by Joshua Zeitz
By no means did every member of the press corps let Moyers off the hook. He was a “slick operator, but he isn’t particularly trustworthy,” one anonymous correspondent offered on background. “A very smart guy, a master at the snow job,” another journalist added. When the Austin American-Statesman surveyed reporters on the presidential beat, it found support for this assessment, though they also conceded that he was “by far the best man for his exacting job. If they think he sometimes falls short of telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth—an allegation he denies—they also think that no one else could come close to explaining the President.” Yet Moyers had also grown “more irritable lately.” In his early days on the job, he seemed to enjoy the easy repartee and good-natured jousting, but in his reflexive instinct to return every volley, he gradually exposed himself to critics who thought he “would sometimes be better advised to simply say ‘no comment’ to some questions than to give partial answers that may lead reporters astray,” as the New York Times observed. It was in some respects an impossible position. When Moyers heeded such advice and pulled back, “saying less in public briefings,” others censured him for secrecy. By the middle of 1966, it dawned on him that the role might be his undoing.
When newspapermen caught him planting questions among reporters favorable to LBJ before regularly scheduled press conferences, Moyers reacted with pique, asserting that these events should serve the “convenience of the President, not the convenience of the press.” It was Johnson’s prerogative to use press availabilities to convey information that he wished to convey to the public, and like his predecessors under earlier administrations Moyers felt no compunction about pointing friendly journalists in the right direction. As a pack, the press corps “tends to write its opinions of a matter, and then to seek out facts for it.” Too often, coverage of the administration demonstrated “very poor judgment” and was “very poorly informed.” Clearly feeling the sting of criticism that he was a chief culprit behind the credibility gap, he argued that the president was better served when he spoke “directly to the people through radio and television, than if the people have to decide upon what some other human being—a subject to all the frailties of human nature—interprets as his intentions or his policy.”
In mid-1966, Moyers attempted to transition out of his role as press secretary. Foreign policy—particularly the war in Vietnam—consumed ever more of his time and interest. After McGeorge Bundy resigned his post as national security adviser in February, reports surfaced that with one eye on that job Moyers was actively recruiting his own replacement as press secretary. Though in April LBJ appointed Walt Rostow, a Kennedy holdover, to replace Bundy, press reports explained that the new aide would share Bundy’s responsibilities with Valenti and Moyers and that Moyers would be chiefly responsible for the Vietnam portfolio. The reshuffle was maddening for those unaccustomed to Johnson’s White House, where, as one columnist explained, “titles mean nothing . . . and salaries among the half dozen highest ranking or so are at the same level and there are no clearly defined duties.” But to those who could read the tea leaves, Moyers and Valenti were clearly ascendant in the field of foreign policy. With clear ambition to shift into Bundy’s seat, that spring Moyers hired Robert Fleming, the former head of ABC’s bureau in Washington, D.C. He would begin as deputy press secretary and then assume full responsibility for the role. Unfortunately for the president—and for Bill Moyers—the transition was a flop. Fleming proved ill-suited to the position, his “flippant and often uncooperative style” an irritant to the press corps, which was already predisposed to question the official White House line. More difficult still, Johnson never took to Fleming and froze him out—a fate akin to professional death for a press secretary. By September, an unhappy Moyers was back at his perch in the press room.
Public speculation about Moyers’s potential career path—perhaps national security adviser, perhaps ambassador to Vietnam—only served to poison further his relationship with Johnson. By Jack Valenti’s recollection, Moyers campaigned too assiduously for promotion. When Valenti proposed his name as a replacement for Bundy, the president, “a little vexed” at the suggestion, replied tartly that Moyers did not “have the experience and the background for the job.”
That autumn, it became conventional wisdom in Washington that Moyers was the administration’s chief dove and had for some time urged the president to seek a peaceful way out of Southeast Asia. This narrative vastly overstated Moyers’s independence from the administration’s foreign policy consenus. At a dinner party toward the end of Johnson’s presidency, Jack Valenti and his wife shared a table with Arthur Schlesinger, who grumbled that “LBJ had not listened to the war advice of Bill Moyers when he was a presidential aide.” “But, Arthur,” Valenti protested, “Bill held no such view, at least not before midyear 1966. He was as much in favor of massive intervention as the President. If he wasn’t, he never let anyone know his true feelings. The president made it clear to me many times that with the exception of [Undersecretary of State] George Ball, no higher official in the government was opposed to our position and that includes every White House aide.”
