The Fierce Urgency of Now

by Julian E. Zelizer

  Though Johnson did not deliver a very thrilling acceptance speech on his fifty-sixth birthday, he did offer an unabashed defense of his domestic record. He promised that the Democratic Party would “continue to extend the hand of compassion and the hand of affection and love to the old and the sick and the hungry.” Building on Humphrey’s popular refrain, Johnson worked his way through a list of issues that mattered to the country, essentially asking for a mandate from voters: “Most Americans want medical care for older citizens. And so do I. Most Americans want fair and stable prices and decent incomes for our farmers. And so do I. Most Americans want a decent home in a decent neighborhood for all. And so do I. Most Americans want an education for every child to the limit of his ability. And so do I . . . Most Americans want victory in our war against poverty. And so do I.” Johnson told the delegates that the nation, “in this hour, has man’s first chance to build the Great Society—a place where the meaning of man’s life matches the marvels of man’s labor.”

  On the final day of the convention, Johnson also spoke to Democratic leaders in a private meeting to inform them of a theme he was planning to make central for the remainder of the campaign. The idea was that a “frontlash,” which would move Republican voters away from their right-wing candidate, would be more significant than any backlash among Democrats against civil rights. Johnson cited opinion polls that showed Goldwater was receiving less support from Republican and independent voters than Richard Nixon had in 1960. “We are finding that one out of every three Republicans stated they are part of the frontlash and will not vote Republican,” Johnson said. “We’ll gain two to three times as many as we lose.”46 He asked his advisers to spread this message to the press.47

  Johnson had ample reason to feel good about his prospects. National polls showed that he had a formidable lead over his opponent throughout the country. In the Republican state of Maine, support for Johnson over Goldwater was running seven to one. In Maryland, where Governor George Wallace of Alabama had scared some Democrats by doing relatively well in the Democratic primaries with a campaign attacking civil rights, Johnson received 60 percent approval ratings. In Wisconsin, the other state where Wallace had done well, Johnson led Goldwater 53 percent to 35 percent. Gallup reported in early September that Johnson was right about the “frontlash.” More Republicans were planning to defect from their party than in any of the last seven presidential election cycles.48

  During the campaign, the Democratic National Committee made unprecedented use of television spots to convey the message that the president was a productive leader and Goldwater was a dangerous extremist “who would ruin this country and our future,” as Jack Valenti put it.49 The DNC had signed a contract with the advertising firm Doyle Dane Bernbach, which had created many famous campaigns, among them “Think Small” for Volkswagen. The Johnson campaign spent a lot of money on television advertising and broadcast, according to one study, more negative spots than any campaign until that time.50

  There were also many television spots that emphasized the positive achievements of the Democratic administration (a strong economy with a booming GNP and low rates of unemployment) and the progressive legislation (the Civil Rights Act and the Economic Opportunity Act) that Johnson had already pushed through Congress.

  One ad, called “Accomplishments,” reviewed the tragic circumstances under which Johnson took office, then went on to explain how Johnson passed a number of historic bills, including the tax cut and civil rights, within a few months. “John Kennedy’s death commands what his life conveyed: that America must move forward,” Johnson was seen saying. “And now the ideas and the ideals which he so nobly represented must and will be translated into effective action.” The narrator then said, “The promises made that November day were strong promises. One by one, they have been kept,” and listed Johnson’s legislative achievements and also his firm stance against communism after the Gulf of Tonkin attacks.

  The president’s campaign also released a blistering series of negative television ads designed to eviscerate Goldwater in the eyes of Democrats, independents, and nervous Republicans. The most famous of these ads went on the air on September 7, 1964. It began with a girl picking the petals off a daisy. Viewers watched her counting the petals to ten; then they heard a male voice counting down from ten to one. The camera zoomed in on one of the girl’s eyes, and a nuclear explosion filled the screen. President Johnson, in voice-over, said, “These are the stakes—to make a world in which all of God’s children can live, or to go into the dark. We must either love each other, or we must die.”51 Another male voice said, “Vote for President Johnson on November 3. The stakes are too high for you to stay home.”

  The “Daisy” spot, though it aired only once, remains the most famous of the campaign, but there were other tough-minded ads that conveyed the perception that Goldwater’s domestic policy ideas were just as radical and dangerous as his foreign policies. “Keep fear of Goldwater as unstable, impulsive, reckless in public’s mind,” Jack Valenti had advised Johnson. “This is our strongest asset. Don’t let up on the possibility of Goldwater dismantling Federal government—specific hits on Social Security, TVA, farm subsidies.”52 In one ad, viewers watched Ku Klux Klan members marching in their regalia, burning crosses. The narrator said, “‘We represent the majority of the people in Alabama who hate niggerism, Catholicism, Judaism, and all the isms of the whole world.’ So said Robert Creel of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan. He also said, ‘I like Barry Goldwater. He needs our help.’”53

  Another ad reviewed a series of statements Goldwater had made about Social Security. The camera focused on a Social Security card, the iconic image of New Deal liberalism, and viewers were told, “On at least seven different occasions, Barry Goldwater has said that he would drastically change the social security system . . . even his running mate, William Miller, admits that Barry Goldwater’s voluntary plan would wreck your social security.” The camera then zoomed in on a pair of hands ripping the card apart, followed by a video of Lyndon Johnson delivering a speech in which he warned, “Too many have worked too long and too hard to see this threatened now by policies which promise to undo all that we have done together over all these years.” The narrator concluded, “For over thirty years, President Johnson worked to strengthen Social Security. Vote for him on November 3.”

