Building the Great Society Read online

  Leaving nothing to chance, Johnson applied the full pressure of his office to whip liberal delegates into line. The president’s campaign compelled the convention to accept a compromise stipulating that the MFDP would be accorded special guest status, along with two at-large, nonvoting delegates. The national party would also obligate subsequent national conventions to apply a strict nondiscrimination standard in accrediting delegate slates. Finally, the Mississippi regulars would have to pledge allegiance to the Democratic ticket before taking their seats at the convention. The MFDP refused the settlement. “We didn’t come all this way for no two seats,” Hamer told the packed MFDP caucus. So did the Mississippi regulars, who backtracked on their agreement and endorsed Barry Goldwater. LBJ—who ultimately rewarded Humphrey with the vice presidential nomination—was furious. He had sorely compromised his standing with the party’s liberal flank and was now faced with the prospect of a mass revolt by southern delegates. “They’re Democrats!” he said of the MFDP challengers in a private conversation with Carl Sanders, the moderate governor of Georgia. “These people went in and begged to go and participate in the convention. They’ve got half the population. They won’t let them.” The president had demanded that the convention ignore southern lawlessness—“You violated the ’57 law, and you violated the ’60 law, and you violated the ’64 law, but we’re going to seat you—every damn one of you”—and in return the regulars bolted.

  Since May, Busby had beseeched LBJ to concentrate more effort on the South. He was particularly concerned that the White House had scheduled relatively few appearances by senior administration officials in the Old Confederacy and opted instead to concentrate efforts in the Northeast and the Midwest. A political realist, Johnson essentially resigned himself to losing at least some traditionally Democratic states in the South, as had Harry Truman in 1948 and Adlai Stevenson in 1952 and 1956. He had been willing to sacrifice the MFDP to avert a far-reaching crackup of the party, but he would not divert resources from his national “frontlash” strategy in the interest of courting hard-line segregationists who, in any event, would likely back Goldwater. But Busby was not alone in his reluctance to forfeit the South. Lady Bird Johnson insisted on conducting her own swing through Dixie. Over just four days, she traveled 1,628 miles by train and delivered forty-seven speeches from the back of her specially outfitted railcar. The reception was vitriolic. She was greeted by acid banners (black bird go home; johnson is a nigger-lover) and violent jeers. Resisting Busby’s advice that she avoid controversial topics, she proudly proclaimed her support for the Civil Rights Act. In Columbia, South Carolina, she stared down an especially ugly mob. “This is a country of many viewpoints,” she declared firmly in a southern drawl. “I respect your right to express your own. Now it is my turn to express mine. Thank you.”

  Over the years, LBJ had visited countless public and private indignities upon Lady Bird, but in their complicated relationship she was a trusted political adviser and close friend. He flew to New Orleans to join her final stop and dramatically walked half a mile to greet her train at the station. African American bystanders cheered wildly; white observers stood back several feet on the sidewalk, staring in silent loathing. Taking the stage at the Jung Hotel, Johnson launched into a passionate stem-winder in defense of the Great Society. “I want us to wipe poverty off the face of the South,” he declared, “and off the conscience of the Nation. I want us to assure our young the best of education at every level, and the expectation of a good job in their home State when their schoolyears are through. I want us to assure our aged that when they need hospital care they will have it. I so much want us to maintain a prosperous, free enterprise economy, so your Governor can continue bringing in new plants and new payrolls and new jobs in the north and in the south of your State.”

  He then fixed his gaze on the crowd and addressed the one issue that he knew would cost him the state of Louisiana in November. “Whatever your views are,” he said of the Civil Rights Act, “we have a Constitution and we have a Bill of Rights, and we have the law of the land, and two-thirds of the Democrats in the Senate voted for it and three-fourths of the Republicans. I signed it, and I am going to enforce it.” What followed next left the crowd slack-jawed. Johnson told the apocryphal story of a visit that the late Sam Rayburn—his idol and mentor who had served for many years as House Speaker—paid to a dying southern senator. Rayburn and the unnamed senator reflected on all that the Democratic Party had accomplished under Franklin Roosevelt—the schools and hospitals it had helped build, the relief jobs it offered to the unemployed, the electricity it delivered to rural farm families. “And [the senator] said, ‘Sammy, I wish I felt a little better. . . . I would like to go back down there and make them one more Democratic speech. I just feel like I have one in me. The poor old State, they haven’t heard a Democratic speech in 30 years. All they ever hear at election time is Nigger! Nigger! Nigger!’”

