by Joshua Zeitz
To be sure, in the years since LBJ left office, America has experienced periods of sustained economic expansion. But in contrast to the postwar era, in recent decades the blessings of limited economic growth have accrued principally to the wealthiest Americans. In the years since Lyndon Johnson left office in 1969, the poorest quintile of Americans have seen a steep decline in its share of national income and wealth, while the richest quintile has seen its portion grow.
Stagnant incomes are central to this story. Between World War II and 1973, real wages grew steadily at a rate of between 2 percent and 3 percent each year, enabling millions of American workers to enjoy unprecedented upward mobility. From that point forward, wage growth slowed dramatically for many Americans. Over the next three decades, household wages remained essentially flat, but principally because more women entered the workforce, even as men’s wages fell by roughly 9 percent. In the main, families with two wage earners were able to maintain parity; families headed by single parents fell behind.
Many of the problems that Daniel Patrick Moynihan perceived in impoverished black communities—namely, the rise of single-parent households and a “tangle of poverty” that saw men exit the workforce permanently and sometimes across generations—gradually befell the white and Latino working class as well. By 2011, some 67 percent of black children, 42 percent of Latino children, and 25 percent of white children resided in single-parent households. Given the steady stagnation of wages since 1973, single-parent families are more likely to be poor. At the same time, record-setting numbers of working-age adults have slipped out of the workforce; they are neither employed nor seeking employment, a trend that has alarmed conservatives and liberals alike. For single parents bereft of well-paying jobs, or working-age Americans who have dropped out of the economy, opportunity theory rings hollow.
The economic history of the last fifty years has armed Johnson’s critics on both the left and the right with ammunition to attack the Great Society. For many conservatives, it was a noble but unsuccessful experiment in European-style socialism that failed to eliminate poverty; instead, it generated a culture of dependency that held millions of families in an intergenerational cycle of privation. For some progressive critics, the Great Society’s preference for qualitative rather than quantitative measures like a guaranteed household income doomed the project from the start. Such detractors believe that opportunity theory was scarcely adequate in good times; it was singularly ill-suited to the lean years that followed.
Each of these critiques has some merit.
Qualitative liberalism assumed that the American economy would continue to grow in perpetuity—that economists and social scientists finally understood how to manipulate the right levers to ensure steady growth and low inflation. In such a world, there was no need to slice the pie more equitably if everyone’s slice continued to grow on its own. In their hubris, the generation of policy makers that endured the Great Depression, vanquished fascism, and saved capitalism could scarcely envision a time when Americans would not be the masters of their own destiny.
The Great Society concerned itself with poverty and quality of life, not economic inequality. Living in a prosperous age, its architects sought to equip Americans with skills and resources to lift themselves above a certain income level—the poverty line—and enjoy the blessings of an affluent society. Equitable distribution of wealth and income was of less concern to a generation of liberals who saw working-class households enjoy luxuries unimaginable to most families that lived through the Great Depression. In 2017, inequality—whether measured by household income, wealth, or retirement security—has achieved levels unseen since the 1920s. If many conservatives regard the Great Society as an exercise in unbridled liberalism, on the left there is growing consensus that the new political economy demands more—not less—state intervention.
But such criticisms also grossly understate the central role that the Great Society programs have played—and continue to play—in reducing poverty, alleviating the suffering of those who live in it, diminishing systemic racial discrimination, enriching the nation’s cultural life, and enshrining consumer and environmental protections in the law. The noncash benefits associated with LBJ’s domestic initiatives have cut the poverty rate by 26 percent since Johnson took office. Food stamps, school breakfasts and lunches, and Head Start programs minimize food insecurity for millions of poor children and their parents each day. Medicaid and Medicare amount to the difference between life and death for 119 million Americans—or roughly 37 percent of the country’s population. Qualitative liberalism has not eradicated poverty, but it sharply reduces it. And today, most people cannot fathom a world in which African Americans are denied service at hotels, restaurants, and hospitals, explicitly excluded from the workplace or the housing market, or barred from voting or holding office strictly on the basis of their race. It is equally difficult to envision a country without laws governing clean air and water, consumer labeling standards, federal aid to public schools, or public television and radio.
Even as this book goes to print, the enduring value of the Great Society is no longer an academic question or political talking point but instead a real-world concern. At the heart of LBJ’s belief system was the conviction that government should unlock potential for individuals while recognizing that individuals also owe certain core obligations to each other. In 2016, the Electoral College installed a president—and the American public chose a Congress—who rejects both LBJ’s belief system and the policies that emanated from it. It remains to be seen whether Republicans will make good on their long-stated desire to repeal Medicare and replace it with a voucher system; convert Medicaid to a limited block grant program; divert ESEA funds away from public schools; gut environmental and consumer protections; sharply reduce funds for food stamps and school nutritional programs; abolish federal aid for the arts, humanities, and public broadcasting; allow broad-based religious exemptions to civil rights laws; or reimpose a modern-day form of poll taxes in the form of mandatory voter identification cards. As with so many things in life, Americans may learn to appreciate the Great Society only when it is gone.
