Building the Great Society

by Joshua Zeitz

  Goodwin left the White House in late 1965; Valenti, Busby, and Moyers, in 1966. All four aides had played a leading role in helping the president articulate his vision. In their absence, McPherson gradually assumed unacknowledged status as Johnson’s chief speechwriter, in addition to his role as chief counsel. “My job was to make staying with it in Vietnam, and in the ghettos, sound compelling and necessary,” he remembered—objectives that were increasingly difficult to meet as LBJ entered the last year of his term.

  After leaving the White House, Moyers privately credited McPherson with keeping a “steady hand on an erratic wheel”—a role, he claimed, that “has never been fully explained or understood. Perhaps it never will be except to a few of us.” In acknowledgment of his own reputation for political cunning, he suggested that had McPherson “only been a former preacher and a few years younger, with a calculating penchant for intrigue, you might have gained the notoriety which your personal talents deserve, but then you would not have been Harry McPherson and you would not have lasted as long or been as effective as you have.” George Christian, who succeeded Moyers as press secretary, would later agree with this confidential assessment. McPherson was less interested in power than in “peace of mind. He dodged the power struggles as best he could and concentrated on influencing the President with the written word; his hand was in virtually every Presidential utterance on major policy.” He also succeeded, where no others did, in “living a private life of his own.” McPherson “occasionally left home with his family without telling the White House switchboard where he was going. More importantly, he was the only one who got away with it.”

  LBJ once told McPherson that it did not “matter what kind of a majority you come in with. You’ve got just about a year when they treat you right, and before they start worrying about themselves. The third year, you lose votes; if this war goes on, I’ll lose a lot of ’em. A lot of our people don’t belong here, they’re in Republican seats, and the Republicans will get them back. The fourth year’s all politics. You can’t put anything through when half the Congress is thinking how to beat you. So you’ve got one year. That’s why I tried. Well, we gave it a hell of a lick, didn’t we?” Johnson had knowingly spent down his political capital on civil rights and the Vietnam War. He exited 1967 in full knowledge that his reelection was far from inevitable. For his aides, this uncertainty lent added urgency to their efforts to build a secure future for the president’s Great Society legacy.

  CHAPTER 13

  The Thirty-first of March

  By the close of 1967, over 500,000 American troops were bogged down in Southeast Asia. More than 15,000 had been killed in action. Within twelve months, the casualty count would almost double. The war was “all people talked about at cocktail parties or across the back fence,” recalled Senator George McGovern of South Dakota. “It was the transcendent issue in American politics. If you lived in Washington, it was the only issue.” As Lyndon Johnson’s approval rating plummeted from 61 percent in early 1966 to 38 percent in October 1967, the former vice president Richard Nixon, now earning a lucrative salary as managing partner of a prestigious New York law firm, slowly rebuilt his political base. The consummate campaigner, Nixon had traveled the country on behalf of Barry Goldwater in 1964, delivering over 150 speeches in thirty-six states and accumulating goodwill among grassroots conservatives who resented the refusal of moderate and liberal Republicans to work for the party’s right-wing nominee. In 1966, Nixon accelerated his political activities, headlining dozens of fund-raisers for congressional candidates and delivering over 600 speeches in forty states. When the party netted 540 state legislative seats, 47 House seats, and 3 Senate seats that year, Nixon—whose political operation already employed full-time advance men and speechwriters—emerged as a leading contender for the presidential nomination in 1968. He was conservative enough to please many Goldwater supporters but moderate enough to calm the nerves of centrist Republicans. Rumors of his political demise, it turned out, had been greatly exaggerated.

  Dick Scammon, the former census director whose survey work informed Moyers’s and Valenti’s messaging strategy four years earlier, conceded the likelihood of Nixon’s nomination but considered him “a born loser.” The race would likely be very close—Republican candidates had won two of the past four presidential elections and racked up a cumulative advantage of roughly 100,000 votes out of roughly 262 million cast. In effect, the LBJ landslide in 1964 had been an outlier event. The default setting in American politics was near deadlock. But by no stretch of the imagination was the race unwinnable. The key to besting Nixon (or Ronald Reagan or Nelson Rockefeller) was to focus intently on the middle-American voter. “He is un-young. He is un-black. He is un-poor,” Scammon said. As Doug Cater explained to the president, “This suggests that campaign strategy should be carefully aimed at the white, middle-aged, middle-class voters—‘the people,’ in Scammon’s phrase, ‘who bowl regularly.’” Pointing to recent backlash votes against open housing in California and a police review board in otherwise liberal New York City in 1966, Scammon advised a centrist approach to the two topics that would almost certainly dominate the coming election: Vietnam and urban riots. To win, the president would have to steer a middle course on the war and “couple any ‘help the ghetto’ programs with a campaign to ‘get tough with rioters.’” In effect, Scammon discovered America’s “Silent Majority” two years before Nixon coined the very term. But as an incumbent president weighted down by war, riots, campus unrest, and an inflationary economy, Johnson was not well positioned to appeal to the sensibilities of that broad center of the national electorate.

