Building the Great Society Read online

  The spots that DDB created under Moyers’s and Valenti’s supervision were like nothing the country had ever seen. In one, the camera lingered over a telephone with a flashing red light, conspicuously missing a rotary dial. “This particular phone only rings in a serious crisis,” a narrator explained in a grave tone. “Leave it in the hands of a man who has proven himself responsible.” Another depicted a young girl raptly engaged in an ice cream cone to a woman’s troubling voice-over: “Know what people used to do? They used to explode bombs in the air. You know, children should have lots of vitamin A and calcium. But they shouldn’t have strontium 90 or cesium 137.” The narrator explained that reasonable leaders came together several years earlier to sign a test ban treaty, thus ridding the atmosphere of harmful nuclear radiant. “Now there’s a man who wants to be President of the United States,” she continued. “His name is Barry Goldwater. If he’s elected, they might start testing all over again.” From a distance, a Geiger counter clicked away with increased rapidity. In “Confessions of a Republican,” an earnest, bespectacled young man—primly dressed and thoughtful in both voice and expression—offered that “I certainly don’t feel guilty about being a Republican. I’ve always been a Republican. But when we come to Senator Goldwater, now it seems to me we’re up against a very different kind of man.” Midway through, he carefully pulled a packet from his suit pocket and lit a cigarette. Resting it between his right index and middle fingers, he continued, “I mean, when the head of the Ku Klux Klan with all those weird groups come out in favor of the candidate of my party, either they’re not Republicans or I’m not.”

  On the evening of September 7, during NBC’s Monday Night at the Movies, the campaign aired “Daisy Girl,” a one-minute ad that featured a young girl picking petals off a flower while counting from one to ten. Midway through the spot, a man’s voice supersedes the girl’s with a countdown. The camera zoomed in on her eye, on which a giant, exploding mushroom cloud was reflected. “These are the stakes,” LBJ’s voice-over sounded. “To make a world in which all God’s children can live, or go into the dark. We must either love each other or we must die.” A narrator then warned, “Vote for President Johnson on November 3. The stakes are too high for you to stay home.” Minutes after the spot ran, the White House switchboard lit up with calls from across the country, complaining about the campaign’s cheap appeal to fear and panic. “Holy shit!” the president screamed at Bill Moyers, whom he had summoned to the Oval Office. “What in the hell do you mean putting on that ad? I’ve been swamped with calls.” Upon a moment’s reflection, LBJ conceded with a laugh, “I guess it did what we goddamned set out to do, didn’t it?” The spot aired only once, but the rival networks CBS and ABC reported widely on the controversy surrounding it. Days later, the chairman of the Republican National Committee lodged a formal complaint with the Federal Communications Commission, protesting that “this horror-type commercial implies that Senator Goldwater is a reckless man.” Moyers was positively ecstatic when he telephoned Johnson to deliver the news. “That’s exactly what we wanted to imply,” he told the president. “And we also hoped someone around Goldwater would say it, not us.” Long after it aired, “Daisy Girl” would be remembered as one of the most vicious broadcast spots in American political history.

  Much as Busby had suggested, the president’s campaign would attempt to construct a vast, winning coalition spanning from center left to center right. The “soundest national approach,” Dick Scammon advised Moyers, was “setting out that middle-of-the-road approach which seems to mark the views of three-quarters of our citizens. Firm support of a law-and-order, moderate program, guaranteeing citizen rights, and enforcing citizen duties. . . . Doubtless this policy should be accompanied by specific rejection of the views—and actions—of Klan hoodlums on the one side or liquor-looting hoodlums on the other.” The president’s campaign could thus argue that Goldwater and the Klan were tarred with the same brush, while avoiding the implication that LBJ drew support from “hoodlums” who had rioted that summer in Harlem.

  Earlier in the year, the pollster Oliver Quayle coined a term to describe this strategy: “frontlash.” Presidential advisers who had only recently braced themselves for a revolt by working-class white voters now perceived an opportunity to exploit the “much larger crack of moderate Republican ‘frontlash’ against Barry Goldwater,” a reporter noted. By presenting themselves as the “party of stability and responsibility and calm judgment,” they would make “it easier for moderate-minded Republicans to vote for President Johnson.” Thinking principally of the immediate goal—racking up a commanding majority to satisfy Johnson’s desire to outperform even Franklin Roosevelt, who in 1936 captured 61 percent of the popular vote and 523 electoral votes, and building liberal majorities in Congress to enact more Great Society programs—“Team A” pursued their opponent without mercy. “We ought to treat Goldwater not as an equal, who has credentials to be president,” Valenti urged. “We must depict Miller as some sort of April Fool’s gag. . . . Practically all our answers ought to mantle in ridicule.” (Indeed, Valenti reached out to Bob Hope’s joke writers for material. The idea was to “whack [Goldwater] EVERY day with gags and humor that deny him any right to be called sane or stable.”) That fall, DDB produced a darkly amusing spot that depicted a hand emerging from water and sawing off the Eastern Seaboard of the United States as the narrator reminded viewers that Goldwater had once advocated precisely this metaphorical outcome.

