The Fierce Urgency of Now

by Julian E. Zelizer

  Johnson knew, however, that despite the political advantages he now enjoyed, his big election victory did not guarantee he would get everything he wanted in the time he was likely to have. He had entered the House of Representatives in 1937, when his hero Franklin Roosevelt was encountering fierce resistance in Congress as he tried to take advantage of what had seemed like an overwhelming mandate for the New Deal in the 1936 election. Johnson knew that the proposals he was going to send to the Hill would be divisive. Some of them would open up deep splits in core Democratic constituencies. Urban Catholics and liberal Protestants, for example, were at odds over how programs for federal aid to education should be designed. With Medicare, Johnson was attempting to resolve a conflict that had devastated Harry Truman’s presidency after his big election victory in 1948, when doctors and insurers, who had immense influence in the districts and states where Democratic legislators and voters predominated, had fought any extension of the federal government into their industry. Voting rights legislation was certain to spark a forceful negative response from southerners who understood that the legislation would hand to African Americans who had been beaten by southern police the political power to challenge the entire governing structure of the region. Johnson knew he would have to fight hard to make sure southerners did not find ways to sabotage voting rights legislation, and at the same time contain liberals who, by demanding the boldest possible measures, might undermine support among moderates in both parties.

  Eager to avoid the strategic mistakes that had stifled his predecessors’ efforts, Johnson wanted to move his legislation as soon as he could. He believed that continuous pressure and constant negotiations would maximize his chances for success. In February, he convened all the legislative liaisons of the major cabinet offices and the entire staff of Larry O’Brien, his man in the White House who was responsible for relations with Congress. He told everyone in the meeting, “I want you to work for my legislative program and get as much passed in the next 90 days and in 1965 as is humanly possible. I want you to take out all proposals and do everything to get the elementary and secondary act, educational legislation, Medicare and all this other [legislation].” After listing all the programs he wanted, he told the group, “You may wonder why I am putting such pressure on it, but let’s go back and look over what’s happened to the Presidents of the United States who are elected.” Johnson analyzed Woodrow Wilson’s presidency for a half hour, as well as how FDR had overreached with the court-packing plan. “Look,” he said, “I’ve just been elected by an overwhelming vote, but every day that I will be in office, I will be losing some of my ability to convert that victory into legislative reality.”6 To counteract the debilitating trend, he would spend every waking minute on the phones, wheeling and dealing, trying to get legislators to fall in line. He instructed cabinet leaders to return the calls of all representatives and senators within ten minutes.

  Johnson’s approach to legislating included far more than his famous Treatment. He tailored the approach to the specific political dynamics of each issue. For his education program, he would depend on the sheer partisan power of Democrats on the Hill to muscle his bill through the House and the Senate. For health care, he intended to allow a southern committee chairman, who had concluded that the election rendered obstruction no longer politically viable, to fundamentally reshape the legislation and claim part of the credit for the final bipartisan victory. For voting rights, he did as he had done for civil rights in 1957 and 1964: he aimed to build on the momentum created by civil rights activists and strike a bipartisan deal to close down a Senate filibuster.

  He decided it was important to avoid talking about funding for his programs. He was riding the wave of an economy entering its fifth year of expansion, and he would count on continued economic growth and rising incomes to generate tax revenues. The GNP was $47 billion higher in 1965 than it had been one year earlier (it had been $675.6 billion), with unemployment down to 4.1 percent and businesses having to spend a record $51.8 billion for new investment. With corporate profits up and personal consumption higher, Johnson constantly boasted how the tax cut in 1964 had paved the way for phenomenal rates of economic growth. He made certain that his plans for funding his domestic programs stayed murky. He would count on savings that might possibly come in the future from proposed cuts to the military budget. At his command, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara hid the projected costs of American involvement in Vietnam.7

  Johnson tabled legislation that would directly benefit unions. Organized labor was at the peak of its power in the 1960s—more than 30 percent of the workforce belonged to unions—but since the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947, the right-to-work laws (section 14B) had hindered the ability of unions to organize workers in many states, particularly in the South. Union leaders had put the repeal of 14B at the top of their agenda since President Truman’s election in 1948, and they were hopeful that their moment had finally arrived with the liberal ascendancy after the 1964 elections.

