by Joshua Zeitz
Though Johnson did not pursue all of his task forces’ recommendations, in launching his ambitious domestic policy agenda in 1965, he enjoyed wide majorities in Congress and, equally important, a liberal resurgence within the House and Senate Democratic caucuses. Though in his years as majority leader LBJ aligned himself more firmly with southern conservatives and frequently thwarted measures important to civil rights groups and organized labor, he now relied on the left wing of his party to shepherd the Great Society through Congress. It took very little time before liberals asserted themselves. On the opening day of what Johnson later dubbed the “Fabulous Eighty-ninth” Congress, House Democrats stripped Mississippi’s John Bell Williams and South Carolina’s Albert Watson of their seniority in response to their endorsement of Barry Goldwater the year before. It was the first such disciplinary action against a sitting congressman since 1911 and effectively deprived the apostate members of their committee assignments and perquisites. The caucus also took aim at Rules Committee chairman Howard Smith when it voted to reinstate the “twenty-one day rule,” a measure that allowed any committee chairman whose bill had been mired in the powerful Rules Committee for more than three weeks to bring the legislation directly to the floor. Though it is unclear whether the caucus passed the measure at the president’s behest, two days after the election LBJ had instructed Bill Moyers to raise the issue with congressional leaders. In the Senate, reformers faced steeper challenges in weakening the filibuster, but by sheer numbers alone the combination of liberal Democrats and moderate Republicans provided a powerful check against the southern caucus. Thus did the Johnson administration begin its full term in a position of strength that earlier presidents would have envied.
These advantages notwithstanding, LBJ’s White House left nothing to chance. In pursuit of his legislative agenda, Johnson benefited from a well-oiled legislative liaison office that Larry O’Brien had first assembled under Kennedy but that enjoyed little success until Johnson inherited the presidency. In the weeks immediately following JFK’s election in 1960, O’Brien consulted a wide swath of White House veterans from earlier Democratic administrations, including FDR’s former administrative aide, Jim Rowe, and Clark Clifford, David Bell, and Charles Murphy, all of whom had served in senior roles on Harry Truman’s staff. O’Brien soon discovered that “there had been no formalization” of the legislative liaison role “at any time. It was just sort of seat-of-the-pants. The President might make a call or send somebody to see someone. But it wasn’t organized.” The first presidential aide officially tasked with congressional relations had been Bryce Harlow, who performed the function for Eisenhower and generously offered O’Brien counsel on how to organize his office. On the afternoon of Kennedy’s inauguration, amid a bitter-cold snap of winter weather, the seasoned Boston political organizer walked over to the White House. “I’d never been in the building, even as a tourist,” he would recall. “So we walked in, with the staff, and looked around the two floors. I don’t think I even knew the basement was there. And I found this corner office on the second floor, and I noted that there was space for two secretaries and a conference room, and about three offices. So I planted myself in the center office and my staff on each end. And that’s how the office was established.”
Under O’Brien’s leadership, the office of legislative liaison pulled all the available levers of presidential influence and persuasion. During his first year in office, JFK held thirty-two private “leadership breakfasts” with the top brass in each house of Congress, ninety group meetings with various senators and congressmen, and dozens of “coffee hours” attended by five hundred legislators—“the entire Congress,” O’Brien remembered, “at one time or another.” There were bill signings. Personal letters from the president to each member on his or her birthday. When members of Congress were out of range for important votes, the White House sent military planes to transport them back to Washington, D.C. O’Brien also made good use of the Sequoia, the official presidential yacht, which set sail on the Potomac several times each week. “We’d have a buffet dinner and maybe an accordion player, at times, or a sing-along. We would leave the dock at 6:00 p.m., return at 9:00. And that became the greatest tool available to us, and I utilized it to the fullest. It became a great bore to be on that Sequoia for my wife for three hours, sometimes two and three times a week,” he later recounted with a laugh.
Yet no charm offensive proved sufficient to break the deadlock. Conservative Republicans and southern Democrats enjoyed sufficient numbers to bottleneck the legislative process throughout Kennedy’s presidency, and JFK, despite having served for six years in the House and eight years in the Senate, had never enjoyed “the kind of seniority in either the House or Senate, obviously, to be a prime mover,” O’Brien observed. “He was very much junior to all his former colleagues, and how do you utilize him?” His clout was limited, in part because he was naturally cooler and more aloof. “Jack Kennedy would not force the issue with a group of senators or congressmen.” Recognizing Kennedy’s more passive approach, O’Brien was deliberately measured in his use of the president’s influence, taking care never to put JFK in a position of asking for a vote that he could not secure. “I would be very, very careful to make it only when I had determined we’d exhausted every possibility and there was one last opportunity and that was the President.”
O’Brien learned early in his tenure as Lyndon Johnson’s congressional liaison that the new president operated in a starkly different fashion. Once, when the administration lost a close vote in the House during a late-night session that wound into the early hours of the morning, O’Brien stopped at a twenty-four-hour cafeteria for breakfast and waited until an appropriate hour—6:30 a.m.—to phone the president. “Why didn’t you call me?” LBJ demanded. “When you’re up there bleeding, I want to bleed with you. We have to share these things.” “I never got over that,” O’Brien recalled.
