Lyndon Johnson

Reparations to Poverty: Domestic Policy in America Ten Years After the Great Society,
Book by Brigitta Loesche; Peter Lang, 1995

Historians and the War on Poverty

Years ago when I started out researching the literature on President Johnson's war on poverty program I had little idea what a vast and mined battlefield I was about to enter. Waving the white flag of a foreign observer I soon found myself surrounded by other flags. Some were still brand new and stiff, others half torn and soiled from many years of use, but they all seemed to obstruct my view of the battle and its casualties. Trying to reconstruct what had happened on these unhappy premises I often found it hard not to mistake those observers for the actual warriors.

Finding the warriors proved to be an impossible task. While my view of the poverty battle gradually cleared and enlarged itself, so did the battle grounds, and so did the tolls each party claimed to have inflicted on the other. Worse, the parties themselves had multiplied on the American side, often attacking each other in the heat of combat instead of fighting the invisible enemy guerrillas. Some parties claimed victories, some defeat. Some took these claims to mark the end of the war just as others rose to announce it had just begun. None of them described the accurate picture, that of a sad border dispute that had long ago lost its popularity and support from the capital. Yet no one dared to dispatch the soldiers in light of the rising number of enemy troops each week.

To confirm any of the tolls I went to inspect the military graves. My findings were disappointing. There were the tombs of two U.S. presidents, both Democrats, I was told. One of them had his brother and Attorney General buried beside him, and at a distance lay a civil rights leader. But where were all the other casualties? The grave keeper shrugged his shoulders. Some were lost. Some were hiding. Many had defected. As for the enemy -- as soon as their dead were granted a burial their graves would get torn up again over night -- most frustrating for the keeper who was supposed to keep count for the occasional government inspection.

My observation was getting nowhere. Instead I decided to visit the peace talks that had started soon after the war broke out. There I ran into some of the same observers I had already met on the battlefield. They told me that the meeting of the day was on war reparations. "War reparations?" I was incredulous. Why should the United States pay war reparations to poverty before even surrendering when it had started the war with the only goal of ending the hated tributes to poverty in the first place? After so many contradictory claims it was hard to believe this latest even less plausible one. Yet, for the first time the observers all agreed on the evidence they presented to me. It was a table entitled "Social Welfare Expenditures as Percent of GNP and Government Outlays: 1950 to 1979" from a recent Statistical Abstract of the United States.

p.405Reparations To Poverty

Nationhood is rarely so defined by wars as in the case of the American identity. When other countries gradually grew into their dominions, America became an instant nation-state through war of independence. Ever since, American wars have taken on a moral quality more reminiscent of religious crusades than political wars elsewhere in the world. Colonial rebels were not preserving their economic privilege in a tax haven of the British Empire, but fulfilling the lofty goals of the Enlightenment. Union soldiers gave their lives for the freedom of Southern slaves, not the commercial hegemony of the North. Even in the two world wars, when everybody else was fighting for bare survival, the United States intervened on behalf of the highest human values.

This powerful moral claim explains why the Vietnam syndrome has been so crippling for the nation. The military brass have digested the defeat quite well. Civilians still need to come to terms with the thought that freedom wars can not only be lost but misguided. Coming to terms with the past is the job of historians, but it is not usually the vanquished who write war history -- if it were, wars of independence and wars of secession would go by the same name.

Just before the word defeat entered the American war vocabulary, the ultimate moral freedom war was launched: to fight for the freedom from want for every American. There has been no victory to report, no independence gained, no armistice reached in the war on poverty. History books devote no more than a few lines to this footnote to the American pageant. Yet in terms of its budget and policy impact, defeat in the war on poverty had further-reaching consequences than its more glorious predecessors. America's social expenditures on transfers to individuals reached their peak yearly increases under the Ford administration. These reparations to poverty were based on scores of peace settlements with different poverty groups.

