The Fierce Urgency of Now
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Because of all the legislative breakthroughs Lyndon Johnson engineered, he has become an iconic figure for students of American history. His successors in office and their advisers—even those who hated what he achieved—have sought to figure out how the shrewd Texan was able to get so much legislation passed.
But we must understand that the Great Society wasn’t all about one man’s political talents or gifts or magic. Nor was it a result of a Congress that naturally worked, where members got along and just knew how to legislate. The political acumen Johnson and his colleagues on Capitol Hill possessed was essential, but what made the difference was the forces that temporarily reshaped Congress and broke the hold of conservatives on that notoriously inertial institution. A grassroots movement and a sea change election were critical to the liberal ascendancy that overwhelmed, if briefly, the forces of conservatism that had been, and are today, so strong. Critical too were the controversial and costly compromises Johnson made to hold off rightward pressure on Capitol Hill.
We as citizens and as politicians must study not only the great personalities who have inhabited the White House but also the full history of the political landscapes in which they operated and which made their achievements possible. Only if we understand how political landscapes change and can be changed will we ever have a chance of breaking the current gridlock in Washington.
Lyndon Johnson applies “the Treatment” to Louis Martin, a journalist, civil rights activist, and trusted presidential adviser, on April 20, 1966, during a reception for Democratic National Committee delegates. The president’s one-on-one powers of intimidation and persuasion are memorialized as being essential to advancing his domestic agenda even during a period when liberals dominated both houses of Congress.
In the early 1960s, Congress was ruled by a conservative coalition of southern Democratic committee chairmen and senior midwestern Republicans. In this photograph, the Connecticut senator Prescott Bush sleeps in his office during a twenty-four-hour filibuster against civil rights legislation in 1960. Scenes like this inspired one Democratic senator to call Congress the “Sapless Branch” of government.
The House Rules Committee chairman, Howard “Judge” Smith (left), was one of the most notorious leaders of the conservative coalition.
The legislative logjam finally started to break when grassroots activists galvanized public support for civil rights legislation. Images of children being confronted and arrested by police in Birmingham, Alabama, shocked the world.
The ranking Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, William McCulloch of Ohio, reached a secret deal with Kennedy administration officials over the July 4 holiday of 1963. He agreed to support Kennedy’s civil rights proposal as long as Kennedy gave credit to the GOP and prevented southern Democrats from watering down the bill.
When Kennedy sent a civil rights bill to the House in June 1963, the House Judiciary Committee chairman, Emanuel Celler of New York, the most senior liberal in the House, used the power of the chairmanship to push aggressively for passage of the bill.
Lobbyists for the major liberal advocacy organizations laid out a strategy to make sure the well-organized southerners did not succeed in stalling the bill by using their familiar legislative tricks. Left to right: Joseph Rauh (ADA), Clarence Mitchell (NAACP), and Roy Wilkins (NAACP) at a meeting on August 23, 1963, in Washington.
The AFL-CIO was an integral part of the liberal lobby for civil rights. The lobbyist for the organization, Andrew Biemiller, had immediate access to all of the most powerful politicians of the day.
Civil rights supporters marched on Washington on August 28, 1963, to demand that Congress pass civil rights legislation.
Martin Luther King Jr. and his colleagues were disappointed when, despite the success of the march, President Kennedy expressed to them his pessimistic assessment of the bill’s legislative prospects.
At the time of Kennedy’s assassination on November 22, 1963, very little of his domestic agenda had made it through Congress. Johnson was determined to persuade legislators to pass transformative programs. On November 28, he prepared to deliver his first televised address as president of the United States.
Johnson inherited the same conservative Congress that had stifled Kennedy’s initiatives. At this meeting on December 7, 1963, Georgia’s conservative senator Richard Russell, Johnson’s mentor, seems not at all intimidated by the new president’s aggressive style.
President Johnson meets with his top advisers. Left to right, facing the president: Pierre Salinger, Bill Moyers, Ted Sorensen, and Jack Valenti.
President Johnson hoped to ride the momentum created by the civil rights movement. During this meeting with civil rights leaders on January 18, 1964, he promised he would fight for the Civil Rights Act and make no compromises with the opposition. Left to right: Martin Luther King Jr., President Johnson, Whitney Young, and James Farmer.
The opposition to civil rights was fierce. These protesters picketed Representative William McCulloch after the Ohio Republican voted with the majority when the House of Representatives passed the Civil Rights Act on February 10, 1964.
These three southern Democrats met on March 21, 1964, to plan strategy against the civil rights bill in the Senate. Left to right: Senators Harry Byrd of Virginia, Allen Ellender of Louisiana, and James Eastland of Mississippi.