  But the unions were disappointed. A clear-eyed look at Congress convinced Johnson that any effort to make union dreams come true could reenergize the conservative coalition in opposition—just as FDR had done in 1937 when he attempted to pack the Supreme Court after an earlier epic election victory for liberalism.8 Worse, an attempt to repeal 14B would anger Senator Dirksen, who was under immense pressure from the business community to oppose labor law reform and who was promising to filibuster any repeal effort. Although a majority of the Senate favored repeal of 14B, Dirksen maintained the support of approximately twenty-eight Republicans and southern Democrats.9 Johnson made it clear to Walter Reuther, the president of the United Automobile Workers and one of his most loyal allies, that he would support legislation to repeal 14B within the year, but not yet. Johnson asked Reuther to help him quiet the growing discontent of labor leaders; he argued, successfully, that pushing too soon for repeal would cause him to lose the support of the Republican legislators he needed for issues that were at the top of his agenda—education, medical care for the elderly, and voting rights.10

  PUTTING SOUTHERN DEMOCRATS ON NOTICE

  Johnson’s many years in Congress had taught him that when you had the power, the best move was to maximize your advantages. On the day after he beat Goldwater, LBJ was on the phone, making sure congressional Democrats took every possible step, without going overboard and getting tied up in divisive wrangling, to capitalize on the election. “The 1964 election gave us the legislative machinery to pass it [the Great Society],” one Democrat said, “if we know how to use it.”11 That meant changing some of the rules and procedures upon which conservatives had depended to sustain their power.

  Liberal Democrats in the House set out to make a number of reforms that would bolster the effectiveness of their majority, primarily by weakening the power of committee chairmen to obstruct legislation. These changes were spearheaded by the Democratic Study Group, which had grown from 125 to 165 committed liberal members and was now the dominant liberal faction in the House Democratic caucus.

  The liberals were undertaking a difficult balancing act. Given the nature of the election, they saw that this was a highly unusual, even historic, opportunity to pass wide-ranging domestic legislation, so they didn’t want to get Congress tied up in debates about procedural reform that would delay addressing substantive matters of social policy. While the number of liberals on Capitol Hill had vastly increased, many senior northern, urban Democrats, among them Emanuel Celler and Adam Clayton Powell Jr., didn’t want to tamper with the committee process through which they had laid claim to substantial power. The newest Democrats, even those from northern states, also hoped at some point to get a piece of the power seniority could grant them. So any kind of proposed congressional reform could easily open up divisions among Democratic factions, energize the demoralized southern Democrats, and steal valuable time away from debates over domestic policy.

  DSG members wanted to send a mess
age to southern Democrats not to stand in the way of Lyndon Johnson’s proposals. They began by proposing that the Democratic caucus discipline two southern conservative Democrats, Mississippi’s John Bell Williams and South Carolina’s Albert Watson, who had publicly endorsed Barry Goldwater in the election. Neither man was the biggest fish in the congressional sea, but taking action against either of them would send a clear message to more prominent southerners that the Democratic caucus was prepared to sanction any colleague who didn’t go along with the majority. Watson was a freshman, a protégé of Strom Thurmond’s, who had headed “Democrats for Goldwater.” Williams was a bigger fish, an eighteen-year veteran of the House, a lifelong segregationist who was next in line to become chair of the powerful House Interstate Commerce Committee. Williams’s support for Goldwater had been only the latest in what the liberals saw as a string of despicable acts. He—and the rest of the Mississippi House delegation—had voted against Johnson’s tax cut, civil rights, and food stamps. The liberals wanted to strip both men of their committee assignments and kick them out of the Democratic caucus, with the result that they could no longer enjoy “the same privileges, committee assignments, seniority and other prerogatives reserved for loyal members of the Democratic Party.”12 In light of their transgressions, these harsh sanctions would be a highly unusual move—the caucus had not disciplined any member since 1911—but even some southerners agreed with the liberals’ plan. Majority Whip Hale Boggs of Louisiana, who had little in common ideologically with the northern liberals, wanted to discipline the two men. As he told the president, “I don’t want to put up with these traitorous bastards anymore.”13