The most effective bargainers had been senior citizens. People over 65 became a fast-growing and increasingly affirmative electorate in the ten years between the war on poverty and the Ford years. Their voting power was not regionally concentrated and their cause appealed to all non-aged Americans because (at the time) everybody could expect to be a Social Security recipient in the future. There was scarcely a Congressman who could afford to ignore the demands of the aged for more income transfers. The results were frequent and substantial Social Security benefit increases since the late 1960s, coupled with the explosive cost of Medicare. These payments, most of which went to non-poor recipients, took up the largest part of all social expenditures.

The same composition of mostly non-poor members seems to have supported the advancement of the black community. The civil rights movement had been launched by educated middle-class blacks. Its legal successes profited from mainstream sympathy for their discrimination by color as the only characteristic that distinguished these blacks from other middle-class Americans. After the movement matured and grew aware of...

Decade of Disillusionment: The Kennedy-Johnson Years,
Book by Jim F. Heath; Indiana University Press, 1975

Foreword

"How come we never get past World War II?" Teachers of United States history must hear that refrain a hundred times a year, and in all too many cases the complaint is valid. Having lived through the 1950s and 60s, many of us find it hard to think of those years as textbook-type history, and we have often failed to take the time to sit back and make the historical judgments that must precede any attempt to teach about those years. An even greater problem is posed by the scarcity of solid, fully researched syntheses dealing with the more immediate past. That gap is precisely what the series America since World War II is designed to fill.

Some will quarrel with the decision to construct the series along the traditional lines of presidential administrations. Granted, such an organization does tend to disguise the broader social, political, and economic trends which developed and/or continued after 1945 without regard for what Winston Churchill called America's "quadrennial madness." Yet, in each volume, the authors have consciously examined such trends and, when read as a whole, the series provides an overview of the entire postwar period. Periodization is not only a useful teaching device, but has a validity all its own. As will quickly become clear to the reader, each of these administrations possessed a personality that, while reflecting the broader ideals and attitudes of the American nation, nonetheless remained unique and identifiable. Nor have the authors merely summarized the political history of the period. Rather, each has carefully examined the cultural, social, and economic history which make an era much more than just dates and names.

Preface

In view of the immense quantity of records still closed to researchers and the limited perspective of time, it is perhaps presumptuous to attempt an historical evaluation of the Kennedy-Johnson years. Yet, it is a safe bet that a great many more people are interested now in the happenings of the 1960s and the presidential leadership of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson than will be interested in a hundred years. At any rate, all conclusions, no matter how well researched, are always tentative, for the very simple reason that--as the distinguished historian Frederick Jackson Turner once explained --"each age writes the history of the past anew with reference to the conditions uppermost in its own time." It is hoped that this study will help to meet the needs of readers in the seventies about their immediate past.

I Introduction

AS THE nineteen fifties drew to a close, optimistic Americans found little to suggest that the approaching decade would evolve into such a disaster. According to the 1960 census, the United States contained almost 180 million people, and, thanks to the economic boom that began during World War II and continued after the end of the conflict, most of them were more affluent than ever before. During the fifties, the total population grew faster than during any decade in half a century. The great bulk of the increase resulted from a soaring birthrate, although it had begun to decline in 1958. Because of restrictive immigration laws, the percentage of foreign born dwindled to but 5 percent, the lowest in America's history. Over 11 percent, however, were nonwhite, a proportion that was steadily rising. There were both more young and more old people. Medical advances lengthened the life span enough to offset the baby boom and keep the median age at 29.5, a fraction higher than in 1940. The gap in life expectancy between females and males widened dramatically, so that by 1960 the ratio of men to women was 100:97.

Americans had been moving west for over three hundred years, and in the fifties the trend continued. The sun states of the Southwest--California, Nevada, and Arizona--along with equally sunny Florida were the big gainers. Equally significant was the massive exodus from the farm to the city. Total urban population spurted by almost 30 percent between 1950 and 1960. Yet 60 of the 212 cities of 50,000 or more actually lost population. Huge numbers of middle-class Americans fled to the burgeoning suburbs--planned communities of small single-family homes, garden-type apartments, and convenient shopping centers--which ringed the congested center cities. The urban fringe grew an amazing 85 percent. As a result, the center cities became largely the homes of the wealthy in their high-rise apartments and the poor, including increasing numbers of blacks, in their decaying ghettos. Suburbia,...

