Building the Great Society

by Joshua Zeitz

  Most famously, in 1963 Fortas provided pro bono representation for Clarence Gideon, a Florida man who had been convicted of a pool hall burglary two years earlier. Appearing before the U.S. Supreme Court, at whose request he agreed to serve as counsel, Fortas argued that the State of Florida had denied Gideon—who had been too poor to afford a lawyer at his original trial—due process rights. The resulting opinion in Gideon v. Wainwright established the fundamental right to counsel. Fortas never actually spoke with his client. “Why the hell would I want to meet a son of a bitch like that?” he told one of his cousins. “He’s no good.” He was motivated solely by the opportunity to establish a key civil liberty. That the Court had invited his participation was itself a justification for taking the case. It was “like a Presidential invitation to dine. Few are turned down.” Eight months later, he would receive just such an invitation when his old friend Lyndon Johnson moved into the White House.

  Over the years, Fortas had served LBJ informally as a legal and political adviser. That relationship intensified after Johnson became president. Days after Kennedy’s assassination, Fortas found himself in LBJ’s bedroom at the Elms until 2:30 a.m. helping to finish the draft of Johnson’s speech before Congress.

  Johnson repeatedly pressed him to accept a staff position in the White House; after Robert Kennedy left the cabinet, the president urged him to serve as attorney general. Fortas, who enjoyed his growing law practice and the comfortable lifestyle it afforded him, resisted at every turn. “I am desperately trying to avoid a government post,” he told a friend. But even in private practice, his time and talent inevitably shifted to matters of state and politics. Another lawyer in his firm recalled that by early 1964 Fortas seemed to spend more time in the Oval Office with the president than attending to business. No sooner would he return to his desk and begin leafing through a mounting pile of draft briefs and phone messages than the “President would call and that was the end of it.” When Paul Porter told LBJ that Fortas simply did not have enough hours in the day to practice law and serve as an on-call counselor to the president, Johnson replied tartly that he could “get up a little earlier in the morning.”

  • • • • •

  Days after Kennedy’s assassination, LBJ telephoned Larry O’Brien, unaware that Kenny O’Donnell was also in his office. “Needless to tell you, I’m most anxious for you to continue just like you have been, because I need you a lot more than he did,” LBJ opened. O’Brien let out an audible sigh. “Mr. President,” he began, “did you—Ken is here with me. Did you—do you have any immediate problem?”

  A close intimate of the Kennedy family, O’Donnell had roomed with Bobby at Harvard and, after service in the U.S. Army Air Force during World War II, worked as campaign scheduler and political fixer on both of Jack’s Senate races, as well as the 1960 presidential campaign. Possessed of sinewy features, a tightly wound demeanor, and a “grim, cryptic wit,” O’Donnell was a tough and formidable operator. As White House appointments secretary, he exerted wide-ranging influence on the administration’s agenda by controlling access to the Oval Office. “I found him to be one of the most candid and direct men I had ever met,” noted Pierre Salinger, the White House press secretary. “He would never use five words if one would do, and that word was very often a flat ‘no.’”

  For days after the funeral, overcome by grief, he simply stopped coming to the office until Johnson, acting out of both personal concern and genuine need, instructed Jenkins to track him down. “He was bleary-eyed and unshaven” when Jenkins finally saw him. At first demurring, he ultimately pledged, “If I can, I’ll be here Monday morning. I’ll be ready to work, and I’ll do everything I can. If I find I can’t, I’ll tell you so and know you’ll understand.” As Jenkins later recounted, O’Donnell resurfaced on “Monday morning and went to work, shaven and ready to go, and did, I think, a good job.”

