Building the Great Society

by Joshua Zeitz

  Which left Valenti a critical player without a real job. An accidental presidential adviser with no prior experience in government, he proved a quick study in the ways of Washington and a skilled practitioner in the art of administration. Inside the White House and in the corridors of the Capitol, few insiders doubted his value. But he remained the butt of jokes from critical reporters—he was the “valet,” the gofer, the presidential sidekick. “When the crunches came from time to time with the press and inside the government,” he later observed, “I did not have allies, because I was alone.”

  In June 1965—still in the heady days following Johnson’s victory over Goldwater—Valenti had broken with habit and agreed to address the American Advertising Federation. He flew to Boston, delivered his speech, and returned to Washington, thinking little of the occasion. Upon his arrival at the White House, George Reedy, then in his final days as press secretary, phoned him and angrily asked, “What the hell did you say in that Boston speech?” It was then, Valenti would recall, that “the mortars began to land, and it was guerilla warfare in the West Wing.” In the closing lines of his talk, Valenti told his audience that he slept “each night a little better, a little more confidently because Lyndon Johnson is my President.” The reaction from newspapermen, editorialists, and capital cognoscenti was scathing. They lambasted Valenti as a simpleton and sycophant who lacked independence of thought or action. The speech inspired Herblock’s depiction of the White House as a plantation, where the master (LBJ) whipped his slaves (staff) into submission. “Happy days on the old plantation,” the caption read. “A sensitive man . . . a warm-hearted man . . . I sleep each night a little better, a little more confidently because Lyndon Johnson is my President.” Outwardly, Valenti took the ribbing in good stride. Privately, he fumed in full knowledge that when Ted Sorensen compared his boss, John Kennedy—then still very much alive—to Saint Francis, the intelligentsia smiled and nodded with approval.

  Though LBJ supported his aide through what UPI’s Merriman Smith dubbed the “love-that-boss speech” incident—the president’s “attitude, as described by one staff member, was essentially, ‘Poor Jack’”—it contributed to Valenti’s growing weariness. Early in 1966, Lew Wasserman, the president of the Music Corporation of America, and Edwin Weisl, a prominent attorney who had been close to Johnson since his days in the Senate, offered Valenti the presidency of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), the powerful trade organization that represented Hollywood’s movie studios both in the United States and abroad. The post was prestigious and lucrative; his starting annual compensation would be $175,000, a princely sum for the time and a large multiple of his government salary. In April, Jack and Mary Margaret joined the president and the First Lady in the private quarters for dinner. Valenti made his case for leaving the White House: he owed it to his young family to secure their financial future and to spend more time at home. At his personal insistence, the MPAA had agreed to a clause in his contract that allowed him to take leave whenever the president requested his assistance or time. Johnson graciously wished his aide well. “You have served your country with devotion and distinction,” he wrote later that month, “and you can always be as proud, or prouder of that, as you are of your fifty-one missions. You served me, though—and I thank you, and love you, and am very proud of you.”

  True to their agreement, within months of leaving the West Wing, Valenti—in Rome for a meeting with Italian government officials—received an urgent telegram summoning him to Manila, where the president requested his participation in a diplomatic conference. Valenti packed a bag and caught a military flight to the Philippines.

  Valenti’s departure followed closely on the heels of the overlapping resignations of Dick Goodwin and Horace Busby. Goodwin’s allegiance to LBJ had always been contingent. He was a New Frontiersman and Kennedy partisan above all, and it was less surprising that he parted ways with the president than that he waited so long to do so. Nevertheless, LBJ was deeply embittered by his departure and assumed that his aide intended to rejoin the Kennedy camp. When Moyers beseeched LBJ to bring Goodwin back on a onetime assignment to help draft the 1966 State of the Union address, Johnson begrudgingly consented to the request but patently refused to meet with his speechwriter. He ultimately left most of Goodwin’s prose on the cutting room floor. The result—the first major speech of his presidency in almost two years that did not bear Dick Goodwin’s imprimatur—was an uninspiring and prosaic work. It met with widespread diffidence.