  A consummate political animal, Johnson proved unusually slow to focus on his reelection effort, his days increasingly given to urgent meetings with his national security advisers. In late 1967, his aides implored him to act. “I believe we are going to have a real battle for survival next year,” cautioned James Roche, a political scientist who joined the White House staff the year before. Robert Kennedy was still an untested and undeclared candidate for the Democratic nomination, but Roche believed that any attempt to challenge an incumbent president for the party’s nomination would inevitably result in a Republican general election victory. Above all, he implored, it was time to “break the administration out of the ‘siege’ mentality which is a form of defeatism. . . . The 1968 campaign is going to be a real slug-fest and your supporters should get in training.” In November, Johnson begrudgingly convened a group of trusted hands—Marvin Watson, who would run the campaign’s operations; Larry O’Brien, who would direct its political shop from his new perch as postmaster general; Jim Rowe, the mastermind of Harry Truman’s improbable victory some two decades earlier; and other members of the senior staff—to assemble the shell of an organization. But the president himself cast only one eye on politics as he searched despairingly for a way out of the Vietnam quagmire.

  LBJ’s advisers firmly believed that the standard political playbook would prove unequal to the new dynamic—a dynamic that Larry O’Brien confidentially laid out for the political reporter Teddy White as the year wound to a close. “New forces were changing the country,” White recalled. “The middle class now included all of the working class, too—why, Walter Reuther now had strikes without pickets, no passion. Workingmen used Labor Day to clean out the basement or fix up the playroom, and the traditional political kick-off of a Democratic campaign before the auto workers in Detroit on Labor Day meant nothing; last time the unions couldn’t even fill up Cobo Hall.” Even if Scammon’s centrist messaging was correct, the president’s team would need to develop an entirely fresh approach to engaging newly affluent working-class and middle-class families who had turned against the Great Society’s civil rights agenda and who were deeply divided over the Vietnam War. More perplexing to O’Brien were twelve million first-time voters—young men and women in their early twenties—who would be eligible to participate in the election. “These were the uncommitted childr
en of the middle class, seeking new causes,” White related. “You had to go out after them and bring them in. Yet even O’Brien’s perceptive analysis was oriented only to the clash with the Republicans in the November elections . . . it was unthinkable that a sitting President of the United States could be un-horsed within his own Party either by primaries, conventions or riot in the streets.”

  • • • • •

  The one person of consequence who first perceived an opportunity to “un-horse” the sitting president was Allard K. Lowenstein, a thirty-eight-year-old veteran organizer and Yale-educated attorney who had spent the better part of fifteen years moving from one university teaching or administrative post to another, all the while insinuating himself in various civil rights and antiwar campaigns. Teddy White sized him up as a “permeant youth leader. Wiry yet frail, balding early, his eyes compelling behind their black horn-rimmed eyeglasses, a non-smoker and non-drinker, Lowenstein was a one-man excitement wherever he moved.” Throughout the late summer and fall, Lowenstein traveled the country, coalescing antiwar party activists and students at the local level into a loose coalition that would seek to deny Johnson renomination the following year. “I said we’ll build the base first, [then] the candidate will come along,” he explained. Building the base was easier than expected. Recruiting a credible challenger proved more daunting. He approached first Robert Kennedy, who took the meeting out of courtesy to his young staff members, then George McGovern, then the retired lieutenant general James Gavin, a liberal who had served briefly as ambassador to France and who now argued that America was squandering resources in Vietnam that could be put to better use in the urban ghetto. All three men turned him down. Finally, Lowenstein approached Eugene McCarthy, the senior senator from Minnesota. It took several conversations, but when McCarthy asked, “How do you think we’d do in a Wisconsin primary?” Lowenstein knew he had found his candidate. “I was ecstatic,” he said. “It was like music, like an organ welling up in my ears.”

  When McCarthy formally announced his candidacy, most observers believed that he was on a suicide mission. There was good reason why he was Lowenstein’s last call. A devout Catholic and former college instructor, though he had won election five times to the House and twice to the Senate, he was a cold, aloof character. A loner who seldom partook of the capital’s lively social scene, he often holed himself up in his Senate office, reading poetry, appearing on the floor only to cast a vote before returning to the solitary confines of his hideaway, which he preferred to the glad-handing ways of the Democratic cloakroom. Notwithstanding the normal challenges of unseating an incumbent president, McCarthy was a lazy and diffident candidate. He refused to appear before the multitude of state organizing conferences that were desperate to meet their newly anointed standard-bearer and kept Lowenstein and his staff at arm’s length. Disengaged from campaign strategy and unfamiliar with many of the staff members and local activists whom Lowenstein recruited for the effort, he had to be cajoled into canvassing on his own behalf. During his fifteen-day campaign swing through New Hampshire, he routinely skipped scheduled events, refused to make obligatory early-morning appearances at factory gates (“I’m not really a morning person,” he explained), and delivered dry, pretentiously cerebral speeches that tended to anesthetize, rather than galvanize, his audiences. When Johnny Carson, the host of NBC’s popular Tonight Show, asked what sort of president he would be, McCarthy replied, “I think I would be adequate.” Polling initially had him below 10 percent, and even his staff members found his lackluster performance uninspiring. Many of them would have much preferred to work for Bobby Kennedy. But Kennedy was not running.

