Building the Great Society

by Joshua Zeitz

  At Johnson’s urging, Congress also passed the 1966 Child Nutrition Act, which substantially expanded a preexisting, subsidized school lunch program for poor children and established a pilot breakfast program. Both initiatives experienced steady growth under successive Democratic and Republican initiatives: between 1970 and 2010, the number of disadvantaged youth benefiting from free or subsidized breakfasts grew from 450,000 to 11.7 million, while those receiving free or reduced-price lunches grew from 22 million to 32 million.

  Aside from the very real contribution that school meals play in providing food security for poor children, census data report that they account for a 1 point decrease in child poverty rates when accounting for the cash value of the benefit. In absolute numbers, food stamps and school meals together reduce the total number of children living in poverty today by approximately 15 percent.

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  In his signature address at the University of Michigan, LBJ had declared that the Great Society was “a place where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community.” It was a “place where men are more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods.” Such sweeping rhetorical flourishes reflected the imprimatur of New Frontiersmen like Dick Goodwin and Bill Moyers on the Great Society’s agenda. (They also drove Horace Busby and George Reedy to distraction.) Fighting poverty and completing the nation’s frayed and patchwork safety net were legacy items from the New Deal and Fair Deal years; expanding the liberal agenda to include environmental, consumer, and workforce protections reflected the concerns of younger LBJ aides who presaged the “New Politics” movement of the 1970s. Over the course of his presidency, Johnson signed roughly three hundred such measures into law. The Water Quality Act of 1965 established standards for interstate lakes and rivers and held states accountable for enforcement. The Clean Water Restoration Act appropriated over $3.5 billion to remediate lakes and rivers and created regulations to stem the flow of sewage and industrial waste. The Air Quality Act of 1967 established some of the first emissions standards for automobiles and industrial plants. A highway beautification bill—an initiative that Lady Bird tirelessly championed, the passage of which became “a matter of personal honor” for the president—limited the placement of billboards along federal highways. Such measures—pioneering in their time—were fundamental building blocks on which the modern environmental movement later established a more stringent regulatory apparatus to safeguard America’s water, air, and land. “No longer is peripheral action—the ‘saving’ of a forest, a park, and a refuge for wildlife—isolated from the mainstream,” declared Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall, who served under both Kennedy and Johnson. “The total environment is now the concern, and the new conservation makes man, himself, its subject. The quality of life is now the perspective and repose of the new conservation.”

  The Great Society was also on the vanguard of consumer protection and health and safety reform, emerging concerns among liberal interest groups. At the administration’s urging, in 1966 Congress passed the Fair Packaging and Labeling Act, which required manufacturers of consumer goods to label the “net contents, identity of commodity, and name and place of the product’s manufacturer, packer, or distributor.” The law also empowered the Federal Trade Commission and the Food and Drug Administration to impose additional rules governing the disclosure of ingredients, package size, and pricing.

  With the support of overwhelmingly Democratic majorities in the House and the Senate, LBJ secured passage of two new federal agencies—the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts—with a mandate and budget to promote American cultural achievement. He also signed into law the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, which established the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, an agency with dedicated federal funding that helped local public television and radio stations create and broadcast quality programming. The broadcasting act spurred the creation of both the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and National Public Radio, which launched in 1970. In his memoirs, Johnson was critical of PBS. “Considering that the thrust of the Great Society in general was toward the poor and minorities,” he concluded, “it is worth saying that the emphasis in public broadcasting turned out to be toward an elite audience.” He was correct inasmuch as local stations devoted a large portion of airtime in the system’s early years to costume dramas and television plays produced by the BBC. But Johnson, who died in January 1973, did not enjoy the opportunity to witness the lasting influence of PBS on quality children’s programming.

  In 1968, Joan Ganz Cooney, a New York–based public television producer who had won an Emmy for her documentary on the achievements of the Head Start program, founded the Children’s Television Workshop (CTW). Convinced that television had an important role to play in preparing low-income children for school, Cooney received backing from the Carnegie Foundation to plan an educational show targeted to children between the ages of three and five. The concept was generally uncontroversial, but its approach was highly unorthodox. “If we accept the premise that commercials are effective teachers,” Cooney wrote in her Carnegie report, “it is important to be aware of their characteristics, the most obvious being frequent repetition, clever visual presentation, brevity and clarity.” In the course of a two-hour time slot, television viewers—young and old alike—were exposed to as many as fifty thirty-second advertisements. Rather than fight this tendency, the fledgling production shop would build advertising techniques into its premier effort, Sesame Street. Each hour-long episode featured upwards of twenty-five short, educational segments “sponsored” by letters and numbers (“Today’s show was brought to you by the letter J and the number 7”). Sesame Street broke new ground in its use of an inner-city street set and knowingly spoofed the bland daytime game shows and soap operas that children invariably took in over the course of their preschool years; it had its own white-toothed game-show host, a Muppet named Guy Smiley, and a man-on-the-scene reporter named Kermit the Frog. Occupying the 9:00 a.m. time slot, when 20 percent of children aged three to five were already seated in front of the television, Sesame Street drew almost half of the nation’s preschool population within a year of its debut. The generation of children raised in the 1970s was the first to learn its numbers and letters—and some of its values—from public television.

