Guns or Butter

by Bernstein, Irving;

  On February 28, 1967, the President sent a special message to Congress in which he endorsed passage of the bill to create the Corporation for Public Broadcasting with a one-year funding of $10.5 million for construction and $9 million for operations. He said nothing about a tax on receivers, but he did establish an internal and secret task force to weigh long-term financing of the system. The only other significant deviation from the Carnegie report was the inclusion of public radio.7

  Johnson’s decision to strip away the Carnegie recommendation for assured financing had a very important permanent result. It meant that the conservatives who dominated Congress in 1967 would control the corporation’s funding through the annual appropriations process; in addition, the Republicans among them expected to capture the presidency and perhaps the Congress in 1968. Thus, they felt little concern over a bill that would operate on a shoestring. This guaranteed its passage.

  Magnuson, chairman of the Commerce Committee, introduced the bill, and Pastore, chairman of the Subcommittee on Communications, held hearings during April 1967. The administration, the foundations, and both the commercial and educational broadcasters testified in favor. In fact, there was no opposition. The Commerce Committee on May 11 reported it in almost exactly the form in which it had been introduced. The Senate adopted it by voice vote on May 17, 1967.

  The House proved only a little more difficult. The Commerce Committee held hearings in July and listened to the same witnesses. It reported a bill amended mainly to assure political neutrality on August 21 by a vote of 15 to 6, all the latter Republicans. The House acted favorably on September 21 by a roll call of 265 to 91.

  The conference resolved the differences between the bills in favor of the House on October 18. The House the next day and the Senate on October 26 accepted the report, and the President signed the Public Broadcasting Act on November 7, 1967, at the White House.

  Title I extended the life of a 1962 law that subsidized the construction of TV station facilities for three years and increased coverage to public radio. It authorized appropriations of $10.5 million in 1968, $12.5 in 1969, and $15 million in 1970.

  Title II created the nonprofit, nongovernmental Corporation for Public Broadcasting to funnel funds to the system, not as a network. The corporation was forbidden to own stations. It would assist stations with their operating costs to produce programs, finance program producers, and establish interconnection. CPB would be governed by a board of 15 directors. Stations were prohibited from editorializing or taking sides in elections. The corporation was banned from interference in the affairs of stations and was directed to adhere to objectivity and balance with controversial programs. CPB received an appropriation of $9 million for 1968 and nothing more for the future.

  Johnson waited until after he signed the law before he appointed the internal task force on financing public broadcasting. It consisted of Califano, his assistant James Gaither, Budget Director Zwick, Schultze, Cohen, and Mel White of the Treasury. The task force made a careful study of financial needs on the assumption that funding must be insulated from the political process to the maximum extent possible. It proposed $30 million in 1969, rising swiftly to $135 million in 1973. There would be three possible sources: (1) either a tax on commercial broadcasters or a tax on TV and radio receivers; (2) federal matching of the funds raised by donations from other sources; and (3) general revenues of the Treasury deposited in a trust fund, as with Social Security. The President did not make a choice from these alternatives and made no financing proposal to Congress. By now, 1968, his standing on Capitol Hill, particularly on new taxes, had vanished.

  Johnson’s final responsibility under the new law was to nominate the board of directors of CPB, which he announced on February 17, 1968. Frank Pace, Jr., became chairman. He had been Director of the Budget and Secretary of the Army under Truman, president of General Dynamics, and chairman of Eisenhower’s National Goals Commission. Killian and Hobby came over from the Carnegie Commission. The movie industry supplied Johnson’s former aide, Jack Valenti, now of the Motion Picture Producers Association, and Robert S. Benjamin of United Artists. Two were former governors—Joseph D. Hughes of New Jersey and Carl Sanders of Georgia. Milton Eisenhower had just left the presidency of Johns Hopkins and Frank Schooley was from Illinois and NAEB. Michael A. Gammino was a Rhode Island banker, a friend of Pastore; Saul Haas was a Seattle broadcaster and a friend of Magnuson. John D. Rockefeller III had been the main force behind Lincoln Center and Erich Leinsdorf was music director of the Boston Symphony and a friend of LBJ. Roscoe C. Carroll was a black attorney from Los Angeles and Joseph A. Beirne was president of the Communication Workers Union.

