Building the Great Society Read online

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  In winning his own term in office, Lyndon Johnson at last felt at liberty to fashion his presidency rather than complete Jack Kennedy’s. He exercised this freedom in ways large and small, from reconstituting his staff to refurbishing his office. For all the glamour and sparkle that Americans had come to associate with Camelot—an image that often seemed at odds with the coarser, less polished air that the Johnsons, Texans born and bred, brought to the White House—the West Wing during JFK’s tenure had been a shabby, dilapidated affair. Teddy White remembered the “business lobby” entrance as “a huge room, in the center of which is an enormous table of Philippine mahogany, normally festooned with coats, cameras and news gear in an untidy pile; on the walls, some of the uglier paintings of American art; about the sides, black easy chairs and oversized black sofas for lounging.” The press room was small, dark, and cramped. In early 1965, under Lady Bird’s direction, the Johnsons refurbished the West Wing. In consultation with Bill Walton, an abstract expressionist painter and art critic whom the Kennedys had appointed chairman of the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, they enlarged the press room and redecorated the public hallways and entrances. “Newly lit and painted,” White reported, “its ugly oil paintings replaced by fresh American art, the lobby has seen the removal of its old furnishings and their replacement by glittering green leather armchairs and sofas in the style called ‘Dallas Modern.’ It is a gayer, pleasanter place, but the atmosphere and gossip remain the same.”

  The “Fish Room”—later redubbed the Roosevelt Room during Richard Nixon’s tenure—was “exceedingly drab and unattractive,” Horace Busby remarked to Liz Carpenter. It was an “embarrassment as a waiting room for visitors coming to see the President.” At Walton’s suggestion, the staff remodeled the room with a bright, plush red carpet, fresh paintings, and walls lined with “items of historical interest, together with books and other materials giving it a semi-library tone and quality.”

  The Oval Office, too, underwent physical transformation. Gone was the bright red rug that Jackie Kennedy ordered installed during the trip to Texas—a surprise gift for her husband, who never lived to see or pace the length of it. In its place was a gray-green substitute, with the new seal of the United States—completed by two extra stars (for Hawaii and Alaska) surrounding the eagle—woven into its textured surface. The oatmeal curtains in red trim that Jackie had also selected remained in place, but the walls now featured a selection of American art from the Smithsonian, including a Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington above the fireplace, on whose mantel sat a vermeil tureen from the Margaret Biddle collection, flanked on each side by a pair of Chinese export vases—all of it carefully curated by Lady Bird and Bill Walton. LBJ’s tall wooden rocking chair—not dissimilar to Kennedy’s—faced the fire place. On side tables and bookshelves rested color photographs of his wife and daughters. There was a grandfather clock, with silenced chimes, to furnish the office with a constant metronome sound that Johnson found calming. And of course, a long console that housed three televisions—one for each network—and a newswire ticker concealed within a custom wood credenza.

  Of the many doors leading to and from the Oval Office, one led to an outer chamber where the president’s secretaries kept watch, which in turn emptied into the ornate Cabinet Room. Another door on the west end of the Oval opened into a side study that the president used for reading or for hosting small conclaves with staff members and visitors. Outfitted with a couch and easy chair, each upholstered in a deep shade of green (LBJ’s favorite), the room was lined with historic relics, including a framed letter penned by Sam Houston to Johnson’s grandfather and autographed photographs of FDR, Harry Truman, and Dwight Eisenhower. That study, in turn, led to Kenneth O’Donnell’s office—later bequeathed to Marvin Watson, a Texan who joined the administration in 1965—which opened next into Jack Valenti’s lair, then to another room housing Valenti’s small staff, then to a small office where Horace Busby set up shop, and finally to a spacious corner suite that housed Busby’s team. Though each office had doors to its adjacent rooms, enabling LBJ to ramble from one to the other unencumbered, it also had a front entrance that spilled into a long, red-carpeted corridor running past the Fish Room and the West Lobby. On the other side of the wing were Moyers’s palatial suite (since the early 1980s, the vice president’s office), a small nook designated for the Secret Service, and the press room. The indoor swimming pool, where Johnson so often held court in his natural element, occupied the runway from the West Wing to the mansion. In later years, the Nixon administration built a floor above it and converted it into a more modern briefing room for the press.

