“I figured when my legislative program passed the Congress,” Johnson said in 1971, “that the Great Society had a real chance to grow into a beautiful woman. And I figured her growth and development would be as natural and inevitable as any small child’s. In the first year, as we got the laws on the books, she’d begin to crawl. Then in the second year, as we got more laws on the books, she’d begin to walk, and the year after that, she’d be off and running, all the time growing bigger and healthier and fatter. And when she grew up, I figured she’d be so big and beautiful that the American people couldn’t help but fall in love with her, and once they did, they’d want to keep her around forever, making her a permanent part of American life, more permanent even than the New Deal.
“But now Nixon has come along and everything I’ve worked for is ruined. There’s a story in the paper every day about him slashing another one of my Great Society programs. I can just see him waking up in the morning, making that victory sign of his and deciding which program to kill. It’s a terrible thing for me to sit by and watch someone else starve my Great Society to death. She’s getting thinner and thinner and uglier and uglier all the time; now her bones are beginning to stick out and her wrinkles are beginning to show. Soon she’ll be so ugly that the American people will refuse to look at her; they’ll stick her in a closet to hide her away and there she’ll die. And when she dies, I, too, will die.”1
The commentary is authentic Johnson, truth mingled with censure and regret; the metaphors, uniquely his—the girl-woman, simultaneously his creation, his gift, and his own life—emerging from the inward structure of the mind. It omits, however, the fact that his progeny’s growth had been halted, not in 1969, but some years before, during his own Presidency—and not by Richard Nixon, but by Lyndon Johnson himself, as the consequence of his escalatory policy in Vietnam and his economic policy at home.
Nor was the Great Society—as Johnson pictured it in his metaphor—a single entity to be judged a success or failure, dead or alive. It was, in fact, a medley of programs—between 1965 and 1968, five hundred social programs were created—administered with varying degrees of success. Some of these programs—e.g., Medicare and voting rights—succeeded admirably in achieving their objectives; others accomplished far less than was originally hoped—e.g., Model Cities and federal aid to education; still others proved self-defeating—e.g., community action.
Some of Johnson’s administrative problems stemmed from the incoherent structure of the federal government. As Chief Executive, he was expected to obtain concerted action from a sprawling feudal government comprised of hundreds of autonomous fiefdoms, each with its own clientele, traditions, and loyalties. In domestic affairs, the conditions that made for presidential supremacy in foreign affairs were not present. In dealing with controversial issues of health, education, poverty, and manpower, the President could not invoke his office as a symbol of national unity in the same way as he could in matters of war and peace; nor could he point to the widespread consensus of attitudes that underlay his conduct in foreign policy. And his only constitutional grant of authority in domestic affairs was to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed,” but even this does not grant independent authority; it only gives him authority to look over other people’s shoulders.
In the absence of national emergency and constitutional authority, each department tended to go its own way, following its particular traditions and habits. The leadership task facing Johnson as Chief Executive of the domestic establishment bore closer resemblance to the challenges he faced as legislative leader in the Senate, where he also confronted the problem of securing responsiveness from a structure of feudal barons, entrenched within independent committee domains, fortified by the system of seniority, than it did to his other presidential roles as Commander in Chief or Chief of State.
But if the problems of the administrator were similar in character to those of the legislator, they were very different in scope. As legislative leader in the Senate, Johnson had dealt with fifty or at most one hundred individuals, divided up into twenty-one separate committees. In the legislative phase of the Great Society, the numbers had increased to 535 individuals and 45 committees. Now as administrator of the Great Society, Johnson had to deal with a bureaucracy of one million employees, charged with implementing more than four hundred grant-in-aid programs, each involving dozens of institutions. One example illustrates the problem of scope. Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 barred discrimination under any program or activity receiving federal assistance against any person because of race, color, or national origin. Full implementation of Title VI required that racial discrimination be eliminated from the practices of any institution receiving or applying for federal grants—10,000 hospitals, 23,000 public school districts, 2,000 colleges—all in all, 35,000 institutions in 50 states.
In the Senate, with the aid of a small staff, Johnson was able to program staggering amounts of information, correlating complicated fragments of knowledge about the desires, whims, fancies, and fears of his colleagues with the myriad resources of the Majority Leader—committee assignments, trips, campaign funds, invitations—to produce an individualized read-out for each Senator. By necessity, the staff system became more elaborate when Johnson reached the White House and began to enact the laws of the Great Society. Providing the President with head counts, tallies, charts, and nightly memos about both individuals and the legislative timetable, the White House liaison staff expanded Johnson’s capacity beyond one hundred Senators to the entire Congress, allowing him once again to intervene effectively and efficiently at critical points in the legislative process.
Presidential intervention in the administrative process, however, involved thousands, not hundreds, of individuals. Five federal bureaucracies were charged with administering the programs of the Great Society: Health, Education, and Welfare; Housing and Urban Affairs; the Office of Economic Opportunity; Labor; and Agriculture. Each of these was subdivided into dozens of bureaus and departments. Physical size and spread alone precluded Johnson from roaming the hallways in search of information. And unlike the circular hallways in Congress, where tramping tourists and open doorways created a welcome atmosphere within which Johnson could absorb information about individuals and bills, the departments’ corridors, one gray office after another, created an atmosphere impervious to all outsiders, including the President.