Martin Luther King Jr. (left) and Malcolm X (right) meeting in the halls of Congress on March 26, 1964. They threatened to mobilize massive grassroots protests against any senator who continued to support the filibuster.
The civil rights filibuster consumed Washington for months. Here, on April 13, 1964, opening day of the Washington Senators’ baseball season, Lyndon Johnson shares some of his popcorn with Speaker of the House John McCormack (to the president’s immediate right) and Majority Whip Hale Boggs. The game would be punctuated by an announcement that all senators should return to Capitol Hill for a quorum call.
Nicholas Katzenbach, who served as deputy attorney general and attorney general under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, was the administration’s point man in negotiations with the Senate over civil rights.
Senate minority leader Everett Dirksen, known as the Wizard of Ooze for his melodramatic orations, sits cross-legged on top of a desk in the Senate press gallery on April 7, 1964—his favorite position in which to talk with reporters during these weeks—outlining the amendments he planned to make to the civil rights bill that had passed in the House. In the end, Dirksen delivered enough Republican votes to end the civil rights filibuster. Dirksen was able to do that only because the civil rights movement had convinced many midwestern Republicans to support the bill.
With victory in sight for the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Johnson was already campaigning for his War on Poverty.
President Johnson persuaded Sargent Shriver (left), who had headed the Peace Corps, to run the War on Poverty. Shriver’s boundless energy helped build strong legislative support for the initiative.
Johnson made his liberalism a central theme in the campaign. Robert Kennedy was running for a Senate seat in New York.
With the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, Johnson shored up his credentials as a cold war hawk. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman, William Fulbright, helped the White House find support for the resolution, which granted the president broad authority to conduct military operations in Vietnam.
A billboard for Senator Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign in Atlantic City, with a comment by his opponents appended.
Johnson watches the 1964 election returns as reported by the three broadcast television networks.
The 1964 presidential election created the perception that there was a mandate for Lyndon Johnson and made liberals a dominant force on Capitol Hill. Johnson won 486 electoral votes and 61 percent of the popular vote. Democrats gained huge majorities in the House (295–140) and the Senate (68–32). Here is how the pres
idential election looked at 1:30 a.m. EST, November 4, 1964, as returns showed the proportions of the Democratic landslide.
A dejected Barry Goldwater during a news conference at Camelback Inn near Phoenix, Arizona, after he lost the presidential election. Republicans were thenceforth afraid to be associated with the extreme conservatism Goldwater represented.
Lyndon Johnson admiring a portrait of Franklin Roosevelt. In 1965, Johnson hoped to complete the work FDR had started when he created the New Deal.
Lawrence O’Brien, legislative liaison for Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, understood the immense possibilities that had resulted from the election. Left to right: Lyndon Johnson, Lawrence O’Brien, and Bill Moyers.
The House majority leader, Carl Albert, would serve as the president’s point man in the House of Representatives during the Eighty-ninth Congress throughout the debates over most of the major domestic bills.
The Missouri congressman Richard Bolling, a founder of the Democratic Study Group, entered the Eighty-ninth Congress with grand expectations about moving forward with the liberal domestic agenda and congressional reforms that would permanently weaken southern conservative chairmen.
Speaker of the House John McCormack (right) believed the election had created the best opportunity Democrats would have for decades to enact new domestic policies.
The first major bill Johnson sent to Congress was for a program to provide federal aid to education. The New York congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr., chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, here seen at a 1965 press conference, used his authority to move this bill through the House, but his erratic personal behavior frustrated Johnson despite their shared goals.
When the federal education bill reached the Senate, Oregon’s Wayne Morse made sure it passed the chamber intact. Morse, a former law school dean, helped the administration design a bill that would avoid the disputes over parochial schools that had bogged down previous proposals.
LBJ signs the Elementary and Secondary Education bill on April 11, 1965, in front of a former school in Stonewall, Texas. Beside him is his first schoolteacher, Kate Deadrich Loney.
Health care was a top priority for the Eighty-ninth Congress. The New Mexico Democratic senator Clinton Anderson, shown here, who almost died from tuberculosis in his twenties, had been sponsoring proposals for Medicare since 1961. Until 1965, the House Ways and Means chairman, Wilbur Mills, a Democrat from Arkansas, had prevented the legislation from being reported out of his committee.
Retired senior citizens rallying in favor of Medicare.
The Wisconsin representative John Byrnes, ranking Republican on the House Ways and Means Committee, proposed an alternative to Medicare that would have covered the cost of physician care (Medicare covered only the cost of hospitals). Administration officials worried that the Byrnes proposal might siphon off votes from their bill.
