Building the Great Society

by Joshua Zeitz

  LBJ ultimately delivered Goodwin’s draft (with embellishments by Moyers), and to great fanfare. Riding back to Washington on Air Force One, Charles Roberts witnessed “the president in his manic phase . . . he was absolutely euphoric . . . he was sweating and exuberant. He violated his old rule and had himself a drink, a Scotch highball, and came back to our press pool.” When Roberts complimented the president on his performance, noting that the audience had interrupted him twenty-seven times with applause, LBJ excitedly called Jack Valenti over to display an annotated copy of the text. “No, no,” Johnson insisted, “there were twenty-nine.” Roberts grasped the import of the moment. “That was his unveiling of the Great Society, his own program, the program he was going to run on the next fall.”

  Years later, in a rare interview about his tenure in the White House, Moyers conceded that Johnson “never really liked the term Great Society. It didn’t come easily to him.” Like Busby, Valenti, and Reedy, he equated liberalism with “fulfilling FDR’s mission.” “I’m going to be President for nine years and so many days,” he habitually reminded Moyers, “almost as long as FDR or second only to FDR.” Yet “fulfilling FDR’s mission” was by no means a cut-and-dried mission, because the New Deal itself had been a loose idea. Some of its components, like the National Industrial Recovery Act, sought to restructure American capitalism along the lines of European-style syndicates; others sought to break up monopolies. It was composed of temporary relief and infrastructure programs like the Works Progress Administration, the Public Works Administration, and the National Youth Administration and of lasting measures like old age insurance, unemployment insurance, and mortgage insurance, all of which removed some of the basic risks associated with everyday life. The New Deal was not in most respects redistributionist, though it did tilt the scales in favor of workers’ rights by providing for collective bargaining, maximum hours, and a minimum wage. In effect, it was a malleable idea. “The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent experimentation,” Roosevelt famously argued. “It is common sense to take a method and try it: If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.” When they urged the president to pattern his agenda along the lines of the New Deal, Busby and Valenti were not arguing against the concrete action items that the president had prioritized for 1964—civil rights, an antipoverty measure, a tax cut to stimulate the economy. Neither were they opposed to promises that would follow in 1965—aid to schools and universities, environmental legislation, health care for the elderly. They wanted, rather, to identify his administration with concrete and attainable goals around which LBJ could build national consensus, and they recoiled from grandiose promises that the president might not be able to keep. George Reedy, who later had a serious ax to grind with Bill Moyers, identified a divide between younger staff members of the 1960s generation and older advisers who had come of age in the days of the Roosevelt and Truman administrations. Others perceived the emergence of rival camps: “liberals” like Moyers and Richard Goodwin, on the one hand, and “conservatives” like Busby and Valenti, on the other. The debate was about what liberalism meant, not whether it should inform domestic policy.

  Busby, who had served off and on since 1948 as LBJ’s “ideas man,” was now in direct conflict with Bill Moyers, whose “militant conscience,” according to an admiring journalist—“not zealot, not fanatic, just that of a young man responding with a wish for action to inner knowledge of what is right”—made him the resident White House moralist. Widely hailed as the administration’s bridge to the Kennedys, Moyers appeared to be the very antithesis of Busby, a pro-business Texan more than ten years his senior (though as one astute columnist observed, “Mr. Busby would not seem conservative in Congress or in most state capitals”). Some of the distance between the two men was simply personal. They “clashed very early,” Valenti would explain. “Buzz had been with the President the longest, his oldest and trusted aide, and probably next to Goodwin the best writer I ever saw. Buzz is a philosophical man; he’s not happy in the corridors of raw naked power. He’d rather philosophize than brutalize. He thought a good deal, and while this is very useful to a President, it doesn’t help you if you get in open conflict with some colleague who has shored up all the sides of the circle.” An ardent student of politics from his early days as an elementary school student, Busby—who once told a colleague, “I am not the praying type myself”—seemed galled to find himself politically outmaneuvered at every step by a Baptist preacher.