II The Torch Is Passed

AS THE Eisenhower administration drew to a close, the torch of leadership, as John F. Kennedy later observed, passed to a new generation of Americans. The key figures guiding the United States during the sixties would be primarily younger men, born in the twentieth century and conditioned by their experiences during the depression of the 1930s, the Second World War, and the cold war. Three of those who actively sought to succeed Eisenhower in 1960--Kennedy, Johnson, and Richard M. Nixon--would serve as President during the chaotic decade. Each would be both a major contributor to and a principal victim of the centrifugal forces at work in the country.

Historically, the incumbent party has usually retained power when the nation was prosperous and at peace, as the United States was in 1960. But Eisenhower's success at the polls had largely been a personal, not a Republican party, triumph. Even with Ike, the GOP had controlled Congress for only his first two years in office. Voters tended to regard Eisenhower as above partisan politics. Although immensely popular himself, he was never able to transfer his appeal to his party or to Republican candidates generally. Nor was he able to heal the bitter split between GOP liberals and moderates on the one hand and dyed-in-the-wool conservatives on the other. As a result, the Republicans lost seats in 1954, 1956, and 1958, a demise of strength that was paralleled on the state level. After the 1958 elections the party held only fourteen governorships and the majority in but seven state legislatures. Almost certainly Eisenhower could have been reelected with case had he wished to run and been eligible to do so in 1960. But the Twenty-second Amendment, ratified in 1951, blocked any possibility for a third term, making the Republicans' prospects for victory far from...

III Opening the New Frontier

DURING the period between his election and his inauguration, Kennedy mixed rest and relaxation with planning for his administration. In late November, he made it a point to confer with Nixon, a meeting which helped to soothe, at least modestly, passions that their hard-fought contest had aroused. JFK's main purpose in seeing his opponent--to discuss the possibility of appointing Republicans to office, particularly to posts abroad--reflected the impact of the narrowness of his victory.

Whatever possibility remained of a Republican challenge to the final election returns ended in early December when President Eisenhower invited Kennedy to call at the White House, thus confirming the legitimacy of the succession. Their talk, which each reported as congenial, focused on the smooth transfer of government responsibilities. To coordinate relations with the Eisenhower administration, Kennedy relied on Clark M. Clifford, former special counsel to President Truman and later Secretary of Defense under Lyndon Johnson. Since August, Clifford had been working for JFK to determine the priority decisions that would be required of the President-elect, what positions would have to filled immediately, and how to establish relations with the outgoing administration. Eisenhower designated an assistant, Major General Wilton B. Persons, to serve as his liaison in the "transfer" of power. Ike disliked the term transition, because it suggested a gradual change, something he rejected. He made it perfectly clear to Kennedy that he intended to retain full authority and responsibility until the end of his term, but he encouraged members of his administration to cooperate fully with their incoming counterparts, insisting only that they clear their actions with Persons.In the opinion of Laurin L. Henry, who studied the transfer for the Brookings Institution, there was a substantial...

p.94IV Ambivalence and Action

DURING 1961 and on into 1962, Kennedy often seemed indecisive and uncertain. His first two years constituted a period of intensive learning, and at times his actions reflected his lack of administrative and executive experience. Only gradually did he begin to feel comfortable with the awesome powers and responsibilities of the nation's highest office. Worried about his characterization as a "power-hungry young careerist" and about the narrowness of his election, he sought to win the nation's confidence by avoiding premature battles over partisan issues. By following the politics of consensus instead of the politics of conflict, JFK hoped to reassure the public that he was, as he honestly believed himself to be, a person who generally saw reason on both sides of complex issues. A moderate by temperament, he moved cautiously on controversial, emotional questions, prompting complaints that he cared more for "image" than substance.