With each department governed by its own traditions and habits in devising the rules and regulations to carry out the bills assigned to it, the President experienced considerable difficulty keeping track of, much less controlling, the administrative timetable. In the bureaucracy, unlike in the Congress, the passage of a bill is the beginning of the job, not the end. As Chief Executive, the President needed information about the effectiveness of his earlier efforts in order to weigh new programs against them. But program evaluation was not easy to secure, given goals that were often vague and even contradictory and a bureaucracy with no tradition of judging the relative effectiveness of services rendered.
An additional factor that aggravated the problem of evaluating program activities was the inevitable reliance upon operating interests for the preparation of evaluation reports. In the operation of the manpower programs in the Department of Labor, I saw how difficult it was to separate out objective information from the habits and customs of the people involved.
The Economic Opportunity Act provided support for new programs to train and employ the hard-core poor. But the new programs depended upon old institutions—the State Employment Services—for their implementation. Set up during the New Deal as an exchange between the business community and the unemployed, the offices of the Employment Service were primarily located in the business districts of the central cities, not easily accessible to the residents of the slums. For thirty years, the employees at each local office had filled out the same report, documenting the number of people serviced that week. Now there suddenly appeared a new clientele, more difficult to place in jobs. The forms to be filled out at the end of the week, however, remained the same, pressuring the employees to “cream the crop,” servicing the least needy and least difficult to place first.
In an effort to reverse the situation, the executives in the Labor Department prescribed a new weekly form; local Employment Service employees were now called upon to report only the hard core’s placement, those who’d been out of work for eighteen months and made under $3,000 a year. The shift in the pattern of incentives finally focused attention on the hard core, but now a different problem emerged. Evaluated only on the basis of how many of the most difficult people were placed in their training programs, the local employees began waving advance payments to drag in off the streets drug addicts, prison convicts, and anyone they could find. Evaluators of the training program in the Cardozo section in Washington, D.C., discovered that heroin addicts made up more than half the trainees. The word had spread in the heroin community that one had only to enter the program, stay long enough to collect the advance, and then return to the streets, providing a successful placement for the Civil Service employees and $50 to the addict for another day’s fix.
The director of the Cardozo program knew what was going on, but could not admit it publicly. His program, he said to me, had to compete for money and staff with the program in Anacostia, the other slum area in the District of Columbia, and such a revelation would hurt his chances for funding in the following year. Better to keep it quiet and work from within to change the situation. The executives in the Labor Department also knew what was going on, but they, too, felt the pressure of competition—at that time, the Labor Department was locked in a bureaucratic struggle with the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare to determine which agency could best serve the poor—and decided simply to let the reports stand and change things from within.
When I went to the White House, I reported the situation to the President, who smiled at me as he said: “Of course I understand the difficulties of bureaucracy. But what you don’t understand is that the President’s real problem is with the Congress, not the bureaucracy. It is the Congress that demands numbers from us, insisting that we handle the most people at the least cost. If we went around beating our breasts and admitting difficulties with our programs, then the Congress would immediately slash all our funds for next year and then where would we be? Better to send in the reports as they are, even knowing the situation is more complicated than it appears, and then work from within to make things better and correct the problems.”2
So it happened that the bureaucracy from top to bottom became involved in a public-relations charade, each level legitimizing its activities and covering its failures with the statistics of success. “I wish it had been different,” Johnson said later. “I wish the public had seen the task of ending poverty the same way as they saw the task of getting to the moon, where they accepted mistakes and failures as a part of the scientific process. I wish they had let us experiment with different programs, admitting that some were working better than others. It would have made everything easier. But I knew that the moment we said out loud that this or that program was a failure, then the wolves who never wanted us to be successful in the first place would be down upon us at once, tearing away at every joint, killing our effort before we even had a chance.”3
Was Johnson correct in presuming the public’s unwillingness to experiment? Or was his assumption an unexamined premise, a legislative piety projected upon an unwitting public? “I knew from the start,” Johnson added, “that the ’64 election had given me a loophole rather than a mandate and that I had to move quickly before my support disappeared.”4 In this recognition, Johnson was correct. A study of public opinion in 1964 suggested that the consensus behind the Great Society merely signified an acceptance of the individual programs Johnson had sponsored—Medicare, education, voting rights; it did not represent a shift in underlying philosophy. On the contrary, the majority of Americans still resisted the idea of federal intervention. But if Johnson recognized the conservative bias of the public’s underlying attitudes, the pattern of his behavior did not reflect this knowledge. Just the opposite: at a time when careful deployment of administrative and public resources was essential, Johnson squandered both.
In the early months of his administration Johnson shaped a public image of himself he could not sustain over time. Presenting himself to the people as a master technician, a consensual leader who could produce something for everyone without cost to anyone, he created expectations that only a consummate administrator could have satisfied. To say this is not to suggest, as several observers have done, that Johnson was simply ill-suited, because of his legislative background, for the administrative aspects of the Presidency. The job of administering the Great Society was essentially political in nature, involving Johnson in many of the same challenges he had brilliantly mastered in the Senate, in the NYA, in the Little Congress, and even in college, by developing a flow of detailed information, concentrating in his hands a maximum supply of carrots and sticks with which to reward allies and punish enemies, deciding when and where to intervene.
Admittedly, the scope of the task was far larger, but the President did possess substantial tools for tracking his subordinates’ behavior and could have organized his government to provide others, just as he could have expanded the mixture of resources—top-level appointments, White House endorsements, presidential publicity for selected programs, invitations to White House functions, backing on the Hill, budget allocations—which he already had at his disposal for rewarding energetic bureaucrats and sanctioning recalcitrant ones. The point is not that Johnson was incapable of becoming a consummate administrator—that remains an open question—but that he never really tried. His priorities were elsewhere. The skills and resources he might have invested in shaping the bureaucracy to meet the Great Society’s goals were channeled, instead, into the war in Vietnam.