By late 1966, those nearest the president knew that he had tired of reading that Moyers was his “intelligent social conscience.” He came to suspect that Moyers was the source of multiple leaks emanating from the West Wing, and indeed, as Harry McPherson would attest, “Bill had adopted a method of operation that included an awful lot of backgrounding on what the President was really doing, and most of it was intended to push the President—to show the President as a liberal and a bit to push the President as well.” By George Reedy’s estimation—and, increasingly, LBJ’s—Moyers was interested less in pushing Johnson to the left than in convincing reporters of his own ideological independence from the president.
Moyers was “fairly near a snapping point,” McPherson recalled. In late September, his older brother committed suicide at age thirty-nine, leaving Bill both deeply anguished and with an added financial burden to provide for his sister-in-law and her children. His own marriage was purportedly under strain, the natural result of punishing hours and unrelenting responsibilities. His “once-close personal relationship with Lyndon Johnson was crumbling,” said another colleague. “His ambition,” Jake Jacobsen believed, “just about ran him into the ground.” Early in 1967, Moyers announced his decision to leave the White House for New York, where he would succeed the legendary Harry Guggenheim as publisher of Newsday, then still a nationally influential newspaper. The break with Johnson was bitter. “I don’t think the President cried very many tears when Bill left,” an aide recalled. The day after he departed the White House, Moyers accepted Bobby Kennedy’s invitation to lunch at Sans Souci, a restaurant popular with the capital’s power crowd. As they broke bread, a news photographer quickly snapped a picture of the two men.
Moyers remained ambivalent. In the coming months, even as he settled into his new life in New York, he sent feelers—first, to determine whether the president might appoint him to run the Peace Corps. When, “after a while that got to be not enough . . . he wanted to become Under Secretary of State very badly.” The UN ambassador, Arthur Goldberg, and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara were supportive of his aspiration and urged LBJ to bring Moyers back to Washington. But the president proved unbending.
When Moyers conveyed his torment over his break with Johnson, Abe Fortas advised that “it is always a mistake to think in terms of resuming a relationship, or any part of it, which has been characterized by such intimacy or interdependence.” It was wise counsel. LBJ and Moyers would never repair the breach.
• • • • •
Even before Moyers’s departure, it became increasingly clear that Joe Califano had emerged as the White House official chiefly responsible for managing, expanding, and—as Johnson’s slip on power grew more pronounced—preserving the Great Society. He was a skilled political operator. He also showed little
compunction about “inhaling other secretaries and staff people,” according to Jacobsen, who privately regarded him as “an empire builder” and “would not trust him around the corner”—“nobody liked Califano,” he claimed in a moment of candor—but conceded that he was “bright as hell” and “a fine assistant to the President.” By 1967, he had assembled a crack staff that included James Gaither, a former law clerk to Chief Justice Earl Warren, who served as the principal liaison with the White House task forces; Fred Bohen, a young assistant dean at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School; and Matthew Nimetz, who graduated first in his class at Harvard Law School before clerking for Justice John Marshall Harlan II. Their average age was thirty-two, and by one colleague’s estimation they “quite possibly topped anything the White House had ever seen. Writers, composers, lawyers, economists, dreamers, slaves—each of them was a little of all.”
Despite his age, and that of his core staff, Califano brought managerial expertise that proved essential to the Great Society’s ambitious expansion of the federal state. When he came to the West Wing, Califano carried over the Planning, Programming, and Budgeting System (PPBS) that Robert McNamara had initiated at the Pentagon, to great public acclaim. Before its adoption, different defense agencies with overlapping mandates jockeyed each year over funding for pet projects. It was an inefficient and costly way of budgeting. Originally the brainchild of researchers at the Rand Corporation, PPBS leveraged advanced quantitative modeling and economic analysis to establish long-range program goals and multiyear budget models. The system was meant to smooth out interagency rivalries, eliminate duplicative initiatives, and create spending and operational efficiencies. It was a “rational concept,” McPherson believed, “but difficult to practice.” It required skillful negotiations with members of Congress who viewed spending and procurement decisions as inherently political. Califano’s management discipline proved critical as the administration shifted from imagining new initiatives to securing a durable future for them. Some of the Great Society’s signature components required multiyear congressional reauthorizations and appropriations. Califano’s insistence on more rigorous budgeting processes armed the administration with powerful tools in its successful effort to preserve and extend the life of these programs through the following decade.
