Building the Great Society

by Joshua Zeitz

  Harry McPherson, who remained Moynihan’s closest ally inside the West Wing, later observed that as the administration shifted its focus from securing equality of opportunity to equality of outcome, it waded into murkier waters. Most northern white voters could agree that segregated buses and Jim Crow voting laws were morally reprehensible. They recoiled in collective horror at images of white policemen brutally assaulting peaceful protesters. But when it came to housing segregation, ghetto violence, and economic inequality, there were no apparent “villains—at least none that strangers could identify—in the broken homes of the Northern cities where men ‘chose’ to be unemployed, women chose welfare, and young people chose heroin.”

  Inside the White House, Moynihan’s report circulated quietly for several weeks. It is unclear whether LBJ ever read it; his aides would later claim he did not. But it made an impression on the staff, who recognized both its powerful argument and its explosive potential. In May 1965, Moynihan was summoned to the West Wing, where he collaborated with Goodwin on the president’s forthcoming commencement speech at Howard University. The speech was in large part a condensed and sanitized version of Moynihan’s larger effort. Johnson acknowledged the centuries of systemic violence and discrimination against black men—the “long years of degradation and discrimination, which have attacked his dignity and assaulted his ability to produce for his family.” He rehearsed the familiar themes of broken families, single-parent homes, and communities in disarray. But in his call to action, LBJ—reciting lines that Goodwin and Moynihan penned for him—went further than the report in providing prescriptive guidance. He declared that “freedom is not enough. You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying: Now you are free to go where you want, and do as you desire, and choose the leaders you please. You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘you are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.” The president announced that he would soon convene a conference of “scholars, and experts, and outstanding Negro leaders—men of both races—and officials of Government at every level,” to propose a bold course of action that would remedy centuries of debilitating oppression. Titled “To Fulfill These Rights,” the speech heralded a new phase in the Johnson administration’s War on Poverty and drive toward black equality.

  In the meantime, aides grappled with how to handle the report, a potentially incendiary document whose author, Moynihan, left the administration that summer to run for city council president in New York City. LBJ’s aides intended to head off controversy by instructing the Government Printing Office to release the document under plain cover and make it available for purchase at forty-five cents per copy. If it were issued as just another document, perhaps it would not draw unusual attention. But in August, someone—perhaps Moynihan, perhaps another official—leaked the report to Newsweek and set off a firestorm of controversy. The magazine ran its review beside a photograph of children throwing glass bottles in an urban neighborhood, with a subtitle that read “A time bomb ticks in the ghetto.” The report “has set off a quiet revolution in the basic White House approach to the continuing dilemma of race,” claimed the author, who lent special focus to “the splintering Negro family,” “the rising rate of non-white illegitimacy,” the “runaway curve in child welfare cases,” and the “disintegration of Negro families,” which “may have fallen into a self-sustaining vicious cycle.”

  By the end of the month, Robert Novak and Rowland Evans dubbed it the “Moynihan Report”; most of official Washington was already familiar with its general contours. So were civil rights leaders and black intellectuals, many of whom took great umbrage at its thesis and immediately returned fire. The NAACP’s official organ, the Crisis, announced “The New Genteel Racism.” James Farmer, the leader of the Congress of Racial Equality, denounced Moynihan for providing a “massive academic cop-out for the white conscience.” It was, by his estimation, “the most serious threat to the ultimate freedom of American Negroes to appear in print in recent memory.” Moynihan’s implicit argument was that “Negroes in the nation will never secure a substantial measure of freedom until we learn to behave ourselves and stop buying Cadillacs instead of bread.” Kenneth Clark, who originated the term “tangle of pathology,” was one of a few prominent black scholars to defend Moynihan. “It’s kind of a wolf’s pack operating in a very undignified way,” he complained. “If Pat is a racist, I am.” But the stigma followed Moynihan for the better part of the decade, even as he took up a prestigious post at Harvard University. Though his report was meant to sound a clarion call for a family income floor—a measure far more radical and redistributionist than any contemplated by the Great Society—many liberals regarded him as a turncoat who furnished conservatives with a powerful rhetorical argument against antipoverty and civil rights initiatives. The “middle-class sense of fairness,” McPherson observed, was “willing to free the Negro from certain obvious and obnoxious restrictions. Once that was done, the American idea was that every man was on his own. No one was supposed to get special treatment. The Irish hadn’t; the Italians hadn’t; the Jews hadn’t. What made the Negro special?” Such was the argument that pervaded working-class neighborhoods in the Chicago bungalow neighborhoods and in prosperous Orange County, California, where voters in 1966 sharply rebuked Pat Brown. However unwittingly, Moynihan furnished opponents of the Great Society with an intellectually respectable means to sanitize backlash politics and make it seem both credible and reputable.

