Building the Great Society

by Joshua Zeitz

  Reedy was not above the occasional “gimmick.” He once arranged a news conference on the South Lawn to which the children of the press corps were invited. After his question-and-answer session, Johnson jubilantly posed for photographs with the daughters and sons of his jousting partners. The reporters greatly appreciated the gesture. But he felt caught between a rock and a hard place. “Reedy rarely got a respite from the demands of his job,” Roberts wrote. He was at the beck and call of the president (who insisted that he install a news ticker in his office bathroom, lest he skip a beat), on the one hand, and a press corps that grew increasingly skeptical of the administration’s credibility, on the other.

  In the immediate wake of his landslide victory against Barry Goldwater, Alan Otten of the Wall Street Journal reported that LBJ’s relationship with the press had reached its nadir. “Mr. Johnson does not enjoy great personal affection or respect from many editors and Washington correspondents,” the paper concluded. “Many resent his vanity, his corniness, the tendency of the President and his aides to slant or even twist facts.” During the fall campaign, most political reporters muted their dislike for LBJ out of genuine fear of a Goldwater victory. With that “threat now removed, it’s likely that large parts of the press will now flip-flop and become highly critical of Mr. Johnson.” In a portent of what was to come, Otten noted that, however unsuccessful Goldwater proved at the ballot box, he succeeded in sowing considerable doubt about LBJ’s trustworthiness and personal credibility—doubt that would follow him throughout the duration of his presidency. Merriman Smith of UPI agreed, observing in mid-1965 that Johnson, who “enjoyed a longer political honeymoon than most chief executives, is now experiencing the slings and arrows of outrageous criticism that invariably go with high office.” His quirky personality traits, which reporters initially regarded as the “colorful folkways” of a larger-than-life, southwestern politician, now seemed unbefitting the most powerful man in the country. Particularly loathsome to some members of the political press was Johnson’s addiction to raw polling data, a tendency that, in the opinion of one reporter, made him seem like “a man goaded by an insatiable need for public acclaim.” The charge was essentially fair—a fact that did not make Reedy’s job easier.

  Given the abundance of former newspaper reporters, editors, sometimes speechwriters, and image makers on the president’s staff, there was no shortage of public relations counsel. Early in his White House tenure, Busby encouraged LBJ to exude a more “relaxed demeanor—and a willingness to smile at questions. Visible good humor is especially desirable in responding to the usual ‘iffy’ questions about politics.” He also looked with disfavor upon Reedy’s practice of providing friendly columnists with the first bite at newsworthy information. Such columnists, by definition, would inevitably place the information in a favorable light, while the “younger front page byline reporters resent favored status of such highly-paid columnists and tend to regard most of them as non-critical apologists.” Instead, the White House should cultivate their favor by conducting more regular background briefings that provided the administration’s “line” on breaking news. Such practice would inevitably reduce the press secretary’s role in controlling the flow of information and empower the senior special assistants to speak more freely with the media.

  A year later, Buzz—who, with Johnson’s knowledge (and, quite possibly, encouragement), often circumvented Reedy to gauge the outlook and disposition of the White House press corps—warned that “the newsmen, almost universally, feel these are ‘worrisome times,’ and offer as supporting evidence what they describe as the ‘president’s withdrawal.’” A combination of “fewer public appearances, less visible ebullience [and] uncharacteristic ‘subdued’ appearances” left the journalists with a critical outlook on the president’s leadership.

  Valenti believed that television offered the president an opportunity to circumvent the opinion makers and communicate directly with the American people. He also understood that his principal was ill at ease with the medium. “You know the old cliche, but it was true,” he later acknowledged, “in a small room with a hundred people or ten people Johnson was magnificent—the most persuasive man I have ever met. But when he went before television, something happened. . . . He became kind of stiff and foreboding.” He encouraged LBJ to forgo his teleprompter and consulted several Hollywood producers to solicit their advice about how best to add production value to the president’s broadcast appearances. The initiative went nowhere. Johnson also rejected an offer by Fred Friendly, the president of CBS News, to produce a year-end television special for distribution on all three major networks, despite the assurances of one senior aide that Friendly was “the best in the business and has a proper sense of respect for the Presidency.”

