Building the Great Society Read online

  After working from bed for several hours, Johnson would arrive in the Oval Office at about 9:00 a.m. to begin meetings. In the early days of his presidency, the room still bore Jackie Kennedy’s aesthetic touch: a new red carpet and white drapes, which she had ordered installed as a surprise for her husband upon his return from Texas. Only later would he make the room, with its stark white walls, three-inch-thick windows, and handsome French doors, his own. Around 2:00 p.m., the president routinely went for a swim in the White House pool, which was then located in the indoor area that today houses the press room. By habit, Johnson swam au naturel and expected that when his aides joined him—a frequent occurrence, given his predisposition to insist—they did as well. After a sparse lunch, he retired to his bedroom, changed into pajamas, and napped for an hour; he then showered, changed into fresh clothes, and resumed his schedule around 4:00 p.m.—the “second shift,” as his aides called it. “It’s like starting a new day,” LBJ offered in a rare moment of introspection, “but at 5 in the afternoon I sometimes feel sorry for the poor Cabinet officers and other people I call in here who have been tied to their desks all day.” When the president finished afternoon meetings at about 8:00 p.m., he retired to the residence for dinner, often with friends and family, and by 10:00 settled into bed for his “night reading”—stacks upon stacks of memos from his staff members, many of them requiring feedback (“OK/LBJ,” or “Have him see me,” or a simple check mark next to the words “Yes” and “No”). Valenti, who assembled the night reading and thereby enjoyed wide latitude in determining which voices the president heard, later estimated that LBJ pored over 200,000 words each week—which of course meant that Valenti read more than 200,000 words of policy and political memorandums weekly.

  As he thumbed his way through the pages, Johnson would invariably pick up the phone and dial his staff members. For convenience—his convenience—each of the chauffeured black sedans assigned to presidential assistants was outfitted with a two-way radio that enabled Johnson to call them back from home or dinner, and each of their homes had been equipped with a direct line to phone consoles in LBJ’s residence and office, thus eliminating the need to wait for an operator or the White House signal office to track down the right number. Some aides pined for the days when they might once again enjoy “freedom from the white telephone of President Johnson.”

  “It’s real Orwellian,” one bemused staff member admitted. “You can’t escape him.” Even in his Senate days, Johnson had been known as a tough boss, but it took little time before the country understood that he demanded absolute commitment from his advisers. “Where do they get the stories that I’m a slave driver?” he once whined. “I tell people to go home. But when there’s a job to be done, they want to stay and work.” (Perhaps from the cartoonist Herblock, who lampooned Johnson’s staff as “fear-bent sharecroppers tugging their forelocks in cringing fealty as the master strode by with a coiled whip,” as Merriman Smith of UPI described the rendering.)

  Eric Goldman likened Johnson’s attitude toward staff to that of “the head of the duchy with all rights thereto appertaining.” It was a near-feudal relationship: “When he did not like the length of a Special Assistant’s hair, he told him to go to a barbershop; he ordered a secretary to enroll in charm school.” Yet as a reporter for the New York Times aptly noted, despite the “heavy demands” that he placed on his closest aides, Johnson inspired unusual loyalty. The flip side of requiring their complete availability was that LBJ “made his assistants his close personal and social companions. He likes them, trusts them; and partly because he is addicted to shop talk, he likes to have them around for an evening drink, a late dinner or a lazy weekend.” The affection that Johnson regularly showered on Valenti’s daughter, who as a toddler would tumble down the corridors of the West Wing and leap into the arms of “Prez!” spoke to his genuine affection for his team, however abusive he might be in turn. A mid-level holdover from the Kennedy administration begrudgingly acknowledged, “Frankly, the people around Kennedy saw none of his faults, though he had them. The people around Johnson see his faults, but think he has tremendous attributes that more than counterbalance them.” Shortly after the First Family moved into the White House, they invited staff members to the private residence for a cocktail party. The wife of a former Kennedy aide confided to Lillian Reedy, George’s wife, that she had never seen the inside of the living quarters before. That small gesture made a considerable impression.

  The relationship between Johnson and his staff posed one dynamic, the relationship among the staff, another. Douglass Cater, a domestic policy specialist who joined the ranks of the senior staff in 1964, lauded the absence of “prima donnas,” but by the start of Johnson’s full term conflicts began to surface. As George Reedy noted, “Court politics in the White House”—any White House—“are always very severe. It’s no place for a man of any real sensitivity whatsoever.” No administration, Valenti surmised, was absent the “interplay of egos and clashings of ambitions, all sort of like satellites circling the sun.” Yet relatively speaking, LBJ’s White House functioned with minimal public spectacle or rancor, particularly in the first two years of his presidency. This degree of harmony was all the more remarkable in light of the almost complete lack of hierarchy and structure governing the president’s staff. While at different times certain staff men stood out as first among equals—Jenkins in 1963 and 1964, Moyers in 1965 and 1966, Califano in 1967 and 1968—Johnson preferred a flat organizational structure and, compared with Kennedy, kept an open door. “Neither Kennedy nor Johnson had a chief of staff,” Valenti observed, “which any political pundit will tell you is quite surprising. . . . So how on earth did the West Wing function without one? Simply put: very, very well.” Unlike in later administrations, most staff members did not generally confine themselves to narrow portfolios. This dynamic led to duplication of effort, Cater observed, particularly when the president grew impatient and assigned the same task to multiple actors. But it rarely resulted in discord. Though some old hands in government regarded LBJ’s approach to staffing as “deliberately chaotic, governed by impulse and generally hit-or-miss,” it worked.

