge, the voices of moderation in the party, had helped Goldwater win by viciously attacking one another in the primaries. Goldwater’s highly controversial vote against the Civil Rights Act in July had positioned him in clear opposition to the expanding role of government under Johnson.

  Johnson wanted to depict himself as a president who cared about average Americans and would use the federal government to help them. His civil rights achievement and his programs to end poverty demonstrated that he was a “President of all the people,” as he described himself throughout the spring and summer. As one reporter for the Washington Post noted, Johnson’s antipoverty proposal would allow him to “project to the voters an ‘image’ of his party as the friend of the little man and the underprivileged—the party with more heart, with the most concern for human values. It is an image that the Democrats as a party have put forward successfully for the most part, especially since the great depression of the 1930s.”9 Declaring war on poverty was also a declaration of war on Goldwater and his conservatism.

  From the moment he announced the plan to the House and the Senate, Republicans came down hard on the proposal, and their attacks became stronger after their party convention. Republicans claimed that the legislation would have no salutary social effects. Despite the small budget Johnson had attached to the plan, they said it would result in an excessive and costly expansion of government power. They characterized the proposal as a political ploy designed to provide the White House with money for vote buying before the election. Goldwater labeled the program a “Madison Avenue” scheme with the “single objective of securing votes.”10 The New Jersey representative Peter Frelinghuysen, a moderate Republican, charged that Sargent Shriver would become a “poverty czar” and that the money would “stir up a nightmare of trouble” when Shriver dispensed it to militant activist organizations in New York.11 The former president Dwight Eisenhower dismissed “catchily labeled panaceas—like ‘war on poverty’—which usually turn out to be new channels by which even more power is siphoned into the federal government.”12 Minority Leader Charles Halleck poured an enormous amount of his energy into blocking the legislation. In his individual meetings with Republicans, Halleck insisted that members commit not to vote for it and warned that he would no longer consider anyone who supported the bill to be part of the Republican Party. The implicit threat was to withhold campaign money and other kinds of assistance.13

  Johnson believed the antipoverty program had a chance of passing before the election despite Republican opposition because it was essentially a revival of New Deal jobs programs—the National Youth Administration, which Johnson had run in Texas, and the Civilian Conservation Corps—and because local party officials would have a major role in deciding how to distribute it. What could be better going into an election? As Johnson had told Chicago’s mayor, Richard Daley, the embodiment of the machine mentality, “Get your planning and development people busy right now to see what you can do for the crummiest place in town, the lowest, the bottom thing, and see what we can do about it. We’ll get our dough, and then you can have your plan ready, and we’ll move.”14 The part of the program that would end up becoming the most controversial—the inclusion of nongovernmental organizations in the decision-making process of the CAAs—had not yet surfaced as a concern for most officials who would be voting on the bill.

  Because the legislation would be cheap to implement—only $500 million for the new War on Poverty programs and about $400 million in additional funds for existing programs that dealt with poverty—Johnson would not have to go back to Harry Byrd or any of the other congressional budget guardians.15 Johnson’s budgetary request was in fact far below what most experts believed would be necessary to make a serious dent in chronic poverty.

  The War on Poverty was also sold as a fundamentally conservative program.16 When Johnson phoned undecided legislators to win their votes, he stressed that his collection of programs would help the poor become self-sufficient and alleviate the conditions that had recently led to urban riots. Of the people who lived in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City, where there had been a riot shortly after the Republican National Convention, Johnson said, “They’ve got no jobs, they can’t do anything, they’re just raising hell.”17

  Johnson’s major theme was that the program would not provide government handouts. He told Congressman Mahon that the initiative would teach the poor “some discipline” and give them skills so they could drive a truck for a living instead of sitting “around a poolroom.”18

  At the time of the legislative debate, the Job Corps caused more controversy than any other program in the EOA, because southerners assumed that in the wake of the passage of the Civil Rights Act the camps would be integrated, though not all southern Democrats opposed the program on these grounds. The opposition of most southerners to federal programs had largely been based on fears of racial integration, which was now going to happen anyway. While some southerners grumbled about any distribution of funds to African Americans, they were happy to see federal money go to the poor whites who were their constituent base. The highest rates of dependency on Aid to Families with Dependent Children were in the South (2.2 percent of the population in the South; in the West and the North it was 1.5 percent, and it was 1.7 percent on the Pacific coast),19 and most of the program’s recipients would be white.20 Most poor Americans in 1964 lived in rural areas and small towns.21 African Americans in the South would get a little money, but whites would get by far the most.