  George Reedy, who had inherited Salinger’s job as press secretary earlier in the spring, told Johnson that the speech left reporters “gasping.” Jack Valenti, who was present, would describe the shocked reaction of the audience as “a physical thing—surprise, awe—ears heard what they plainly could not hear, a cataclysmic wave hit everyone there with stunning irreversible force.” After a moment of dazed silence, African Americans in the crowd stood on their feet and—joined by many white bystanders—“rocked” the hall in “thunderous applause.”

  The newspapers promptly sanitized Johnson’s language, but political professionals understood that he had invoked the crudest epithet in America’s dark racial lexicon to implore a southern audience to resist the misdirection of Jim Crow demagoguery and rise above hate. The traveling press corps, previously lukewarm on LBJ, began evincing qualified “respect and admiration,” his aides informed him. “The New Orleans (Negro, Negro, Negro) speech captured them,” Busby gushed. “Thus overnight they are speaking of you—as once FDR—as ‘the master,’ ‘the champ.’”

  Though aimed at a southern audience, LBJ’s speech in New Orleans represented a definitive embrace of frontlash and an acknowledgment that the solid South would inevitably fissure. Indeed, Goldwater ultimately carried Louisiana, as well as Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, and South Carolina, which delivered forty-seven of his fifty-two electoral votes. Four years later, Wallace—running as a third-party candidate—would win the Goldwater states, while Richard Nixon would carry Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, Oklahoma, and Kentucky.

  In stark contrast to Johnson, who gambled that he could win a changing map with an unorthodox racial calculus, Goldwater—who claimed to be personally opposed to segregation—played fast and loose with racial incitement. The New York Times observed that as the fall campaign wore on, he “began to link directly his ‘law and order’ issue—in which he deplores crime and violence—with the civil rights movement, mentioning the two in juxtaposition.” During a speech in Minneapolis, he “mentioned ‘gang rape’ and civil rights disturbances in the same paragraph.” Speaking to campaign supporters in an all-white suburb of Philadelphia, he charged that “minority groups run this country” and “Americans are getting sick and tired of it.” In southern states, his campaign aired a commercial that depicted a clean-cut, hardworking white youth losing his job to an “arrogant-looking Negro boy,” as the president himself described the spot—courtesy of the Civil Rights Act.

  Earlier in the year, the two candidates met in the White House, ostensibly to agree that neither side would stoke racial fears or resentments for advantage. Goldwater “came in, just wanted to tell me that he was a half-Jew, and that he didn’t want to do anything to contribute to any riots or disorders or bring about any violence,” Johnson told one of his cabinet members. “Because [of] his ancestry, he was aware of the problems that existed in that field, and he didn’t want to say anything that would make them any worse.” But Goldwater did not keep consistently to his pledge.

  Most often, Goldw
ater’s campaign exploited a wider constellation of grievances as proxy issues for race, as when it profited from a thirty-minute televised infomercial titled Choice, which juxtaposed imagery of women in topless bathing attire, striptease clubs, and pornographic literature with film footage of black urban rioters. Interspersed throughout scenes of lascivious pool parties, drug-addled youth, and dancing black children, a man veered wildly and at high speed in a Lincoln Continental, throwing beer cans out the driver-side window, willy-nilly, for added effect. The subtext was unmistakable: the same liberal forces that threatened to unravel the moral fabric of American society were driving racial minorities to lash out violently against public authority and private property. Or, for those who required direct narration: “Honest, hard-working America” was under assault. There were “two Americas, and you alone standing between them.” The film was technically the work of Mothers for a Moral America, but just as Jim Rowe’s seventy-two independent committees were not really independent, the GOP campaign played a hand in its production. Russell Watson, the communications director for Citizens for Goldwater, freely acknowledged that it would tap the “prejudice” of “people who were brought up in small towns and on the farms, especially in the Midwest.”

