The Fierce Urgency of Now

by Julian E. Zelizer

  Johnson’s announcement surprised almost everybody. Few had anticipated that his decision not to run for reelection was even a remote possibility. He was, after all, the incumbent and still the dominant force in the Democratic Party. Senator Kennedy was on a plane just returned from the first leg of his campaign in Phoenix when the Democratic state chairman John Burns stormed up the aisle of the American Airlines plane to tell him, “Johnson isn’t running.” “Fantastic,” said William vanden Heuvel, a close adviser of the senator’s. “This sure solves a lot of our troubles.”65

  Congressman Clement Zablocki, who was organizing the Johnson effort in the upcoming Wisconsin primary, learned about the news while working at a campaign dinner. Just a few days earlier he had been at an event in the White House where the president had told him to move forward in Wisconsin at full speed.66

  Senator Eugene McCarthy’s supporters were thrilled. Volunteers at Milwaukee hotels, where their campaign was preparing for the Wisconsin primary, chanted, “The wicked witch is dead.”67 In New York City’s Greenwich Village, where counterculture figures like Bob Dylan commanded much more respect than the commander in chief, a small group marched on Eighth Street chanting, “Good-by, Lyndon. Good-by, Lyndon. Good-by, Lyndon. We’re glad to see you go.” Said one demonstrator, “It’s a magnificent gesture on Johnson’s part. It’s a good thing for him to do.”68

  The president’s announcement had an immediate impact on the tax debate. It motivated the Senate leadership to finish up work on the tax legislation that included the Smathers and Williams amendment, with its 10 percent tax surcharge and $6 billion in discretionary spending cuts. There was a very brief moment of good feeling for the president in Congress. He was no longer merely a “self-seeking politician”; he was a “self-sacrificing statesman,” one columnist wrote.69 He had sacrificed himself for the national good; the bill was sold as the sacrifice for citizens to make—through tax hikes and spending cuts—for the good of the nation. Now that Johnson was freed from immediate political considerations, most of his opponents in Congress expected that he would be more willing to make a deal on spending in order to obtain the tax revenue, even if the cuts angered liberals and the tax surcharge alienated moderate voters and conservatives.

  The Democratic leadership seized the opportunity to obtain a vote, and on April 2 the Senate passed the revenue legislation that included the 10 percent tax surcharge. The vote on the amendment was 53 to 35, with strong support from the conservative coalition and a lukewarm response from liberals. Republicans were strongly in favor of the austerity package, with only 3 voting no; 31 in the GOP voted in favor. Democrats were more divided. Thirty-two Democrats voted against the amendment, with only 22 voting yes. Southern Democrats voted 10 to 8 in favor of the amendment.

  Seventeen of the 29 senators running for reelection, well aware that no voter liked higher taxes and cuts in domestic benefits, voted against the bill, but the full Senate passed the bill, with substantial support from both parties, 30 Republicans and 27 Democrats.

  “Only last week,” wrote the Washington Post reporter Frank Porter, “before President Johnson’s dramatic announcement of an initiative for Vietnam deescalation and his unavailability for reelection—prospects for the omnibus revenue and economy measure were dubious.”70

  AN AUSTERITY BUDGET

  On April 4, Martin Luther King Jr. was shot and killed as he stood on the balcony of his motel room in Memphis, Tennessee, where King had just given a speech in support of striking sanitation workers. Memphis, with a population that was 40 percent African American, was a tinderbox in which news of the shooting spread like a flame. Tennessee’s governor, Buford Ellington, immediately announced a curfew and ordered four thousand National Guard troops into the city.

  The administration expected that the murder would spark more rioting in the cities and knee-jerk law-and-order rhetoric from conservative Democrats and Republicans. Another round of devastating riots would likely set back the progress that had been made on civil rights since 1964. Robert Kennedy, who had decided to enter the Democratic primaries a few weeks before Johnson withdrew from the race, was about to deliver a speech on a street corner in an African American neighborhood in Indianapolis when he learned about what had happened. He broke the news to the crowd and asked them to act not with violence but with “love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black.”71 The people cheered and applauded the senator, and they remained calm.