  In a brutally direct memo to LBJ, Valenti contended that “[our] main strength lies not so much in the FOR Johnson but in the AGAINST Goldwater. . . . We must make him ridiculous and a little scary: trigger-happy, a bomb thrower, a radical . . . not the Nation’s leader, will sell TVA, cancel Social Security, abolish the government, stir trouble in NATO, be the herald of WWIII.” Moyers was in full agreement. The central message of the president’s campaign was that Goldwater “could do these things—but only if we let him. Vote for President Johnson on November 3. The stakes are too high to stay home.” The longer-term disadvantage of pursuing a “frontlash” strategy might not have been immediately apparent to the president’s team. Writing that summer, the columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak observed that the White House was transforming the Democratic Party “into a non-ideological broad-based ‘consensus’ party cleansed of over-partisanship.” The question was “whether these new Johnson voters, if even translated into a whopping majority in 1964, can be retained as Democrats in the future.”

  But Team A remained singularly focused. “We have a few more Goldwater ads,” Moyers assured the president in the immediate wake of the “Daisy Girl” spot. It was a considerable understatement. They produced more spots than they could use. “Right now, the biggest asset we have is Goldwater’s alleged instability in re atom and hydrogen bombs,” Valenti offered. “We must not let this slip away.”

  Moyers and Valenti built an operation almost unprecedented in American presidential politics. The “Five O’Clock Club” deployed trackers to attend Goldwater’s and Miller’s public speeches and provided reporters with real-time retorts to the opposition’s claims. They worked with friendly journalists to monitor Goldwater’s off-the-record conversations with his press pool and put E. Howard Hunt, a CIA intelligence officer who would later gain notoriety for his role in the Watergate scandal, on the payroll to gather intelligence on the opposition. While presidential campaigns customarily relied on polling, Johnson’s voracious hunger for data drove the White House to new extremes. In addition to conducting regular surveys of the two-candidate horse race, Moyers privately commissioned the Gallup organization to run “flash” polls that tested public reaction to specific speeches or messaging. Using dispersed call centers, Gallup could deliver results within twenty-four hours, at a cost of $4,000 per survey. This practice, which would later become standard, was wholly without precedent when Moyers first suggested it to the president.

  In further pursuit of the “front
lash” strategy, Jim Rowe took leave of his law practice to organize seventy-two affinity groups, including the National Independent Committee for Johnson and Humphrey, an organization that drew together leading Republicans, including John Loeb, Sidney J. Weinberg of Goldman Sachs, Henry Ford II, Donald C. Cook of American Electric Power, two members of the staunchly Republican Cabot family of Massachusetts, and Bob Anderson, former Treasury secretary under Dwight Eisenhower, who chaired the organization. “Not since the 1920s,” wrote the Christian Science Monitor, “has the businessman been so ardently wooed in a presidential election.” The political humorist Art Buchwald noted that most of Rowe’s committees—artists and authors, organized labor, women’s groups, rural advocates—were fundamentally predictable. The only one that stood out, he wisecracked, was “Republicans for Goldwater.”

  Moyers was aware that “frontlash” was limited in its strategic value. If he did not take Goldwater seriously, he nevertheless cautioned the president not to ignore the GOP nominee’s broader resonance with a large portion of the electorate. Moyers urged LBJ to make at least a symbolic gesture toward Americans who felt their country changing in ways that seemed menacing and unfriendly. He wanted to see Johnson “visit county fairs—be seen shaking hands—walking around among the people—talking to rural Americans.” Wise counsel or not, Moyers could not—and LBJ would not—run such a campaign. The issues confronting Americans were too grave, and the emerging divisions too wide, to escape.

  • • • • •

  Despite the early and trenchant success of the “frontlash” strategy, LBJ was not unassailable. His support for civil rights had opened an enormous chasm within the Democratic coalition.

  On Friday, August 21, just days before the opening gavel of the Democratic National Convention, several busloads of black Mississippians arrived at the shabby, beaten-down Gem Motel, a mile from Convention Hall in Atlantic City. A reporter watching them assemble for a prayer session saw “a hymn-singing group of dedicated men and women, who feel as though they had temporarily escaped from a Mississippi prison and who think they may be jailed when they get back.” They were sharecroppers, small-business owners, maids, and schoolteachers. Among them were a few whites, including the Reverend Ed King, the chaplain of Tougaloo College, a small black institution just north of Jackson. The Mississippians slept four to a room and dined frugally. They were “all dressed up in their Sunday-go-to-meeting best,” recalled the veteran civil rights activist James Forman. They were representatives of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP). On Saturday, they would appear before the convention’s Credentials Committee and ask to be seated as the official Mississippi state delegation.

  For more than three years, several civil rights groups, including the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and the Congress of Racial Equality, had cooperated under the umbrella of the Council of Federated Organizations to run voter-registration drives in Mississippi. Even in the American South, where only 40 percent of eligible black citizens were registered to vote, the Magnolia State was exceptional. Of its several hundred thousand black voting-age residents, only 6.4 percent had managed to wade through the thicket of literacy and citizenship tests, poll taxes, and violence to register.

