On November 5, 1968, 73,359,762 citizens voted. Nixon received 31,785,480 votes; Humphrey 31,275,165, Wallace 9,906,473. Nixon got 43.3 percent of the vote, Humphrey 42.6, Wallace 13.5. Of the two-party vote, Nixon got 50.4 percent, Humphrey 49.6. Nixon’s victory margin in the popular vote was the lowest in any election since 1912. Nixon, however, won comfortably in the electoral college with 302 votes compared with Humphrey’s 191 and Wallace’s 46. Nixon won seven states in the South, Wallace five, and Humphrey one (Texas).
Wallace, who seemed very strong early in the campaign, wilted badly at the end. His residual support consisted mainly of white racists, extremists of the right, and super-patriots who wanted to nuke North Vietnam back into the Stone Age.
David Broder concluded that the 1968 election was remarkable because it was so ordinary:
The central paradox of the 1968 election was that a year of almost unprecedented violence and turmoil, a year of wild oscillations and extremes produced a terribly conventional result. A year that saw repeated challenges from the nation’s political left- and right-wings ended with the country dividing with almost mathematical equality between two candidates of the center. A year that saw more than the usual amount of internal warfare within the major parties and the birth of the most ambitious third party in forty-four years ended in an election which vindicated the two-party system. A year which posed a constant threat of constitutional crisis ended with an electoral verdict, rendered in the customary way, without recourse to Electoral College bargaining or a contingent election in the House.
Lyndon Johnson, who had been an almost powerless self-proclaimed lame duck for six months, now became a constitutionally powerless lame duck for the last three. The Democratic Kennedy-Johnson interlude had come to an end after only eight years in control of the White House. Johnson’s war would now become Nixon’s war.10
IV
CODA
20
Guns or Butter
PERICLES, perhaps the wisest statesman of antiquity, led Athens into a golden age in the years between the close of the Persian War in 449 and the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War in 431 B.C. He greatly extended democracy by granting citizenship to poor males, allowing them to take seats in the legislature, and placing them on juries in the courts. He launched a massive rebuilding program to restore the damage suffered by Athens during the Persian War. The capstone was the Acropolis with its great new structures—the Parthenon, the Propylaea, the Erectheum, and the Odeum. The culture of the city soared to heights matched among city-states only by Renaissance Florence. Architecture, sculpture, painting, drama, literature, music, history, and science flowered. “Few eras in human history,” Donald Kagan wrote, “can compare with the greatness achieved by Athens under the leadership of Pericles in the fifth century B.C.”
These achievements, as Pericles knew better than anyone, depended upon three interdependent factors: the empire, prosperity, and, above all, peace. Athens possessed by far the largest empire of the Greek world, reaching from Macedonia in the north almost to Crete in the south. It included much of mainland Greece, most of the Aegean Islands, the coast of Asia Minor, and the straits leading into the Black Sea. The greatest navy of its time was its protector.
Athens became wealthy from her empire, which imported her goods and paid tribute to her. A large hoard of gold and silver was deposited in the treasury in the Parthenon.
Peace was the key. Pericles, who had been a commander in the Athenian navy, knew war and much preferred to avoid it. But the Greek world was an unstable system of competing cities which frequently took up arms.
In 433 Corcyra appealed to Athens in its conflict with Corinth, which had brought powerful Sparta to its aid. Pericles engaged in complex negotiations. But neither Athens nor Sparta would make the concessions needed to gain peace. Sparta and the Peloponnesian League voted for war. Proud Pericles, the honor of Athens at stake, went to war in 431 on behalf of Corcyra. Sparta’s goal, Kagan wrote, was “the destruction of Athenian power.”
Each year as the crops ripened the Spartan army advanced into Attica. The Athenian farmers, their families, and their animals took cover behind the city’s walls. The troops destroyed the crops. In this war of attrition which continued for ten years Sparta held the trump cards. The morale of the Athenians was undermined, the treasury was depleted, and the colonies broke away. Worse, ferocious plagues swept the overcrowded city, killing a third of the population, including many soldiers. In 430 the Athenians turned on Pericles for leading them into disaster. They removed him from office and convicted him of embezzlement. In 429 a defeated and saddened Pericles died, evidently a victim of the plague.
In 425 in Athens Sophocles staged his masterpiece, Oedipus Tyrannus. While the setting was Thebes and the leading character was the tragic king Oedipus, the Athenians read his name as Pericles.
Finally in 404 the Spartans, now supported by Persia, brought the bitter war to an end as Athens capitulated. She lost her empire and her fleet; the walls were torn down; the treasury was gone; the populace was starving. The Spartans imposed their foreign policy on Athens. They installed a puppet government of oligarchs which destroyed democracy and imposed a reign of terror.
Such was the tragic end of the Periclean dream. Pericles in the twentieth-century phrase had given up butter for guns and had thereby invited disaster. For the Greeks Pericles was an example of what they called hubris, the arrogance that was certain to bring on the destruction of those who dared to rule over others as though they were Gods.1
The choice between peace and war goes back to an early stage in human history, but the guns-or-butter metaphor did not emerge until the twentieth century. It was invented, according to William Safire, by Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister, who said, “We can do without butter, but, despite all our love of peace, not without arms. One cannot shoot with butter but with arms.” Shortly, Hermann Goering, the head of the German Air Force, said in a radio speech: “Guns will make us powerful; butter will only make us fat.” Goering must have spoken from the heart because he was very fat.
