Chapter 8 / THE GREAT SOCIETY

In the spring of 1964, only four months after he had become President, Lyndon Johnson had spoken at the campus of the University of Michigan, and there he sketched the outlines for a program intended to go beyond the “Kennedy legacy”—one that would be his creation, his gift, and the monument to his leadership. In that address he spoke of a “Great Society”—a phrase used a few times before, but at Ann Arbor for the first time given substantial content and thus, by inference, intended as history’s label for his administration.

Even now when commentators discuss the Great Society, they concentrate on programs for the relief of poverty, help to education, etc.—measures, in the New Deal tradition, for the just distribution of rising abundance. And, in fact, most of the specific proposals that Johnson was to advance were directed toward just such ends. The concept itself, however, as described at Ann Arbor, and as elaborated in a remarkable series of speeches and messages to Congress over the next eighteen months, rejected national wealth and personal income as ends in themselves. “The challenge of the next half century,” Johnson said, “is whether we have the wisdom to use that wealth to enrich and elevate our national life,” to prevent “old values” from being “buried under unbridled growth.” A rising Gross National Product and full employment would not by themselves create a civilization “where leisure is a welcome chance to build and reflect, not a feared cause of boredom and restlessness … where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community … where men are more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods … where the demands of morality, and the needs of the spirit, can be realized in the life of the nation.”¹

These gigantic aspirations—although clearly unattainable within one Presidency, or one generation—were not, however, intended merely as rhetorical exhortation. They expressed Johnson’s intention to embark on a mammoth program of social reform. The climate that made it possible for a President to adopt such large ambitions and to succeed in enacting so many of his proposals was the product of converging historical circumstances. The shock of Kennedy’s death, the civil rights movement, an emerging awareness of the extent and existence of poverty, a reduction of threatening tensions between the United States and Soviet Union, all helped Americans to focus public energies and perceptions on the problems of their own country. More important was the deepening confidence that sustained economic growth, steadily increasing affluence seemed now an enduring and irreversible reality of American life. Therefore the problem was no longer simply the creation of wealth—that would continue—but how best to apply our riches to the improvement of American life.

Moreover, the Great Society was a response to—indeed, part of—gradually emerging currents in American awareness—the sense that we were losing control of our own society, that the means we had devised to create wealth had consequences that were beginning to threaten and degrade humanity. Along with the civil rights and peace movements came consumerism, environmentalism, and women’s liberation, all protests against the system, not just for its economic deficiencies, but at its constriction of the possibilities for human fulfillment.

Thus a multitude of changing conditions and attitudes conspired to convince a President who was bent on achievements that would leave his mark on the country’s history that the Great Society was not a utopian vision, but the inevitable direction for progressive action. Indeed, without this conviction neither the concept nor the many successful efforts of implementation would ever have come from the White House. For political leaders in a democracy are not revolutionaries or leaders of creative thought. The best of them are those who respond wisely to changes and movements already under way. The worst, the least successful, are those who respond badly or not at all, and those who misunderstand the direction of already visible change.

As the full scope of Johnson’s ambitions gradually became apparent, public reaction seemed to demonstrate that he had accurately perceived the national will. Political leaders and men of independent influence—from Martin Luther King to Henry Luce—praised his program for the country. His landslide election in 1964 appeared to constitute popular approval and a mandate to proceed. And opinion polls confirmed what most men already knew: the people were pleased with their President and shared his confidence in the almost limitless capacity of the American nation. During 1964 and 1965, however, Johnson’s virtuoso performance obscured the fact that all his achievements depended upon this essential harmony between his acts and popular desires; that without that all his skills and energies would have been futile, would have been, in Blake’s words, throwing “sand against the wind.”

There were then few critics to claim that the Great Society was a mistake or a fraud, that the nation was being misled by unfulfillable promises, that unreal expectations might stir up irrational discontent. And those who voiced such apprehensions went unheard. In his Inaugural Address, Johnson declaimed: “Is our world gone? We say farewell. Is a new world coming? We welcome it, and we will bend it to the hopes of man.”² Few censured this arrogance, which was, after all, consistent with the strain of limitless faith in American possibilities that had been a national characteristic from the beginning.

Thus, in the first years of Johnson’s Presidency, as twice before in the twentieth century—during the New Freedom and the New Deal—special circumstances produced a blend of interests, needs, convictions, and alliances powerful enough to go beyond the normal pattern of slow, incremental change. But if the resources of change were provided by the circumstances, Lyndon Johnson played the dominant role—as Wilson and Roosevelt had before him—in transforming opportunity into achievement. His formidable presence seemed to infuse all the decisions of government, and he exacted a compliance from Congress unprecedented since the beginning of the New Deal. Yet the perception of Johnson—one that was accurate and that he encouraged—as the gargantuan manipulator, the tireless practitioner of political skills, submerged awareness of another quality that contributed to his effectiveness: his own belief, and his need to believe, in limitless possibilities for the achievement of common purposes that would serve the welfare of every citizen. Even after failure and rejection, until the end he retained this belief. At the ranch in 1970, referring to criticism of what was termed “guns and butter,” he affirmed: “We have enough to do it all.… We’re the wealthiest nation in the world. And I cannot see why, if we have the will to do it, we can’t provide for our own happiness, education, health, and environment. There are no controls now and everyone’s a little selfish; there’s no jawboning any more and big business wants to get everything out of our hide, and the worker, too, like dogs chasing their tails. We need to appeal to everyone to restrain their appetite. We’re greedy but not short on the wherewithal to meet our problems.”³

The election of 1964 had given an independent legitimacy to his Presidency, his own ambitions and intentions detached from any responsibility for another’s legacy. This enabled him to accelerate and more openly express his uniquely personal influence over the conduct of national affairs.

For the five years between 1963 and 1968 Lyndon Johnson dominated public life as almost no one before him. Even under Roosevelt there had been room for a varied, often colorful, cast of officials—men of independent stature who often asserted their clashing views to press and public rather than concealing them in “eyes only” memoranda, individuals who acquired a significant public identity and, sometimes, a public following: Hugh Johnson and Jesse Jones, Henry Stimson and Henry Wallace, the “Whiz Kids” and the “braintrusters.” Under Johnson there was no one, except, of course, Robert Kennedy, an exception Johnson’s mind experienced as a serious threat.

In the first two years of his Presidency Johnson seemed to be everywhere—calling for new programs and for action on the old, personally organizing his shifting congressional majorities, signing bills, greeting tourists, settling labor disputes, championing the blacks, constantly on the telephone to publishers, businessmen, astronauts, farm leaders, in a working day that began at 7 A.M. when he watched, simultaneously, the morning shows of all three networks and that ended sometime in the early hours of the next morning. The pulling of his beagle’s ears and the exposure of his abdominal scars became subjects of national discussion, evoking emotions and argument ordinarily reserved for more portentous matters.

In Washington itself Johnson’s personality and conduct were the unavoidable topic of continual discussion. “Under Kennedy it used to be ideas,” remarked a columnist’s wife, explaining why her dinner party guests had spent the entire evening gossiping about Johnson. “Now it is Lyndon Johnson’s personality.” Washington became, as one reporter described it, “obsessed by its President.” Everything seemed to orbit about this compelling man who seemed to have an endless capacity to dominate every setting. Diplomats, reporters, and administrators alike, whether admiring or repelled, were all fascinated by the baffling ambivalence of Johnson’s 'margin-top:18.0pt;margin-right:0cm;margin-bottom: 0cm;margin-left:0cm;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-align:justify;text-indent:12.0pt; line-height:normal'>Lyndon Johnson was not a man who looked upon the acquisition of power and position as an end in itself. The reality and scale of power were defined by the extent to which it influenced or dominated behavior and conditions external to the man of authority. Since in the Presidency, as in every position of authority that he had held, Lyndon Johnson’s ambitions were not confined by lack of confidence in his capacities, it was inevitable that he would want his administration to outdo all others in achievement. His concept of achievement was derived from the New Deal and Roosevelt—which dominated the formative years of his public life—and from those influences and conflicts of his childhood that had brought him to equate achievement with fulfilling the needs and expectations of others, a purpose whose nobility was not impaired by his belief that such accomplishments also strengthened the authority of the man who had achieved them.

Among Johnson’s greatest satisfactions as a Congressman had been bringing electricity to the Pedernales Valley. Now as he looked at maps of the country, flew over great cities, campaigned in New Hampshire, led a motorcade through Los Angeles, he could envisage new houses, new shops and roads; community organizations being formed in churches and schools; men and women walking unafraid through the night streets; cities reborn. To Johnson, this meant that he must broaden his goals in proportion to the immense variety of needs and expectations contained within this constituency. He could no longer find satisfaction in his capacity to manipulate or influence other individuals or groups to direct their authority to his immediate ends. Responding to the dimensions of his new office, Johnson became deeply conscious of the effect he might have on the daily lives of ordinary men and women for generations to come.

This consciousness of his ability to influence the future combined with awareness of the past traditions and accomplishments of his office to exercise a large, partially transforming influence on Johnson’s long-established conception of the meaning and nature of his public life. “A President’s hardest task,” Johnson said in the State of the Union message delivered on January 4, 1965, “is not to do what is right but to know what is right.