  Busby’s exit prompted greater speculation. Though his position had not weakened, particularly as he took a more direct hand in foreign policy deliberations, he chafed under Moyers’s growing power and influence and—as had been the case over his long association with Johnson—found it difficult to subordinate his personality to LBJ’s overpowering ego. Eric Goldman observed that Busby “admired Lyndon Johnson in much the same way that George Reedy did, but unlike the unflappable Reedy, he found it impossible to take the lashings for any length of time.” The president, in turn, was fond of Busby but “could make a remark like ‘Buzz is a very sound, very solid, able, good boy.’ The very sound and solid and able—and very adult and complex—Horace Busby would hear about the remark and flare.”Eager to return to the business of making money, and ideologically out of step with Moyers and Califano, he took leave. As had always been the case, he would be back.

  • • • • •

  Though lacking a formal title or role, from early in Johnson’s tenure in the White House Abe Fortas emerged as “probably the single greatest influence on the President,” according to Arthur Goldberg, the former labor secretary whom JFK had appointed to the Supreme Court in 1962. Fortas edited major presidential addresses and provided counsel on the formation of Great Society legislation. As the administration increasingly found itself mired in Vietnam, he began attending meetings in the Situation Room. He enjoyed unfettered access to Johnson and, along with Clark Clifford and Jim Rowe, constituted the core of the president’s kitchen cabinet.

  Fortas was a complicated and contradictory figure. Clifford later described him as “a deep-seated dyed-in-the-wool one-hundred percent liberal. . . . He was a true-blood Roosevelt liberal.” Trained in the tradition of legal realism at Yale, he believed that laws were living constructs whose evolution should be informed by science, sociology, and economics. He embraced an active federal state in the 1930s and advocated broadly for the rights of individuals and minorities, including Clarence Gideon’s right to counsel (a right that technically appeared nowhere in the Constitution). He encouraged the president and his aides to move aggressively on civil rights and believed, as he once expressed in his draft of a presidential speech, that a civilized country should “provide our people with the facilities needed for their health, for the education of our children, for welfare, for the development of our national resources.”

  But Johnson’s aides often questioned Fortas’s political judgment. A brilliant but consummate lawyer, he often gave Johnson sound legal advice that clashed with good politics. “It seems to me I’m on opposite sides almost every time when we get down to some purely political decision that the President has to make,” McPherson offered. “But on the great issues Abe Fortas is really just tremendous.”

  Though a committed liberal, Fortas also developed a second, quite different reputation as an unscrupulous fixer and corporate lawyer with a rapacious appetite for the good life. When Walter Jenkins was arrested at the YMCA, the president turned to Fortas and Clifford to try to squash the story, as well as the charges. Fortas was deeply entangled in the Bobby Baker affair (he served as Baker’s counsel but resigned after LBJ became president) and crossed multiple ethical lines to help the president obtrude with inquiries into the Johnson family’s wealth and finances. Fortas resisted a cabinet post because he was loath to abandon his practice during peak earning years; his wife, Carolyn Agger—a high-powered tax attorney in her own right—was immovably oppo
sed to the idea for precisely the same reason.

