The Fierce Urgency of Now

by Julian E. Zelizer

  Slumped forlornly in his chair, Johnson signed a presidential proclamation that ordered federal troops to intervene. On the evening of July 24, in an emotional television address, the president said, “We will not tolerate lawlessness. We will not endure violence. It matters not by whom it is done, or under what slogan or banner. It will not be tolerated.” By justifying his actions on law-and-order grounds, Johnson purposefully echoed the themes that Republicans had been using against him and other Democrats for almost a year.

  The rioting continued for several terrible days. Forty-three people died; more than a thousand were injured; almost seven thousand people were arrested. More than a thousand buildings were damaged. Massive clouds of black smoke hovered over the city. “It looks like Berlin in 1945,” lamented Mayor Jerome P. Cavanagh.23

  As the rioting was finally calming down in Detroit, Johnson established the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, under the direction of Illinois’s governor, Otto Kerner, to investigate the root causes. Some advisers were skeptical. Califano complained to the president, “The cities are aflame, the country’s coming apart, LBJ can’t get a tax bill, so what does he do? Set up a commission and say a prayer.”24 The commission’s report was released in February 1968. It concluded, “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal,” and endorsed a number of government actions, including programs to end residential segregation and reduce minority unemployment.

  The political impact of the riots was immediate on Capitol Hill. The turmoil hardened the conservative resolve to go after domestic programs on the grounds that they were not producing positive results and were, in some cases, making conditions worse than before. The Vermont Republican Winston Prouty released the text of a telegram from a Newark police official, Dominick Spina, to Sargent Shriver in May; Spina had warned that War on Poverty funds were being used to foment riots. “If Mr. Shriver and his colleagues blind themselves to the newer and more serious charges from Newark,” noted the editors of the conservative Chicago Tribune, “they may soon find themselves in the business of subsidizing local ‘wars of liberation’ in cities all over the country.”25 The Oklahoma Republican Page Belcher expressed the sentiment of many conservatives when he said, “If you keep telling a man he’s downtrodden, sooner or later he’ll believe it. Ghetto conditions have nothing to do with it. We’ve had them for hundreds of years. It wasn’t until we started passing civil rights bills that the trouble started.”26

  When the riots began, Congress had been working on legislation to provide $40 million in grants to local governments to subsidize rat extermination programs in urban neighborhoods. The bill had seemed likely to pass by large margins, given that rodents were widely considered a major public health problem. Events in the cities changed the vote count. Conservatives derided the “Civil Rats Bill,” which they said would create a “rat bureaucracy” and provide the White House with more funds to distribute to urban machines. Only three days after the Newark riots started, the conservative coalition killed the bill in the House by a vote of 207 to 176.27 One hundred forty-eight Republicans and 59 Democrats voted no. Every reporter and politician attributed the dramatic turn in legislative sentiment to the riots. President Johnson called the defeat a “cruel blow to the poor children of America.” The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights called the vote an “act of shocking irresponsibility.” Theodore Kupferman, a liberal Republican from New York City’s silk-stocking district, which abutted Harlem, said, “If you were a hardworking father coming home from work to find one of your children bitten by a rat, you might very well start a small riot yourself.”28

  Johnson’s real problem wasn’t Republicans and southern Democrats. The biggest threat to his legislation was that a growing number of legislators who represented traditionally Democratic northern districts, especially those with white ethnic voting groups—Polish Americans, Italian Americans, and others—were hearing from their constituents that civil rights and the Great Society had gone too far.

  The House Education and Labor Committee postponed action on a bill to provide funding for the War on Poverty because members were concerned that the riots were strengthening and broadening the opposition. Legislators and the public were starting to talk about the War on Poverty as primarily urban policy, connected to the unrest, though it had been largely rural from the outset. One liberal House Democrat told a reporter, “We’ve got to convince the members that poverty workers have not instigated the riots, but rather have been helpful in keeping them from getting worse or even starting in many cities of the nation.”29 Shaking his head in despair, Senator Philip Hart, who had been instrumental in moving the civil rights bills through Congress in 1964 and 1965, admitted, “What people saw a few years ago on television was police dogs jumping on people trying to vote. Now they see Negroes throwing rocks in store windows.”30

  Polls showed that the riots were stimulating intense fears among voters about the potential for more violence. There was a sharp difference along racial lines about causes. According to one poll, 45 percent of whites thought radicals and communist agitators had started the riots, compared with 7 percent of African Americans. Ninety-three percent of African Americans felt that living conditions in African American slums and ghettos fueled the riots, compared with 40 percent of whites.31 Richard Veith, who headed one of the nation’s most profitable guard dog rental agencies, said that since the riots, “My phone hasn’t stopped ringing.”32

  The polls taken by Harris and Gallup after the riots showed that President Johnson’s approval level had fallen to 39 percent, a decline of thirteen percentage points since June; it was the worst approval rating for a president since Harry Truman in 1952. Gallup reported that 54 percent disapproved of how the president was handling Vietnam. There was weakening support for how he was handling race relations. A thirty-one-year-old woman, the wife of a minister in Rochester, New York, said, “With rioting, inflation, and civil unrest, our society seems to be crumbling around us while Johnson is wasting our resources on Vietnam.” Another poll found that Governor Romney was doing better than Johnson in a projected presidential election.33