  Despite its incendiary quality, the Moynihan Report reflected growing skepticism within the administration that qualitative measures could eradicate poverty. That fall, Sargent Shriver told the president that to “end poverty in the United States, as we know it today, within a generation,” the administration ought to adopt a “negative income tax.” Rather than pay taxes to the government, poor people would receive money back. Layering a minimum income support on top of existing antipoverty programs would cost at least $7.5 billion in incremental spending. It was a political nonstarter, though one of the internal proponents of this strategy nonsensically argued that “one of the attractive features of the Negative Income Tax is that it would automatically go away as the [poverty] problem is solved.” Policy makers would revisit this concept sporadically, but only in the 1970s would a critical bloc of Democrats—and some Republicans—consider it seriously.

  Moynihan’s report was not the only challenge to the intellectual foundation of the Great Society. In 1966, a team of researchers led by James Coleman, a respected sociologist based at the University of Chicago, released a report titled Equality of Educational Opportunity. Commissioned by HEW, the “Coleman Report” studied a broad sample of 655,000 students and concluded that “school factors” were less instrumental in determining individual performance than “family background and socioeconomic factors.” Coleman’s team concluded that “the sources of inequality of educational opportunity appear to be first in the home itself and the cultural influences immediately surrounding the home; then they lie in the schools’ ineffectiveness to free achievement from the impact of the home, and in the schools’ homogeneity which perpetuated the social influences of the home and its environments.” Conservatives pointed to the Coleman Report as proof positive that schools could not remedy more trenchant cultural pathologies that grew out of poverty and broken homes; thus, no amount of government largesse would make a difference. In the coming years, other studies would challenge or reaffirm Coleman’s findings: the White Task Force on Early Childhood Development (1966–1967) found that early intervention of the Head Start variety was in fact instrumental in improving student outcomes and urged that more funding be directed to primary and secondary schools. By contrast, a government study issued in 1967, Racial Isolation in the Public Schools, found that deep patterns of residential segregation had isolated a critical number of black students; impl
icitly, the report argued that integration, not resources, would close the gap between black and white student performance. On some level, Title I of the education act, which allocated funds to school districts on the basis of how many poor students they served, had always operated as a mechanism by which to surpass the church-and-state dilemma that had long stymied federal aid to primary and secondary schools. But LBJ and his advisers genuinely believed that education was a key that poor people could use to unlock the door to opportunity. Alongside Moynihan’s analysis, these reports supplied ammunition to congressional Republicans who in 1967 proposed bundling a substantial portion of categorical aid into block grants that the federal government would then return to states, much to the advantage of wealthier districts and the detriment of poor ones. As it had on prior occasions, the Johnson administration called on labor, religious, and civil rights groups to lobby on behalf of its legislative program. Congress reauthorized ESEA with its original formula intact, but not without protracted debate over amendments—ultimately unsuccessful—that would have prohibited the use of funds for busing and would have sharply restricted the ability of the Office of Education to withhold funds from districts that did not meet its Title VI enforcement guidelines.

  • • • • •

  In mid-1966, local Democratic leaders raised a hue and cry when the Child Development Group of Mississippi (CDGM), an all-black community action program that administered most of the state’s Head Start programs, requested an appropriation of $41 million for fiscal year 1967—a large multiple of its current-year funding. Staffed in large part by veterans of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party who in their off time continued to take an active hand in voter registration and political organization, the CDGM raised the ire of the U.S. senator John Stennis, who denounced its leaders as “extremists.” It did not help matters that an OEO audit found that the program could not account for thousands of dollars of questionable expenses, employed no white teachers or paraprofessionals, and had “been increasingly oriented toward the economic needs of adults rather than the education and development needs of children.” Under fire from liberals, Shriver defended the OEO’s decision to defund the program. “We see every reason in morality and public policy to encourage racially integrated groups in Mississippi,” he insisted. “We intend to encourage such groups in Head Start and other programs.” When the OEO announced Head Start funding for a new, interracial CAP whose leadership included Aaron Henry and Hodding Carter III, a liberal white newspaper editor, activists denounced the administration for impeding “the prospect of a self-emancipated Negro community.” Shriver was deeply embittered by the criticism. “I’d never really seen him as moved and angry,” Jule Sugarman remarked. “It was a terrible reflection on his personal integrity.” Years later, Shriver spoke to the pain of being caught in the cross fire between black community organizers who in many respects embodied the expectations of community action—they were, after all, building indigenous organizations to lift their own communities out of poverty and dependency—and politicians who demanded moderation and accountability. “I was trying to defend CDGM,” he insisted. “But those people were so zealous, so religiously dedicated to what they were doing—and not without good cause—on behalf of the black people in Mississippi, that that was all they could see. My critics thought I was not sufficiently interested in blacks, or in CDGM. They thought I did not understand the situation, or that I was gutless and couldn’t take the political pressure.”