  In late 1965, LBJ finally persuaded Fortas to accept an appointment as associate justice of the Supreme Court, where he filled the so-called Jewish seat previously held in reverse succession by Goldberg, Felix Frankfurter, and Benjamin Cardozo. (To make room for his friend, he persuaded Goldberg to resign from the bench and accept an appointment as ambassador to the United Nations. An opponent of the war in Vietnam, Goldberg believed he might be able to influence the administration’s policy in Southeast Asia.) When she learned of her husband’s appointment, Carolyn Agger was furious with the president, who she believed, correctly, had strong-armed her husband onto the bench. The couple had recently purchased a rambling home in Georgetown, where they planned extensive refurbishments, including the installation of an inground pool. When friends suggested that they earned so much money—and paid such a large portion of it to the government—that Abe’s cut in income would have little net effect on their lifestyle, Carolyn replied that “two big gross incomes equal two big net incomes.” (Shortly after the appointment, Joe Califano paid a visit to the nominee. As he stepped into the handsome entryway, Fortas pointed to a hole in the foyer ceiling. “That, my friend, was to have been our central air conditioning,” he said with a smile. “Now we won’t be able to afford it.” It was, by Califano’s recollection, “the first of several complaints I heard Fortas make about the income that he would forfeit from his private law practice.”)

  Monetary concerns aside, Agger believed that her husband would do better to wait until Earl Warren retired so that he could ascend directly to the chief justiceship. “You don’t treat friends that way,” she snapped at LBJ when he telephoned her law office to extend a conciliatory gesture. She then proceeded to hang up on him. In confidence, Fortas told one of his law partners that he had “never heard anybody talk to the President like Carol did.”

  As an associate justice, Fortas contributed to building on the Warren Court’s formidable legacy of liberal jurisprudence, including rulings on civil rights, privacy rights, and the rights of the accused that infuriated conservatives of both parties who were already unnerved by LBJ’s expansion of the federal welfare state and desegregation of southern schools, hospitals, and places of public accommodation.

  Even as he sat on the Court, Fortas remained an informal presidential adviser, and like most of the staff he was unconcerned by the seeming impropriety of the executive branch and the judicial branch colluding on matters of policy and politics. In an earlier era, Felix Frankfurter remained an informal counselor to FDR, even after joining the Court. “The President has got too much respect for the independence of the Court for that and wouldn’t want to embarrass Abe,” McPherson added. “But he has asked him an awful lot of things, which probably have gone on occasion too far.”

  If the impropriety of a justice serving as an informal presidential adviser was not so clear in 1968 as it would be in later years, the continued intensity of their relationship was extraordinary even by contemporary standards. LBJ ordered a direct White House line installed in Fortas’s home and office, enabling the president to reach him at all times of the day. Between November 23, 1963, and early July 1968, when the president nominated him as chief justice, Fortas met with LBJ at least 145 times in person and spoke with him on countless occasions by phone. As associate justice, Fortas violated a bright red line when he knowingly shared important information with the president concerning Court deliberations and weighed in on matters of policy and constitutional law. In one case, he advised the administration on a matter involving the Interstate Commerce Commission’s approval of a railroad merger and then participated in a Court case on the very same matter.

  When Congress sent a stringent anticrime bill to the president in November 1966, LBJ sought Fortas’s counsel. While the FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover, and Nicholas Katzenbach, the former attorney general now serving as undersecretary of state, advised the president to sign the measure, Fortas agreed with the White House staff, which was almost unanimous in its support of a veto. The justice believed that several provisions, including an antipornography title and extended authority to interrogate witnesses and suspects prior to an arraignment, were patently unconstitutional. He allowed that a section providing for mandatory sentences would likely survive judicial scrutiny, even if it was ill-advised. As was usually the case, the president heeded Fortas’s advice. The associate justice and Califano drafted the veto message, which LBJ issued verbatim.

  Harry McPherson would later recall a moment late in the evening on July 24, 1967, when rioters in Detroit had exhausted the capabilities of Michigan’s state police and National Guard. He entered the Oval Office, only to find Abe Fortas polishing a draft of the president’s televised address to the nation, in which Johnson would announce the deployment of military personnel to restore order in Motor City. McPherson disagreed with the tenor of the draft, which he believed gave excess weight to framing the legal justification for sending troops at the expense of discussing the social and economic roots of urban riots. But he did not press the point. “I was intimidated by the stature and the brains and the judgment and the reputation and my own relationship with Justice Fortas,” he explained. “I was very much the junior man and although I would have argued with the President alone about it, I didn’t argue with Justice Fortas.” Fortas, a sitting associate justice, helped the president of the United States frame his justification for a decision that could well have faced legal scrutiny in the federal courts. The episode foreshadowed a larger conflict of interest that would later haunt both men.

