Building the Great Society

by Joshua Zeitz

  • • • • •

  Later that evening, Valenti found himself seated on the edge of a straight-backed chair in the president’s bedroom at the Elms as LBJ—clad in pajamas and perched upright in his bed—fired off a seemingly endless line of directives. Also seated around him were Moyers and Cliff Carter. Horace Busby had only just departed. Johnson’s aides were wearing the same suits they had climbed into that morning. The television set remained on, casting a dim glow across the room as it broadcast an endless loop of the day’s tragedy.

  The new president was famously addicted to the telephone and had already placed scores of calls to congressional leaders, cabinet members, foreign heads of state, and corporate chieftains. Working out of his office in the Executive Office Building, he had been briefed by his economic and military advisers. Now, as Valenti recalled, “he was surrounded by men whom he trusted, and in whose persons he fully knew reposed love and respect and enduring loyalty to him.”

  “You know, when I went into that office tonight and they came in and started briefing me on what I have to do,” he told his aides, “do you realize that every issue that is on my desk tonight was on my desk when I came to Congress in 1937?” Civil rights. Health insurance for the elderly and the poor. Federal aid to primary and secondary education. Support for higher education. Antipoverty and nutritional programs. It was there in LBJ’s bedroom at the Elms, twelve hours after Johnson assumed the awesome powers of the presidency, that the first cornerstone was laid for the Great Society.

  Introduction

  Boundless in his appetite for power and recognition, extreme in his personal habits and style, Lyndon Johnson was both a towering historical figure and a bundle of jarring contradictions. He was a crass political operator and liberal idealist, an unbridled opportunist and steadfast champion of the poor, a southern temporizer and civil rights trailblazer, a progressive hero and bête noire of the antiwar Left. “He was cruel and kind,” John Connally observed, “generous and greedy, sensitive and insensitive, crafty and naive, ruthless and thoughtful, simple in many ways and yet extremely complex, caring and totally not caring; . . . he knew how to use people in politics in the way nobody else could that I know of.”

  There is no shortage of literature on LBJ or his presidency, but the vast body of writing and criticism focuses on how one individual—Lyndon Johnson—plied his mastery of the political process to push an ambitious slate of liberal legislation through Congress in 1964 and 1965. But not even so dynamic a leader as LBJ could do it alone. Who helped him along the way? And what came next?

  It was no small accomplishment to secure passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. It was another matter entirely to have it mean something—to leverage the full weight of the federal government to desegregate public and private institutions peacefully throughout one-third of the United States. Persuading Congress to enact a steady profusion of liberal initiatives was a crowning achievement. Equally remarkable was the Johnson administration’s success in building programs like Medicare and Medicaid from the ground up, transforming the manner in which American elementary and secondary education was funded, providing food security to tens of millions of impoverished children and adults, inventing public television and radio, and restructuring the federal government’s relationship with ordinary citizens on a scale unseen since Franklin Roosevelt’s tenure in office—all in the space of five years, even as the Vietnam War increasingly strained the administration’s credibility and means to advance its domestic agenda.

  One man could not and did not go it alone. LBJ assembled a talented and energetic group of advisers who made his vision a reality. Some of his aides, like Jack Valenti, found themselves accidentally in the right place at the right time. Others, like Bill Moyers, made sure to put themselves there. Most, like Joe Califano, were relatively young men in their thirties and early forties, though LBJ, who deliberately aspired to match and then exceed FDR’s achievements, turned regularly for counsel to a small cadre of New Deal veterans whom he had known intimately since his early days in Congress. The core of LBJ’s staff claimed a Texas pedigree: Walter Jenkins, Bill Moyers, and Jack Valenti; Horace Busby, Johnson’s in-house intellectual of long standing; Harry McPherson and Marvin Watson, who came aboard in 1965. Yet most were men of broad learning and experience, and it sometimes astonished jaded political observers how fluidly they worked with the “best and brightest” of the Ivy League set who had come to Washington to join John Kennedy’s New Frontier, only to make history in Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.

  Though different in temperament and background, each staff member believed that government should play an affirmative role in creating economic opportunity for its citizens and smoothing out the rougher edges of liberal capitalism. Each was also, in his own way, as pragmatic as Johnson himself—attuned to the workings of political power, skilled in the art of throwing a sharp elbow or building an administrative empire, and hungry for position and prominence.

  • • • • •

  Richard Goodwin, a former Kennedy aide who later joined LBJ’s staff as chief speechwriter, coined the term “Great Society.” Often invoked interchangeably with the “War on Poverty”—a term that Johnson introduced in his first State of the Union address in 1964—the Great Society included antipoverty programs, but it aspired more broadly to complete America’s patchwork safety net and maximize the individual citizen’s ability to realize his or her fullest potential. In effect, the War on Poverty was just one part of the puzzle. Conservatives then and later decried the Great Society as an engine of economic redistribution that led millions of Americans into a state of permanent dependency on the government, but in truth LBJ and his aides never seriously contemplated policies that would enforce equality of income, wealth, or condition. They did not broadly support quantitative measures like cash transfers or a guaranteed minimum income but, rather, believed that qualitative measures like education, workforce training, access to health care and food security, and full political empowerment would ensure each individual a level playing field and equal opportunity to share in the nation’s prosperity.

