An Associated Press writer observed of 1965 that “the more things were out, the more they were in.” There were demands for, among other unlikely articles, tasseled lamps, and sailor suits. Bell-bottoms came on strong. Peter Max, a twenty-five-year-old commercial artist, had a vision of “a huge monumental wave of youth—the youth revolution coming,” and in anticipation of it he created psychedelic art. Within five years his designs on decals, posters, scarves, etc., would provide him with an annual income of two million dollars. Pop art masterpieces included a woman’s girdle with an enormous eye painted on the back. “Camp” entered the language and was applied to such artifacts as feather boas, antimacassars, bubble gum cards, Shirley Temple photographs, and souvenirs of Atlantic City. Humphrey Bogart and Jean Harlow films enjoyed revivals, and for a while girls again tried to look like Harlow. Big films included Lord Jim, The Agony and the Ecstasy, and two broad farces: Cat Ballou and What’s New, Pussycat?
Lou Harris reported a “growing disenchantment with television on the part of the affluent, better-educated section of the adult American public.” All three networks appeared to be searching for the lowest common denominator in popular taste, and they were virtually tied in the Nielsen ratings. (“It was inevitable,” observed the New Yorker. “It shines with the clarity of a mathematical law.”) The debasement of network programming was particularly painful at CBS, which in the great days of Edward R. Murrow had appealed to intelligent viewers. Now, under James T. Aubrey Jr., CBS offered mystery dramas, rural comedies, and peepshow sex.
Adlai Stevenson and Winston Churchill died in 1965. J. Edgar Hoover was still alive and running the FBI, but he was becoming senescent. FBI figures indicated that the national crime rate was rising 11 percent a year, and the President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice concluded that possibly three times as much crime was committed as was reported. Social protest was a growing category for law infractions. The anti-Vietnam teach-ins, which began with a twelve-hour all-night seminar at the University of Michigan on March 24, 1965, were perfectly legal, but that was not always true of the nude-ins, lie-ins, and love-ins which followed. Leaders of the Brooklyn chapter of CORE threatened to spoil the opening day of the New York World’s Fair on April 22, 1964, with a stall-in—snarling traffic by allowing thousands of cars to run out of gas in the middle of it. They succeeded in cutting the opening day crowd from about 250,000 to 92,646. Nearly three hundred were arrested, including James Farmer, national director of CORE.
The level of violence in the country continued to appall. In the summer of 1966 an itinerant worker named Richard Speck murdered eight student nurses in Chicago. Two weeks later Charles Whitman, an honor student at the University of Texas, climbed to the top of the university’s twenty-seven-story tower in Austin and opened fire on passersby below, killing fourteen and wounding thirty, and three months after that an eighteen-year-old student entered the Rose-Mar College of Beauty in Mesa, Arizona, with a pistol and killed four women and a child. He told police he had been inspired by the Chicago and Austin killings. Like Speck and Whitman, he said, he wanted “to get known.”
Two legislators from opposite ends of the ideological spectrum were in trouble. Adam Clayton Powell had called a Harlem widow “a bag woman for the police department”; she had been awarded damages, but he ignored the verdict and avoided New York. Senator Tom Dodd of Connecticut was censured by his colleagues for misuse of campaign funds and selling influence to an agent for West German business interests. A New York undercover policeman infiltrated a conspiracy to blow up the Statue of Liberty, the Liberty Bell, and the Washington Monument; the causes of the various plotters ranged from Quebec independence and admiration for Fidel Castro to Negro rights and support of North Vietnam. In New York a Vacation Exchange served as a contact for homeowners who wanted to swap houses during holidays, and from a small city in eastern Massachusetts came the first word of young married couples who swapped spouses. A travel agency advertised a judo tour of Japan: two sweaty weeks for $1,396. President Sarah Gibson Blanding of Vassar told her 1,450 girls that she expected them either to abstain from sexual intercourse or leave the campus. Jack Valenti told an audience of advertising men that “I sleep each night a little better, a little more confidently because Lyndon Johnson is my President.”