Yet the Presidency brings no special gift of prophecy or foresight. You take an oath, you step into an office and you must then guide a great democracy. The answer was waiting for me in the land where I was born. It was once barren land. The angular hills were covered with scrub cedar and a few large, live oaks. Little would grow in that harsh caliche soil of my country. And each spring the Pedernales River would flood our valley. But men came and they worked and they endured and they built. And tonight that country is abundant, abundant in fruit and cattle and goats and sheep and there are pleasant homes and lakes and the floods are gone. Why did men come to that once-forbidding land? Well, they were restless, of course, and they had to be moving on. But there was more than that.

There was a dream—a dream of a place where a free man could build for himself and raise his children to a better life—a dream of a continent to be conquered, a world to be won, a nation to be made. Remembering this, I knew the answer. A President does not shape a new and personal vision of America. He collects it from the scattered hopes of the American past. It existed when the first settlers saw the coast of a new world and when the first pioneers moved westward. It has guided us every step of the way. It sustains every President.⁴

Johnson’s ideal—and hence the guide to his ambitions—was an America in which every person shared in the progress and the responsibilities of the country. The ideal as abstractly stated is not novel. But Johnson seemed to mean something more than equality of opportunity, that no one should be deprived of the essentials of a decent life. Everyone should be not only guaranteed an equal chance but insured against the possibility of total defeat. Johnson wanted to give his people everything this principle suggested, and he wanted them to have it at once. There was no justification for delay in providing what had been already denied. And Johnson, never patient in his ambitions, was anxious to hasten the recognition of his administration, along with the acknowledgment of historic leadership that would reward his achievements. Undoubtedly, he also sensed that the mood and circumstances, coupled with the mandate he had just received, created an unusual opportunity for successful action. So the agenda was established; the Great Society would offer something to almost everyone: Medicare for the old, educational assistance for the young, tax rebates for business, a higher minimum wage for labor, subsidies for farmers, vocational training for the unskilled, food for the hungry, housing for the homeless, poverty grants for the poor, clean highways for commuters, legal protection for the blacks, improved schooling for the Indians, rehabilitation for the lame, higher benefits for the unemployed, reduced quotas for the immigrants, auto safety for drivers, pensions for the retired, fair labeling for consumers, conservation for the hikers and the campers, and more and more and more. None of his fellow citizens’ desires were, Johnson thought, wholly beyond his ability to satisfy.

Johnson’s optimism and energy were accompanied by an intense anxiety that his popular mandate might be swiftly eroded. In January, 1965, the congressional liaison men from all the executive departments were assembled in the Fish Room to hear Johnson explain his rationale for pushing forward on every front at once. “I was just elected President by the biggest popular margin in the history of the country—16 million votes. Just by the way people naturally think and because Barry Goldwater had simply scared hell out of them, I’ve already lost about three of those sixteen. After a fight with Congress or something else, I’ll lose another couple of million. I could be down to 8 million in a couple of months.”⁵

Johnson felt that it was necessary to act swiftly, since he could not know how long his consensus would last. The speed with which he sought to define and prescribe for all the deficiencies of a society that was changing in unknown ways shaped both the substance and the style of the Great Society. In addition, it produced a politics of haste. “Democratic men,” Tocqueville observed long ago, “are more apt to complete a number of undertakings in rapidity than to raise lasting monuments of their achievements; they care much more for success than for fame.”⁶ So it seemed with Lyndon Johnson. While he dreamed of fame, he acted only for success. He shaped the effort to enact his legislative program, not with an eye to the needs of the next generation, but in response to the sensed urgencies of the moment. Every technique reflected the importance being given to movement and speed. While a typical schedule of presidential messages to the Congress consists of one or two a month, in 1965 Johnson transmitted sixty-three separate documents requesting action on a bewildering variety of legislation.

Most of these proposals had been produced by seventeen task forces designated to consider an extensive list of topics, which ranged from transportation and education to Indians and rural development. Consisting mainly of university professors, the task forces were asked to identify the major issues in each area, analyze the most significant problems, and recommend specific programs. Johnson charged the task force members with the responsibility of “developing the most creative and imaginative ideas,” believing that he had found a structural format that would produce a flow of brilliantly conceived descriptions and solutions. But the politics of haste also injured the work of the task forces. Much of American liberal thought was in disarray, still seeking to understand and accommodate itself to swiftly changing conditions and attitudes. The formulas of political liberalism, largely derived from the New Deal, were directed at many important and unresolved problems, but there were now other afflictions not yet included in the categories of liberal thought. So long as millions remained in poverty, and large numbers of citizens could not find decent jobs and were denied adequate housing for their families and education for their children, the New Deal’s effort to provide basic economic security remained a significant objective of liberal politics. However, it was also true that the economic and political structure that resulted from the New Deal’s attempt to restore economic growth and increase prosperity had itself generated a different set of problems: monopoly, bureaucracy, technology, wasteful growth, fragmented social groupings, alienation. There was no established canon of thought for these problems; indeed, there was often little comprehension of—and less agreement on—what the problem was, even whether it was a problem at all. No task force, for example, could have drafted a description of the action necessary to rebuild the central cities, restore the bonds of community, or restructure the nature of work. In many cases, the basic knowledge necessary for the development of a convincingly reasoned analysis did not even exist.

And even in more familiar areas of public policy, the need for haste often resulted in a failure to define the precise nature and requirements of social objectives. Legislative solutions were often devised and rushed into law before the problems were understood. Since time was limited and agreement on ends could be assumed, since surely all reasonable men—especially those likely to be consulted by a liberal Democratic President—favored the elimination of poverty, the expansion of educational opportunity, and improvement in the delivery of medical care, most of the attention was focused on means. Yet it is far from self-evident, for example, what is meant by “educational opportunity,” what forms of training are most useful or most desired, whether access to a classroom means access to knowledge. Yet if one fails to examine such questions, then the “expansion of educational opportunity” is necessarily assumed to mean more buildings and teachers, as if putting more money into a poorly conceived system will inevitably make it better.

Pass the bill now, worry about its effects and implementation later—this was the White House strategy. For now, the legislative architects must be guided by the need to design each program in the manner best calculated to attract support so as to make it politically easier for reluctant Congressmen to join with Johnson. The objective was to make laws, not raise problems. How could government best organize itself to implement the Great Society? Were there inadequacies or dangers inherent in trying to solve problems from the center of government? What was the appropriate relationship between different government departments which had responsibilities for programs directed at the same problem? On these, and on other equally significant questions, little time was spent. Discussions in the Cabinet and the White House amounted to little more than rehearsals for the arguments that one could expect from the advocates of “states’ rights.” There seemed to be few among the principal officers of government who were trying to determine how the programs could be made actually to work. The standard of success was the passage of the law—and not only within the administration, but in the press and among the public. By this standard, the Great Society was on its way to becoming the most successful domestic program in history.

In his determination to get Congress and America moving again, Johnson demanded support for the Great Society and confidence in the capacity of government to improve all the conditions of society as matters of faith. In seeking support for his often embryonic programs, he drew upon the skill of the entrepreneurs who went East in order to persuade people to leave their homes for settlements on the Western frontier. They described Western life in almost imaginary terms: towns were referred to as cities, small colleges described as universities; taverns became hotels; a tent containing rows of benches was transformed into an opera house.⁷ Lyndon Johnson was a twentieth-century booster. His object was to persuade others to move, not to the West, but toward an America that was the creation of his own desires and convictions—Johnson’s “promised land.” The intensity of his own belief strengthened his formidable persuasive powers. It did not seem to matter that in his enthusiasm he sometimes confused the dream with present realities, that he sometimes presented as facts events that had not yet occurred, changes of condition that were still only intentions. In so expansive an era, filled with such benevolent intentions, the boundaries between fact and fiction, between the present and the future, no longer held.

Johnson seemed to regard the programs of the Great Society in the way overly fond parents look at their children. By building on the strengths of prosperity rather than on the necessities of depression, the program of the Great Society would fulfill all the hopes that had been beyond the reach of the New Deal. It would accomplish more for the nation than had the programs of any other administration, compelling history to acknowledge the greatness of its progenitor—greater, perhaps, than the already legendary FDR. In the urgency of his desire to persuade others and, perhaps, to reinforce his own belief, he often spoke of hopes and possibilities as if they were established certainties. “No longer will older Americans be denied the healing miracles of modern medicine,” asserted the message on Medicare. Other messages proclaimed “a national war on poverty,” whose outcome must inevitably be “total victory.” And so it went in message after message. The subjects might change, but the essentials remained the same: in the opening, an expression of dire need; in the middle, a vague proposal; in the end, a buoyant description of the anticipated results—all contained in an analysis presented in a manner that often failed to distinguish between expectations and established realities.

More serious than the exaggerations, and deceptions, and illusory assertions, which were consequence and result of his impatient ambitions, was the failure to acknowledge—in description or in the actual design of programs—many of the most fundamental elements of social problems. Johnson ignored the obstacles to his intentions that were inherent in the distribution and forms of economic power, the force of habit and tradition, the stubborn preference of people for doing things in their own way.

This was less a deception than a consequence of limits to his own perception of the country and of himself. There could be, he believed, no fundamental or impenetrable barriers to changes that would be beneficial to all, and that everyone desired—or would desire—once they understood the purpose and the inevitable consequences of those changes. Nor were there basic elements of design and social process hostile to his objectives. There was almost nothing beyond the practical capacities of a united and determined America. This view of social problems was not uniquely personal, but characteristically American—part of the common wisdom that Americans derived from what appeared to be the self-evident lessons of our historical experience and a native confidence in the irresistible force of practical understanding and action. What was unique to Johnson was the confidence that he possessed, powers of will and persuasion which could convince an entire nation that his policies represented the necessary and wisest course toward the kind of America that all should desire. There was much to justify this confidence, but it also made him unable to foresee the possibility of resentment based, not on objections to his social goals or to the practicality of specific measures, but on hostility to the implicit assertion of increased central authority to define the general welfare and confer benevolences which, however desirable in themselves, should not be imposed by presidential will.

