Building the Great Society

by Joshua Zeitz

  Cater’s function in the White House was important but also “contingent,” McPherson noted. “You have the power to speak for the President so long as the President gives it to you, so long as your water is not cut off; and you speak as the President and you bring a Presidential perspective to bear on the problems of various departments.” LBJ never did cut off Cater’s water, and in his four and a half years on staff the onetime editor and professor would play a leading role in expanding the American welfare state.

  At the time of his appointment to the White House staff in 1965, Marvin Watson was a forty-year-old steel company executive—“a dark, green-eyed, squarely built 180-pounder,” as Charles Roberts remembered him. A conservative Texan, he had worked on LBJ’s presidential campaign in 1960 and then stepped in four years later to run logistics at the 1964 convention. As Valenti increasingly assumed a larger portfolio of responsibilities, LBJ invited Watson to assume the role of appointments secretary, installing him in an office adjacent to his private study. “Marvin is a hard-nosed, hard-shell, nondrinking, no-nonsense Baptist,” a Johnson aide said. “He’s all business and he gets things done. He is not afraid to make decisions, where some people around here are afraid to go to the bathroom without asking the President.” The only “frippery” that Watson indulged, said a fellow aide, was attire: “He was a natty dresser, given to hand-tailored seersucker suits, color-checked shirts, flashing gold cufflinks and a jewel-flecked triangular watch.”

  Two qualities set Watson apart: his politics, which were out of step with the liberal spirit that pervaded Johnson’s White House, and his personality, at once gruff and provincial. “Watson is a conservative in every sense of the word,” a friend observed, but as a reporter noted, “as the man whose office is closest to the President’s, he has been required to speak for the most liberal pieces of the Great Society legislative program,” an agenda that included the repeal of right-to-work provisions in the Taft-Hartley Act, which Watson supported, and the adoption of rent subsidies for the poor, which he opposed. As keeper of the gate, Watson brandished his power with far greater gusto and less discretion than Valenti, who attempted to preserve LBJ’s access to a wide variety of ideas and voices. Busby, who had no great love for his new colleague, would later refer disdainfully to “the totalitarian days of Marvin Watson,” when, as another insider noted, one could not so much as “buy a postal stamp without getting his O.K.” Francis Keppel, the erudite former dean of Harvard’s Graduate School of Education who served from 1962 to 1965 as the commissioner of education, held most of Johnson’s staff in high regard, but not Watson. Cater, Califano, Moyers, O’Brien—“they were excellent. . . . It was just that ‘glupp’ [Watson] I didn’t like.”

  McPherson described Watson as “a tremendously industrious person, totally loyal to the President, a literalist, who had to learn the hard way that the President doesn’t always mean exactly what he says.” That literalism—an inability to discern between what the president said and the outcome that he wanted—in addition to his “provincialism” caused Watson trouble in his early days at the White House. It was “not so much a Texas provincialism,” McPherson qualified, “as a limitation in understanding of tides in American history.” Tasked with reading the FBI files of prospective administration officials, Watson knew too little about the ways of Washington to regard J. Edgar Hoover and his organization with an appropriately skeptical eye. “The FBI reports are a disaster,” McPherson categorically declared, and Watson read them as gospel. “We had some real battles over particular appointments.”

  Watson resented the influence that McPherson and Joseph Califano exerted on LBJ; he felt that “the President should not be going as swiftly and as vigorously toward the left as he was going.” McPherson, in turn, sized up his fellow Texan as “conservative,” though “by no means a Bircher or that sort”—someone who was “educable” and “liberalized his views about a lot of things” since joining LBJ’s staff. “But essentially Marvin is an organization man,” “a man of . . . tremendous personal loyalty.” Valenti, who turned over the quotidian functions of his job to Watson but retained higher-level input into LBJ’s schedule, argued that his colleague “was not abrasive. Marvin was tough. Marvin was able, competent.” This assessment was kind. Though loyal to the president and hardworking in the extreme, Watson was generally unsympathetic to the Great Society and played little role in conceiving or executing its component parts. He was an enforcer of discipline in the West Wing—important in his own right, but never particularly critical to domestic policy discussions.