In the beginning, Johnson did devote some energies and talents to the task of organizational output: he sponsored the installation of a new system—PPBS (Program, Planning, Budgeting System)—designed to evaluate programs according to defined objectives and to expand the President’s control over the budget-making process; he appointed the Heineman Commission to study the question of governmental reorganization;5 he considered bringing Robert McNamara from Defense to head a superdepartment of domestic affairs, incorporating all the Great Society programs with major impact in the urban area; he experimented with various institutional arrangements for securing greater coordination between departments—interagency committees, Executive Orders, and lead agencies—and he even toyed with the more promising idea of creating an Office of Program Coordination in the Executive Office with a mandate to monitor Great Society programs and settle jurisdictional quarrels.
The Office of Program Coordination was reminiscent of several innovations begun in President Roosevelt’s time to rationalize the myriad New Deal agencies and to coordinate agency responses during World War II—to Budget Director Harold Smith’s ambitions for the Budget Bureau, and the Bureau’s field offices, and to the Office of War Mobilization and Reconversion, especially under James Byrnes. But after the war came a long period of legislative and administrative drought. The wartime machinery was never converted to peacetime use. For nearly two decades, the domestic affairs of the government were either shrinking or stationary.6 During this period the Budget Bureau fell on bad days; its administrative arm grew weaker and weaker. Accustomed to sending up messages with little expectation of their passage, the Bureau developed the habit of screening substantive programs primarily in terms of financial implications, which diminished still further its sensitivity to administrative problems.7
Even long-standing habits, however, can be changed with the proper incentives. Subordinates who are aware that their leader is measuring his own success on the basis of their ability to implement his programs will inevitably exhibit more concern with output than those who feel their superiors basically do not care. Morale, obedience, and initiative are all qualities that good leadership can help to bring into play.8 The key to the successful passage of the Great Society legislation in 1964–1965 was the constant attention Lyndon Johnson focused on his legislative program. Through nightly memos, Tuesday breakfasts, and Cabinet meetings, he imposed his priorities on the system; and his energy was transmitted to hundreds of key individuals in both the executive and the legislative branches.
This same combination of commitment, energy, and attention could have been focused on questions of administration in 1966–1968. Johnson could have mobilized the members of his White House staff and his Cabinet to provide frequent reports on the implementation of Great Society programs. He could have devised a collective forum—reconstituting the Cabinet meeting or creating a new institution—for discussing administrative problems. He could have reached below his Secretaries to energize lower-level bureaucrats and to keep his Cabinet members on their toes. He could have structured a system of participation within individual agencies so that those responsible for administering the departmental rules and regulations were involved in the process of drawing them up. The principle of involving participants in a process—which he had practiced so successfully on Capitol Hill—had as much force in the bureaucracy as it did in the legislature.
None of these actions would have been easy to carry out in a bureaucratic system that for years had exercised considerable autonomy, free from presidential control. Still, a concerted presidential effort—with the commitment of substantial blocks of time—might have made a difference. But time was the one resource Johnson failed to give to his administrative role. Indeed, as the months went by, consumed more and more by the war in Vietnam, Johnson saw the heads of his domestic agencies less and less. Gradually, an atmosphere developed in which the domestic Cabinet members stopped asking for private meetings, assuming the President was too busy to concern himself with their business, as if their business were no longer his.
In contrast to the systematic way in which he had involved himself in the legislative process, faultlessly preparing his every word and deed, Johnson carelessly delegated the administrative tasks of the Great Society to the members of the White House staff. Worse than noninvolvement was Johnson’s sporadic need to reassert control by arbitrarily inserting himself, directly and deeply, into the operation of a particular program. Often provoked by a congressional complaint or a newspaper story, these raids drained the entire system. Demanding instant reports, spot checks on field operations, and sudden meetings with program heads, Johnson created one crisis after another, each lasting no more than one or two days and often totally disappearing once the President’s attention returned—as it always did—to Vietnam.
So it happened that the man who had prided himself all his life on attention to fine detail approved a one-billion-dollar poverty program without even coming to grips with the possible implications of the major provision calling for local community-action agencies sponsored by private as well as public groups. “I thought we were just going to have the NYA,” Johnson later said to Bill Moyers. “I thought we were going to have CCC camps and I thought we were going to have community action where a city or a county or a school district or some governmental agency could sponsor projects—the State Highway Department, for example, where we’d pay the labor and a very limited amount of the materials and a good deal of the supervision. I thought we’d say to high school boys that are about to drop out, ‘We’ll let you work at the library or sweep the floors or work in the yard and we’ll pay you enough so that you’ll stay in school’… Now I never heard of any liberal outfits where you could subsidize anyone. I’m against that. Now if we had 100 billion dollars we might need to but with all the government agencies in this country, I’d prefer that Dick Daley do it rather than the Urban League. He’s got heads of departments and he’s got experienced people that are handling hundreds of millions of dollars and every one of these I’d make them come in and sponsor these projects. This other way just leaves us wide open.”9
While Johnson’s instincts proved politically correct, he never followed through to ensure that his wishes were carried out, and the privately sponsored poverty projects became a major source of political controversy. This failure to address himself to substantial detail became more and more noticeable as the war drained away increasing reserves of psychic energy, intuition, and talent. In the course of working on his memoirs, I asked Johnson how he felt about this diversion. He responded gruffly at first, flatly denying even the possibility of a conflict between the war and the Great Society, but the next day he produced a large red and black chart, which compared the hours he had spent on the war with the hours he had spent on the Great Society. “You see,” he said, pointing to the long, black columns indicating his domestic activities, “no matter what you say about how I abandoned the Great Society, the truth is that I gave more hours every day to my domestic programs than I gave to anything else. Look, there’s the entry for May 8: 6 hours on domestic policy, 1½ on Vietnam. June 4: 10 hours on domestic policy, 3 on Vietnam. July 15: 8 on domestic policy, 2 on Vietnam.”10
Beneath the statistics, however, lay the fact that more than three-fourths of the hours he counted as domestic activities involved Rose Garden speeches, formal meetings with group leaders, bill-signing ceremonies, and presentations of awards to the Girl Scout of the Year, the Beauty Queen of the Month, or the Handicapped Veteran of the Year. Subtracting these ritualized activities from the total number of hours recorded, the years 1966–1968 show a decided shift of time and attention from domestic politics to the war in Vietnam.
