Once in a Great City

by David Maraniss

  Even in a fabricated fairyland palace, the real world intruded with the imperfections of man and machine. It would be easier to fix the Magic Skyway ride in the Ford Wonder Rotunda than to repair the wounds of racial segregation. As Martha Reeves and the Vandellas would soon sing on a hit record and in a Motown music video in which they danced and skipped their way down a Mustang assembly line at Ford’s Dearborn plant, “Nowhere to run, baby, nowhere to hide.”

  Chapter 22

  * * *

  UPWARD TO THE GREAT SOCIETY

  ON THE FOURTEENTH of April, the day after Iacocca’s unveiling of the Mustang at the Ford Wonder Rotunda, the news made its way from the White House to Mayor Cavanagh’s office in Detroit: LBJ was coming to town, or at least to Metropolitan Airport. He would arrive on the morning of May 22 on his way to Ann Arbor, where he was to deliver the commencement address at the University of Michigan. With about five weeks to prepare, Cavanagh and his aides were instructed to make sure the welcoming party at the airport met the president’s expectations. This was an election year, Johnson was running, and Detroit was important to him for many reasons. As the capital of the automobile industry and the center of the progressive labor movement, it was critical to the economic well-being of the nation and the political well-being of the man in the Oval Office. Detroit was also where JFK had started his campaign in 1960 with his invocation of a New Frontier, and LBJ wanted to match or surpass that with a grand inspirational slogan of his own.

  As the weeks went by, the instructions sharpened. The airport rally should have the feel of a spontaneous outpouring of affection for the president, not an overt political event for a candidate. The crowd needed to be large, in the tens of thousands, enough to signal the inevitability of his triumph in November, and it should be composed of more than the usual Democratic partisans. As Cavanagh later recalled in an oral history conducted for the LBJ Library, Johnson wanted “some prominent businessmen, Republicans or at least non-Democrats, as most of them were, to serve on the welcoming committee.” As part of that effort, Cavanagh called a Ford vice president who also presided over the Detroit Regional Chamber of Commerce and asked if he would serve. Sorry, came the reply, the Ford man would be out of town that day. “But shortly after I spoke with him I received a call back from him, saying that he again apologized that he couldn’t make it but he’d like to recommend a substitute,” Cavanagh said later. “I said, ‘Fine. Who is that?’ He said, ‘Henry Ford himself would like to serve.’ ” HF2 on a welcoming committee with Walter Reuther and August Scholle, president of the Michigan AFL-CIO—that sounded like something that might slake the unquenchable thirst of the president.

  The genesis of the visit went back to the previous July, when Kennedy was still alive. Roger Lowenstein, a student leader at the University of Michigan, wrote a letter to Harlan Hatcher, the school’s president, suggesting that they invite JFK to be the commencement speaker the following spring. Many students at Michigan felt a special bond with the young president. It was on their campus that he had first articulated his idea for what would become the Peace Corps, and over the years the Wolverines had supplied a generous number of Peace Corps volunteers. When university officials broached the idea with the Kennedy White House, the answer came back that the president was interested but his schedule could not be fixed that far in advance. One month later, Kennedy was assassinated. Michigan eventually asked President Johnson, who accepted on the condition that they move up the commencement from Saturday to Friday morning to accommodate his schedule.

  In the hour or so before Air Force One touched down that morning of May 22, there already had been a day’s worth of politicking at the airport. When Cavanagh got there, he discovered that his staff had placed Governor Romney three positions back in the receiving line, behind the mayor himself, and Romney was fuming about this slight. He was, after all, the highest-ranking official in Michigan; he deserved to be at the foot of the stairs when LBJ deplaned. Cavanagh quickly acquiesced to the governor’s demand. In the months since they had bonded in bipartisanship over Detroit’s ultimately unsuccessful bid to win the 1968 Summer Olympics, both Cavanagh and Romney had flirted with greater political ambitions that placed them in partisan conflict.

  Cavanagh had started the year by entertaining the idea of running for governor, or at least not discouraging stories and conversations speculating that he might challenge Romney. The notion never went further than talk, and Cavanagh soon set his sights on becoming the nation’s leading urban spokesman during an era when the focus in Washington was turning to big cities and their problems and possibilities. Whatever policies the Johnson administration had in mind, Cavanagh wanted Detroit to be a laboratory for their implementation. Neil Staebler, the congressman from Ann Arbor, had emerged as the Democratic challenger to Romney, despite doubts about him expressed by labor and civil rights leaders in Michigan, which meant that Romney started the campaign year as a heavy favorite for reelection. But, like Cavanagh, the governor also had considered moving his show to a larger stage. Barry Goldwater, the conservative Republican senator from Arizona, had visited Michigan at the start of his presidential primary campaign in early January, stating at a rally in Grand Rapids, “Americans didn’t want a choice between Tweedledee and Tweedledum.” That same day Romney, who disagreed sharply with Goldwater on civil rights, was in Washington telling a National Press Club audience that Goldwater was taking the party in a losing direction. “A party representing one or a few narrow interests cannot indefinitely survive in this country,” he said. When a reporter followed with a logical question—Was he an active candidate for president, and if not, would he consider being one if there was a public demand for him?—Romney responded “No” to the first part and “Possibly” to the second, explaining that “to do anything else would be sheer effrontery and refusal to accept my duty.” The reaction back in Michigan was mostly confusion, forcing Romney to hold another press conference to try to explain himself, which by most accounts he failed to do.