  The rest of the campaign emphasized the same themes. In a speech broadcast on national television, Johnson, without mentioning Goldwater, said, “We are now told that we the people acting through Government should withdraw from education, from public power, from agriculture, from urban renewal, and from a host of other vital programs. We are now told that we should end Social Security as we know it, sell T.V.A., strip labor unions of many of their gains and terminate all farm subsidies. We are told that the object of leadership is not to pass laws but to repeal them.” During a southern campaign swing, Johnson defended his civil rights record and told his audience they should expect more. In Louisville, Kentucky, he told a large crowd gathered near the courthouse square, “We are going to wipe out poverty in this region, in the rural mining areas, as well as in the cities of Kentucky.”54

  Goldwater’s campaign was poorly organized, and his advertising was not nearly as effective as Johnson’s. The Arizona senator also tended to play the part the Democrats had assigned to him. During a visit to Appalachia, one of the most economically depressed regions in the country, Goldwater told a cheering crowd of about six thousand people, “The theorists of the much-advertised ‘Great Society’ have redefined the luxuries of yesterday as the necessities of today, and those who fall behind in this race constitute the new class of ‘the poor.’” The senator dismissed the War on Poverty as outdated “gimmicks” from the Great Depression era that would stifle economic growth.55 He ripped into the Medicare proposal in a speech to a group of retirees in Florida.

  Goldwater’s campaign was also wrongheaded and poorly executed. As he became more desperat
e, he attacked the morality of Johnson’s administration rather than its public policies. A lot of Goldwater’s time and energy was devoted to showing that he was neither extreme nor crazy, but this defensive approach only served to highlight how extreme he was.

  LIBERAL LANDSLIDE

  The election was a Democratic triumph. Johnson won 43,129,484 popular votes and 486 electoral votes to Goldwater’s 27,178,188 popular votes and 52 electoral votes. Johnson won the biggest popular vote, 61 percent, in American history, better than FDR in 1936, and registered the largest margin of victory. Goldwater’s extreme right-wing candidacy, as well as the excitement over Johnson’s legislation and the positive memories in the electorate of John Kennedy, drove the size of Democratic majorities to historic levels. The composition of Congress, which the New York Times columnist James Reston would later term the “Goldwater Congress,”56 changed dramatically. With huge majorities in the House (295–140) and the Senate (68–32), Democrats would have more seats than at any time since 1936. Thirty-nine out of forty Democratic incumbents supported by the DSG were reelected, while forty of the sixty-six nonincumbents who received assistance were victorious.57 The conservative coalition in Congress had been reduced to its smallest size since it had formed. The Senate Democratic majority was the biggest since 1940. The thirteen liberal Democrats elected to the Senate in 1958 all retained their seats. In addition, Democrats won three Republican seats, including Robert Kennedy’s victory over Kenneth Keating in New York. Robert Taft Jr., the son of “Mr. Republican,” lost to Stephen Young in a stunning upset. Conservatives were dismayed because many hoped that Taft could become a future leader.58

  Democrats were disappointed that the Republicans carried the Deep South—Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana—though the Democratic South had started to crack before Goldwater came on the scene, and there were compensations to the Democrats for the loss of these states. African American voting, though still limited, increased and was almost entirely Democratic.59 Johnson had started to build a strong coalition in the coastal states and in the Republican Midwest, including in North Dakota, Missouri, Michigan, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. The “frontlash,” as Johnson had predicted, kept Republican voters away from the polls or impelled them to vote Democratic. Johnson won Kansas with 54.1 percent of the vote, the first time the state had not gone Republican since 1936. Maine went for the Democratic candidate for just the second time in the state’s history—and gave him close to 69 percent of the vote. Johnson also won in Vermont, which had not gone Democratic since the 1820s.60 Goldwater won only sixteen non-southern congressional districts.61 Democrats did extremely well among women, college-educated voters, and the elderly, and in the big cities and the suburbs.62

  A study by the Christian Science Monitor found no evidence of a white backlash in seven cities where lower- and middle-income white Democrats had been expected to vote Republican in higher numbers as a result of Johnson’s push for civil rights. In three Polish districts in New York, the Democratic margin increased from 75 percent in 1960 to 82 percent in 1964. In Chicago, Johnson won in key ethnic communities by margins that were bigger than Kennedy’s. Johnson won an overwhelming victory in a ward in Cleveland, Ohio, where African American schoolchildren were being bused into schools with white children. He did extremely well in the state of Indiana, where many observers had wondered, after George Wallace’s unexpected victory in the Democratic primary, whether the population of white steelworkers would migrate toward the Republicans.63 They didn’t. The entire Iowa delegation in the House flipped to the Democratic side of the ledger, a dramatic reversal for one of the most conservative Republican factions in Congress. The most successful Republicans were those who had distanced themselves from Goldwater and his conservative politics. The NAACP reported that one senator and thirteen congressmen were defeated mainly because of their votes against civil rights.64

  There was plenty of evidence from polling data that voters had favored liberal ideas in the election, had confidence in the federal government, and supported, broadly speaking, many of the key Johnson initiatives. According to the National Election Study, one of the most sophisticated analyses of the electorate, Americans had voted in favor of liberalism, tended to favor civil rights legislation, and wanted the government to do more to help people obtain health insurance.