  Johnson was acutely aware of the negative political repercussions of what had taken place, in terms of his ability both to defend the Great Society and to win reelection in 1968. The influential political scientist Richard Scammon, the founder of the Elections Research Center and one of the leading analysts of political statistics, reminded Johnson that the key characteristics of the voter who would determine the election in 1968 were that he is “un-young. He is un-black. He is un-poor.” This meant that with all the chaos taking place in the cities, the campaign of 1968 would have to target “white, middle-aged, middle class voters.” Scammon called these the people who “bowl regularly.” Based on his analysis, the depth of “anti-Negro sentiment” was extraordinarily strong among these voters.34

  LURCHING INTO AN INTERNATIONAL CRISIS

  Johnson’s bet to delay asking for a tax surcharge had not paid off.

  The need for revenue was even more urgent toward the end of the summer than it had been in January, and the political conditions in Congress were worse. Now Johnson needed the tax surcharge immediately, and it would have to be bigger than what he had been planning to request just a few months earlier. The budget situation had deteriorated since January: government spending had increased, and tax revenue was much lower than had been expected. Johnson’s economists had been predicting a deficit of $8 billion, but they were now saying, and Johnson was publicly admitting, that the federal deficit might reach $29 billion. The rapid rise in consumer prices during June and July fueled concerns about inflation.

  On August 3, Johnson finally delivered a special message to Congress to propose a 10 percent surcharge, rather than the 6 percent discussed in January, on all corporations and on most individuals—the lowest wage earners were excluded—and $2 billion in discretionary spending cuts. For a family
of four who earned $10,000 a year and paid $1,100 in taxes, the surcharge would mean an increase of about $9.25 a month. It would raise an estimated $6.3 billion for the federal government; additional revenue from proposed increases in excise taxes would bring the total increase to almost $7.4 billion. If Congress didn’t pass the measure immediately, Johnson warned, there would be higher interest rates when the Federal Reserve took the necessary steps to slow runaway inflation. The Fed would tighten the money supply, and this would make it harder for individuals and businesses to get loans. As a result, the overall growth of the economy would be slowed. Johnson insisted there were limits to the cuts he could make in expenditures, especially for the Vietnam War, so he had no option but to raise taxes.

  Johnson’s sharp warning of the potential for “a ruinous spiral of inflation” and “brutally higher interest rates” if Congress did not endorse his plans satisfied neither the public nor most of the political class. Slightly more measured in their rhetoric were Harvard’s John Kenneth Galbraith, Yale’s James Tobin, and many others of the nation’s most prestigious economists, who did support the president. In a joint statement, they warned that economic restraint was essential to “maintain orderly growth, prevent a resurgence of inflation, and forestall excessive reliance on tight money. With government expenditures rising rapidly, the growth of total demand threatens to exceed the capacity of the economy to increase total output.”35

  Republicans, who were demanding major cuts in spending, were quick to attack the president. He was on the rocks, and they knew it; if they could block his fiscal plans, they believed they would benefit politically. The House minority leader, Gerald Ford, led the chorus of critics when he told reporters, “I will not concede that the present level of Federal spending cannot be cut back sufficiently to avoid a tax increase,” while John Byrnes, the ranking Republican on the House Ways and Means Committee, bluntly announced, “Without an austerity program on expenditures, a tax increase is out of the question.”36 A significant number of Republicans and southern Democrats who had voted for the president’s domestic programs were now calling for cuts in all domestic spending. It was now their intention—and Johnson knew it—to cripple his programs and to make it impossible for him to create any new ones.

  The most important player in the House of Representatives was Wilbur Mills. Upon hearing the president’s message, Chairman Mills, in his characteristically elusive fashion, announced to reporters, “I’m uncommitted.”37

  Although Mills said no more in public about the president’s surcharge, he didn’t agree with Johnson’s interpretation of why there was inflation. The chairman subscribed to the “cost-push” theory of inflation, which blamed overly generous wage settlements with unions for driving up the costs that businesses faced. An inflationary cycle ensued, Mills argued, when businesses raised their prices to cover these costs, which then led consumers to demand even higher wages so they could afford to purchase costlier goods. Based on this interpretation of the economic situation, Mills argued that raising taxes could make things worse by creating greater pressure on wage earners to demand raises. In contrast, he believed, federal spending cuts would remove money from the economy without affecting individual and corporate income.38

  Mills, however, had reluctantly come to the conclusion that there would have to be a tax increase as part of a deal in which the White House and non-southern Democrats would support essential spending cuts. Without a deal, the nation would have to live with skyrocketing deficits. Mills’s fellow conservatives, including Senator Dirksen, had reached the same conclusion.

