The Fierce Urgency of Now

by Julian E. Zelizer

  But most Republican candidates viewed deficit reduction not as a macroeconomic tool that could be used to moderate inflation but as the cure for a cancer that was gradually destroying the economy. They tried to sell the idea that there was a genuine fiscal crisis, and they proposed deficit reduction based on cuts in nondefense spending. This approach, which the Republicans labeled “budgetary austerity,” liberals labeled “balancing the budget on the backs of the poor and middle class.” The Republicans managed to call for deficit reduction without directly questioning the necessity of specific federal programs—Barry Goldwater had made the political mistake of doing this in the 1964 campaign—because polls showed that even though Americans harbored negative views about government spending in general, a majority supported specific programs Johnson had introduced, Medicare among them.76

  The Republican Campaign Committee distributed pamphlets complaining about “Great Society play money” that featured pictures of Texas longhorns hovering over LBJ, saying, “Progress is a shrinking dollar.” Republican candidates staged photo ops at supermarkets where they pushed shopping carts and lamented the rising prices of household goods.77 Senator Dirksen stumped for Republicans by saying, “Every housewife who shops in a grocery store knows this. They are the living, breathing signs of this destructive burglarizing force.”78 During one campaign speech, Richard Nixon urged voters to make the election “a National Price Protest Day.”79 Republicans warned that the administration was secretly planning to send proposals to Congress, after the election, that would impose wage and price controls and raise taxes.

  The midterm elections took on added significance at the national level because several Republicans were seeking to use the campaign to claim the mantle of front-runner in 1968. The most visible was the former vice president Richard Nixon. The midterm campaigns marked his full-fledged return to the national political arena. Nixon, who had a staff of just three people and generally traveled on commercial airlines, was able to raise $6.5 million for the GOP and spoke in support of over eighty candidates in thirty-five states.80 Another Republican who gained national attention was Ronald Reagan, who sought to unseat Governor Pat Brown of California. A product of the conservative movement, Reagan railed against the college counterculture and condemned Johnson’s policies for having created social havoc in the cities. He attacked Brown’s support of the state’s fair housing bill and the California Supreme Court ruling in 1966 that held that Proposition 14—which overturned the fair housing law—was unconstitutional. Governor George Romney of Michigan used his reelection campaign against Zolton “Zolty” Ferency as an opportunity to establish his national credentials as the most electable person in the GOP.

  The Republican campaign issues were a serious concern to Johnson. He didn’t want to see the Republican attacks on his domestic proposals and the growing opposition to his policies in Vietnam lead to southern Democratic chairmen and their Republican counterparts regaining all their former power to thwart his legislation. The congressional liaison Charles Roche said, “This is the big ball game of 1966. The results will be reflected in the next two years of legislative activity on the Hill.”81

  Taking a page out of the 1964 campaign playbook, Johnson attempted to portray Republicans as appealing to the worst emotions of the country. In Newark, New Jersey, he said, “The Republican symbol is the elephant and the elephant never forgets. The Republicans remember that they have always been elected by scaring people. Their platform this year is made up of one word, and that word is fear.”82

  Johnson and other Democrats also had a positive message about their legislative productivity. “I am willing to let any objective historian look at my record,” Johnson told an aide. “If I can’t do more than any[one else] to help my country, I’ll quit. FDR passed five major bills in the first one hundred days. We passed 200 in the last two years. It is unbelievable. We must dramatize that.”83 Johnson urged Democrats to highlight the ways in which their programs, those that Republicans would certainly try to cut if they had more power, were helping the country. Johnson could make these claims effectively because he had made certain that his initiatives were up and running within a year. As information that was assembled by White House staffers revealed, Medicare was fully operational by the summer of 1966, one year after Congress had enacted the law. Almost 4.5 million would be receiving benefits by 1967. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act had already benefited 7 million schoolkids through special education projects for disadvantaged children and 49 million kids who were using library books and textbooks.84 In a motorcade tour in New York City, the president reminded voters that “the war on poverty has helped 9,000,000 Americans, and they are glad that fear struck out. Today 3,000,000 educationally deprived American children are glad that fear struck out.”85 The White House research team also distributed evidence to the media of how essential congressional Democrats were to key votes, if the “legislative process is not to grind to a halt.”86

  The president tried to combat the racial backlash. Two nights before the election, he made a statement toward the end of a press conference in which he said, “I can think of nothing more dangerous, more divisive, or more self-destructive than the effort to prey on what is called ‘white backlash.’” He urged “every American to ask himself before he goes to the polls on Tuesday: Do I want to cast my vote on the basis of fear? Do I want to follow the merchants of bigotry? Do I want to repudiate good men—Democrats and Republicans alike—who have given us Medicare, a great education program, a higher minimum wage, new parks and playgrounds, protection for the consumer, the hope for cleaning out our slums and rivers and the air we breathe?”

