The vote in the House was delayed by the Republican National Convention, which nominated Barry Goldwater for President on July 16. Judge Smith refused to issue a rule for consideration of the bill until after the close of the convention, which annoyed the President. He wanted the Democratic leadership to have a vote on July 20. But it was not to be.
O’Brien wrote the President on July 31 that he counted 195 Democrats and 8 Republicans in favor, 203 of the needed 218. Those in doubt from whom he hoped to get the other 15 votes totaled 47. But Halleck refused to concede. He was visiting every Republican in the House (with Shriver at his heels) telling “his boys” that “a vote for the poverty bill is a vote against the party.”
House debate was scheduled to open on August 7. According to Evans and Novak, Shriver was called before a “kangaroo court” in Speaker McCormack’s office on August 6. Aside from the speaker, those present included the House Democratic whips, Landrum, Cooley, and other Carolina congressmen. Cooley told Shriver that eight representatives from the Carolinas would not vote for the bill unless Yarmolinsky was dumped. The whips said that the bill would not pass without these southern votes.
While the President had suggested that Shriver would head the OEO, he had not agreed to do so. In fact, he did not want to be the director, much preferring to remain with the Peace Corps. He told this to Cooley and company. He also said, “Adam Yarmolinsky is an extremely competent person. I think he would be great in the program. But I do not have the right to put him in or put him out. … That’s for the President to say.”
They told him to phone Johnson. The President said, “You tell them that you won’t recommend that I appoint him.” Shriver said he could not do so because Yarmolinsky was his friend and was being attacked by bigots. Johnson told him to say that the President would act “in his own judgment” and that no one’s recommendation would be controlling. Shriver tried it, but it was not acceptable. They wanted an “assurance” that Yarmolinsky would not be named.
Shriver phoned again and Johnson told him what to say. According to Evans and Novak, he said, “The President has no objection to my saying that if I were appointed I would not recommend Yarmolinsky.” That did it.
Shriver recalled, “That was the most unpleasant experience I ever had in the government of the United States. … I felt… as if I ought to just go out and vomit.” He returned to the task force office and told Yarmolinsky that he would not be deputy director of the OEO. “It was a question of whether we have this bill and the benefits which it will bring to hundreds of thousands or maybe millions of poor people, or you.” In fact, Yarmolinsky learned more about what had happened from the Evans and Novak newspaper columns published on August 11 and 12, 1964.
Debate on August 7 opened innocently with a typical motion by Howard Smith to delete the enacting clause of the poverty bill. It went down to defeat 225 to 197. One wonders whether those eight southern votes were needed.
Conservative Republican W. H. Ayres of Ohio then stated that Yarmolinsky “is the man who is really running this show under Sargent Shriver.” Landrum cut him off: “So far as I am concerned, this gentleman, Mr. Yarmolinsky, will have absolutely nothing to do with the program. And, second, I wish to state that not only will he not be appointed, but that he will not be considered if he is recommended for a place in this agency.”
Landrum then turned to the bill and said it was “the most conservative I’ve ever seen.” This was because it would take people off welfare and make them “taxpayers instead of taxeaters.” In the vote on August 8 the House increased the margin of victory to 226 to 185. The majority consisted of 204 Democrats and 22 Republicans, the minority of 145 Republicans and 40 Democrats. The northern Democrats voted 144 to 0 for the poverty bill, the southerners 60 to 40 against. Evans and Novak wrote, “The eight votes from the Carolinas were superfluous. The sacrifice of Adam Yarmolinsky was unnecessary.” On August 11 the Senate accepted the House version of the bill by voice vote.
At the President’s press conference on August 8 a reporter raised the question of Yarmolinsky, starting to say that “he had been with the Department of Defense. … ” Johnson interrupted, “He still is.” The reporter thought he had been “working for the Peace Corps and working on the poverty bill.” “No,” the President said, “your thoughts are wrong. He is still with the Department of Defense.” This was technically true in that Yarmolinsky was not with the Peace Corps, but inferentially false in that he had been working on the poverty program.8
President Johnson signed the Economic Opportunity Act in the Rose Garden on August 24, 1964. His address, broadcast over television and radio, sounded like a campaign speech, which, in fact, it was. His eye was fixed on the election and he did not bother to discuss what had been accomplished. When Shriver was sworn in as director of the OEO on October 16, the President’s remarks merely rambled about.
Johnson does not seem to have been much interested in his new law. Yarmolinsky said he talked about it “endlessly,” “but in an impressionistic way. … Poverty is a bad thing, let’s get rid of it, it was just about as simple as that.” As Sundquist correctly perceived, administration of the program was going to be critically important. But the President thought “administration would take care of itself,” and, in any case, that was Shriver’s job. However, Sundquist said, “Shriver certainly had no interest,” and his administrator, Yarmolinsky, had been dumped. It is unlikely that any member of Congress really understood the complications of the new law. Hackett was convinced that Shriver never did get community action straight. Kermit Gordon was persuaded that the “experts” at CEA and the Bureau of the Budget knew very little about poverty.
