Take the measure of the man.
Like a tailor stitching a bespoke suit, Lyndon Johnson took the measure of Everett Dirksen, just as he had of Harry Byrd, Judge Smith, and indeed, most of the other senators. A decade of experience with the Illinois Republican had taught Johnson that Dirksen had no hesitation asking for “a laundry list” of favors in return for his support on legislation. Now that pattern only accelerated as the filibuster droned on. Johnson would sit with Dirksen over drinks in the White House dispensing all manner of quid pro quos: a judgeship in the 5th District, a post office in Peoria, a promised presidential speech in Springfield, an ambassadorial appointment, a federal project in Chicago. A thick pile of memos in the Johnson Library attests to their copious swappings and dealings over the years.
But this time, Johnson offered Dirksen something far more important than tangible favors. Beneath the flamboyant minority leader’s penchant for grandstanding, Johnson detected a genuine idealism and patriotism. He appealed to Dirksen’s hunger to be remembered. “I saw your exhibit at the World’s Fair, and it said, ‘The Land of Lincoln,’ ” Johnson pointed out. “And the man from Lincoln is going to pass this bill and I’m going to see that he gets proper credit.” With a gift for flattery equal to Dirksen’s vanity, he assured the senator, “if you come with me on this bill, two hundred years from now there’ll be only two people they’ll remember from the state of Illinois: Abraham Lincoln and Everett Dirksen!”
As the filibuster dragged on week after week, Dirksen began to play what might have become a “dangerous game.” Unless he could thumbprint the language of the final measure with some amendments of his own, Dirksen could not bring his fellow Republicans along. Although Johnson appreciated Dirksen’s dilemma, he balked at any public discussion of amendments, relegating the process of negotiation with Dirksen to Humphrey, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, and the civil rights leaders. In the end, the civil rights coalition reached an agreement on several amendments that did not alter the fundamental integrity of the bill. “We’ve got a much better bill than anyone dreamed possible,” Humphrey assured Johnson. Once that agreement was reached, Dirksen took to the floor to announce his support for the bill. Quoting Victor Hugo, Dirksen said: “Stronger than an Army is an idea whose time has come.” With the Senate minority leader fully on board, a cloture petition was filed, setting June 9 as the date for the vote. Dirksen’s support notwithstanding, the civil rights forces appeared a half-dozen votes short.
The time had come for both the president and the civil rights coalition to shift into overdrive. In the waning hours, Johnson personally recruited several western senators, while clerics of all denominations reached out to their congregations. On June 9, after more than five hundred hours of talk stretched over seventy-five days, Humphrey was finally convinced he had secured the requisite sixty-seven votes. After a high-voltage, questioning phone call from Johnson, Humphrey stayed up all night to make sure.
When the Senate convened at 10 a.m. on June 10 for the final hour of debate before the cloture vote would be taken, every seat was filled and the walls of the Senate gallery were lined with people standing to witness the grand event. “I say to my colleagues of the Senate,” Hubert Humphrey said, “that perhaps in your lives you will be able to tell your children’s children that you were here for America to make the year 1964 our freedom year.”
Tension rose as the clerk began the roll call. No sound was heard when California’s senator Clair Engle’s name was called. The fifty-two-year-old Engle had been hospitalized since April following surgery for a malignant brain tumor. The night before, after speaking with Engle’s wife and doctor, Johnson had arranged for an ambulance to transport Engle to the Senate. Seated in a wheelchair, unable to speak, Engle slowly lifted his hand and pointed to his eye. “I guess that means ‘aye,’ ” the clerk said, as the chamber erupted in applause. When the clerk reached the Ws, Delaware’s John Williams recorded the 67th vote, shutting off the filibuster. Finally the majority could register its vote. There was nothing now to stop the passage of the sweeping bill that would vanquish legal segregation in the United States at last.
“Although I differ—and differ vigorously—with President Johnson on this so-called civil rights question,” Russell said, “I expect to support the President just as strongly when I think he is right as I intend to oppose him when I think he is wrong.” For his part, Johnson had approached Russell from the beginning with affection and sensitivity and without a trace of vindictiveness. Clearly, both men loved the South, but Russell clung to its past while Johnson nurtured a different economic and social vision for its future, a vision stillborn without the changes this bill promised to deliver.
On July 2, after the House accepted the Senate’s version, Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 before members of Congress and the civil rights coalition at a memorable ceremony in the East Room of the White House. He gave the first of seventy-five signing pens to Everett Dirksen, followed by Hubert Humphrey, the House leaders, and leaders of the civil rights movement. During the reception, Johnson reminded Lady Bird that this was the ninth anniversary of his heart attack, the profound experience that had altered his outlook on power and purpose. “Happy anniversary,” she told him with a laugh.
And a joyous day it was. After the signing, Johnson’s thoughts returned “to that afternoon a decade before when there was absolutely nothing I could say to Gene Williams or to any black man, or to myself. That had been the day I first realized the sad truth that to the extent Negroes were imprisoned, so was I. On this day, July 2, 1964, I knew the positive side of that same truth: that to the extent Negroes were free, really free, so was I. And so was my country.”