By 1967, Califano’s talents were in high demand. Faced with the need to placate liberals who demanded a steady expansion of existing Great Society programs and conservative Democrats and Republicans who in the aftermath of the off-year elections enjoyed renewed influence—particularly in the House—the administration had to show dexterity at the negotiating table. That year, Califano and Cater hammered out a compromise set of amendments to the Social Security Act that raised the payroll tax (much to the chagrin of liberals, who viewed this measure as a means to obscure and offset the war’s drain on the regular budget) to fund a 13 percent increase in retirement benefits. This measure helped lift many elderly Americans above the poverty line. The amendments also loosened Medicare’s reimbursement process—a boon to doctors, who could now submit “reasonable” charges for such procedures as X-rays and radiology directly to the government. But the White House had to swallow caps on Medicaid, an opening salvo in a decades-long effort by conservatives to constrain the program’s growth, as well as new work training requirements for recipients of AFDC. The administration was even less successful that year in persuading Congress to approve a modest appropriation of $40 million to help cities pay for rodent control. “The knowledge that many children in the world’s most affluent nation are attacked, maimed, and even killed by rats should fill every American with shame,” the president told House and Senate members. The initiative quickly foundered as Newark erupted in flames. Conservatives seized upon the riots as confirmation that black ghetto residents were lawless and beyond redemption. “Let’s buy a lot of cats and turn them lose,” a southern Democrat cackled from the House floor. “Civil rats!” another member catcalled from the rear of the chamber. Martha Griffiths, a liberal congresswoman from Michigan, was appalled by her colleagues’ insensitivity. “If you’re going to spend seventy-nine billion dollars to kill off a few Vietcong,” she intoned, “I’d spend forty million dollars to kill off the most devastating enemy that man has ever had.” Her plea fell on deaf ears; the House rejected LBJ’s proposal by a wide majority.
Fred Panzer, a staff assistant responsible broadly for research and analysis, likened the Republican Party’s new approach to domestic policy to “the great Detroit-style wars of the late 50s when tailfins and chromium were the automakers’ weapons of choice. To match all the new features of the LBJ-product—Medicare, war on poverty, model cities, federal aid to education, air and water pollution control, and extensive government reorganization—the GOP has unveiled its new 1967 ‘Kandy-Kolored, Tangerine-Flake, Streamline’ model. What they have done is to bolt a flashy ‘leopard’ body onto their basic ‘elephant’ chasis [sic]. They are market-testing names for it right now.” In place of ESEA, they offered block grants to states, with minimal federal oversight—a “handy gimmick” that Panzer rated “unsafe for school children.” To supplant the War on Poverty, the GOP proposed a hollow “dismantling device” that they called the “Opportunity Crusade.” Rather than public housing vouchers, the “Gerry[sic] Ford ‘home ownership’ clutch,” which would effectively act as a subsidy for middle-class families and do little for impoverished urban residents. The administration successfully protected its programs from the newly resurgent congressional coalition of conservative Republicans and southern Democrats, but preservation gradually replaced innovation as a staff priority.
Despite increasingly trenchant backlash, Califano left a considerable mark in his tenure as domestic policy chief. At LBJ’s urging, he played a driving role in creating a new cabinet agency, the Department of Transportation, that would streamline the efforts of over thirty disparate agencies and bureaus then dedicated to coordinating federal transportation policy. The president demanded a holistic approach that would improve the country’s transportation infrastructure “radically, looking not only to the next year, but to 1980, the year 2000 and beyond.” He aspired not just to restructure the existing collage of fiefdoms but to “invigorate” and “modernize” an ailing grid of roads, waterways, railroads, and airports that were built to support a smaller, more dispersed nation. Though Americans spent $120 billion in aggregate on transportation—accounting for one-sixth of economic output—Johnson maintained that the country’s system of “aging and often obsolete plant and equipment” and infrastructure built to support a bygone agrarian economy would hobble future economic growth. A dedicated cabinet agency could act “as a full partner with private enterprise in meeting America’s urgent need for mobility.”