  On January 30, 1968, the political winds shifted. Some sixty-seven thousand Vietcong troops launched a massive invasion of South Vietnamese cities on the eve of the Tet New Year’s celebration. Known thereafter as the Tet Offensive, the military campaign lasted several months and ultimately cost the Vietcong enormous troop losses, but it fundamentally shook the confidence of many Americans who had believed the administration’s assurances that the United States was turning the corner in Southeast Asia and that the enemy’s resources were nearly spent. For weeks on end, television viewers absorbed the shock of evening news reports that portrayed the enemy as well stocked, resilient, and nowhere near surrender. Support for the war plummeted sharply. A Gallup poll showed that the portion of Americans describing themselves as “hawks” dropped from 60 percent to 41 percent, while the portion of those calling themselves “doves” rose from 24 percent to 42 percent. Antiwar activists who had long represented minority opinion now saw an opportunity to build a broad-based coalition in opposition to the war. Suddenly the unthinkable seemed possible.

  If McCarthy was disengaged—on one occasion, inquiring newsmen in search of the candidate, who had failed to appear at his own event, found him dining alone in a hotel restaurant with the poet Robert Lowell—his young staff and volunteers were anything but. From their headquarters at the Sheraton-Wayfarer hotel in Manchester, Dick Goodwin—a fervent critic of the war who was now determined to force his ex-boss into retirement—assumed day-to-day control over the ragtag, amateur operation. Suddenly there were professional and disciplined radio and television spots saturating New Hampshire’s airwaves and a massive field operation well suited to New Hampshire’s peculiar brand of retail politics. Students from Harvard, Yale, Amherst, Smith, Mount Holyoke, and other New England colleges flooded the state—by some estimates, three thousand strong. “They came with sleeping bags and ski boots,” White wrote, “like a Boy Scout camp-out, bringing with them the youthful talent for improvised organization. . . . Bearded students had sacrificed their beards so as not to alarm the citizens on their rounds; blue jeans and sweatshirts were also proscribed. . . . All were as neat, tidy and wholesome as their parents had ever hoped they would be.” Sympathetic locals housed them in spare bedrooms, in church and synagogue basements, and on living room floors. “What is happening is that violet-eyed damsels from Smith are pinning McCarthy buttons on tattooed mill-workers,” observed the veteran political journalist Mary McGrory, “and Ph.D.s from Cornell, shaven and shorn for world peace, are deferentially bowing to middle-aged Manchester housewives and importuning them to consider a change in Commander-in-Chief.” On-site to cover the primary, White found that “Hampshiremen and their wives loved it.” “These college kids are fabulous,” the chairman of the Nashua Democratic City Committee crowed. “There are so many people who have kids of their own of the same age, and they can’t talk to their own kids, it’s another generation. These kids knock at the door, and come in politely, and actually want to talk to grown-ups, and people are delighted.”

  On March 12, McCarthy scored a stunning near upset in the New Hampshire primary, winning 42 percent of the vote to Lyndon Johnson’s 49 percent. The candidate was, as always, confident but wryly diffident. “I think I can get the nomination,” he told reporters. “I’m ahead now. We’ll be able to finance our Wisconsin campaign after what happened here yesterday, we’ll be able to pay our hotel bills.”

  While McCarthy’s team picked up stakes and headed for Wisconsin, Robert Kennedy remained racked by uncertainty. Since December, his inner circle had hotly debated the merits of challenging LBJ. His young aides Adam Walinsky and Peter Edelman strongly favored entering the race. Kenneth O’Donnell believed that Bobby would likely lose but argued that some things were worth losing for. Others were less certain. Edward Kennedy and Ted Sorensen feared that Bobby would accomplish little other than to divide the liberal camp in two and tarnish his own reputation as an antiwar leader. Larry O’Brien—still a member of Johnson’s cabinet and deeply involved in the president’s reelection campaign—kept a respectful distance from the deliberations. Outside RFK’s inner circles, signals were equally mixed. From California, Jesse Unruh, the powerful speaker of the state assembly, urged Bobby to enter the fray. In Chicago, Mayor Richard Daley—who opposed the war and had warned Johnson that it would prove the
undoing of the Great Society—signaled an unwillingness to break with the president. In late January, even in the wake of the Tet Offensive, Bobby maintained his public insistence that he would not be a candidate.