Building the Great Society Read online

  The new law mandated the integration of all facilities that received federal funds and—more jarring to many white southerners—places of public accommodation. From hotels, buses, and rest stops to golf courses, restaurants, and swimming pools, Jim Crow was now a violation of federal law. “Desegregation was absolutely incomprehensible to the average southerner,” said an attorney from Greensboro, “absolutely unbelievable.” “How can I destroy the lingering faces of Stepin Fetchit, Amos & Andy, Buckwheat and all the others?” wondered a college student from North Carolina. “[My] world view is still strongly rooted in . . . a rural, agrarian, black-belt county, which is, in many ways, the same way as it was in 1900.” For southerners like Margaret Jones Bolsterli, who grew up on a cotton plantation in Arkansas, “racism permeated every aspect of our lives, from little black Sambo . . . in the first stories read to us, to the warning that drinking coffee before the age of sixteen would turn us black. It was part of the air everyone breathed.”

  Observing the scene outside Montgomery’s Jefferson Davis Hotel a year later, Jimmy Breslin, the irascible New York City newspaperman, wrote, “You have not lived, in this time when everything is changing, until you see an old black woman with mud on her shoes stand on the street of a Southern city and sing ‘. . . we are not afraid . . .’ and then turn and look at the face of a cop near her and see the puzzlement, and the terrible fear in his eyes. Because he knows, and everybody who has ever seen it knows, that it is over.” “This thing here is a revolution,” a businessman from Montgomery confided to Breslin. “And some of us know it. The world’s passed all of us by . . . unless we start to live with it.” The bill’s passage promised a definitive end to the brutal and comprehensive system of de jure segregation that existed in the South since the turn of the century: “white” and “colored” water fountains, schools, and medical facilities; whites-only swimming pools, movie theaters, and restaurants; legally permissible discrimination in the workplace. For white southerners, the year 1964 portended the end of life as they knew it, if the government proved serious about enforcing the law.

  Some people proved able to reconcile themselves to the changes around them. In Birmingham, Ollie McClung, owner of a popular barbecue shack, mounted a legal challenge to the Civil Rights Act, claiming that the federal government had no jurisdiction over intrastate commerce. When the Supreme Court ruled against him in December 1964, finding that his restaurant was engaged in meaningful interstate commerce (much of its pork and beef was purchased from out-of-state vendors), McClung opened his doors to black diners. “As law-abiding Americans we feel we must bow to the edict of the Supreme Court,” he grudgingly announced. On December 16, five black diners came to Ollie’s to feast on his legendary ribs and chicken. To everyone’s surprise—McClung’s included—nothing happened. “Everything was lovely,” said one of the black customers. “Lovely. Not a single incident. We sure enjoyed Ollie’s good barbecue.” Others proved less flexible. In Greenwood, Mississippi, the local government drained and shuttered a municipal pool rather than open it to black citizens. In Atlanta, Lester Maddox, a prominent cafeteria owner, chased black diners out of his establishment with a gun and an ax handle, then defiantly closed his restaurant rather than integrate it. In 1966, he was elected governor of Georgia, indicating the limits of white accommodation.

  Yet among private businesses, the “general picture” was “one of large-scale compliance,” the U.S. Justice Department concluded shortly after the civil rights bill became law. Church, business, and civic leaders throughout the country had combined forces even before July to smooth the way for compliance. Julius Manger, a wealthy hotel mogul and “one of the unsung heroes of the civil rights era,” personally traveled the South that spring and summer to plead with other hospitality executives to effect a swift and peaceful integration of their facilities. Where his company owned a significant concentration of properties, he recalled, “I was able to say to other hotel and motel owners that I was not just asking them to do something and then going to walk away, but that we actually had a bigger investment to lose than they did.”

  Notwithstanding their signature accomplishments, civic, business, and religious leaders could only move the needle so far. By late 1964, thousands of southern schools, hospitals, and nursing homes remained strictly segregated, and in Deep South states like Mississippi only 10 percent of eligible black citizens were registered to vote. Cracking decades of state-enforced segregation and political disenfranchisement was beyond the means of private individuals and organizations. Compliance with the law would require the full force of the federal government. Ironically, southern congressmen had concentrated their fire on the bill’s public accommodations provision rather than on Title VI, which stipulated that no public funds could support racially exclusive or segregated programs. It would ultimately prove easier to persuade restaurants and hotels to open their doors to African Americans than to compel public schools to mingle students and faculty, or health-care facilities to place black and white patients side by side. Even before the legislation cleared Congress, one of LBJ’s top domestic policy advisers was readying federal departments to issue sweeping rules that would fundamentally reorder southern society. Securing a bill was a monumental achievement. Breathing life into it would carry far greater political risk.