All chief executives are image-conscious, but in Kennedy's case the concern often seemed excessive. His unusually warm rapport with most newsmen made the task of cultivating favorable publicity relatively easy. Even more important, his administration raised the skill of deliberate news management to a fine art. Allusions by friends and foes alike to the New Frontier as a modern-day Camelot--the legendary kingdom of King Arthur--added an aura of romance to the Kennedy image. As the veteran journalist I. F. Stone seriously wrote in 1963, "the atmosphere of Washington . . . is like that of a reigning monarch's court."Nevertheless, the President frequently ignored protocol and stressed naturalness. His low-key wit was an invaluable ally. Sailing with Prime Minister Nehru of India, Kennedy pointed towards several huge mansions of an older era and quipped, "I wanted you to see...

V The Unfulfilled Promise

AT THE time, the Kennedy administration's policies in Vietnam commanded no consuming public interest. Never during the New Frontier did the Vietnamese conflict provoke riots or demonstrations. The news media argued only about the methods of conducting the war, not about the basic commitment. The consensus supporting the government's efforts to check Communism continued to be strong and healthy with only a modest fraying around the edges, and although the situation in Southeast Asia was exasperating, it was never Kennedy's number-one problem. In fact, during his last months in office, legislative matters occupied his time far more than Vietnam. And while the verdict was not in before his death, there were signs that for the first time since his early days in the White House, Kennedy was gradually regaining the initiative in his relations with Congress.

He had begun his administration by submitting an ambitious legislative program, which included, with the glaring exception of a civil rights proposal, the bulk of the Democrats' 1960 campaign promises. On the surface, his legislative record during his first two years looked impressive. Congress, Sorensen boasted, "enacted four-fifths of Kennedy's program." Measuring the administration's success with Congress by pointing to the high percentage of the President's total requests passed was deceiving, however. It gave equal weight to both minor and major proposals and included foreign policy legislation--normally much less partisan in nature--as well as domestic requests. Furthermore, some acts remained the chief executive's in name but were amended so extensively as to change sharply the substance of the original bill. Obviously, too, the "box score" approach conveniently ignored bills not submitted for fear they would not pass.During 1962 only the Trade Extension...

VI Transition to the Great Society

JOHN F. KENNEDY was the eighth American President to die in office, and the sixth in little less than a hundred years. In four cases the chief executive was assassinated. The fact that Kennedy's death occurred in Vice President Johnson's home state was an irony appropriate to a decade that seemed to be patterned after a Greek tragedy. Johnson was with Kennedy on that fateful autumn day in Dallas, riding in an open car only a short distance behind him. When the shots that struck the President and Texas Governor John Connally were heard, Secret Service agent Rufus Youngblood roughly pushed Johnson to the floor of the car, courageously covering him with his own body as a protection against further gunfire. A short time later, with Kennedy officially declared dead, Dallas police drove Johnson to the presidential airplane at Love Field. There, on November 22, 1963, he took the simple oath that made him the thirty-fifth man to hold the highest office that the people of the United States can bestow.

Despite the numbing impact of the assassination, the transition from Kennedy to Johnson was remarkably swift and smooth. Johnson was better prepared than any Vice President in the country's history to assume his new duties. Realizing that an activist like LBJ could scarcely avoid being depressed by the frustrating powerlessness of the Vice Presidency, Kennedy had taken great pains to keep his subordinate involved in important government affairs. Johnson served as a member of the National Security Council and chaired both the National Aeronautics and Space Council and the President's Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity. He dutifully attended meetings of the cabinet and the weekly conferences where the President briefed Democratic congressional leaders. In addition, Johnson journeyed over 100,000 miles to 30 countries as the chief executive's special representative, and...