The diversion of Johnson’s attention from domestic concerns took place in a period when the problems of the Great Society were no longer simply problems of administration but the erosion of Johnson’s consensus and the disappearance of those economic conditions of national life that had made the enactment of the Great Society possible. The beginnings of the Great Society coincided with the happy realization that federal budget revenues were rising faster than projected expenditures for ongoing programs and allowed Johnson to avoid difficult choices between constituents and programs. The first phase of the Great Society promised something for everyone, and the promises continued even as Johnson escalated the war in July, 1965. His cardinal rule in his conduct of the war was to keep it as painless and concealed as possible. Deliberately avoiding new taxes, he drew upon existing revenues to finance his bombs and his troops. But the painless phases of the Great Society and Vietnam came to an abrupt end as the rising costs of the war combined with increased consumer demand and rising expenditures for the Great Society to produce inflation.
Consumer demand had risen sharply in 1965 in response to the Tax Reduction Act of 1964. Business had spent heavily on new plants and equipment to meet this rising demand. At the same time the government was increasing its expenditures for programs of social reform. Still, all these demands were being met until the economy ran into the sudden and sharp expansion of defense requirements. Together with the other expansions, the defense costs pushed total demand beyond the speed limits at which production could be expanded. Something had to give. Prices started to move up in 1965. As living costs rose, workers sought higher wages. These in turn raised the costs of production. Faced with higher production costs and strong markets, producers sought to raise their prices still further. This was the chain reaction that resulted in the wage-price spiral known as inflation.
Johnson was warned by Gardner Ackley, the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, in December, 1965, that unless expenditures could be contained, a significant tax increase would be necessary to prevent an intolerable degree of inflationary pressure. But the President was in no mood to listen to such warnings at the moment when the American people were enjoying all the favorable consequences of the boom: profits were soaring, consumer living standards were improving dramatically, poverty was declining sharply, and the goal of 4 percent unemployment was finally being reached. While listening to Ackley’s concerns, he flatly refused to consider a tax increase, sticking to his initial position that the American nation could afford guns and butter alike. This decision not to recommend a general tax increase in 1966 was the critical decision that set the economic system into a prolonged period of chaos, from which it has still not recovered. By refusing to administer counterinflationary measures in the early stages, Johnson allowed the economy to heat up to the point where even drastic measures could have little impact.
Nor was Johnson willing to impose wage and price controls, preferring to solicit voluntary adherence to the established guidelines by jawboning with business and labor. But with the economy soaring out of control, Johnson’s patriotic appeals for restraint had only limited success. Once food and service prices began to accelerate, it was unrealistic to ask organized labor to accept low wage increases and equally unrealistic, once the wages went up, to ask business to lower their prices. By 1967 the guidelines were badly frayed.
Still, Johnson refused to institute wage and price controls. “I don’t think,” he later said, “we ever ought to have anything compulsory we can do voluntarily. I think by reasoning together we may perhaps avoid some of the harassing details that come in an overregulated economy. I lived through the OPA, WLB, WPB in World War II and the Korean War. I remember going home one time and going to see a farmer neighbor. I told him I wanted to bring back a ham to Lady Bird for a Sunday night buffet. I asked how much. He said three dollars. I pulled out my wallet and gave him three dollars. Then I said, ‘How many stamps?’ He said, ‘How many which?’ I said, ‘How many stamps are required for this?’ ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘you’re talking about the OP and A. Well, we just never did put that in down here.’ And that was only one measure of how deeply the American people resisted wage and price controls. I didn’t ever want to go through that period again.”11
In the absence of either wage and price controls or a tax increase, the Great Society became the sacrificial lamb of the rising inflation. In early 1965 Johnson had projected that the Great Society would get fatter and fatter with each passing year, and in some respects his projection came true: In 1965 the combined expenditures for education, community development and housing, manpower, health, and welfare totaled $7.6 billion or 6.4 percent of the federal budget. In 1970 the figure was $29.7 billion or 15.1 percent of the budget, representing a quadrupling of outlay. But this increase was less substantial than it appeared because of the rise in prices between 1965 and 1970. And the total increase must be placed alongside the increase in the Defense Department budget in that same period from $46 to $77 billion, an amount greater than the total combined expenditures for all the new human resource programs put together.12
Yet all along, the precise costs of the war were kept from the Congress and the American people. Budget Director Charles Schultze remembered that in the spring of 1966 both the President and Secretary McNamara clearly knew that Vietnam spending for fiscal year ’67 would be considerably higher—by $6 billion—than the $10 billion allotted for it.13 Still, they refused to admit how much defense spending would rise, limiting their public statements to vague pronouncements.