  As the day of the bill signing—July 2—faded into night, Bill Moyers found Johnson in a glum mood. “I think we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come,” Johnson told his aide.

  CHAPTER 4

  Revolutionary Activity

  To spirit his antipoverty initiative to life, Lyndon Johnson turned to the one member of the extended Kennedy family who had ever shown him a moment’s consideration: Sargent Shriver, the handsome, Yale-educated attorney whom JFK tapped to run the Peace Corps—arguably the most successful and popular of the New Frontier’s domestic initiatives. Born to a prominent Catholic family in Maryland, Shriver fought in the Battle of Guadalcanal before returning to the United States. He moved to Chicago, where he managed Joseph P. Kennedy’s Merchandise Mart out of the red and swiftly established himself as one of the emerging pillars of the city’s business community. Along the way, he met and married Kennedy’s daughter Eunice and became chairman of both the Chicago Board of Education and the Catholic Interracial Council. Devoted to the social justice wing of the Roman Catholic Church, he fused a tradition of faith and service to an impressive private-sector career. In 1960, he had been widely touted as a possible candidate for governor of Illinois, but he deferred to the wishes of his wife’s brothers, who were determined that only one member of the Kennedy family should appear on the ballot in that election season. Among his responsibilities on JFK’s presidential campaign was co-coordination of civil rights policy. When officials in Georgia arrested Martin Luther King Jr. on dubious charges that fall, it was Shriver who famously prodded the candidate to place a phone call to Coretta Scott King—a small gesture that later became central to Camelot lore. (“What the hell,” his brother-in-law JFK responded. “That’s a decent thing to do.”) “He was just enormously impressive,” recalled a reporter. “All the clichés fit: tall, dark, handsome. Fit as a college athlete at forty-five. He was warm and friendly and funny—was interested in everything, full of anecdotes. He knew as much about sports as he did about politics and as much about the civil rights movement as he did about theology.” “Shriver had the kind of charisma that makes men charge the barricades,” a Peace Corps staff member later said.

  Johnson’s principal tie to Shriver was Bill Moyers, who in the weeks after JFK’s assassination had technically been on loan to the White House from his role as associate director of the Peace Corps. From their first meeting in late 1960, Shriver had been deeply impressed by Moyers, particularly by his almost singular ability to tolerate the famous LBJ “treatment.” “Johnson would just come in and stand over you and try to overpower you with his physical presence,” Shriver would explain. “And
he’d do that to Moyers. And Moyers was just a kid, maybe less than 125 pounds. Johnson would yell at him, tell him what to do. And then I’d see Moyers stick his head back, and his jaw would clench and he’d grit his teeth and say, ‘No.’” So close were Moyers and Johnson that when Shriver first angled to hire him, Kenny O’Donnell tried to block the appointment. “He’s the only one on Johnson’s staff we trust,” he barked at Harris Wofford, a close associate of Shriver’s. “The president’s going to tell him to stay there, and you can tell Sarge to keep his cotton-picking hands off Moyers.” Kennedy ultimately agreed to release Moyers to the Peace Corps, and in the months that followed, he became Shriver’s indispensable right hand. The two men spent weeks lobbying skeptical legislators to secure passage of the Peace Corps bill. Though only twenty-seven years old, Moyers was by far a more experienced hand in the ways of congressional politics. “Bill Moyers and I have been living on the Hill,” Shriver reported to the president at one critical moment. When Congress finally authorized the program, Moyers was recognized as the most influential among the legion of young, idealistic staffers who gathered each weekend at the Shrivers’ rambling country estate, Timberlawn, for hours of Peace Corps meetings, family barbecues, and raucous outdoor sporting competitions.

