The Passage of Power

by Robert A. Caro

  That was the meeting at which, as Heller was leaving, Johnson stopped him, shut the door, and assured him that he was not a “conservative” but “a Roosevelt New Dealer,” and “I should be sure to tell my friends that.” The conversation at the door, Heller was to say, was a little “calculated … a play for support … there he was: Lyndon Johnson, the politician.” There was, Heller felt, no calculation in Lyndon Johnson’s response on poverty. That was “so spontaneous and so immediate … an instinctive and intuitive and uncalculated response.” Heller then asked him “point-blank” how fast he wanted to move on anti-poverty. Johnson responded, in Heller’s words, that “we should push ahead full tilt.”

  Arriving at the ranch on December 29, Heller and Kermit Gordon found that Johnson had been doing that on his own.

  The emphasis on reducing the budget to satisfy Harry Byrd had led the two economists to concentrate on finding funds for the anti-poverty program within existing federal programs: on spending a portion of funds already earmarked for manpower training or youth employment, for example, on programs specifically directed at people below the federally defined poverty line. A total of $500 million had, in fact, been thus identified in a number of programs, and they had been lumped together and labeled an “anti-poverty program.” The thinking in Washington was to use those funds on modest pilot projects—demonstration programs, some of them defined only vaguely, to test their workability. “We started out with the notion that we were not talking about big new budget resources, and that was a constraint,” Capron says. “That’s why … we talked about a targeted demonstration program. We used the argument that we were all terribly ignorant about poverty and programmatic ways to do something about it, that we had to learn a lot more. We were not talking about a massive” program at all. And even about these modest programs, there was mostly confusion and competition: Washington turf wars. A December 20 meeting of Cabinet officers and lower-level officials disintegrated into what participants call a “nasty jurisdictional dispute” with “angry arguments” among the Cabinet officers over who would control the various projects, with Sorensen, at the head of the table, too “morose” to take charge. “It was,” Capron says, “clear that there wasn’t going to be a big new program of any kind.”

  Immediately upon Heller and Gordon’s arrival at the ranch, however, that clarity vanished. The two economists found that Johnson had found new money for the program—that he had meant what he said when he blurted out, “I’ll take money away from things to get money for people.” The overall budget was, of course, coming down; Johnson didn’t want it to start going back up. McNamara’s Defense Department economies had started to add up, however, and out of these savings, they found, Johnson had reserved money for the anti-poverty program—and the amount he had thus reserved was $500 million, which, added to the $500 million from existing programs, meant there would be twice as much, a billion dollars for anti-poverty, as they had been thinking about. And inadequate though the total might still be—1 percent of a nation’s spending specifically directed at the 20 percent of its people who most needed help—a “billion-dollar” figure had a symbolic, significant, ring to it. “Gordon and Heller had been thinking of a pilot venture to be carried out in a limited number of ‘demonstration project’ cities,” Johnson would write in his memoirs. “But I urged them to broaden their scope. [The program] had to be big and bold, and hit the whole nation with real impact.” As he had earlier explained the congressional realities of the tax cut to Heller and Gordon, now he laid out for them a basic congressional reality that would confront an anti-poverty program: why a “limited number” of smaller projects would never pass; why the program would have to be “big and bold” if it was to have a chance of enactment. A small number of projects, he explained, meant that only a small number of congressional districts would receive the new federal funds, and the number of congressmen with a vested interest in supporting the program would therefore be small. “I was certain that we could not start small and propel a program through Congress,” he was to say.

  He wanted them to find new programs in which to spend it. There was a new urgency. He kept asking, “How are you going to spend all this money?,” Heller recalls. “He was extremely demanding. Time and time again … he said, ‘Look, I’ve earmarked half a billion dollars to get this program started, but I’ll withdraw that unless you fellows come through with something that’s workable.’ ”

  There was a new demand for specifics. “He wanted something concrete,” Heller was to recall. “He made it very clear that they [the programs] had to have some hard, bedrock content, and he kept referring time and again to his NYA [National Youth Administration] experience. He liked the idea of learning while doing, learning through doing.” But he didn’t want to go just back, but forward. “The challenge I presented to my advisors was the development of a new concept,” he was to write. “I didn’t want to paste together a lot of existing approaches. I wanted original, inspiring ideas.”

