GUNS OR BUTTER
GUNS
OR
BUTTER
The Presidency of
Lyndon Johnson
IRVING BERNSTEIN
Oxford University Press
Oxford New York
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Copyright © 1996 by Irving Bernstein
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bernstein, Irving, 1916–
Guns or butter: The presidency of Lyndon Johnson /
Irving Bernstein.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 0-19-506312-0
1. Johnson, Lyndon B. (Lyndon Baines), 1908-1973.
2. Presidents—United States—Biography.
3. United States—Politics and government—1963–1969.
I. Title. E847.B45 1996
973.923’092—dc20 [B] 94-46879
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
To
MIKE MANSFIELD
A superb public servant
who steered the Great Society
through the Senate and
opposed the Vietnam War
Preface
LYNDON Johnson’s presidency opened with the catastrophe of the Kennedy assassination and closed in the disaster of the Vietnam War. During the intervening five years the nation was racked by turmoil—demonstrations by blacks seeking racial justice and riots in the urban ghettoes, student unrest in the colleges, and demonstrations by opponents of the war. It was an extremely trying period to be President and it is small wonder that Lyndon Johnson is ranked low among American Presidents by both the public and historians.
But there is another and very important part of his presidency: he started out brilliantly. Johnson united the country after the assassination in Dallas; he won a great landslide victory over Barry Goldwater in 1964; and, most significant, he persuaded Congress to enact a massive legislative program which greatly expanded the welfare of all Americans, rich and poor, black and white.
Lyndon Johnson has been short-changed. He has been charged with what went wrong and he has not been credited with what went right. This book seeks to redress this unfair balance.
At this time the literature on the Johnson presidency is badly skewed. There are an enormous number of studies of Vietnam; the flood of books that began in the sixties shows no sign of abating. On domestic policies there is only a respectable literature on civil rights. For the many other topics there is, at best, no more than a thin monographic literature and the searcher must dig into the primary documents. Here the great source, of course, is the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library in Austin.
Writers owe heavy debts to others who have assisted them. Three have been exceptionally helpful to me. Joseph A. Califano, Jr., who was in charge of domestic policy in the Johnson White House, was most generous with his time, his papers, and his savvy. Linda Hanson, archivist at the Johnson Library, seems to know how to locate anything in the labyrinthine recesses of that institution and led me to those documents that I needed. A. Philip Scott, the head of that library’s audio-visual department, was very helpful in guiding me to the great majority of the photographs that illustrate this book.
I am also in debt to a number of kind people who took the time to read all or part of the manuscript and who between them offered many useful suggestions: Benjamin Aaron, Fritzi Bernstein, Joe Califano, Robert Dallek, Harold Horowitz, George Reedy, Murray Schwartz, Willard Wirtz, and Adam Yarmolinsky. Bonny M. McLaughlin prepared the index.
Sherman Oaks, California Irving Bernstein
February 1995
Contents
PROLOGUE: THE VICE PRESIDENCY
I CARETAKER OF JOHN F. KENNEDY’S LEGACY
1. Fifteen Days
2. The Tax Cut
3. The Civil Rights Act of 1964
4. The War on Poverty
II LYNDON JOHNSON—“THE GREAT, FABULOUS 89TH CONGRESS”
5. Prelude: The 1964 Election
6. Medicare: The Jewel in the Crown
7. Breakthrough in Education
8. Selma and the Voting Rights Act
9. Immigration: Righting the National Origins Wrong
10. The Environment: From Conservation to Pollution
11. Failure: The Repeal of Right-to-Work
III LYNDON JOHNSON—EMBATTLED, BESIEGED, UNDERMINED
12. Unhinging the State of the Union
13. Vietnam: Sliding into the Quagmire
14. Launching the Great Inflation
15. Turmoil at Home
16. Updating the Minimum Wage and Social Security
17. Lyndon Johnson, Patron of the Arts
18. Model Cities
19. The Collapse of the Johnson Presidency
IV CODA
20. Guns or Butter
Notes
Index
PROLOGUE
THE VICE PRESIDENCY
JOHN Nance Garner said that the vice presidency “isn’t worth a pitcher of warm piss.” He spoke out of a rich experience, including two terms as Franklin Roosevelt’s Vice President. The history of the office supported his conclusion.
The framers of the Constitution who met in Philadelphia between May 14 and September 17, 1787, were baffled by the vice presidency. They stumbled over it, were uncertain of its need and shape, and dealt with it in a clumsy manner. In fact, the issue was not resolved until the report of the Committee on Style (whose five members included Hamilton and Madison) on September 12, a few days before the convention closed. With minor changes that report became the Constitution of the United States.