  This commitment to qualitative, rather than quantitative, liberalism cannot be understood outside the context of postwar American political culture, with its prevailing spirit of confidence and triumphalism. It was little wonder that citizens living in that age exhibited great hubris. In recent memory, the United States had weathered the Great Depression and defeated fascism in both Europe and the Pacific, and in the two decades that followed, Americans benefited from seemingly boundless economic growth that vastly expanded the ranks of the middle class. Looking back on the early postwar years, the columnist Robert J. Samuelson remembered that “you were constantly treated to the marvels of the time. At school, you were vaccinated against polio. . . . At home, you watched television. Every so often, you looked up into the sky and saw the white vapor trails of a new jet. . . . There was an endless array of new gadgets and machines. No problem seemed to be beyond solution. . . . You took prosperity for granted, and so, increasingly, did other Americans.”

  John Kennedy captured this can-do ethos when he challenged his fellow citizens to “explore the stars, conquer the deserts, eradicate disease, tap the ocean depths . . . encourage the arts and commerce [and] heed in all corners of the earth the command of Isaiah—to ‘undo the heavy burdens . . . and to let the oppressed go free.’” Echoing his predecessor’s outsized ambition, LBJ called on the nation to defeat “ignorance, illiteracy, ill health and disease.” Liberal economists in this era were equally ebullient. They assumed that through close management of fiscal and monetary policy, the government could sustain economic growth indefinitely. For the architects of the Great Society, it was an unspoken article of faith that the means to a more just and equal society was not cutting the pie into smaller slices so that everyone would enjoy his or her fair share but baking a larger pie. The idea that the economy might somed
ay stop growing rarely factored seriously into liberal thinking.

  Predicated as it was on qualitative measures conceived to unlock individual opportunity, the Great Society would later draw sharp criticism for what it did not do. It did not eliminate poverty. It did not effect wide-scale cash transfers or establish a minimum family income. It did not extend quality medical care and educational opportunity to all Americans. It did not save urban America from blight or depressed rural areas from further decline. Essentially, it disappointed liberal aspirations and only confirmed the worst of conservative fears. George Reedy, who served as Johnson’s White House press secretary and special assistant, later surmised that the sweeping promises associated with the Great Society “may have had a negative impact on the willingness of Americans to trust such efforts.” When those measures did not meet the grandiose expectations that liberals established in the heady days of 1964, many Americans came to agree with LBJ’s conservative critics that government itself was the cancer, not the cure. In a scorching address delivered some two decades later, Ronald Reagan gave voice to conservative criticism of the Great Society as a bundle of expensive and failed initiatives that contributed to, rather than alleviated, poverty. LBJ’s legacy reinforced the “central political error of our time,” the flawed notion that “government and bureaucracy” were the “primary vehicle for social change.”

  Yet if Johnson and his aides overpromised, they also outperformed. Few presidents have left in place so sweeping a list of positive domestic accomplishments. Fifty years after the fact, it is all but impossible to imagine the United States without Medicare, public television, integrated hotels and restaurants, federal aid to primary and secondary schools, or federally guaranteed college loans—all measures that continue to enjoy wide support. Moreover, if LBJ’s Great Society failed in its ambition to eliminate poverty, it took a sizable bite out of it. The government normally measures poverty on the basis of pretax cash income, but when economists factor in noncash assistance including food stamps, Medicaid, and housing subsidies (all products of the Great Society) and tax adjustments like the earned income tax credit (a product of the Nixon administration), the poverty rate fell by 26 percent between 1960 and 2010, with two-thirds of the decline occurring before 1980. Some groups, like African Americans and the elderly, experienced a precipitous drop in poverty. Others, including children, did not. LBJ’s domestic programs assumed that economic output and wages would continue to grow in perpetuity; they were not designed to combat trends that neither the president nor his staff anticipated, including the rise of single-parent households, stagflation, supply shocks, globalization, and—most important—stagnant wages in the 1970s and beyond.

  Equally underappreciated is the political capital that Johnson and his aides readily spent down in the cause of laying Jim Crow in his grave. Excepting Abraham Lincoln’s government, no administration then or since pulled the levers of government with such unwavering resolve to disrupt the economic, political, and social privilege that many white Americans had long assumed was their birthright. Desegregation was not a solitary building block of the Great Society; it was a central theme that ran throughout most of its key initiatives, from health care and education to voting rights and urban renewal. Moreover, Johnson’s White House knowingly took the fight beyond the South and challenged much of the hidden privilege that white northerners had grown to expect—privilege that came in the form of the “de facto,” or seemingly accidental, segregation in residential neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces. With great valor came great risk. By numbers alone, far more white Americans than black Americans benefited from the Great Society, but the administration’s full-throated support for racial equality led many white voters to identify Johnson’s domestic programs as a minority handout. The Democratic Party paid—and continues to pay—a heavy political price for its support of civil rights.