However, these flaws were not to appear until later. During 1965 Johnson’s faith in the country’s ability to heal its afflictions and enrich human life—to build a Great Society—infused his insistent messages and public exhortations. In later years these speeches might seem bombastic or arrogant, but when they were spoken, they had the desired result. The American people were anxious for a renewal of belief, and Johnson was not only a great believer but a great persuader. Indeed, for a brief moment it seemed that this mammoth Texan might be able to impose his personal configuration of the world on an entire society.

Johnson was also the beneficiary of change produced by the presidential institution itself. His authority to formulate the Great Society derived from two decades of institutional development during which the preparation by the executive of a comprehensive legislative program, complete with detailed requests and drafts of bills, had become a routine practice. Patterns established in the New Deal and continued through the postwar decades had modified the previous structure of institutional relationship so that the President was now expected to present a programmatic agenda to the Congress. Indeed, it had become his responsibility to do this. This responsibility and the increased authority it implied had their inception during the Roosevelt Presidency, and were expanded with the development of elaborate and institutionalized methods for formulating and presenting programs—such as the Budget Bureau’s requirement that the departments present legislative programs for review, the annual messages, the special messages, the White House briefings, etc.

“The President proposes, the Congress disposes.” According to conventional theory, the President takes the lead in setting priorities and offering programs, thus initiating a process which Congress then completes by adjusting, accepting, or rejecting the President’s bills. But that was not Lyndon Johnson’s theory in the early days of the Great Society. And by ignoring customary functions and roles, he contributed to the scale and the success of his legislative program. He blended and obscured the usual relationship between the President and the Congress, mingling previously distinct functions together until he involved each branch in both proposing and disposing of legislation. He was seeking to fashion an American version of the British parliamentary system, arrogating to himself the role of the British Cabinet—“a hyphen which joins, a buckle which fastens the legislative part of the state to the executive part.”⁸

Johnson believed that all legislators were influenced by two emotions, each of which stimulated a different direction for fear closed it. The desire for recognition could persuade a legislator to risk allying himself with the effort to bring about change so that he might receive acknowledgment of his good works. Fear of losing the struggle immobilized him, influencing him to stand pat, to leave things as they were. Johnson’s success in winning congressional support for change depended upon his ability to reduce the fear and increase the desire, which, in turn, required him to establish closer ties between the often warring branches. By having Congress participate in the initiation of the programmatic process, Johnson could increase the rewards of recognition. By inserting himself into the traditionally congressional dispositive stages of the process, he could reduce the risk of moving ahead.

“The trick was,” Johnson later mused, “to crack the wall of separation enough to give the Congress a feeling of participation in creating my bills without exposing my plans at the same time to advance congressional opposition before they even saw the light of day. It meant taking risks, but the risks were worth it. Legislative drafting is a political art. The President is continually faced with a number of tough choices: how to strike a balance between the bill he really wants and the bill he’s got a good chance of getting; how to choose between a single-purpose or omnibus bill; how to package the bill for the Hill, when to send it up. In all these choices the President needs congressional judgment, and if he’s wise, he seeks it.

“My experience in the NYA,” he recalled, “taught me that when people have a hand in shaping projects, these projects are more likely to be successful than the ones simply handed down from the top. As Majority Leader I learned that the best guarantee to legislative success was a process by which the wishes and views of the members were obtained ahead of time and, wherever possible, incorporated into the early drafts of the bill. As President I went one step further. I insisted on congressional consultation at every single stage, beginning with the process of deciding what problems and issues to consider for my task forces right up to the drafting of the bills.”⁹

Each fall, in anticipation of the President’s annual program, the White House established task forces to study and define major issues. Perhaps because their subject matter and memberships were kept secret from the public, Johnson managed to persuade selected Senators and Congressmen to serve on these task forces. In so doing, he implicated them in what is generally considered an exclusively executive function. Using the task-force reports as the basis for their work, staff members from the White House, the Bureau of the Budget, and the agencies developed the substantive message in each field. At this stage, Johnson again insisted on congressional participation, and sent his aides to the Hill for secret sessions with key Senators and Congressmen. To consider the provisions of the draft message or bill, they consulted Wilbur Mills on taxes, Warren Magnuson on consumer protection, Robert Kennedy on housing, Edmund Muskie on pollution, and so on. Johnson himself would not approve the draft until the relevant Cabinet member had presented him with a statement that he had carried out the necessary consultations with Congress giving proof that he had done his homework: “I have touched base on this message with the leadership from the Committee on Labor and Public Welfare in the House, where this bill is likely to start; the chairman has polled selected members for their first reactions. The following six are likely to be favorable for these reasons, four are likely to be in opposition. Our answers to the questions of the opposition are ready, our testimony is complete and we are anxious to move.” Of course such discussions with members of Congress greatly increased the risk that something would leak to the press. But most of the time, so long as the discussion was prefaced by explaining, “The President hasn’t decided to do this, but if he did, how would you respond?” the member of Congress would respect the privacy of the meeting.¹⁰

Johnson explained: “My father always impressed me with the importance of trying to know whenever you walked into a room where your friends and enemies were standing. These initial checks gave us that knowledge; they gave us an early and quick sense of where our friends and enemies were likely to be found.”¹¹

More that that, these early checks gave the White House an opportunity to redraft its bills so they would be assigned to different and more favorable committees. This was not always possible, but the staff was instructed to concede the impossibility of avoiding the assignment of a proposal to a committee likely to act unfavorably only after secret consultations with the official parliamentarian and discussions with the President himself.

After all these preparations had been completed, the message was ready for official transmittal. Even at this final moment, however, Johnson insisted on one more step—a White House briefing with congressional leaders, conducted the night before the message was to be sent to the Hill. The briefings generally took the form of dinner meetings in the White House mess, to which Johnson invited the chairmen of the appropriate committee and subcommittee, the party leadership, and other legislators who were likely to be influential on this particular issue. At such meetings, Cabinet members, together with the White House staff, would review the contents of the message, provide background information, clarify language, and answer questions.

“Everyone thinks it was simply crises or assassinations that produced legislation. No one knows about the hundreds or more briefing sessions we conducted for Congressmen and Senators. That’s what did it. It’s all in my diary. I’d do it like the British system. It was my version of the question period—an opportunity for the members of Congress to get an advance look at my documents and then to confront my Cabinet members with all sorts of questions. Allowing some to receive an advance look the night before may seem like nothing, but, in fact, it was everything. It gave the chosen ones—between the charts and the tables and the answers to their questions—a knowledgeable understanding of what often turned out to be complex legislation. This understanding put them in good shape the next day when reporters and cameramen began pounding the Hill for reactions. The ones who had been at the briefing had their thoughts in order; they made the best statements on the 6 P.M. news. They looked smart before their constituents and that made an enormous difference in their attitude toward the bill.”¹²

By insisting on White House briefings, Johnson was applying a lesson he had learned as a freshman Congressman. He described the experience in his memoirs:

I was standing in the back of the House behind the rail as Speaker Sam Rayburn listened to the House clerk read an important new administration message President Roosevelt had just sent to the Hill. Several dozen Democrats were gathered around him. As he finished, a unanimous chorus of complaints rushed forth: “Why, that message is terrible, Mr. Sam—we can’t pass that.” … “That last suggestion is awful.” … “Why in the world did you let the President send one up like that?” … “Why didn’t you warn us?”

Speaker Rayburn listened to all the criticisms and then responded softly: “We’ll just have to look at it more carefully. That’s all I can say now, fellows. We’ll have to look at it more carefully.” The crowd scattered. Mr. Sam and I were left alone in the back. I could see that something was wrong. “If only,” he said, “the President would let me know ahead of time when these controversial messages are coming up. I could pave the way for him. I could create a base of support. I could be better prepared for criticism. I could get much better acceptance in the long run. But I never know when the damned messages are coming. This last one surprised me as much as it did all of them.” He shook his head sadly and walked slowly away.

I could see that his pride was hurt. So was the President’s prestige and the administration’s program. I never forgot that lesson.¹³

When particularly sensitive matters were involved, Johnson often conducted his own one-to-one briefings, in person and on the phone wielding the same skills that had served him at all stages of his career: knowledge of the levers of power—personal and institutional—over each particular matter, the capacity to understand the motives and vulnerabilities of others and how best to approach them. The technique imposed towering demands upon his energy; he had to know how much to involve which members of Congress in what bill, selecting for each member the kind of participation that promised him the greatest reward, deciding where to draw the line in order to avoid the kind of overinvolvement that might expose his program to crippling opposition in advance. And he had to know these things himself, directly, from face-to-face talks, because only Johnson was in contact with all the varied groups and subgroups in both Congress and the administration. He alone could know the full implications and possible consequences of decisions in the conduct of relations with Congress. Johnson’s methods for implicating the Congress in the traditionally executive function of initiating legislation would have been hard and completely consuming work for any man. Yet they comprised only one-half of his approach to Capitol Hill. The other half—inserting himself deeply and systematically into the traditionally legislative function of enacting legislation—proved even more demanding of his time, energy, and skill.