  • • • • •

  Loyalty to LBJ did not ensure camaraderie or uniformity of thought. By 1965, according to Goldman, “Cater, Califano, Goodwin and McPherson moved principally in Moyers’ orbit”—which was to say, on the outer left edges of the Great Society. “Valenti and Watson worked in uneasy relationship to each other, and both to Moyers. Busby and Reedy were off by themselves, sometimes functioning together, mostly singly.” Factions and rivalries inevitably emerged, and while some were driven by ideology, others—particularly the toxic relationship between Reedy and Moyers—owed to the contest between so many aides over a finite amount of power. Such antipathies were inescapable, Valenti thought, “in a place where you’re sitting amid power and the celebration of power. . . . You’re going to have bruised egos, you’re going to have a kind of Machiavellian jostling and crawling and pushing and vaulting. . . . Practically all of these fellows who work in the White House are men of some ego, and they are all looking for ways to enhance their own reputations as well as their power.”

  Califano, who promptly established himself as the administration’s domestic policy czar, was particularly adept at the game. “Nothing in Joe Califano’s original writ over here gave him the authority to do what he has subsequently come to do,” McPherson noted with admiration. “He’s an extremely capable and aggressive guy, who has taken the responsibility.” When Daniel Patrick Moynihan once asked him how one obtains power in the White House, Califano replied nonchalantly, “You take it. There are vacuums everywhere, and if you do it, if you take it and seize it and run with it, it’s yours, and you develop a certain right of adverse possession to responsibility.”

  Doug Cater found himself occasionally struggling to protect his remit. More interested in advancing policy than accruing power, he took the position that “as long as I was kept informed so that I wasn’t ignorant of what was going on I was perfectly content to let” Califano and his staff members work on specific policy issues with HEW staff. “If I had been sensitive that any time anybody else spoke to HEW they were stepping in my territory, it could have caused a problem.”

  When Valenti surmised that every White House operated with an “interplay of egos and clashings of ambitions, all sort of like satellites circling the sun,” his reference point for the bright star at the center of the solar system was, of course, Lyndon Johnson, an enormously complicated individual whose relationship with his staff members was a study in contradiction. To serve LBJ as a special assistant to the president came with perks: a salary of $28,500 (equivalent in 2016 to over $215,000—far in excess of the top salaries that latter-day White House aides earned); chauffeured town cars to shuttle them to and from work or about town; frequent use of air force planes to traverse continents or simply hop to a nearby city for a brief meeting; and privileged status in elite social circles in Washington, D.C., and beyond. But, a newspaper informed readers, “he works you like a dog. He does not tolerate mistakes. He inspires fear and trepidation. He has a hair-trigger temper.” Unlike Kennedy’s staff, those in Johnson’s employ were “treated like a member of the family, like a nephew, a niece or a brother. . . . [H]e is demanding, but that can bring out the best in a person.” But along with the prestige of having a “PL” installed in one’s home—the famous private line that only Moyers, Valenti, Busby, Watson, and McGeorge Bundy, the national security adviser, could boast—came the understanding that t
he president would use it at all hours. The human toll was considerable. Bill Moyers developed an ulcer from the stress, the president would inform visitors with satisfaction. Implicit in his pride was the understanding that Moyers would work through the pain.

  Johnson’s dislike of staff structure and organization (“The President isn’t a flow-chart man,” explained one staff member. “We do what he tells us, never mind the rank and titles”) was not dissimilar to the management style practiced by his idol, Franklin Roosevelt. Like Valenti, Busby was a general utility player and became increasingly involved in foreign policy matters as 1965 gave way to 1966. McPherson was technically the top lawyer at the White House but also conferred with LBJ on Vietnam. The Boston Globe once proposed a movie script about the Johnson presidency in which Valenti played the part of the “image maker,” Busby, the “licensed rhetorician in residence,” and Moyers, the “auxiliary social conscience.” In truth, each staff member was expected to wear multiple hats.