  Whatever his intentions, his immediate future was essentially decided for him by Martin Hayden, the influential editor of the Detroit News, who wrote a strongly worded editorial on the subject. The headline was “Romney in GOP Race? Count us Out!” Hayden exploded the myth that Romney was merely waiting for the people to beg him to run for president, labeling it a classic political ploy. “That’s the standard form for presidential race entry, and no one using it in the past ever has waited for a draft,” Hayden wrote. The News had endorsed Romney for governor and had supported and praised his work in Lansing. “But if Governor Romney places his obligations to the people who elected him here second to what he may believe is his obligation to make himself available as a candidate for the Republican nomination this year, the News will not support him in that contest.” The News was the foundation upon which Republican candidates built their campaigns in Michigan, and without that home-state base, Romney retreated quietly back to state matters, which included wanting to be in on the action when the president of the United States came calling.

  The twenty-four-member welcoming committee gathered in the American Airlines maintenance hangar awaiting Johnson’s arrival. “We had set some coffee and doughnuts up for these men and women, and a number of reporters were mingling through the crowd,” Cavanagh recalled. Those were the days before the press corps was herded into pens and treated like children at the zoo. (You can look when we tell you to, but don’t get too close.) Frank Beckman of the Free Press came across Henry Ford II and found him not only surprisingly approachable but with something newsworthy to say. This was no day for Ford to be grouchy. He was living free and easy, his company was making record profits, and the Mustang was the hottest car in America.

  “Mr. Ford, what is your opinion of President Johnson?” Beckman asked.

  “I think he’s terrific,” HF2 responded.

  “Do you think he will be reelected?”

  “There’s no question about it.”

  “Will y
ou support him?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you ever voted for a Democratic presidential candidate?”

  “He’ll be the first I’ve ever voted for.”

  “Regardless of whom the Republicans put up?”

  “Regardless.”

  “How do you view the way he’s handling his job?”

  “He’s doing an excellent job as president. I’ve heard him say many times that he’s for all the people in the country—for business, labor, and the general public. I agree with what he says.”

  Ford also told the Free Press that he had known LBJ since the Texan was the Senate majority leader but had been to the White House only once in the six months that Johnson had been president. He said he thought of himself as an independent, not a Republican. A check of records indicated to Beckman that indeed HF2 and his brothers, Benson and William Clay, had made significant campaign contributions to both Democrats and Republicans since 1962.

  In Washington, Johnson was awakened that morning at seven by a call from the White House operator. He was served breakfast in bed before meeting with aides Bill Moyers, Jack Valenti, Walter Jenkins, and Dick Goodwin, who had been the main speechwriter for the commencement address. As Goodwin later recalled, Johnson reviewed the speech at his Oval Office desk, scratched in a few changes with his pencil, and without looking up said, “It ought to do just fine, boys. Just what I told you.” Then he turned to Valenti: “What time’s that plane leave? And why are we always running out of Fresca?” Johnson departed the South Grounds of the White House at 8:57 for the thirteen-minute helicopter ride to Andrews Air Force Base, where a contingent of state congressional members and administration officials with Michigan ties waited to hitch rides home, a delegation that included both senators, thirteen House members, one former governor, and two assistant cabinet secretaries. Air Force One touched down in Detroit at 9:11, according to the White House Daily Diary.

  Behind the airport fence, a crowd had been building since sunup. The Detroit Police Department Band was there, and the Detroit Fire Department Band, and the Redford High School Band, all entertaining a throng now estimated at thirty thousand. The silver-and-blue 707 “glinted in the bright sun as it landed and taxied,” Beckman and his colleague, Barbara Stanton, wrote later of the scene. “The ramp was placed, the door opened, and the shout went up THERE HE IS” as the combined bands played “Hail to the Chief.” Waiting in line below were Governor Romney, Mayor Cavanagh, labor leaders Reuther and Scholle, and the talkative Henry Ford II, along with John Leary, a vice president at Chrysler; Walker Cisler, president of Detroit Edison (and one of Cavanagh’s colleagues during the Olympic effort in Baden-Baden); J. Arthur Mullen, vice president of the Detroit Region Chamber of Commerce; Horace Sheffield of the Trade Union Leadership Council; and other leaders from business, labor, and academia—the sort of mix the president wanted.