  Part of the explanation for Lyndon Johnson’s enthusiasm for the anti-poverty program was, as was always the case with Lyndon Johnson, political.

  All his efforts on behalf of the tax cut and civil rights bills had not come close to erasing liberal suspicions about him. On the day Johnson flew back to Washington from Texas, the liberal columnist William V. Shannon would tell his readers that the credit for anything the new President might have accomplished belonged not to him but to John F. Kennedy, that now the honeymoon was over and it was time for him to produce on his own—and that, judging from his record, it was doubtful that he could.

  “All of us have been grateful to our new President,” Shannon wrote, in a tone that suggested that he himself had not been overwhelmed by that emotion, “for the magisterial way in which he took hold of his responsibilities. His energy, self-confidence and natural energy have been therapeutic in a disheartening and troubled time. His conduct in the past several weeks which impressed everyone is already part of the history of the Kennedy period. It was a fitting epilogue to the Kennedy story.”

  Now, Shannon said, the time had come to view the Johnson Administration on its own. “It is time to examine President Johnson in the cold winter light of the problems and opportunities which confront him.” The view was not reassuring. “History suggests that the martyrdom of a great man does not necessarily have positive political consequences.” Lincoln’s, for example, “led only to the failures of Reconstruction.… What was the political sequel to [Woodrow Wilson’s] personal sacrifice” when he “broke his health in a stumping tour on behalf of the League of Nations? The isolation and corruption of the Harding Administration.”

  As for Johnson, Shannon wrote, he “is politically weak in the northeast and in the big cities generally … in the liberal, urban areas,” and, he wrote, there was good reason for that weakness. “We have already witnessed the failures that occurred last month”—Shannon was classifying as failures the new President’s inability to get the tax and civil rights bills through Congress before the end of the year—and, he said, those failures might be symptomatic of disturbing qualities in Johnson. “There are genuine ambiguities in his legislative record,” and “moreover, as a legislator he overemphasized his talent for adjustment and compromise at the expense of … commitment.… We have to acknowledge that there are valid grounds for apprehension regarding Mr. Johnson or any other public man whose emphasis is almost wholly on means rather than ends.… The broker concept is inadequate for the far more demanding office of the presidency. What are a man’s values, his moral ends, his vision of justice? These are the important questions.” Shannon’s was far from the only liberal voice still asking such questions. A campaign against poverty would strengthen Johnson in the “liberal, urban areas” in which he was weakest. And there was a political reason for launching the campaign quickly: an election that was now just ten months away.

  But part of the explanation was, as always with Johnson, something more, something that had to do
less with strategy than with memories. The ranch, with the pathetic frame house and the road across the river, was, after all, an appropriate setting for him to be thinking about poverty. And allusions in his conversation both in person and over the telephone—sentences, phrases, reminiscences—allusions that started to be heard as he chatted on the plane ride down to Texas, and that continued to sprinkle his speech during the two weeks on the ranch, show how fresh his youth was in his mind during that time. Talking to reporters on the plane about the federal budget, he had suddenly stopped and begun talking about himself. “I’ve always been an early riser,” he said. “My daddy used to come to my bedroom at four-thirty in the morning when I was workin’ on the highway gang, right out of high school, and he’d twist my big toe, real hard so it hurt, and he’d say, ‘Git up, Lyndon, every other boy in town’s got a half hour’s head start on you.’ ” Making an early-morning call to an old Hill Country ally, E. Babe Smith of Marble Falls, he said he hoped he hadn’t woken him up—and then said he was sure he hadn’t because Smith had been “a poor boy,” too, and therefore must have been getting up early all his life, as he himself did. “That’s the only way we can keep up,” he said. “Otherwise, they’re too far ahead of us.” Other old acquaintances recall similar early-morning calls from the Johnson Ranch that vacation. “We always get up early, don’t we?” he told Fredericksburg attorney Arthur Stehling. “We can’t make it unless we do.” And at the age of nine and ten he had worked beside his cousin Ava, hauling the heavy bags of cotton, their backs stooped over in the burning sun, Ava to whom he had whispered as they worked, “Boy, there’s got to be a better way to make a living than this. There’s got to be a better way.” Asked by the author twelve years after that Christmas trip what she and Lyndon had talked about that Christmas, Ava said she didn’t remember, except that they had reminisced about their youth, and about the cotton picking. Whenever she and Lyndon reminisced, that subject came up, she said. “We always talked about the cotton. We just [had] hated that so much.”