  So the outline of a deal was clear. Congressional conservatives would obtain the spending cuts they desired, and the president would get the tax surcharge his advisers were saying was essential. Mills also believed that coupling the surcharge with spending cuts was necessary to make sure the new revenue was not spent on additional programs, thereby negating any anti-inflationary effects. For “those who are concerned with the size of the deficit—and I am certainly in that category,” Mills said, “matching expenditure reduction with tax increases should be highly desirable: It doubles the reduction in the deficit.”39

  While the administration was contemplating a deal that included $2 billion in immediate spending cuts, the most Johnson and his advisers thought was possible without damaging his domestic programs, Mills and fellow conservatives had in mind a figure closer to $6 to $8 billion. Mills also pressed for cuts of funds that had been appropriated but not used the previous year, instead of their being incorporated into the new budget for each agency. He also demanded that the next budget include proposed future cuts—about $20 billion—in domestic spending.

  Whereas Mills had been virtually powerless to stop Johnson in 1965 when the administration proposed the Medicare bill he had previously opposed, in 1967 the political situation was reversed. The conservative coalition was resurgent, and the president was asking Congress to take things away from Americans rather than give them benefits.

  In a private telephone conversation in September, Mills tried to reason with Johnson. He told the president that if he was willing to cut deeper into congressional appropriations, which would only strengthen the impact the package would have on the federal deficit and inflation, they would have enough votes to pass the bill in the House. Administration officials believed Mills had the power to move any bill he wanted to move, but the chairman insisted that if the deal was to include the president’s taxes, it would require concessions on spending that could win twenty to twenty-five Republican votes. Mills told Johnson, “I never saw such damned opposition any day in my life as there is to . . . any increase in taxes.”40

  Johnson’s closest advisers told him that if he stood firm against spending cuts, Mills would blink first, but Mills didn’t blink. In early October, Ways and Means set aside the legislation. “The tax bill is dead unless this is done,” Mills said, referring to the inclusion of deeper spending cuts in the package.41 The conservative coalition was the core of the vote. John Watts, who offered the motion, was joined by Mills, eight other Democrats, and all ten Republicans to shelve the bill; it was a sign of the fragility of the liberal coalition. Congressman Dan Rostenkowski, an Illinois Democrat who was a product of Mayor Daley’s machine and who had been a loyal Johnson supporter, agreed to raise taxes but felt that bigger spending cuts would be necessary to win congressional support. The “president was not moving,” Rostenkowski observed, defending the committee’s decision to shelve the legislation, “and we are not moving . . . We hope this will get the executive branch off dead center.”42

  For the time being, the legislation was going nowhere. Mills told reporters, “Contrary to the impression that is sometimes given by intemperate critics of the Congress, these actions are not irresponsible, bullheaded, or spiteful, nor are they maneuvers for partisan advantage. They are, on the contrary, an expression of the anxiety, which many Members of Congress feel—fortified by the uneasiness they found in their constituencies over the recent Labor Day recess—about the recent sharp rise in federal outlay and the proliferation of federal government activity.”43

  At his press conference on November 17, Lyndon Johnson was uncharacteristically animated and informal. He removed his glasses, stepped away from the podium, and moved around with a portable microphone tucked into his jacket. He answered reporters’ questions with the manic bravado he often showed when twisting congressional arms but rarely displayed in his careful, and usually monotonous, public speeches.44 He expressed his anger and frustration with Congress, and he reprimanded his opponents for their decisions in blunt language. Mills and Ford, he said, would “live to rue the day when they made” the decision to block this legislation, “because it is a dangerous decision. It is an unwise decision.”

  In January 1968, with the fate of the tax surcharge still uncertain, Johnson’s proposed budget for fiscal 1969 hit $186.1 billion. The bulk of the increased spending was once again for Vietnam and
for payments, including interest on the debt and Social Security, that were fixed by law. It looked as if the deficit for fiscal 1968 would end up being approximately $20 billion. Naturally, Republicans disputed the number the president had announced and publicly predicted that the deficit would be closer to $35 billion than to $20 billion. With the GNP predicted to grow at a rate of 7.75 percent, which most economists considered unsustainable, and prices rising at 4 percent in the past six months (up from a rate of 3 percent in the past two years), those economists believed an inflationary period had begun.45 The situation was generating international warnings that the U.S. government was out of control and its economy in a perilous condition.

  As the cost of the Vietnam War continued to rise, the situation on the ground deteriorated steadily. The administration sent more and more ground troops, but it was clear that U.S. forces were not making substantial gains against the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong. The United States had conducted a ruthless bombing campaign—the Republicans complained that Johnson was too timid—but instead of breaking the will of the enemy, the bombing hardened their resolve to endure and to drive out the Americans.

  Johnson had utterly lost control of the war. While the United States wielded overwhelming firepower, the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong fought tenaciously; they knew how to use the terrain and were supported by many of the people in South Vietnam. Their strategy was to wear down American troops through constant surprise attacks and stealth warfare. The members of the South Vietnamese military were incompetent and corrupt allies. On the home front, avoidance of and resistance to the military draft fueled widespread dissatisfaction with the war policy and provoked the slogan “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” and the bitter advice that the U.S. government should “declare victory and withdraw.”