In the first phase of the Americanization of the Vietnam War President Johnson insisted that the U.S. could have both guns and butter:
I believe we can do both. We are a country which was built by pioneers who had a rifle in one hand and an ax in the other. We are a nation with the highest GNP, the highest wages, and the most people at work. We can do both. And as long as I am president we will do both.
He repeated this empty promise in his 1966 State of the Union message and the press immediately called it guns and butter. Chairman Wilbur Mills of the House Ways and Means Committee said, “The Administration simply must choose between guns and butter.”
This dilemma was the key to the tragedy of Lyndon Johnson’s presidency, perhaps the most tragic in the history of that great office. He acted as though he could have both, while everyone, himself included, knew that he could not. Stephen Skowronek wrote,
The “tragedy of Lyndon Johnson” is a drama without parallel in modern American politics. It is the story of a master politician who self-destructed at the commanding heights, of an over-arching political consensus shattered in a rush of extraordinary achievements, of a superpower that squandered its resources in a remote conflict with people struggling on the fringes of modernity.
Lyndon Johnson generated and shouldered through Congress a formidable bundle of domestic legislation that he called the Great Society. With this very important achievement, he joined two of his illustrious presidential predecessors in the twentieth century—Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt. Together they created a significant historical rhythm: a burst of progressive laws occurring approximately a generation apart. Wilson’s New Freedom statutes were enacted between 1913 and 1915, Roosevelt’s New Deal program between 1933 and 1935, and Johnson’s Great Society legislation between 1964 and 1966. They shared several important characteristics: a strong and energetic Democratic President who did not hesitate to lead; lar
ge Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, which followed their President; solid public support; and the guns-or-butter dilemma which eventually led the President to abandon domestic reform and lead the nation into war—Wilson into World War I, Roosevelt into World War II, and Johnson into the Vietnam War.
Measured by legislative output, Johnson’s presidency fell into two periods—1964–66 and 1967–68. Although 1964 constituted the second session of the 88th Congress in which the Democratic majorities were modest, the performance was impressive. In November 1964 Johnson won a landslide victory and carried with him very large majorities in both houses. Thus, 1965 was an extraordinarily productive year with the first session of the 89th. The second in 1966 saw a marked fall-off, but remained a strong year. In the second period, reflecting a sharp Republican rebound in Congress in the 1966 elections and the hemorrhaging of the Johnson presidency due mainly to the war, legislative output dropped sharply in 1967 and virtually disappeared in 1968.
On October 24, 1966, Larry O’Brien and Joe Califano submitted a report to the President on the legislative gains of both sessions of the 89th Congress. They reached this conclusion:
In a word, this was a fabulous and remarkable Congress. We say this not because of its unprecedented productivity—but because what was passed has deep meaning and significance for every man, woman and child in this country—and for future generations. A particularly striking feature about the 89th was that its second session was as equally productive as the first.
The report then listed all the bills passed in each session as though each was equal in significance to the others. In the first session of the 89th, 84 were passed of the 87 proposed; in the second session, 97 of the 113 submitted. By this method of counting the second session was even more productive than the first. But the yardstick was seriously defective. Most of the statutes were of very modest importance. A relatively small minority of the laws was significant, and a very small number was of great importance. In 1965, for example, Medicare far outweighed the statute that authorized the legislature of Guam to fix the compensation of its members. Nevertheless, the 89th was in fact a “fabulous and remarkable Congress,” as the authors claimed.
The Congressional Quarterly in its annual Almanac tracked the legislation more comprehensively than O’Brien and Califano. By CQ’s rating, 1965 stands alone as the banner year, 1964 is second, 1966 and 1968 are tied for third, and 1967 is last.
Perhaps most significant, CQ also made narrative judgments of the President’s legislative performance. It wrote of 1964: “He had great success with Congress.” The editors were swept off their feet by 1965, a “legislative grand slam.” CQ stated,
It was clear that the first session of the 89th, starting early and working late, had passed more major legislation than most Congresses pass in two sessions. The scope of the legislation was even more impressive than the number of new laws. Measures which, taken alone, would have crowned the achievements of any Congress, were enacted in a seemingly endless stream. …
The pace of the session was so breathless as to cause a major revision of the image, widely prevalent in preceding years, of Congress as structurally incapable of swift decision, prone to frustrate demands for progress.
The 1966 session was a big letdown. “With the public increasingly concerned with inflation and the Viet Nam War,” CQ wrote, “Congressional Republicans found new Democratic allies in the effort to curb the ‘Great Society’—not only its spending programs but almost any measure providing social reform.”
CQ summarized the President’s performance in the 1st session of the 90th Congress in 1967 as follows:
Mr. Johnson’s success in 1967 did not nearly meet his historic accomplishments in getting landmark Great Society legislation through the overwhelmingly Democratic 89th Congress (1965–66). The specter of the war in Viet Nam coupled with the shift to the GOP of 47 House seats and three Senate seats in the 1966 election gave the President a relatively hostile Congress which was intent on holding down Government spending.
