Eleanor’s reports mobilized Roosevelt to streamline programs, sharpen their effectiveness, and sometimes create altogether new agencies. The Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) had begun paying farmers to destroy their crops and slaughter animals in an attempt to raise the depressed farm prices that had created untold suffering in rural areas. “Why do you dump all these little pigs into the Mississippi when there are thousands of people in the country starving?” Eleanor pointedly asked an administrator. Her appalled observations about the wasteful aspects of the AAA program led to the creation of a new agency (the Federal Surplus Relief Corporation). The government purchased surplus wheat, corn, meat, and cotton and then distributed the excess commodities to relief agencies to feed and clothe the unemployed.
While bringing fresh sources of information from outside, Franklin Roosevelt churned up the normal flow of information from inside as well. Told about an interesting young subordinate in a bureau, he was likely to invite that employee to the White House, disrupting the chain of command and often irking the department’s chief. Roosevelt habitually read more deeply into people than in books. Conversation afforded him the occasion to work out his own thoughts. “In the course of the average day,” Roosevelt said, “I come in contact with representatives of about half the Federal relief agencies personally, or by telephone, or by correspondence. I try to keep in touch with the coordinating of all our work as much as is humanly possible.” Memos were tailored to winnow down the mountains of data that piled up every hour. “I learned to prepare material so that it would photograph itself upon his memory,” Frances Perkins said. Recommendations for action should be short, “preferably one page,” presented in outline form, revealing who was in favor, who opposed, and why. But what he wanted most of all, she knew, were the particular stories of ordinary people. These stories indelibly tattooed his memory.
Adapt. Be ready to change course quickly when necessary.
“I do not deny that we may make mistakes of procedure,” Roosevelt had said when he first outlined plans for systemic changes in his second fireside chat. “I have no expectation of making a hit every time I come to bat. What I seek is the highest possible batting average, not only for myself, but for the team.” Repeatedly, he told staffers prone to stress about the magnitude of the tasks before them that so long as they considered every angle as best they could in the time they had, there was no use agonizing over whether they were right or wrong. “You and I know people who wear out the carpet walking up and down worrying whether they have decided something correctly,” Roosevelt confided to Rosenman. “Do the very best you can in making up your mind, but once your mind is made up go ahead.”
Such adaptability, the willingness to shift ground, revise, and accommodate the contours of changing circumstances, can be discerned as an animating principle threading through the scores of programs set forth during the hundred days and beyond. Some of these programs would remain a permanent part of the federal government, including the TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority), FHA (Federal Housing Administration), and FCC (Federal Communications Commission). Others would be disbanded once the mobilization for war rendered them unnecessary—among them the CWA (Civil Works Administration), PWA (Public Works Administration), WPA (Works Progress Administration), NYA (National Youth Administration).
Readiness to adapt played a central role in enabling Roosevelt to fulfill the pledge he had made at the height of the banking crisis—to follow recovery with reform, to uproot “old abuses” in both the unregulated stock market and the banking system so they would not reoccur. He took his first stab at regulating the stock market with the Truth in Securities Act, designed, he said, “to guard investors against false information in the selling of securities.” Having seen “so much misery come to honest families who had been persuaded to invest their savings in speculative securities masquerading under the name of investments and sold by high pressure methods,” he had come to the conclusion, Roosevelt said, “that national legislation was a necessity.” The act required issuers of new securities to file complete registration statements with the Federal Trade Commission. Deliberate misrepresentation would be subject to up to five years’ imprisonment. The bill angered people on both the right and the left. While businessmen warned that the “draconian” punishments, determined by amateurs at the Federal Trade Commission, would so restrain brokers that the market would be stalled, further retarding recovery, reformers were profoundly disappointed that all stocks and bonds already issued were exempted from regulation.
Realizing within six months that the bill was “unworkable,” Roosevelt set out immediately “to loosen up the constrictions” and to extend federal regulation over the whole field of stocks and bonds, not simply new issuances. The act called for a wide range of specific prohibitions against all forms of stock manipulation. It proposed the creation of a new regulatory body, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), to be comprised of five commissioners appointed for five years. Business leaders reacted with outrage at the idea of putting a government “cop on their corner.” The New York Stock Exchange threatened to move to Montreal. Roosevelt sent a special letter to Congress warning that a “more highly organized drive” had formed against this bill than any other New Deal legislation. If any attempt were made to weaken or scuttle the bill, he warned, the members would have to answer to the American people, who were fully aware that “unregulated speculation” had helped precipitate “the unwarranted boom” and the “terrible” years that followed the crash. The bill easily passed. And eventually, the SEC became one of the most admired of the New Deal agencies.
Legislation to regulate the banking community was finally signed into law on Day ninety-nine of the hundred days. The Glass-Steagall Act offered prophylactic reforms to check the signal abuses contributing to the banking crisis. That crisis had arisen, Roosevelt believed, when banks were unable to meet withdrawal demands because they had used depositors’ funds to speculate in an overheated stock market. The new bill required banks to make a choice. They could pursue either commercial activities or investment banking, but henceforth, they were forbidden to do both.