But there is a cautionary tale for opponents of the Great Society. Franklin Roosevelt argued that the New Deal was designed to “save our system, the capitalistic system,” from extremists on both the far left and the far right. Its expansion of state authority and construction of a partial safety net offended many conservatives but worked within the existing boundaries of the American political economy. It was designed to help capitalist institutions function with greater order, less risk and volatility, and more uniformity. In later years, many political observers noted that FDR’s legacy was strikingly conservative, relative to the path traveled by many postwar European democracies. The same is true of the Great Society, a program of important but limited ambition that was predicated on growth liberalism, not redistribution. The Trump administration and its congressional allies may eliminate access to health care for tens of millions of poor people and senior citizens, strip away food security for impoverished children and their parents, erode civil rights for people of color, and make it possible once again to despoil America’s water and air. But when the pendulum swings back, it may swing hard. The next burst of liberal reform may not be anywhere near as solicitous of capitalist institutions and private industry, and it may take a more radical approach to securing not just opportunity but also equality. Like the New Deal, the Great Society tamed capitalism and secured a modicum of political peace. In its absence, the political controls come off.
For those who value Lyndon Johnson’s legacy, the early days of Donald Trump’s presidency augur some hope. Staffed by a thin layer of political neophytes with little experience and even less curiosity, Trump’s White House has no Harry McPherson or Joe Califano, no Bill Moyers or Douglass Cater. It is true that Jack Valenti was no more prepared to assume the awesome responsibilities of his office than were many of Trump’s senior advis
ers. But Valenti threw himself into the role, worked punishing hours, and consumed tens of thousands of pages of briefing memorandums each week. The same cannot be said of Trump’s aides. LBJ’s White House also valued the collective expertise of the federal bureaucracy and worked closely with cabinet departments and agencies. The Trump administration has been slow to appoint subcabinet officials, has cast off career public servants as part of an enemy “deep state,” and has demonstrated little facility for the art of administration. A staff unprepared to govern, and dismissive of administrative expertise and discipline, may well find itself hard-pressed to undo the work of a presidential staff that did.
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Not three months after leaving the White House, Harry McPherson was asked by an interviewer what it was like “not to be there anymore.” Did he feel a “loss of relevance”?
“Well,” McPherson answered with a touch of sarcasm, “I’m without a car, which is a terrible loss. And I’m without constant telephone calls, which sort of makes you wonder whether you really count in the world anymore.” But he was “glad to be away from Johnson at last, after so many years with him, because I need to develop my own maturity; that is, to be my own ‘daddy,’ to a considerable extent, so far as one can be one’s own father. He has been an overpowering influence in my life, one whom I had to fight to keep from utterly dominating me. He is consuming to be with. His preoccupations become yours. Whatever he happens to be working on becomes the only thing that anybody works on around him, or thinks about.”
Other aides exhibited more conflict about departing the West Wing. Even after leaving the White House, Jack Valenti remained a member of LBJ’s inner circle. Despite his lucrative and glamorous position, he grappled with a sense of emptiness. “At this time [last year] I was helping the President decide whether to make a major international trip and whom to see,” he told McPherson in 1967. “This week I spent an entire day trying to get ‘The Sound of Music’ into Kenya.” He cautioned his former colleagues of what they, too, could expect upon leaving government: “the tremendous fall, drop, in relevance, in breadth of concern, that one experiences in returning to private life.”
In the years that followed, the men who constituted LBJ’s inner circle followed divergent paths. Some, like Joe Califano, returned to government: in 1977, President Jimmy Carter named the domestic policy wunderkind as his secretary of health, education, and welfare. By his own assessment, Califano used the post to expand and administer the very Great Society programs that in prior years he had helped to conceive. Well to the left of the administration politically, he angered several southern governors over the pace of school desegregation and—ironically—tangled frequently with Carter’s inexperienced but headstrong White House staff. In 1979, the president fired Califano, who returned to the private practice of law. His dismissal drove a deeper wedge between the Democratic Party’s liberal wing and the White House and was one in a series of precipitating events that led Edward Kennedy to challenge Carter unsuccessfully in the 1980 primary season.
A consummate party man, Larry O’Brien managed Hubert Humphrey’s campaign in 1968 and subsequently served two turns as Democratic National Committee chairman between 1968 and 1972, resigning to accept the national chairmanship of George McGovern’s doomed bid for the presidency. It was to be his last moment in politics. O’Brien moved to New York, built a successful public relations practice, and capped off a remarkable career by serving as commissioner of the National Basketball Association between 1975 and 1984. In that role, he helped to revive the game’s declining fortunes. He died in 1990.
After Robert Kennedy’s assassination, Richard Goodwin left politics altogether. He served briefly as editor of Rolling Stone, became a prolific contributor to other magazines and newspapers, and moved to Massachusetts with his second wife, Doris Kearns—a Harvard-educated political scientist who served as a presidential fellow in the Johnson White House before helping the ex-president to pen his memoirs and subsequently blazing a trail as one of America’s foremost presidential biographers. Dick Goodwin returned briefly to the public eye in 1994 when the film Quiz Show featured him as its central character. The movie concerned Goodwin’s role as a young House aide, not his work in the Kennedy or Johnson administrations.
