Building the Great Society

by Joshua Zeitz

  Jenkins had been lunching at the Congressional Hotel on November 22 when he first heard of Kennedy’s assassination. “I had a very sick feeling at the pit of my stomach,” he remembered years later. Not long after returning to the vice president’s suite, Jenkins received a summons from the West Wing. Requisitioning a vacant staff office, he monitored events by television until, soon enough, White House operators patched through a barrage of calls from the new president, who by years of habit began assigning him a multitude of responsibilities, large and small. “He called me once to get the wording of the oath,” Jenkins recalled. “He called me once to ask me whether I had any feeling as to whether he should be immediately sworn in or not.” In a city where proximity is power, Jenkins now found himself in a startling and altogether new dynamic. Kennedy aides who an hour earlier gave little consideration to what the staff members at EOB 274 thought about anything now turned to Jenkins to ask, “What do we do about this, you’re making the decisions?” It was “very hard for me,” he confided to an interviewer some years after the fact. “I didn’t want [the responsibility].”

  Johnson informed him that Air Force One was carrying a large contingent back to Washington and requested that marine helicopters be on hand at Andrews Air Force Base to convey the passengers to the White House. Walter Jenkins, putatively the chief counselor to the president of the United States, had no idea whom to call. “I didn’t know anything about how you accomplished those things,” he admitted. Just weeks later, he “sat in his big office in the West Wing,” Goldman remembered, “suit baggy, his middle collecting fat, his dark hair graying and his face turning the more florid the wearier he became, endlessly doing a sweeping variety of tasks.”

  • • • • •

  While the “self-effacing” Jenkins would serve as LBJ’s untitled chief of staff, he was “not an idea or program initiator in the sense that Clark Clifford, Sherman Adams and Ted Sorensen were,” explained Carroll Kilpatrick, the Washington Post’s chief White House correspondent. For those needs, the president turned instinctively to Horace Busby, a former member of his House and Senate staff who remained his in-house intellectual and speechwriter even after departing his direct employ. “Buzz,” as friends affectionately called him, was the son of a Church of Christ preacher in Fort Worth. Freckled and wavy-haired in his youth and “seeming every inch the all-American boy,” he enrolled at the University of Texas, where he became editor of the student newspaper. When the oil barons who controlled the university’s board of trustees fired President Homer P. Rainey, a strong-minded reformer and champion of academic freedom, he turned out a chain of scorching editorials that earned him an exaggerated but enduring reputation for radicalism.

  In fact, since the age of eight, when he sat rapturously in front of his parents’ wireless to hear FDR accept the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, Busby had identified as a staunch but conventional New Dealer. “I’m going to go to Washington. I’m going to live in Washington and see presidents someday,” he informed his parents. “I meant to. I mean, I meant to be a correspondent, eventually when I understood about newspapers.” While his classmates followed baseball box scores and movie stars, Buzz flipped the pages of Time and Life and avidly read syndicated political columns chronicling affairs of state in the heady days of the New Deal. “You had Washington at one level, and you had the European situation, the war coming on at another,” he remembered. “I was just juiced up above my eyebrows on this stuff before I was a junior in high school.” Busby was employed as a statehouse reporter in Austin for the International News Service when, in 1948, Johnson plucked the young man—then just twenty-five years old—for his congressional office. At first, Buzz resisted Johnson’s overtures. The staff job would occasion a sharp pay cut and, more important, would obligate him to subordinate his intellectual autonomy to the famously high-handed congressman. “There was no way in the world I was going to work for Lyndon Johnson,” he thought to himself. But as Busby and others would learn, when Lyndon Johnson set his hooks in, there was no escape. At LBJ’s prodding, Lieutenant Governor Allan Shivers implored him to accept the job—“You’ll learn more from Lyndon in a year than you’d learn from all of us around here in ten years,” he insisted. Buzz acquiesced but did not intend to linger long. At the very least, he could realize his boyhood ambition to work and live in Washington and perhaps even attend the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. After a year on staff, he might pole-vault his way to a reporting job with one of the New York dailies.