The Dallas trial of Jack Ruby opened on February 17, 1964, and ended March 14 with a guilty verdict. His lawyer, Melvin Belli, screamed: “This was a kangaroo court, a railroad court, and everyone knew it.” Ruby would die of cancer in jail on January 3, 1967. Senator J. William Fulbright delivered a major speech on foreign policy, warning that unless the United States “cut loose from established myths” he would break with the administration. Pope Paul VI spent an October day in New York and addressed the United Nations. Hubert Humphrey, the new Vice President, seemed determined to demonstrate superloyalty to Johnson; echoing an Avis car rental ad, he said, “I’m number two and I have to try harder.” Some observers wondered whether the winning Democratic ticket was developing a sadomasochistic relationship. The President almost seemed to enjoy humiliating his Vice President. “Boys, I just reminded Hubert I’ve got his balls in my pocket,” he told reporters.
In 1966 The Sound of Music became one of the greatest hits in movie history. People went around saying, “You better believe it.” Television was now almost 100 percent color during prime time. The two pro football leagues merged. The Valley of the Dolls and How to Avoid Probate were best-sellers. Cabaret and Mame were big on Broadway. David Merrick put $500,000 into Breakfast at Tiffany’s; it failed. A clothing firm marketed disposable paper dresses which came in cans, cost a dollar or two, and were discarded when dirty. New male cosmetics included false eyelashes—called “Executive Eyelash”—and an after-shave powder puff—“Brass Knuckles.” The summer of 1966 was spoiled for a lot of travelers by the longest and costliest airline strike ever; five major airlines were grounded for forty-three days. That fall the Dodgers lost four in a row—the World Series—to Baltimore. A wacky bumper sticker in California announced: MARY POPPINS IS A JUNKIE.
Labor troubles left New Yorkers without newspapers for 279 days in the mid-Sixties. The World-Telegram, Journal-American, and Herald Tribune merged into one paper, the World Journal Tribune—it was called the Wijit—which failed after nine months. After 190 years, superstition finally killed the two-dollar bill; the Treasury Department stopped printing the bills on August 10, 1966, citing “a lack of public demand.”
***
The fall elections of 1966 marked a political turning point. Resentment against ghetto riots and civil rights demonstrations had finally coalesced, making white backlash a potent political force for the first time. Combined with inflation, high interest rates, a scarcity of mortgage money, and the rising cost of living, backlash provided Republican candidates with a powerful springboard. George Romney and Nelson Rockefeller were reelected with huge majorities. Among the new Republican faces in the Senate were Howard Baker Jr. of Tennessee, Edward W. Brooke of Massachusetts, Mark Hatfield of Oregon, and Charles H. Percy of Illinois; new Republican governors included Ronald Reagan of California and Spiro T. Agnew of Maryland. Altogether the Republicans picked up three seats in the Senate, eight new governors, and 47 seats in the House of Representatives, more than they had lost in 1964.
But by then Johnson had lost interest in legislation. Increasingly, he had become preoccupied with the Vietnam War, believing that its outcome would determine his place in history. Nearly every night at 3 A.M., according to his brother, Sam Ealy Johnson Jr., he would “crawl out of bed, wearily slip on his robe and slippers, then go down to the Situation Room in the basement of the White House to get the latest reports coming in from Saigon.”
He was increasingly isolated. Robert S. McNamara, Secretary of Defense in this administration as he had been in Kennedy’s, was losing confidence in the ability of bombing to bring the enemy to his knees. McNamara was now engrossed in a fantastic scheme for building an electro
nic barrier across the waist of Vietnam to stop infiltration from the North. When he abandoned that, his faith in military technology would collapse. Soon the chief White House consultant on Vietnam would be Walt Rostow, whose relation to the embattled and lonely war President, said another aide, was “like Rasputin to a tsar under siege.” The conservative 90th Congress would join Rostow in goading Johnson on, passing huge military appropriation bills, encouraging him to sink ever deeper in the Vietnamese mire.