  House Speaker John McCormack also endorsed punitive action against Williams and Watson.14 The Speaker’s support was essential for the liberals; it gave the leadership’s imprimatur to their initiative. The cigar-chomping, backroom-dealing Speaker was a loyal New Deal Democrat who looked forward to legislating an expanded role for the federal government. He was also eager to step out of the shadow of Sam Rayburn, his legendary predecessor as Speaker. McCormack respected the committee process and had developed strong working relationships with the southerners, but he firmly believed they had no right to stand in the way of President Johnson after the dramatic election results. He resented southern Democrats who had disloyally endorsed the GOP candidate. When the House had reformed the Rules Committee in 1961 by adding three members to the panel so that more liberals could be assigned, McCormack, who was then the House majority leader, had been one of only a few top Democrats who supported a bolder alternative that would have purged Howard Smith’s main ally, William Colmer, from the committee for having failed to support Kennedy in 1960. McCormack’s outlook was at the center of Democratic Party thinking; he wanted to sanction the recusant members, a decision that the Democratic caucus clearly had the right to make, but he didn’t want to boot them out of the caucus, a move that could easily be interpreted as overstepping his power and overturning the democratic decisions of voters.

  On January 2, the Democratic caucus met and stripped Williams and Watson of their seniority rights by a strong vote of 157 to 115.

  Next the liberal Democrats took direct aim at Howard Smith by asking the Democratic caucus to reinstate the “twenty-one-day rule,” which had first been adopted after the 1948 election but was struck down by conservatives two years later. The rule permitted a committee chairman or members of a committee whose bill had been held up by the Rules Committee for twenty-one days to force the legislation out of the committee and onto the House floor.15 One House liberal, Henry Reuss of Wisconsin, recalled that when the rule had been in effect for the brief period from 1949 through 1950, “It broke open a stopped dike for legislation. But the 88nd [sic] Congress threw it out. We need it back now.”16

  President Johnson, honoring the long-standing tradition of presidents’ refraining from making public statements about the internal matters of the legislative branch, left no doubt on the phones that he supported bringing back the twenty-one-day rule. He explained to Speaker McCormack that the rule was desperately needed because, despite voters’ decisive rejection of Goldwater and his brand of right-wing conservatism, the most reactionary southern conservatives still chaired the key committees. “These people in these 45 states—44 states and the District of Columbia—they didn’t vote for Howard Smith . . . He’s representing another century and Goldwater represented his viewpoint and they got six states and the people, 15 million of them, say they want to move ahead. And if we don’t move with them they’re going to move over us.” Democrats needed to make changes so that “you’re the boss up there and not Howard Smith,” the president told McCormack.17

  Because passage of the twenty-one-day rule would be a reform to the procedures of the House, a majority of the entire chamber—not just of the Democratic caucus—had to endorse the change. On the same day the Democrats voted to punish the turncoats Williams and Watson, the House considered all the reforms that had been proposed by the DSG. Despite the mood of the postelection period, the outcome of the vote on the twenty-one-day rule was in doubt. Howard Smith argued that the rule was “unworkable” and would grant excessive power to the Speaker. But times had changed. The Democratic Study Group was now a significant force in the House, and the House was more receptive to its proposals than in the past. Howard Smith no longer seemed as formidable to members as he had in previous years. The House passed the twenty-one-day rule by a close vote of 224 to 201. Sixteen Republicans, taking the position that (in the wake of Goldwater’s candidacy) it was best to avoid being seen as the party of obstruction, joined 208 Democrats to provide liberals the margin of victory.18 The message had been delivered to Howard Smith that if he tried to stop a bill from reaching the floor of the House for a vote, a committee chairman whose panel had passed the bill could humiliate him by getting the bill forced out of Rules. The message would also be understood by every other committee chairman who might ever contemplate defying the will of the liberals.