Other Presidents had paid close attention to the Congress, but the scope and intensity of Lyndon Johnson’s participation in the legislative process were unprecedented. He began with an inherited liaison staff, headed by Larry O’Brien. John Kennedy’s liaison operation had been organized to provide consistent, orderly attention to the legislators on the Hill. It could provide legislators with invitations to White House dinners and ceremonies, advance notification of federal contracts, detailed data about a bill’s effects, campaign help from the Democratic National Committee, and birthday notes from the President. Many carrots and a few sticks, these were the tools of O’Brien’s men. And they had learned to manipulate them with increasing skill. As one who worked for both Kennedy and Johnson as a congressional aide described it: “The first couple of years were the years of learning. It takes time to learn the men and to understand the process. It takes time to build the links. In 1965, we were beginning to come into our own. In fact, if we had known in 1961 what we knew in 1965, we might have had far greater success in securing the passage of the bills John Kennedy wanted so much. But all that is impossible speculation. What is more important is the fact that when Lyndon Johnson came to us for help we were ready to provide it.”¹⁴

Using many of the same men Kennedy had used, Johnson created the most successful liaison staff in the history of the Presidency. He expanded the range of its duties and the depth of its involvement, and participated constantly and personally in its work.

“There is,” Johnson later explained, “but one way for a President to deal with the Congress, and that is continuously, incessantly, and without interruption. If it’s really going to work, the relationship between the President and the Congress has got to be almost incestuous. He’s got to know them even better than they know themselves. And then, on the basis of this knowledge, he’s got to build a system that stretches from the cradle to the grave, from the moment a bill is introduced to the moment it is officially enrolled as the law of the land.”¹⁵

Congress has the formal power to decide which bills to consider in what sequence. As a practical matter, however, the President can shape the legislative calendar by the order and the pace of the messages he sends to the Hill. Johnson offered the following account: “A measure must be sent to the Hill at exactly the right moment and that moment depends on three things: first, on momentum; second, on the availability of sponsors in the right place at the right time; and third, on the opportunities for neutralizing the opposition. Timing is essential. Momentum is not a mysterious mistress. It is a controllable fact of political life that depends on nothing more exotic than preparation.”¹⁶

Even before his staff had completed the final draft of a message, Johnson personally decided who should introduce it in the House and the Senate. This was a delicate, dangerous business. Custom did not easily sanction White House interference in the internal operations of congressional committees. But since the fate of many a proposal depended on the intellectual capacity and personal force of its sponsor, Johnson was willing to run the risk. On several important bills, he directly sought out the sponsors he wanted—among them, Phil Landrum, the conservative Georgian, for the poverty program; and the Senator from rural Maine, Edmund Muskie, for Model Cities. While these preparations were going on, the White House staff worked with committee staffs to schedule hearings and to draw up lists of potential witnesses so that, if possible, Johnson could simultaneously announce the introduction of a program and the start of hearings on the 6 P.M. network news.

Maximum attention in minimum time was also Johnson’s way to avoid what he looked upon as Congress’ congenital disease, its tendency to bog down. And in 1965 immobility and inertia were among the principal obstacles to success in his legislative struggles. The battles began with Medicare and education.

Johnson’s decision to push for health and education legislation ahead of housing proposals and the granting of home rule to the District of Columbia resulted from his carefully considered judgment as to the amount of time each of the bills would consume and which measures were most likely to provoke the kind of debate and controversy that would drain valuable energy. Recognizing that John Kennedy had lost a full legislative year in pursuit of federal aid to education, Lyndon Johnson refused to let the education bill go to the Congress until administration officials had secured the agreement of two major lobbying groups—the National Education Association, which spoke for the public schools, and the National Catholic Welfare Conference, which represented parochial schools. The seemingly irreconcilable conflict between these lobbies had been largely responsible for the earlier failure to pass an education bill. Now an agreement was fashioned by means of an ingenious formula by which assistance would go, not to the schools, but to impoverished children, whether they attended P.S. 210 or St. Joseph’s. Immediately thereafter the President dispatched the program to the Hill, and within four months the Elementary and Secondary Education Act was the law of the land.

“In some ways,” Johnson confided, “Congress is like a dangerous animal that you’re trying to make work for you. You push him a little bit and he may go just as you want but you push him too much and he may balk and turn on you. You’ve got to sense just how much he’ll take and what kind of mood he’s in every day. For if you don’t have a feel for him, he’s liable to turn around and go wild. And it all depends on your sense of timing.”¹⁷

Johnson’s sense of timing told him that after the struggle over the Civil Rights Act of 1964, 1965 was not a propitious year to press for more civil rights proposals. He felt that the American people wanted an intermission, a period without renewed conflict, in order to assimilate the political and social impact of the earlier bill. The agencies involved in matters of civil rights wanted time for orderly incorporation of the new people and bureaus and their new responsibilities. The Congress wanted time to heal the wounds of division. Though, in January, 1965, Johnson directed Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach to begin the complicated task of preparing legislation to protect the voting rights of black Americans, no action was expected until the spring of 1966. Then came Selma, and everything changed. Responding to his own need for continuing action and momentum in order to sustain support for the civil rights movement and for his leadership, Martin Luther King initiated an all-out drive for Negro registration by leading a protest march from Selma, Alabama, to Montgomery on March 7, 1965. When Governor Wallace sent state police against the marchers, the televised scenes of unarmed blacks being brutally whipped with billy clubs aroused many people in the country. Demonstrations multiplied, and there was massive pressure on Johnson to protect the marchers by mobilizing the National Guard.

But Johnson refused to be pushed. Pickets surrounded the White House, carrying placards calculated to shame him into action: “LBJ, open your eyes, see the sickness of the South, see the horrors of your homeland.” Telegrams and letters demanding action streamed into the President’s office. Still, Johnson held back, fearing, as he described it in his memoirs, “that a hasty display of federal force at this time could destroy whatever possibilities existed for the passage of voting rights legislation,” knowing that “such action would play into the hands of those looking for a states’ rights martyr in Governor Wallace.”¹⁸ It was, in retrospect, a brilliant move. In the middle of the turmoil, Wallace requested a meeting with the President, who granted the request at once. In the Oval Office, they discussed the question of troops. Johnson appealed to the large ambition and the populist strain that he perceived in Wallace: How could there be any fixed limits, he suggested, to the political career of the first Southern governor to combine economic and social reform with racial harmony? Why not Wallace? The talk lasted three hours; afterward, Wallace was reported to have said: “If I hadn’t left when I did, he’d have had me coming out for civil rights.”¹⁹

Two days later, when Johnson finally sent troops to Alabama, the act was generally regarded, not as an imperious imposition of federal power, but as a necessary measure to prevent further violence. By waiting out his critics and letting the TV clips make their own impression on the country, he had succeeded in persuading most of the country that he had acted reluctantly and out of necessity, not because he was anxious to use federal power against a guilty South. Then, once the Justice Department had finished drafting a Voting Rights Act, he presented the bill in a speech to a joint session of the Congress conducted during the prime evening viewing hours of the television networks, all of which covered the President’s address. With this event, Johnson gave his fellow citizens a specific outlet for inchoate emotion and assured himself of irresistible support for his next, and now become urgent, civil rights program.

The speech was Lyndon Johnson at his best—homely, compassionate, audacious, and noble—a hard practical appeal and a strong moral statement. “I speak tonight,” Johnson began, “for the dignity of man and the destiny of democracy.… At times history and fate meet at a single time in a single place to shape a turning point in man’s unending search for freedom.… So it was a century ago at Appomattox. So it was last week in Selma, Alabama.… There is no constitutional issue here. The command of the Constitution is plain. There is no moral issue. It is wrong … to deny any of your fellow Americans the right to vote.… This time, on this issue, there must be no delay, no hesitation, and no compromise with our purpose.… What happened in Selma is part of a far larger movement which reaches into every section and state of America. It is the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life. Their cause must be our cause too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice.”²⁰

Here Johnson stopped. He raised his arms and repeated three words from an old Baptist hymn, now the marching song of the civil rights movement: “And … we … shall … overcome.” At this moment, as an observer described it, “the whole Chamber was on its feet.… In the galleries Negroes and whites, some in the rumpled sports shirts of bus rides from the demonstrations, others in trim professional suits, wept unabashedly.”²¹

Then Lyndon Johnson spoke of his own past. He talked of his teaching experience in Cotulla: “Somehow you never forget what poverty and hatred can do when you see its scars on the hopeful face of a young child. I never thought then, in 1928, that I would be standing here in 1965. It never occurred to me in my fondest dreams that I might have the chance to help the sons and daughters of those students and to help people like them all over this country. But now I do have that chance—I’ll let you in on a secret—I mean to use it.… I do not want to be the President who built empires, or sought grandeur, or extended dominion. I want to be the President who educated young children … who helped to feed the hungry … who helped the poor to find their own way and who protected the right of every citizen to vote in every election.… God will not favor everything we do. It is rather our duty to divine His will. But I cannot help believing that He truly understands and that He really favors the undertaking that we begin tonight.”²²

It had been a summons and a sermon. It had been that rare thing in politics, rarer still for Lyndon Johnson—a speech that shaped the course of events. For once, Americans would honor him for a greatness of spirit as well as a mastery of technique. For on this issue he was more than a giver of gifts; he had become a moral leader.