  LBJ was equally determined to keep Salinger on staff. A rotund and expressive former investigative reporter, Salinger had transformed Kennedy into America’s first television president, first as director of press relations on the 1960 campaign and later in his role as White House press secretary. Johnson, who lacked JFK’s native appeal with reporters, would need his skill set. In his first weeks with the new president, Salinger exhibited a strong determination to fit in, but in so doing, he unwittingly made his own life a living hell. As Arthur Schlesinger acidly observed in his private diary, “There is nothing more dangerous, so far as I can see, than being accepted by Johnson as one of his own.” LBJ proved “meticulously polite” to Kennedy staffers, but “when he starts regarding them as Johnson men, their day is over. He begins to treat them like Johnson men, which means like servants. . . . Of all the Kennedy people, [Salinger] seemed to make the transition most easily—which meant that LBJ began shouting at him, ordering him around and humiliating him just as if he were Jenkins or Valenti.”

  Like many other liberal intellectuals, Schlesinger, a Pulitzer Prize–winning historian who took leave from Harvard to join the White House staff, had long held Johnson in disdain. But he was not entirely wrong: after a smooth several weeks in which the president and his press secretary seemed to become fast friends, LBJ began tormenting Salinger in ways large and small, compelling him at one point to don a cowboy suit that was anything but flattering to his heavy frame. “For all his striped shirts and big cigars, Salinger is a literate and subtle man, and not disposed toward cornball humor and a folksy approach,” a reporter noted. “When I saw Lyndon having fun with Salinger and putting ten-gallon hats on him and so on, I just had a feeling Salinger wasn’t going to wear that hat very long.” He stuck by Johnson through early spring before departing the White House to run for the U.S. Senate in California.

  Unsurprisingly, Schlesinger—whose East Wing office location spoke to his subordinate standing in the Kennedy administration—had little interest in staying on. He “declared war, I guess, the day that John F. Kennedy went into the ground,” a fellow Kennedy aide said. Schlesinger privately mourned that it was “almost unbearable to watch that graceful witty, incandescent personality” replaced by the boorish image of Lyndon Johnson. By late January, he had resigned his position.

  Gone, too, was Ted Sorensen. Johnson lobbied hard to retain Kennedy’s longtime ghostwriter and most trusted of aides, out of both genuine respect for his talents and a pragmatic desire to maintain continuity with the New Frontier. In the days immediately following JFK’s assassination, the new president demonstrated extraordinary patience with Sorensen, who, when asked to draft LBJ’s first address to Congress, included the line “I who cannot fill his shoes must occupy his desk.” Most of the speech, though not that sentence, survived, but Sorensen deeply resented edits by Valenti, Abe Fortas, and Hubert Humphrey that ultimately worked their way into the text. Riding in the presidential limousine to the Capitol, Johnson gently tried to soothe his bruised ego. “You’ve got 80 percent of your stuff in there,” he insisted. Days later, Katharine Graham, the publisher of the Washington Post, advised LBJ to show Sorensen “a little love.” He was “marvelous,” she insisted, but also “very hurt. I encountered him and I know the mood he was in, and I don’t forgive him for it, but . . . we all have to just imagine how he feels, in that he is a man who [instead] of crying did this really naughty trick of being cantankerous and hurt.” Despite Johnson’s genuine efforts, Sorensen’s heart was no longer in it. In late February, he submitted his formal resignation, which LBJ reluctantly accepted.

  Hardened observers of national politics were genuinely surprised that “the mingling of Boston Brahmins and Texas Longhorns” proved as harmonious as it did. Joseph Alsop, a syndicated columnist who enjoyed wide influence, was impressed by the “continuity of the Johnson White House with the Kennedy White House,” calling it “one of those very rare political events that are distinguished from the common run by the credible roles played by everyone concerned. Shabbiness and pettiness are generally to be found somewh
ere in every political process; but for once they have been absent.” The Texas mafia—Jenkins, Moyers, Valenti, and Reedy—“miraculously but quite pointedly refrained from throwing their weight around,” while the Kennedy partisans “have seen that they had a duty left to perform, not least to the lost president.” In later years, the mounting feud between LBJ and Robert Kennedy would feed the perception that Johnson and Kennedy staff members were locked in unremitting struggle. The assumption was patently incorrect.

  Bill Moyers, who likened the White House staff to a basketball team (and whose colleagues, in future years, would accuse him of hogging the ball), fairly summed up the role as such: “We all have one common goal—to put the ball through the hoop.”