  If diverse issues like crime and morality were increasingly attractive proxies for racial appeals, Goldwater and Miller found an unexpected opening on October 13, when police sources in Washington, D.C., informed Republican campaign staff that Walter Jenkins had been detained earlier in the week on public indecency charges. After drinking several martinis at a party marking the opening of the new Newsweek building, the president’s top aide had proceeded to the Washington YMCA, a notorious cruising locale for men seeking sexual liaisons with other men. There, he was arrested after an undercover police officer apprehended him in mid-act with an older man in a bathroom shower stall. Jenkins was booked, identified himself as a government “clerk,” paid a $50 fine, and returned to the White House, where staff members thought nothing of his haggard appearance, because Jenkins often remained at his post until well after midnight. Goldwater’s campaign sat on the information, unaware that the next morning several newspapers had also been tipped off and were seeking comment from Jenkins. In a panic, the chief of staff telephoned Abe Fortas, who found him “well off his rocker” and assumed that a combination of stress and fatigue had robbed him temporarily of his senses. Along with Clark Clifford, Fortas paid a series of urgent visits to the editors of the Washington Star and the Washington Post, both of whom agreed to hold the story out of consideration for Jenkins’s family. The reprieve would prove temporary. That evening, the Republican National Committee issued a statement that accused the White House of “desperately trying to suppress a major news story affecting national security,” and within half an hour UPI broke the news. It further materialized that Jenkins had been arrested several years earlier on similar charges. Under Fortas’s direction, Jenkins committed himself for hospitalization and tendered his resignation. The White House put out a simple statement indicating that Moyers would assume his responsibilities, in effect elevating the young preacher to the untitled position of presidential chief of staff. In a striking conversation later that day, the First Lady firmly rejected her husband’s instruction not to speak publicly on the matter and conveyed her intention to issue a “gesture of support to Walter.” Hours later, her office released a statement. “My heart is aching for someone who has reached the end point of exhaustion in dedicated service to his country,” she said, hewing closely to the official reasoning behind Jenkins’s resignation.

  For the most part, newspapers took a delicate approach to Jenkins’s downfall, in no small part because he was a popular and sympathetic character to those on the inside. The columnist William White voiced mainstream consensus when he explained the episode as “a case of combat fatigue as surely as any man ever suffered it in battle.” While Miller asked rhetorically “how a man of such convictions could be appointed to the highest councils of government,” Goldwater did not wade into the Jenkins affair, preferring instead to speak more generally about Johnson’s multiple conflicts of interest: his entanglement with Bobby Baker, the scandal-ridden former secretary of the Senate who had once been his protégé and trusted aide and now faced federal corruption charges; his accrual of massive wealth over years of Senate service; his relationship with several shady Texas businessmen. His followers eagerly drew the connection between perceived moral decay in society and corruption in the White House. Cries of “thief!” and “steal away!” rang out routinely when the candidate fulminated against LBJ’s alleged venality. But the issue failed to gain GOP traction.

  Lyndon Johnson ultimately won the fall election in a landslide, carrying forty-four states (and Washington, D.C.) with 61 percent of the popular vote. Larry O’Brien had predicted that many “Johnson Republicans” would “swing right back to the big R for the other state contests,” but in fact the president’s coattails were long: Democrats netted two Senate seats and thirty-seven House seats, delivering the largest majorities that the party had enjoyed since FDR’s second term. O’Brien’s prophecy would nevertheless prove correct in other ways. Shortly before Election Day, he told the president that few Johnson Republicans were “likely to become Democratic converts.” The president’s team won the election by convincing the country that Goldwater was “not a normal American politician,” as Walter Lippmann observed, but rather a “grave threat to the internal peace of the nation.” But it did not build a mandate for the Great Society. This was a strategic decision that would come back to haunt the architects of the Johnson landslide. Indeed, frontlash was a devil’s bargain.