Except for breaking a tie in the Senate, the Constitution dealt with the office only in the succession clause, which read: “In Case of the Removal of the President from Office, or his Death, Resignation, or Inability to discharge the Powers and Duties of the said Office, the Same shall devolve on the Vice President. …” Trouble came swiftly. In 1800 the Republican party nominated Thomas Jefferson for President and Aaron Burr for Vice President. While this ticket defeated the Federalists, both candidates received 73 electoral votes. The Constitution specified that the House of Representatives would break a tie. But the House that would decide had been elected in 1798 with a Federalist majority. Thus, Jefferson’s enemies had the power to deny him the victory he had won, and Burr encouraged them by refusing to promise that he would not accept the presidency. Jefferson did not get the needed majority until the 36th ballot on February 17, 1801.
The controversy almost dismantled the new republic and its fledgling Constitution. But now, with the Republicans in control of both the presidency and Congress, the Twelfth Amendment was adopted in 1804, requiring separate balloting of electors for President and Vice President.
The vice presidency fared even worse as an institution than it had under the Constitution. John Adams, Wa
shington’s Vice President, referred to himself as “His Superfluous Excellency.” Webster said, “I do not propose to be buried until I am dead.” Clay resented offers and rejected them twice. Calhoun, who held the office under Andrew Jackson, resigned to become a senator from South Carolina.
Those who followed during the latter part of the nineteenth century were, as the Twentieth Century Fund report put it, “a virtual rogues’ gallery of personal and political failures.” Six suffered from old age and/or ill health and died in office. Three were tainted by financial scandal. Two were heavy drinkers. One had a penchant for slave mistresses. Three publicly attacked the Presidents under whom they served. So dismal had the reputation of the vice presidency become that the Republicans used it as a burial ground for their youthful, vigorous, and progressive Theodore Roosevelt in 1900, a scheme subverted by William McKinley’s assassination the next year.
During the first third of the twentieth century the office became a national joke. Mr. Dooley said that the vice presidency is “not a crime exactly. Ye can’t be sint to jail f’r it, but it’s kind iv a disgrace.” Woodrow Wilson’s Vice President, Thomas R. Marshall, is known to history for his statement, “What this country needs is a good five-cent cigar.” He described his role as “a man in a cataleptic fit; he cannot speak; he cannot move; he suffers no pain; he is perfectly conscious of all that goes on, but has no part of it.” George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind reached the ultimate with the invention of Vice President Alexander Throttlebottom in their smash musical Of Thee I Sing in the early thirties. Poor Throttlebottom was denied a library card because he could not get two references, and he took a public tour of the White House so that he could learn where the President lived.
Despite these disabilities, the vice presidency worked in the succession. Between the late eighteenth century and 1960, seven Presidents died in office and their Vice Presidents stepped up smoothly. Of the 34 Presidents from Washington to Eisenhower, 7 had come to the office from the vice presidency, about 1 in 5. During the 170 years of the presidency, almost 23 were served by former Vice Presidents, roughly 1 in 7. A candidate for Vice President, therefore, had a fair chance of becoming President merely by waiting.
More important, the office of Vice President was transformed in the middle of the century. Franklin Roosevelt enormously expanded the powers of the presidency by leading the nation through the Great Depression and World War II. This heightened the importance of the succession. Roosevelt’s death on April 15, 1945, was a complete surprise to the public, and everyone asked who Harry Truman was. Henceforth presidential candidates would often select their running mates with an eye to their ability to take over the White House. Further, Presidents would arrange for their Vice Presidents to be better informed on public issues, to be accustomed to performing ceremonial functions, and, increasingly, to play legislative and administrative roles. This, in turn, led to a second succession, the development of the vice presidency as a stepping stone to the nomination for President. Richard Nixon, Eisenhower’s Vice President, was the first modern figure to take this route. While Lyndon Johnson had little respect for Nixon, he must have watched that process with interest and no little admiration.1
Lyndon Johnson hungered after the presidency. But, as the 1960 elections approached, he was torn by ambivalence. On the one side, his record as majority leader in the Senate may have been the finest in history; his political acumen seemed unmatched; and a number of respected and prominent Democrats considered him the best qualified potential candidate. On the other, the cards were stacked against his winning the nomination. The Democratic party had not selected a southerner for a century and his style was deeply rooted in Texas and the South. The convention would be dominated by northerners—big-city bosses, liberals, organized labor, blacks, intellectuals—almost all of whom regarded him with suspicion. Moreover, his political base was tightly concentrated at the top in the Congress, really the Senate; the great majority of delegates, however, would come from the bottom and the middle, the big cities and the states.
For a year Johnson chewed over this dilemma, unable to make up his mind. Certain that he would lose, he did not enter the primaries. His hapless strategy was that John Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey would knock each other out and that a deadlocked convention would turn to him. It did not work out. Kennedy overpowered Humphrey, triumphed in the primaries, and came to the Los Angeles convention with the nomination virtually locked up. According to George Reedy, Johnson at this time was drinking very heavily, and old Washington friends Jim Rowe and Tom Corcoran, discouraged by his ambivalence, split away.
Now Johnson’s options had narrowed. A Texas law tailored to fit him allowed Johnson to stand for reelection as senator while also running for President or Vice President. There was little doubt that he would be reelected and could then return to the Senate as majority leader. Or, if Kennedy offered him the second place, he could enter the race for Vice President. Which should he choose?