  The bill moved swiftly through the Senate, which finished its work on the bill before the House did. A few weeks after the long filibuster against civil rights ended, the Michigan senator Pat McNamara introduced the bill. The Labor and Public Welfare Committee, on which McNamara was the senior ranking Democrat, conducted hearings on the legislation and sent it to the floor by a vote of thirteen for the bill with only the Republicans Barry Goldwater and John Tower against it. “We oppose this poorly constructed an
d misbegotten legislation,” announced the man who was now the official Republican nominee to the national media.22

  During the floor debate, some southern senators, Richard Russell for one, ritualistically grumbled that the legislation would trample on states’ rights. Sargent Shriver approached Georgia’s senator Herman Talmadge, a segregationist who had been a strong supporter of programs for the rural poor, and asked him for advice on how to deal with southern concerns. He told Talmadge, “This is the problem, Senator. We can’t allow all this money to become bogged down in the state and local government apparatus, and we cannot allow a system to be established whereby the purposes of the legislation can be frustrated totally by the clique that might be hanging around a particular governor.” Talmadge listened closely. The senator would not be able to vote for this legislation, because, in his mind, it was too closely connected to civil rights and could cause him problems in his state. But he was sympathetic to the basic objectives of the program and would be open to Georgia’s receiving the funds if they became available. He decided to give Shriver advice about how to win the vote. After puffing on his cigar and tapping the ashes into his spittoon, he proposed that the legislation allow governors to veto War on Poverty programs they didn’t like. The plan was safe, he explained to Shriver: “They’re not going to disapprove of many of them, because the governors all want to have the money come into their states . . . the governor politically doesn’t want to be in the position of being the person who is preventing a certain program from taking place in his state.” Shriver was impressed and persuaded. Here was a way to please Richard Russell with an amendment that would never be used. It gave each state governor the authority to veto any project that the OEO proposed for his state.23 The amendment was attached to the bill, and the Senate passed the legislation on July 23, just a week after the Republicans ended their convention, by a vote of 61 to 34, with 11 southern Democrats in favor and 11 against.

  In the House, the legislation was first considered in the liberal Education and Labor Committee. Its chairman was Adam Clayton Powell Jr., who also served as minister of Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church and had been a controversial figure from the moment he first entered the House in 1945 and angered colleagues by sitting in the “wrong” sections of the segregated House dining room and barbershop. He had repeatedly antagonized southerners in the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s by proposing amendments to appropriations bills that would have prohibited federal funds from going to racially segregated institutions. One such amendment had become Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

  As chairman, since 1961, Powell had been very effective in moving liberal bills through the committee. He displayed sound parliamentary acumen and an ideological boldness that frustrated southerners who still didn’t believe African Americans should be allowed to drink from the same water fountains they used, let alone run important congressional committees. His flamboyant personality and the color of his skin had caused him trouble in public life. His 1960 trial for tax evasion had ended in a hung jury. Three years later, his refusal to pay a $211,500 slander judgment fine for accusing a Harlem woman of being a “bag woman” for corrupt police in New York City meant he risked arrest anytime he set foot in his own district. Later, a congressional investigation for using government funds to pay for personal travel and expenditures resulted in sanctions against him and the loss of his chairmanship.

  Powell used the same strong-arm tactics to move the Economic Opportunity Act swiftly through his committee as southerners had used against civil rights. He prevented Republicans from offering amendments to the bill. He blocked their participation in markups. He did not allow objections. He scheduled meetings at odd hours and on Mondays, Fridays, and weekends, when legislators traditionally wanted to be back in their districts mingling with constituents, an important activity in the summer of an election year, when members desperately wanted as much interaction with voters as possible. When Republicans did manage to get to committee meetings, Powell gave each minority member just five minutes to cross-examine witnesses.24

  On May 26, Powell’s committee sent the bill, by a party-line vote of 19 to 11, to the more conservative Rules Committee, where Howard Smith would sit on it until after the Senate passed the bill. Then the 1961 reform that had expanded the Rules Committee from twelve to fifteen members finally paid off, along with the prudent inclination of moderate Democrats not to vote against the president’s signature bill in an election year. The committee passed the bill on July 28 by a vote of 8 to 7, with all the Republicans and two southern Democrats, Smith and Colmer, voting with the opposition, but even with the bill out of the Rules Committee the White House was still worried. Larry O’Brien’s vote counts indicated that the administration had somewhere between 200 and 210 House votes for the bill, at least 8 votes fewer than the 218 it needed. Republicans were steadfast in their opposition. Halleck believed the program to be wasteful, and he had no intention of handing Johnson another legislative victory to run on in 1964.