Accordingly, the President introduced little in the way of new Great Society programs, preferring instead to improve and expand already enacted programs. Even some of these proposals—notably the antipoverty program, model cities and rent supplements—faced serious trouble. …
The President suffered major defeats when the House Ways and Means Committee refused to act on his proposal for a 10-percent surcharge on personal and corporate income tax and when Congress voted the lowest foreign aid bill in 20 years.
By Labor Day the year was notably unproductive. Congress had enacted only six of the 52 bills … Mike Mansfield … had listed as “must legislation.”
CQ on the second session of the 90th Congress in 1968:
Mr. Johnson’s success did not nearly meet his historic accomplishments. …
In many cases Congress enacted bills requested by the White House only after adding relatively unpalatable provisions or restrictions.
The important income tax surcharge, for example, was approved in conjunction with a limitation on federal expenditures which the President was forced to accept as the price for passage of the tax hike. …
The President’s spending plans for a variety of health, education and urban welfare programs were cut back considerably by the budget-minded Congress.
This book addresses small numbers and large significance. That is, it deals with only 17 of the bills President Johnson proposed that were enacted which were, in this author’s judgment, significant. That term is understood to mean both (a) measures which represented a new policy or an important change in an old policy and (b) statutes which affected very large numbers of Americans. There have been few acts of Congress, even in so productive a period as the Johnson presidency, which can meet both of these tests. For the years 1964–68 there were merely 17, which is less than 1 percent of the 1902 bills, according to CQ, that Johnson proposed to Congress.
These 17 statutes, in turn, break down into two categories: blockbusters and those that are no more than significant. There were six blockbusters, counting both major education and conservation statutes as one, which is justified because the former involved the same principle of federal aid for education and the latter were both concerned with the preservation of the nation’s physical heritage. The blockbusters were: the Revenue Act (Keynesian tax cut), Civil Rights Act, Economic Opportunity Act (poverty), and the Wilderness Act and Land and Water Conservation Fund Act, all 1964; and Medicare and the Elementary and Secondary Education and Higher Education Act, both 1965.
President Johnson must share credit with President Kennedy for these statutes because all, excepting poverty, which was only a Kennedy idea, had been drafted and were well on their way through the congressional machinery at the time of the assassination. Had Kennedy lived, there is no doubt that all would have been passed by 1965. Nevertheless, Johnson deserves much of the glory because he quickly endorsed every one (including getting the poverty bill drafted) and brought his legislative experience and skills into play to assure their passage. All were enacted during the first two years of the Johnson presidency, 1964 and 1965.
In addition, there were 11 statutes which, if they did not meet the high test of a blockbuster, were nevertheless significant: the Voting Rights Act, Immigration Act, Water Quality Act, and Clean Air Act amendments and Solid Waste Disposal Act, all 1965; the Fair Labor Standards Act minimum wage amendments and Model Cities Act, 1966; the Air Quality Act and Public Broadcasting Act, 1967; and the Tax surcharge, Social Security Act amendments, and civil rights with open housing, all 1968. Johnson takes the credit for all of this legislation.
If the blockbuster and significant groups are joined, the importance of the first two years of Johnson’s presidency becomes dramatic. In 1964 and 1965 the total was ten; in 1966, 1967, and 1968 together it dropped to seven.
These numbers are remarkable. While they look small, they are huge. The likelihood is that a majority of U.S. Presidents did not produce a s
ingle blockbuster and many failed even to achieve passage of one significant statute. Clearly, the only President in U.S. history who was on Johnson’s level was Franklin Roosevelt. Here Wilbur Cohen, who served under both, on an intuitive “Richter-type scale” of legislative effectiveness with a yardstick of 10, ranked LBJ first at 9.8 and FDR second at 6.7. This can be argued. Despite the fact that Roosevelt was Johnson’s great hero, LBJ consciously set out to surpass FDR and he may have succeeded. He certainly was at least FDR’s equal.
This legislation in the aggregate thrust the U.S. a giant step forward in the direction of democratization by assisting those who needed help the most. The unemployed found jobs; the elderly gained health care; the young enjoyed greater educational opportunity; blacks and women, among others, overcame discrimination and the former in the Deep South won the right to vote; the poor received hope; discrimination against certain types of immigrants was ended; the national park system was much expanded and great stretches of wilderness were preserved; and the first efforts were made to counter air and water pollution.
For these achievements Lyndon Johnson deserves the lion’s share of the credit. He, of course, received great help from others, starting with the critical Kennedy legacy. In the departments Wilbur Cohen on Medicare and Social Security and Stewart Udall on conservation and pollution performed masterfully. Several members of Johnson’s White House staff made notable contributions: Larry O’Brien and his assistants, Mike Manatos and Henry Hall Wilson, on congressional relations, Joe Califano on overall domestic policy, Douglass Cater on education. But Lyndon Johnson was at the center of the whirlwind. He relentlessly drove himself, his staff, and the Congress to enact this program. It was a virtuoso performance.
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