Building the Great Society

by Joshua Zeitz

  In the end, Nixon’s surprise trumped LBJ’s. On November 2, Thieu announced that “the government of South Vietnam deeply regrets not being able to participate in the [peace] talks,” and as quickly as it had emerged, the euphoria over LBJ’s October 31 announcement broke. Without South Vietnamese participation in the Paris talks, there was little chance of final resolution.

  Even as the Nixon campaign was secretly—and quite possibly illegally—engaged in a campaign to sabotage the Paris peace talks, it allowed the vice presidential nominee Spiro T. Agnew to denounce Humphrey’s call for a bombing halt. Such a promise “strengthened the hand of Hanoi,” Agnew said, and undermined the Johnson administration’s negotiations. It is impossible to say whether Nixon’s October surprise was decisive. The election results were painfully close, with Nixon taking 43.4 percent of the popular vote to 42.7 percent for Humphrey and 13.5 percent for Wallace. In the Electoral College, Nixon’s margin was wider—301 electoral votes to Humphrey’s 191 and Wallace’s 46. But minor swings in the popular vote in key states might have resulted in a Democratic victory.

  In the election’s aftermath, the Wall Street Journal concluded that while Nixon might have won, it was “clear that the American people have not yet settled their collective mind on what they really want.” Calling Nixon’s victory a “loose mandate” for change, the editors summed up America as “a people uncertain and yet searching. They do not like the kind of foreign policies that involve us in Vietnams, but they find little appeal in a new isolationism. They enjoy the new prosperity but resent having it eaten away by inflation. They see that the vast Federal social welfare programs of the past years have produced little demonstrable result, but they are by no means abandoning efforts to solve very real social problems.”

  Early in the afternoon of November 6, following a long night of nail-biting and poll watching, Hubert Humphrey greeted thousands of supporters at Minneapolis’s Leamington hotel and announced that he had called Richard Nixon to congratulate him on a hard-fought victory. Moments later, after the crowd dispersed, Humphrey, choking back tears, told an aide, “Jesus, I think I would have done a good job in the White House.”

  Days later, he and his running mate, Senator Ed Muskie of Maine, came to the mansion for a prescheduled breakfast with Johnson. “Even the Vice President’s natural ebullience was finally muted,” recalled George Christian, “and when the three of them walked out of the Family Dining Room it appeared to me they had been attending a wake.” After showing his guests to the elevator, LBJ turned to his press secretary and muttered, “Well, they almost did it.”

  Conclusion

  January 20, 1969

  I do understand power, whatever else may be said about me,” Lyndon Johnson sometimes reminded his aides. “I know where to look for it and how to use it.” Now, in the final weeks of his term, aides witnessed “a steady diminution of Presidential power,” as Harry McPherson later recalled. “There was no point in preparing a massive legislative program for the next year since the new President would urge his own. So the lines of demand and response between the White House and the departments grew slack. There was no sense of anticipation, no fear of sanctions.” Joe Califano remembered the closing days as “bleak.” Bereft of clout and preparing to hand the keys of the White House to Richard Nixon—a virtuoso in the art of backlash politics who was widely expected to dismantle large parts of LBJ’s domestic legacy—advisers to the outgoing president could do little but count down the hours until January 20. Many of the assistants began looking for jobs. Califano and McPherson prepared to resume the practice of law. Mike Manatos, a veteran of the Kennedy and Johnson legislative affairs office, would continue to ply his talents, but for private-sector clients. Fred Panzer, the president’s research wiz, accepted an offer from the Tobacco Institute. All were “beginning to scatter, in spirit if not in body,” George Christian wrote.