  Although conditions remained stable in Indianapolis, riots erupted in more than a hundred cities, including New York, Boston, Washington, and Trenton, New Jersey. Johnson sent the National Guard to establish calm. Forty-six people were killed and approximately two thousand injured, according to reports. More than thirteen thousand troops were stationed in Washington by the time the riots simmered down, some patrolling on foot and others by jeep.72

  It was something of a surprise that the fury over King’s murder led to one of the few legislative breakthroughs of the year for liberals—the Civil Rights Act of 1968 and its prohibition of racial discrimination in the sale or rental of some housing. Twenty-one House Republicans announced they would support the housing proposal that had stalled the civil rights bill in the House Rules Committee.73 The real estate lobby was caught off guard by the sudden change in the legislative climate,74 and on April 10 the House passed the bill by a vote of 229 to 195. The following day, Johnson signed the legislation.

  Supporters of the legislation had been debating and redrafting the bill for more than a year, compromising and narrowing the scope of the proposal, hoping that an opportunity would arise to bring back the idea that had caused so much controversy in 1966. Ironically, though it was rioting that had made passage of the legislation almost impossible in 1966, the assassination of Dr. King in 1968 and the rioting that followed propelled Congress to adopt a measure that would demonstrate its concern to African American voters. Senator Joseph Clark called on his colleagues to pass the bill and said that by doing so, his colleagues could “build for him [King] a lasting monument of law.”75 In an unpredictable turn of events, some of the Republicans who had been elected with the help of the racial backlash in 1966, Charles Percy among them, were instrumental in moving the bill toward passage in the Senate. The fact that the civil rights movement—black power advocates and mainstream leaders, King among them—had been presenting more radical demands for economic equality made open housing seem a much milder demand than it had just two years earlier. The good news for civil rights activists was that the Civil Rights Act of 1968 firmly established the principle of nondiscrimination in housing and rental markets, including a ban on the notorious practice of blockbusting.76 But the final legislation was in fact a watered-down compromise of a watered-down compromise. It would not cost the federal government any substantial amount of money to implement—there were virtually no enforcement mechanisms in it—a good thing given how the budget was shaping up.77

  Johnson sent a different message to the electorate in the wake of the King assassination when he pushed for the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act, which Congress passed in June. The legislation offered a Democratic response to demands for law and order—among them were restrictions on the sale of handguns and a federal grant for research on the social and environmental factors that caused crime. The centerpiece of the bill was the establishment of the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration to coordinate crime-fighting operations.

  The King assassination also led to further polarization of the budget battles that had been taking place since January. Both sides of the legislative debate were even more certain now of the correctness of their positions. Congressional conservatives pointed to the riots that followed the assassination as further evidence of the breakdown of law and order and proof that Johnson’s social experiments were not working. Liberals, shattered by t
he death of one of the most influential people of the decade, were doubly determined to protect their most treasured social policies from the depredations of legislative conservatives.

  The closer the president and Mills got to an agreement, the more desperate some liberal officials in the administration became to persuade Johnson to stand his ground on an absolute maximum of $4 billion in discretionary spending cuts—a definite retreat from their previous ceiling of $2 billion. Even as a lame-duck president, Johnson had some leverage. For all the trouble the conservatives were giving him, they were equally intent on passing the bill; they were sincerely concerned lest the growth of deficits rattle international financial markets. They needed Johnson to signal his support to non-southern Democrats who were skittish about the bill, and they needed to make sure there was no possibility of his vetoing it. Joseph Califano believed the outcome of the budget fight would be decisive in shaping the political dynamics for the remainder of Johnson’s term.78 If the president agreed to spending cuts that were too deep, conservatives would be confident enough to ignore him on everything else. If he stood his ground and won, he would demonstrate the strength he still had. “If you get stuck either with no tax bill or with provisions of the kind Mills is now peddling,” Califano wrote to Johnson, “I think the ball game may well be over on the Hill for the rest of the year.”79