  • • • • •

  Several weeks after Johnson became president, Bill Moyers met with him in the Yellow Oval Room on the second floor of the White House residence. Used by most presidents from Lincoln through FDR as a private library or study, the room now functioned as a formal living room and parlor. There, Moyers found the president scrawling out columns and dates on a yellow legal pad:

  November 22, 1963, to January 19, 1965.

  January 20, 1965, to January 19, 1969.

  January 20, 1969, to January 19, 1973.

  Alongside these columns he wrote, “1964, win. 1965, P&P”—propose and pass. “And then for 1967,” Moyers recalled, “it said ‘hold gains.’” Johnson looked up from his notepad and explained, “Bill, I’ve just been figuring out how much time we would have to do what we want to do. I really intend to finish Franklin Roosevelt’s revolution. . . . In an ideal world . . . we would have about 110 months to his 144 months. . . . I’ll never make it that far of course, so let’s assume we have to do it all in 1965 and 1966, and probably in 1966 we’ll lose our big margin in the Congress. That means in 1967 and 1968 there will be a hell of a fight.”

  It was a moment of striking clairvoyance. The fight came when expected, but Johnson could not then have anticipated its source: the conflict in Vietnam. The war did much to undermine LBJ’s credibility and standing with the American public. More fundamentally, it catalyzed economic and social trends that would erode the very intellectual foundation of the Great Society. When it became clear by 1967 that the country could not afford guns and butter—that permanent growth without inflation was in fact an elusive dream and that equal opportunity often fails to deliver equal results—Johnson’s project fell into disrepute. For some fifty years, he would be known, at best, as a “flawed giant” who, in his own words, “left the woman I love—the Great Society—in order to fight that bitch of a war.” At worst, he was the exemplar of runaway liberalism.

  But history has a way of restoring focus. Far from the master legislator and failed executive of popular lore, LBJ was a skilled chief executive who assembled one of the finest White House staffs in modern history and exhibited as much success in establishing and administering programs as he did in securing their passage. Regarded as a poor and bumbling country cousin when compared with his intellectually dashing predecessor, in fact he drew more abundantly on the talent and expertise that resided in America’s university campuses and think tanks. A product of the New Deal era, when the country’s best minds gravitated to Washington to labor in agencies whose obscure names masked their true significance, Johnson appreciated both the power and limitations of the federal bureaucracy and taught his aides how to make it work like a finely tuned machine. A man of vast personal ambition, he deliberately drew down his political well in advance of causes that he knew to be controversial in their own time, and he encouraged his young staff to appreciate that power is only as meaningful as how—and for what purpose—one uses it.

  “He felt entitled to every available lever, to help from every person, every branch of government, every business and labor leader,” recalled Joe Califano, one of the brightest of the bright young men who brought LBJ’s domestic agenda to life. “After all, as he often reminded us, he was the only President we had.”

  PART I

  CHAPTER 1

  Put the Ball Through the Hoop

  Seated behind his desk in the Oval Office, Lyndon Johnson appeared pensive and subdued when, on the evening of Thursday, November 28, 1963, he delivered brief remarks to the nation. It was 6:15, and LBJ was only in the sixth full day of his presidency. “Tonight, on this Thanksgiving, I come before you to ask your help, to ask your strength, to ask your prayers that God may guard this Republic and guide my every labor,” he began. “All of us have lived through 7 days that none of us will ever forget. We are not given the divine wisdom to answer why this has been, but we are given the human duty of determining what is to be, what is to be for America, for the world, for the cause we lead, for all the hopes that live in our hearts.” Reading with deliberate care from a prep
ared text, the president acknowledged what was surely on every American’s mind: “A great leader is dead; a great Nation must move on. Yesterday is not ours to recover, but tomorrow is ours to win or to lose.”

  The day before, LBJ had delivered his first speech before a joint session of Congress—a solemn and widely acclaimed address in which the new president pledged to pick up the mantle from John F. Kennedy and secure passage of the New Frontier’s sweeping but stalled policy agenda, including a major tax cut that Kennedy’s advisers believed would stimulate the economy; aid to primary and secondary education; and hospital care for seniors. Dozens of LBJ’s former colleagues from Dixie sat in stone-cold silence as Johnson affirmed to stirring applause that “no memorial oration or eulogy could more eloquently honor President Kennedy’s memory than the earliest possible passage of the civil rights bill for which he fought so long. We have talked long enough in this country about equal rights. We have talked for one hundred years or more. It is time now to write the next chapter, and to write it in the books of law.”

  Now, on Thanksgiving, Johnson doubled down, asking his countrymen to join him in prayer “for His divine wisdom in banishing from our land any injustice or intolerance or oppression to any of our fellow Americans whatever their opinion, whatever the color of their skins—for God made all of us, not some of us, in His image. All of us, not just some of us, are His children.”

  For most Americans, Thanksgiving week marked the start of the holiday season. For Lyndon Johnson, it signaled the beginning of an intense, yearlong sprint to prove that he could break the logjam, achieve the New Frontier, and surpass it beyond even the wildest expectations of John Kennedy’s supporters. It would be no easy lift.