  This able new board faced formidable difficulties. The recruitment of a staff moved slowly and CPB did not get a president until after Nixon’s election. John W. Macy, Jr., former chairman of the Civil Service Commission, took office in February 1969.

  The funding problem was crippling. The new system needed a massive infusion of money at the outset to build up station equipment and operating capability, to provide interconnection, and to finance program production. Johnson’s task force had anticipated this need and had proposed a hefty increase in the appropriation. But Nixon distrusted public broadcasting and kept its funding very low. When he vetoed the 1973 appropriation, Macy and his top aides resigned. Between 1972 and 1987 the federal government’s contribution to public television ranged from a niggardly 16 to 28 percent of its actual expenditures. “The failure to provide adequate funding,” Bruce McKay wrote, “invalidated the conditions of the public broadcasting experiment at least as seriously as the denial of [political] insulation.”

  Interconnection proved difficult, exposed internal division within the system, and consumed more than a year to resolve. CPB, supported by the Ford Foundation, urged creation of a new agency that would, like a network, both produce and distribute programs to its affiliates. But the stations, particularly the large ones, feared centralization of authority in such an agency. Intense and prolonged negotiations led to a compromise settlement. The Public Broadcasting System (PBS) was incorporated in 1969 with authority both to produce and to distribute programs, but the stations received five of the nine seats on its board of directors.

  Despite these problems, the remarkable fact about the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 was that the system it created—CPB, PBS, and National Public Radio—survived and blossomed. In both television and radio the programming sought to fulfill the goals of the Carnegie Commission: service to substantial fragmented audiences with variable tastes along with a stress on public affairs, the arts, and culture to fill the virtual vacuum left by commercial broadcasting. While the initiative to establish this important system had come from the Ford and Carnegie foundations, Lyndon Johnson had responded at once when he received the Carnegie report. It is unfortunate that it did not arrive until 1967 when his control over Congress was so diminished that he could not get adequate funding, in fact, did not even try.8

  On November 21, 1968, shortly before Johnson left the White House, he and Mrs. Johnson invited the National Council on the Arts to dinner. In introducing the President, Roger Stevens offered this assessment: “President Johnson has done more for the arts than any other President in the history of the United States.” Stevens could have added public television and radio. Odd, but true.9

  18

  Model Cities

  BY the sixties the large American city had become a bundle of distressing problems—overpopulation, white flight to the suburbs, black ghettoes, unemployment, eroding housing and schools, crime, drugs, transportation bottlenecks, inadequate medical care, and so on, through a long and depressing litany. The universities had begun serious study of urban issues and the Ford Foundation was investing in a pilot program to deal with them in New Haven.

  In shaping a study or in devising a policy on the city there are two ways to go. Either one can chip off a discrete problem—such as local or metropolitan government, land use, housing, black
ghettoes, or the suburbs—or one can treat the city as an integrated whole in which these problems are interrelated. Historically the literature had concentrated on separate issues and federal policy for a generation had been similarly piecemeal—housing, urban renewal, community facilities, financing, one after the other.

  In 1959 scholars at Harvard and MIT formed the Joint Center on Urban Studies to conduct research on city problems. They came from anthropology, architecture, business, city planning, economics, education, engineering, history, law, philosophy, political science, and sociology. Their many studies were published by the Harvard and MIT university presses. The Joint Center soon became the nation’s leading source of urban scholarship.

  The members of the center encompassed a diversity of views. On the right scholars like Edward C. Banfield and James Q. Wilson argued that the cities would be better off if the federal government retreated to Washington and allowed the local market free rein. The majority committed themselves to the piecemeal approach and worked on their particular specialties. Robert C. Wood, the chairman of MIT’s Political Science Department, and Charles M. Haar, of the Harvard Law School, contended that the U.S. was in the midst of an urban crisis which called for a consolidated policy. As Wood put it, “the Cambridge urbanists, except for me and Charlie Haar, were mostly optimists and Pollyannas. They were really convinced that things were getting better in American cities, and so were not policy oriented.”