  Increasingly, the president came across in media reports as a slippery character—his words calculated for maximum effect, his appearances overly staged and intended to manipulate public opinion, his lofty speeches unconvincing. By early 1965, to repair his public image, Johnson would need to think anew about his relationship with the Washington, D.C., press corps, and that process, in turn, would necessitate a change in personnel.

  Harry McPherson, who served alongside Reedy on LBJ’s Senate staff and later joined the White House as chief counsel to the president, sized up his colleague as hopelessly out of step with the vigor and bold experimentation that the Great Society hoped to project. “He was an old UPI fellow from Chicago,” McPherson coldly explained. “He had a lot of liberalism in him, but [not] of the radical kind. He was just not the guy to be the spokesman. For all the complaints that people have made about Moyers, self-serving, serving himself as against Johnson and all the rest of it, he was a far better proclaimer of the Great Society message, far more in tune with that kind of politics than George would have been.”

  In July, the White House announced that Moyers would replace Reedy in the role of press secretary. The official explanation for the switch was that Reedy required surgery to correct his chronic hammertoe, a condition that often left him in debilitating pain and unable on some days to walk. That much was true. The outgoing press secretary would remain a special assistant to the president without portfolio. Within the corridors of power, it was widely assumed that Moyers had sidelined Reedy and added the press office to his already swelling portfolio of responsibilities. Reedy would inculpate his colleague for playing a perpetual game of “court politics.” When later asked whether he thought the young theologian was “just specifically out for your job,” Reedy replied without hesitation: “No, he was out to be [the] number one man, and succeeded.”

  Publicly, the White House maintained that Moyers had been reluctant to accept the job, a posture that Reedy and others dismissed as pure fiction. On his first day in the role, reported the Los Angeles Times, the “youthful” Moyers—just thirty-one years old and now entrusted with a broad mandate that included domestic policy, White House administration, and the press office—“showed his virtuosity by easily fielding questions and reeling off facts so fast that only shorthand reporters could follow him.” At once earnest and urbane, he charmed a press corps that, in the main, felt warmly toward George Reedy but viewed Moyers as a more contemporary fit for the role.

  • • • • •

  Moyers was on the rise. Reedy was out (out of the press office, in any event). Califano was in. And so was Harry McPherson, a thirty-five-year-old attorney whom Bill Moyers lured from his post as assistant secretary of state for educational and cultural affairs. A “tall, handsome and personable” man, by Charles Roberts’s description, McPherson was a native of Tyler—an East Texas town not far from Marshall, where Moyers grew up. Though the local economy relied principally on oil and livestock, Tyler hosted a vibrant junior college and the East Texas Symphony Orchestra. Harry, whose father worked in advertising and whose mother was an aspiring novelist, grew up in a home rich with culture and art. Unlike other LBJ protégés, he bypassed the Univers
ity of Texas at Austin, training ground for generations of the state’s business and political leaders, preferring instead to attend the University of the South at Sewanee, Tennessee, still celebrated as the center of the southern agrarian literary movement that had captured the national imagination briefly in the 1930s. McPherson aspired to become a poet. After completing his undergraduate degree in 1949, he relocated to New York and began a graduate program in literature at Columbia University. The Korean War changed his plans. Harry enlisted in the air force and served for three years as an intelligence officer in Wiesbaden, Germany, where he assessed Soviet troop deployments. Still intending to pursue a life of letters, he was stunned when, in 1953, Roy Cohn and G. David Schine—Senate staff members in the employ of Joseph McCarthy—visited his base while on a whirlwind inspection tour of American military installments in search of communists (or at least communist books in libraries maintained by the U.S. Information Agency). “Maybe my sense of history was bad,” McPherson would later remark, “but McCarthy and his witch-hunting looked to me like a real threat to liberty. I saw us going into a sort of McCarthy Era, where everyone’s rights would be in danger. I decided then that I wanted to be a lawyer.”