  “Hate” is, in fact, a word that occurs frequently in descriptions of Lyndon Johnson’s feelings about poverty. He “hated poverty and illiteracy,” Dr. Hurst would say. “He hated it when a person who wanted to work could not get a job.” Accompanying Johnson on a vice presidential trip to Iran, Hurst had seen his reaction when someone in the party said that a group of Iranian children they passed had “rags” for clothing.

  “They did not,” Johnson said. “Don’t say that. I know rags when I see them. They had patched clothes. That is a lot different than rags.” Hurst says that “I noted as the years passed that he reacted in the same way whenever he heard the word ‘rags.’ I realized that to him rags were the ultimate symbol of the poverty he detested.” There had, after all, been patches on clothing worn by his brother and youngest sister, who had still been small when Sam Johnson went broke on the ranch, and that clothing certainly hadn’t been rags!

  From the moment Heller and Gordon arrived at the ranch that Christmas, Johnson “hounded” them to get him an anti-poverty package with hard, concrete, specific programs that would produce results. The two economists were quartered in the green frame guest house, and in the late evenings, when they, and perhaps Moyers and Valenti, were sitting around a little kitchen table littered with papers and coffee cups, its ashtray overflowing with cigarette butts, the President would suddenly appear in the doorway. He found the scene amusing, he was to recall: “Just a few feet from the window several of my white-faced Herefords were grazing placidly and a little noisily. It was an incongruous setting for Gordon and Heller, those two urbane scholars.” Gordon was wearing one of his host’s khaki western shirts, far too large for him, with “what we Texans called ‘city-bought’ trousers and low city shoes. Sitting down at the table, Johnson bantered with him about his half-hearted attempt … to blend in with his … surroundings.” Johnson’s mind was on the anti-poverty legislative program, however; when he was with the men working on it, all subjects, even their attire, were seen in their relation to that. When Gordon replied to the joking about his clothes by saying he was trying to blend urban and cattle country, “it struck me that the poverty program itself was a blend of the same: of the needs and desperate desires of the poor in the city ghettos and the poor in obscure rural hollows”—and that the new program must therefore include provisions not only for the urban slums on which attention was focused but also for rural areas, scattered, “obscure,” in which needs were just as desperate.

  Eager for new ideas, he even accepted one that had emerged from the President’s Committee on Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Crime, chaired by a longtime Robert Kennedy friend, David Hackett.

  While Johnson was talking about concrete, bulldozer projects, Hackett’s committee had been urging him to make a concept called “community action”—a vague proposal to involve the residents of impoverished neighborhoods in programs that affected them—a key part of the program. Opposed to the idea at first as being too vague, not something that would give people jobs or children an education, Johnson changed his mind, according to Busby partly because it had emerged from a “Kennedy committee” and opposing it would therefore conflict with the continuity theme. “People would have said, ‘Oh, he’s not really sincere.’ ” Johnson’s own explanation was that while “I realized that” the community action concept “might shake up many existing institutions, but I decided that some shaking up might be needed to get a bold new program moving.”