  The other major reform proposed by the DSG was to alter the party ratios on every major committee to reflect the new balance of the parties. Traditionally, when such adjustments had been made after big elections, the leadership tended not to alter party ratios on the Ways and Means Committee. But now McCormack and Carl Albert, with the support of the newly elected Republican minority leader, Gerald Ford, who had successfully challenged Charles Halleck in the leadership election, agreed with the DSG that the changes should be more sweeping, given the size of the Democratic majority. Ford had promised to transform the image of his party, to “promote and communicate the image of a fighting, forward looking party.” The change in party ratios would be an effective way for Ford to signal that he was willing to work constructively with the Democrats on their agenda, though House Republicans would not have had much leverage to prevent the change even if they hadn’t been searching for a new image.

  So the House voted to adjust the committee ratios from three Democrats to two Republicans to two Democrats to one Republican. The members also voted to alter the composition of the Ways and Means Committee from fifteen Democrats and ten Republicans to seventeen Democrats and eight Republicans. Although liberals had not undertaken more drastic reforms—one such reform would have been to strip Ways and Means of its power to make committee assignments for the Democratic caucus—they had changed the vote count in the panel that would take up President Johnson’s Medicare proposal for 1965. The southern Democrats and the Republicans no longer constituted a majority on the committee, as they had since Medicare was first proposed in the committee in 1957, because the three new Democrats assigned to the committee all favored Medicare. “This change means half the battle of enacting the Johnson program is over,” Larry O’Brien commented.19 With the reforms, Albert added, it wouldn’t matter to the leadership if Wilbur Mills was “for Medicare or not.”20 O’Brien and Albert were clearly exaggerating; Mills continued to have immense power, and his colleagues still feared
him, assuming that he would regain all or most of his power within a few years, but the change in ratios would vastly diminish his ability to hold back Medicare in the coming months.

  The possibilities for reform were far more limited in the Senate. It would be extraordinarily difficult to reform the filibuster. As they had done at the opening of every new Congress since 1949, a bipartisan group of liberals proposed reducing the number of senators required to end a filibuster to a mere majority rather than two-thirds of the Senate, but the reform never gained much traction, particularly after Johnson, who believed there was little chance of passing it, refrained from advocating for it. Southerners had successfully argued in the past that because only one-third of the chamber was elected in any given election, the Senate was a “continuing body,” so that the rules of the previous session always applied at the start of every new session. Hence, any proposed change in filibuster rules could be filibustered. Many western senators were adamantly opposed to filibuster reform, and a number of liberal northerners were dubious about it. Every senator could see how someday he might have a critical need for the filibuster. Johnson knew a fight over the filibuster would be quixotic and would draw Democrats into an internal debate, something the president didn’t want as he set about launching his legislative initiatives. The liberal Democrats who supported the reform agreed to postpone debate on their proposal, which meant that effectively it was dead.

  BRINGING WASHINGTON INTO THE CLASSROOM

  Federal assistance to schools was high among Johnson’s priorities. Over the previous decade, the nation’s school systems had been struggling to keep up with the influx of baby boom children who were reaching school age. In poorer communities, overcrowded school buildings were crumbling. In many districts, to create more space in elementary school buildings, administrators moved fifth and sixth graders into middle schools and ninth graders into high schools. New York City educational administrators used libraries, cafeterias, and storage spaces as temporary classrooms. Some schools constructed cheap prefab trailer annexes. Desperate administrators put students on shifts. Some children reported at 7:50 a.m. and departed at noon; others came in for the noon to 4:00 p.m. shift.21 Students lacked supplies; library shelves were sparsely inhabited by books; there were insufficient resources for foreign language studies, art and music classes, and other enrichment programs.