  • • • • •

  “We on the White House staff ought not to be public figures,” Bill Moyers told a reporter in April 1966. “It is not in our interest to have what we do publicized. . . . You aren’t a man in your own right when you are working for a President. To be most effective you need to have an umbilical cord character, nature, and personality.” Moyers was by this time seemingly unable to follow his own sound advice. Over the course of many days, he sat for interviews with the New York Times, which published a lengthy and glowing profile of the thirty-one-year-old wunderkind adviser. “I am not the president’s ‘Good Angel,’” Moyers averred. “I am not the president’s conscience, as some people have written. To say that implies that he does not have motives and instincts and values with which I can identify. It was the President who taught me that power must have a purpose.” It was not an interview likely to endear Moyers to the small, growing—but, for the time, silent—group of administration officials who cast a wary eye on the preacher-politician. Behind his back, they dismissed him as a modern-day “Elmer Gantry” and derided his combination of staged authenticity and “stiletto tactics.” “Whatever he does,” one critic sneered, “he does with every assurance that he is carrying out the will of John the Baptist.”

  George Reedy, whom Moyers replaced as press secretary, believed that LBJ had “a rather unfortunate predilection to flattery, which accounted to a tremendous extent for the Bill Moyers syndrome. And also I think that he’s a little bit over-awed by self-confident people.” Even Moyers’s allies, including Harry McPherson, acknowledged that several of Moyers’s staff assistants were more loyal to the Kennedys than to the president in whose White House they served. “They made it appear that all that was good, all that happened, that Bill was a good angel; that Lyndon Johnson was really a kind of an evil old man, who was inclined always to do the wrong thing.”

  When Moyers told reporters that he had “developed a relationship with Lyndon Johnson that it takes a man a long time to carve out; I can’t forfeit that,” and that he could “interpret what I knew to be the ‘Complete Johnson’ to the bureaucracy. I was certain I knew what the president wanted”—or when the New York Times likened him to “Sherman Adams, Harry Hopkins, Colonel House and other well-remembered presidential advisors of the past”—it rankled those of his colleagues who envied that rapport and harbored suspicions about
his motive and character. “He’s an individual, not a team player,” an anonymous colleague told the press. “He’s out for himself.” Jake Jacobsen later confided to an interviewer that “Moyers was always undercutting somebody. Or he’d call you in on his own and say, ‘Now, Jake, so-and-so is just fixing to write a mean article about you, and I stopped him from doing it.’ Well, about half the time that wasn’t true at all.” With bemused wonder, he remembered that “Moyers treated me about as bad as a man could be treated. Every time he’d get a chance to take a swipe at me he would. I don’t know why. I had no animosity toward Bill.”

  LBJ appeared to tolerate his aide’s public persona as the good angel on his shoulder, though another aide remarked anonymously that the president hardly required such prodding on domestic issues: “He’s way out in front of the country there.” He might also have forgiven the presumptuousness in Moyers’s remark “I work for him despite his faults, and he lets me work for him despite my deficiencies.” But as Johnson’s relationship with the press frayed, a rift gradually emerged between the president and his young aide. He was the “ideal press secretary,” the New York Times reported. “The press has been good to Moyers, and Moyers has been good to the press.” He was “informed, concise, quotable,” “unexcelled in the art of the leak and in the trial balloon, and in coaxing columnists, charming publishers and converting skeptical reporters.” LBJ valued this aptitude when it operated in his favor, but not when his press secretary began to enjoy better coverage than the president. “There was much talk of a ‘credibility gap’ during his tenure,” the Times continued, “but reporters tended to blame Johnson, not Moyers, for alleged inconsistencies on Vietnam policy.”