  CHAPTER 2

  Participation in Prosperity

  Walter Heller, the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, would later recall the prevailing sense of unease and apprehension after SAM 86972 abandoned its original course for Tokyo and landed in Honolulu on the afternoon of November 22. Military officials posted armed soldiers with fixed bayonets around the plane’s perimeter and instructed the cabinet members to remain inside the aircraft while it refueled. After receiving a briefing from the commander in chief of the Pacific forces, the officials took flight for Washington. Heller huddled in the back of the cabin with the cabinet secretaries Orville Freeman (agriculture), Luther Hodges (commerce), Stewart Udall (interior), and William Wirtz (labor). “The five of us had a long, long seminar, so to speak, on Lyndon Johnson,” Heller would relate, “everybody tossing in his impressions. We went back to the events of 1960, going back to the relationships they had had one way or another over the years, what kind of man was this, and so forth.”

  They all agreed that there was little doubting LBJ’s intelligence, but they were divided in their assessment of his political worldview. Some envisaged a deeply conservative Johnson presidency: LBJ was, after all, a former member in good standing of the Senate’s “southern caucus” and had racked up a checkered legislative history that gave cold comfort to liberals. Others wondered if he were not more of a southwestern populist, remembering the young, New Deal congressman who might now move the country in a liberal direction. All agreed that he would likely be an impossible man for whom to work. “He’ll just suck the guts out of you,” one of the cabinet members warned.

  Of all aboard the plane, Heller was arguably the most liberal and thus the most heavily invested in knowing what made Johnson tick. His father, a civil engineer in Milwaukee, had lost his job in the Great Depression, and had it not been for FDR’s Works Progress Administration, the family would have been left penniless and without recourse. After earning his bachelor’s degree from Oberlin College, Heller pursued graduate work at the University of Wisconsin, where a grant from the National Youth Administration—the same New Deal agency that LBJ administered in Texas—supported his doctoral research on state income taxes. During World War II, he helped engineer the federal government’s income tax withholding system and later served as an adviser to General Lucius Clay, the military governor of Germany. He then spent the better part of fifteen years as an economics professor at the University of Minnesota, but in 1961 he traded the comfort and clubby environment of academic life for JFK’s New Frontier.

  As the key architect of JFK’s tax cut—the very same measure that LBJ ultimately secured in 1964—Heller had struggled for several months to obtain Kennedy’s support for a comprehensive federal initiative to combat poverty. Just three days before the assassination, he met with the president in the Oval Office to issue yet another plea for dedicated planning and resources. At last, he appeared to achieve a breakthrough. “Yes, Walter,” the president assured him, “I am definitely going to have something in the line of an attack on poverty in my program. I don’t know what yet. But, yes, keep your boys at work, and come back to me in a couple of weeks.” Now, with Kennedy gone and an ostensibly more conservative president holding the reins of government, it was not altogether clear that his initiative would survive. Even with the new president’s support, success was uncertain, given the state of Congress.

  When Heller visited Johnson at the Executive Office Building early on Saturday evening, he raised the question of the poverty program and seemed to get a promising response. As the meeting appeared to wrap up and Heller—pleasantly surprised by Johnson’s zeal in the antipoverty cause—stood to leave the office, “the President gently pushed [the door] shut and drew me back in.” Leaning in close, LBJ unleashed his full powers of persuasion. “Now, I want to say something about all this talk that I’m a conservative who is likely to go back to the Eisenhower ways or give in to the economy bloc in Congress,” he began. “It’s not so, and I want you to tell your friends—Arthur Schlesinger, Galbraith and other liberals—that it is not so. . . . If you looked at my record, you would know that I am a Roosevelt New Dealer. As a matter of fact, to tell you the truth, John F. Kennedy was a little too conservative to suit my taste.” As he later recalled, Johnson ended the meeting by affirming that the antipoverty initiative was “my kind of program. I’ll find money for it one way or another.”