The negotiations, which stretched over the better part of 1966, proved thorny. The Treasury Department jealously held to its stewardship of the Coast Guard. (“[W]hat is it?” the president ribbed Secretary of the Treasury Henry Fowler. “Do you have a boat, a yacht, a plane you want to keep? Is it the Coast Guard mess you want to keep? Do you like to wear a Coast Guard uniform?”) Management and labor representatives from the waning maritime industry—with support from the AFL-CIO—looked with disfavor on consolidation, fearing it might cost them their public subsidies. John McClellan, the powerful senator from Arkansas whose committee claimed jurisdiction over the enabling legislation, demanded that the administration alter its criteria for approving waterway projects. In short, multiple constituencies threatened to scuttle the project over parochial concerns. When Califano caved on several of McClellan’s key demands, LBJ rose from his chair and fixed his intense stare on the young aide. “Open your fly,” he instructed. Califano laughed obligingly, “knowing he wasn’t serious but surprised nonetheless.”
“Unzip your fly,” the president repeated, “because there’s nothing there. John McClellan just cut it off with a razor so sharp you didn’t even notice it.”
The
president proceeded to reach the errant senator by telephone. “John,” he began, “I’m calling about Joe Califano. You cut his pecker off and put it in your desk drawer. Now I’m sending him back up there to get it from you. I can’t agree to anything like that. You’ve got to realize that the transportation system of the country needs something besides more highways in Arkansas.”
The legislation, which Johnson signed in October 1966, was a singular accomplishment, as was the Traffic Safety Act, which Congress sent to LBJ’s desk several weeks earlier. It provided grants to states to improve road design and safety, required automobile manufacturers to enhance safety performance, and established a national research and test center for highway safety. Califano, who was instrumental in securing passage of both measures, would play an equally critical role in overseeing the creation of the Department of Transportation and the growth of its mandate and resources.
• • • • •
If Califano played the driving role in expanding and securing the administration’s Great Society initiatives in 1966 and 1967, his closest collaborator was Harry McPherson. Ostensibly the president’s chief counsel—a role in which he served as legislative and administrative draftsman and primary liaison to the Department of Justice—he gradually assumed an enhanced portfolio that included mediating labor and industry disputes and, alongside Califano, coordinating rapid response during the perennial outburst of urban riots during the “long hot summers” between 1965 and 1968. In what became a painfully familiar routine, the White House would dispatch Deputy Secretary of Defense Cyrus Vance or Deputy Attorney General Warren Christopher to coordinate with local elected officials and to serve as the administration’s on-site liaison to National Guard units called up to quell the disturbance. During the first wave of uprisings, the administration found itself at a disadvantage. For several years, the Department of Justice had “operated a very extensive network throughout the South,” McPherson explained. When violence erupted in a southern city like Selma or Meridian, it had informants on the ground—a “lawyer or a judge or an elected official” who would “call from that part of the country and say there is going to be trouble tonight, and there is going to be physical violence.” But that was in the South. No such web of local contacts and informants existed in the North, where most urban riots occurred. Determined to build better relationships and understanding, in late 1967 and early 1968 McPherson traveled with White House colleagues on a fact-finding tour of ghetto neighborhoods in New York, Chicago, Cleveland, and Baltimore, among other cities. He acknowledged that it was a “desultory way of getting information about the black poor to the President”: “We knew we could not learn much about [the communities] in the course of a long weekend. What we hoped to gain was a sense of how the people who lived there felt about their future: specifically, whether they thought conditions might be improved through peaceful processes or only through violence; or that nothing would help.” Still expecting that Johnson would serve a second full term and that the war would come to an end in the foreseeable future, the White House staff continued to look for ways to quell urban unrest.