  This was LBJ’s first appearance in Michigan as president. He seemed spry, buoyant, in good humor. He asked Romney and Cavanagh to stand next to him and get proper introductions. He went through the list of politicians who flew out from Washington with him. Then he addressed the crowd: “I want you to know that there is nothing that restores a president’s soul more than a warm Detroit greeting.” So what if his staff had virtually demanded such a showing? “I want to thank each of you so very, very much for coming out here this morning. My first thought is to sing an old song, ‘Will You Love Me in November as You Do in May?’ ” The election was never far from his mind.

  But he had come to Michigan to say something larger. This is where he would present his vision of the societal good that a powerful and committed federal government could achieve, and though he would deliver that speech twenty-eight miles away, in Ann Arbor, no place seemed more important to his mission than Detroit, a great city that honored labor, built cars, made music, promoted civil rights, and helped lift working people into the middle class. “This city and its people are the herald of hope in America,” he said. “Prosperity in America must begin here in Detroit. You folks in Detroit put American citizens on wheels; you have the American economy on the move. Unemployment in Detroit is down, profits are up, wages are good, and there is no problem too tough or too challenging for us to solve.”

  This was Walter Reuther’s kind of talk, and in other circumstances he might have been arm in arm with the president, but instead he was lingering in the shadows. He had been criticizing HF2 harshly in recent speeches, their symbiotic relationship as friendly adversaries now decidedly in nemesis mode as contract talks approached later in the year. There were complicated and competing factors at work here: pragmatism versus idealism, conflict versus cooperation, the narrow interests of collective bargaining versus the broad interests of progressive government. Johnson had been urging Reuther to tamp down both his rhetoric and his demands in the larger interests of helping the president maneuver his way through the election year and implement the policies that he and Reuther equally believed in. And here was Henry Ford II, embracing that same president, an unprecedented moment that demanded that Reuther recede. LBJ even scratched him from his airport speech, choosing instead another labor leader, the state AFL-CIO president, to make a point about his new coalition. “My cup runneth over here when men come here to greet me like Gus Scholle and Henry Ford,” Johnson said. “When the president has Gus and Henry by his side, the sky is the limit. And the sky is bright today.”

  • • •

  At 9:55, at the end of a short whirl over from the airport in Detroit, four identical helicopters landed on an opening to the east of Michigan Stadium, carrying the president and his entourage. Valenti walked behind his boss, carrying notes and a copy of the speech. A radiant spring day, the blue sky high and bright, the heat of the sun beaming down. Waiting inside the stadium was the largest crowd ever to attend a university commencement address, or so it was called. Somewhere between seventy thousand and ninety thousand people. Faculty members often shun commencement ceremonies, but this time more showed up than ever, along with almost all of the 4,943 graduating seniors. President Hatcher greeted Johnson near the landing area and ushered him into a trailer next to the Yost Field House, where he donned his black gown with three velvet bands ringing the sleeves and prepared for the processional through the gates and on toward the extensive speaker’s platform at the north end of the stadium. The massive bowl was filled except for the end zone, behind the platform, closed off on orders of the Secret Service. A roar went up when the president came into view. His speech was fed into a teleprompter, ready for delivery after all degrees had been conferred en masse, ending with the honorary Doctor of Civil Law degree for Lyndon Baines Johnson.

  Nine paragraphs into his speech, after pleasantries and jokes, LBJ issued the clarion call of his presidency. “Your imagination, your initiative, and your indignation,” he told the graduates, “will determine whether we build a society where progress is the servant of our needs, or a society where old values and new visions are buried under unbridled growth. For in your time we have the opportunity to move not only toward the rich society and the powerful society, but upward to the Great Society.”

  The Great Society. The phrase was not yet well known, nor was it new. Adam Smith, the eighteenth-century philosopher and political economist, had used it in his writings. Walter Lippmann, the most influential columnist of the mid-twentieth century, took it down a notch but discussed the meaning of a Good Society. More recently a British journalist and author named Barbara Ward, who had frequented LBJ’s White House, wrote about a Great Society in a book Johnson read at night, The Rich Nations and the Poor Nations. The president himself had tried it out once before, at a fund-raising dinner a month earlier at the Conrad Hilton Hotel in Chicago. Now it would be attached to this commencement address and live on, for better and worse, for decades thereafter. Mostly it would be connected to poverty programs Johnson tried to implement over the next five years, and sometimes would be referred to with disparagement, sarcasm, or wistfu
lness to signify good intentions gone awry, as a symbol of hopes and dreams dashed by big-government excesses and LBJ’s inability to create something great at home at the same time that he was waging war overseas. But to listen again to Johnson delivering it on that spring morning, to read the words anew—even knowing all that was to come after—is to appreciate that it was meant to convey something deeper, a spiritual rising.