Six years later, when I asked Johnson to explain to me how the defense expenditures were so consistently underrated, he responded angrily: “No human being is ever able to estimate accurately the costs of a war. No one man can say from one month to the next how many dollars’ worth of bombs thousands of other men, thousands of miles away, will fire. No one could estimate the atomic bomb. When Marshall went to Rayburn, he said it would cost hundreds of millions of dollars; he couldn’t be any more definite than that. All he knew was that if we got it before the Germans, we’d be able to preserve our people, if not, we’d all be slaves. Besides, all this talk about our not knowing anything about controlling costs is a lot of shit. We had a hell of a lot more control than those guys did over in Medicare. Why, no military man could spend a dime without McNamara’s approval. He fought and bled for the principle that the Joint Chiefs of Staff could not get a mandate without a specific request. Otherwise we’d be giving them money based on pie-in-the-sky figures. When he told the Congress that he was assuming for political purposes that the war would be over by June 30, 1967, it was not a lie; it was simply the most efficient way to plan the military budget and enforce the requirement on the Joint Chiefs of Staff that they were not to receive one nickel without a plan. And moving step by step was not only the best way to plan the budget; it was the best way to save the Great Society.”14
If Johnson had hoped to save the Great Society by moving step by step, his secrecy had just the opposite effect. When the inflation set in, in the absence of a wartime mood of sacrifice, the centers of power in the Congress responded with a conventional call to cut the budget. Succumbing to their pressure, Johnson sent word to his agencies: hold the line on budget requests. So just at the time when, according to Johnson’s original scenario, the Great Society should have been entering its second phase—in which the good programs were to be expanded and the bad ones scuttled—the program administrators were told to tighten their belts and adopt a program of austerity. And Johnson the benefactor was forced to starve his own programs.
The second phase of the Great Society also made it clear that some people would have to pay the cost of helping others, shattering Johnson’s earlier hopes of sustaining a Federal Community Chest joining the blacks and the whites, the browns and the yellows, the rich and the poor, the young and old. Once it became apparent that more jobs for blacks meant less jobs for whites, that cheaper housing for the poor meant coming up against the building trade apparatus, that welfare reform meant redistributing income, and that restructuring education meant restructuring neighborhoods, the choices became much harder. To revitalize the cities or to reform the educational system required a restructuring of vested interests that lay beneath the Congress and the bureaucracy.15 To accomplish this, Johnson had to meet the power of group interests with an organized movement of his own. Building that coalition from the bottom up, however, demanded a willingness to delineate friends and enemies that went against everything Johnson believed. The task of creating a social movement dedicated to redistribution and reform was very different from the task of creating a consensus behind a vague set of individual programs. All his life Johnson had believed in blurring rather than defining issues. Skeptical of party organization, he had weakened rather than strengthened the very vehicle he now needed to mobilize grass-roots support behind the Great Society.
Yet to recognize the strength of the patterns of the past is not to say that Johnson was inevitably imprisoned by them. Observing Johnson’s immense growth in civil rights, it is possible—in the absence of Vietnam—to imagine an equally impressive growth in any number of areas. But Vietnamwas there; indeed, at the very moment when new and imaginative thinking was essential, Johnson’s mind was elsewhere. Many times, Johnson later recalled, he consciously and deliberately decided not to think another thought about Vietnam. Nonetheless, discussions that started on poverty or education invariably ended up on Vietnam. If Johnson was unhappy thinking about Vietnam, he was even less happy not thinking about it. Away from Westmoreland, McNamara, and Rostow, separated from his maps and his targets, he felt anxious. He found himself unwilling, and soon unable, to break loose from what had become an obsession.
I remember once asking him if he had ever felt imprisoned by bureaucracy.
“Yes,” he said, “but not for the reasons you think. My problem was not bureaucracy with a capital B, but a few self-satisfied bureaucrats in the Defense Department who thought they knew what was going on better than the President. I barely knew or saw them, yet there they were disagreeing with my policy and leaking materials to the press. It was a real problem all right. A President is entitled to people who’ll execute his views.”16
Johnson’s obsession with the war inevitably damaged his relations with the Congress, contributing to the frantic pace the Great Society tried to sustain, even after the first year of amazing output. Determined to show that the war had not diminished the Great Society, Johnson relentlessly pushed the Congress to prove his case by producing one law after the next. Before one bill on a particular subject could be implemented, a new bill on the same subject had been proposed. Before the standards for the Water Quality Act of 1965 had been developed, the Clean Water Restoration Act of 1966 had been passed and Water for Peace Act had been proposed, diverting both congressional and bureaucratic attention at a time when focus on administrative questions was essential. Under siege about Vietnam, Johnson interpreted pleas made by the congressional leadership to concentrate on questions of implementation as a disguised attempt to sabotage the Great Society.17
The more defensive Johnson became about the war, the more he demanded sole credit for the laws the Congress had passed. He violated his own principle of sharing publicity and credit in order to create a base of goodwill for the future. “There were a lot of us,” one Senator later said, “who broke our backs on some of these bills, but Lyndon claimed he did it all himself. And you don’t make friends that way.” By constantly referring to “my Medicare bill,” “my housing bill,” and “my education bill,” Johnson created congressional ill-will that exacerbated the difficulties the Great Society already faced.18
But Johnson’s faltering touch with the Congress was most clearly revealed in his tortuous struggle over the question of taxes. After hesitating for nearly two years to recommend a tax increase, Johnson finally asked the Congress for a 6 percent surcharge in September, 1967, but the price of the legislation—as Johnson had feared all along—was a crippling reduction in domestic programs.