  After his discharge, Harry attended law school at the University of Texas, where he “graduated a quick-minded, agreeable young man with soft good looks, strong ties to the Episcopal Church, and a questing way of talking about ‘social consciousness,’” Eric Goldman wrote. He authored two plays—Ground Zero and Missing Person, “staged in an Episcopal church and filled with social significance”—and had not entertained a career in politics. But when a relative on Johnson’s Senate staff informed him that the Senate Democratic Policy Committee, the legislative arm of the leadership office, was in need of an assistant counsel, he jumped at the opportunity. Though a year earlier McPherson and his wife had fired off a hostile telegram to Johnson, sternly disapproving of his rhetorical support for the right-wing China Lobby, he had never met LBJ, who was then the Senate minority leader. Liberal in outlook, McPherson did not regard LBJ as a “bomb-throwing ally. But at the same time, there was a good deal of respect for him and considerable feeling that he might be an instrument of good, once you put that phrase in quotes. . . . And given Texas politics, he was certainly the most progressive senior public official on the scene.” He would spend six years learning political craft from LBJ, first as assistant counsel and later as counsel to the Policy Committee. Early in the Kennedy administration, McPherson served a tour at the Pentagon as deputy undersecretary of defense, where he became one of McNamara’s bright young men, and later at the Department of State. By virtue of his apprenticeship at LBJ’s side, by his early thirties he was world-wise, if not world-weary, well acquainted with and known by the nation’s most senior lawmakers and administration officials and skilled at the craft of legislative draftsmanship and government and administration.

  McPherson was in Japan on State Department business when a military aide phoned him at 5:30 a.m., Tokyo time, to inform him that John Kennedy had been assassinated. “You know, to wake up, to come out of a deep sleep in a part of the world with which you’re very unfamiliar, where your bearings are quite foreign to you, and to hear that kind of hallucinatory statement, boggles the mind,” he later remembered. Arriving in Washington on Saturday evening, he caught a few hours of sleep and proceeded the next morning, as he did every Sunday, to attend services at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church on Capitol Hill. Unbeknownst to him, the Johnsons chose to worship there as well that morning. Lady Bird was fond of both the minister and the congregation. “The place was swarming with Secret Service agents,” McPherson remembered. “God, there must have been twenty in the church, and there were cops on the top of the Library of Congress Annex with rifles, and a massive crowd outdoors.” After the service—the Reverend Bill Baxter “preached a hell of a sermon” titled, simply, “America”—the Johnsons surprised the congregants by joining them in the parish hall for coffee. “The Secret Service was going crazy,” but LBJ and Lady Bird took strength from the moment, as did the churchgoers. “It was very comforting to him, quite obviously, to shake hands. Very plain people, old women and kids and everybody just going up and taking his hand. And a lot of people crying and holding his arm. It was immensely strengthening.” After some time, the president and his onetime aide stole off to a quiet corner of the room and “stood toe to toe for a long time and we just talked very quietly about what he was doing.” At LBJ’s behest, McPherson walked him to his motorcade when, suddenly and without warning, a Secret Service agent brought a heel down on his foot and delivered a sharp elbow blow to his stomach, as two other agents hustled the president away. There would be no repeat of Dallas. As the president’s entourage sped away, Harry returned to the vestry, where a fellow congregant informed him that Lee Harvey Oswald had been shot.

  At the White House, McPherson owned a broad portfolio of responsibilities, though nominally he would serve as assistant counsel—and later as counsel—to the president. Though he had known LBJ for many years and owed his personal career advancement to the president, like many other young men who had been part of the New Frontier, even McPherson felt a melancholy sense of loss upon first entering the Oval Office as a staff member. “In 1965 one could still feel John Kennedy’s presence in the White House,” he later wrote. “I walked out of the mansion one cold, starry night, headed for my office in the West Wing, and imagined I saw that little figure standing in the Oval Office, his back to the window; but it was only an aide.”