During the debate on the bill, the Senate added an amendment calling for the federal government, in conjunction with insurance premiums placed on banks, to guarantee deposits up to a certain limit, which would shift over time. Roosevelt strongly objected to this guarantee. In a written note, he asked the members of the House-Senate conference committee to reject the amendment. “It won’t work,” he insisted, convinced that “the weak banks will pull down the strong.” He even threatened to veto the entire bill unless the amendment to guarantee deposits was defeated. Nonetheless, after a contentious debate, the bill finally passed with the amendment intact. Roosevelt at once telephoned congratulations to Senator Glass and at the signing ceremony joked that the bill had more lives than a cat. “A good natured admission,” Moley observed, “of his ultimate defeat on deposit insurance.”
Yet, within a matter of months, Roosevelt realized that his staunch opposition to guaranteed deposits had been wrongheaded. The creation of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) gave depositors the security they needed. Over 90 percent of banks purchased the insurance by 1934, and within five years deposits had increased by nearly 50 percent. According to monetary historians, “federal insurance of bank deposits was the most important structural change to result from the 1933 panic, the most conducive to monetary stability.”
In both these cases, Roosevelt tinkered with his original proposals and proved willing to compromise. The Securities and Exchange Act softened the severity of penalties while widening the field that would constitute transgression. After opposing the FDIC, Roosevelt gracefully accepted it, and, in the end, embraced it as his own successful and legitimate child. Nothing was set in stone. Nothing was final. For FDR, decision making and administration were parts of a living process. “We have to do the best we know how to do at the moment. If it doesn’t work out,” he assured
Perkins, “we can modify it as we go along.”
Given this penchant for improvisation, alteration, and modification, given the imaginative and proliferating nature of this template of supple leadership, it is unsurprising that Roosevelt is so often likened to a creative artist—“a real artist in government,” according to the playwright Robert Sherwood. As an artist of the turnaround, Roosevelt had no finished model or maquette before him to enlarge and then impose upon the country. Rather, Perkins observed, he “worked with the materials and problems at hand, and as he worked with one phase the next evolved.” And as one project after another took shape, so his deftness and skill continued to flourish. His intuitive touch became more confident and refined just as the country’s confidence and trust in him and in themselves grew stronger.
At the close of the hundred days, when the special session of the 73rd Congress finally adjourned on June 16, Roosevelt let his gratitude be known. He spoke in praise of “this spirit of teamwork” that had “transcended party lines.” He paid tribute to “the whole-hearted cooperation between the legislative and executive branches” that had embraced a “new approach to problems both new and old” and “has proven that our form of government can rise to an emergency and can carry through a program in record time.”
When war came, Roosevelt liked to say that Dr. New Deal had metamorphosed into Dr. Win the War. While the two doctors faced different challenges, they shared the same practice, as well as the same DNA of leadership—a temperament that did not wear out the carpet worrying, that relaxed and thought out problems while conversing, that relished the joy of exercising leadership itself. When something desperate needed doing, both doctors leapt into the fray.
The doctor who set a target of enrolling a quarter of a million young people in the CCC in but three months’ time made a dramatic call seven years later for a staggering annual productive capacity of fifty thousand planes to put America ahead of Germany within a single year. What at first seemed a preposterous goal proved “a psychological target to lift sights,” fire the imagination of team members, and galvanize the home front into accomplishing the unobtainable. The educator who had lucidly explained the labyrinthine complexity of the banking crisis in his first fireside chat would later ask the nation to spread a global map of the theater of war upon their tables so he could point out “something about geography—what our problem is, and what the overall strategy of the war has to be—how each battle fits into the picture.”
Roosevelt’s gift of communication proved the vital instrument of his success in developing a common mission, clarifying problems, mobilizing action, and earning the people’s trust. His faith never foundered that if the people “were taken into the confidence of their government and received a full and truthful statement of what was happening, they would generally choose the right course.” This reciprocal connection between Roosevelt and the people he served lay at the heart of his leadership.
Indeed, if ever an argument can be made for the conclusive importance of the character and intelligence of the leader in fraught times, at home and abroad, it will come to rest on the broad shoulders of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
TWELVE
VISIONARY LEADERSHIP
Lyndon Johnson and Civil Rights
Everything was in chaos,” Lyndon Johnson recalled of the hours and days following Kennedy’s assassination. One shocking event cascaded into the next as the country watched in real time, aghast—the announcement that shots had been fired at Kennedy’s motorcade, confirmation of the president’s death, the arrest and subsequent murder of Lee Harvey Oswald, the identification of Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby as the murderer, the speculation that both murders were part of a larger conspiracy related to Russia, Cuba, or the Mafia. For four days, from the assassination to the funeral, Americans remained transfixed before television screens as the three networks canceled all regular programming to cover the news.