VII The Years of Triumph

ALTHOUGH Johnson was immensely pleased by the warm response of the American people to his leadership during the difficult months of the transition, he still worried about being an "accidental President." The stigma could be removed only by winning the office in his own right in the 1964 election. Victory alone, however, was not enough to satisfy the ambitious Texan. Determined to be remembered in history as a great President, he was anxious to triumph by a margin that would be regarded as a popular mandate for his Great Society. To enact the sweeping legislative program he had in mind required an unusually cooperative Congress. If he could win big, it would provide an invaluable argument to convince reluctant congressmen to go along with the administration. If his margin was sufficiently large, in close congressional races it might also tip the scales in favor of the numerous Democratic candidates friendly to the President.

The President could scarcely have written a scenario more perfectly suited to his desire for a smashing victory than what actually developed. For two decades Republican conservatives had been charging that GOP candidates simply "me-tooed" their Democratic opponents. According to the conservative thesis, it was essential to wrest control of the party away from the eastern Establishment and return it to the "real Republicans," who had been denied a dominant voice in party leadership. The eastern clique-Wall Street lawyers, advertising men, and executives in blue-chip corporations--accepted the same brand of liberal internationalism and big government power as did the liberal Democrats. Small-town, rural, and independent business-oriented Republicans were ignored. Starting with the nomination of Wendell Willkie in 1940, the eastern Establishment had tapped a "me-too" candidate every four years to represent the...

VIII The Years of Frustration

"I JUST hope that foreign problems do not keep mounting," Lady Bird Johnson remarked during the summer of 1965. "They do not represent Lyndon's kind of Presidency." The irony of her comment soon became painfully apparent, as Vietnam increasingly consumed the energies of the chief executive as well as the resources of the nation. Like an acid eating at the vitals of America, the war destroyed the strong consensus on foreign policy that existed when Johnson entered the White House and both directly and indirectly aggravated the country's domestic troubles. Like two other Democratic Presidents he greatly admired, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt, Johnson was elected as a domestic reformer but found that war came to dominate his time.

Johnson was not so insensitive as to be unmoved by protests against the conflict. But as his hands became figuratively bloodier, he grew even more determined not to end the American involvement without a settlement that would guarantee a non-Communist South Vietnam. Anything else, he believed, would make meaningless the sacrifices of the Americans killed and wounded in the fighting. Convinced that history would judge the United States' role in Southeast Asia to have been correct, wise, and necessary, the President held relentlessly to his course in the face of opposition to the war that grew steadily more aggressive and widespread. Although public opinion polls taken during the Johnson years indicated that at no time did the majority of the American people favor simply walking out of Vietnam, by late 1966 public appearances by the chief executive were carefully restricted to functions where protesting demonstrators likely to embarrass him could be excluded with relative certainty. If not a captive in the White House, he was, at the least, unable to move about the country with the

IX The Legacies of Disillusionment

JOHNSON'S departure from the White House marked the end of an ambitious effort to move America forward in the well-worn tracks forged by Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman. Both Kennedy and Johnson proudly carried the banner of New Deal liberalism at home and cold war containment abroad. As a result, despite marked differences in their backgrounds and personal styles, their administrations were essentially pieces of the same cloth. Measured by new laws enacted and programs initiated, especially under Johnson, their record was impressive. Yet after eight years of their leadership, instead of being stronger and more unified, the United States was actually weaker and more divided.

Even if the sixties had been as tranquil a period as the later fifties, Lyndon Johnson's style alone would have caused him problems. His coarse, common mannerisms offended the sensibilities of intellectuals and media taste makers who believed that a President should make politics sound like a moral and intellectual challenge. Such faults were minor, however, compared to his incredible vanity, arrogance, and propensity for secrecy and dissembling. Subjected to the relentless attention that any chief executive invariably receives, everything about Johnson--his shortcomings as well as his many virtues--seemed excessive. He could be cranky or jovial, waspish or considerate, vindictive or generous, but he was never bland. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge described him perfectly: "The great problem is that this fellow is outsize, oversize; he's bigger than life, so his virtues seem huge and his vices seem like monstrous warts, almost goiters. It's because all you can do is photograph him at a particular angle at a particular time, and whatever it is you're seeing is all outsize."President-watchers marveled at Johnson's almost inexhaustible energy. On one occasion guests at his...