“You have to go on TV,” Wilbur Mills notified the President in 1967, and explain that “because of Vietnam we must cut domestic spending and pass a tax increase, and if you take this position you can count on me to go with you all the way.… I also want some commitments made in executive sessions of the Ways and Means Committee on major slashes in domestic spending.”19 The skillful trader, his bargaining position enfeebled, now had to give up what he wanted to get what he needed; for almost the first time in his public life he was on the wrong side of a bargaining process that he did not invent, but had improved, strengthened, and transformed into a uniquely effective instrument for the exercise of power. “If I were a dictator,” he informed a Cabinet meeting in the spring of 1968, “and didn’t have to be concerned with the city council or the legislative body and could just write my own ticket, I would add to the budget instead of taking from it and I wouldn’t have a ten percent surcharge either.”20
But Johnson was not a dictator—his request for the tax increase produced only wrangling on the Hill. For eighteen long months, while the economy slid into more and more trouble, the bill remained trapped in the Ways and Means Committee and Johnson was unable to spring it free. It was not until after he had withdrawn from the presidential race in 1968 and after the gold market collapsed that Johnson finally secured the passage of the surcharge.
In the beginning Johnson had expected that economic arguments alone would be sufficient to persuade both the liberals and the conservatives to join with him on the tax increase. But this assumption failed to account for the depth and the bitterness of the issues that separated liberals from conservatives on the question of taxes. While the conservatives linked their support of the tax increase to a demand that Johnson wrap the tax in the American flag and use the resources gained from it to prosecute the war in Vietnam, the liberals conditioned their acceptance on the promise that funds be used solely for domestic purposes without a single penny going to the war.
Building a consensus under these conditions was clearly not easy, but Johnson had faced even deeper splits in the past—notably on civil rights in 1957—and had still managed to produce viable legislative strategies. Why did the keys to this particular issue elude him for so long? Part of the answer lay in the tensions involved in his relationship with Wilbur Mills, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. The two men had never been close, but until now each had so fully respected and appreciated the other’s base of power that they had skillfully managed to bury their personal dislikes in public policy. On this issue, however, all manner of personal feelings and animosities came to the surface. Reading the public sentiment against a tax increase and recognizing that the Congress would reflect that sentiment, Mills refused to let the surcharge reach the floor, where he was sure it would be beaten. But Johnson interpreted his actions as a purely personal show of force. “I saw Wilbur holding back my bill up there,” he later said to me, “and I knew why he was doing it. Not because he didn’t believe in it but because that prissy, prim and proper man was worrying more about saving his face than he was about saving his country. He was afraid to put his reputation behind a risky bill. But when you run around saving your face all day, you end up losing your ass at night.”21
Fumbling with the Congress, Johnson also fumbled with the American people. “The [prince],” Machiavelli warned, “must arrange to commit all his cruelties at once, so as not to have to recur to them every day.… For injuries should be done all together, so that being less tasted, they will give less offence.”22 By refusing to ask for a tax increase early on, Johnson failed to prepare the public for the sacrifices the war would entail. On the contrary, everything he said and did in the early days of his administration promised a painless war and a profitable peace. Nothing creates more bitterness than promises made and not kept. When life got tough on the American people, when the war and the inflation began to intrude upon their daily lives, they aimed their frustration at the President. Between 1964 and 1968 Johnson’s support rating dropped 36 percentage points.
This sweeping decline in Johnson’s popularity can be traced in part to the one-dimensional image he initially projected of himself as a master technician. Once formed, the impression of a President tends to last a long time, but the values people assign to what they see can quickly shift.23
The public’s notions of what a President should be are affected by what is happening in their daily lives. Between 1966 and 1968 the private prospects of millions of Americans were upset by war and inflation. As this happened, their expectations of the President changed. A country at war wants a Commander in Chief, not an evasive manipulator. A country suffering from social and economic crisis wants a public leader, not a private schemer. Shifting expectations produced shifting perceptions; with startling speed, the respected wizard became the wheeler-dealer, a man of shabby quality.
Johnson accelerated his problems with the public by his clumsy handling of the press. At the most basic level, he failed to recognize that the White House press corps was not the same as the Senate press corps. The techniques he had used so successfully in the Senate were ill-suited to the White House. If the Senate correspondents needed Johnson more than he needed them, the situation was reversed in the White House. To understand the inside workings of the Senate, the Senate reporters had to cultivate the Majority Leader. There were few alternative sources. This was less true in the White House, where correspondents could obtain information from other sources: from members of the White House staff, from the agencies, and from the Congress. Prior experience with a number of submissive correspondents led Johnson to the erroneous conclusion that his press relations could be solved by the art of seduction. He told various reporters he “would make big men out of them if they played ball.” But if they agreed, they were immediately identified by other reporters as sycophants; their words were read as the President’s, and their standing within the Washington community sharply declined.
In the Senate, Johnson could trust the regular reporters not to reveal too much of his private person in their reports about his public acts. The interest of the press in the Senate was more in what was happening than in personality. This was not so in the White House, where anything the President said or did, if known, was news. Little was sacred to a highly competitive press corps composed of more than fifty reporters. Taken by themselves, the reports of Johnson’s colorful language and behavior might not have been so damaging; it was the contrast between this earthy man and the image of the pious preacher he projected that did Johnson in. But he remained a wolf in sheep’s clothing before the public at large. Terrified of making slips swearing or using ungrammatical constructions, Johnson insisted on reading from formal texts. Facial muscles frozen in place, except for the simpering smile, he projected an image of feigned propriety, dullness, and dishonesty.