Set forth a compelling picture of the future.
With the passage of the two top items on Kennedy’s agenda—the tax cut and the civil rights bill—the prologue of what would become Johnson’s signature program, the Great Society, had begun in earnest. Kennedy’s stalled intentions had served their purpose as a springboard; now the time had come for Johnson to spell out his own progressive vision for America.
For that purpose, Johnson chose a May commencement at the University of Michigan, the place where Kennedy had called for a Peace Corps to lay out his own expansive picture of a future in which every person would share in the progress of the country. By building on the strengths of prosperity rather than on the necessities of Depression, the Great Society would exceed the New Deal. “For a century we labored to settle and to subdue a continent,” Johnson told the graduates. “For half a century we called upon unbounded invention and untiring industry to create an order of plenty for all our people. The challenge of the next half century is whether we have the wisdom to use that wealth to enrich and elevate our national life.”
From its first declaration, the Great Society was presented in philosophical, qualitative, and visionary terms. At the heart of his vision, Johnson later explained, was “an extension of the Bill of Rights,” an enlarged definition of freedom requiring that every American have “the opportunity to develop to the best of his talents.” To reach this goal he intended to wage a war on poverty, provide economic aid for both inner-city slums and distressed rural areas, make medical care available for the elderly and the poor, conserve natural resources, and much more. “We have enough to do it all,” he said. “We are the wealthiest nation in the world.”
“These are the goals toward which I will lead, if the American people choose to follow,” Johnson had pledged when he accepted the Democratic Party’s nomination in August 1964. In the service of this projected vision, he asked the people for “a mandate to begin.” A mandate was necessary to harness the moment, to help direct and implement its possibilities, to give legitimacy to Johnson’s mammoth aspirations. The true contest in this election, he declared, “is between those who welcome the future and those who turn away from its promise.”
That election, which pitted Johnson against Barry Goldwater (viewed by many as an extremis
t who would dismantle the New Deal’s social network), yielded the sweeping mandate Johnson sought. His landslide victory brought liberal majorities into the House and Senate for the first time since Roosevelt’s smashing victory in 1936.
The readiness is all.
While propitious circumstances—the sympathetic reaction to Kennedy’s death, the landslide election, the strength of the civil rights coalition, a booming economy, and a seemingly peaceful world—created the context for the historic success of the 89th Congress, Johnson’s gargantuan ambition, driving temperament, and unique legislative experience all converged to make the most of this rare moment of opportunity. To this day, the lightning pace of the 1965 congressional session, the quality and quantity of the landmark laws it would produce, glazes the mind. And without question, the generator at the core of this high-speed process was Lyndon Johnson.
For this moment, Johnson had long been in readiness. Even before the election and its decisive mandate he had begun constructing a legislative assembly line as original and daring as the assembly line that built Henry Ford’s Model T automobiles. At the christening speech of the Great Society, he had promised to “assemble the best thought and the broadest knowledge” into task forces unbound by conventional thinking. “The standard method of developing legislative programs,” he explained, “had consisted of adopting proposals suggested by the departments and agencies of the government.” He had “watched this process for years” and “was convinced that it did not encourage enough fresh and creative ideas.” Government bureaucracy was “too preoccupied with day-to-day operations,” too “dedicated to preserving the status quo.” What is more, as Johnson had gathered from his mentor, Franklin Roosevelt, “the cumbersome organization of government is simply not equipped to solve complex problems that cut across departmental jurisdictions.”
By early summer of 1964, fourteen such task forces were already under way. Johnson had made it clear to each of the chairmen that he wanted them to set their sights “too high rather than too low,” and that he expected their work to be kept top secret until, by Election Day, their completed reports were on his desk. Those reports were then distilled into special messages to Congress that recommended specific legislation. Ordinarily, a president might send one or two special messages each month to Congress. So comprehensive was Lyndon Johnson’s preparation process, however, that in January alone he sent six messages to the new Congress. And in the following months, on a wide variety of issues, nearly sixty additional messages requested legislative action.
Hardly a week after the inauguration, haunted by an inordinate sense of how fleeting and fragile was this moment of opportunity, Johnson convened the congressional liaison officers from every department in the Fish Room for a discussion of his plans for implementing the Great Society. “I was just elected by the biggest popular margin in the history of the country, fifteen million votes,” Johnson noted to the gathered crowd. “Just by the natural way people think and because Barry Goldwater scared hell out of them, I have already lost about two of these fifteen and am probably getting down to thirteen. If I get in any fight with Congress I will lose another couple of million and if I have to send any more of our boys into Vietnam I may be down to eight million by the end of the summer.” Such shrinkage, he explained, was “in the nature of what a president does. He uses up his capital.” All this subtraction added up to one gigantic goad: “So I want you guys to get off your asses and do everything possible to get everything in my program passed as soon as possible before the aura and the halo that surround me disappear.”
