Building the Great Society

by Joshua Zeitz

  Jim Rowe would later maintain that “George was a mirror of [Johnson’s] thinking. I had trouble deciding which was which. . . . George had been around him so much he knew exactly how he thought, and knew how he would react.” Yet as was so often the case in his interaction with staff members, LBJ’s relationship with Reedy was rife with contradiction. Johnson regarded Reedy as a genuine intellectual and political asset, but he could also prove unfailingly cruel. A prodigious drinker, smoker, and eater, Reedy fluctuated in weight from as little as two hundred pounds to almost three hundred pounds and suffered from chronic hammertoes and hypertension. “I remember one time standing with Johnson on the [Senate] floor and George came heavily almost like Willy Loman down the halls and off to the chamber,” McPherson told an interviewer, “perspiration coming down his face, face white, painfully coming across the floor, Johnson was saying, ‘Look at George moving his fat ass across the floor.’ I mean it was said with real contempt for this guy who was just busting his tail in every way for Lyndon Johnson and who adored him, who thought he was the greatest of all men.” Such abuse was typical of LBJ, who routinely showered invective on his most loyal retainers—even those, like Reedy, for whom he felt genuine affection. When Reedy’s obesity began to pose a real health threat in 1964, the president phoned George’s physician, arranged for hospitalization and a weight-loss regimen, and offered to cover the bills. On another occasion, LBJ administered a “terrific tongue lashing” to Reedy but subsequently bought him a car—not at all out of character for Johnson, who lavished expensive gifts on his staff members.

  Reedy, who had “grey hair en brosse and puffs at a pipe” while lecturing his audience on all manner of topics, impressed one veteran reporter as a “large, rumpled man whose ponderous approach sometimes obscures a well-stocked and active mind.” There was a limit to LBJ’s patience for his longtime aide; he sometimes preferred reading his memorandums to speaking with him in person. But there was little doubting LBJ’s trust in his intellect and instinct. “You ask him what that tree is over there, and he’ll tell you who first brought it to this country and talk half an hour before he tells you what you wanted to know in the first place,” the president complained. “But he knows what he’s talking about.”

  On the afternoon of Kennedy’s assassination, Reedy had been working out of his office on the Senate side of the U.S. Capitol, where vice presidents traditionally based their small staffs. He first learned of the news when Busby telephoned him. Jenkins called him later in the afternoon and asked that he come directly to the White House. Though he was one of the president’s longest-serving aides, Reedy shared his colleague’s hesitation to overstep his place. “Both Walter and I took the position that we didn’t want to be issuing orders or making determinations at that particular point,” he later explained. “All we really knew, and our information was extremely sketchy . . . was what was on the ticker.” On the helicopter to Andrews Air Force Base, Reedy sat beside Ted Sorensen, one of JFK’s most trusted advisers, with whom he had been acquainted since their days as Senate staff members. He escorted the new president back to the Executive Office Building, where, the next morning, he reported directly for work. Weeks later, he installed himself in the White House; for the time being he would serve as a general utility player, hammering out policy and political memorandums and turning his years of service to good use in helping Johnson channel his inner liberal.

  • • • • •

  From the start, Johnson was determined to keep Kennedy’s core White House aides in place. He understood that his Texans were untried and untested and that his early success was contingent on the appearance of continuity with JFK’s New Frontier—a sentiment that he expressed in the most memorable line of his address to Congress on November 27: “Let us continue.” In his first moments as president, aboard Air Force One as it sat on the runway at Love Field, Johnson huddled with Kenneth O’Donnell and Larry O’Brien, two of Kennedy’s closest and most trusted aides, and pleaded with them to remain at their posts. “I need your help,” he implored. “I need it badly. There is no one for me to turn to with as much experience as you have. I need you now more than President Kennedy needed you.” It had been less than two hours since JFK died, and both men were still profoundly in shock. “We can talk about all that later, or some other time,” O’Brien muttered. O’Donnell was equally “noncommittal,” by his own account.

