Lady Bird Johnson sent out the following statement:
My heart is aching today for someone who has reached the end point of exhaustion in dedicated service to his country. Walter Jenkins has been carrying incredible hours and burdens since President Kennedy’s assassination. He is now receiving the medical attention which he needs. I know our family—and all of our friends—and I hope all others—pray for his recovery. I know that the love of his wife and six fine children and his profound religious faith will sustain him through this period of anguish.
The President remained silent. He ordered an FBI investigation into the possibility of a breach of national security. None was found. He directed his pollster, Oliver Quayle, to make an instant survey. The next day Quayle reported no significant shift in voting intentions and suggested that the President proceed with his campaign plans. The results were confirmed by other polls.
The next day, suffering from a cold and fever, Johnson campaigned with Kennedy before immense crowds in Buffalo and Brooklyn. They were a tonic for his ailments, physical and emotional. His luck turned in the next few days as public attention shifted to larger matters: the deposition of Khrushchev in the Soviet Union, the detonation of China’s first atomic bomb, the defeat of the Tory government in Britain, and the victory of the St. Louis Cardinals in the World Series. The Jenkins affair was forgotten.
Miller and Humphrey. William Miller was convinced from the outset that he did not have the slightest chance of becoming Vice President. After the convention he seems to have slipped into a black hole and was never heard from again.
Humphrey was his usual optimistic, ebullient, and energetic self. His four-engine Electra, called the Happy Warrior, hardly ever came to rest. Sample for September 27 to October 2: four stops in Georgia, including Atlanta, two in Detroit, two in Iowa, including Des Moines, one each in North Dakota and Montana, three in Washington, including Seattle, and a day touring Los Angeles with speeches at the University of Southern California and the Shrine Auditorium.
The Polls. The major polls—Gallup, Harris, and Roper—showed a massive landslide from start to finish. Gallup consistently gave Johnson 5 points more than Harris, in late October 67 percent as against 62. On October 29 Moyers’s office put together a composite of all the state polls and state estimates from Congressional Quarterly, Newsweek, and Time. The total for the U.S. gave Johnson a 60–40 sweep, a plurality of 14 million, and the electoral votes of 46 states, including Arizona, closely. Goldwater would carry only Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina. The International Institute of Public Opinion Research made two national polls for Rockefeller on September 31 and October 30. With a bit of diddling with the undecided and the margin of error, the Institute’s final prediction was 61–39.
John Bailey, like a ball player, was superstitious and placed great confidence in high school polls in small towns near Hartford. He sent the results to the President on October 22. Wethersfield was a Republican town. In 1960 Kennedy’s run had been “outstanding,” but he still lost to Nixon in the election by 800 votes. Now Johnson-Humphrey carried the high school in Wethersfield 888 to 146. Avon was another Republican community where Nixon had won easily in 1960. Now the Democrats were ahead 301 to 115. East Hartford was heavily Democratic. Kennedy won overwhelmingly and Johnson had about the same margin.
The Democrats swept the Ivy League: Harvard 84-16, Yale 69-20, Princeton 67-23, Columbia 81-19. The nationwide popcorn poll taken in the lobbies of movie houses (how unscientific can you get?) came out about the same—77-23. The Virginia barber shop poll was a bit lower—65-25.
Fact magazine made the most original and controversial poll. It asked 12,350 psychiatrists the question: Do you believe that Barry Goldwater is psychologically fit to serve as President of the United States? There were 2,417 replies of which 1,189 held him unfit and 657 voted him fit. This was not far from the outcome of the other polls. The others who responded did not take a position.
The Press. Until 1964 the newspapers had always been overwhelmingly Republican. Now this was completely reversed. In fact, only three important Republican papers stayed with Goldwater—the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the Cincinnati Enquirer. The list of desertions was enormous and included the New York Herald-Tribune, the Hearst papers, the Detroit Free Press, the Philadelphia Bulletin, and the Baltimore Sun. For some it was a first Democratic endorsement, such as the Binghampton Sun-Bulletin, a first since 1822. Equally remarkable, the Saturday Evening Post, Life, Time, and the Atlantic Monthly endorsed Johnson.