  But their friction was also philosophical in nature. Where Moyers and Goodwin would refashion LBJ in the image of a prophet, Busby feared that displays of “evangelistic fervor” would play poorly with “the vast middle majority of America—particularly beyond the Eastern seaboard.” Ordinary voters would support tangible programs that benefited a broad swath of the citizenry. They would not be moved by gauzy promises of a better world or more meaningful human existence. By contrast, Moyers invoked the memory of Theodore Roosevelt when he urged Johnson to regard the White House as “a bully good pulpit.” The president, he believed, “must use it to exert the moral leadership without which none of these issues can capture the public attention or concern.”

  However much they differed in their temperamental and rhetorical approach to presidential leadership, Johnson’s aides shared prevailing liberal orthodoxy that the United States was a rich nation and advised the president that “we are enjoying abundance, we have statistically and actually the best life any people have ever known. But we are putting proportionately less of that wealth and abundance back into the renewal of our society than at any time since the pre-depression era.” Buzz agreed with his younger colleagues that “while comfort has come to us abundantly, abundance itself has brought us little comfort. Our age is eventful and exciting—but many lives are afflicted with boredom and dullness.” Moreover, all of Johnson’s aides—Busby, Valenti, and Reedy; Moyers and Goodwin—concurred that the “Great Society rests on abundance and liberty for all. It demands an end to poverty and racial injustice, to which we are totally committed in our time.” They shared a commitment to build schools and make financial investments in urban renewal. If Moyers and Goodwin fundamentally envisioned the Great Society as proof that “our material progress is only the foundation on which we will build a richer life of mind and spirit,” for Buzz it was something far more concrete. Having built a successful private-sector research consultancy, he envisioned the Great Society in brick-and-mortar terms: investments in science (“perhaps the most universally intriguing field of the present period”), mental health services, transportation and infrastructure (including 150-mile-per-hour trains that would connect metropolitan areas), library construction, and small businesses. And—a theme to which he would return time and again—a sweeping overhaul of government at all levels, to bring the full advantages of modern business management to the public sector. His vision was by no means as grandiose as that which Moyers and Goodwin urged on the president, but it reflected the spirit of growth liberalism in its faith that government could unlock opportunity by making broad investments that benefited all of its citizens.

  In later years, Johnson’s disparagers would argue that the administration raised public expectations with elaborate promises to remedy problems that government simply could not solve. Reedy would claim that this had always been his criticism of the Great Society’s sales pitch. But the real divide among Johnson’s aides was not whether the agenda should be narrow or expansive. Even the relative moderates among them aspired to complete Roosevelt’s New Deal by enacting and administering comprehensive education and health-care programs, enhancing the safety net for the most vulnerable Americans, and integrating schools, hospitals, and places of public accommodation. It was rather a gulf between conventional liberals like Reedy, Valenti, and Busby, who championed tangible measures that would materially benefit as many Americans as possible, and younger liberals like Moyers and Good
win, who believed that government should also address more nebulous, qualitative challenges to the public spirit. There was a good deal of common ground. Douglass Cater, who did not fall neatly in either camp, suggested to the president that just as the Council of Economic Advisers delivered an annual report to Congress on the nation’s “economic well-being,” the administration ought to initiate an annual report “examining the ‘quality’ of life in the Great Society.” Most of the benchmarks that he proposed reflected long-standing liberal programs: achieving benchmarks for life expectancy, infant mortality, the eradication of disease, school completion, and crime prevention. But he distinguished between the “‘quality’ [and] the ‘quantity’ of life in America. This cannot be stated solely with an economic yardstick.”

  All of Johnson’s aides spoke the common vernacular of growth liberalism, with its faith in quantitative measures to unlock individual opportunity. Some also echoed liberal economic and social critics like Dwight Macdonald and John Kenneth Galbraith who regarded the country’s misuse of its wealth and power as a missed opportunity. Others, like Busby, Valenti, and Reedy, preferred to keep the administration’s feet firmly on the ground. The promise of good schools and access to medical care was lofty enough without faraway promises to fix humankind’s broken spirit.