  Among Kennedy’s senior staff, O’Brien, who directed congressional outreach for the White House, was first to commit to the new president. The son of an Irish tavern keeper in Springfield, Massachusetts, O’Brien was a skilled and widely respected political operative who became acquainted with the Kennedys in 1952, when he agreed to work on Jack’s first Senate race. He was a key architect of JFK’s blowout reelection campaign in 1958 and engineered pivotal victories in the Wisconsin and West Virginia primaries in 1960. After directing political activities in the general election campaign, O’Brien staked his claim on the White House office of legislative liaison, only to learn that Jack and Bobby Kennedy felt it was a poor fit for someone with negligible experience on Capitol Hill. When he threatened to pack his bags and return to Springfield, the Kennedys relented, in part because they did not want to anger O’Brien’s many supporters among the party’s leadership ranks, but also because they envisioned little movement on domestic legislation in JFK’s first term and regarded the legislative function as less important.

  Because O’Brien was a long-standing member of Kennedy’s “Irish mafia,” a triad of senior advisers that also included O’Donnell and David Powers, LBJ might have assumed that he was loath to remain at his post. Certainly he pulled out all the stops in his courtship. In early December, he invited O’Brien and his wife to a private dinner at the Elms and plied them with gifts, including a bottle of perfume for Elva O’Brien and a sports shirt emblazed with the initials “LBJ” for Larry. Such gestures first left him uncomfortable, though by Christmas, when Johnson gave him an engraved wristwatch, O’Brien came to appreciate the president’s solicitousness. Unlike the Kennedys, the Johnson family routinely invited aides to the White House residence for cocktails or dinner. “He would be interested in your wife and that she was included. Elva got to really love Lady Bird, and she was very much involved, which was not the case with Jackie. The situation was considerably different.”

  Johnson was a careful student of other people and quickly sized up his opportunity. Unlike many of his colleagues in the Kennedy White House, O’Brien was not a scion of Harvard or Yale, or a veteran combat officer, but a working-class graduate of Western New England University who had been drafted into the army as an enlisted man and, because of poor eyesight, never saw combat. He regarded himself as a trusted political associate of the Kennedys but not a “social friend.” Conscious that he lacked the “Harvard style,” he soon developed a more natural rapport with LBJ, who “ran an elevator and then . . . worked in a congressional office.” LBJ encouraged him to make this connection. “I had gone to night law school, I was not part of the Eastern Establishment, I had worked for a congressman as a young guy, I had struggled in the boondocks of politics, in the nuts and bolts of politics. I had worked arduously and I had made a contribution to the legislative program, and it was high time that the record recognize me by title. That was really his whole pitch, and I think he really felt that way, that he and I did have a lot in common, and we did. . . . He wasn’t the son of immigrant parents, but his years as a youth and the economic struggle and all was very much comparable to mine.” Like Johnson, he regarded himself as “very much a New Dealer” in spirit. “I could equate with Lyndon Johnson’s view of social problems, because as a kid my family and relatives and friends had many of the same experiences that Johnson’s associates had when he was a young fellow. And we shared a strong, strong feeling about the Roosevelt era and what it meant. I think it had political connotations because it made us even prouder to be Democrats.”

  • • •
• •

  From the earliest days of his presidency, Johnson relied on the informal counsel of three friends whom he had known since the New Deal era: Jim Rowe and Clark Clifford—the architects of Harry Truman’s improbable, come-from-behind electoral strategy in 1948—and Abe Fortas, a title partner in the powerful law firm of Arnold, Fortas & Porter.

  Rowe was a native of Butte, Montana, who moved east at the age of eighteen to attend Harvard University. After remaining in Cambridge to earn his law degree, in 1934 he relocated to Washington, D.C., where he served as clerk to Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who—like many other retired Supreme Court justices—still maintained chambers. After Holmes’s death, Rowe cycled between high-level posts at a number of New Deal agencies, including the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, the Public Works Administration, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Labor Department, where he helped launch Aid for Dependent Children (later renamed Aid to Families with Dependent Children). By the late 1930s, he was assigned to the White House, where he served as Franklin Roosevelt’s chief administrative assistant, a role in which he enjoyed considerable influence. It was roughly around this time that the freshman congressman Lyndon Johnson befriended him. LBJ relied on Rowe and his wife, Elizabeth, for introductions to the city’s leading New Deal staff members. The Johnsons soon enjoyed regular invitations to dinner parties at the Rowes’ home, where Lyndon would suck the air out of the room and engage the other guests in long—often amusing—monologues until, eventually, “people would drift off and start having their own conversations. When he saw he had lost his audience, he would just go to sleep, just sit there [at the table] and go to sleep.” The friendship was genuine, though each man benefited from his association with the other. When LBJ ran unsuccessfully for an unexpired Senate seat in 1941, Rowe, at FDR’s direction, aggressively funneled federal projects through Texas to benefit the young, New Deal congressman. When the navy rejected Rowe in 1943 because of his poor eyesight, Johnson intervened to secure him a commission.