  Four days before the election, Johnson held three ceremonies to sign eight bills that provided support for Great Society programs, including legislation that authorized $6.1 billion in assistance to the elementary and secondary school program. All the signings took place in front of a turquoise backdrop, ideal for broadcasts on color television. The president, who shook the hands of numerous legislators and furiously handed out pens, clearly intended the events for the edification of a national audience. The Marine Corps orchestra played “Hail to the Chief” each time he entered the room for another ceremony.87

  THE RESULTS

  The final efforts were not enough. As Johnson had expected, the elections went poorly for liberals. Although Democrats continued to control Congress, with 64 Democrats in the Senate and 248 Democrats in the House, the size of the conservative coalition had grown substantially.88 In the House, their numbers grew from approximately 240 members in the Eighty-ninth Congress to 278 in the Ninetieth.89 Republicans gained 47 seats in the House and 3 seats in the Senate. This was well above the predictions of most pundits, and notably higher than the 33-seat-average opposition party gain in off-year midterm elections since 1934.90

  Only thirty-eight out of seventy-one Democrats elected in the Johnson landslide—slightly more than half of the 1964 freshman class—were reelected to the House in 1966. Just twenty-three of the forty-seven freshman Democrats who had been elected in Republican districts in 1964—not counting the freshmen who had defeated Democratic incumbents—were victorious.91 At the state level, Republicans won a net of eight governorships as well as 557 state legislative seats. Richard Nixon, who had watched the returns from a room at the Drake Hotel and gone home to his Fifth Avenue apartment at about midnight, called his staff at 2:30 a.m. to receive an update on the returns. They reported each victory, state by state. “We’ve beaten the hell out of them,” Nixon yelled into the receiver, “and we’re going to kill them in ’68!”92

  There was deep disappointment for younger liberal Democrats in Dixie, who had once hoped to replace senior conservatives. Liberal and moderate Democrats had been hoping to appeal to the growing number of southerners who wanted to move beyond racial issues, focus on the economic revitalization of their region, and attract suburbanites who wanted to relocate from the North to the “New South.” From
the vantage point of 1965, when liberals were still enjoying the afterglow of the 1964 election and Congress was passing major domestic legislation on a regular basis, a positive outcome had seemed plausible if not certain to younger southerners, but political conditions had changed rapidly throughout 1966, as the struggle over the civil rights bill had revealed. Rather than liberal southerners taking control, a new generation of Republicans was replacing the old Dixiecrats. In Virginia’s Eighth District, liberal Democrats celebrated Howard Smith’s defeat in the primary—the unexpected result of court-ordered redistricting—until his conqueror, the progressive George Rawlings, was defeated in the general election by William Scott, a conservative Republican attorney from Fairfax.

  The GOP also rebounded in its traditional stronghold of the Midwest, where the party had been humiliated two years earlier. Republicans regained many of the House seats they had lost in 1964; they won 57 percent of the rural vote.93 The election of two Republican senators, Percy in Illinois and Robert Griffin in Michigan, was considered a major victory for the GOP. Republicans did extremely well regaining ground in Michigan, where the defeated freshmen Wes Vivian, Paul Todd, John Mackie, Raymond Clevenger, and Billie Farnum were nicknamed the Michigan Five Fluke Freshmen. In Ohio, Republicans beat three Democratic freshmen and two senior members. In Wisconsin, the two freshman Democrats, one of them John Race, were defeated. The only Democratic freshmen to survive in the Midwest were John Culver in Iowa and Indiana’s Andrew Jacobs and Lee Hamilton, all of whom had benefited from gerrymandering.94

  The overall outcome was worse than liberals had hoped for, but it was not a surprise; it was a predictable midterm loss after a huge landslide triumph. It boded ill, however, for the future. The campaigns and the final vote seemed to expose 1964 as more of an aberration than liberals wanted to believe. The number of liberal Democrats in the House and the Senate had significantly declined. Southern committee chairmen would face a diminished threat that the Democratic caucus could force bills out of their committees. Allied with non-liberal Republicans, conservative southern Democrats would have enough votes on the floor to threaten the success of liberal proposals. According to the Congressional Quarterly, “The pro civil rights coalition which had operated so effectively in previous years—Republicans and Northern Democrats in Congress and civil rights, labor and church groups outside Congress—fell apart in 1966.”95

  “The nation has voted to restore the two parties to their normal competitive balance,” noted the editors of the New York Times. “The Republican party has become once again a viable and effective opposition after the Goldwater debacle of 1964.”96 Ray Bliss, the Republican National Committee chairman, told a packed room of reporters in a Washington hotel, “This press conference will be a little different from my first one, when you were asking me if the Republican Party would survive. It looks to me as if we have a very live elephant.”97

  The polls showed that the Republican campaign themes had resonated with the electorate. Many voters were not pleased about the direction of civil rights. Seventy-three percent of those polled in one major study said that activists were moving too fast. Voters were also worried about inflation. Seventy-eight percent of those surveyed thought prices would continue going up, and only 35 percent of respondents thought they would be doing better economically within a year.98

  Civil rights activists tried to make the best of the outcome; they pointed out that the election resulted in higher numbers of moderate Republicans in the Senate. In Illinois, for instance, the backlash helped defeat Paul Douglas, but the victor, Charles Percy, was a strong supporter of civil rights.99 Voters in Massachusetts had made Edward Brooke the first African American in the Senate since Reconstruction. Some Democrats who were under fire from opponents of racial integration, like Chicago’s congressman Pucinski, survived the election. “Despite appeals to bigotry of an intensity and vulgarity never before witnessed in the north,” Martin Luther King said, trying to make the best of the situation, “millions of white voters remained unshaken in their commitment to decency.”100

  In many respects, King and others were right. The elections rolled back the victories from 1964, but they didn’t make them disappear. The Democratic caucus remained much more liberal than it had been in the previous decade. Even conservative members of both parties expected that most of the programs enacted by the Eighty-ninth Congress would remain in place for decades to come.