  In 1963, the organizations switched tactics and coordinated the “Freedom Vote,” an independent mock election intended to demonstrate that Mississippi’s black citizens would vote if provided the opportunity. Some eighty thousand black citizens turned in mock ballots electing the state NAACP chief, Aaron Henry, governor and the Reverend Ed King lieutenant governor of Mississippi. The election was nonbinding, but it conveyed a powerful message: if given the opportunity, black Mississippians would readily exercise their constitutional right to the franchise.

  Building on the success of the Freedom Vote, the organizers laid plans for two bold projects. First, they would bring a large contingent of white students to Mississippi in the summer of 1964 to register voters. Placing the sons and daughters of affluent middle-class whites from New York, Boston, and elsewhere in the line of fire would surely draw media attention to the violent injustice of Mississippi political culture, as well as provide sorely needed manpower. Second, they would sponsor another parallel election, this time to select delegates for the 1964 Democratic National Convention. To that end, the Council of Federated Organizations created the MFDP and invited every black and white citizen of voting age to participate in local, county, and statewide caucuses to choose delegates who would go to Atlantic City. They followed Mississippi election law to the letter, acting as though the MFDP were, in effect, the state Democratic Party. Because most black citizens were artificially disenfranchised, and because the MFDP opened its delegate caucuses to people of all races, the new organization would argue that it, not the regular state party, held rightful claim to Mississippi’s slate of convention delegates.

  The experiment in interracial cooperation drew enormous media attention. On Monday, June 22, just weeks into the project, Americans learned of the disappearance of three voter-registration workers—James Chaney, a twenty-one-year-old black native of Meridian; Michael Schwerner, a young, Jewish New Yorker; and Andrew Goodman, a summer volunteer from Queens College in New York City. Weeks later, after a massive and well-publicized manhunt, their bodies were found beneath an earthen dam.

  By the opening gavel of the 1964 convention, it was clear that the MFDP enjoyed the strong support of liberal delegates. If the national convention agreed to seat the MFDP instead of the Mississippi regulars—and this was not entirely unimaginable after the chair of the delegation, Lieutenant Governor Paul Johnson, infuriated many northern Democrats by affirming that NAACP stood for “niggers, alligators, apes, coons and possums”—white southern state delegations might bolt the convention. To avert that possibility, Johnson dangled the vice presidency before the only Senate liberal with sufficient credibility to shut down the challenge: Hubert Humphrey. “I always had the feeling, and it was implicit,” one of Humphrey’s advisers later explained, “that if Humphrey messed this up, Johnson was not going to make him the running mate. It was a kind of test for him. If he couldn’t do it, so much for Humphrey.”

  The MFDP’s lawyer, Joe Rauh, was a veteran labor attorney and a close adviser to both Hubert Humphrey and Walter Reuther, the head of the United Auto Workers. Rauh had been a bitter enemy of Lyndon Johnson’s throughout the 1950s but had recently closed ranks to help the White House secure passage of the Civil Rights Act. Now he found himself once again challenging Johnson on a matter of liberal conviction. His strategy was simple. He expected a majority of the convention’s Credentials Committee to oppose seating the MFDP, but he needed only 10 percent of its members—eleven delegates—to force the drafting of a minority report, and then he needed just eight state delegations to request a formal convention-wide vote on the minority report. If he could carry the MFDP that far, he expected delegates outside the South would close ranks with the civil rights activists. To build momentum, he called a string of witnesses to testify before the Credentials Committee about the brutality of Jim Crow. Rita Schwerner, Michael Schwerner’s young widow, spoke, as did Martin Luther King Jr., who told the committee that “if you value your party, if you value your nation, if you value the democratic process, then you must recognize the Freedom party delegation.”

  By far the most stirring testimony was that of Fannie Lou Hamer, a forty-six-year-old ex-sharecropper who was said to be SNCC’s oldest but most dedicated field organizer. The youngest of twenty children, Hamer had spent all but two years of her life in Sunflower County, Mississippi, the home of the segregationist senator James Eastland. In 1962, when Hamer attempted to register to vote, the landowner she worked for had demanded that she withdraw her application. In a voice that was unschooled yet full of eloquent resilience, wearing new city clothes over her short, stout frame, and bearing an expression of both sadness and hope, Hamer to
ld the Credentials Committee that “if the Freedom party is not seated now, I question America. Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, where we have to sleep with our telephones off the hooks because our lives be threatened daily, because we want to live as decent human beings, in America?”

  Watching the coverage from the Oval Office, Johnson realized the potential political danger of Hamer’s testimony. He immediately called a press conference, diverting television coverage away from the credentials hearing. The networks were forced to change their live feeds, but the strategy backfired that evening when they rebroadcast her appearance before a prime-time audience. The next day newspapers ran photographs of Fannie Lou Hamer arm in arm with the family of Michael Schwerner in vigil on the Atlantic City Boardwalk.