Know when to hold back, when to move forward.
After the long struggle to secure the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Johnson felt that the dust had to settle before pressing for the next item on the agenda of the civil rights coalition—a vastly strengthened voting rights bill. Congress, he adjudged, needed time to heal the wounds of division. On a practical level, federal agencies needed time to develop enforcement procedures to integrate public restaurants, bathrooms, and theaters. And the American people needed a period of calm without renewed discord in order to assimilate the vast political and social impact of the earlier bill.
Johnson’s commitment to the objective of voting rights was never in question. He told Martin Luther King at the start of the 1965 congressional session that passage of a strong voting rights bill would be “the greatest breakthrough” for African Americans, more vital than the Civil Rights Act of 1964. “Once the black man’s voice could be translated into ballots,” he maintained, “many other breakthroughs would follow, and they would follow as a consequence of the black man’s own legitimate power as an American citizen, not as a gift from the white man.” For the present, he entreated King to work with him on the rest of the Great Society legislation. Both Medicare and aid to education were at critical stages, and both were vital to the quality of black as well as white lives. Queued behind these bills on the prospective assembly line awaited a public works bill for economically distressed communities, a nationwide job training act, a revitalization of inner cities, expanded poverty relief, and much more. Let this agenda get through to help all Americans, Johnson promised, and voting rights would be the absolute number one priority in 1966.
Events in Selma, Alabama, would alter the entire landscape. An added cog was driven into the orderly timetable of Lyndon Johnson’s projected order of legislation. In early March 1965, King and civil rights activists had taken independent action to mobilize support for a voting rights bill that would eliminate the exclusionary and punitive tests southern officials required African Americans to pass before allowing registration. Such sham tests included quoting the first ten amendments, reciting sections of the Constitution, or explaining the Fourteenth Amendment. The discriminatory system worked precisely as southern officials planned: of fifteen thousand voting-age African Americans in Selma, only 335 were registered to vote.
On March 7, an infamous day that came to be known as “Bloody Sunday,” more than six hundred civil rights activists gathered at Brown Chapel in Selma to begin a peaceful fifty-four-mile march to Montgomery, the state’s capital. When they reached the narrow Edmund Pettus Bridge, they walked side by side, singing “We Shall Overcome,” the anthem of the civil rights movement. At the top of the bridge, they were met by state troopers and Sheriff Jim Clark’s mounted posse, armed with pistols, nightsticks, bullwhips, and billy clubs. As television cameras recorded the scene, “the mounted men charged. In minutes it was over, and more than sixty marchers lay injured, old women and young children among them. More than a score were taken to the hospital.” As the marchers retreated toward Brown Chapel, the mounted posse pursued them. The carnage, which was witnessed by millions of television viewers, mobilized the conscience of the nation.
“It was important to move at once if we were to achieve anything permanent from this transitory mood,” Johnson recalled. “It was equally important that we move in the right direction.” As demonstrations across the country spread in size and intensity, massive pressure was brought to bear on Johnson to mobilize the National Guard to protect the marchers who planned to resume their walk to Montgomery. Pickets surrounded the White House carrying placards designed to shame the president into action: “LBJ, open your eyes, see the sickness of the South, see the horrors of your homeland.” Despite the terrible pressure, Johnson deemed the moment had not yet come. He feared “that a hasty display of federal force at this time would destroy whatever possibilities existed for the passage of voting rights legislation.” As a southerner, he knew well that the sending of federal troops would revive bitter memories of Reconstruction and risk transforming Alabama’s governor George Wallace into a martyr for states’ rights. “We had to have a real victory for the black people,” he insisted, “not a psychological victory for the North.”
As people from all over the country streamed into Selma to join the march, Johnson reached out to Governor Wallace. He understood that Wallace was caught in a bind. As governor, he was responsible for maintaining law and order. Continued bloodshed would damage his national standing and hopes for higher office. Yet if Wallace deployed the Alabama State Guard to protect black citizens, his white political base would turn on him. “It’s his ox that’s in the ditch,” Johnson figured. At a hastily arranged private meeting at the White House, Johnson suggested a deal. If Wallace requested help because the state could not properly protect the marchers with its own resources, Johnson would at once federalize the Alabama National Guard. Of utmost importance was at whose request federal force was brought to bear. When the troops went in, Johnson later explained, “they were not intruders forcing their way in,” and “that made all the difference in the world.”
With the immediate problem of law and order held in abeyance, Johnson focused on the major underlying issue—how best to utilize the Selma atrocity and the ensuing national humiliation to expedite passage of a voting rights bill. On Bloody Sunday, Johnson had directed Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach to work nonstop to draft the strongest possible bill. By the following Sunday morning, the draft was completed. Through seven crisis-filled days, Johnson had outwaited critics and let the horrific events in Selma reverberate through the American people.