“Momentum is not a mysterious mistress,” Johnson liked to say. “It is a controllable fact of political life that depends on nothing more exotic than preparation.” The separation of powers ordained that Congress held the power to decide what bills to consider and in what order to consider them. The executive prerogative, however, could influence and reformulate the legislative calendar by the order the president chose and the rate of delivery of the messages he sent to the Hill. To avoid crippling opposition to particular bills, he could withhold messages until problems were resolved. He could seek out desirable sponsors in advance. He could steer each bill to the most responsive subcommittee.
In pursuit of federal aid to education, for example, Kennedy had used up an entire legislative year. He had not preaddressed the central problem of how to include parochial schools in the prospective program without running afoul of the separation of church and state. That dilemma unresolved, Johnson would never have sent the measure to the House. Because of Johnson’s utilization of the task forces, however, a remedy was devised beforehand whereby federal aid was dispersed not to P.S. 210 or St. Joseph’s, but to impoverished school districts in general. Similarly, the task force on health care untangled the “Gordian knots” relating to doctor’s fees. Only then did Johnson proceed with his first two messages—Medicare, designated as HR 1 in the House and S 1 in the Senate, and federal aid to elementary and secondary education. Both initiatives had developed substantial support over the years; and with time-consuming controversies now averted, they could easily pass, making room on the assembly line for dozens of additional bills.
Much as Henry Ford’s streamlined production methods, conveyor belts, and moving chassis assembly lines had initiated a new era, so Lyndon Johnson’s construction of an overflowing cornucopia of legislation (the ever-moving steps, the dramatically increased productivity) ushered in a new era of modern lawmaking.
Give stakeholders a chance to shape measures from the start.
“My experience in the NYA,” Johnson recalled, “taught me that when people have a hand in shaping projects, these projects are more likely to be successful than the ones simply handed down from the top.” As president, “I insisted on congressional consultation at every single stage, beginning with the process of deciding what problems and issues to consider for my task forces right up to the drafting of the bills.” Not only did Johnson put congressmen and senators onto his secret task forces, but he dispatched aides to the Hill for secret sessions with key members to determine what should be in both his messages and the drafts of his bills. Then, the night before each message was sent, he invited members of Congress to dine at the White House mess. There cabinet officials provided background information and fielded questions. Such a preview might have seemed “like nothing,” Johnson commented, “but, in fact, it was everything.” These preliminary briefings “put them in good shape the next day when reporters and cameramen began pounding the Hill for reactions.” The members “looked smart before their constituents and that made an enormous difference in their attitude toward the bill.”
The significance of briefings was underscored by his experience as a young congressman. “I was standing in the back of the House behind the rail as Speaker Sam Rayburn listened to the House clerk read an important new administration message President Roosevelt had just sent to the Hill. Several dozen Democrats were gathered around him. As he finished, a unanimous chorus of complaints rushed forth: ‘Why, that message is terrible, Mr. Sam—we can’t pass that’ . . . ‘Why in the world did you let the President send one up like that?’. . . ‘Why didn’t you warn us?’ ” After the crowd dispersed, Rayburn turned to Johnson. “If only the President would let me know ahead of time when these controversial messages are coming up. I could pave the way for him. I could create a base of support. I could be better prepared for criticism.” That Rayburn’s “pride was hurt” Johnson immediately understood. “I never forgot that lesson.”
Nor did Johnson’s executive micromanagement cease when the messages reached the Hill. The assembly line he had created was not a mechanized process; it was made of individual people and required tending and consideration at every step along the way. An extended family of legislators, constituents, and lobbyists surrounded each bill, all demanding his personal attention. In the spring and summer of 1965—before Vietnam spread its pall upon the Great Society—Johnson devoted most of his waking hours to the leg
islative process. A summary of the Congressional Record appeared at his bedside table each morning. Nightly memos from his White House staff detailed every legislative contact of the previous day, flagging special problems. “Pending legislation” headlined the agenda of every cabinet meeting. Each secretary was expected to report on the progress of his department’s legislative program.
Nothing mattered more to the president than the passage of his Great Society program. An oversized chart rested on an easel in the corner of the Cabinet Room, illustrating the journey of individual bills: which ones were still in subcommittee, which were ready for mark-up or poised for debate on the floor. Such information allowed Johnson and the members of his team to exert the necessary pressure at the right moment upon the right person to keep the process steadily advancing.
During the first ten months of his presidency, Johnson invited every member of Congress to the White House. Couples came in groups of thirty to be treated to festive dinners, complete with wine and cocktails, all at Johnson’s expense. Afterward, while the men smoked cigars and drank bourbon with the president, Lady Bird escorted the women on a private tour of the mansion. These small dinners allowed the president and the members to relax, tell stories, enjoy each other’s company. “There is but one way for a President to deal with Congress,” Johnson explained at one point, “and that is continuously, incessantly, and without interruption. If it’s really going to work, the relationship between the President and the Congress has to be almost incestuous.”
At another point, Johnson likened the Congress to “a dangerous animal that you’re trying to make work for you. You push him a little bit and he may go just as you want but you push him too much and he may balk and turn on you. You’ve got to sense just how much he’ll take and what kind of mood he’s in every day. For if you don’t have a feel for him, he’s liable to turn around and go wild.”
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