This unfolding tragedy presented Lyndon Johnson with extreme danger yet also an unprecedented opportunity for action and judgment. A successful transition called for both the establishment of immediate command and the symbolic assurance of continuity. “The times cried out for leadership,” Johnson later said. “A nation stunned, shaken to its very heart had to be reassured that the government was not in a state of paralysis.” And beyond the nation, “the whole world would be anxiously following every move I made—watching, judging, weighing.” As such, “it was imperative that I grasp the reins of power and do so without delay. Any hesitation or wavering, any false step, any sign of self-doubt, could have been disastrous.”
“We were all spinning around and around, trying to come to grips with what had happened, but the more we tried to understand it, the more confused we got. We were like a bunch of cattle caught in the swamp, unable to move in either direction, simply circling round and round.” With this imagery, Johnson harked back to his childhood in the Texas Hill Country, to the stories his grandfather told. “I knew what had to be done,” Johnson continued. “There is but one way to get the cattle out of the swamp. And that is for the man on the horse to take the lead, to assume command, to provide direction. In the period of confusion after the assassination, I was that man.”
Even as he showed strength and assurance to the public at large, however, he exhibited modesty and deference to Kennedy’s inner circle. In contrast to Theodore Roosevelt, who, in the wake of McKinley’s assassination, had three years to gain his footing before facing the electorate in his own right, Johnson had less than a year before the next election. There was no time to build a new team from scratch. Furthermore, the retention of the important Kennedy men signaled respect and steadiness. In this contradictory role of beseeching power, as humble apprentice striving gradually to attain mastery, Johnson had long excelled.
Johnson approached each of the Kennedy men: “I know how much he needed you. I need you that much more and so does our country.” Never once did he suggest that however things were done before, this was now his White House. “I knew how they felt,” he later said. “Suddenly they were outsiders just as I had been for almost three years, outsiders on the inside.” Checking his storied arrogance, softening his tone, he conveyed a deep humility, sharing his doubts, continuously requesting patience, advice, and assistance. “There is much I don’t know,” he would say. “You must teach me.” That so many key figures of Kennedy’s cabinet and White House staff remained during the transition testified to the perfect pitch he displayed during this fraught transition.
So faultless was Johnson’s performance upon his assumption of leadership that it appeared as if he had long rehearsed what he would do if he held the power and the time were ripe. Suddenly, the time was right. He chanced to hold the power and he intended to use it.
* * *
Everyone agreed that Lyndon Johnson was a master mechanic of the legislative process. What became apparent from the first hours of his presidency, however, was that he meant to use these unparalleled skills in the service of a full-blown vision of the role government should play in the lives of the people. From the outset, he knew exactly where he wanted to take the country in domestic affairs and he had a working idea of how to get there.
After landing in the nation’s capital at 6 p.m. of the day of the assassination, he reached out by phone to scores of people, including former presidents Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower, and met with a delegation of congressional leaders in his vice presidential office in the Executive Office Building. At 10 p.m., he returned to “The Elms,” his three-story residence in Spring Valley, Washington, with a small group of advisers and friends. “Spend the night with me,” he entreated three close aides, Jack Valenti, Cliff Carter, and Bill Moyers. More than ever, he did not want to be alone. After this cataclysmic day, he especially needed an intimate circle of listeners to sort out his thoughts and to get his bearings. An hour later, after Lady Bird went to sleep in her own bedroom, Johnson put on his pajamas, and with the three men propped beside him on his
immense bed, held forth as they all watched the nonstop reportage of the world-riveting story on the television.
In the early morning hours, Valenti recalled, “the new president began to ruminate aloud about his plans, his objectives, the great goals he was bound to attain.” In his mind’s eye he could already envision a future in which all of Kennedy’s progressive legislation, then deadlocked in Congress, had become law: “I’m going to get Kennedy’s tax cut out of the Senate Finance Committee, and we’re going to get this economy humming again. Then I’m going to pass Kennedy’s civil rights bill, which has been hung up too long in the Congress. And I’m going to pass it without changing a single comma or a word. After that we’ll pass legislation that allows everyone anywhere in the country to vote, with all the barriers down. And that’s not all. We’re going to get a law that says every boy and girl in this country, no matter how poor, or the color of their skin, or the region they come from, is going to be able to get all the education they can take by loan, scholarship, or grant, right from the federal government. And I aim to pass Harry Truman’s medical insurance bill that got nowhere before.”
The somnolent vice president seemed magically reawakened as he revealed a rudimentary sketch of what would become the Great Society. This might seem an apocryphal tale had not three aides been there until 3 a.m. to witness his fierce resolve not simply to dislodge Kennedy’s stalled agenda but to realize a society built on racial and economic justice far beyond the dreams of the New Deal and the New Frontier.
Leadership Page 40