Now the time to push for voting rights had come. The question arose: how best to transmit the message and the bill to Congress. It had been nearly twenty years since a president appeared before Congress to deliver a legislative message. It was full of risk to bypass Congress and appeal directly to the people. Regardless, Johnson chose to seize this moment for executive advocacy with all the might of the bully pulpit. On Sunday evening, he summoned the leaders of Congress to the White House and asked to address a Joint Session at 9 p.m. on Monday night.
“I speak tonight for the dignity of man and the destiny of democracy,” Johnson began, speaking with extreme deliberation. “At times history and fate meet at a single time in a single place to shape a turning point in man’s unending search for freedom. So it was at Lexington and Concord. So it was a century ago at Appomattox. So it was last week in Selma, Alabama.
There is no Negro problem. There is no Southern problem. There is only an American problem. And we are met here tonight as Americans—not as Democrats or Republicans—we are met here as Americans to solve that problem.
There is no issue of States rights or national rights. There is only the issue of human rights. But even if we pass this bill, the battle will not be over. What happened in Selma is part of a far larger movement which reaches into every section and State of America. It is the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life.
Their cause must be our cause too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice.
Here Johnson stopped. He raised his arms and repeated the words of the old Baptist hymn. “And we . . . shall . . . overcome.”
“There was an instant of silence,” one White House staffer recalled, “the gradually apprehended realization that the president had proclaimed, adopted as his own rallying cry, the anthem of black protest, the hymn of a hundred embattled black marches.” Then, in a matter of seconds, “almost the entire chamber—floor and gallery together—was standing, applauding, shouting, some stamping their feet.”
The power of the speech was found not simply in its graceful rhetoric, but in its demonstration of consummate leadership at a critical juncture. Importantly, Johnson declared that “the real hero of this struggle is the American Negro,” whose actions had “awakene
d the conscience of this Nation.” Yet, he refused to scapegoat the South, making it clear that no part of the country was immune from responsibility for failing to accord justice to black citizens. “In Buffalo as well as Birmingham, in Philadelphia as well as Selma, Americans are struggling for the fruits of freedom.” He reminded his countrymen that while the bill he was sending to Congress was designed for black Americans, civil rights was one part, albeit a keystone, of his vision for a Great Society in which all Americans would have “a decent home, and the chance to find a job, and the opportunity to escape from the clutches of poverty.”
As he neared the close of his speech, Johnson returned to his own seminal experience as a teacher in the poor Mexican American community of Cotulla, Texas—the place where his ambitions for power were first joined with a deep sense of purpose.
Somehow you never forget what poverty and hatred can do when you see its scars on the hopeful face of a young child. I never thought then, in 1928, that I would be standing here in 1965. It never occurred to me in my fondest dreams that I might have the chance to help the sons and daughters of those students and to help people like them all over this country.
But now I do have that chance—and I’ll let you in on a secret—I mean to use it. And I hope that you will use it with me.
The applause swelled to a crescendo, ignited by the manifest emotional conviction of this moment. “What convinces is conviction,” Johnson liked to say. “You simply have to believe in the argument you are advancing.” In this instance, Johnson spoke directly from the heart.
Even from his old friend and mentor Richard Russell came words that brought a gratifying smile to Johnson’s face. While he couldn’t vote for the bill, Russell told Johnson, “it was the best speech he ever heard any president give.” More telling for the nation at large, there came a telegram from Martin Luther King: “Your speech to the Joint Session of Congress was the most moving, eloquent and passionate plea for human rights ever made by any President of the Nation.”
Let celebrations honor the past and provide momentum for the future.
Johnson orchestrated the signing ceremonies for each of his Great Society programs with the same concentrated care and intensity that he had bestowed upon every step of their march through the legislative process.
To sign the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which Congress had passed in early April after years of wrangling, he traveled back to the one-room schoolhouse, the Junction School, where he had started school at the age of four. From California, he had transported his former teacher, Miss Katie Dietrich, who had taught all eight grades. By returning to the beginning of his own education, he wanted to remind others “of that magic time when the world of learning” begins to open before a child’s eye. “As the son of a tenant farmer,” he said, “I know that education is the only valid passport from poverty.” Outside of a consuming career in politics, only the teaching profession had ever beckoned to Johnson. To honor that vital element of his past, he had brought former students from both Cotulla Elementary and Sam Houston High to the ceremony. To have the privilege as president of signing “the most sweeping educational bill ever to come before Congress” was, he said, the fulfillment of a dream. “A pattern had come full circle in the course of fifty years.”
It was not sentimentality but Johnson’s sense of history and gratitude that led him to abruptly reschedule the signing of Medicare from Washington, D.C., to Independence, Missouri. He felt it was an honor earned and due to former president Harry Truman in his hometown. Johnson wanted to remind the country that the battle for health care had really begun with the man from Independence. Congressional leaders and cabinet officials, including Undersecretary of Health, Education and Welfare Wilbur Cohen, resisted, citing the confusion resulting from so many people shuffled from the nation’s capital to Missouri on the spur of the moment. Confusion notwithstanding, Johnson held firm. “Why, Wilbur, don’t you understand? I’m doing this for Harry Truman. He’s old and he’s tired and he’s been left all alone down there. I want him to know that his country has not forgotten him. I wonder if anyone will do the same for me.” Johnson’s instincts were right. Truman was deeply touched. “You have done me a great honor in coming here today,” Truman said. “It is an honor I haven’t had for, well, quite a while.”