Johnson responded to criticism of his speaking style by commissioning a monstrous podium, which reporters nicknamed “mother” because it encompassed the orating President with enormous sound-sensitive arms. Teleprompters rose from the top but the microphones themselves remained invisible. Johnson took “mother” with him wherever he went, carefully wrapped in furniture padding. Without his podium, Johnson felt lost. Once, when he was scheduled to speak in Philadelphia, it was discovered minutes before the event that “mother” had been left on the plane. Fortunately, before he spoke a local minister was to give an invocation. In a state of panic, Johnson’s aides seized the minister’s own podium, and sawed it down to three-quarter size to make its height the same as “mother’s.”
Fundamentally, however, Johnson’s failure with the public was one of purpose, not technique. His difficulties as a public leader were rooted in the choice he made in 1965 to commit American troops to an undeclared war in Vietnam while continuing to build the Great Society and while keeping the full extent of America’s commitment from the public, the Congress, and even members of the executive branch. And taken together, these decisions produced an atmosphere of frustrated hope that contributed to the outbreaks of ugly riots in city after city for three turbulent summers.
In the middle sixties the civil rights movement shifted from the rural South to the Northern slums, from lunch counters and laws to employment, broken homes, and disease. With this shift, the earlier consensus on ends and means split apart; in 1964 only 34 percent of the American people believed that Negroes were trying to move too fast; by 1966 the percentage had increased to 85. Nearly one-third of the whites interviewed said they thought differently about Negroes now than before—they felt less regard and respect; the Negroes were demanding too much, going too far. This was not, the media said, a temporary downturn. It was, instead, “the end of the civil rights era.” Initiative had passed from the leaders who had brought about the Civil Rights Act of ’64 and the Voting Rights Act of ’65—LBJ, Martin Luther King, Roy Wilkins, Whitney Young, Clarence Mitchell—to a new group of militants, young and angry blacks whose primary experience had been in the ghettos of the North, where the gains of the sixties had barely penetrated.
Or so the media claimed as it crowned the militants kings of the civil rights movement, summarily rejecting the old leaders as men of a forgotten age. From a later perspective, the media’s image turns out to have been more myth than reality—studies indicate that even at the height of the radical activity, the old leaders still retained the overwhelming support of the Negro community—but the images presented by the media had a profound effect upon racial relations, as did the changes in vocabulary, hair, and life style that were initiated by a small segment of the Negro community but which ended up affecting large numbers of blacks.
Johnson was slow to recognize and slower to admit the significance of the confusing events set in motion by the riots and the backlash. News of the rioting in Watts, Los Angeles, in August, 1965—the first riot to capture national attention—reached Johnson at the end of a week that had begun with the signing of the Voting Rights Act, a victory Johnson described as “a triumph for freedom as huge as any victory that has ever been won on any battlefield.” “How is it possible,” Johnson asked, “after all we’ve accomplished? How could it be? Is the world topsy-turvy?” So dreadful was the fact of Watts that Johnson simply refused at first to acknowledge it. “He just wouldn’t accept it,” White House aide Joseph Califano recalled. “He refused to look at the cable from Los Angeles describing the situation. He refused to take the calls from the generals who were requesting government planes to fly in the National Guard. I tried to reach him a dozen times. We needed decisions from him. But he simply wouldn’t respond.”24
Watts was the precursor of more than one hundred riots that stretched out for three long summers, leaving 225 people dead, 4,000 wounded, and $112 billion in property damage. Initially, Johnson perceived only the harm the rioters had done to him, seeing in the flames of the stores and the houses his own betrayal. “It simply wasn’t fair for a few irresponsible agitators to spoil it for me and for all the rest of the Negroes, who are basically peace-loving and nice. A few hoodlums sparked by outside agitators who moved around from city to city making trouble. Spoiling all the progress I’ve made in these last few years.”25
Sometimes, though, Johnson seemed to understand the honest frustration that was a source of the riots, although never admitting that he himself might have been responsible for some of that frustration. “God knows how little we’ve really moved on this issue, despite all the fanfare. As I see it, I’ve moved the Negro from D+ to C–. He’s still nowhere. He knows it. And that’s why he’s out in the streets. Hell, I’d be there too. It was bad enough in the South—especially from the standpoint of education—but at least there the Negro knew he was really loved and cared for, which he never was in the North, where children live with rats and have no place to sleep and come from broken homes and get rejected from the Army. And then they look on TV and see all the promises of a rich country and they know that some movement is beginning to take place in their lives, so they begin to hope for a lot more. Hell, when a person’s released from jail or his parents, it is only natural that he takes advantage and turns to excess. Remember the Negroes in Reconstruction who got elected to Congress and then ran into the chamber with bare feet and white women. They were simply not prepared for their responsibility. And we weren’t just enough or kind enough to help them prepare. So we lost a hundred years going backward. We’ll never know how high a price we paid for the unkindness and injustice we’ve inflicted on people—the Negroes, Mexicans, and Jews—and everyone who really believes he has been discriminated against in any way is part of that great human price. And that cost exists where many people may not even think it does. No matter how well you may think you know a Negro, if you really know one, there’ll come the time when you look at him and see how deep his bitterness is.