  Walton transformed the once-featureless hallways into a veritable art gallery, with most of the pieces borrowed from the Smithsonian. The work ranged from Frederic Remington’s depictions of cowboys and western landscapes and James McNeill Whistler’s atmospheric paintings to a series of prints by Currier and Ives. For his own book-lined office, Buzz selected sixteen miniatures and silhouettes by early American artists. The walls in Valenti’s office were framed by a series of paintings by the American artist Childe Hassam, whose work was deeply influenced by the European impressionists. Finally, there was Bill Moyers—first among equals since Walter Jenkins’s departure, and the one aide, according to the Washington Post, who did not need to borrow his art. He brought his own, including a “dramatic” modern piece titled Carnival by the Mexican painter Alfredo Santos and a “striking canvas” that comprised “geometric designs in reds, orange and black”—the work of an unknown artist from an island off the coast of Panama. Behind his semicircular desk, three floor-to-ceiling windows offered a direct view of the Executive Mansion’s front lawn.

  “Intriguing designs and soft or brilliant colors of a new décor snap, crackle and pop in the renovated Presidential offices at the White House,” a newspaper feature began. Presidential advisers, who “give more hours of their day to their country than to their own families, have brought a look of home-away-from-home to their workaday world.”

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  Not long after LBJ’s victory, Charles Roberts of Newsweek remarked that members of the White House press corps regarded LBJ as “a frustrating paradox—the most accessible and yet the most thin-skinned of Presidents. He encourages contacts with them, then reacts indignantly when their stories don’t come out as pro-Johnson.” Serving as a buffer between Johnson and the press was in most regards a losing proposition, but there were few people less suited to the role than George Reedy, a “friendly, pipe-smoking, contemplative man” who had been in the president’s service for over a decade. Reedy was completing his third week of hospitalization for a weight-loss regimen in May 1964 when Walter Jenkins summoned him to the White House.

  Upon arrival, he stumbled across Bill Moyers, who “made some inane remark like, ‘Congratulations!’” (Reedy’s enmity for Moyers was extreme and only grew with time.) Pierre Salinger had resigned as press secretary, and the role would now fall to Reedy, a former newspaperman who, in addition to his many other responsibilities as a member of Johnson’s Senate and vice presidential staff, had been the principal liaison with the media. “I didn’t know what he was congratulating me on,” Reedy would recount, “but the tone of it sounded to me like I was being led to the Last Supper. And I remember my response was something equally inane like, ‘If it weren’t for the honor, I’d just as soon walk.’” He huddled with LBJ and Salinger in the small study adjacent to the Oval Office and reluctantly accepted the assignment. “I knew the President quite well. . . . And I had come to the conclusion many years previously that if he ever did become President, one of his greatest problems was going to be his handling of the press simply because he would want the press to do things that it would not do and could not do, and I didn’t want to be the man caught in the middle on it.” When Reedy entered the hospital, he weighed over 275 pounds. By the spring of 1965, he was down to approximately 2
00 pounds. Much of the weight loss owed to his weeks of hospitalization and a rigid, thousand-calorie-per-day diet to which he subsequently committed. But Roberts was certain that the “cruel and unusual punishment to which press secretaries are subjected” had a good deal to do with his reduced frame. (“Poor George,” the president once told a group of reporters. “He can’t drink and he can’t eat. All he has in life is to take a beating twice a day from those White House correspondents.”)