  Jim Rowe sized up Johnson as “an overpowering man,” “a hard man to argue against, face to face.” Without “really wanting to do it, he intimidated his staff a little too much, just with the force of his personality. When he wanted information, he was the best listener I’ve ever run into. . . . When he didn’t want information . . . [if] I am trying to sell him something that does not interest him, I might as well be talking to a wall.” Contrary to Johnson’s famed vulgarity, Cater did not think that the president’s “humor or his anecdotes were that much different in their crudeness from that of most men who are anecdotalists. He could tell a lusty story on occasion. He was not all that given to four-letter words. If a four-letter word fitted naturally into a story he would use it but he did not adorn them with four-letter words.” Not everyone agreed. Once, when the White House received sustained, critical coverage from a female member of the press corps, LBJ informed Harry McPherson that “what that woman needs is you. Take her out. Give her a good dinner and a good fuck.” According to Califano’s memory of the incident, “McPherson sighed, shrugged, and continued with his conversation,” but the president continued for weeks to hector him on the matter. Weeks later, Johnson told a group of senators acquainted with McPherson from his service on the Policy Committee staff that Harry was “a fine young man, but I’m a little concerned about his family. You know, Harry’s been taking out this bitch reporter and screwing her, and I worry about his wife and children.” Not dissimilarly, when James Gaither, a rising star on Califano’s staff, informed the president that he was facing opposition on a particular matter from Edith Green, the formidable chairwoman of a key House subcommittee on education, LBJ instructed Califano to have him “take her out, give her a couple of Bloody Marys, and . . . spend the afternoon in bed with her and she’ll support any Goddamn bill he wants. Now if he wants to help his president, that’s what he should do instead of writing these whiney memos every night.”

  LBJ was testing his staff. As Cater noted, it was less Johnson’s boorishness that placed him in a category of one (after all, John Kennedy, for all his polish, had treated women with nearly unparalleled disrespect) than his single-minded expectation that staff members submit fully in mind, body, and spirit to his indomitable will. He had no interests outside politics. He did not read books. He played no sport. What he did was work—eighteen hours each day, unceasingly—and he expected his aides to be as wholly consumed by the art of politics as was he. Charles Schultze, who succeeded Kermit Gordon as budget director, recalled that LBJ “relaxed in ways that would tire me.” On the ranch, he drove his guests at frenetic speeds and talked politics. On the presidential yacht, the Sequoia, he cornered captive friends, staff members, and congressmen and talked politics. “It isn’t that Johnson abuses people,” a holdover from the Kennedy administration told Teddy White. “He simply dehydrates them.” Much of the pressure was self-directed. An anonymous presidential assistant told the New York Times that “there is no real privacy in this job, and the demands are constant. All you have to do is go to dinner with the wrong person or have a drink with the wrong person or check the wrong box or write the wrong memo, and the president is in trouble. I could land him in boiling water 10 times a day.”

  By mid-1965, Washington columnists and opinion makers began to worry openly that Johnson might drive his closest aides to nervous breakdowns, much as they believed he had ruined Walter Jenkins. But for those closest to the president, it turned into their finest, most productive two years—a space of twenty-four months that left a lasting mark on American history and society.