  On his final evening in the White House, Johnson gathered his closest friends and staff in the residence for a buffet dinner. It was a “happy event,” Califano recorded. “We shared a sense of relief that it was over and a sense of achievement, for despite the frightful cost of the Vietnam War in American lives and economic resources,” all assembled knew that “we’d been part of a monumental social revolution. Personally, LBJ had drawn from most of us far more than we ever realized we had to give.” As the evening wound down, LBJ backed Califano into the corner of the living room, just near the elevator. He spoke in a low whisper of Richard Nixon’s fundamentally dishonest and vindictive nature, recalling the days when both men served together in Congress. “You’re going to make some money now for the first time in your life,” he advised. “First, invest it in land. This Nixon knows nothing about the economy and it’s going to go to hell. Second, when you pay your income taxes, after you figure them out, pay an additional five hundred dollars. It’s not enough for Nixon to win. He’s going to have to put some people in jail. Third, the more you succeed, watch out for jealous people. Jealousy and sex drive people to do more damn mean and crazy things than anything else.”

  The next morning, shortly before the Nixons arrived for the ceremonial tea with the outgoing First Family, Johnson phoned Horace Busby, who found the president in good spirits. The moving crews, he told Buzz, were “all around,” eager for LBJ and Lady Bird to leave the residence so that they could begin the frenetic process by which the Johnsons’ belongings were packed and transported to awaiting trucks, crews came in to repaint and recarpet the residence, and the new president’s furnishings, clothes, and personal items were installed—all by the late afternoon, when Richard and Pat Nixon would return from the inaugural parade and dress for the evening’s balls. “They are watching every move I make,” Johnson said with a chuckle. “If I lay a cuff link down on the dresser, a hand comes around the door and snatches it up.” The two men exchanged awkward pleasantries until it was time for LBJ to greet the incoming president. “Well, see you again sometime,” he muttered to Buzz.

  Shortly after 10:00 a.m., the Nixons arrived for the customary tea reception, emerging at 11:05 with Lyndon and Lady Bird to climb inside the black presidential limousine for the short drive to the Capitol. The day was overcast and bitter cold. After the ceremony was over, LBJ joined some of his closest friends and former Senate colleagues for a relaxed brunch of ham and Bloody Marys at Clark Clifford’s home. From there, George Christian remembered, the former president was transported to Andrews Air Force Base, where Boeing 707 No. 2600 “departed for Texas. It was difficult to believe that for this flight it was no longer Air Force One.”

  Among the many former staff aides who gathered at Andrews to bid the Johnsons farewell was Harry McPherson, who “thought back to that first meeting on the Senate floor—almost thirteen years ago—and how in those years Johnson had become like one of my family, not to be judged by me as others judged him, in the aesthetic terms of like and dislike, but more deeply, in love, rage, and grief.”

  As McPherson watched the plane disappear into the cloudy sky, he breathed a sigh of relief. He was “officially powerless, and oddly, relieved.”

  • • • • •

  Johnson’s aides were sure that the incoming administration would set quickly about the work of dismantling the Great Society. The new president would soon surprise them. William Safire, who served as a speechwriter in the Nixon White House, later posited a that while the president’s “heart was on the right, his head was, with FDR, slightly left of center.” Under his watch, Medicare, Medicaid, and aid to elementary and secondary education thrived. Indeed, spending on all three of LBJ’s signature domestic programs continued to rise. Though Nixon discontinued the Community Action Program and dismantled the Office of Economic Opportunity, many of the OEO’s initiatives—including popular programs like Legal Aid and Head Start—continued to operate successfully under the auspices of the cabinet departments to which they were reassigned. By far the most ambitious and potentially progressive
component of Nixon’s domestic agenda was a proposal to scrap the nation’s complicated patchwork of welfare programs and replace it with a negative income tax that would guarantee all families a minimum annual income. Known as the Family Assistance Plan (FAP), the proposal would have streamlined the welfare state, eliminated thousands of bureaucrats and caseworkers, and substituted cash transfers in the form of a negative income tax for services. FAP included work incentives to ensure that recipients would not lose funding if they found jobs. Had Congress passed the plan, it would have covered roughly twice as many people—and three times as many children—as the principal government welfare program, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, and federal welfare spending would have increased by $4.4 billion in its first year of enactment.