  The passage of the Senate amendment had shifted the terms of debate. While Johnson was still hoping he would be able to reduce the size of the spending cuts in conference committee by going along with the Senate he had allowed himself to be placed in a position where he was publicly fighting to reduce spending cuts already passed in the Senate rather than putting the burden on Mills and the conservatives to fight for more reductions.80

  The president was in fact resigned to accepting the deal on Mills’s terms. At a meeting with his cabinet, Johnson had shared a memo from the Council of Economic Advisers that emphasized the urgency of passing the tax hike. Arthur Okun, the chairman of the council, had told Johnson that if the “political realities” meant they had to accept a $6 billion budget cut, then they should go ahead and do it, because “by a definite margin . . . our economy is much better off with this overdose of fiscal restraint than none at all.” Secretary of the Treasury Henry Fowler agreed with Okun; he pointed out that after nine months “we are only able to get 150 House Democrats willing to vote for a tax bill,” which was clearly not enough to win support for legislation that included smaller spending cuts. Secretary of State Dean Rusk supported Johnson by warning his cabinet colleagues that the “international consequences will be very grave indeed if there is no tax bill. It is just absolutely essential.”81

  At a May 1 meeting, Johnson pondered with his advisers the possibility of accepting $6 billion in discretionary spending cuts, though he continued to believe that Congress would not insist on that number. He had concluded that the White House might need to “take the bull by the tail and get the tax bill now” and explained that they should make the reductions in the least painful way possible. Johnson continued to work toward a smaller reduction in spending, but by the end of the month he had resigned himself to the necessity of the congressional cuts. Speaking to the “liberals and progressives” in the cabinet meeting of May 29, Johnson said, “I can take this $6 billion and walk and breathe and live if I get a $10 billion Tax Bill. I want to tell you that you are going to hurt more if I have to take $6 billion and no Tax Bill.” Reminding them of the stakes of this battle, he looked around the room and said, “We’ll look like [Herbert] Hoover if we don’t use all the horsepower we’ve got. This is a question of survival. It is not Democratic or Republican.”82

  The president met with House and Senate leaders in an atmosphere of considerable tension about what to do next. The House majority leader, Carl Albert, warned him that passage of a tax bill through conference committee and then again on the floor of each chamber would still not be an “easy proposition,” because House liberals would not be happy with the $6 billion in spending cuts that had been accepted in the Senate.83

  In an effort to placate liberals, the Democratic leadership, with Johnson’s consent, allowed the House to vote on an amendment by the Massachusetts Democrat James Burke that would instruct the conferees to include $4 billion in spending cuts rather than $6 billion. The amendment had no chance of passing, but liberal Democrats could vote for it and get credit from their constituents for their effort.

  The day after the House rejected the Burke amendment, President Johnson publicly announced for the first time that he would support the $6 billion in spending cuts. A few days later, Carl Albert announced his support as well.

  Wilbur Mills scheduled the final vote for June 20 so that members would have sufficient time to review the entire package. In the intervening weeks, there was more tragedy, when Robert Kennedy was shot in Los Angeles on June 5 and died the following day. Kennedy had lost to McCarthy in Oregon but won in California, and he had been celebrating the revival of his candidacy when he was shot.

  Kennedy’s campaign had stalled McCarthy, and Kennedy’s death left Vice President Hubert Humphrey the inevitable nominee. If there was any candidate who could heal the rifts that had emerged in the Democratic coalition and move liberals beyond the horrendous losses of King and Kennedy, Humphrey was not that candidate. Once one of the most exciting voices in the party, when he had challenged the southern conservative barons of Capitol Hill in the 1940s and 1950s, Humphrey was seen in 1968 by the left wing of his party as the embodiment of the broken status quo. He was the heir, they feared, to Lyndon Johnson’s failed presidency, a politician who would stubbornly continue with the Vietnam War and not do much more on domestic policy.