By then it all seemed inevitable. Yet it hadn’t been. After his rout of Goldwater, Johnson’s consensus had been genuine. The nation had been behind him. His goals had been the country’s goals. It had been a time of great hope for him and for the American people, and few gauged correctly the threat from “a raggedy-ass little fourth-rate country,” as Johnson once called Vietnam. One member of the First Family was worried, though. “I just hope,” Mrs. Johnson had said in the middle of 1965, “that foreign problems do not keep on mounting. They do not represent Lyndon’s kind of Presidency.”
THIRTY-ONE
A Dream of Greatness—and Disenchantment
President Kennedy had devoted his inaugural address to foreign affairs; President Johnson’s four-thousand-word inaugural—which was delivered so slowly and deliberately that one observer said it sounded as though the President were dictating to a stonemason—almost ignored events abroad. The same was true of his second State of the Union message; Vietnam was covered in exactly 131 words. Considering what was to come, the emphasis on economy was odd. (“Last year we saved almost 35 hundred million dollars by eliminating waste in the national government. [Applause.] And I intend to do better this year. [Louder Applause.]”) Johnson said that he wanted to be remembered as “the education President and the health President.” He intended to complete the unfinished business of the New Deal and the Fair Deal.
He was also going to keep faith with Kennedy. From the New Frontier he had inherited four big bills: civil rights, a proposed tax cut, Medicare, and federal aid to education. Priority went to the first two, but he shepherded all of them through Congress. The battle for Medicare was a spectacular confrontation between a President who was a master parliamentarian and the mighty American Medical Association lobby. In 1945 President Truman had appeared personally before a joint session of Congress to ask for a comprehensive medical insurance program; the AMA had beaten him soundly, and he had taken it hard. This time, five presidential administrations and sixteen congressional sessions later, the AMA doctors came forward with something called Bettercare, which was to be voluntary, handled by the private insurance industry—and wholly inadequate, for the number of Americans over sixty-five had more than doubled since the Truman years.
To battle Johnson the AMA employed twenty-three full-time lobbyists and spent $5,000 a day. The President countered with personal telephone calls and invitations to the White House. He twisted arms and he twisted hearts. On July 30, 1965, just 204 days after Johnson had asked for Medicare, he signed the bill in Independence with eighty-one-year-old Harry Truman beaming alongside. On July 1, 1966, Medicare eligibility came to 160,000 elderly hospital patients in the United States. A New Jersey embroidery worker named Eugene Schneider, sixty-five, entered Polyclinic Hospital in New York at 12:01 that Friday, and treatment for his eye was paid for by the Social Security Administration, making him and Mrs. Robert Avery of Napierville, Illinois, the first Medicare patients. An Associated Press survey indicated that the program had increased hospital occupancy by 3 percent—about 100,000 new patients a week.
Five days after his call for Medicare Johnson had sent Congress another historic message, “Toward Full Education Opportunity,” asking a billion dollars for public and parochial schools. Providing federal money for Catholic education was a profound break with the past and a guarantee of searing debate in the House. But Johnson knew that of the forty million American children in school, about six million were in overcrowded parochial schools—schools which would have to be replaced with public money if the church abandoned them. Moreover, excluding them had alienated Catholic legislators on the Hill, who had retaliated by voting against federal funds for public schools. Johnson had decided to include all, and he let it be known that he wanted no amendments, no changing of so much as a comma. All things were possible for him in the 89th Congress—the “Xerox Congress,” Goldwater was beginning to call it—and the measure went through both houses of Congress in eighty-seven days. Designating it “the most important bill I will ever sign,” the President staged this signing ceremony in the one-room Texas schoolhouse he had attended as a child, with his teacher, now seventy-two and retired, beside him.
A voting rights bill was next, a response to the ever more insistent civil rights movement. The measure was ready for his signature August 6. By now a blizzard of Great Society legislation was sweeping through Congress—over forty bills for education alone, including 2.4 billion dollars for college aid, more education legislation than in all American history until then. There were Johnsonian programs to fight heart disease, strokes, cancer, water pollution, air pollution, roadside billboards, and auto junkyards. Congress established a Department of Housing and Urban Development, a National Foundation for the Arts and the Humanities, and an Administration on Aging. A High-Speed Ground Transportation Act opened the way to a study of mass transit problems. The immigration service was reformed. A big excise tax cut—4.7 billion dollars—was approved. Farm legislation and a Public Works and Economic Development Act gave the federal government a strong role in dealing with the changing face of the land for the first time since the 1930s.