  But life took another course. LBJ and Busby developed an almost instant affinity. A political animal himself, Johnson admired Buzz for his encyclopedic knowledge of Washington in the 1930s. “I knew those kinds of nuances, I knew the slogans, I knew the minor characters on the New Deal stage here,” Busby reflected. “These things that I knew from my unusual and freakish . . . close study of the period, this was the stuff of Lyndon Johnson’s life. . . . Well, this was rapport. Here was somebody he could [communicate with]. Here was this little fellow from the corner in his office that he could sit with and he could just re-live all this. Whether I was in his office or I was in a car with him or I was on a trip with him, it was that. He wasn’t just talking to me about history, he was talking about what we had to do in this country. That’s what he talked with me specifically about the night that I first met him.”

  In Johnson’s House and Senate offices, Busby served as a minister without portfolio. His principal mandate was to generate ideas. The most successful politicians, LBJ told Busby, “‘have some little fellow in their office who sits back in a corner. He doesn’t have to have any personality, doesn’t have to know how to dress, usually they don’t have their tie tied right, a button off their shirt’—typical Johnson, running on at this—‘nicotine stains on their fingers, no coat, all like that. But they sit back in the corner, they don’t meet any of the people that come in the office. They read and they think and they come up with new ideas, and they make the fellow smart. I’ve never had one of those, and I want one.’” Off and on, for the better part of two decades, Buzz would play that role for Johnson. A White House reporter noted that their long association was marked by “several angry separations and friendly reconciliations,” because Buzz consistently demonstrated less alacrity than his colleagues in surrendering to LBJ’s unmannerly treatment.

  After parting from LBJ’s staff in 1951, Buzz returned to Austin and founded the Texas Businessman, a subscription newsletter whose tone and tenor increasingly sounded more in harmony with the state’s right-wing professional class than with the New Dealers he lionized as a child. He soon aligned himself with the conservative faction of the state Democratic Party, led by Shivers, who acceded to the governorship in 1949, and Price Daniel, the state’s other U.S. senator. Though both men were engaged in a bitter power struggle with moderate and liberal Democrats led by Lyndon Johnson, Busby’s relationship with his onetime mentor did not appear to suffer for it. Buzz returned briefly to LBJ’s employ in 1957 to assist in the Senate’s “Sputnik investigation” and author the Space Act and later served as an unpaid aide during Johnson’s unsuccessful presidential campaign in 1960. In between, he moved his family back to Washington, founded a successful consultancy, the American International Business Research Corporation, and rechristened his increasingly profitable newsletter the American Businessman. He also accompanied Johnson, who was now vice president, on a series of overseas trips.

  Within official political circles, Busby fast acquired the “reputation of having become a standpatter,” explained Goldman. “His newsletters had a businessman’s ring and occasionally talked of liberals with asperity,” and on the topic of John Kennedy’s New Frontier he was especially cutting. “Kennedy’s ‘thinkers’—despite academic credentials—haven’t innovated,” he grumbled in a typical display of pragmatic derision for intellectuals who opined about, but could not achieve, lasting reform. “They are tinkerers, mechanics. Thus far, the
y’ve wrought very little of moment.” But his was not a simple case of political apostasy. Busby “remained open and freewheeling, his conversation roamed left and right, his humaneness was undiminished.”

  In his capacity as a private adviser to the vice president, in 1963 he urged LBJ to accept an invitation to speak at Gettysburg National Cemetery on Memorial Day. Later that year, Americans would commemorate the centenary of Abraham Lincoln’s dedication speech, and now, over a long, poolside conversation at the Elms, Buzz took a mental recording of Johnson’s spontaneous and heartfelt sentiment about the meaning of that occasion. He returned home and typed out a short address that he believed captured the spirit of their discussion and thought nothing more about it until the Washington Post ran the text in its entirety on the front page. “One hundred years ago, the slave was freed,” Johnson intoned. “One hundred years later, the Negro remains in bondage to the color of his skin. The Negro today asks justice. We do not answer him—we do not answer those who lie beneath this soil—when we reply to the Negro by asking, ‘Patience.’” In a speech that excoriated the stall tactics that Johnson’s Senate colleagues had deployed to block civil rights legislation, the vice president insisted that “our nation found its soul in honor on these fields of Gettysburg one hundred years ago. We must not lose that soul in dishonor now on the fields of hate.”