After leaving the White House, George Reedy became a prolific author of books concerning American politics and political institutions. In 1971, he moved to Milwaukee, where he became dean of Marquette University’s School of Journalism in 1972, a post he held until 1976, when he stepped down to accept an endowed professorship. He taught at the university until 1990 and subsequently took emeritus status. In later years, Reedy became a pointed if fair critic of the president with whom he had once been so close but from whom he gradually grew estranged. The two men did not speak to each other after 1970. George Reedy died in 1999.
Horace Busby maintained his business consultancy and newsletter well into the 1980s, advising large multinational companies, including American Airlines and Mobil Oil, and turning out a steady flow of memorandums—replete with sweeping political and economic syntheses—for which his corporate clients paid him handsomely. Busby retired to Southern California. Unbeknownst to his family, he penned a memoir of his time on LBJ’s staff—tenure that spanned two pivotal decades of American history. His adult children found the unfinished manuscript boxed away in his daughter’s garage several years after his death in 2000.
After leaving Hubert Humphrey’s campaign staff in late 1968, Douglass Cater earned his living as a freelance writer and visiting scholar at various universities and think tanks. In 1982, he accepted the presidency of Washington College, a picturesque liberal arts college located on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. His books and articles received positive reviews, even after he retired from his college post and returned to Montgomery, Alabama, in 1990. When he died in 1995, the New York Times memorialized him as “a soft-spoken student and practitioner of government” who earned his “reputation as a civilizing influence” and “brought thoughtfulness to both his extensive writings and his other work.”
Harry McPherson—of all the presidential aides, perhaps the most relieved to abandon the pressures of political life—built a successful law practice. His clients included multinational corporations and foreign governments, but he continued to take an active part in public affairs. He served on multiple presidential commissions, including one that Jimmy Carter impaneled to investigate the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, and in 1998 played a role in helping forty-six states negotiate a multibillion-dollar settlement with the nation’s big tobacco companies. His memoir, A Political Education, published in 1972, remains a classic study in the ways of Washington. “To put it bluntly,” a reviewer noted, “few Americans have a realistic idea of how our government works. We have instead a series of naïve assumptions. If the message of this book were common knowledge, much of the sound and fury that currently caricatures our politics and our national image could be averted.” McPherson died in 2012 at the age of eighty-two.
After parting ways with Johnson, Bill Moyers returned to his professional roots and built a storied career as a newspaper editor, television journalist, producer of public interest and investigative documentaries, and public television impresario. No less attentive to his personal brand than in his days as a White House adviser, over the years he cultivated a reputation for intellectual integrity and high-minded liberal enlightenment. But with very few exceptions, he rarely spoke or wrote about his association with Lyndon Johnson. Unlike most of his colleagues—Reedy, Valenti, Busby, McPherson, Califano, Goodwin—he has not, to date, written a memoir of his public life nor clarified for the record the circumstances surrounding his break with LBJ. “Lyndon B. Johnson owned and operated a ferocious ego,” he offered in a rare moment of candor in 2015. “But he was curiously ill at ease with himself. He had an animal sense of weakness in other men—he wanted to know what you loved and what you feared
and once he knew, he came after you. . . . He had a passion for power but suffered violent dissent in the ranks of his own personality. He could absolutely do the right thing at the right time—the reassuring grace, if you will, when he was thrust into the White House after Kennedy’s assassination; the Civil Rights Act of 1964; the Voting Rights Act of 1965. But when he did the wrong thing—escalating the Vietnam war—the damage was irreparable.”
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“I’m sometimes amazed, and even appalled, at the fact that we did handle all of this with so small a staff,” Jack Valenti later admitted. Presidents came and went during his four decades at the helm of one of the most formidable industry lobbies in the United States, but Valenti—who first arrived in Washington, D.C., on the wings of random circumstance—remained a fixture in the capital’s power circles. “I have worked in two of life’s classic fascinations, politics and movies,” he later wrote, “and while there are dazzling attractions in both areas, it is the political man who most excites me.” Valenti, who died in 2007, still marveled at the proximity he once enjoyed to Lyndon Johnson. “I think I knew him as well as anyone beyond his wife and family,” he averred, “and I know I did not know all of him.” Johnson was “an awesome engine of a man: ‘terrorizing; tender; inexhaustibly energetic; ruthless’—‘petty; clairvoyant; compassionate; bullying; sensitive; tough; resolute; charming; earthy; devious’—‘disciplined; crafty; generous.’” The president he remembered “had one goal”: to do “the greatest good in the history of the nation. He had one tragedy: a war whose commitments he could not break and whose tenacity he did not perceive.” Valenti knew the value of what Lyndon Johnson left behind and could only wonder what more they might all have accomplished if not for the tragedy in Vietnam.