  Many Republicans saw their losses as a sign that the decision to shift to the right, notwithstanding their gains in the South, had been devastating to the Republican Party. In New York, one upstate Republican commented, “After this election, the conservatives simply are not entitled to be heard any more. They have had their chance and almost killed the party in the process. The election proves we must appeal to independents and Democrats if we’re to win, and that means a far less conservative tack.”65

  With the election behind him, Johnson immediately prepared to ask for more legislation. He was not satisfied with the Civil Rights Act and the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964. He wanted more from Congress: he wanted everything he had told Bill Moyers and his other advisers he wanted on the night Kennedy was killed; and it seemed to him, or at least he would proclaim, that the American people had just told Congress they wanted exactly what their president wanted.

  CHAPTER SIX

  THE FABULOUS EIGHTY-NINTH CONGRESS

  The election of 1964 produced the most liberal Congress since the Democratic landslide of 1936. “There were so many Democrats,” noted the young Illinois representative Donald Rumsfeld upon surveying the landscape after Lyndon Johnson’s victory, “that they had to sit on the Republican side of the aisle.”1 Liberal and moderate Democrats now so outnumbered conservatives that for the first time in decades the conservative southern Democrats were seriously worried about retaining their power. Nor could the southerners depend any longer on the other half of their coalition; not only were there fewer Republicans in Congress, but those who survived were profoundly shaken by the election returns and believed they could no longer afford to obstruct Johnson’s proposals. A growing number concluded that if they continued to just say no, as they had to the War on Poverty, the next presidential election would be as disastrous as the last one had been. One New York Republican admitted in the press, “People think of us Republicans as negative, unimaginative with no true feeling for the wants and needs of the ‘little people.’”2 Republicans tended to accept that the election had been both a rebuke to Goldwater’s conservatism and an endorsement of Johnson’s policies. In a frightening development for the GOP, Democrats had won even traditionally Republican constituencies in the Midwest.3

  A few blocks up Pennsylvania Avenue, administration officials were looking at legislative prospects so rosy they stopped talking about the “Southern Democratic-Republican coalition,”4 a term that had loomed large since FDR’s second term. “I can’t remember when Southern influence in Congress was at this low point,” noted one observer.5 The administration had scored victories before the election—the tax cut, the Civil Rights Act, and the Economic Opportunity Act—but now the possibilities for passing bills seemed almost limitless. Johnson believed he had the best opportunity he would ever have to flood Congress with ideas, new and old, and to persuade legislators to send those proposals back to the White House as bills for his signature. He had plenty of proposals to send.

  Back in the spring of 1964, after an impromptu but mandatory skinny-dip with the president in the White House pool, the speechwriter Richard Goodwin had come up with the trademark Johnson wanted for his domestic agenda. By “the Great Society,” the president intended not just a package of programs but a broad, new vision of how the federal government could help every citizen get better access to the fruits of America’s economic growth. The Great Society was not a radical idea. Nothing in it was meant to change the basic operations of the capitalist economy or to intervene aggressively in class relations. It was still, however, a very ambitious agenda. As the president had explained when he intro
duced the concept in his May 1964 address at the University of Michigan, the Great Society “rests on abundance and liberty for all. It demands an end to poverty and racial injustice, to which we are totally committed in our time. But that is just the beginning. The Great Society is a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and to enlarge his talents. It is a place where leisure is a welcome chance to build and reflect, not a feared cause of boredom and restlessness . . . The Great Society is not a safe harbor, a resting place, a final objective, a finished work. It is a challenge constantly renewed.” The specific proposals Johnson conceived as part of his Great Society were what he now planned to submit to a Congress newly swollen with liberal support for his aims: voting rights for African Americans, economic assistance to schools, health insurance for the elderly and the poor, fair housing laws, government protection for the environment, funding for the arts, an end to discriminatory immigration policies, and more.

  For all the talk then and now about Johnson’s skill as a legislative tactician, by far his most significant advantage in 1965 was the huge liberal majorities he had just won in the House and the Senate. He had done what he could with the Eighty-eighth Congress—he had benefited in this effort from the power of the civil rights movement and the exigencies of the 1964 election campaign—but the conservative coalition had significantly restrained his accomplishments. The Eighty-ninth Congress was potentially more fertile ground for the broad range of controversial programs on his dream agenda.