George Meany was extremely angry over the defeat and seemed to blame the Democratic party for failing to deliver the vote. The President replied that he did his best and had talked to 61 senators.
In the 1966 congressional elections the Republicans gained 47 seats in the House and three in the Senate. Wirtz reviewed the effect of these changes and concluded: “In general, the prospects for 14(b) repeal … are clearly reduced sharply by the election results.” There would be no other opportunity.
Larry O’Brien later reflected on the failure of repeal, which he called “a rare defeat, but it was anticipated, … an effort pretty much doomed to failure.” The time was right to try, “the high-water mark of recent history in terms of the strength of the President and, in turn, his strength with the Congress.” It was a “Democratic Party commitment.” O’Brien’s view was that “it just wasn’t going to happen. … The cold reality was that it was extremely difficult and, I felt, an impossible task. … We didn’t have the muscle to repeal 14(b).” Labor never was able to give the administration a favorable head count. Biemiller was fully aware of the real situation. Mike Mansfield knew that he would lose and said that he would “shoulder the blame for not having the round-the-clock sessions.”3
Since 1878 a three-member board of commissioners appointed by the President had governed the District of Columbia. In 1964 residents of the district won the right to vote, but only for President and Vice President. The problem was that Washington was primarily black, 60 percent in 1965 and growing steadily more so. Many southern Democrats did not want them to vote on racial grounds and many Republicans because they would elect Democrats.
On February 2, 1965, the President sent a special message to Congress urging home rule. His justification was simple: “Our Federal, State and local governments rest on the principle of democratic representation—the people elect those who govern them.” The residents of the District of Columbia were denied this fundamental right. Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy had supported home rule and the Senate had passed bills in 1949, 1952, 1955, 1958, and 1959. But the House District of Columbia Committee, dominated by southerners, had refused to report out these bills.
Johnson proposed a Charter Act to create a representative local government. The mayor, a 15-member city council, and a nonvoting member of the House of Representatives would be elected by the citizens. Both Congress and the President would retain the power to overrule the local council. Once again the Senate acted favorably, approving the bill by a vote of 63 to 29 on July 22, 1965. But the House committee did not change; it sat on the bill.
On August 4, the President wrote to Speaker McCormack: “The House … must be given the opportunity, and promptly, to restore the basic rights of democracy at the very heart of the greatest constitutional system in the world.” The committee was not moved. On August 11 New York Democrat Abraham J. Multer filed a discharge petition. If a majority of the House, 218 members, signed the petition, the bill would be taken from the District of Columbia Committee and placed on the floor for debate and vote. The next day the committee announced that hearings would open on August 18. Johnson, aroused, launched a strong campaign to get signatures for the petition and it reached 218 on September 3—169 northern Democrats, 23 southern Democrats, and 26 Republicans. But a number of the signers said that they would not vote for the bill in its present form.
Moreover, that same day the committee reported a substitute bill: the federal government would retain jurisdiction over the old Federal City of Washington as it existed between 1791 and 1871; the remainder of the district, a majority of the residents, would be offered to Maryland. If the state rejected the offer, the residents would hold a referendum on the issue of creating a board to draft a home rule charter. Either house of Congress would have the power to reject the charter.
Chaos reigned when both bills and many amendments reached the floor on September 29. Ultimately a bill was passed 227 to 174 calling for two memoranda, one on whether to have a charter, and, if adopted, the other on its terms.
Everett Dirksen said he would “stand in a state of marvel and wonderment at the wisdom” of a conference committee that could resolve the differences. Wayne Morse called the House action “a parliamentary exercise in avoiding an issue.” House Majority Leader Carl Albert said that home rule was a “dead duck” and he was right.
In addition to losing a good bill and inflicting a nasty defeat to President Johnson, the failure of the home rule bill seems to have marked the virtual end of congressional support for civil rights. The white backlash so evident later in the decade first appeared here over home rule for the District of Columbia.4
III
LYNDON JOHNSON—EMBATTLED, BESIEGED, UNDERMINED
12
Unhinging the State of the Union
AMONG the years of Lyndon Johnson’s presidency 1965 stood alone at the top in both domestic and foreign policy. Exploiting his massive victory in the 1964 elections, the President rammed through the Congress the next year a broad array of domestic legislation: Medicare, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the Higher Education Act, the Voting Rights Act, the immigration law, the Water Quality Act, the Solid Waste Disposal Act, along with other statutes of lesser consequence. In 1965, as well, Johnson fatefully led the nation into the Vietnam War.
In the early part of the year the White House was not organized to handle the immense flow of domestic legislation. While Bill Moyers was ostensibly in charge, he seemed to have little interest in the responsibility and discharged it indifferently. In July 1965 George Reedy resigned as White House press officer and the President replaced him with Moyers. He then installed Joseph A. Califano, Jr., as his special assistant on domestic affairs. Califano would remain in that position until the end of the administration and would play a decisive role in shaping domestic policy.