During the years of Johnson’s Presidency a cruel joke was often heard at Washington dinner tables, the raconteur first carefully determining that no one present had loyal access to the White House. Johnson, the story went, dismissed his Secret Service guards, got into his car, drove to a distant and deserted corner of his ranch, got out, looked carefully around, and then, throwing up his head, at the top of his lungs shouted “Nigger!” The story always got a laugh, for many reasons, but chiefly because it was difficult for many to accept the sincerity of his dedication to civil rights, believing it, at best, a sudden conversion stimulated by the political necessities of winning and then holding presidential office. But as time passed, and I listened, talked, and learned, it became clear that in this, as in Vietnam, Johnson was a true believer, although with a far more lucid sense of the human and political realities. For these were people, the blacks and their white adversaries, whom he knew and had dealt with, whose variety of circumstance and opinion he had perceived through his own senses.

“I never had any bigotry in me,” he explained much later. “My daddy wouldn’t let me. He was a strong anti-Klansman. He wouldn’t join the Methodists. The Klan controlled the state when I was a boy. They threatened to kill him several times.”²³ Perhaps coincidentally, the assignment which began the “domestic operations division” of the FBI—ordered by Lyndon Johnson in September of 1964—was to infiltrate and disrupt the Ku Klux Klan. Moreover, the outward manifestations of racism—segregation, violence, condescension—had not been part of Lyndon Johnson’s youthful experiences, as they were for so many other Southerners. For there were no blacks in Blanco County, and not many in his congressional district.

“In the middle thirties we didn’t know Lyndon Johnson from Adam,” recounted a venerable and distinguished Negro leader, describing the period when Johnson had directed the NYA in Texas. “We began to get word up here that there was one NYA director who wasn’t like the others. He was looking after Negroes and poor folks and most NYA people weren’t doing that.”²⁴ Johnson did put together special NYA programs for the black young, often financed by secret transfers of money from other projects that had been approved at upper levels of the bureaucracy.

“We had to use most of our money for wages,” Johnson explained, describing one of the less clearly illegal among his techniques, “the rest for equipment, shovels, etc., and nothing for fancy things like dormitories. What I did was go around and get people to donate money for the equipment in the white areas and then apply that saving to Prairie View [a project location for Negro youth] and use it to build dorms which they so badly needed. I’d stop over there to see how they were doing, on my way to the Houston office. Stayed overnight, ate with them. Well, the day I announced for Congress, which was soon after the funeral of the man who’d had the seat, by the next night the announcement had been in the Sunday papers. Four cars drove up to the apartment where we lived on the second floor, and out tumbled ten to twelve Negroes. They said they’d come to let me know that they’d find every Negro in my district and make sure they voted for me.”²⁵

We have seen that in the late forties and early fifties Johnson felt it necessary to consolidate his strength among his new constituency; one far more conservative and racist than his congressional district had been. In those years he avoided being identified with the cause of civil rights. Yet one must also remember that, in the same period, the cause of black Americans had few champions among white politicians. Harry Truman integrated the armed forces, which, under Roosevelt, separate and unequal, had fought World War II. But with that single exception, no important steps were taken to improve the conditions of black Americans. Indeed, the issue was barely an issue, rarely rose to the surface of public debate, and when it did, was formed and fought around issues, such as the poll tax or antilynching, which were purely Southern problems. More fundamental denials of political, legal, and economic equality were neither challenged nor debated. In that period six civil rights bills managed to make it to the floor of Congress; six were defeated.

“In the 1940s and early 1950s,” Johnson later explained, “I did vote against the poll tax bill and the antilynching bill. I just never thought it should be the federal government passing the law. Now I did support a constitutional amendment repealing the poll tax, and in fact in the fifties I went around Texas arguing that Texas should repeal its own poll tax. As for lynching, well now, that’s murder. You’re not going to stop that by passing another law. They simply wanted to put a stain on the South, by implying that Southern lynchings were frequent, which they weren’t.

“I’m not prejudiced nor ever was, but I will say that civil rights was not one of my priorities in those days. I had other concerns. My job took me all day. Nor did I have the power to do anything about them but to stand up and sputter out. That’d be nonsense, like swimming one-half the way across a lake or going to Dallas with one-half a tank of gas left, so you’d be left floating in the water or stranded on the road. But all that changed when I became President. Then I had the power and the obligation to do something. Then it did become my personal priority. Then something could happen.”²⁶

When he finally did become President, when he “had the power and the obligation,” then, as he claimed, it did become his personal priority. In speeches, legislation, and continuing proposals, Johnson took the most advanced position on racial issues of any President in American history; appearing, at times, ahead of the civil rights movement itself, until, sadly, the war in Vietnam extended its paralyzing hand to this as to his other domestic ambitions.

“Without constant attention from the administration,” Johnson argued, “most legislation passes through the congressional process with the speed of a glacier.”²⁷ In each chamber over ten thousand bills are introduced each year. Moreover, legislative activity is just one part of a Congressman’s hectic life. Most members of Congress must also oversee the activities of a staff assigned to advise them on issues, write their speeches, answer their mail, and do their case work. In a sense, each Congressman is the proprietor of a small business. In addition, there are lectures to give, partisan obligations to meet, and necessary trips to their home district or state. House members begin campaigning for a next term almost from the time they are elected to their present one. And at any given moment, at least several Senators are using some of their time to run for President, or to think about running. In this context, the White House can perform an invaluable function—one that serves its own interests as well as those of the Congress—simply by helping the legislators focus on the major bills of the President’s program. But the White House can do this only to the extent the President is willing to concentrate on the Congress, something which varies with the temperament of the President and the nature of his administration.

In words and deeds, Johnson made known his intention to concentrate on legislation. In his message on the State of the Union, he devoted more than three thousand words to domestic affairs. And more importantly, he committed most of his waking hours to the Great Society. He began and ended each day by reading a substantial amount of material related to the Congress. The Congressional Record, clipped and summarized, appeared by his bed at 7:15 A.M. Placed at his bedside at 11 P.M. each night were memos from the staff, which described in detail each of the legislative contacts they had made that day, reported noteworthy conversations with particular members, and called attention to special problems.²⁸

Johnson had an impressive capacity to absorb these reports rapidly and in detail so that he was thoroughly prepared for his Tuesday breakfast meetings with the congressional leadership, where the legislative schedule was discussed in great detail. At these meetings Johnson stood beside an immense chart that rested on an easel in the corner of the room. There he went over the diagrams of the chart, which showed the course of each of his bills: which were still in subcommittee, which were ready for the mark-up, and which were ready for consideration on the floor. The chart, which seemed to accompany Johnson everywhere, was also used to prod the members of his Cabinet, allowing him to request or demand explanations from the Secretaries whose departmental legislation was shown to be lagging. In 1965—before Vietnam became the central concern—the major item on the agenda of every Cabinet meeting was “pending legislation.” At least half of every Cabinet meeting that year was devoted to individual reports by each of the Secretaries on the progress of his legislative program.

After reviewing the latest chart, Johnson focused the Cabinet meeting on the major bills. The White House staff reported the results of the latest head count. The report was divided into five categories: right, probably right, uncommitted, probably wrong, and wrong. It also included richly descriptive material about the status of each member’s position. The Congressman from New York’s 5th District “is all for it but can’t stay with us unless the New York delegation votes for it as well”; the Congressman from Nevada “campaigned last time against this and probably will have to honor that commitment”; the Congressman from the 3rd District in Massachusetts “is absolutely right and doesn’t want to be bothered again”; the Junior Senator from California “will catch an early plane to avoid a negative vote if necessary”; the Senior Senator from Oregon “will vote for it if needed but hopes we can spare him on this one”; the Congressman from Ohio’s 1st District “will go with us only if an amendment on local control is included”; the Congressman from Pennsylvania “is owned body and soul by his local paper; our only way to get to him is to get to the publisher”; the Senior Senator from Louisiana “is immune to pressure from anyone except the President”; the Senator from Idaho “is uncommitted but leaning wrong”; the Senior Senator from New York “could vote for it but only after the New York primary”; the Congressman from South Dakota “is uncommitted but leaning wrong, he will listen only to the National Farmers Union on this one”; the Junior Senator from Illinois “will stay with us provided no softening amendments are added.” And on it went.²⁹

The central question that these tallies were designed to resolve was whether the administration could win on the floor with the legislation that had come out of committee. The validity of that judgment depended on the accuracy with which the views and positions of the members had been assessed. And the ability to make accurate assessments required both knowledge and trust. If a liaison man knew his contacts well, he could determine their initial reaction in a simple meeting or phone call; if he did not, he might be unable to interpret critical subtleties of expression, nuance, and timing. If the bill being discussed seemed in trouble, Johnson began to consider the possibility of amendments that might increase support. “What,” he would ask, “are we willing to concede on this one in order to salvage the bill? What do you say? How do you feel? Well, if we take that amendment, how many votes will it produce? What evidence do you have for that figure? What would you say?” Round and round he went until necessary decisions were made.