  After the assassination, Shriver managed the details of JFK’s funeral while also serving as a conduit between LBJ and the Kennedy family. He even went so far as to present the new president with a brief memorandum, “What Bobby Thinks,” outlining the psychology behind his brother-in-law’s seemingly intractable hatred of Lyndon Johnson. Moyers also let it slip to reporters that Shriver was under consideration for vice president in the 1964 election, as indeed he was for a time. Johnson was under intense pressure to show solidarity with the Kennedys, and as a member of the clan—but not quite a Kennedy himself—Shriver provided Johnson with insulation against Bobby’s ambitions. Moyers and LBJ well understood that Shriver was in, but not of, RFK’s orbit. Bobby often derided Shriver as the resident “Boy Scout” and “house Communist”—too soft to be a real Kennedy. “Believe me,” recounted one of Bobby’s longtime aides, “Sarge was no close pal brother-in-law and he wasn’t giving Robert Kennedy any extra breaks.” With Moyers on loan to the White House and his own brand rising in value, Shriver staked his future with LBJ. But even he was surprised when the president asked him to lead his new “War on Poverty.”

  Shriver returned to Washington on Friday, January 31, 1964, after a monthlong international tour for the Peace Corps. Reporting to the Oval Office to brief the president on his travels, he thought little of it when Johnson remarked, “You know, we’re getting this war against poverty started. I’d like you to think about that, because I’d like you to run that program for us.” Shriver would later admit that he was “totally unfamiliar with the whole project, having been in Asia when he announced the proposal. All I knew was a little item I read in a Bangkok newspaper.” The next afternoon, Johnson reached him by phone at Timberlawn, where the director was spending a quiet day with his wife and children, of whom he had seen precious little in the prior months, given his punishing travel schedule. LBJ explained that in a matter of hours he intended to announce Shriver’s appointment to lead the War on Poverty. He could retain ownership of the Peace Corps or hand that job off to a subordinate, but his primary responsibility going forward would be domestic policy. Shriver protested repeatedly, but Johnson leaned in with his classic “treatment.”

  He enjoyed his work at the Peace Corps. (“You can write your ticket on anything you want to do there,” the president assured him.)

  He knew nothing about poverty. (“Let me make it clear. Let me say that I have asked you to study this.”)

  He would need help. (“If you want Bill to help you, I’ll let him do that.”)

  He worried that “Bill Moyers and Sarge Shriver really to 99 percent of the people abroad” were the face of the Peace Corps. With both of them deployed elsewhere, the staff and volunteers might lose faith. (“Well, don’t you think that they’re not damn glad that both of them have taken over the White House?” the president asked.)

  Could Moyers come back to the Peace Corps to help relieve him of administrative duties while he concentrated on poverty? (“I need him more than anybody in the world right here. And you need him here too. He’s good for Shriver here.”)

  Could he not make Moyers acting director of the Peace Corps? (“Not and run the White House, too. And that’s what he’s doing now . . . now don’t go raiding the White House! Go on and get your own damn talent.”)

  In the end, it came down, as it always did with Johnson, to a crude test of will. “Hell, it’ll be a promotion!” he insisted. “You’ve got your identification with the Peace Corps. You’ve got everything you ever had there plus this. . . . Unless you’ve got some women that you think you won’t have enough time to spend with them.”

  Shriver, a devout Catholic who since his college days had celebrated High Mass each day, laughed nervously.

  “You’ve got the responsibility. You’ve got the authority. You’ve got the power. You’ve got the money. Now you may not have the glands.”

  “The glands?” Shriver replied incredulously.

  “Yes.”

  “I got plenty of glands.”

  With that conversation, Sargent Shriver agreed reluctantly to lead the president’s war to eradicate poverty.

  • • • • •

  Shriver’s first move was to build his own group of trusted confidants to help fashion a legislative proposal. Chief among his advisers was Frank Mankiewicz, who headed the Peace Corps in Peru but happened to be in Washington, where he was slated to appear before the House Foreign Relations Committee. On Sunday afternoon, as he prepared his testimony, Mankiewicz found himself summoned to Shriver’s office at the Peace Corps to participate in the first planning session. He would remain in Washington for six weeks, on loan from the job that he truly loved. “Through all of this period Shriver was perfectly willing to let us do anything in a sense, come up with all kinds of suggestions, and these would all go into a pot and people would talk about them,” Mankiewicz would remark. “We’d discuss it. It was rather informal. We spent a lot of time at Shriver’s house. We would stay up late because it was the best time to get work done because there were no phones ringing.”