  Though some observers worried that Busby would pull Lyndon Johnson to the political right, on balance he would exert a strong and decidedly liberal—if not always crusading—influence on the new president.

  Within a matter of weeks, Buzz—whom one colleague assessed as “one hell of a nice guy,” “a genial man, just turned forty, stocky, soft-mannered and rarely without a good-humored word for everyone”—sold his interest in the American International Business Research Corporation and for the second time in his life took a steep cut in salary to work for Lyndon Johnson. Installing himself first in a palatial suite of rooms in the East Wing, and later in a small office just three doors from the Oval, he gradually assumed the responsibilities of senior speechwriter and cabinet secretary—the chief liaison between the White House and the various executive agencies that would administer LBJ’s Great Society programs.

  • • • • •

  Rounding out LBJ’s new “Texas mafia” was Bill Don Moyers, who rushed to Johnson’s side on November 22 and swiftly became the president’s indispensable man. He was, according to the new president, “about the most unusual 29-year-old I ever saw.”

  The son of a struggling truck driver and candy salesman, Moyers grew up in Marshall, Texas, where he excelled in high school and subsequently matriculated at North Texas State College in Denton. After his sophomore year, Bill—an ambitious, earnest sort who had been voted both class president and “most outstanding” boy on campus—wrote an ingratiating letter to the state’s senior senator, Lyndon Johnson, seeking summer employment. He was deliberating on his major, he explained, and a tour in Washington might help him decide between government, journalism, and education. After checking his credentials with a local newspaper editor, LBJ offered the young man a temporary position in his Washington office. In a matter of weeks, Moyers graduated from addressing form letters by the thousand with a rickety foot-pedal machine to managing LBJ’s personal correspondence. Impressed by his drive and acuity, Johnson helped him secure a transfer to the state’s flagship public university at Austin and offered him a “part-time” job at the Johnson family’s television affiliate, KTBC, where he ultimately worked fifty-hour weeks reporting news and traffic. The job not only secured his relationship with Johnson and paid his tuition; it also enabled him to marry his college sweetheart.

  After graduating from UT, Moyers won a Rotary International Fellowship to the University of Edinburgh. There, his wife, Judy, taught school in a nearby coal town while Bill studied the interplay between church and state in Western civilization and developed a keen passion for Greek literature. (His White House colleagues later fell squarely into two camps: those who smiled in knowing approval and those who privately rolled their eyes when, as he was wont to do, he described the president’s health policy adviser as exhibiting honor “that would have led Diogenes to extinguish his lamp.”) Returning to Texas, Moyers spent a year at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, became an ordained minister, and considered accepting a faculty position at Baylor University. But “there was something about being called ‘reverend’ that I couldn’t endure and my wife couldn’t either,” he explained. Bill joined LBJ’s presidential campaign and, despite his youth and inexperience, emerged as a trusted aide and able tactician. “John Connally is a really tough man,” another aide observed of LBJ’s longtime staff assistant and the future Texas governor, “but he couldn’t organize him. But that Moyers, who was just a kid, could organize him. He could get him to do things he should do when none of the rest of us could. I suppose it was Moyers’ gentle patience that did it.”