The debate over this question was wholly private. Johnson’s public posture was that he was a candidate only for President and expected to win. Excepting his dear friend and mentor Speaker Sam Rayburn, none of his supporters imagined that he would even consider the vice presidency. His opponents, Kennedy and his entourage, were also in the dark. Nevertheless, Kennedy, convinced of his own weakness as a Catholic in the South, offered him the second spot on July 14, 1960, and Johnson accepted immediately. During the convention, while Johnson was waiting to see Kennedy, he spoke to Larry O’Brien, who would direct the campaign:
I want to tell you something. In making this commitment, I am going to do everything humanly possible to help this man and to help this ticket. … And I want you and whoever else handles this campaign to tell me what I should be doing. … Move me everywhere and anywhere you can. I am totally committed, and you’re going to find that I am everything that you would want me to be in terms of being a running mate.
O’Brien was “impressed.” He now thought that Kennedy’s offer to Johnson was “a stroke of genius,” because it would unify the Democratic party and carry much of the South and the Southwest.
Why, everyone asked, had Johnson ignored Jack Garner’s advice to take the equivalent of a pitcher of warm piss? He had good reason to do so.
If Johnson was not on the ticket and Nixon won, northern Democrats would blame him for the defeat and this would damage his chances for the presidential nomination in 1964. If Nixon was elected and Johnson was the leader of the Senate, their relations were certain to be strained, if not embittered, and Nixon would saddle him with responsibility for the stalemate. Johnson had already had a taste of this. Prior to the 1958 elections, when the Democrats were weak, he had gotten along splendidly with Eisenhower, a passive President. But those elections had brought in many new liberal Democrats who, over Johnson’s objections, insisted on confronting Eisenhower. The President, his back now up, vetoed much of the liberal Democratic legislation. Johnson had been trapped in the middle. He did not look forward to a replay of the scenario of a liberal Senate battling an activist conservative Nixon in the White House.
If Kennedy won and Johnson was majority leader, the President would shape his own agenda and would get the credit for legislative successes, while Johnson would be blamed for failures. As a senator from Texas, he would remain a regional rather than become a national figure. Thus, if Kennedy were reelected in 1964, a likely event, Johnson would come to the 1968 convention with the same disability he suffered from in 1960.
In case of either a Nixon or Kennedy victory without Johnson on the ticket, he would almost certainly lose any chance for the presidency. On the other hand, if he ran for Vice President and won, he would keep that option open. Should the Kennedy-Johnson ticket succeed in 1960 and carry much of the South, including the big prize of Texas, he could claim a large share of credit for the victory.
While the notion of Lyndon Johnson, with his overpowering drive, in the vice presidency, seemed a contradiction in terms, the
office was not without attractions. As he told a friend, “Power is where power goes.” Through much of his career he had taken over weak offices and had infused them with authority. Perhaps as Vice President, Johnson reckoned, he could continue to run the Senate. He would certainly use the vice presidency to nationalize his base, to cease being identified as a southerner and a Texan. He could learn about foreign policy and he could speak out on national issues, particularly civil rights. And he could use the vice presidency, as Nixon had in 1960, to secure the presidential nomination in 1968, when he would still be in his prime at age 60.
Now both Kennedy and Johnson, each for his own reasons, had an enormous stake in their joint victory. While Johnson campaigned vigorously in the East and the Midwest, his main effort was in the South. With Kennedy’s Catholicism on his back, he must hold part of the old Confederacy and, above all, carry Texas. Against a Protestant Democrat, Adlai Stevenson, Eisenhower had made deep inroads into the southern states in 1952 and 1956 and had swept Texas both times. Thus, Johnson faced a formidable challenge.
Always vigorous on the stump, Johnson threw himself into this campaign with passion and gusto. As Arthur Schlesinger wrote,
Employing his whole oratorical range—first hunched over the rostrum, talking in a low, confiding, pleading voice, telling a repertory of stories unmatched since Alben Barkley, then suddenly standing erect, roaring, gesticulating, waving his arms—he carried the message of confidence with panache across the southern states.
He confronted religion at every whistle stop, attacking the bigotry of those who opposed Kennedy for his Catholicism, equating it with northern prejudice against the South. Harry Truman, who had campaigned in 1948 by train, told him, “You know, there are a lot of people in this country who don’t know where the airport is, but they know where the depot is. Go out and find them.” Johnson hired an eleven-car train, the “LBJ Victory Special,” which reporters called the “Cornpone Special,” from which he made 60 rear platform speeches across eight southern states. He talked about “mah grandpappy” and “mah great grandpappy.” In Rocky Bottom, South Carolina, he said, “Ah wish ah could stay and do a little sippin’ and whittlin’ with you.” Extremely worried about losing his home state, he covered Texas like a blanket. Fortunately, right-wing Republicans fatally played into his hands four days before the election.
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