  As deputy attorney general, adviser to the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal, campaign manager for Adlai Stevenson in 1952, and a partner in one of Washington’s most prestigious law firms, Rowe built a distinguished career in parallel to Johnson. He was one of very few individuals whom Johnson regarded as an equal, though LBJ being LBJ, there was always a caveat. After suffering a near-fatal heart attack in 1955, he beseeched Rowe to take leave from his practice and join his Senate office. “I can’t afford it,” Rowe repeatedly demurred. “I’ll lose clients.” His real concern was that he would suffer the same abuse that Lyndon imposed on all of his beleaguered staff members. But Johnson was relentless. “People I knew were coming up to me on the street—on the street,” Rowe later remembered, “and saying, ‘Why aren’t you helping Lyndon? Don’t you know how sick he is? How can you let him down when he needs you?’” LBJ managed to enlist Rowe’s law partner, Tom “the Cork” Corcoran, the legendary New Deal wunderkind and Washington, D.C., fixer. “You can’t just do this to Lyndon Johnson!” Corcoran implored. “Never mind the clients. I’ll hold down the law firm.” He even conscripted Elizabeth Rowe, who asked her husband, “Why are you doing this to poor Lyndon?” Rowe took a leave of absence and, as he suspected, endured daily abuse from his temporary boss, the Senate majority leader. After a single session of Congress, he returned to his law practice.

  In 1960, Rowe managed LBJ’s unsuccessful bid for the Democratic presidential nomination. The two friends feuded bitterly over the campaign’s direction, culminating in a vituperative exchange of accusations and insults. After that episode, they “more or less drifted apart,” as Rowe later recalled. He would occasionally brush shoulders with LBJ and could not help but note the shabby way in which Robert Kennedy and other New Frontiersmen treated the vice president, but until November 1963 he kept a distance. Three days after taking the oath of office at Love Field, Johnson personally reached out to his onetime friend and—in a rare display of contrition—apologized for his role in breaching their friendship. It was an emotional conversation for both men. “My God, Mr. President, it wasn’t your fault,” Rowe said, with tears in his eyes. “Yes, it was,” Johnson replied. “Don’t argue with me. Just be content to be the first man to whom the 36th President of the United States has offered his apologies.”

  Rowe later concluded that Johnson was “touching all his old bases as soon as he became president. . . . He was seeing all his old friends that he had known from the beginning of the New Deal. Not so much he wanted their help, which he did want, but it’s almost like a superstition, coming back and touching all these things.”

  Johnson offered Rowe various government appointments, including the post of budget director, a job that the president knew his friend had very much wanted ten years earlier, had Adlai Stevenson won the presidency. But Rowe was content to remain a close adviser, of but not in the White House.

  • • • • •

  Clark Clifford was a young attorney and navy reservist when in the spring of 1945 a local acquaintance from his hometown of St. Louis, Commander James Vardaman, arranged his appointment as a military aide to fellow Missourian Harry Truman, who acceded to the presidency after FDR’s death in April. Tall, wavy-haired, and endowed with strong, chiseled features, Clifford looked the part. Despite his political inexperience, by 1946 he earned appointment as special counsel to the president, a senior role recently occupied by Roosevelt’s indispensable legislative draftsman and political adviser, Sam Rosenman. In November 1947, Clifford and Rowe presented Truman with a forty-seven-page memorandum that laid out the elaborate strategy behind his improbable victory the following year, a coup for which they remained famous almost two decades later.