  CHAPTER 7

  Completing the Fair Deal

  Since the 1930s, federal aid to primary and secondary education had been a foundational aspiration of American liberals. It was “shocking,” Harry Truman told Congress in 1949, that “millions of our children are not receiving a good education. Millions of them are in overcrowded, obsolete buildings. We are short of teachers, because teachers’ salaries are too low to attract new teachers, or to hold the ones we have.” Truman requested direct federal appropriations to assist local schools in upgrading their facilities and paying their teachers and proposed that the various government agencies responsible for administering federal health, education, and welfare programs be accorded cabinet-level status. Congress did agree to consolidate existing agencies under the new cabinet-level Department of Health, Education, and Welfare in 1953, but in the absence of a more sweeping mandate the tiny and moribund Office of Education—which fell under HEW—remained a stodgy resting place for government bureaucrats with no appreciable connection to presidential power or authority. As had been the case for most of the nation’s history, state and local governments bore the primary responsibility for funding and administering elementary and secondary schools, resulting in vast disparities between wealthy and poor districts, segregated and nonsegregated jurisdictions, and rural and urban areas. As the baby boom generation swelled America’s schools, creating massive teacher and classroom shortages, efforts to pass a bill providing for federal aid to local education stalled repeatedly.

  Some Republicans supported the idea, including the conservative senator Robert Taft and President Dwight Eisenhower. “We have helped the states build highways and local farm-to-market roads,” the former general offered. “We have provided federal funds to help the states build hospitals and mental institutions.” Why not classrooms? But most GOP leaders agreed with Barry Goldwater that “if the camel once gets his nose in the tent, his body will soon follow.” The moment that local government became reliant on Washington, “supervision, and ultimately control of education,” would fall into the hands of “federal authorities.” The House minority leader, Gerald Ford, warned of “federalized schools, text books, and teachers, federalized libraries, laboratories, auditoriums, and theaters,” while even Richard Nixon, a relative moderate, predicted in 1960 that when “the federal government gets the power to pay teachers, inevitably, in my opinion, it will acquire the power to set standards and to tell the teachers what to teach.”

  In addition to conservative opposition, efforts to secure federal funding for K–12 education met with the pointed resistance of Catholic political and religious leaders, who insisted that any aid bill include the vast network of diocesan and parish schools that the church had meticulously constructed and nurtured over the better part of a century. In the early postwar era, many white ethnic communities remained tightly bound and organized around a sweeping array of separate institutions—youth clubs, sports teams, fraternal organizations, newspapers—that all led back to the neighborhood church. Primary and secondary schools, which educated five million Catholic children each year, formed a mainstay of this religious network. Catholic Democrats were disinclined to support legislation that might create wider disparities in classroom funding and teacher salaries than already existed between parochial and public institutions. For their part, liberal Protestants steadfastly agreed with the National Council of Churches that it was neither “just
” nor “lawful that public funds should be assigned to support the elementary or secondary schools of any church.” The religious question constituted a major impediment to progress.

  Finally, the issue of race proved a stumbling block for advocates of federal aid. Whenever the issue of aid to education came to the House floor, liberals of both parties routinely supported efforts by Adam Clayton Powell, a black clergyman and lawmaker from Harlem, to bar funds to school districts that were out of compliance with the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education. Without the amendment, liberals could not vote for the broader legislation; with it, southerners would not support it.

  Liberals persisted in their argument that the country was in dire need of additional education funding. In any given year, American schoolchildren suffered a shortage of 304,000 classrooms. Many schools in poor areas lacked gymnasiums, lunchrooms, or libraries. To double up on space, administrators shifted fifth and sixth graders into middle schools and ran double-shift days. In Kentucky, over half of all pupils attended overcrowded classes—many with more than sixty children per room—and, according to the state superintendent of instruction, over 40 percent of facilities were “outmoded or unfit or should be abandoned.” Unsurprisingly, student achievement reflected these broad disparities in resources and facilities. In 1960, the high school completion rate for young adults in the wealthiest five states and five poorest states in the country differed by twenty percentage points. For African Americans, who were substantially less likely than their white peers to finish secondary school, the disparity between residents of wealthy and poor states was 27 percent. It was precisely this fundamental opportunity deficit that enabled LBJ and his administration to slice through the Gordian knot that was federal education policy.