Though Johnson continued to speak constantly with his former congressional colleagues, he took care to consult O’Brien before directly involving himself in legislative lobbying. But he was an aggressive advocate who “would devote an inordinate amount of time to the sales pitch, and he would put it on a truly personal basis: ‘I’m pleading with you. You’ve got to help me. You can’t walk away from this. Come on, you’ve just—’ And that would get to the arm around the shoulder, the close proximity and the pitch that could be lengthy at times. A member would be pretty exhausted. And that was basically the difference in style.” On a typical evening, the president and his legislative liaison sat inches apart, knee to knee, in the small study adjacent to the Oval Office, and dialed almost two dozen members of the House to resolve a fine point around the Washington, D.C., appropriations bill. “I couldn’t stop him,” O’Brien told an interviewer years later. “He proceeded to pick up the phone and gave the White House telephone operator the names of the twenty-two and chased them all over town. I don’t recall he had caught all twenty-two by the time I went home, but he stayed with it.”
These were the high-water days of the Great Society, before the Vietnam War began to eat away at the government’s resources and undermine the public’s faith in the unbounded capacity of their government to solve large, vexing problems like poverty and disease. Years later, O’Brien still displayed with pride a framed collection of some sixty bill-signing pens spanning his service in both the Kennedy and the Johnson White Houses. The vast majority dated to the “Fabulous Eighty-ninth.”
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The “Fabulous Eighty-ninth” began its work against a dramatic backdrop. By early 1965, Martin Luther King Jr. had already determined to stage his next campaign in Selma—the seat of Dallas County, Alabama, where black residents made up over half the population but only about 2 percent of registered voters. King’s strategy was at once simple and complicated. Since Congress passed the Civil Rights Act six month earlier, the movement had renewed its focus on voting rights—a giant piece of the
civil rights puzzle that still required legislative remedy. From a numbers perspective, the decision made sense. As King explained to readers of the New York Times, “Selma has succeeded in limiting Negro registration to the snail’s pace of about 145 persons a year. At this rate, it would take 103 years to register the 15,000 eligible Negro voters of Dallas County.”
Most liberals understood that securing access to the ballot box necessarily constituted an important part of the Great Society. In a phone conversation with King on January 15, LBJ named voting rights as a centerpiece of the civil rights agenda but signaled his intent to wait until Congress passed his health-care and education packages before introducing legislation. He was confident in his strategy and counseled King to galvanize support by “find[ing] the worst condition that you run into in Alabama, Mississippi, or Louisiana, or South Carolina. . . . And if you just take that one illustration and get it on radio and get it on television and get it in the pulpits, get it in the meetings, get it every place you can . . . then that will help us on what we’re going to shove through in the end.” Unbeknownst to LBJ, King had already found his “one illustration”: Selma, Alabama.
King’s own notes explained his thinking: (1) “nonviolent demonstrators go into the streets to exercise their constitutional rights”; (2) “racists resist by unleashing violence against them”; (3) “Americans of conscience in the name of decency demand federal intervention and legislation”; (4) “the Administration, under mass pressure, initiates measures of immediate intervention and remedial legislation.” Selma was a hornet’s nest of racial violence. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee had been active there since 1962, but now King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference planned to join the fray and “dramatize the situation to arouse the federal government by marching by the thousands to the places of registration.”
True to form, local authorities under Dallas County’s sheriff, Jim Clark, took the bait. They clapped over two thousand activists in jail in the first weeks of the campaign and rained unspeakable violence on peaceful protesters. On February 18, state troopers beat and shot Jimmie Lee Jackson, a twenty-six-year-old voting rights demonstrator. When Jackson died eight days later of his wounds, movement leaders conceived a fifty-mile march from Albany to Montgomery, where they would voice their grievances on the steps of the state capitol. The campaign’s climactic moment occurred on Bloody Sunday—March 7, 1965—when state and county law enforcement officers savagely attacked roughly five hundred peaceful marchers as they attempted to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
In 1965, news footage still needed to be flown to New York for national broadcast. That evening, ABC won the race. The brutality was stomach turning. Mounted policemen employed tear gas, electric prods, horse whips, and batons wrapped in barbed wire. They pursued marchers who were running desperately in retreat. When the network broke into its regularly scheduled program—the television premiere of Judgment at Nuremberg—millions of viewers were confronted with gut-wrenching scenes that jarred the nation’s conscience. Two more marches ensued: one, led by King, in which protesters proceeded to the bridge, knelt, prayed, and turned back; and another, which culminated in a historic trek to Montgomery.
Bloody Sunday dealt a profound shock to the American conscience. House Speaker John McCormack denounced the police brutality as a “disgraceful exercise of arbitrary power.” A Michigan congressman called it “a savage action, storm trooper style, under direction of a reckless demagogue.” Behind the scenes, the administration was engaged in tense negotiations with Everett Dirksen, the Senate Republican leader whose support had been critical in securing passage of the Civil Rights Act and who controlled a sufficient bloc of moderate votes to ensure passage of a voting rights bill.