In the House, the Democratic leadership was working with the strongest majority in several decades—a total of 295 members. Although this made a tremendous difference in the substance of the legislation passed and the number of amendments that were needed, the process of decision was the same as it would be in subsequent years when the Democrats would have smaller majorities. Henry Hall Wilson, chief administration lobbyist for seven years, makes this point explicitly: “When we have a fat Congress as we did in the Eighty-ninth, then we can hike up our demands to fit the situation. When the votes are not razor thin in either case, then we are not doing a good job.”³⁰

Wilson’s exposition reflected Lyndon Johnson’s own view that the task was to push each Congress to its limits, to obtain the maximum legislative output that any particular Congress could be made to produce. Thus slim margins were expected and, indeed, planned for. But this approach often required interpretation by the President to restrain the natural congressional tendency to make legislative compromises when the forces are closely divided. On such matters, as the moment of decision nears, concessions are often made even though they are not necessary to passage. “It was my job,” Johnson later explained, “to hold the line on the final stretch.”³¹ How Johnson held the line in that final stretch was, and will undoubtedly continue to be, a subject of continual discussion and conjecture. The popular image at the time—reflected most sharply in the cartoons of Herblock and Al Capp—was of a giant, forbidding figure roaming back and forth between the White House and the Congress, slapping backs, twisting arms, trading dams. In fact, the process was more subtle and less colorful. Once again, it required an accurate sense of timing and substantial preparation. In the first place, Johnson became involved only after a long winnowing process had taken place. He was the ultimate weapon, kept in reserve, to be brought into action only after everything else had failed. Generally, Johnson limited his personal calls to a small number of members who had been identified by White House tallies as among those who were “probably right,” “uncommitted,” or “probably wrong.” He ignored those members who had indicated either strong support or strong opposition to the pending legislation. Within the selected group, Johnson focused his attention on those Senators or Congressmen who could serve as swing votes, influencing others to follow their lead. Before placing his calls, Johnson would study detailed memos prepared by his staff, which indicated the reason for the opposition of a particular Senator or Congressman, what it would take to change him, and what his vulnerabilities might be. Armed with these memos and with his own anatomical knowledge of the states and districts, Johnson proved formidable in personal debate. A freshman Republican, after receiving one such call, said: “It was like talking to my campaign manager—only I wish he knew that much.”³² Obviously, the amount of preparation and knowledge required in order to be effective meant that Johnson’s interventions had to be limited.

In the second place, the President’s contacts rarely involved direct and open “deals.” “The reasons for this,” explained Henry Hall Wilson, “are simple and obvious if you just think about it for a minute. If it ever got around the Hill that a President was trading patronage for votes, then everyone would want to trade and all other efforts at persuasion would automatically fail. Each member would tell his neighbor what he got for his votes and soon everyone would be holding out, refusing to decide until the President called. You can imagine how impossible that would be when I tell you the awful difficulty we had at a much lower level. Johnson had a tendency every now and then whenever he was in a happy mood to pick up the phone and call every Representative who had celebrated a birthday that week. Within five minutes, each of these conversations had spread throughout the Hill, and for weeks the recipients would begin every conversation with ‘Now when the President spoke to me about that bill, he said …’”³³

The principle involved here is the well-known danger of rising expectations: “As people become accustomed to a certain level of gratification which they may have initially considered extreme, they come to take it for granted and to expect at least that much gratification from their associations in the future.”³⁴ This is not to say that rewards were never dispensed to faithful Congressmen, nor that sanctions were never imposed on those who opposed the administration’s programs. The point is that the carrots and the sticks were dispensed by the White House and the executive branch on the basis of a pattern of support and voting over time, not by the President personally in exchange for a specific vote. In other words, the members who cooperated with the administration developed a general store of credit and knew they would be remembered.

The rewards themselves (and the withholding of rewards) took a variety of forms. It might be something as unobtrusive as receiving an invitation to join the President in a walk around the White House grounds, knowing that pictures of the event would be sent to hometown newspapers along with hints from “White House sources” that the President valued and frequently sought this man’s advice. Other inducements might take the form of a designation as sponsor of important administration legislation, or appointment to a special presidential delegation or commission. More direct rewards might consist of benefits to the districts: public works projects, military bases, educational research grants, poverty projects, appointments of local men to national commissions, the granting of pardons, and more.³⁵

In the White House, as in the Senate, one of the most underestimated of all political resources is personal attention. Johnson knew the Congress intimately; it had been his life and love for thirty-four years. Coming from him, little amenities meant a great deal, and he knew what they meant. After each vote he would generally call the man most responsible for the victory: “They tell me you [a liberal Democrat] did a helluva job up there. I’m mighty proud of you and so is the New York Times. It was a great day for the House.…” “I want you [a Southern conservative] to know how proud I am of you today, how proud your country is. You did the U.S. a great service. You’re a gentleman and a scholar and a producer and I love you.”³⁶

Multiple actions at multiple levels were intended to serve as a continual compulsion to action; they were designed to infuse the entire governmental process with Johnson’s goal of legislative success. Johnson saw the problem of dealing with the varied components of the presidential institution—Cabinet members, departments, White House staff and the Democratic Party—as a search for ways to reduce their autonomy in the same way he had once broken the independent power of the Senate’s inner club. Now, as then, he wanted his priorities and his personality to prevail. Now, as then, he was determined to centralize the resources of power under his control—of information, publicity, money, status, legitimacy, and access—thus making their redistribution subject to his terms. He would have admitted that the present task was larger and more complicated. It is one thing to obligate fifty or sixty Democratic Senators by the delivery of services; it is quite another to obligate the entire government establishment. But in 1965, fresh from his wondrous victory at the polls, Johnson was more certain than ever of his schoolboy belief that “what you accomplish in life depends almost completely upon what you make yourself do … a strong purpose, perfect concentration and a great desire will bring a person success in any field of work he chooses.”³⁷

Johnson concentrated first on fortifying his position with his own staff. He wanted to assure his control over his own men, and then, with their support, to stretch his influence through the rest of the government. “When you see an ambitious assistant thinking more of his own future than the President’s,” he explained, “you know at once you’re in trouble.”³⁸ At the same time, he wanted his staff to be “as strong as possible,” composed of “the most intelligent and energetic men he could find,” and in looking for the best, he recognized the connection between ability and ambition. Fearing men of independent ambition around him, yet forced to accept them by his need for able assistants, Johnson sought to ensure loyalty by keeping fixed staff assignments to a minimum, giving everyone jurisdictions that overlapped. Second, he reduced the staff’s access to the media, insisting that he alone was to deal with the press, he alone would determine the news, and if anyone talked to a reporter, it was to be at his instruction. And third, he would keep each of his assistants continually off guard, giving praise one day and taking it back the next, drawing close and then pulling away. One week, an aide would be invited to participate in every aspect of Johnson’s life and work; the next week he would find himself frozen out.

Although Johnson did receive loyalty from the men around him, it was not because he succeeded in destroying their autonomy, absorbing their identities into his own. They were loyal, for the most part, for their own reasons: respect and admiration for the man, as an expedient of ambition, as an obligation of office, etc. Even had he been able to employ his strategies for control of attitudes and feelings, he probably would not have been successful. And the most important of these earlier strategies—the device of changing fixed responsibilities and authority, which undoubtedly was drawn from his earlier observation of Franklin Roosevelt’s style of operation—had been made impracticable by changes in the conduct and relationships of government. In the larger and far more institutionalized Presidency of the 1960s, certain fixed assignments were inevitable, among them the roles and the functions of the press secretary, the appointments secretary, the congressional liaison staff, and the national security staff. For help in developing policies and programs, Johnson had to depend upon expertise and sophistication, both in his own personal staff and in the institutional staff at the Bureau of the Budget, the Council of Economic Advisers, and the Office of Science and Technology. These functions could be performed only by men and staffs with fixed and continuing responsibilities, whose significance made it impossible to conceal or obscure public knowledge of their roles. Moreover, Johnson’s desire to establish domination by creating uncertainty and apprehension among those who worked for him—as he had done with his Senate staff—was made impossible by the size of the modern presidential institution and the vastness of the bureaucracy it commanded. An orderly staff system was required to screen information, evaluate alternatives, and implement decisions.

Since Johnson could not achieve his objectives, the same impulse toward control that motivated his desire to create ambiguity and insecurity now—paradoxically—propelled him in the opposite direction. If the President was to be served by able men of autonomous will and identity—and that now seemed unavoidable—there was always a danger of conflict between the contending ambitions of his subalterns in the executive branch. Of course Roosevelt had thrived on the competition of many men’s ideas. But to Johnson, conducting his leadership amid such competitive struggles, those that he did not initiate and whose content and participants he could not wholly control, was unwelcome, and even threatening. So he sought prevention, and even protection, in hierarchy; and as the pressures of his Presidency increased, the greater became his inclination to find refuge in an increasingly rigid and self-contained hierarchical structure. In contrast to both Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy, he adopted many of the orthodox administrative practices and techniques associated with the Presidency of General Eisenhower. “I talk to Dean Rusk,” Johnson said, “not to some fifth-desk man down the line.”³⁹

Yet if Johnson’s system resembled Eisenhower’s in some of its aspects, it was markedly different in others. His hierarchy was an orderly structure with many fixed relationships, but he alone was at the top with direct lines of communication and authority to the several men who occupied the level below. In Johnson’s administration there was no Sherman Adams. The President was his own chief of staff: he made the staff assignments; he received the product of his staff’s work and reconciled or decided between the competing reports; he set the pace of action and the tone of discussion. And, unlike Eisenhower, the kind of personal control that Johnson could not establish over the government he retained over that more manageable domain—the White House staff. And he extended that control down to the least significant levels of activity, handling such details as approving the guest list for social functions, checking the equipment for the White House cars, determining the correct temperature for the rooms in the Mansion. Late at night he would wander through the offices in the West Wing, reading the memos and letters left on the desks of his aides. Both the random nature of these inspections and the whimsical quality of Johnson’s personal attention to detail helped to create an atmosphere of permanent intimidation which, even though it affected only some among that small group of White House aides who were rather young and whose public careers had been Johnson’s creation, nevertheless seemed to serve as a safety valve for his fears of becoming dependent on those who worked for him.