  Kenneth O’Donnell retained the title of appointments secretary until late in 1964, but in reality Valenti—who first claimed a desk in the secretarial room outside the Oval and subsequently shared O’Donnell’s office, two doors removed from the president’s—gradually assumed the responsibilities of guarding LBJ’s schedule. (O’Donnell’s concentration, in turn, shifted to managing LBJ’s 1964 campaign.) The function of appointments secretary, seemingly bureaucratic in nature, was at the time widely regarded as a senior role; the person filling it enjoyed broad leeway to set the president’s agenda and to determine which voices he would hear—and, by extension, which he would not. Though Valenti and Busby acquired an early reputation as Texas conservatives, in fact both were conventional New Deal Democrats, and Valenti, in particular, was determined to ensure that access to Johnson was as unencumbered as possible. As LBJ liked to remind visitors, “Jack is really an intellectual. People would admit it if he didn’t come from the wrong side of the Mason-Dixon line.” Valenti was a voracious consumer of books—so much so that he installed a machine in his bathroom that enabled him to read while in the shower. Goldman, the Princeton University historian whom others on the White House staff sometimes derided as insufferably haughty and self-important, was impressed by the manner in which Valenti protected the president’s time and focus without walling him off from the wider world. “[He] believed it important for the President to be brought into contact with a wide variety of people and ideas,” Goldman remarked. “In his own way, Valenti was a friend in the White House of the offbeat, or at least of the new.” This view was widely held. A veteran White House reporter credited Valenti with making Lyndon Johnson “the most accessible President in modern history.”

  In person, LBJ tended to dominate almost every conversation in which he took part. But through th
e memorandums they submitted for night reading, his staff members were able to engage him in a meaningful, written dialogue. They were also able to argue with and against each other. Because Jack Valenti ran an open process, the president could weigh markedly different ideas about the direction in which he might take the country.

  • • • • •

  In February 1964, Johnson summoned Bill Moyers and Richard Goodwin to the White House swimming pool and—as was his wont—obliged them to strip on the spot and join him for a dip. Goodwin, who had “been raising the eyebrows and blood pressure of conservatives” since the day that he “checked in” to Washington in 1958, was a celebrity in staff circles. The son of Jewish immigrants, he sailed through Tufts University and Harvard Law School, clerked for the Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter (making him perhaps the last of the “Little Frankfurters”—young aides whom the justice scouted on behalf of Democratic presidents and congressmen), and served as an investigator for the House Subcommittee on Legislative Oversight, in which role he was instrumental in exposing the common practice by which network television studios rigged popular game shows. After working as a speechwriter and Latin American policy aide on Kennedy’s presidential campaign, he joined the White House staff as assistant special counsel under Ted Sorensen. He was, by one colleague’s estimation, “dark, disheveled, brilliant and sardonic.” Though a “Kennedyite of the Kennedyites,” Goodwin—“connoisseur of the latest in literature and art who at the age of thirty-two, last week’s soup stain on his suit, puffing his cigar and twirling his gold chain enigmatically, talked of power and policy with a faintly weary smile”—agreed to remain on Johnson’s staff. Moyers was in awe of his establishment credentials and political savvy; Goodwin, in turn, had no other entrée into Johnson’s inner circle but Moyers. The two men became fast friends and allies.

  For weeks, LBJ had been grasping for a watchword that would describe his far-reaching but still inchoate agenda. Some of its pieces were holdovers from Kennedy’s unfinished presidency: a tax cut to unlock economic growth and full employment, a civil rights bill that would at long last afford equal opportunity to African Americans, a sweeping initiative to eradicate poverty. Others were long-standing articles on the liberal wish list, including federal aid to schools and universities and hospital insurance for the elderly. Missing was an organizing thesis to join these policy items together. Theodore Roosevelt had promised a Square Deal, FDR a New Deal, Harry Truman a Fair Deal. What turn of phrase would Johnson deploy to articulate his vision? Bobbing about in the White House pool (“It’s like going swimming with a polar bear,” Moyers whispered), he instructed Goodwin and Moyers to help him introduce a “Johnson program, different in tone, fighting and aggressive”—more visionary even than John Kennedy’s New Frontier.