Assistant Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare Wilbur Cohen (who became undersecretary in April 1965), the consummate Social Security insider, had only a few days to redraft the entire Medicare bill when Wilbur Mills surprised everyone in closed hearings by announcing he wanted to combine the administration and the Republican proposals into one giant bill.
Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare John Gardner outlines the steps for implementing Medicare. Johnson was determined to get Medicare running effectively as quickly as possible so that elderly recipients would oppose any legislator who tried to tamper with the program.
During a march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, on March 7, 1965, to demand full voting rights for African Americans, the SNCC leader John Lewis (light coat, center) is viciously attacked by a state trooper. This and other images from the march shocked Americans and produced more demands from Republicans and Democrats in Congress to pass a voting rights bill. Few legislators knew that Senator Dirksen had already been negotiating the details of a bill with Nicholas Katzenbach.
President Johnson’s special address to Congress on voting rights on March 15, 1965. Toward the end of the speech, thunderous applause filled the chamber and civil rights supporters wept as Johnson uttered the words “We shall overcome.”
The Pennsylvania senator Joseph Clark (left) and the Massachusetts senator Ted Kennedy were two of the most passionate advocates of civil rights. Kennedy caused some political problems for Johnson when the senator pushed for a federal ban on the poll tax as part of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
After the passage of the Voting Rights Act, tensions over race relations escalated. A six-day riot broke out after police arrested a man in the predominantly African American neighborhood of Watts in Los Angeles.
Johnson’s decision to propose a fair housing bill caused huge political problems for Democrats. White residents in traditionally Democratic districts in the North reacted violently against this phase of the civil rights struggle. In this photograph, civil rights demonstrators in Chicago duck in an effort to avoid flying rocks and firecrackers hurled at them during a protest march against the housing practices of real estate offices in all-white neighborhoods.
There was growing tension in 1966 between Chicago’s mayor, Richard Daley, and the White House over the Economic Opportunity Act. Daley was angered to see federal funds directed to activists and community organizers who were outside the control of his machine.
Vietnam politics were heating up in 1966. Senator William Fulbright (pictured in front of Senator Mike Mansfield) conducted televised hearings during which he grilled administration officials about the war.
President Johnson was less concerned about Senator Fulbright than he was about Republican criticism that he wasn’t being hawkish enough in Vietnam. Here, the House minority leader, Gerald Ford (center), expresses this criticism at a White House meeting with Senator Everett Dirksen (left) and Congressman Leslie Arends (right) seated beside him.
Johnson came under growing pressure to raise taxes to contain inflation and pay for Vietnam. Here he meets with his fiscal team to discuss the gloomy budgetary situation.
The Senate majority leader, Mike Mansfield, reviews the 1966 midterm elections. Republicans put together effective campaigns that focused on Vietnam, inflation and deficits, and law and order.
Senator Robert Kennedy (left) campaigning for Senator Paul Douglas (right) in Illinois. Kennedy praised Douglas as a pioneer in the civil rights movement, but Douglas lost to the charismatic Republican businessman Charles Percy, who benefited from the backlash against civil rights among white ethnic Democrats.
African Americans line up to vote at the courthouse in Camden, Alabama. Many of them were voting for the first time as a result of the protections afforded by the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Despite their participation, the conservative coalition regained its strength in the House and the Senate.
By 1967 and 1968, images of Americans in combat in Vietnam were grabbing national attention, and the war was becoming more controversial.
Antiwar activists protest Johnson’s policies in Vietnam. Until 1967, the president had ignored the antiwar Left (dismissing its members as “little shits on the campuses”). But he could ignore them no more.
The budgetary concerns about Vietnam mounted. The Federal Reserve chairman, William McChesney Martin Jr., called on the White House and Congress to reduce the federal deficit to prevent an inflationary spiral. Johnson still postponed sending Congress a tax surcharge proposal in the hope that he would be in a stronger position by the summer to obtain the bill he wanted with minimal cuts in his cherished programs.
The riots in Detroit, Michigan (pictured here), and Newark, New Jersey, strengthened the hand of congressional conservatives who wanted to cut spending. In response, they argued that liberal social policies were rewarding lawless behavior and causing domestic chaos.
At an Oval Office meeting on July 24, 1967, to address the Detroit riots, a dejected president Johnson (seated, foreground) confers with (backg
round, left to right) his adviser Marvin Watson, J. Edgar Hoover, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, General Harold Johnson, the domestic adviser Joe Califano, and Secretary of the Army Stanley Resor.