  Not everyone shared the enthusiasm of so many young viewers. In Mississippi, public television stations initially refused to air the show because it featured a racially integrated cast, while in England, BBC’s children’s programming director declined to run Sesame Street because he was “worried by the program’s authoritarian aims. Right answers are demanded and praised.” Some education experts also argued that Sesame Street socialized kids to learn by rote memorization rather than creative thinking and deduction. CTW remained defiant in the face of these criticisms, insisting, as did one producer, that “we’ve proved [that] kids will watch quality shows and will choose them over sleazy competition.” By numbers and brand recognition alone, they were right.

  In every sense, CTW and Sesame Street were children of the Great Society.

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  Despite the sheer breadth of his achievement, Johnson sustained mounting criticism from liberal intellectuals and journalists, particularly those who identified most closely with the New Frontier and viewed Robert Kennedy as the true heir of his brother’s legacy. Many of these critics had never accepted LBJ as one of their own and could not intellectually reconcile his emergence as a liberal icon. Speaking before the annual conference of Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) in April 1965, after LBJ’s historic address on voting rights and with ESEA and Medicare gliding their way through the legislative process, Arthur Schlesinger baldly claimed that the Great Society had been Dick Goodwin’s doing—not just the phrase, but the very concept. LBJ’s brain trust—Valenti, Busby
, and Reedy—had resisted it with unbending will, believing that its “dreamy vague proposals would be interpreted as a hangover from the Soviet Union’s series of unsuccessful five-year plans.” It was only by virtue of Goodwin’s intellectual probity and towering influence that the forces of goodness had scored “a clear victory of the liberal cause of American politics over the messianic conservative complex of the President’s Texas mafia.” Earlier that year, Schlesinger privately recorded his opinion that LBJ was “living intellectually off the Kennedy program.” Anything worthwhile emanating from the Johnson White House had been the handiwork of “the Kennedy people.”

  Johnson was acutely aware of this perception and increasingly wary of Kennedy loyalists who sought to diminish his standing. When the historian William Leuchtenburg visited the White House to interview LBJ at the conclusion of the first session of the Eighty-ninth Congress in late 1965, he found the president—whom he had never met—irritable and on edge. “Mr. President, this has been a remarkable Congress. It is even arguable whether this isn’t the most significant Congress ever,” he began by way of opening. “No, it isn’t,” LBJ snapped. “It’s not arguable. You can perform a great service if you say that never before have the three independent branches been so productive. Never has the American system worked so effectively in producing quality legislation—and at a time when our system is under attack all over the world.” Johnson was wound up “like an old Victrola” and let go a two-hour volley of grievances against the Kennedys, “ADA liberals” generally—Arthur Schlesinger specifically—and the press. It was a remarkable display of annoyance and resentment.

  At the time of the interview, Lyndon Johnson stood at the height of his power and accomplishment. Arthur Schlesinger might not admit to the world what he acknowledged in his diary: LBJ was likely destined to greatness. But in ways that were not then apparent, Johnson and his inner circle had already committed themselves to decisions that would nearly prove the undoing of the Great Society.

  PART III

  CHAPTER 10

  Guns and Butter

  I don’t want to be known as a war president,” Lyndon Johnson insisted in the summer of 1965. Franklin Roosevelt would forever be remembered for leading the nation to victory in Europe and the Pacific, but Johnson vividly recalled how the exigencies of mobilization and combat had forced FDR to transform himself from “Dr. New Deal” to “Dr. Win the War,” effectively drawing to a close a decade of liberal domestic reform and forestalling the completion of the nation’s safety net. It was the story of every Democratic president in the twentieth century, from Woodrow Wilson, who largely sidelined progressive economic and social reform after America entered the European conflict, to Harry Truman, who became bogged down in Korea and ultimately spent down his political capital to raise armies and manage a wartime economy rather than pursue his Fair Deal programs. Foreign adventures had also consumed the Kennedy administration, much to the detriment of the Democratic Party’s domestic policy agenda. Johnson was acutely aware of this cumulative history and remained determined not to fall into the same trap. Yet in the early months of his full term, he made fateful decisions that proved his political undoing.