  With liberals totally deflated about the direction of Washington politics, on June 20, after more than a year of brutal legislative debate, the final budget bill sailed through the House (268–150) and the Senate (64–16). The legislation received opposition only from a small coalition of ardent liberals, unhappy with the cuts, and from staunch conservatives who refused to go along with any kind of tax hike. Much of the opposition from both wings was minimal, intended to please constituents, with full realization that the legislation would pass.84

  The Revenue and Expenditure Control Act of 1968 increased revenue by $15.5 billion in 1969. The bill included $6 billion in immediate cuts to the fiscal 1969 budget (exempting spending on Vietnam, debt interest payments, veterans’ benefits, Medicare, and Social Security). The bill also cut $8 billion from cabinet budgets that had not been spent in the previous fiscal year, rather than allow agencies to carry the money over. The final legislation specified that the following year’s budget would have to recommend additional cuts—beyond the $6 billion to be implemented immediately—that would amount to a total of $10 billion over about two years. The deficit would fall by an estimated $22.5 billion, down to $7.5 billion.85

  Johnson normally signed a bill in a public ceremony in the East Room, surrounded by legislators and supporters, but this time he quietly signed in his office. In his statement on the new law, the president explained, “Now we can attack decisively—at the roots—the threats to our prosperity: accelerating inflation, soaring interest rates and deteriorating world trade performance.” The president jabbed Congress for having forced a “deep reduction” in the budget but said he had to accept this, given how important the bill was to the vitality of the economy.

  The legislation and the debate that led to its passage had shifted liberals from the politics of expansion to the politics of protection.86 “What was left,” the historian Robert Collins wrote, “was not the powerful reform surge of mid-decade but only its inertia.”87 Congress had shifted the debate from liberal growth to austerity, where talk about the creation of big new programs that required more spending would be difficult. Republicans continued to attack the president for his fiscal record. Richard Nixon warned of the “grave and permanent damage to the economy” that had been admini
stered by the “Johnson-Humphrey Administration.” Once the president had acknowledged the criticism of his spending record by signing into law a policy of restraint, there was little room for him to transform the government any further along liberal lines. His window for legislating had closed. Now all he could do was use his remaining power to protect his legacy from further destruction and come up with a way to get out of Vietnam.

  CHAPTER NINE

  THE ENDURANCE OF THE GREAT SOCIETY

  After the midterm elections and the austerity battles, President Johnson could no longer pass important legislation. The tax surcharge and spending cuts in the summer of 1968 were his last achievements. He had managed the liberal ascendancy and made the Eighty-ninth Congress historically productive, but the midterm elections, the budget debates, and the Vietnam War had eroded all his advantages. In the Ninetieth Congress, he could control very little, and he could dominate nothing. The political landscape in which he could twist arms to achieve legislative victories had vanished; even if he had twisted every arm in Congress, he could not have moved any more important legislation. He spent most of his final months in the White House fruitlessly trying to find a way to close out the war in Vietnam and to withstand fierce attacks from liberals who were condemning his presidency. Republicans continued to rail against what they characterized as chaos in the streets and on college campuses; they demanded the restoration of law and order and depicted Johnson’s America as a country coming unglued.

  Hubert Humphrey, the unfortunate heir to Johnson’s political legacy, seemed the candidate of last resort. Committed as he was to the president’s disastrous Vietnam policy, he struggled to regain the moral high ground he had staked out in his early political career. As intra-party conflict demoralized the Democrats, the third-party candidate George Wallace, the former Alabama governor, appealed to voters who opposed any further legislation for civil rights and any social programs that aimed for racial justice. The Republican Richard Nixon rebounded from his devastating defeat in the 1962 California gubernatorial election to take advantage of the damaged state of Democratic politics. He vowed to avoid Barry Goldwater’s disastrous southern strategy in 1964 and developed a message tailored for conservative Democrats, moderate and progressive Republicans, the business and financial community, and the party stalwarts in the Midwest.