In the end, no organizational chart could define Johnson’s system of White House control. His techniques were essentially psychological. He elevated a smile, a glance, or a courtesy above all political honors. The system included as well an endless series of psychological collisions with the master himself. In this atmosphere, as one observer described it, “The group of assistants fragmented even more than the White House staffs usually do. Bundy’s foreign affairs operation went largely its own way. Cater, Califano, Goodwin and McPherson moved principally in Moyers’ orbit. Valenti and Watson worked in uneasy relationship to each other, and both to Moyers. Busby and Reedy were off by themselves, sometimes functioning together, mostly singly. To a considerable extent, the staff was turning into a shifting band of individuals and groups moving in mutual suspicion around the commanding demanding figure of Lyndon Johnson.”⁴⁰ Johnson knew what he was doing in fragmenting the White House staff. By splitting it into more than a dozen pieces, he made it just one aspect of the kind of hierarchy he was constructing. By compartmentalizing the members of his staff, he clarified the fact that their authority and position came directly from Lyndon Johnson alone.

Lyndon Johnson demanded a great deal from his staff, and they received much in return: participation in great matters and an enormous arena for their talents, a relationship with a brilliant man who, though sometimes harsh, often honored them with benevolent intimacies. He exacted a precise account of how each staff member spent his time, whom he talked with, and where he went. Minutes became valuable, holidays a misfortune. Johnson considered it something dangerously close to treason for a staff member to spend Sunday afternoon with his family instead of at the office. Even if they complied, however, some of the people around Johnson occasionally suffered treatment that was harsh and even degrading. The price Johnson exacted for the gifts he bestowed upon his aides—personal intimacy, access to the presidential office, power for themselves—was often nothing less than their dignity. Some willingly paid the price. But Johnson also understood that some would not give up their dignity, that they could be pushed only so far, and with them he seemed to sense the point of no return and restrained himself from crossing it. And he never drove an assistant harder than he drove himself.

Sometimes, in the middle of a meeting, Johnson declared a swimming break for everyone. And everyone followed him into the White House pool. To save time, Johnson said, he often swam in the nude. Stripping down by the side of the pool, he invited others to do the same. Some found it difficult. Those who didn’t want to undress in front of everyone else, however, were badgered and mocked until they complied. After the swim, the grudging swimmers were given towels. Standing in quarters so close that the drops from one body would splash onto another, they were expected to rub themselves dry, put on their clothes and return to the meeting.

Few Presidents have permitted the kind of intimacy between themselves and their staffs that Johnson encouraged. When he had to go to the bathroom in the middle of a conversation, it was not unusual for him to move the discussion there. Johnson seemed delighted as he told me of “one of the delicate Kennedyites who came into the bathroom with me and then found it utterly impossible to look at me while I sat there on the toilet. You’d think he had never seen those parts of the body before. For there he was, standing as far away from me as he possibly could, keeping his back toward me the whole time, trying to carry on a conversation. I could barely hear a word he said. I kept straining my ears and then finally I asked him to come a little closer to me. Then began the most ludicrous scene I had ever witnessed. Instead of simply turning around and walking over to me, he kept his face away from me and walked backward, one rickety step at a time. For a moment there I thought he was going to run right into me. It certainly made me wonder how that man had made it so far in the world.”⁴¹

From the beginning Johnson realized that his methods of working with his staff could not be duplicated in his relationships with the members of his Cabinet. “When I looked out at the heads of my departments, I realized that while all of them had been appointed by me, not a single one was really mine. I could never fully depend on them to put my priorities first. All too often they responded to their constituencies instead of mine. Here I was working day and night to build the Great Society, conquering thousands of enemies and hurdling hundreds of obstacles, and I couldn’t even count on my own administrative family for complete support. I felt like a football quarterback running against a tough team and having his own center and left guard throwing rocks at him. It was an impossible situation and I was determined to change it. I was determined to turn those lordly men into good soldiers. I was determined to make them more dependent on me than I was on them.”⁴²

Resonating through this statement can be heard Johnson’s familiar conception of power as one-sided dependence, resting on the ability of the leader to give and withhold the services needed by others.

Johnson’s drive to expand his power over the Cabinet was consistent with long-established historical trends. Over the first six decades of the twentieth century, the power relationship between the President and the Cabinet had turned sharply in favor of the President. By the time Johnson took office, the creation of presidential task forces to help design, new legislation and the institutionalization of presidential authority in the Bureau of the Budget to approve legislative requests for appropriations, and to monitor some aspects of performance, had made the departments increasingly dependent upon the White House for programmatic ideas and for the translation of ideas into legislative proposals. With the creation of the legislative liaison staff in the White House and the consequent subordination of congressional liaison offices in the departments, this dependence was extended to the passage of legislation and congressional approval of appropriations. Even at the stage of implementation, frequently, overlapping jurisdictions had forced the departments to rely on the White House to help in sorting out bureaucratic tangles and arbitrating conflicting claims. Once this last function was established, a convenience rapidly became a virtual requirement, and public struggles between department heads—once frequent—virtually ended. Such matters were to be discussed in White House offices, and the decision accepted with silent loyalty.⁴³

All this was in striking contrast to the situation in the nineteenth century, when the relationship of dependence tended to run the other way. In the early days, the President had no staff of his own. George Washington had one secretary; Abraham Lincoln had one clerk. The Presidents were forced to rely on their Cabinet members to answer mail, discuss newspaper stories, formulate legislative programs, develop legislative strategies, receive visitors, plan tours, and prepare speeches. Nor did they have the means to monitor or control the performance of their department heads, except on matters of the greatest significance—and not always then. Throughout the nineteenth century, Presidents tended to appoint men of public stature and independent political power to the Cabinet. Indeed, the earliest Cabinets were composed of the leading public figures of the day. Powerful as individuals, the early Cabinet officials also possessed collective power vis-à-vis the President through the institution of the Cabinet meeting, which at one time regularly, and with serious intent, discussed and debated alternatives of national policy, even to the point of taking a vote on the various options.

The twentieth century brought a sharp reduction in the power of the Cabinet. The Reorganization Act of 1939 provided the President with an institutional staff of more than a thousand people, while the President’s personal staff grew from one to several dozen members. As a result, most of those functions traditionally performed by Cabinet officers that involved direct personal assistance to the President—e.g., mail, visitors, trips—were transferred to the President’s staff; assumed by a swelling assemblage of ceremony coordinators, advance men, travel agents, assistants in charge of correspondence, etc. For advice on legislative strategy, the President now had his own liaison staff. For help in writing and delivering speeches, he had his own speechwriters and consultants on techniques of delivery. For help in formulating programs, he could call on skilled staff members on a “brain trust.” Thus the extent to which the President had necessarily to rely on his Cabinet officers was substantially reduced. And a self-reinforcing process of decline had begun. For example, the diminished prestige and power of the Cabinet made it more difficult for the President to recruit men of the highest stature; the lack of such men reduced even further the prestige of the Cabinet. And the further expansion and institutionalization of the Presidency during the postwar decades led to those substantial accretions in the President’s power to dominate his Cabinet which, as we have seen, Johnson inherited, and on which he was to build.⁴⁴

Applauded by the liberal theory of his time, which saw the decline of the Cabinet and the rise of the White House staff as one aspect of a more general movement toward concentrating power in the hands of “the one institution that represented the public interest,” Lyndon Johnson moved effectively to exploit his advantage. He used every tool at his disposal, most prominently his budget and his White House staff, to concentrate information, publicity, and decisions in the Oval Office. A variety of presidential orders were directed at the same purpose. He decreed that all major pronouncements on policy and program would be issued directly from the White House. And he warned his Cabinet officers that he would cancel their projects if he found them making unauthorized disclosures to the press, thus keeping them dependent on the President for publicity. He assumed personal control over decisions on the budget and on personnel, forcing his Cabinet to plead with him directly for money and staff. He refused to allow the findings of his commissions and task forces to be released to the public; the information and ideas they contained would be distributed when, and if, he wanted. He alternately encouraged and rejected requests for private meetings. In these and other ways, Johnson made the members of his Cabinet act as courtiers.

Implicit in Johnson’s intention to expand presidential power was the need to strengthen his control over the Democratic Party, of which, as President, he was now the acknowledged leader. He had always regarded political parties, strongly rooted in states and localities, capable of holding him accountable, as intruders on the business of government. Moreover, he believed that excessive partisanship was bad for the country and dangerous to his leadership. The consensus that Johnson now needed could be formed only with the support of people from all constituencies and both parties. All the forces and groups of American life must be assembled under the same huge tent: labor, management, farmers, blacks, browns, yellows, Republicans, Democrats, dirt farmers, and Wall Street brokers. So once the election was over, Johnson ordered a drastic cutback in the activities of the Democratic National Committee; he slashed the committee’s budget in half, reduced the staff by two-thirds, and removed the long-distance telephone lines. The White House regularly and as a matter of deliberate practice bypassed the committee in the distribution of patronage and funds. Johnson’s principal fund-raising device, the President’s Club, diverted money and contributions from party organizations at all levels, concentrating control over party funds in the President’s hands, and thus further contributing to the disintegration of the local party.⁴⁵

Here again the President’s efforts were consistent with established trends of modern political history. Much earlier, in the nineteenth century, party leaders had essential resources at their disposal to secure their power: jobs, food baskets, medical care, legal aid. Involved with the daily lives of people and able to help them, the party bosses were able to create and sustain high levels of party identification, thus making it natural for many people to vote along strict party lines. Rooted in the local neighborhood, the party organization also provided a major source of entertainment and fraternity for large numbers of people.