This general state of ignorance emerged in part from the fact that there was no consensus on the definitions of poverty and of a poor person. Lampman had done what he could with imperfect data and had been forced to make many arbitrary assumptions. Furthermore, as Lampman had stressed in the poverty chapter of the Economic Report, “Poverty … has many faces.” Dealing with it would be a challenge of extraordinary complexity.
This was reflected in the administrative system set up by the Economic Opportunity Act. The OEO was not a department and was not a regular administrative agency. Rather, as the President insisted over the objection of the Bureau of the Budget, it was placed in his executive office.
Here Shriver, already encumbered by the Peace Corps, was supposed to coordinate and administer an extremely bizarre organization. Unlike other executive agencies, it had direct operating responsibilities for the urban Job Corps, the Community Action Program, VISTA, and migrant workers. The Labor Department ran the Neighborhood Youth Corps. Agriculture operated some Job Corps conservation centers and rural loans. Interior handled most of the other conservation centers. HEW was responsible for adult basic education and work experience, the Small Business Administration for small loans. There were many jurisdictional disputes between these agencies. With the stress on local control, regionalization was necessary, but a rational attempt to match the geographic boundaries used by Labor and HEW failed. The OEO established seven regional offices. Community action regionalized quickly, but the Job Corps and VISTA held back. While the framers of the statute thought the states would be of little importance, they actually became significant, in part because of the governor’s veto. Community action had no choice but to function locally and this was supported by the “maximum feasible participation” standard in the law. Where blacks were involved, as in several major cities in the North as well as in the South, there was a sharp challenge by mayors. The loss of Yarmolinsky was felt keenly. In fact, the OEO did not get a “permanent” deputy director until Bertrand M. Harding took the job in June 1966.
John R. Commons at the University of Wisconsin had taught his students, including Wilbur Cohen, that a bad law well administered was better than a good law poorly administered. The conclusion Cohen had drawn was: keep it simple. He was critical of those who put together the Economic Opportunity Act. They “
tried to do too much at one time.” Yarmolinsky in 1980 agreed. He thought there were programs that would work with small numbers of people that could not work with large numbers. “I won’t say I’m pessimistic, but I guess I am because if I were in complete charge I don’t know what I’d do.”
Despite these defects, President Johnson, Shriver’s task force, and the Congress deserve an accolade for their accomplishment: the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 was, truly, a noble experiment. No other nation, even Britain, had confronted the formidable problem of poverty so squarely. As Secretary Wirtz said,
The purpose of government in a democracy must be indistinguishable from the purpose of those who are its members. To the extent that our lives as individuals find their meaning in what we can add to the lives of others, a program to fight poverty is the embodiment of the central idea of this system of government. The text for this bill could be: Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these, my brethren, ye have done it unto me.
Henry Mayhew, Charles Booth, and Charles Dickens would have raised their glasses to wish the Office of Economic Opportunity Godspeed.9
II
LYNDON JOHNSON—“THE GREAT, FABULOUS 89TH CONGRESS”
5
Prelude: The 1964 Election
THE Republican party had an identity crisis. It did not know who it was. This was caused by the unease and frustration growing out of both defeat and internal division. Jud Morhouse, the chairman of the New York State party, in 1962 referred to “the lethargic and amorphous slough of defeat and despair to which the Republican party has fallen.”
Of the preceding eight presidential elections, the GOP had won two—1952 and 1956—and those Eisenhower victories from the viewpoint of the party were tarnished. No one believed that Dwight Eisenhower was both a national hero and a confirmed Republican. He had beaten out Robert A. Taft, “Mr. Republican,” for the nomination in 1952. It was no secret that he was bored with partisan politics. Anyone with half an eye could see that Eisenhower had himself won in 1952 and 1956 and had not done very well in dragging the party after him. Nixon had then lost to Kennedy in 1960 by a razor-thin edge. “His defeat,” dedicated Republican William A. Rusher wrote, “seemed to tell the world that the GOP, without some charismatic national hero like Eisenhower at its head, was still a born loser.”
The congressional performance was even more dismal. Of the elections between 1932 and 1962, the Republicans had won two—1946 and 1952. In each year they captured both houses of Congress. But the Democrats took them back in 1948 and 1954. Thus, of the 30 years in this span of time, the GOP had control of Congress for four. The situation in the states was even less encouraging.
The split between the left and right wings of the Republican party could be traced back to 1912 when Teddy Roosevelt walked out to form the Progressive (Bull Moose) party, leaving the conservative shell to William Howard Taft. In the late fifties the wound bled profusely. Governor Nelson Rockefeller led the liberal wing for the nomination with a progressive platform on both international and domestic issues. Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona was the leading conservative spokesman. Nixon played the role of centrist, bridging the gap between these extremes at least long enough to insure his own nomination. But the span collapsed after his defeat.