  Roberts sized up Reedy as “more erudite” but “not so fast on his feet as either of his predecessors.” Eisenhower’s press secretary, Jim Hagerty, brought reporters to heel with his stern glower and habit of publicly discomfiting those who posed questions that the administration preferred not to answer. Salinger, by contrast, relied on demonstrations of wry wit and charm and turned daily press briefings into clever verbal jousts. Reedy took another tact altogether—periphrasis. “Your question is assuming some conclusions based upon some facts of which I am unaware,” he might offer in response to a direct query, lit pipe in hand, a plume of smoke surrounding his jowly face. “As a casual newspaper reader, I have some awareness of the stories to which you have alluded. As I can gather from these stories, I know of no particular occasion that could be identified from them on which I was present. Consequently, I cannot draw conclusions on a series of facts which are not known to me.” If Reedy’s default style was ponderous and indirect, many newspapermen who covered the administration blamed the president rather than his press secretary for their information deficit. Johnson “tended to view reporters as so many enemies to be told as little and manipulated as much as possible,” Eric Goldman believed. “He kept a tight rein on what his Press Secretary could say.” LBJ eschewed regular press conferences for hastily arranged briefings with select newsmen or awkward, brisk strolls around the White House grounds, the journalists struggling to keep pace with the president’s long stride even as they scribbled notes.

  Reedy would later characterize his relationship with LBJ as “stormy” throughout his tenure as press secretary. The president ridiculed him for being overly solicitous of reporters. “His attitude toward me was that I was being grossly abused by the press,” Reedy surmised. “I think he really meant it. And I would try to explain to him that I had no problems at all that he wasn’t creating for me, but that didn’t help any.” He considered his role partly as a liaison between reporters and the White House. Reporters had a job to do, and the administration could either help or—to its detriment—impede them. Ultimately, they would write stories, with or without the cooperation of the president’s staff. Reedy was capable at staying on message, delivering official spin, or practicing bare-knuckle politics. As press secretary during the campaign—there was no separate political press office—he regularly savaged Barry Goldwater to brutal effect. When in the wake of the Harlem riots the GOP nominee attempted to soften his image by meeting with LBJ to reach a joint agreement not to stoke racial tensions, Reedy acidly offered that “as a man who has asked for observance of the civil rights law and who has signed the law and who is implementing the law, the President would not do anything to incite or inflame tensions.” Johnson, he continued, did not require a meeting to avoid provocation. Perhaps Goldwater did.

  But the president faulted Reedy for what he perceived as abject servility to the press corps. “He thought, and I was never able to disabuse him of this, that my whole strategy was to make the press happy by seeing that their bags were carried and that they had airplane space and adequate hotel space,” Reedy concluded in retrospect. “He thought I was pampering the press. I wasn’t. I was just trying to set up rational procedures so that the press could cover him.” Indeed, reporters increasingly resented receiving the eleventh-hour notice of presidential travel—to the ranch, from the ranch, to random destinations—that they were required to cover. “The White House press corps wasted literally thousands of hours sitting on its baggage in Washington, Austin, Texas, and way stations waiting for the President to move,” Charles Roberts mordantly observed. Reedy understood that reporters relished their access and dined out on tales of their frenetic lifestyles. He also appreciated that they were human beings who needed to manage their lives.

  Even during the 1964 campaign, when Johnson earned an outsized share of positive coverage, there gradually emerged a trust deficit between reporters and the White House. It would later be termed the “credibility gap.” As Goldman candidly acknowledged, the “press was growing increasingly suspicious of what was told them. Too often President Johnson was making statements that did not check out and denying rumors which turned out to be facts.” Reporters did not generally hold Reedy accountable, though not for reasons that would have flattered the official White House secretary. Simply put, they believed that the “big, rumpled panda man” was the “last to know of White House developments.” Though on the surface, the staff ran a tight operation—a reporter noted that a journalist making “an inquiry of Mr. Valenti or Mr. Moyers is much more likely to be referred back to the press secretary Mr. Reedy than he was in the old days of Pierre Salinger”—in truth, Goldman believed, “the LBJ White House was one vast sieve.” Aides interacted regularly with reporters; on some occasions they kept Reedy informed, and on others they did not. It was of no help that Johnson would often encourage staff members to back channel information to journalists on his behalf, with an unspoken agreement to keep such interactions confidential. “George Reedy was a Press Secretary with a severely limited amount of information that was authoritative to announce,” Goldman continued, “while other statements were constantly making their ways to the press.” Sympathetic reporters agreed. “Mr. Johnson has given increased freedom to his staff except for George E. Reedy, his press secretary, whom he has not given the chance to do his job either freely or well,” the New York Times reported in June 1965.