Protestant Religious Journals. Historically church papers had maintained strict political neutrality. This changed dramatically in 1964. The Christian Century editorialized “Goldwater? No!” Later it declared, “Johnson? Yes!” The Arizonan was a member of the Episcopal Church. The Witness, the church’s magazine, published a stinging editorial signed by eleven ministers denouncing him. Bishop William Scarlett, who had baptized Goldwater and had great affection for him, was compelled to disagree with his social and political views. Of his foreign policy proposals, he wrote, “Frankly, he scares me.” The Churchman, another Episcopal paper, printed an editorial called “The Goldwater Threat to America.”8
For those accustomed to the interpretation of early returns the election was over by 4 p.m. eastern time on November 3. People were still eating lunch in California and breakfast in Hawaii. The Republicans had to deliver heavy majorities in New England villages no one had heard of in order to make it close. They failed. Johnson was ahead in New Hampshire 35 to 29 and in Massachusetts 28 to 18. Kansas had been the most Republican state in the U.S. in 1960. By 5:30 Johnson was leading in Kansas 65,000 to 62,000. Thereafter he piled on the votes.
A total of 70,621,479 people went to the polls. The Johnson-Humphrey ticket received 43,126,218 votes to 27,174,898 for Goldwater-Miller. This was a plurality of 16,162,052, or 61 percent. The Democrats swept 44 states with 486 electoral votes. The Republicans carried 6 with 52: Arizona, Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Georgia. The damage Goldwater did to the rest of the Republican ticket was devastating. Robert Taft, Jr., running for the Senate in Ohio, polled 400,000 more than Goldwater and still lost. Charles Percy, the Republican candidate for governor in Illinois, ran 300,000 ahead of Goldwater and went down to defeat. Kenneth Keating, the incumbent senator from New York, outpolled Goldwater by 860,000 and lost his seat.
Johnson’s plurality was the greatest in history, exceeding FDR in 1936 by 5 million votes. In the electoral college he ran behind Roosevelt, who lost only Maine and Vermont. But Johnson’s percentage of the total vote was slightly higher—61 to 60 percent.
Frank Cormier, a White House correspondent, bet the President $5 that Goldwater would carry no more than two states. When he paid off, he wrote “with much regret that Goldwater got four states more than I bet he would and six more than he deserved.”
Johnson had long coattails. Some 28 Democratic senators and 295 Democratic representatives were elected. The Democrats gained two seats in the Senate, their number rising from 66 to 68, as against 32 Republicans. The entire “Class of ‘58,” those liberal Democrats elected for the first time in 1958, was reelected in 1964. The House would have 295 Democrats, an enormous gain of 37, as against 140 Republicans. Some said the United States would have a one-and-a-half party system in the 89th Congress.
Some thought the Republican party had been so savaged that it would not recover for a generation, if ever. Johnson was not among them; he expected a quick return. This was because the Republicans would not soon repeat the mistake of nominating a divider and loser like Goldwater and because the Democrats could not possibly keep those gigantic majorities. In 1964 the Democrats won 61 seats in the House with less than 55 percent of the vote, 37 of them with below 53 percent. Many of those closely-contested seats would move back into the Republican column in 1966.
Thus, Johnson had the two years of the 89th Congress to put over his Great Society. The old southern Democratic-
Republican coalition that had dominated the Congress since 1938 was temporarily disabled. He could get whatever he wanted, but he would have to hurry.
James Reston of the New York Times called the 89th the “Goldwater Congress”:
The record of the 89th Congress shows what can happen in this country under the leadership of Lyndon Johnson and Barry Goldwater. They did not intend to cooperate, but they have. Apart they are insupportable; together, invincible. In combination, their unintended alliance has produced a torrent of social and economic legislation. …
The irony of the Goldwater challenge to the welfare state and planned economy is that, by losing so overwhelmingly, he brought in a Congress that enacted precisely the legislation he ran for the Presidency to oppose.9
6
Medicare: The Jewel in the Crown
TWO Wilburs starred in the leading roles, Wilbur Cohen as the supreme advocate, Wilbur Mills as the master legislator. Cohen was the assistant secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare responsible for legislation, Mills the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, which handled Social Security.