  Ultimately, Shriver hammered out a difficult compromise that divided jurisdiction over Mississippi’s Head Start program between several organizations, including CDGM, which agreed to adopt stricter accountability standards and appoint several white people to its board. The agreement represented a victory for the state’s poor children but exhausted the director’s capital among increasingly skeptical members of Congress. The controversy was only one of many local firestorms over community action. In dozens of cities around the country, elected officials—many of them Democrats—complained loudly that community activists were using federal dollars to organize voters against the local machines.

  Few people at the time knew that Shriver was fighting a multifront war. With the war in Vietnam commanding additional attention and resources, the administration approved a 1967 budget for the OEO that came in at just one-third of Shriver’s original request and one-tenth of what experts believed was necessary to fund its initiatives at full capacity. In the same way that the president grew ever more wary of Robert Kennedy, he came to question Shriver’s loyalty—a cruel irony, given Bobby’s visceral disregard for his brother-in-law. There was also continued blowback from northern mayors who resented the autonomy and occasional hostility of federally funded community action programs. In Newark, Mayor Hugh Addonizio, a Democrat who had been elected with support from the city’s black and Italian communities, complained loudly that the Newark Community Union Project was attempting to topple his government by organizing rent strikes and political protests demanding better public services and better oversight of the police. The same pattern was on exhibit in San Francisco, where the Democratic mayor, John Shelley, did battle with Citizens United Against Poverty.

  At the LBJ Ranch on December 19, Califano delivered Shriver’s handwritten resignation to the president. The director believed that it was in Johnson’s interest “and OEO’s [to have] a new face and a new image.” He had “exhausted his bargaining power in the Congress. I am out of IOUs up there.” And “having been in this job for three years, I believe it is time for a change. There are certain jobs in which your capital is eroded faster than in others; this is one of them.”

  Alarmed by the damage that Shriver’s departure would inflict on the administration’s antipoverty program, Hubert Humphrey persuaded the president to reject his resignation. For the time, Shriver would remain at his post, with the promise that more funding would ensue as the military effort in Vietnam achieved steadier ground. That promise would prove ever more elusive as Americans flipped their calendars to 1967.

  CHAPTER 12

  You Aren’t a Man in Your Own Right

  Working in any White House is an exhausting and all-consuming endeavor. Most senior staff members reach a burnout point. This was certainly the case in LBJ’s administration. Even before the midterm elections that weakened the liberal majority in Congress, the president’s original slate of White House aides began showing signs of enervation. Their lives, explained the New York Times, had grown “extremely demanding. The hours are long and the vacations are infrequent. The 12-hour day, the six-day week, with half a day at the desk on Sunday, is routine. There does not seem to be much evidence that this pace by itself exhausts the special assistant. But many of them do develop feelings of guilt because they feel they are neglecting their families.” The grueling demands of the job wore heavily on all staff members, but none more than Jack Valenti, whose ragbag of responsibilities—though lacking cohesion—required that he shadow the president at all times and on all days. He was, according to the veteran political reporter Tom Wicker, the “most enigmatic and the most omnipresent of the Johnson men,” the aide who saw “Mr. Johnson first in the morning and last at night, and nobody in Washington underestimates that privilege. . . . He can be seen passing notes to the President at a news conference or alighting at his side from a helicopter.” LBJ, who by habit tested the limits of his aides’ forbearance and devotion, once described him as “more important than a valet and less important than an ambassador,” with “some of the functions of each—and many in between.”

  Like Moyers and Busby, by 1966 Valenti increasingly found himself attending long foreign policy meetings—particularly on the sinking quagmire that was Vietnam. The pace, as well as the burden of responsibility, was bound to take a toll on his sunny disposition and eventually did. “You didn’t take work home,” he remembered, “because I would usually arrive around 7:30 in the morning . . . and would leave the White House anywhere from
ten to midnight or one. . . . You went home to sleep and then you were up the next day. . . . The hours were very long and very strenuous.” With time, Valenti—who bore “the most stereotyped image of [LBJ’s] staff members,” one newspaperman wrote—came to resent his popular caricature as an intellectual lightweight and consummate bagman. “Every time I see a story about myself I’m described as a fast-talking Houston ad man who wears metallic suits,” he grumbled in a moment of rare candor and pique with the press. “Goodwin isn’t the only guy around here who has ever read a book.”

  His want of a defined portfolio also began to grate on Valenti. Moyers initially owned development of the Great Society agenda and later served concurrently as press secretary—a role that Valenti had once coveted for himself—and de facto chief of staff. Joe Califano hastily built a small empire headquartered in the basement of the West Wing, where he ran herd over domestic policy, overlapping at times with Doug Cater, who enjoyed sweeping influence over education and health initiatives. Horace Busby had a wide-ranging mandate that included his well-defined role as cabinet secretary. McGeorge Bundy was the staff man chiefly responsible for foreign affairs.