  The working group brought together in one room several of the country’s most capable minds: Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a working-class New Yorker and onetime longshoreman who earned a Ph.D. in international relations at Tufts University and was now serving as assistant secretary of labor, a post in which he functioned as the department’s house intellectual; Harris Wofford, a white Peace Corps official with close ties to Martin Luther King Jr.; Wilbur Cohen of HEW, whom John Kennedy called “Mr. Social Security,” in respectful acknowledgment of his role as a young New Dealer in establishing the Social Security Board and lifting the program off the ground; Dick Goodwin, who was already at work with Moyers in fashioning the organizing thesis of LBJ’s Great Society; Michael Harrington, whose book The Other America had been instrumental in animating liberal passion around the blight of poverty; Dave Hackett and Dick Boone; Charles Schultze, the assistant budget director; Louis Martin; and Adam Yarmolinsky, the intense, fiery-eyed special assistant to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara—a sober-minded tactician who wore a tight-cropped crew cut and perpetually looked “like he’s got a bomb in his back pocket, ready to throw,” by one colleague’s estimation. A graduate of Harvard University and Yale Law School, Yarmolinsky clerked for the Supreme Court justice Stanley Reed before launching a successful legal career. As one of McNamara’s bright young men, he earned the lasting enmity of southern congressmen when he cajoled the Defense Department into barring all servicemen from visiting or patronizing segregated facilities—a proviso that infuriated businessmen who operated stores and restaurants outside southern military installations.

  Because all of the p
rincipals held day jobs at the highest echelons of the federal government, meetings were scheduled on weekends or weekday evenings. The planning committee had neither a budget (Shriver relied on a small appropriation from Johnson’s presidential contingency fund) nor adequate offices. Initially housed in the Court of Claims building—an abandoned structure that predated the Civil War—the small support staff was forced to relocate when a large portion of its plaster ceiling caved in and engineers declared the entire edifice unsafe. From there, they claimed space in the basement of a decrepit hospital and a floor of a derelict hotel that in its glory days had functioned as a “second-class whorehouse.” Each time they moved, secretaries and task force members were assigned new telephone extensions, contributing to almost constant logistical confusion. Badly under-resourced, they pilfered office supplies from other federal agencies. Despite these deficiencies, Shriver’s makeshift operation soon became a center of gravity in Washington. There was an “excellent esprit de corps,” remembered one of the participants. Johnson would later salute the “contagious” enthusiasm behind the antipoverty working group. “They went at it with a fervor and created a ferment unknown since the days of the New Deal,” he wrote, “when lights burned through the night as men worked to restructure society.”

  James L. Sundquist, an official on loan from the Department of Agriculture, observed that “Shriver’s own temperament and method of operation was extremely open and fluid. He doesn’t like fixed organizations anyway, so he was perfectly in his milieu on this one.” Yet even though Shriver cast a “dragnet out for new ideas and additional ideas,” the departments offered precious few new ideas—except for community action. When Heller’s group first met with Shriver, they imparted their shared conviction that the larger initiative should focus on unlocking opportunity through an attack on the “root causes” of poverty, rather than redistributing wealth or income. Community action programs (CAPs) of the variety pioneered by the Ford Foundation and the juvenile delinquency commission, Schultze advised, should be the driving force behind the administration’s program. Shriver was initially skeptical. “It’ll never fly,” he told Yarmolinsky. Both men soon came around and agreed that community action should constitute an important part of the antipoverty plan, if not its entirety. For one, the governing ethos behind community action—that local communities should be equipped with the means to build sustainable, homegrown institutions—was not altogether different from what the Peace Corps was attempting outside the United States. Mankiewicz believed “the notion of organizing people around their grievances to accomplish a single thing, whether it was to set up a co-op or clinic or soccer team or to get the playground open at night or whatever it might have been, was . . . in a sense revolutionary since the idea of it was to create alternate situations of power in a country where most people were powerless.” Moreover, as Yarmolinsky observed, it was clear from the start that funds would be limited—at least in the first year. “One of the choices we had to make was whether to concentrate on preparing jobs for people or preparing people for jobs. We decided for the latter, partly because we thought that the president’s tax cuts would in effect be job-creating, partly because we thought it takes more time to prepare people for jobs than jobs for people.” Firm in the shared conviction that economic planners could manufacture permanent growth—the very purpose of the Kennedy/Johnson tax cuts—Shriver’s group assumed prima facie that antipoverty policy need not concern itself with redistributing resources in the form of make-work programs or income floors.