He had been born and was raised in Brooklyn. He attended Jesuit schools, including Holy Cross College. He then went to the Harvard Law School, from which he graduated in 1955. Califano would later explain his sensitivity to social needs as arising from his Jesuit schooling and Paul Freund’s analysis of the Constitution in law school. He then spent three years in the Navy in the Judge Advocate General’s office in the Pentagon. In 1958 he joined Dewey Ballantine, a big Wall Street law firm. At this time he had no political commitment, leaning, if anything, toward the Republicans.
Califano spent the Washington’s birthday weekend in 1960 at home sick. He read John Kennedy: A Political Profile by James MacGregor Burns and sat in on a couple of meetings his wife held in their apartment on Democratic reform politics. Califano was hooked. He became a Democrat and a vigorous supporter of JFK, throwing himself into the campaign at the “lowest imaginable level.”
After the election, because he was impressed by the new President’s appointments and was hopelessly saddled at the law firm with an “enormously boring but complicated stock-split transaction,” Califano began to think about going to Washington. He learned that McNamara had named Cyrus Vance, a very good lawyer, general counsel at Defense. Though he did not know Vance, on Wednesday before the inauguration Califano wrote him saying that he would like to work for him and enclosed a resume. Vance phoned on Friday asking him to come down for an interview the next day. On Monday Vance offered him a job as his special assistant. Califano would have jumped at once but could not shed the stock-split albatross until April. In 1962 Vance became Secretary of the Army and brought Califano along. Within a few months he became general counsel of the Army, “a wonderful opportunity,” he said, “for a 31-year old lawyer.”
In April 1964 McNamara asked him to succeed Adam Yarmolinsky as his special assistant. This was on the assumption that Yarmolinsky would leave to become deputy director of the poverty program, which did not work out. Califano got the job and worked on a great variety of important assignments, many involving contacts with the White House staff.
On the day after the 1964 election Mac Bundy and Bill Moyers invited Ca
lifano to become a special assistant to President Johnson to head the talent hunt and to work on Latin America. Califano said he had to talk to McNamara. They told him not to because the President had not yet spoken to him. Califano insisted. But Moyers called McNamara before Califano could get back. The secretary told Moyers that he was out of his mind and ought to take a vacation. He then told Califano that there were only two jobs at the White House better than the one he now had—Bundy’s and Moyers’s, if it could be pumped up as domestic adviser. McNamara then talked to the President and told Califano that “he’d gotten me [Califano] about six months of grace time, but that the President would make another pass.”
On the day Moyers was named press secretary he told Califano that the President wanted him to handle domestic programs. Califano then had a long talk with McNamara about what the job should cover, which he summarized as
the preparation of domestic programs, first, that is, in terms of legislation and administration; second, the coordination of the operation of the domestic programs once they were begun; third, the handling of domestic crises; and fourth, heavy involvement in the economic area. [If this was an accurate job description, McNamara said,] you could probably make something out of the domestic part of the government.
The secretary presented these points to the President and stressed that Califano must report directly to him. Johnson agreed. That weekend Califano and his wife were at the ranch. He went to work as special assistant to the President for domestic affairs in late July 1965. He soon put together a small, extremely competent staff and, with a big shove from Johnson, waded into the heavy seas of the Great Society.
A young man who could win the high esteem of Cyrus Vance, Robert McNamara, and Lyndon Johnson was, obviously, special. Joe Califano had the essential qualities: high intelligence, loyalty, probity, command of language, an easy manner that made friends quickly, enormous energy and diligence, great curiosity, and management skills. Like the President, he believed that government could be used to broaden democracy in order to raise those at the bottom of the social order. At the same time, Califano was a political pragmatist. As with his boss and the best kids on the streets of Brooklyn, he held no prejudices based on ethnicity or religion. While it is difficult to imagine two people more different than Lyndon Johnson and Joe Califano, they meshed almost perfectly. The President came to rely on him heavily and put him in charge of major crises. Further, at moments when Johnson was under great strain he would turn to Califano for personal support.
In 1966 when the President was about to leave for Southeast Asia he brought Califano to his bedroom. As Califano recounted, Johnson said,
“You’re going to be the President. … We have to get all this legislation passed. We have to do this, we have to do that.” And then he proceeded to load me up. He gave me cufflinks. He gave me an electric toothbrush with the Presidential seal on it. He gave me a tie clasp, he gave me cigarette lighters and I ended up walking with my arms full of all these presents, to say goodbye to him. … I don’t think I slept … for all the time he was away. I worked so hard because all these bills were on the Hill. [His] calls were always at … three in the morning.
By the fall of 1965 it was clear that the war would not be over soon, more likely not for many years. This raised acutely the question of guns or butter. For those concerned about the economy, piling the costs of the war upon a system presently fully employed guaranteed rapid inflation. The Federal Reserve was about to raise interest rates and the Council of Economic Advisers was considering higher taxes. Conservatives who believed in the war as a fight against Communism urged the abandonment of the Great Society. Liberals who supported Johnson’s domestic policies feared that their programs would be washed down the drain in Vietnam. The guns or butter issue could tear the social fabric of the nation as well as the Johnson presidency to pieces.