Over 900 million dollars was set aside to deal with America’s oldest rural slum, Appalachia. Under the ebullient leadership of Sargent Shriver, who had been the first director of the Peace Corps, the new Office of Economic Opportunity declared war on poverty. OEO programs included Job Opportunities in the Business Sector (JOBS), to provide special help in job placement for the hard-core unemployed; Head Start, for preschool children from poor families, which brightened the future for 1,300,000 of them in its first year; Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA), in effect a domestic peace corps; the Neighborhood Youth Corps, providing a half-million part-time jobs for teen-agers; Upward Bound, enrolling precollege youths in campus programs; the Community Action Program (CAP), coordinating local health, housing, and employment programs and offering the poor free legal advice; Foster Grandparents, to work with children without homes; and agencies to work with Indians, migrants, and seasonal workers.
Critics christened the Washington office building in which the OEO leased seven floors “The Poverty Palace.” Republican Congressman Albert Quie of Minnesota said the OEO undertaking “could become not just a national disgrace but a national catastrophe.” Richard Nixon said, “The war on poverty has been first in promises, first in politics, first in press releases—and last in performances.” And even Shriver conceded that administration of the most successful of the OEO programs, Head Start, was marred in one state (Mississippi) by nepotism, conflict of interest, misuse of government automobiles, and payments to people who weren’t even in the state.
But time would be kind to the OEO, as it was to Roosevelt’s WPA. In five years the war on poverty programs would play a key role in lifting thirteen million people out of pauperism. Another part was played by Johnsonian prosperity. The Great Society appeared to be on its way, and Americans seemed appreciative; at the end of Johnson’s second year in office the public opinion surveys reported that no other President in their thirty years of polling had received such strong, consistent support throughout the country.
His landslide triumph over Goldwater would have tempted another President to ride roughshod over Congress. Not Johnson; he remembered vividly how Roosevelt, after his great victory in 1936, had been humbled by the defeat of his plan to reorganize the Supreme Court. “I’ve watched the Congress from either the inside or the outside, man and boy, for more than forty years,” he said in the aftermath of the 1964
election, “and I’ve never seen a Congress that didn’t eventually take the measure of the President it was dealing with.” Rather than aim for a spectacular Hundred Days, he said, he would send each bill to the Hill only when the legislators were ready for it. He explained: “It’s like a bottle of bourbon. If you take a glass at a time, it’s fine. But if you drink the whole bottle in one evening, you have troubles. I plan to take a sip at a time and enjoy myself.”
The final result was stunning. When the first session of the 89th Congress rose on October 23, it had approved 89 major administration bills and rejected just two: home rule for the District of Columbia and repeal of Section 14(b) of the Taft-Hartley Act, permitting states to ban union shop contracts—and it had been by no means clear on the Hill that the President really wanted the Taft-Hartley change. He was entitled to rest on his laurels. He didn’t do it. Ever dissatisfied, he kept casting about for new ways to dominate the news and convert his critics.
One of the oddest was a summit meeting with Soviet Premier Alexei N. Kosygin in Hollybush, the turreted stone home of the president of Glassboro State College in New Jersey. Glassboro was chosen because it was exactly halfway between Washington and U.N. headquarters in New York, where Kosygin was staying; neither leader would call on the other; the little campus was a compromise. The two leaders had no agenda—had, indeed, nothing specific to talk about. Afterward Johnson said, “It helps to try to reason together. That is why we went to Hollybush. Reasoning together was the spirit of Hollybush.” There was little else to say, other than that “the exchange of views once more revealed profound differences between the United States and the Soviet Union.” The President’s popularity rating soared just the same. The very fact that the two men, with nuclear arsenals at their disposal, had talked together seemed to reassure people.
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