  Before the early 1950s, few Americans had heard of Vietnam, a onetime French protectorate in Southeast Asia that fell under Japanese control during World War II and emerged after the war as one of many nations eager to shake off the yoke of European colonialism and achieve political independence. A nationalist guerrilla army, the Vietminh—led by a longtime communist insurgent, Ho Chi Minh—engaged in a ten-year struggle with the French, who fought to reimpose control on their former province. It was around this time that the U.S. government took an interest in Vietnam. Prevailing foreign policy wisdom held that if one country were to fall to the communist bloc, a “domino effect” would soon topple nearby democratic or colonial governments, thus emboldening communist China and depriving Americans and their allies of access to raw materials, markets, naval bases, and strategic positions throughout Asia. The Eisenhower administration watched with concern—but did not intervene—when the Vietminh defeated the American-backed French army at Dien Bien Phu. In subsequent peace talks held in Geneva, Switzerland, the United States stepped in as the lead Western power seeking to check the influence of Ho’s nationalist movement. By agreement, the country would be temporarily split in two at the seventeenth parallel, with reunification and free elections to follow two years later.

  The United States subsequently installed a new leader in South Vietnam—Ngo Dinh Diem, a Catholic civil servant from the old French regime—and attempted to prop up his government with military and financial aid. With American consent, Diem canceled the scheduled elections in 1956. In the coming years, he would prove an expensive and troublesome client of the United States. Corrupt and inept, his government alienated large numbers of Vietnamese peasants and soon fell into open, armed conflict with southern remnants of the Vietminh, now rebranded the National Liberation Front (NLF), or Vietcong (VC). Courtesy of Ho’s government in Hanoi, the NLF enjoyed a steady supply of materials that flowed down the “Ho Chi Minh Trail,” a winding network of footpaths and tunnels that extended over six hundred miles through Laos and Cambodia.

  Frustration with Diem’s government led JFK to sanction a military overthrow in 1963; in the American-backed coup, just weeks before Kennedy’s assassination, Diem and his brother were killed and a new military junta installed. The United States had already committed billions of dollars in assistance to the Saigon government and had over fifteen thousand military advisers in place. Such was the state of American involvement when Johnson became president.

  At three critical junctures, LBJ and his foreign policy advisers led the country further down a path to war: in August 1964, when, in response to a suspected North Vietnamese attack on an American gunboat in the Gulf of Tonkin, Congress authorized the administration to use “all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the armed forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression”; in February 1965, when American forces began a massive bombing campaign against North Vietnamese and NLF targets—later dubbed “Operation Rolling Thunder”; and in July 1965, when Johnson committed combat troops to root out the NLF and prop up the weak and disreputable government in Saigon. Until late 1967, LBJ’s advisers were near unanimous in their conviction that South Vietnam must not fall. “If I don’t go in now and they show later that I should have,” LBJ lamented, “they’ll push . . . Vietnam up my ass every time.” Even later, when some of his national security advisers arrived at the conclusion that the war could not be won, Johnson remained adamant that the political costs of capitulation were too heavy to bear. A communist victory “would shatter my Presidency, kill my administration, and damage our democracy. I knew that Harry Truman and Dean Acheson had lost their effectiveness the day that the Communists took over in China.”

  The administration’s lone dissenter of consequence was George Ball, the undersecretary of state, whose work as a director of the Strategic Bombing Survey in 1945 led him to believe that the United States would gain little advantage through the indiscriminate bombing of a preindustrial country (North Vietnam) with precious few vital targets. Ball also questioned America’s ability to win a ground war against well-stocked guerrilla fighters. History would later prove him right, though at the time his was a lone voice. By the end of 1965, over 150,000 servicemen were stationed in Vietnam; by 1968, over 500,000.

  In World War II, the average American combat soldier was twenty-six years old. In Vietnam, he was nineteen. From the very start, his exposure to war was surreal. Rather than send servicemen by military transport, the government contracted with commercial airlines to shuttle fresh troops to Southeast Asia. The sleek civilian jets were “all painted in their designer colors, puce and canary yellow,” remembered one veteran. “There were stewardesses on the plane, air conditioning. You would think we were going to Phoenix or something.” Another serviceman rememb
ered that “you could cut the fear on that plane with a knife. You could smell it. The guy sitting next to me was married. I’m sure he was worried sick about his family back home. The stewardess came by and gave us sandwiches . . . and he started crying. He couldn’t eat his sandwich. He just sat there and cried.”