  When Jim Rowe served as the top staff man to FDR, Johnson enjoyed essentially unfettered access to the Oval Office. He enjoyed no such preexisting relationship with “this curly-haired fellow, Clifford,” who “doesn’t want the President to be around southerners and political types,” LBJ groused to Horace Busby in 1948. In fact, Truman had initially been friendly enough to Johnson, inviting him several times to sail on the presidential yacht and to meet with him at the White House. But after 1947, when Johnson joined other southern conservatives in voting to override the president’s veto of the Taft-Hartley Act—a law that sharply curtailed the right of workers to join unions and bargain collectively—the president locked LBJ out.

  In the years after he left government service and launched a successful law practice in Washington, D.C., Clifford would encounter LBJ every few months, usually on the cocktail circuit, though he was “a friend who was available to him as a consultant and as an advisor” and sometimes offered his assistance to the Senate majority leader or vice president. But their relationship, if cordial, “was not a real close one.” That dynamic changed in November 1963. The day after JFK’s assassination, Johnson summoned Clifford to the Elms, where the two men conferred from early afternoon until late evening, interrupted or joined by a flurry of aides and advisers who cycled through the temporary presidential residence. “From then on the relationship . . . really achieved an entirely different image and purpose and function,” Clifford later recalled. “He had this mean job . . . and I had served as a presidential adviser for some four or five years before.” He functioned thereafter as one of LBJ’s wise men—an informal, outside adviser until 1968, when he agreed to join the cabinet.

  • • • • •

  Abe Fortas and Lyndon Johnson first made each other’s acquaintance in 1938. Fortas—a Yale Law School graduate who came to Washington at the invitation of his mentor, the SEC chairman and future justice William O. Douglas—and LBJ, who was then serving his first term in Congress, belonged to a tight social network of upcoming New Dealers who shared a common ambition and liberal affinity. The group included LBJ and his wife, Lady Bird; Rowe, who was then serving as FDR’s executive assistant; Clifford and Virginia Durr, who would later earn a place in history as friends and advoca
tes of the civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks; and Justice Hugo Black and his wife, Josephine. The bonds that they forged over cocktail parties at the Johnsons’ small apartment on Connecticut Avenue or back-garden cookouts at the Black family’s more stately home on Seminary Hill would, with some strains and exceptions, last a lifetime.

  After serving in a string of powerful New Deal posts, Fortas entered into private practice and swiftly emerged as one of Washington’s highest-paid attorneys. By happy coincidence, he was on business in Dallas in late 1948, precisely when LBJ needed help in a last-ditch effort to overturn a federal court ruling that would have removed his name from the general election ballot pending resolution of a hotly contested U.S. Senate primary. Fortas devised a complicated, risky, and ultimately successful strategy that involved deliberately losing an appeal at the circuit court level in order to kick the case to Hugo Black, who enjoyed jurisdiction over the Fifth Circuit. The rest was history.

  Even as he built a lucrative practice representing clients in the private sector, Fortas remained a committed advocate of liberal reform. He and his law partners, Thurman Arnold and Paul Porter, were among a handful of prominent attorneys who represented government employees before anticommunist loyalty boards in the late 1940s. “Everybody, I assume, now knows that in the thirties and part of the forties, thousands of fine, thoroughly non-Communist people contributed to Spanish relief organizations, attended anti-Fascist meetings, participated in rallies against Hitler, joined in organizations to promote friendship with the Soviet Union when it was our wartime ally,” he explained. Now such past activities threatened to derail the careers of longtime civil servants and even result in criminal trials or public shaming before House and Senate committees. Fortas and his partners handled most such cases at cost; their defense of Owen Lattimore, a leading Near East expert whom Joseph McCarthy publicly accused of spying for Russia, racked up $2.5 million in shadow billings. “We of course take his and all other cases for nothing and, if necessary, put up expenses,” he told a reporter. They did so, he later explained, because “we were ‘liberals.’ We were New Dealers.” If they lost corporate business because of their full-throated defense of McCarthy’s victims, it was an outcome that the partners were willing to tolerate. “There are some things you have to do in order to live with yourself,” he told a reporter.