The President was compelled to confront the problem and he did so by making it the theme of the State of the Union message to Congress on January 12, 1966. The composition of that speech became an ordeal of exceptional messiness.
The original scheme seemed sensible—Bundy would handle the part on the war, Califano would submit the legislative program, and Jack Valenti would pull the pieces together for final editing by the President. Califano thought that Johnson was “a very good editor once he got down to the nitty-gritty.” He had a “way of making things clear, easily understood by the American people.” But the plan did not work out. On November 27 Valenti, supported by Califano, asked the President for permission to bring in Dick Goodwin, who had resigned during the summer. This opened a can of worms.
Valenti’s suggestion had a certain logic. Goodwin had written three of LBJ’s “most memorable speeches”—the Great Society address at the University of Michigan on May 22, 1964, the We Shall Overcome speech to a joint session of Congress on March 15, 1965, and the Howard University address on race on June 4, 1965. “At his best,” Valenti wrote, “[Goodwin is] incandescent and possibly a near-genius in his field. For when Goodwin is collaborating with his muses, he is the most skilled practitioner of an arcane and dying art form, the political speech.” But he had a bad side. Goodwin was “a prickly chap,” as “lovable as a sullen porcupine.” He held on to a speech until the last moment to prevent the speaker from messing around with it. Nor did he care for anyone else’s prose. In this case Valenti got John Steinbeck to submit some chiseled lines. Example: “The Great Society is not the ordered, changeless, and sterile battalion of the ants.” Johnson loved it; Goodwin tossed the Nobel Prizewinner’s phrasemaking into the trash bin. The President, moreover, disliked and distrusted Goodwin and told Valenti he did not want him around.
But a month later there was still no progress. Johnson, at the urging of Valenti, Califano, and Moyers, authorized a call to Goodwin. But he himself would edit Goodwin’s drafts and he absolutely refused to meet with him directly. Shortly after the new year Goodwin checked into the Mayflower and worked out of his hotel room.
While Johnson drew immense pride from the enormous legislative achievements of the first session of the 89th Congress, he would not tolerate any resting on the oars. He demanded that the second session be even bigger, to fix in law his vision of the Great Society. Thus, he drove Califano and his team relentlessly to scour the universities, the federal agencies, and any other source they could think of for legislative ideas.
On December 29, 1965, Califano was in Johnson’s office at the ranch with a huge loose-leaf notebook entitled “The Great Society—A Second Year Legislative Program.” Califano slowly turned the pages as the President chose the proposals he wanted and discarded the rest. The number that went through the screen was enormous. “We were serving up plenty of butter to go with the guns,” Califano wrote, “a grand design. … It was an extraordinary experience. In less than two hours, this President had blessed a massive second-year program that would astound the Congress and the country when he unveiled it in his State of the Union message on January 12, 1966.”
Between January 5 and 11 the White House and its Mayflower annex became a madhouse as the President sent draft after draft back for revision. A basic problem was that Johnson and Bundy found Goodwin’s dovishness intolerable.
The night of January 11 was unreal. Califano, Valenti, and Moyers had a “final meeting” with the President in which he gave them “his last round of comments.” Califano said later, “I remember essentially being up all night writing. So I slept on the couch in my office.” Goodwin wrote that he approached the end of what he called the “guns and butter” speech at dawn. He had worked, “without respite, for almost thirty-six consecutive hours.” He could barely make out the keys on the typewriter and was unable to formulate coherent sentences. Desperate, he phoned the White House doctor to give him a few more hours. The M.D. arrived quickly, “draw a hypodermic partially filled with an unnamed red liquid from his bag, and, as I continued to jab haltingly at the typewriter keys, … injected the chemical into my shoulder.”
The doctor said, “Don’t tell anyone.” It worked. Goodwin finished his draft.
By 7:15 a.m. on January 12 Johnson had read the “final” draft and had rejected it. At a conference with his exhausted staff in his bedroom he demanded a rewrite. He worked on it throughout the day and got many revisions. In the afternoon he got Fortas and Clifford to go over it. “Lunch” was at 6:17. Califano got a call from him at 7:32 “on this damn message that he’s going to deliver at nine o’clock.” With his usual fussiness Johnson arranged for counting and measuring the applause and for Marvin Watson and Larry O’Brien to start clapping if it lagged. Finally, he got a haircut, dressed, and left for the Capitol.
At the end of the afternoon Johnson’s secretary had awakened Goodwin at the hotel. “The President would like you to ride up to the Hill with him for the speech.” Goodwin was tempted but decided not to accept and went back to sleep. “I was never to see or talk to Lyndon Johnson again.”
In the House chamber at 9:04 that evening the President opened the State of the Union message by joining guns and butter:
We will not permit those who fire upon us in Vietnam to win a victory over the desires and intentions of all the American people. This Nation is mighty enough, its society is healthy enough, its people are strong enough, to pursue our goals in the rest of the world while still building a Great Society here at home.
Guns or Butter Page 47