  In 1964–65 the Johnson administration, shaping the Great Society, went through a task force population explosion. Bill Moyers and Dick Goodwin established a large number in 1964 and Joe Califano did the same the next year. The labor market for task force members, especially chairmen, flourished. If Lyndon Johnson had prayed that the Lord would provide him with several superb chairmen, He would have sent the White House Robert C. Wood in triplicate.

  Wood was born in St. Louis in 1923, but his parents were from the South—Tennessee, Alabama, and Florida. He was raised in Jacksonville and attended its schools. His mother, a school teacher, said that the city’s schools functioned in an aura of “savage gentility.” He was ready for college at the end of the depression but the family was strapped. Both of his brothers had gone to the University of Florida. “I was lucky,” he said, “to get a scholarship at Princeton.” He was there two and a half years and then served three with the 76th Infantry Division in the European Theater, completing his hitch with a Bronze Star. After the war he alternated between finishing his education at Princeton and the Littauer School at Harvard and working for the state government in Florida. He received a Ph.D. jointly in political economy and government from Harvard in 1950; by now government was his main interest. He taught briefly at Harvard and then shifted to MIT in 1957. He soon developed a great interest in urban problems.

  In 1960 Wood advised John Kennedy and worked on the campaign from a distance. He was more involved in revitalizing the Democratic party in Massachusetts. In 1962 he helped Ted Kennedy in his first campaign for the Senate.

  Early in 1964 J. K. Galbraith assembled a group of Cambridge experts, including Wood, to meet with Moyers and Goodwin on ideas for programs. It was, Wood said later, “a very, very good meeting. … Moyers was able to convey to that group the impression of an administration that was anxious for ideas and movement on the domestic field side.” He had already served on a task force for Robert C. Weaver, the administrator of the Housing and Home Finance Agency. Wood had the impression that the Kennedy-Johnson administrations were moving toward his view that the U.S. faced an urban crisis that demanded an integrated policy.

  Kennedy had proposed a severely limited program—the elimination of discrimination in housing, the elevation of HHFA to cabinet status as a department of urban affairs, and the promotion of Weaver to secretary, the first black to become a member of the cabinet. But Kennedy waited almost two years to propose a weak open housing executive order and the House Rules Committee bottled up the urban affairs department, leaving Weaver adrift.

  In 1964 Johnson renewed the proposal to create a Department of Housing and Urban Development. In order to help shape the new agency’s program, the President appointed a Task Force on Metropolitan and Urban Problems.

  Wood was named chairman and he headed a group he called “very high powered people”: Mayor J. P. Cavanaugh of Detroit, S. B. Klaman of the Association of Mutual Savings Banks, Ralph McGill of the Atlanta Constitution, Paul Ylvisaker of the Ford Foundation, Nathan Glazer, Norman Kennedy, Martin Meyerson, Catherine Bauer Wurster of Berkeley, Raymond Vernon of Harvard, and Karl Menninger of the Menninger Foundation. Menninger would interrupt the discussion periodically to say that everyone ought to go back to living on the farm. Wood wondered whether the White House had gotten the right Menninger brother. It was, Wood said, “a tough … report on which to get consensus.” Nevertheless, the final result reflected the chairman’s viewpoint. He delivered the document—comprehensive, acute, and well written—to the President on November 30, 1964.