Days after the massacre at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the two sides reached an agreement: the proposed bill would create automatic triggers that suspended discriminatory practices like literacy tests in states where a given portion of eligible voters did not participate in federal elections. It empowered federal examiners to monitor polling stations and in certain cases replace county registrars, stipulated that poll taxes were unconstitutional, required states that qualified for the trigger to preclear any changes to their voting process with the Department of Justice, and established criminal penalties for officials who interfered with citizens’ right to vote.
Inside the White House, aides urged Johnson to use the presidential pulpit in support of the measure. “The public knows you are for the enforcement of civil rights,” Harry McPherson told LBJ. “The Deep South knows it; that is why it went for Goldwater.” The American public felt the “deepest sense of outrage” and “want you to express your own, present sense of outrage,” he urged. Even Abe Fortas, a “reasonable man” not usually given to displays of emotion, wanted to impose martial law on Alabama. The moment demanded executive action. It took little convincing. Dick Goodwin later recalled that “America didn’t like what it saw. And neither did Lyndon Johnson, who witnessed not a revelation (he had grown up in the South), but an affront to the sensibilities and moral justice of the country he now led.”
Johnson addressed a rare joint session of Congress on March 15 and called for the passage of voting rights legislation. After a long build in which he situated the black freedom struggle in the historical arc of democratic struggle dating back to the American Revolution, he proclaimed, “This time, on this issue, there must be no delay, no hesitation and no compromise with our purpose. . . . There is no moral issue. It is wrong—deadly wrong—to deny any of your fellow Americans the right to vote in this country. There is no issue of States rights or national rights. There is only the struggle for human rights.” Speaking in a slow, steady Texas drawl to a near-silent chamber, the president told Congress, “Their cause must be our cause, too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.”
Goodwin, who drafted the speech, later wrote that there “was an instant of silence, the gradually apprehended realization that the president had proclaimed, adopted as his own rallying cry, the anthem of black protest, the hymn of a hundred embattled black marchers.” He observed tears streaming down the Senate majority leader Mike Mansfield’s face and Emanuel Celler, the seventy-six-year-old chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and a stalwart supporter of equal rights, “cheering as wildly as a schoolboy at his first football game.” With bipartisan support, but again in the face of southern opposition, Congress swiftly passed the Voting Rights Act, and Johnson signed it into law on August 6.
As with its strict enforcement of the Civil Rights Act, the administration signaled its unwavering intent to force compliance with the new voting rights law. Not an hour after the bill-signing ceremony, LBJ instructed Joe Califano to ensure that the attorney general “immediately mounted an all-fronts attack on poll taxes and literacy tests.” Four days later—the ink barely dry—federal examiners descended on twelve counties in Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Georgia. By the following January, they added over ninety thousand voters to the rolls in those jurisdictions alone. Violence and intimidation persisted, but for the most part southern authorities acquiesced in the face of strong executive enforcement.
Alongside the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 reordered daily life in the eleven former states of the Confederacy, as well as border states like Kansas, Maryland, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Delaware. As late as 1965, only 6.7 percent of African Americans in Mississippi and 19 percent in Alabama had surmounted the complex of legal and extralegal measures in place to prevent them from exercising the franchise. But southern resistance crumbled in the wake of congressional action. By 1970, roughly two-thirds of African Americans in these Deep South states were registered to vote, and most were able to exercise this right without interference. White southerners now had to grapple with the long-term prospect of black representation at all levels of government and w
ith the more immediate reality of political power sharing. Edgar Mouton, a state legislator from Louisiana, marveled that he had “never shook hands with a black person before I ran for office . . . the first time I shook hands it was a traumatic thing.” The Voting Rights Act did not just redistribute power; it compelled white southerners to rethink their relationship with their black neighbors.
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If the administration’s aggressive enforcement of civil rights moved the country toward a new pluralism, it also took other steps that would fundamentally change the meaning of what it meant to be an American. In October 1965, Lyndon Johnson signed into law the Immigration and Nationality Act, a measure that opened the floodgates to new immigrants—the vast majority of them from Latin America, Africa, and Asia. At the time, non-Hispanic white citizens constituted over 85 percent of the American population. Fifty years later, that portion was just 62 percent and falling. Alongside civil rights enforcement, immigration reform was the realization of a decades-long liberal aspiration and fundamentally changed not only the demography of the United States but the very meaning of American citizenship. Before the Great Society, the concept of full citizenship was deeply bound up with race. After 1965, that would no longer be the case.
Between 1820 and 1924, roughly thirty-seven million European immigrants came to the United States. Proportionally, this migration was unprecedented (the population of the United States in 1850 was just twenty-three million). Northern Europeans—Irish and Germans, especially—predominated in the first wave, between 1820 and 1880. The second great wave, between 1880 and 1924, drew newcomers from southern and eastern Europe, including large numbers of Italians, Greeks, Slavs, Poles, and Jews from the Russian Empire. Smaller numbers of immigrants also came from China, Japan, and other Asian countries. By the early twentieth century, immigrants and the children of immigrants constituted upwards of 75 percent of the population in major cities like New York, Chicago, Boston, Cleveland, and Detroit.