  • • • • •

  Rounding out the new senior staff were Marvin Watson and Douglass Cater, two individuals vastly different in background and temperament. A native of Montgomery, Cater was the son of an Alabama state legislator but early in life left the South behind, to attend first boarding school at Exeter and then college at Harvard, where he interrupted his undergraduate studies during World War II to serve as a Russian specialist with the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the postwar Central Intelligence Agency. After returning to Harvard, where he completed a graduate degree in public administration, Cater served as the Washington editor of the Reporter, a nationally influential magazine of news and opinion, and oversaw the outlet’s searing coverage of Joseph McCarthy and full-throated advocacy of black civil rights. Time and again, he took leaves of absence from the magazine to author several books on national politics or to serve as a consultant to various government agencies, including a tour as special assistant to the secretary of the army. He was on sabbatical, serving as a visiting scholar at the Center for Advanced Studies at Wesleyan University in the spring of 1964, when Bill Moyers summoned him to the White House for a meeting. At the time, he was forty years old.

  Cater had known LBJ for almost ten years, though by his own admission he was “never an intimate.” He arrived at the White House expecting simply to lunch with Moyers but instead found himself paddling around in the pool with LBJ, Valenti, and Moyers—all in the buff—and discussing the president’s declaration of a war on poverty. “It was exceedingly hot water,” he told an interviewer some years later, “and it caused me almost to fall asleep at lunch because it was so soporific.” He had little inkling that his visit was something approximating a job interview. Weeks later, he again flew to the capital at Moyers’s request, where he was offered the post of special assistant to the president, with a vague and nondescript portfolio. At first, he concentrated on campaign work, drafting stump speeches and compiling an anthology of LBJ’s most notable addresses for release in the fall. He soon emerged as the administration’s point man on health and education, a mandate that would assume outsized importance after 1965 and that would also create repeated overlap with Califano’s growing empire. He was a “tall man with a thatch of bushy hair and a slow Southern drawl,” a newspaperman observed. “Cater puffs meditatively on a cigar, paces around his office or props his feet on his desk as he talks, occasionally twirling in his big swivel chair. He speaks wit
h a good deal of reserve, evidently cherishing his status as one of the White House’s backroom boys.” Eric Goldman remembered him as equipped with “a well-stocked mind and readily adaptable to the main chance.” Cater was “one of the few figures of the American intellectual or quasi-intellectual world who seemed ready to be a thoroughgoing LBJ man.” (The warm sentiment was not mutual. In a private oral history conducted after Johnson left office, Cater identified the Princeton historian as one of the few “prima donnas” in an otherwise mainly harmonious staff.) Cater, McPherson, and Califano became LBJ’s unofficial emissaries to the nation’s universities and think tanks and populated the administration’s task forces with some of the country’s sharpest minds, exceeding the Kennedy White House by a mile in its engagement of public intellectuals.

  Operating first out of a palatial suite in the Executive Office Building, and later from a basement office in the West Wing, Cater served as the chief liaison between the White House and the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, the cabinet-level colossus responsible for implementing key Great Society programs. A southern liberal, Cater was genuinely committed to civil rights and used his administrative authority over federal education and health-care funds to effect a thoroughgoing desegregation of schools, hospitals, and universities. Both a scholar and a pragmatist, he believed—as did most historians and political scientists of his generation—that the lessons of the Reconstruction era counseled both moral certitude and flexibility. “It was a failure of men and institutions” that led the U.S. government into constitutional crisis, he counseled the president. “Equally tragic, war freed the slave but failed to set conditions by which he could become a free man.” In his dealings with local and state authorities, Cater wielded both carrot and stick with equal conviction.