  Yet, at some level, King and other civil rights leaders did understand that the election represented the end of this important and historic liberal moment. There was some clear evidence that race mattered in the northern electorate. Percy won by triple the normal Republican margin in the Thirteenth Ward of Chicago, a neighborhood populated by Eastern Europeans and a site of open-housing protests in the summer. Douglas did worse than Democrats had traditionally done in the Democratic hotbed of Chicago, with most of the falloff coming from white Catholic voters.101

  Vietnam was also causing discontent, and fears of inflation and deficits registered high among voters. The outcome had made the prospects for passing more liberal legislation increasingly bleak. The liberal majorities from 1964 had been deflated, and those liberals who survived were scared by the political trends they were seeing.

  Frustrated as he was by the campaign and the election results, Johnson was not subdued. In fact, the conservative revival seemed to make him even more determined to fight for all he could get for as long as he could. On the last day of the year, the president told Humphrey that when they faced the new Congress in January, he would go after his opponents with “hammer and tongs.”102 Both men knew just how different the Ninetieth Congress would be. The good times for legislating were over, the battles would be more grueling, and the agenda would have to change drastically.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THE TRIUMPH OF AUSTERITY POLITICS

  For three years, Lyndon Johnson had chosen to ignore warnings that Vietnam was not an essential battleground in the cold war and that sending troops would be a mistake. By early 1967, he was paying the price for having chosen to prosecute the war. In 1966, 6,000 Americans had been killed in Vietnam, and 30,000 had been wounded. With approximately 450,000 troops bogged down there and no end of the combat in sight, the antiwar protests at home were intensifying. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman, William Fulbright, the person on whom Johnson had relied to sell the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution to Democrats in the upper chamber, had given mainstream legitimacy to critics of the war by conducting televised hearings in which he grilled high-level administration officials and exposed flaws in their logic for pursuing victory in Vietnam.

  In his determination to deprive conservatives of a potent political weapon against him—the argument that he was soft on communism abroad—Johnson had alienated the very people who were naturally the supporters of his domestic policies: the liberals. Martin Luther King Jr. blamed the “ill-considered warfare” for Johnson’s “leisurely approach to social change.” King told the Senate, “The guns of war become a national obsession.”1 King’s statements shattered Johnson, who believed he had done all he could to advance the cause of African American equality in the past two years.

  Middle-class students on the left who had once cheered Johnson’s work on the Civil Rights Act of 1964 now railed against what they called Johnson’s War. They staged dramatic protests around the country, burned their draft cards in front of the national media, and accused politicians of war crimes. On college campuses, protesters blockaded the offices of military recruiters and departments enriched by government grants to develop weapons. One of the most popular antiwar songs of early 1967, from the folksinger Pete Seeger, featured the lyrics “If you love your Uncle Sam, Bring ’em home, bring ’em home. Support our boys in Vietnam, Bring ’em home, bring ’em home. . . . Show those generals their fallacy, Bring ’em home, bring ’em home.”

  Johnson’s idea that by embracing a hawkish stance he could success
fully insulate himself from right-wing attacks on his domestic moves had been partially successful. He had divided the GOP: Senator Dirksen, among others, had become, though fitfully, his ally, but other GOP leaders berated the president for being insufficiently aggressive.

  Taking flak over the war from both his left and his right flanks, Johnson turned his long-delayed attention to paying for it. At this point he had very few options. Everyone in Washington had noticed the growth in the federal budget and the expansion of the deficit. The anticipated deficit for fiscal year 1967 was $8.64 billion, a significant jump from $3.7 billion the year before. Republicans had successfully made the deficit a big issue in their election campaigns, and the January numbers confirmed that government expenditures were growing at a fast pace. Not surprisingly, domestic spending had surged. Between 1963 and 1966, total expansion of federal social welfare expenditures had been $14.5 billion; the growth in the budget was a total of $35.3 billion in fiscal years 1966 and 1967, when spending on Social Security, Medicare, education, and Medicaid were the biggest items.2 But domestic programs were not the only driving force behind the deficit; the war was too. According to the Pentagon, spending for Southeast Asia would be $19.4 billion in fiscal 1967 and reach $21.9 billion in fiscal 1968. Johnson’s advisers predicted that the overall Pentagon budget would reach $72.3 billion by fiscal 1968, a level not reached since World War II.3