Medicare, no matter how measured, was enormous and enormously important. During 1966, the first year it was in effect, the number of persons 65 and older enrolled in the hospital insurance program was 19.1 million, in supplementary medical insurance 17.7 million. In fiscal 1967, the first full year of operation, it paid over 7.1 million hospital bills for a total of $3.1 billion, and 24.4 million doctor bills with total charges of $7.5 billion. Since the number of old people would grow steadily, the program would inevitably become much larger. It would have a great impact upon the structure of the nation’s health care delivery system. Organized medicine, that is, the American Medical Association, feared and opposed the establishment of Medicare with passion. The AMA waged what was probably the biggest and costliest lobbying campaign in history to prevent the passage of the law. It had 70 publicists at work in its Chicago headquarters and 23 at its lobby in Washington. The AMA spent $50 million on this unsuccessful battle. When the bill passed in 1965, Richard Harris wrote, “members of both political parties in both houses of Congress agreed that their votes on the measure were the most important ones they had ever cast.”
The nation was fortunate to have these very large stakes in the hands of such gifted professionals as Cohen and Mills. Wilbur J. Cohen was born in Milwaukee in 1913 and attended the experimental college of the University of Wisconsin in Madison. He was a brilliant student and was profoundly influenced by three distinguished labor economists—John R. Commons, Selig Perlman, and Edwin E. Witte. He graduated in 1934.
That year President Roosevelt committed himself to an omnibus economic security law and instructed Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins to chair the committee to draft a bill. She appointed Arthur J. Altmeyer assistant secretary of labor and put him in charge. He was from Wisconsin and had taken his doctorate with Commons. Altmeyer asked his friend Witte to become executive director of the committee. Witte brought his student, Wilbur Cohen, with him.
This experience, which led to passage of the Social Security Act in 1935, hooked Cohen on two interests that would dominate his life: Social Security and the ways of Congress. After the law was passed Altmeyer, a dedicated public servant and brilliant administrator, became the key figure in directing the administration and expansion of the Social Security system. Cohen was at his side, working on legislation with the House Ways and Means Committee and the Senate Finance Committee.
Every industrialized nation in the world except the U.S. had either a nationalized health system or national health insurance. In 1934 FDR had wanted to put a national system into the Social Security Act, but had backed off in the face of powerful opposition from the AMA. In 1939 liberal Democrats proposed the Wagner-Murray-Dingell bill to establish national health insurance, but it got nowhere. By 1950 the expert backers, including Cohen, concluded that the AMA had made the prospect hopeless for the foreseeable future. They decided to narrow their target to those who needed help most, the elderly, and to coordinate what they called Medicare with Social Security. In 1951 Cohen and his good friend I. S. Falk, the head of Social Security’s bureau of research and statistics, wrote the first Medicare bill.
But Eisenhower’s victory and the election of a Republican Congress in 1952 not only prevented any action on Medicare but got Cohen and Falk in trouble. The Republican National Committee decided to throw out the top team at Social Security and instructed HEW Secretary Oveta Culp Hobby to get their resignations. Altmeyer and Falk were among those who left quietly. But Cohen refused to resign. “It was extremely humiliating to me,” he said, “but I made up my mind that I was not going to get kicked around for political reasons by the Republican National Committee.” He was a career civil servant who thought political reprisal was “unsound, and undesirable, and unfair, and inequitable, and inconsistent with our career service.” The new commissioner of Social Security, John Tramburg, was a friend and declined to fire him. Next best, the Republicans demoted him one grade into Falk’s old job and cut his pay. Cohen swallowed this arrangement briefly. Satisfied that he had established his principle, he departed for the University of Michigan in 1955.