  The key to the vote on the floor would be to make sure that enough southern Democrats could put aside their concerns about civil rights and vote for the bill. To this end, the president had asked for help from the conservative Georgia congressman Phil Landrum, a segregationist who, in the 1950s, had earned the enmity of organized labor for championing legislation to weaken unions but who, like many southerners, supported public works projects and area redevelopment programs that helped the white constituents in his impoverished Appalachian Mountains district. Larry O’Brien believed that Landrum would do a “whale of a job” in winning support for the bill from fellow southern Democrats,25 and Landrum enthusiastically accepted the job. “I want it clearly understood here,” he told his colleagues, “that it is a source of pride to me to have my name on this bill.”26 Landrum was a southern legislator who had accepted the fact that southern life would change with the end of Jim Crow, and now he believed that there should be poverty programs to help everyone in need, black or white. He worked furiously behind the scenes to win his colleagues’ votes for the bill. He reiterated to them that even if certain parts of the program, the Job Corps, for example, would be integrated, there wasn’t much they could do about it, given that the Civil Rights Act had made integration the law of the land, so they might as well accept the federal money. Most legislators understood this without Landrum’s detailing the logic for them, but southern and moderate Democrats felt more politically secure with a solid southern conservative like Landrum publicly in favor of the legislation. If Phil Landrum could say yes to Lyndon Johnson, so could they.

  Feeling the pressure to get the bill passed before legislators left Washington for the Democratic National Convention in August, Johnson cut a series of additional deals to fortify southern Democratic support before the final vote on the floor. To get Russell Tuten’s support, he agreed to have the chief of the Corps of Engineers approve a project in the congressman’s Georgia district (Tuten voted yes). He told Alabama’s Robert Jones that he would talk to the editor of a local newspaper that had endorsed Goldwater and persuade him to endorse Jones in the election (Jones voted yes).27 The Texas Democrat Olin Teague told Johnson he couldn’t vote for the bill because if he did, conservatives in his district would attack him as too liberal, but he promised he would work privately to expand support among other southern members. The president assured him that the program would bring a lot of money into his district, which included Texas A&M University: “By god they’ll be calling it Olin Teague College.”28 With Johnson’s approval, Larry O’Brien even tried to break Republican unanimity by calling on union leaders to pressure liberal Republicans in Pennsylvania. O’Brien also asked railroad owners in the state, who had just received federal assistance as a result of mass transportation legislation, to lobby liberal Republicans (six Pennsylvania Republicans ended up voting in favor of the bill).29

  A problem arose when members of the North Carolina delegation, headed by Congressman Har
old Cooley, informed the administration they would not support the bill unless they were guaranteed that Adam Yarmolinsky would not have a role in running the program.30

  “Who the hell is Adam Yarmolinsky?” Johnson asked.

  Yarmolinsky was Sargent Shriver’s top aide, an organized and efficient administrator whom Shriver relied upon in developing the poverty program; Shriver intended to appoint him as his deputy.

  Yarmolinsky’s parents were leftists who had been active in numerous political causes. He had worked at the Defense Department, where he was one of Robert McNamara’s “whiz kids.” When McNamara said that he wanted to hire Yarmolinsky at Defense, Sargent Shriver suggested the secretary should take a look at his FBI file first. When McNamara received the file from J. Edgar Hoover, he was alarmed to learn that it was “as thick as a Manhattan phonebook.” But that wasn’t the main reason Harold Cooley wanted young Yarmolinsky excluded from working on the poverty program. The main reason was that when he was working at Defense, Yarmolinsky had worked to desegregate southern military bases, including one in North Carolina.31

  Without the votes of the North Carolina delegation, the bill would be in trouble, especially if other southerners followed their lead.32 In an effort to hold North Carolina, House Speaker McCormack convened a meeting in his office with Shriver, Cooley, and South Carolina congressman Mendel Rivers. A number of Democratic whips joined them to hear the discussion. Cooley repeated his demand. Either the administration promised that Yarmolinsky would not work in the program, or the entire North Carolina Democratic delegation would vote no. In a prearranged move, Congressman Rivers announced that he and his fellow South Carolina Democrats would also vote against the bill. It was clear to McCormack that the bleeding could get worse.