The split had a regional dimension. The progressive East, particularly New York, confronted the conservative West, formerly led by Ohio, but later shifting farther west. New York controlled the presidential nominations between 1940 and 1956—Wendell Willkie in 1940, Thomas Dewey in 1944 and 1948, Dwight Eisenhower in 1952 (engineered by Dewey) and 1956. The losers were Ohio’s Governor John Bricker in 1944 and Senator Robert Taft in 1948 and 1952. This was far more than a contest of personalities; it was a conflict over fundamental strategy. The easterners, conceding the South to the Democrats, argued that Republicans could not win with their historic base in the West. They must add New York, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and the smaller states of the Northeast. The western theory was that the nation had become homogenized after World War II, that the South was now ripe for the picking. Thus, an alliance between the South and the West would insure victory. Goldwater said, “Sometimes I think this country would be better off if we could just saw off the Eastern Seaboard and let it float out to sea.”
The deep division within the party created splinter groups, the most important being the emergence in the fifties of a full-dress conservative movement, called the “new conservatism.” Those on the right with intellectual pretensions had long suffered from an inferiority complex, the suspicion that the political theory on which they rested their case had no merit. In the nineteenth century John Stuart Mill had called conservatives the “stupid party.” More relevant now, in 1950 the liberal critic Lionel Trilling had written:
In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition. For it is the plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation. This does not mean, of course, that there is no impulse to conservatism or to reaction. Such impulses are certainly very strong, perhaps even stronger than most of us know. But the conservative impulse and the reactionary impulse do not, with some isolated and some ecclesiastical exceptions, express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seem to resemble ideas.
The modest number of liberals who read Trilling shrugged. For the new conservatives, however, this criticism was a knife in the heart.
Thus, during the fifties they erected an intellectual edifice. A group headed by William F. Buckley, Jr., launched the National Review, a journal of opinion, in 1955. Buckley had a knack for attracting public attention. He did so upon his graduation from Yale by attacking his alma mater, particularly its faculty, for teaching what he considered radical ideas. With his charm, quick wit, and vaguely British accent, he became a modest celebrity as a conservative commentator on television. This did no harm to his journal’s circulation. Russell Kirk started the quarterly Modern Age: A Conservative Review in 1957. A sometime professor, Kirk became the most obstinate of reactionaries. His style was the opposite of Buckley’s: academic, highfalutin, humorless, turgid, and dour, indeed, pessimistic. Henry Regnery, the publisher in Chicago, brought out a small torrent of conservative books and tracts.
More important, the new conservatives framed an agenda of three fundamental issues, which they defined and refined to their own satisfaction, if not always to the comprehension of others. Each was keyed to an important book.
The first doctrine of the new conservatives was dedication to a free market economy cleansed of any government intervention. In September 1960, 90 approximately youthful activists met at Great Elm, the Buckley estate in Sharon, Connecticut, to form a new organization they called Young Americans for Freedom (YAFs). (Youth is relative. One of the YAFs, who felt the weight of his years, noted to several others of his vintage that they were Old Americans for Freedom, or OAFS.) The YAFs adopted the Sharon Statement, a succinct and emphatic set of principles which proved that one need not be a liberal to write well, though it probably helped. As the statement put it, the “eternal truths” that expressed the first doctrine read as follows:
That liberty is indivisible, and that political freedom cannot long exist without economic freedom. That the market economy, allocating resources by the free play of supply and demand, is the single economic system compatible with the requirements of personal freedom and constitutional government, and that it is at the same time the most productive supplier of human needs. That when government interferes with the work of the market economy, it tends to reduce the moral and physical strength of the nation; that when it takes from one man to bestow on another, it diminishes the incentive of the first, and integrity of the second, and the moral autonomy of both.
The book which expressed these ideas most forcefully was Friedrich A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom (1944). The author was a very conservative Austrian economist of the very cons
ervative Austrian school. Hayek had left Vienna in crisis in 1931, had observed the rise of Hitler with dread from his position at the London School of Economics, and had written his tract from embattled Britain during the war. He abhorred totalitarianism and equated it with planning and collectivism. He insisted that democratic socialism was a contradiction in terms, that state control led inevitably to the destruction of freedom and ineluctably to a latter-day serfdom.
The second new conservative doctrine was to struggle against Communism both at home and abroad. The Sharon Statement’s “eternal truths” put it this way:
That we will be free only so long as the national sovereignty of the United States is secure; that history shows periods of freedom are rare and can exist only when free citizens concertedly defend their rights against all enemies, that the forces of international Communism are, at present, the greatest single threat to their liberties. That the United States should stress victory over, rather than coexistence with this menace.
A basic problem with these verities was that conservatives, old as well as new, never bothered to define Communism. If limited to the Soviet Union and the U.S. Communist party (assuming one could find it), there was little confusion. But many conservatives insisted, like Hayek, on broadening the definition. Thus, there was little difference between Soviet Communism and the British and Swedish welfare states, or, closer to home, FDR’s New Deal, JFK’s New Frontier, and LBJ’s Great Society, on the one hand, and, on the other, the American Communist party. Even more bothersome, Robert Welch, the founder and leader of the extremely conservative John Birch Society, declared that President Eisenhower was “a conscious articulate instrument of the Soviet conspiracy.” While Welch was indubitably a new conservative, this statement caused endless trouble for the official movement, not least for Buckley.
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