  The U.S., the task force declared, has been “an urban nation for at least 60 years. … Yet we have never fashioned a genuine national response to this … urban development.” The report was “directed to that end.” The prime function of the city was to “ensure options in choice of residence, place of work, meaningful leisure time activities, and effective civic participation.” But citizens confronted many barriers in exercising these choices which, in turn, created “anxiety, alienation, and powerlessness.” In the preceding 30 years the federal government had piled categorical programs one upon the other to assist cities. But they had not been integrated. The task force, therefore, recommended a number of different new programs, among them, block grants to allow local communities to attack their most pressing needs, rent supplements, strengthening the executive order barring discrimination in housing, support for law enforcement, assistance to city planning, large renewal projects to alter the character of entire neighborhoods, rehabilitation of older dwellings, a national system of development funds, and creation of an urban affairs council in the office of the President.

  The impact of this part of the report on the President was clearly evident in his Special Message to the Congress on the Nation’s Cities of March 2, 1965. It called for a comprehensive attack on urban problems and urged enactment of a number of the programs the task force had identified.

  But there was something else. Leonard Duhl and Antonia Chayes of the National Institute of Mental Health had proposed that the report include a demonstration cities program in three major communities. The task force’s final recommendation read as follows:

  We believe there is need to accelerate the impact of the varied human development programs by a dramatic demonstration of ongoing and newly conceived urban aids in one or more especially chosen cities. Such a demonstration would involve long-range and short-term planning both for citywide renewal and a comprehensive program of human services. The city should be of typical size and present typical problems of urbanization.

  The selection of the cities could take place through procedures established by the White House. The recipients should be assured of Federal funds sufficient to develop a model program for urban America.

  This was the origin of model cities.1

  Johnson insisted that his task force reports be kept secret, but Mayor Cavanaugh of Detroit showed the demonstration cities proposal to Walter Reuther. Detroit, one of the nation’s most racially divided cities, had suffered a massive race riot in 1943 and would soon have another.

  Reuther, a man of exuberance and unrestrained rhetoric, embraced the idea enthusiastically. On May 13, 1965, he proposed to Johnson a crash program to build model neighborhoods in the blighted centers of six major cities—Washington, Detroit, Chicago, Philadelphia, Houston, and Los Angeles. They would be “VISIBLE examples of new environments, where new technologies of housing construction and prefabrication, new types of schools, new types of old age centers, recreational facilities and social services” would be erected.
Each 700- to 1000-acre neighborhood would contain 15,000 living units housing 50,000 people. “What FDR created for the TVA as a worldwide symbol to combat erosion of the land, President Johnson is asked to initiate to stop erosion of life in urban centers among the lower and middle income population.”

  The White House sent a copy of Reuther’s proposal to Haar. While he found the rhetoric “superfluous” and the details and implementation “obscure,” the core idea “should be explored. The creation of entire new neighborhoods to replace decaying areas is a particularly exciting proposal.” It would remedy the weaknesses of the current low-income programs. Public housing segregated the poor and the blacks and ignored recreation, education, and social services. Urban renewal displaced the same people and failed to provide them with alternative housing.

  Haar preferred one carefully worked out model project with attention to relocation and cost. He thought the program should be put in a new agency rather than HHFA to encourage innovation. “It seems a worthwhile, albeit difficult, undertaking.”

  But demonstration cities had to wait as Johnson concentrated on pushing the bill creating the Department of Housing and Urban Development through Congress. Once that succeeded, he needed to name a secretary. While an expert on housing and an experienced bureaucrat, Weaver had drawbacks. Johnson, according to Kermit Gordon, preferred someone who was “stronger and more decisive and a more effective administrator than Bob Weaver.” Moreover, he was unpopular on the Hill, having even alienated Mike Mansfield. But Johnson finally turned to Weaver and immediately ran into trouble with Senator John McClellan of Arkansas, whose committee vote was critical. This led to an involuted Johnsonian maneuver to buy off McClellan with federal funds to build roads in Arkansas. The result was the joint appointment of Weaver as secretary and Wood as under secretary, which was not announced until January 17, 1966. Herbert Kaufman, chairman of the Politics Department at Yale, wrote Wood, “I’ve thought of many ways to get out of being chairman of a Political Science Department, including suicide, but I never thought of anything that drastic.” Haar became Assistant Secretary for Metropolitan Development.