  But FAP proved a nonstarter. It won accolades from many people on the left, who in the final years of the Johnson administration came to doubt the underlying wisdom of opportunity theory, and from many on the right, who believed that the working poor knew how to spend their money better than social workers and public-sector bureaucrats. But a strange coalition of southern conservatives and northern liberals killed the legislation in Congress. Taking their cues from the National Welfare Rights Organization, liberals argued that the plan would not provide poor families with enough money to keep them afloat. At the same time, business and political elites in the South dreaded the possible ramifications of FAP. Studies estimated that the program would have covered 35 percent of Mississippi’s population, thus equalizing the earnings of the state’s black and white citizens. In Mississippi, two-thirds of black women worked in service industries. FAP would have boosted the earnings of a $40-per-week housekeeper to $3,408 per year—not too far off from the average wages of a male factory worker ($3,984). By raising income levels across the board, FAP threatened to destabilize race relations and increase the region’s low prevailing wage.

  Though the proposal reflected an emerging consensus that poor people needed cash income, not just qualitative assistance, FAP’s early demise resulted in a continuation of Johnson’s approach to fighting poverty. Nixon did sign into law the Supplemental Security Income program, which provided a minimum cash income for disabled adults and their dependents, as well as the first automatic cost-of-living adjustments for Social Security recipients. Together, these measures helped alleviate poverty by providing defined categories of Americans with income assistance. But on the whole, the federal government’s antipoverty activities continued to focus on health care, nutritional assistance, education, and job training.

  In other areas, too, Nixon built on LBJ’s legacy—sometimes with enthusiasm, on other occasions with diffidence or outright derision. Nixon proclaimed in his 1970 State of the Union address that the “great question of the seventies is, shall we surrender to our surroundings, or shall we make peace with nature and begin to make reparations for the damage we have done to our air, our land and our water? . . . Clean air, clean water, open spaces—these should once again be the birthright of every American.” Privately, the president was dismissive of environmentalists, telling his domestic policy aide, John Ehrlichman—the one member of his inner circle who was genuinely interested in the issue—that the entire question was pure “crap.” Still, Nixon understood that public opinion was moving in the opposite direction. In the first year of his presidency, the country watched with horror as an accidental spill attributed to the Union Oil Company polluted two hundred miles of shoreline off the California coast and as the Cuyahoga River, which ran through Cleveland, Ohio, caught fire—the product of several decades of egregious industrial pollution. By the early 1970s, between two-thirds and three-quarters of Americans were concerned about air and water pollution. Ever the politician, Nixon knew he could not afford to seem aloof from reality. What LBJ had begun, he would continue.

  As president, Nixon asked Congress to pass legislation establishing the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. When the House and Senate complied, Nixon signed both agencies into existence. His pick for EPA chief, William Ruckelshaus, proved a strong proponent of clean air and water. Nixon also signed off on the 1970 Clean Air Act, which forced automobile manufacturers to cut carbon monoxide emissions to 90 percent of their 1970 levels within five years, and the 1972 Coastal Zone Management Act, which safeguarded estuaries. He transferred over eighty thousand acres of federal land to the states for the creation of public parks and set aside millions more acres for protection under the National Wilderness Preservation System.

  Even on matters related to race relations, Nixon demonstrated unexpected continuity with his predecessor. He understood that once unleashed, federal efforts to desegregate schools would be difficult to stop, particularly given the heightened involvement of federal judges who enjoyed lifetime tenure and thus immunity from the whims of current politics. Nixon ordered his liberal HEW secretary, Bob Finch, to abandon Johnson’s policy of threatening to withhold federal funds to coerce districts into developing desegregation strategies. Instead, Finch worked with Attorney General John Mitchell to develop a compromise strategy by which the Justice Department more aggressively sued recalcitrant school districts in the federal courts, a policy that became all the more powerful in October 1969 when the Supreme Court ruled in Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education that the South had to “terminate dual school systems at once and . . . operate now and hereafter only unitary schools.” This legalistic approach was in line with Nixon’s personal feelings that “when funds are cut off, [the] law has failed. [You have] neither integration or education.” On a more practical level, by relying on Justice Department lawsuits to effect desegregation, Nixon deflected southern backlash away from his administration and onto the courts. Nevertheless, the pace of desegregation continued to increase, in part because judges were newly emboldened to involve themselves on a district-by-district level.