  The deterioration in his relationship with LBJ pained Reedy. A stalwart veteran of the inner circle, he had been a loyal retainer in both the heady days when Johnson ruled the Senate with an iron fist and the gloomy years when the vice presidency stripped him of all power and prestige. Asked in later years whether Johnson kept him “adequately informed” during his tenure as press secretary, Reedy answered, “No . . . which I think was kind of unfortunate because I have been an extremely close adviser of his for many years on political problems and any other types of problems. And in a sense the mere fact that I was press secretary placed me in a category that in his mind took me outside his problems.”

  Reedy was also out of step with Moyers and Valenti, whom the president increasingly trusted to shape and guard his image, and even with Busby, who, he believed, shared their love of “gimmicks.” Reedy advocated staging more televised presidential press conferences, a tactic that Salinger and JFK pioneered, initially to some criticism but ultimately to their advantage. He argued that such formal engagements, when offered at a regular cadence and with a minimum of ground rules in place, extended more control—not, as LBJ feared, less—over message. Such had been the case for John Kennedy, who at the urging of Pierre Salinger became the first president to stage regular briefings in front of television cameras. Many of JFK’s other advisers opposed this approach at first, to say nothing of officials at the State Department and Department of Defense who feared that a spontaneous presidential remark might trigger a global crisis. But Salinger knew his boss to be a cool customer—witty, at ease with himself, and fully in command of policy. His clean disposal of Richard Nixon during their televised presidential debates in 1960—Salinger believed that Kennedy came across as a “mature, knowledgeable, attractive man,” while Nixon looked the part of “an actor reading a toothpaste commercial”—established the importance of keeping JFK front and center. Unfortunately, Reedy had no such asset with which to work. LBJ as president was little better at his role than Nixon had been as a candidate.

  Though Reedy believed that a head of state had a civic obligation to submit himself to public scrutiny b
y representatives of all of the national daily papers, wire services, and broadcast outlets on a regular basis, he was by no means in the thrall of journalists. He regarded press conferences as mostly stagecraft; “questions become highly rhetorical because they’re intended to put the newspapermen on television more than they are to elicit information.”

  Valenti and Moyers advocated a different sensibility. Theirs was modish, where Reedy’s was old-fashioned. In the same way that they embraced leading-edge methods in broadcast advertising to frame the stakes of the 1964 election, they encouraged the president to turn his press interactions into performance art that he, not the reporters, could control. One favored device was the wandering press conference. To Reedy’s chagrin, the concept soon caught on, as did “haystack press conferences”—quite literally, availabilities staged beside a stack of hay at the LBJ Ranch—and “Saturday morning press conference, simply because when he’d wake up on Sunday morning he’d pick up the New York Times and the Washington Post, and there would be nothing in the papers except his press conference. This was an idea that came to him from Jack Valenti.” Reedy believed that few Americans did more than gloss over the Sunday morning paper; they were too preoccupied with church, family leisure time, and children’s sporting activities to deliberate over political affairs. He also fielded recurring complaints from editors and publishers about the logistical complications of amending their Sunday editions on short notice. “A press conference like that would cost the New York Times around $600,000,” he fumed. “From a mechanical stand point, newspapers are really not geared to handle a large influx of unexpected news for the Sunday morning paper—about 85 percent of the Sunday paper is printed on Thursday.”