  He remained on staff through the fall campaign and carefully cultivated relationships with key advisers to the Kennedy family. Though Johnson asked him to join his vice presidential office, Moyers had something different in mind. Possessed of an evangelical reform spirit, but also attuned to where real power would lie in the new administration, he secured an introduction to Sargent Shriver, a Kennedy brother-in-law who had been designated to lead the Peace Corps—the New Frontier’s signature initiative—and eventually rose to become the agency’s director of public affairs. Through his close association with Shriver and his deliberate cultivation of younger, low-level and mid-level Kennedy aides, Moyers, more than anyone else on LBJ’s White House staff, could credibly claim to be both “an authentic Johnson man and an authentic New Frontiersman,” as Tom Wicker of the New York Times argued. He was a “useful linchpin holding Kennedy and Johnson men together.”

  Charles Roberts sized up Moyers as “a slight, bespectacled, scholarly-looking, 160-pound six footer” who looked “more like Clark Kent than Superman.” But he was formidable. From his perch at the Peace Corps, and “in imitation of his mentor, LBJ,” observed Goldman, “he began building an empire. He started binding to himself—by camaraderie, by favors given and favors hinted, by a general air of pushing ahead together—a number of younger men throughout the federal government.” Given his religious piety and association with the Peace Corps, he soon gained recognition—deserved or not—as the social conscience of LBJ’s White House. (For a time, the new president encouraged this notion: not long before he delivered the speech that heralded his Great Society program, Johnson instructed Moyers to “get your Bible . . . and get us some good quotations on equality, and we’re all of God’s children . . . you mark yourself a lot of good quotations on it, and then get a central theme and a good lead.”) Jack Valenti later ventured that the robe “tended to lull people into a false sense of security, I mean, give them the idea that this was a nice young man. . . . But Bill was a technician in the use of power.”

  Well-known and equally well regarded within staff circles, Moyers settled easily into his new presidential staff role, even before he formally left the Peace Corps. Two days after Kennedy’s assassination, Johnson spoke by phone with the civil rights leader Whitney Young, who explained that he and Roy Wilkins, the executive director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), had not managed to secure tickets to the funeral. The president used Moyers as a back channel to Shriver, who promptly made arrangements. “All right,” Johnson told Young. “Now if you don’t [receive the tickets], you call Bill Moyer [sic] through the White House switchboard.”

  “Bill Moyer?” Young asked in confirmation.

  “Yeah. M-O-Y-E-R [sic]. He’s my assistant,” Johnson responded.

  “Yes, I know him.”

  It took little time before everyone knew Bill D. Moyers. “As molder of the President’s legislative program—the man to whom task forces, Cabinet officers and speechwriters submitted their ideas—he
is more nearly the architect of the Great Society than any other man save the President himself,” Roberts informed readers in early 1965. “He is involved in more policy decisions in more areas of government than any other Presidential aide. . . . He is the primus inter pares (first among equals). . . . He is, according to one LBJ friend, the President’s ‘good angel, representing his conscience when there’s a conflict between conscience and expediency.’”

  Exhibiting the same calculated earnestness that drove his critics to distraction, Moyers insisted that he was not an “exciting, interesting, mysterious person behind the scenes. I’m just here helping a friend, and when that ends I’ll drift away and never be heard of again.”

  • • • • •

  When Horace Busby first left LBJ’s employ in 1951, the man whom he recommended as his replacement was George Reedy, an erudite newspaperman who graduated from the University of Chicago and served as an intelligence officer in the Pacific during World War II before moving to Washington to cover Congress for UPI. “Six feet two inches tall, the loose body barely concealed in sagging suits, ponderous in walk and speech, Reedy had a swift, powerful mind, a delight in books and talking about them,” recalled Goldman. He had “an instinct for philosophical quandrums, and a quiet, subtle religious faith.”

  During Johnson’s tenure as majority leader, Reedy served as policy director, press secretary, and liberal alter ego. He was a shrewd counselor, and his outsized personality matched his expansive frame. “George lived a life that only a political junkie could live,” Harry McPherson recalled. He would arrive at the office late in the morning, hours after most staff members had begun work. By routine, around 6:30 p.m. he made his way to an Italian restaurant near Eastern Market, where, in the company of reporters and labor leaders, he would inhale “an enormous number of martinis” before returning to the office at 11:30 p.m. to turn out another policy or political memorandum for LBJ.