  Nixon’s Labor Department also enforced employment provisions of the Civil Rights Act when it issued sweeping orders in at least ten cities compelling unions and private firms involved in federal contracting to establish hiring targets. Known as the “Philadelphia Plan” for its city of origin, this program built on a Johnson administration initiative aimed at increasing the number of black workers in the construction trades. For several decades, a powerful combination of private-sector discrimination and racism and nepotism within trade unions had excluded black workers from well-paying blue-collar industries.

  Even more so than their Democratic predecessors, Secretary of Labor George Shultz and Assistant Secretary of Labor Arthur Fletcher demanded that federal contractors and the unions with which they did business draw up “goals and timetables” for black hiring. In addition to these actions, between 1969 and 1974 funding for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), the federal agency empowered to take discriminatory employers to court, increased from $13.2 million to $43 million, and the agency’s staff jumped from 359 professionals to 1,640. Nixon also signed into law the new Equal Employment Opportunity Act, which broadened the EEOC’s jurisdiction to include educational institutions, state and local governments, and all private businesses with fifteen or more employees.

  In effect, even as Nixon played the race card during political appearances before suburban and southern audiences, his administration maintained the government’s commitment to Johnson’s civil rights acts. Believing that “people who own their own homes don’t burn them down,” the president signed Executive Order 11458, which established the Office of Minority Business Enterprise (OMBE), under the auspices of the Commerce Department. In conjunction with the Small Business Administration, the OMBE promoted the start-up and expansion of minority-owned businesses. The Nixon administration also increased the volume of federal contracts with minority-owned businesses and increased the amount of federal and corporate deposits in black-owned banks.

  Lyndon Johnson understood better than his aides that once established, benefi
ts and protections are seldom eliminated but often enhanced. He died of chronic heart disease on January 22, 1973—just two days after Nixon took the oath of office for his second term—safe in the belief that his domestic achievements would long endure, though cognizant that his historical reputation would forever be clouded by Vietnam.

  • • • • •

  It was remarkable that Johnson’s Great Society endured into the 1970s, 1980s, and beyond, even as the economic theory that underpinned it fell into doubt. LBJ’s domestic policy was born of prevailing liberal conviction that experts could grow the economy in perpetuity while sustaining low unemployment and inflation. After 1973, this belief no longer seemed tenable. Owing in part to spending on the Vietnam War, as well as a series of supply shocks in the food and energy sectors, Americans absorbed over a decade of runaway inflation. Inflation was accompanied, in turn, by rising unemployment, particularly in the manufacturing sector, which for many years had formed the backbone of America’s prosperous, postwar middle class. Stagflation—the combination of high unemployment and inflation—was the very antithesis of liberal economics, and it undercut the entire premise of opportunity theory. Experts had lost control of the economic levers, and increasingly it became clear that all the education and training in the world would not help poor people in urban ghettos, declining coal towns in Appalachia, or midsized cities like Youngstown, where in the coming decade empty steel mills stood as skeletal reminders of the region’s bygone industrial might. Poor people needed jobs and income, not qualitative assistance to help them capture prosperity that no longer existed.

  During the decade in which John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson governed, the American economy expanded at an average rate of 7.5 percent each year. The country has not seen growth like this since. When the Republican Donald J. Trump won the presidency in 2016 on a platform of economic populism and white nationalism—some fifty years after the high-water mark of the Great Society—he promised to deliver 4 percent annual growth. An understated columnist spoke for most experts when he affirmed that it would be a “monumental task” to achieve such results. What liberal economists in the postwar era assumed would last forever—boundless economic growth and low inflation—was in fact an aberration.