  The conversation was an iconic display of performance art, LBJ-style, designed in large part to earn the good grace of liberals who instinctively distrusted the president. But Johnson proved good to his word. On January 8, in his first State of the Union address before Congress, he boldly declared an “unconditional war on poverty.” The “chief weapons” in this attack would include “better schools, and better health, and better homes, and better training, and better job opportunities to help more Americans, especially young Americans, escape from squalor and misery and unemployment rolls where other citizens help to carry them.”

  It was a lofty and even audacious proclamation—one that later critics would condemn for its seemingly impossible promise. But in that time and place, and for that president living in that moment, it made all the sense in the world.

  • • • • •

  Lyndon Johnson and his aides assumed that they could do it all because they lived in a wondrous age almost without parallel in American history. In the quarter century following World War II, the United States experienced an economic boom unprecedented in scope and size. Median family income grew by a stunning 30 percent in the 1950s, driving the typical American’s transition from renter to homeowner, from blue-collar to white-collar worker, and from a culture of Depression-era scarcity and wartime rationing to postwar consumer abundance. Between 1950 and 1960, the average American family experienced a 330 percent hike in purchasing power, reflecting an amazing 55 percent increase in the gross national product over roughly the same period. These trends continued unabated into the next decade.

  Affluence cannot be counted by numbers alone. By the late 1960s, most families enjoyed access to a broad range of consumer luxuries that were not even imaginable at the end of World War II, including Polaroid cameras; hi-fi stereo systems; long-playing records; electric refrigerators and freezers; cars with automatic transmissions, tubeless tires, and power steering; shopping malls; fast-food restaurants; and electricity, which almost one-fifth of households still lacked as recently as 1945. In 1950, only 3 percent of farm families owned televisions; ten years later, that figure rose to 80 percent, while almost all suburban and urban homes had at least one set. Americans also started drinking diet soda, cooking on nonstick pans, reading by halogen lamps, listening to audio cassettes, and wearing permanent-press clothing and soft contact lenses.

  Abundance radically transformed the way that American policy makers thought about their country. In the bleakest days of the Great Depression, most liberal intellectuals and elected officials had agreed in some form or another that capitalism was foundationally broken. FDR’s chief aide, Harry Hopkins, foresaw permanently high levels of unemployment “even in future ‘prosperity’ periods,” while Alvin Hansen, a prominent economist who taught at Harvard University, warned in his presidential address to the Ameri
can Economic Association in 1938 of a future marked by “sick recoveries which die in their infancy and depressions which feed on themselves and leave a hard and seemingly immovable core of unemployment.” Against so gloomy a backdrop, many reformers assumed that government could mitigate the human toll of permanent economic contraction only by making broad and even radical changes to capitalism’s underlying structure—changes as wide-ranging and sometimes inconsistent as public ownership of utilities and factories, a guaranteed family income, a breakup of monopolies and trusts or, conversely, industrial cartels invested with sweeping power to set uniform wages and prices. But the experience of World War II, in which the United States emerged as the world’s “arsenal of democracy,” forced a swift reappraisal of these reformist and, in many ways, radical assumptions. The federal government built ships, airplanes, and tanks by the thousands. It raised, supplied, and deployed a military force of sixteen million men. It defeated fascism in Europe and the Pacific and took a leading hand in establishing postwar economic order around the globe. In so doing, the government lifted the country out of the Depression and proved that through skilled planning and economic management policy makers could provide, as the labor leader Walter Reuther described it, “full production, full employment and full distribution in a society which has achieved economic democracy within the framework of political democracy.” American capitalism “works,” the economist John Kenneth Galbraith marveled a decade later, “and in the years since World War II, quite brilliantly.” Thinking back on the New Deal era, Chester Bowles, who led the Office of Price Administration during the war, recalled that “many frustrated economists told us that there was little more that we could do” to fix the country’s underlying economic problems. “We must learn to live with a certain amount of scarcity in the midst of plenty,” they had insisted. But now America was growing, and its “population isn’t going to stop growing, technology isn’t going to stand still, and all these new plants and machines . . . will steadily increase our ability to produce.”