  PART II

  CHAPTER 6

  A Frustrating Paradox

  Joe Califano later recalled the whirlwind of events that swept him into Lyndon Johnson’s close orbit. The Brooklyn-born son of an Italian American father and Irish American mother, Califano—young in appearance for his thirty-three years, with a full complement of dark, wavy hair, soft black eyes, and round face—was the product of Jesuit schools and Harvard Law School. Like so many of the nation’s “best and brightest,” in 1960 he caught the Kennedy fever fast and early and spent every spare hour knocking on doors in Manhattan, where he worked by day as an associate at the white-shoe firm of Dewey, Ballantine, Bushby, Palmer & Wood. Astonished to find that politics held his interest more than “splitting stocks” for clients, he gave up a hefty corporate paycheck and leveraged personal connections to secure a position at the Pentagon, where, as Eric Goldman would recall, “his sharp intelligence” and “ability to analyze a problem quickly and come up with clear alternative proposals” drew him to the attention of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, a number-crunching businessman with an abiding faith in process and empiricism. When Adam Yarmolinsky left his post as special assistant to the secretary, Califano took his place as well as his prized office, across the hall from McNamara’s. One of his chief assignments was to act as the department’s liaison to the White House.

  In mid-1964, Bill Moyers made an abortive attempt to bring Califano into the White House. The defense secretary blocked the move. Still, it came as little surprise on July 8, 1965—not even six months into Johnson’s new term as president—when Jack Valenti summoned him to the West Wing. In a brief meeting with Valenti and Moyers, Califano learned that he was to become a “general-utility infielder on the domestic scene,” with a broad mandate to direct legislation and oversee the smooth enactment of LBJ’s Great Society programs. Less than forty-eight hours later, he awoke at 3:00 on a Saturday morning for the short drive to Andrews Air Force Base, where he joined a small contingent that included Jack and Mary Margaret Valenti and Dick Goodwin for a flight aboard Air Force One, bound for the LBJ Ranch.

  Still unaccustomed to the baroque rituals that governed life as a member of LBJ’s White House staff, Califano changed on command into swim trunks and treaded water as the president, several inches taller and habitually wont
to compel visitors into the deep end of the pool, where he could stand but they could not, jabbed him repeatedly with his index finger and spoke in an animated tone about the Senate’s recent passage of his Medicare bill. Later that afternoon, still dressed in a damp suit and knit shirt, Califano rode shotgun as LBJ drove him at high speed around the sprawling ranch. From behind the wheel, the president was sipping Cutty Sark scotch and soda and would at irregular intervals stop the car, extend his left hand out the window, and rattle the paper cup, whereupon a Secret Service agent in the follow car would dash ahead and refresh Johnson’s drink with ice and whiskey. There was a helicopter ride to the Haywood Ranch, a nearby property that the Johnsons also owned, lunch aboard a thirty-seven-foot yacht on Lake LBJ, and waterskiing (the president drove the motorboat, “faster and faster, zigging and zagging around the lake,” as Califano held on for dear life. “He threw me only once”). Returning to dry land, the president beckoned his new aide into a small blue convertible—top down—and once again took the wheel. Moments later, as the vehicle began veering wildly toward the lake, LBJ cried, “The brakes don’t work! The brakes don’t work! We’re going in! We’re going under!” Califano braced for impact, only to find that the small blue convertible was an Amphicar: half car, half boat. “Did you see what Joe did?” the president bellowed in laughter to other guests. “He didn’t give a damn about his President. He just wanted to save his own skin and get out of the car.”

  There was ample serious conversation that weekend about domestic policy—particularly, the imperative to fight a dual-front war at home (against poverty) and in Vietnam (against communism) without sacrificing one priority to the other. For Califano, the maiden voyage to the LBJ Ranch was in the main a lesson about the eccentric strains and stresses of his new life. As they walked from the lake into one of the nearby guest cottages, he later remembered, “the President stopped in a bright shaft of sunlight in the living room. He unbuckled his belt and twisted toward his right side as he lowered his pants and pushed down his undershorts, trying to look at his increasingly bare right buttock. ‘Something hurts back there,’ he said, now exploring the surface with his right hand. ‘Is that a boil?’” Califano reluctantly glanced at the president’s backside and confirmed that it was. The president nodded, made a mental note to contact the White House physician, and pulled his trousers up.