  While few specifics of the anti-poverty program had been decided upon when, on January 3, the two economists flew back to Washington from the ranch, by the time they left, the atmosphere surrounding the program bore little resemblance to the atmosphere that had existed before November 22. There was no more talk about “coming back in a couple of weeks.” Instead, there were orders to have the Budget Bureau and the other government agencies involved draw up detailed recommendations, and to draw them up fast. By Monday, January 6, they were ready, and the two economists sent them to Cabinet members with a covering memo. “Your preliminary written reactions are required before the close of business, Thursday, January 9th,” the memo said. Other deadlines were set—also tight deadlines. And by the end of the vacation, the program had a name. The “1964 State of the Union Message—First Draft” was completed in the little house on the Lewis Ranch on December 30, and a secretary was driven up to decipher and transcribe Ted Sorensen’s tiny handwriting, and the draft’s first page contained the words “Let this session of Congress be known as the session which … declared all-out war on human poverty and misery and unemployment in these United States,” and the fifth page contained the words “This Administration hereby declares unconditional war on poverty in America.”

  While during the next week the message would go through many drafts, those sentences were to remain, essentially unchanged, in all of them. The provenance of the phrase “War on Poverty” is difficult to determine. When the author of this book asked Sorensen about it, Sorensen said that “it doesn’t sound like something President Kennedy would have been comfortable saying, or that I would have been comfortable writing.” In fact, however, President Kennedy had said it—in a little-noticed campaign speech in 1960, which, it appears, Sorensen wrote. Whether the phrase sprang from Sorensen’s pen as he scribbled away in the guest house, or whether it was suggested to him by Lyndon Johnson in their early discussions about the speech, it caught Johnson’s fancy—because it caught Johnson’s feelings. Why wouldn’t it? Lyndon Johnson knew what to do with enemies. And if, to destroy them, war was necessary, war it would be.

  There would later—not at the time—be criticism of the phrases and sentences in which the war was declared for their overblown, hyperbolic quality, their gaudy rhetoric. But, says Elizabeth Wickenden, “The whole idea of declaring a big war on poverty and ending it for all time, all the rhetoric of it, appealed to him very much.” By the time Johnson flew back to Washington, the speech had been finished in essentially its final form
, and it laid out an anti-poverty program with only a few details filled in but designed to right, on a vast scale, vast wrongs. “The moral arc of the universe bends slowly, but it bends towards justice.” Lyndon Johnson was trying to bend it faster.

  THE STATE OF THE UNION came three days after he flew back from the ranch.

  In the message, he gave Congress, as the mandate required, information—a startling announcement—about the budget for the next fiscal year. “Under the budget that I shall shortly submit,” he said, there would be “an actual reduction in federal expenditures and federal employment.”

  A reduction in the number of federal employees, he said, would be “a feat accomplished only once before in the last ten years,” and, he said, the reduction would be “substantial.” As for the size of the overall budget, “It will call for total expenditures of $97,900 billion.” Not only had he cut the budget below $100 billion, he had cut it so far below that magic figure that Harry Byrd wouldn’t feel it had been brought in below only through accounting gimmicks. It was, in fact, lower, half a billion dollars lower, than the previous year’s budget of $98.4 billion.

  That announcement allowed him to segue into the need for a tax cut. A lower budget, he said, was an argument for lower taxes. Unemployment was still unacceptably high. “I would remind you that,” despite America’s prosperity, “four million workers … are still idle today.” By creating an incentive for business investment, a reduction in the corporate tax rate would create jobs. “That tax bill has been thoroughly discussed for a year,” he said. “Now we need action. The new budget clearly allows it. Our taxpayers surely deserve it. Our economy strongly demands it.… And the most damaging and devastating thing you can do to any businessman in America is to keep him in doubt and to keep him guessing on what our tax policy is.”