For the signing of the voting rights bill on August 6, Johnson chose the President’s Room off the Senate chamber where Abraham Lincoln, on that same August day a little more than a century earlier, had signed a bill that freed fugitive slaves pressed into service by the Confederates. “Today is a triumph for freedom as huge as any victory that has ever been won on any battlefield,” he told the gathering of civil rights leaders, cabinet officials, White House staff, senators, and congressmen. In just four months’ time, “this good Congress” worked together to pass “one of the most monumental laws in the entire history of American freedom.” Yet, even as he heralded the collapse of “the last of the legal barriers,” Johnson insisted that the fight for freedom had only just begun. To achieve true social and economic opportunity, “the struggle for equality must move toward a different battlefield. It is nothing less than granting every American Negro his freedom to enter the mainstream of American life.”
In each of these three ceremonies, far more than self-congratulatory fanfare was taking place. In Johnson’s hands, they offered occasions to give credit to others, to survey the past and look forward to the future, to mark the moment when a legislative process was completed and the process of implementation had begun.
* * *
When Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, only 623 days had passed since Kennedy’s assassination, since the night Johnson shared his prospective vision for his unforeseen presidency with three sleep-deprived aides. What was most astounding, exceeding the breadth and coherence of that vision, was that in a year and three-quarters Lyndon Johnson had accomplished everything he set out to do that night—tax reduction, civil rights, federal aid to education, Medicare, and voting rights. Moreover, the impact of these five landmark bills was greatly enhanced by their deep interrelationships. The tax cut helped generate three years of phenomenal growth, providing fuel for the Great Society programs without inciting “a class struggle between the haves and the have-nots.” To receive Medicare funds, hospitals had to comply with the nondiscrimination provisions of the Civil Rights Act. Before long, all segregated hospitals in the South had vanished. The Voting Rights Act led to an exponential increase in the registration of black voters—which, in turn, led to a tenfold increase in black elected officials. Head Start programs widened horizons and increased the health of millions of underprivileged young children, expanding their chances to graduate from high school, enter the job market, and become productive citizens. With the help of Medicare, life expectancy was actually increased by five years.
And more sweeping bills followed in the three remaining months of the 89th Congress: a higher education act to provide scholarships, loans, and work study programs for needy students; a public works and economic development act; a national foundation of the arts and humanities to ensure that art, music, dance, and culture were not limited to metropolitan areas; a public broadcasting network; a housing and urban development act to expand federal housing programs and reinvigorate the inner cities. And finally, he signed into law a major immigration bill that abolished the discriminatory national origins quota system that favored whites from western and northern Europe. By opening America’s doors to immigrants on the basis of their merits as individuals without reference to the country of their birth, and by adding a preference for family unification once the first members arrived, the new law shifted the immigration stream to Africa, Asia, and Latin America, dramatically expanding American diversity.
For nearly two years, under Lyndon Johnson’s domestic leadership, Republicans and Democrats had toiled together to engineer the greatest advances in civil rights since the Civil War and to launch a comprehensive, progressive vision
of American society that would leave a permanent imprint on the national landscape. When Congress adjourned in late October 1965, the New York Times hailed the restoration of productive “relations between the executive branch and the legislative branch that had been missing for years.” Columnists noted the unusual concatenation of circumstances that led to “the legislative harvest,” including the emotional consequences of Kennedy’s death, sustained economic growth, and huge liberal majorities in the Congress. All these factors notwithstanding, it was generally agreed that the prodigious record of the 89th Congress was “above all the record of a great legislative leader who had suddenly become President of the United States.”
The right man at the right time in the right place had come as close as any president to envisioning and pursuing what Abraham Lincoln had once defined as the object of a free government—to provide all its citizens with “an open field and a fair chance” to use their “industry, enterprise and intelligence” to compete “in the race of life.”
At this glorious summit of achievement, it would have been inconceivable to imagine that this president’s consummate exercise of leadership was drawing to a close. Yet, as the terrain shifted from domestic politics to the war in Vietnam, Lyndon Johnson demonstrated an epic failure of leadership that would compromise his credibility and trust, forever scar his legacy, and nearly tear the country apart.
CODA
How did the visionary leadership Lyndon Johnson exhibited from the day of Kennedy’s assassination come to abandon him so utterly when he dealt with foreign affairs and Vietnam?
From the first day of his presidency, when engaging domestic affairs and civil rights, Johnson had a concrete vision of the goals he wanted to achieve and a clear strategy for how to rouse Congress and the people to attain those goals. By contrast, when he drew his countrymen into a ground war in Vietnam he was motivated less by a set of positive goals than by a powerful sense of what he wanted to avoid—failure, loss, and a humiliating defeat for himself and his country.
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