With their power securely rooted at the local level, the party leaders brought obedient delegations to the national convention, giving them the power to select the nominee. And on election day the parties were responsible for printing and distributing the ballots. Nor did party discipline stop at the conventions or the polling places. In those days, the party’s strength extended to the Congress. The Speaker of the House had enormous powers to implement his party’s program. As chairman of the caucus at which important party positions were determined, and as the man who made all the committee assignments and decided who should speak on the House floor, he possessed an impressive authority to punish or reward with which to keep his party members in line.

The turn of the century marked the beginning of a decline in the strength of party organizations. Reacting to the strict and conservative control exercised by House Speaker Joseph Cannon, the Progressives (a combination of Midwestern Republicans and liberal Democrats) instituted a number of reforms designed to reduce the party’s capacity to strangle liberal legislation: they curtailed the powers of the Speaker, introduced the direct primary, and fostered the establishment of nonpartisan elections and city managers. By redistributing the Speaker’s powers to various committees and calendars, the reformers intended to open up the legislative process to the individual Congressman or Senator. By giving the voters the chance to nominate candidates before the convention, the reformers intended to reduce the power of the party barons at the nominating stage. But their actions had unforeseen and devastating consequences for the Congress and the party system. Deprived of centralized party leadership, fragmented by committees, the Congress lost its collective voice—a circumstance that contributed to growing presidential supremacy. To the extent it was deprived of the opportunity to nominate the candidates, the party organization lost its central function and most important source of cohesive authority. As this process continued, the focus of campaigning was gradually to shift from the party to the candidate.

Changes in the economic and social structure contributed to the decline of the political party. The organization of unions, the development of the Civil Service, and the rise of the welfare state deprived the party of its capacity to provide jobs, food, and services to loyal constituents, thus severing its connection with the daily lives and needs of the people. Increasing mobility weakened the ties to neighborhood and community around which local parties were organized. Technology provided access to new forms of amusement and recreation, such as movies and then television, which were more diverting than party-sponsored dances and made it unlikely that people would attend political meetings and speeches for their entertainment value. During the 1960s more and more people declined to affiliate themselves with a party and identified themselves as independents. Straight party voting became an increasingly rare exception. And voter turnout precipitously declined. Thus the changed conditions of political life strengthened and helped to vindicate Johnson’s drive to reduce the significance of party, and to substitute leadership by consensus, designed to transcend the merely political, and appeal to voters on the basis of shared interests and their common stake in the progress and well-being of the country. And the liberal theory of his time greeted his style with acclaim. “We are entering another era of good feelings,” one commentator remarked, “and Lyndon Johnson is the gargantuan figure making it all possible.”⁴⁶

Johnson’s expansion of the President’s power over the Cabinet and the party was accompanied by an energetic campaign to build his influence with the press to consolidate his gains. For he believed that no President could lead effectively for very long if the media did not support him; unfriendly media would make him vulnerable to assaults on the power he was building. Johnson regarded members of the press as similar to the membership of any other interest group. And he acted on the assumption—congenial to his natural traits and conduct—that he could find a way to bargain with them for good coverage and favorable stories. “Reporters are puppets,” Johnson said. “They simply respond to the pull of the most powerful strings. Every reporter has a constituency in mind when he writes his stories. Sometimes it is simply his editor or his publisher, but often it is some political group he wants to please or some intellectual society he wants to court. The point is, there is always someone. Every story is always slanted to win the favor of someone who sits somewhere higher up. There is no such thing as an objective news story. There is always a private story behind the public story. And if you don’t control the strings to that private story, you’ll never get good coverage no matter how many great things you do for the masses of the people. There’s only one sure way of getting favorable stories from reporters and that is to keep their daily bread—the information, the stories, the plans, and the details they need for their work—in your own hands, so that you can give it out when and to whom you want. Even then nothing’s guaranteed, but at least you’ve got the chance to bargain.”⁴⁷

Modern Presidents have the ability to command the nation’s attention. They are the only public leaders with the ability to select issues for public discussion, and establish the terms of that discussion. Although every President must respond to events and circumstances of great public concern, the importance of their office means that whatever they say or do will be considered news. At any moment they can divert attention to themselves simply by arranging for what Daniel Boorstin has called a “pseudo event.” Because the Presidency is the object of unrelenting attention and mandatory “coverage,” Johnson was able to use routine procedures as political instruments. Private interviews were no longer given solely because they were thought the best and most effective way to communicate the President’s news or qualities. They were disposed as reward or denied as punishment. Reporters in favor were given long and intimate interviews, filled with colorful detail and personal revelation. Reporters out of favor were simply denied access, a denial aggravated by the unsubstantial nature of Johnson’s formal press conference—the institution originally designed to counter precisely this kind of favoritism. In theory, the press conference was to be a restraining influence against the Chief Executive, giving reporters an equal opportunity to question the President directly, and, in so doing, to expose the shortcomings of his administration. But in the hands of timid reporters and a dominant President the press conference became simply another tool for the strengthening of presidential power.

Johnson avoided, as much as was politically feasible, the type of press conference the newsmen wanted: formal sessions, scheduled regularly and announced in advance. Determined to escape the well-informed and difficult questions that might result if sufficient time was allowed for preparation, he deliberately announced his press conferences at the last minute and generally scheduled them on weekends, when the White House correspondents—who necessarily had little knowledge about the substance of particular issues and comprised the group of reporters most dependent on the President, whose activities were the sole target of their jobs—were the only Washington newsmen at work. Johnson opened his press conferences with a long statement that served to consume a third to one-half of the allotted time, and responded only indirectly to questions, often dodging an answer to the main point by discussing peripheral areas. The frequency of his press conferences varied with his changes of mood: when he felt good, he would hold four or five conferences within a few weeks; when he felt persecuted, he could go for months without any conferences at all. Still, even this whimsical behavior helped to strengthen the impression that news of presidential activity was dispensed as the President wished, not as the press demanded.

Unpredictability served Johnson in other, even more arresting ways. If a reporter learned in advance that the President was going to do something on Thursday, and reported that fact in Tuesday’s paper, Johnson would often change his plans in order to embarrass the reporter, who had then to explain his error, and to serve notice on those who leaked the story that such indiscretion was a serious act of insubordination. The tales of such behavior are legion. When James Reston saw a copy of the speech Johnson was about to make to the UN in 1965, and wrote about the President’s proposal for ending that organization’s financial crisis, Johnson not only dropped the proposal, but he gave an entirely different speech. When the word leaked out that James Farmer had been appointed director of a new literacy drive in the Office of Economic Opportunity, Johnson canceled both the program and the Farmer appointment. When a story appeared in the Baltimore Sun describing Johnson’s plans for a new Food for Peace program two days before they were to be announced by the White House, Johnson canceled the program and ordered his staff to burn the already prepared and mimeographed releases. Equating predictability with weakness, Johnson found occasions to deliberately throw reporters off guard; sometimes he speculated in great detail about plans he never intended to carry out; other times, he denied the existence of plans already under way.⁴⁸

So during 1965 Johnson absorbed the Cabinet, the party, and, to a lesser extent, the press into the legislative process that was the focus of his Presidency. Cabinet Secretaries were there to do his bidding, rarely to question it. The party organization was hardly there at all, which meant one less source of potential criticism. And the press was everywhere Johnson was, judging him by his standards, celebrating his incessant transitions, from advancing a new idea to change the world to signing a new law that presumed to change, and might change, the lives of many Americans.

When Johnson signed a law, he brought to an end a legislative process that had begun with the preparation of a presidential message. Another program had come home from the Congress to the White House. This process was the center of Johnson’s life, and the ceremony of successful completion was also a personal celebration. Every such occasion, whether it was a small gathering in the Oval Office or an elaborate affair in the East Room of the White House, was designed, conducted, and dominated by Johnson himself. The ceremonies were also a public forum in which Johnson bestowed upon the nation his most valued creations—the laws of the Great Society. And within that forum he assembled the people who had made the greatest contribution to the result. But Lyndon Johnson never ceased his labors. The ceremony was also a summons to the next series of legislative endeavors.

When major legislation was to be signed, Johnson often chose a setting outside the White House. On April 11, 1965, he traveled to a one-room schoolhouse, a mile from his birthplace, to sign the Elementary and Secondary Education Act in the presence of his first teacher, Miss Kate Dietrich. On August 6, 1965, he signed the Voting Rights Act in the President’s Room adjoining the Senate chamber where Lincoln had signed the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. On October 3, 1965, he signed the Immigration Act in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty.

The signing of Medicare had originally been scheduled for Washington. But, at the last minute, the President changed his mind. He wanted to go to Independence, Missouri, so Harry Truman could attend. Wilbur Cohen, Under Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, along with other concerned officials, resisted the proposal. There would be chaos if they tried to fly all the people who had planned to attend halfway across the country and back in a single morning. There was also some concern that the symbolic choice of Independence would remind the nation of Truman’s more radical plan for national health insurance; that it might even risk an AMA boycott of the ceremony. But the President insisted. “Why, Wilbur,” Johnson said, “don’t you understand? I’m doing this for Harry Truman. He’s old and he’s tired and he’s been left all alone down there. I want him to know that his country had not forgotten him. I wonder if anyone will do the same for me”⁴⁹