  His mandate in hand, Goodwin conferred with Goldman, who had already advised Johnson to “place his Administration in the perspective of the long-running American experience.” Rather than recite the same tired trope that liberals had exhausted over several decades, he should arrange his program “not only to the quantity but to the quality of American living.” Whether knowingly or not—and in all likelihood, the choice was deliberate—Goldman echoed Arthur Schlesinger, who in 1955 published a widely acclaimed article that challenged readers to reimagine the meaning of liberalism “in an age of abundance.” “Instead of the quantitative liberalism of the 1930s, rightly dedicated to the struggle to secure the economic basis of life, we need now a ‘qualitative liberalism’ dedicated to bettering the quality of people’s lives.” Like many of his countrymen, Schlesinger took it for granted that economists and planners could, through a careful application of Keynesian measures, underwrite unlimited growth and prosperity. It was no longer necessary to speak as though “the necessities of living—a job, a square meal, a suit of clothes, and a roof—were at stake” but rather to “move on to the more subtle and complicated problem of fighting for individual dignity, identity, and fulfillment in a mass society.” In conveying similar wisdom to both the president and his speechwriter, Goldman implicitly argued for a message and a program that would transcend partisan divisions and draw together as wide a coalition as possible behind essential policies like propping up the nation’s education system and securing rights for African Americans. The phrase that he suggested, “the Good Society,” owed its origins to Walter Lippmann’s book of the same title. Goodwin preferred “the Great Society,” though he might have been unaware that its provenance lay with a volume by Graham Wallas, a prominent socialist and professor at the London School of Economics in the early twentieth century. At first, Jack Valenti enthusiastically embraced the Great Society tag. “Why not enlarge the theme,” he suggested to Johnson, “coupling the phrase with a new outline of what the president felt would be his philosophy, his précis of his move to the future, his aims and objectives for this country here at home.” While the White House tested the phrase at least seventeen times in early 1964—along with close cousins like “greater society” and “glorious kind of society”—it was agreed that Johnson would unveil his platform in a commencement speech on May 22 at the University of Michigan.

  Against advice to focus the president’s remarks on a narrow list of bills expanding the New Deal, Goodwin went big. “My objective—my mandate—as I understood it—was not to produce a catalogue of specific projects, but a concept, an assertion of purpose, a vision . . . that went beyond the liberal tradition of the New Deal.” In preparation for the assignment, he pored over the most current primary literature emanating from identity-conscious activists, including Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique, Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” and the Port Huron Statement—the cri de coeur of the New Left. When Goodwin shared his draft, Valenti, Reedy, and Busby were unconvinced. Aside from perfectly acceptable rallying cries for classroom construction and teacher training, and a resounding call to eradicate racial discrimination, the speech—in their minds—was laden with woolly observations about how the loss of such values as “community with neighbors and communion with nature” bred “loneliness and boredom and indifference.” What could the government possibly do, they wondered, to ensure that (as the draft proposed) the “meaning of our lives matches the marvelous products of our labor”? How could it build a country “where men are more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods”? It was challenge enough to keep inflation and growth in balance and to move pragmatic, liberal legislation through Congress. To promise utopia, or to suggest that LBJ’s administration should be associated with that promise, seemed an overreach.

  In the twilight days of Johnson’s presidency, Reedy would confide to Juanita Roberts, the president’s longtime senior secretary and confidante, that “the phrase bothered me because it seemed pompous and had many overtones of Marxist-style planning.” Busby, for his part, prepared an alternative draft that envisioned the Great Society as the product of our “next scientific and technological capabilities.” Almost futuristic in its anticipation of humankind’s eventual ability to “fly oceans in an hour—see as well as hear over telephones—employ computers as everyday appliances in our homes—and find nothing novel in journeys to the moon or beyond,” he framed the Great Society as a collection of lofty but concrete technological aspirations: new methods of desalination and irrigation, advances in chemistry and plant science to increase the food supply for a burgeoning world population—ambitions that would unlock the full promise of prosperity and in which government could undoubtedly serve as a catalyst and organizing force. Busby nevertheless hit the right liberal chords when he heralded a “society which knows no poverty, which knows no hunger, which knows no illiteracy—a society without slums in the cities or shame on the farms—a society in which leisure time is not wasted but the most useful time of our lives.”

  Moyers rejected Busby’s draft as “adequate” but a “far cry from the original—in both quality and tone.” In a tart memo to Val
enti (who had collaborated in the Busby draft), he defended Goodwin’s copy as “a provocative appeal to the mind of modern America.” Perhaps it “sounded literate, too essay-like, but it was directed to the university audience—and beyond to the thinking people of our society.” Moyers and Goodwin also fired off an ardent memo to Johnson—a document that Valenti could certainly have weeded out of the night reading but instead placed before the president. “This is a political year, but the President is not just thinking of the next election—he is thinking of the next generation,” they implored. “He believes there is danger that the primacy of politics this year will prevent the Nation from looking at the longer pull—hence his deliberate decision to cast the spotlight on certain issues which ought to be imbedded in the Nation’s consciousness.” Appealing to LBJ’s determination to equal the esteem in which liberal columnists and intellectuals held John Kennedy, they urged him to accept a draft “designed to make people like Reston and Lippmann, Pusey and Goheen, sit up and say: ‘This President is really thinking about the future problems of America.’”