  It was not simply that Busby remained unconvinced that Goodwin’s prose would work for Johnson. He doubted that it had worked for Kennedy. Early in 1964, Buzz carefully analyzed the Kennedy administration’s poll numbers and concluded that for all of JFK’s dash and youthful appeal—and however intensely the illuminati in official Washington circles might have worshipped him—the New Frontier had racked up precious few domestic achievements. On the eve of his death, JFK was personally popular, but his agenda remained bottled up in Congress, and his administration’s approval ratings were plummeting.

  As late as May 19—just three days before LBJ’s speech in Ann Arbor—Busby urged the president to tell reporters that he was “rejecting efforts to label his Administration’s program, such as FDR’s ‘New Deal,’ Truman’s ‘Fair Deal,’ Kennedy’s ‘New Frontier.’” He would ultimately reconcile himself to the term, though not to Bill Moyers’s and Dick Goodwin’s understanding of what it meant.

  • • • • •

  No component of the Great Society was more critical than the civil rights bill before Congress. In his first hours as president, Johnson signaled to friend and foe alike that its passage would be a central feature of his agenda in 1964. “Dick, I love you,” he told his mentor Richard Brevard Russell, the senior senator from Georgia and acknowledged leader of the chamber’s southern bloc. “I owe you. But I’m going to run over you if you challenge me or get in my way. I aim to pass the civil rights bill, only this time, Dick, there will be no caviling, no compromise, no falling back. This bill is going to pass.” During his tenure in the House, Johnson had been a reliable vote against civil rights legislation, including measures that would have made lynching a federal crime, outlawed the poll tax, and established a permanent fair employment practices committee. In the Senate, he devoted his maiden speech to a ringing defense of southern traditions and repeatedly frustrated liberals by forestalling consideration of civil rights legislation. Only in 1957, with one eye cast on the White House, did he concede the necessity of mollifying his liberal critics by moving a bill through the Senate, but he stripped that measure down so severely that it was little better than a token measure.

  In later years, George Reedy, whose relationship with Johnson ended on bad terms, was unsparing in his criticism of his longtime boss. Yet he would go to the grave firm in the conviction that LBJ was “one of the least prejudiced or biased or intolerant or bigoted men I have ever met. He has many shortcomings and he has many failings, but I don’t believe there is any racial prejudice in him whatsoever; and this is the thing that became very, very apparent to most of the Negro leaders when they had a chance to know him personally.” As a young man in Texas in the early 1930s, Johnson taught at an elementary school populated by impoverished Mexican children. His commitment to his students was so ardent that even his most critical biographers acknowledge it as a genuine reflection of his character. Those few observers who bothered to take note of LBJ during his years in JFK’s shadow saw a new and unanticipated persuasion emerge as though from nowhere. He delivered stirring remarks in favor of civil rights at Detroit’s Wayne State University in January 1963 and again at Gettysburg in May. He signaled his strong support for Kennedy’s civil rights bill but voiced legitimate concern that the administration had no viable plan to navigate the complicated roadblocks that southern lawmakers would inevitably stand up in both houses of Congress. When in the spring of 1963 JFK hosted a sequence of meetings with civic, religious, and business leaders to build support for the legislation, LBJ confounded liberal activists by emerging as the strongest voice for action. “Kennedy had made an intellectual appeal for the lawyers’ duty and so forth,” remembered one prominent civil rights leader. “There was no passion in any of it until LBJ took the podium. And he gave an impassioned speech about what kind of a country is this that a man can go die in a foxhole and can’t get a hamburger in a public restaurant. I would say he was by far the most effective fellow there. I was impressed by him.”