By this time Cohen was the nation’s leading authority on Social Security. As Senator Paul Douglas said, “An expert on Social Security was anyone with Wilbur Cohen’s phone number.” Nelson Cruikshank did not know him when he took over the Social Security department at AFL-CIO. “I guess that, if there was one, there were 50 people who told me that the first thing I should do was get acquainted with Wilbur Cohen.”
Cohen knew Theodore Sorensen and Myer Feldman, who worked for Senator Kennedy, and they sought his advice. Elizabeth Wickenden was also a good friend and got him to counsel her old friend Senator Lyndon Johnson. He helped write a new Medicare bill which Representative Aime Forand of Rhode Island introduced in 1957 and which quickly gathered wide support. In fact, it became one of the hottest issues in the 1960 presidential campaign. After his victory Kennedy asked Cohen to chair the task force on health and Social Security and Cohen brought Wickenden on board. To no one’s surprise, the task force strongly endorsed Medicare under Social Security. At the request of Senator Robert Kerr of Oklahoma, Cohen wrote the Kerr-Mills bill for medical assistance to the poor. Despite the objections of supporters of Medicare, he insisted that Medicare and Kerr-Mills were complementary rather than alternatives, that both were necessary because each addressed a different group of the elderly who needed help. He added, “I felt this developed the principle of public financial responsibility for medical care.”
In 1961 Kennedy gave Cohen the job he hungered for, assistant secretary of HEW responsible for legislation, a base for shaping national policy. It must have been the most important congressional relations position in the executive branch, covering, among other important matters, Social Security, including Medicare, and the enormous complex of legislation embraced by federal aid for education.
Cohen had a staff of two deputies, two special assistants, a program planning group of four, and he coopted anyone in HEW when the need arose, which was often. He may well have been born with a sense of history. If not, he certainly acquired it from his mentors in Madison—Commons, Perlman, and Witte. Cohen recognized that the sixties constituted, as his assistant Michael L. Parker put it, a “singular moment in history.” He instructed Parker several times “to push the people I was working with as hard as I could, whether they protested or not; that we were to work any day, any hour, to do whatever was necessary to pass the legislation.” His administrative style fitted this tempo. He chose good people, insisted that they take responsibility for important decisions, backed them up, and maintained a flexible, informal shop. Cohen himself seemed tireless and worked extremely long hours.
Douglass Cater, the White House staff member with whom Cohen worked on both Medicare and education, thought he was “the ideal public servant, in that he had great ideals and great freshness of approach.” Moreover,
he was “very shrewd and very skilled in how to maneuver programs through Congress.” Most amazing, Cater thought, was that “he showed no sign, up until the very day he left office, of ever getting bureaucratic battle fatigue.”
There were two extremely important people with whom Cohen enjoyed a special relationship—the President of the United States and the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. Lyndon Johnson was hardly among the first politicians to see the significance of Medicare, but by the time he became President his commitment was total. Cohen thought he felt so strongly because of “the biblical injunction of honoring thy father and thy mother.” He was concerned about “people who became old and indigent and sick and disabled and he wanted to do something for them.” Further, as Johnson told Richard Goodwin, doctors had “too much money already … Hell, if I were a young man today, I’d get myself a medical diploma and then find an investment broker to handle the profits.”
The Medicare bill, which ultimately reached 400 pages in length, had the appeal of an insurance policy, which, in a sense, it was. Johnson had only a general notion of what was in it. But he held Franklin Roosevelt in awe and he thought Social Security was his greatest domestic achievement. He associated Wilbur Cohen with Social Security and his good friend Elizabeth Wickenden assured him that he was correct. Cohen said that Medicare would help the old folks in need and that was good enough.
Cohen understood the President very well, and, by and large, they got along swimmingly. He could always count on Johnson on the big issues and the President never snarled at him. The only problem he had was with the White House staff. There had been no difficulty with Kennedy. “When you dealt with Ted Sorensen and you agreed on something, you were 9,999 times [out of 10,000] agreeing with the President.” But Johnson bred uncertainty. Neither Cater nor, later, Joe Califano, knew how the President would react and they were cautious. “And the President would reverse them many times, or delay, or the President would consult with someone else.”
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