“But there are thousands of people out there who’ll never understand this, people who’ve worked hard every day to save up for a week’s vacation or a new store and they look around and think they see their tax dollars going to finance a bunch of ungrateful rioters. Why, that’s bound to make even a nonprejudiced person angry. Prejudice—you know, my feeling all along has been that prejudice about color is not the big factor. Maybe the Poles do hate the Negroes, but I think fear is the cause of their hatred, not prejudice—anyone who’s afraid of losing his job to another man will soon turn to hate that other man. Now I thought when we got unemployment down, we’d eliminated that fear. When I got the tax bill passed in ’64, it made such a dent in unemployment I figured we were on the way. And when I got the stock market up and everyone was making money, with wages going up even higher than prices, I figured if there was a time when jealousy wouldn’t assert itself, it would be this one. Now I knew that as President I couldn’t make people want to integrate their schools or open their doors to blacks, but I could make them feel guilty for not doing it and I believed it was my moral responsibility to do precisely that—to use the moral suasion of my office to make people feel that segregation was a curse they’d carry with them to their graves. This guilt was the only chance we had for holding the backlash in check.
“Then when we got that voting rights bill passed, I figured the most constructive thing that could have come to the Negroes would have been to register and vote for the people who’d do a good job for them. And when I met all the time with the heads of the black organizations, I knew I was helping those organizations grow in the eyes of their constituents. Why, if Whitney Young or Roy Wilkins could hang a picture of me on their office walls, shaking hands with them, they’d be in good with their people for some time. And when I appointed Thurgood Marshall to the Supreme Court, I figured he’d be a great example to younger kids. There was probably not a Negro in America who didn’t know about Thurgood’s appointment. All over America that day Negro parents looked at their children a little differently, thousands of mothers looked across the breakfast table and said: ‘Now maybe this will happen to my child someday.’ I bet from one coast to the other there was a rash of new mothers naming their newborn sons Thurgood.”26
The stance Johnson adopted toward the racial issue was courageous and humane. In the political world of the 1950s and early 1960s it would have comfortably occupied a position midway between the radicals and the conservatives. But the dimensions of the racial problem in the mid- and late sixties were so large, having grown larger with every year of neglect, that it could not be easily handled by traditional politics. Sparked by frustrated hope, the violent events strained the common frame of reference that had offered the earlier period its measure of certainty. Centrist leadership is possible in the last analysis because the individuals within the society carry around in their heads a similar picture of the means and ends of their political order. Common purpose is essential for the development of mutual trust. But the sense of common purpose seemed to have vanished with the riots; the media suggested that a significant portion of the American population had lost its faith in the rules of the game and in the leadership organizations designed to articulate their demands.
After the riots, the media described America in very different terms. It was as if overnight an innocent child had become a middle-aged man, as if within months the soul of America had passed from childlike mirth and unreasoning optimism to deep dejection. The pointless deaths were taken by the commentators as evidence of the bankruptcy of the earlier faith in gradual progress, making it clear that equality for the Negro was a far greater problem than anyone had imagined and its solution probably more remote than ever. Suddenly the hopeful attitudes of the past were seen as somewhat embarrassing, the symbol of youthful improvidence.
While Johnson expected thousands of mothers to name their children after his new Supreme Court Justice, birth certificates on file in Boston and New York City revealed seven Martins, ten Luthers, eleven George Washingtons, and fifteen Franklin Delanos, but not a single Thurgood. To say this is not to take away from Johnson’s action in appointing the first Negro to the Court; it was a measure of the times that achievements which would have seemed monumental in 1960 were taken as tokenism rather than progress. Militant leaders argued that whites had traditionally exercised the prerogative of choosing their own Negro leaders and choosing them on the basis of which ones were the most accommodating.
Clearly the racial situation in the late 1960s presented Johnson with political liabilities no matter which way he moved. Public opinion surveys taken in the aftermath of the riots suggested a sharp polarization in black-white attitudes. Of the whites surveyed, 45 percent blamed the riots on outside agitators with Communist backing. Only 7 percent of the blacks took this view; 93 percent blamed general frustration. Two-thirds of the blacks felt the police had contributed to the riots; only one-sixth of the whites even acknowledged the presence of police brutality.27 And what the riots began, the inflationary economy—which locked the blue-collar worker into a struggle with the blacks for jobs—finished: the collapse of the old coalition of organized labor, intellectuals, workers, minorities, and the poor that had functioned for nearly a generation to unite the Democratic Party.
The anger and bitterness on all sides presented Johnson with a task of leadership more difficult than any he had ever faced before. It is tempting, but wrong, to suggest that it was simply a task beyond the ability of this traditional Southern politician. Considering how much Lyndon Johnson had grown on the issue of civil rights, remembering his “We Shall Overcome” speech to the Congress, watching his persistent commitment to open housing long after most of his advisers suggested that he give up, I think the question remains open. Perhaps the symbolic aspects of reunifying the blacks and the blue-collar workers would have been beyond his grasp; perhaps he never could have projected an image that pointed toward the future instead of the past. The point is, we shall never know. For once again, the war in Vietnam mortgaged his leadership at home—exacerbating tensions with Martin Luther King, forcing Johnson into defensive postures, draining his resources.
And in his abdication of leadership on this critical issue, Johnson paved the way for the emergence of two of his greatest rivals: Robert Kennedy, who came to be seen by many in 1968 as the only man capable of rebuilding the Democratic Party and bringing back together the blacks and the whites; and, after his assassination, Richard Nixon, who shared and elaborated upon Johnson’s means without any ends at all.