  In 1957, Senate majority leader Johnson had twisted arms, deployed obscure parliamentary procedure, and doled out rewards and punishments to neuter an otherwise strong civil rights measure. Now, as president, Johnson threw the weight of his office behind the fight to pass a bill that would outlaw segregation in public accommodations and provide for remedies to combat racial discrimination in the workplace. He urged union leaders like Dave McDonald of the United Steelworkers to apply lobbying muscle on Capitol Hill. He implored friends like Katharine Graham, publisher of the Washington Post, to turn up the heat on recalcitrant members of Congress. He actively encouraged the bill’s managers to whip up support for a discharge petition in the House and might have played a decisive role in persuading House Republicans to threaten to join with liberal Democrats in a bipartisan takeover of the Rules Committee. (“If I were you, Charlie,” LBJ told the House GOP leader, Charles Halleck of Indiana, “I wouldn’t dare go out and try to make a Lincoln Birthday speech” without committing to the bill. “They’ll laugh you right out of the goddamned park when Howard Smith’s got his foot on Lincoln’s neck.” For good measure, he held out the possibility of building a NASA science center in Halleck’s district.) Faced with the real likelihood that he would lose his gavel, Smith relented. “I’ve been around a long time, and I recognize the facts of life,” he conceded, “and one of the facts of life is that this bill is going to the floor, and that it is going soon.” After several days of debate, on February 10 the House passed the bill by a vote of 290 in favor to 130 opposed.

  It took four months before Senate liberals were able to break a southern filibuster and send the Civil Rights Act to Johnson’s desk. The president and his aides—particularly Larry O’Brien and his legislative affairs team—were deeply involved in driving strategy, but contrary to popular lore the president did not play a decisive role in securing cloture. He persuaded just one senator, Carl Hayden of Arizona, to absent himself from the chamber rather than vote to sustain the filibuster. While he attempted to move several southerners, including Al Gore Sr. of Tennessee, William Fulbright of Arkansas, and Robert Byrd of West Virginia (“You’re with me!” he pleaded with Byrd. “You’ve got to be with me”), all three opposed the bill to the bitter end—none more forcefully than Byrd, who personally filibustered it for over fourteen uninterrupted hours. Johnson wheedled the Senate Republican leader, Everett Dirksen, spoke strongly in favor of equal rights during his “Poverty Tour”—a series of speeches in favor of the administration’s War on Poverty that April—and signaled that he was willing to sacrifice other legislative priorities. If the Senate accomplished nothing else, he insisted, it must pass the civil rights bill.

  By throwin
g the full moral weight of the presidency behind the bill, LBJ did more for civil rights than any president since Lincoln. His outspoken support established a sense of purpose and urgency. But it was grassroots activists, religious and lay, who won the votes. Richard Russell later confided to a friend that the southern bloc “had been able to hold the line until all the churches joined the civil rights lobby in 1964.” Under the leadership of national organizations—and with coordination from Victor Reuther, an official with the United Auto Workers who also worked with the National Council of Churches—Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish clergy mounted an unrelenting and politically sophisticated campaign to win over strategically identified members of Congress. If organized labor held little sway with Republicans, ministers did. A loose confederation of clergymen activated a network of thousands of lay and religious community leaders who in turn spurred congregants to inundate key congressmen with telegrams and office visits. Congressional staff members soon became accustomed to the heavy volume of mail that poured in on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, inspired by synagogue and church sermons the weekend before. Joe Rauh, a prominent labor attorney and liberal leader who helped whip for the bill, remembered that in the Capitol complex that spring, “You couldn’t turn around where there wasn’t a clerical collar next to you.”

  Johnson was delivering a speech at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, on June 9 when an aide stepped quietly to his side to whisper the news. He reacted immediately. “We are going ahead in our country to bring an end to poverty and racial injustice,” he told the assembled audience. “In the last ten minutes we made progress. The Senate voted 71 to 29 for cloture.” The crowd roared. On July 2, at a White House ceremony, the president signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law.