Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (83 page)

LBJ and JFK at the Democratic National Convention, July 1960.
UPI/ Bettmann
.

The Kennedy brothers and J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI.
John F. Kennedy Library
.

Bobby Kennedy and César Chávez. Ernest Lowe,
UPI/Bettmann
.

Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, General Maxwell Taylor, Kennedy, and Secretary of State Dean Rusk.
AP/Wide World Photos
.

Dean Rusk and Senator J. William Fulbright, January 1962.
UPI, Library of Congress
.

Left to right: National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy, Ambassador Maxwell Taylor, and General William Westmoreland, in Vietnam, February 1965.
UPI/Bettmann
. would sooner or later have to drop bombs on the North, and in August they manipulated naval confrontations in the Tonkin Gulf off the coast of Vietnam that gave them congressional authorization for escalation if the time should come.
⁸¹

Having secured authority for military action in the future, Johnson posed as the peace candidate during the campaign. He denounced Republican speakers, including Goldwater, who talked of bombing the North, and said, "I want to be very cautious and careful, and use it [bombs] only as a last resort, when I start dropping bombs that are likely to involve American boys in a war in Asia with 700 million Chinese." He added,

I have not thought that we were ready for American boys to do the fighting for Asian boys. What I have been trying to do . . . was to get the boys in Vietnam to do their own fighting with our advice and with our equipment. That is the course we are following. So we are not going north and drop bombs at this stage of the game, and we are not going south and run out and leave it for the Communists to take over.
⁸²

From the beginning of the campaign, polls showed that Johnson had a large lead. But it was simply not in him only to win; he had to dominate. Taking no chances, he sanctioned an unprecedentedly harsh and negative series of television spots. One featured a large saw cutting through a wooden map of the United States while the narrator cited Goldwater's comment about the East Coast. Another depicted a pair of hands tearing up a Social Security card.
⁸³
The most controversial spot characterized Goldwater as a maniac whose foreign policies would destroy the world. It showed a little girl picking petals off a daisy and counting, "one, two, . . . five—." Then the girl looked up startled and the frame froze on her eye until she dissolved into a mushroom-shaped cloud and the screen went black. While she disintegrated a man's voice, loud as if at a test site, intoned, "ten, nine. . . ." An explosion followed, whereupon the voice of Johnson was heard. "These are the stakes—to make a world in which all of God's children can live, or go on into the dark. We must either love each other, or we must die." The spot closed with the familiar message, "Vote for President Johnson on November 3. The stakes are too high for you to stay at home." The daisy spot, as it was called, provoked a flood of protest that deluged the White House switchboard with phone calls. Embarrassed, Johnson had it pulled after one showing. But television news programs showed it repeatedly during the next few weeks. It was later estimated that 40 million Americans saw it at one time or another.
⁸⁴

Goldwater and his staff responded with some negative spots of their own. Indeed, the battle in 1964 was especially nasty. A later survey of campaigns between 1964 and 1988 concluded that a record-high 40 percent of television ads in 1964 featured negative personal jabs at the opposition.
⁸⁵
But Goldwater's spots were much less negative, and they attracted less attention. Most of the GOP budget went instead to coverage of speeches and statements. These continued to feature Goldwater's uncompromising and often reactionary views, mainly on domestic issues. According to polls, they did nothing to bolster his chances in November.

S
OME OF THE RESULTS
of the election of 1964 signaled deep danger ahead for the Democratic party. Thanks mainly to Johnson's ardent support of the civil rights act, many southern whites showed that they wanted nothing more to do with him. Largely for this reason he lost the states of Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina, Louisiana, and Georgia in November, as well as Goldwater's Arizona. He won narrowly in Florida. A majority of white voters in Arkansas, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Virginia rejected the President.
⁸⁶

The growth from 1964 on of the GOP in the South and the Southwest turned out to be one of the most important long-range trends in postwar American politics. Thereafter Republicans were highly competitive in presidential elections in these areas. There were many causes behind the decline of the Democratic party in the South and Southwest, but chief among them, as Johnson himself recognized, was his open endorsement of civil rights in 1964. "I think," he told Califano when he signed the civil rights act, "we delivered the South to the Republican party for your lifetime and mine."
⁸⁷

In 1964, however, few pundits paid much attention to the travails of Democrats in the South. They focused instead on LBJ's astonishing national triumph. Voters gave Johnson 43.1 million votes to Goldwater's 27.2 million. This was 61.2 percent of the total vote, an extraordinary showing. Carrying all but six states, LBJ swept the electoral college, 486 to 52. Democratic congressional candidates coasted in on his coattails. They were slated to control the House by a margin of 295 to 140 and the Senate by 68 to 32, gains of thirty-seven and one respectively.

Notwithstanding these numbers, some observers wondered whether Johnson's mandate would last. Many who voted for him did so out of distaste for Goldwater, not out of support for the President or his programs. LBJ never aroused deep affection among voters. Still, there was no doubting that Johnson sat high in the saddle at the end of 1964. Beginning with his reassuring presence in the anxious days following the assassination, he had seemed purposeful and effective during his year in office. He had displayed great skill in dealing with Congress, getting it to approve an apparently beneficial tax cut and a "war" on poverty. He had shepherded through a historic civil rights act, presided over a year of rapid economic growth, and kept the peace. With a strongly Democratic Congress awaiting him in 1965 he was poised to lead the nation to new and unprecedented triumphs. The liberalism that he championed rode at high tide.

19
A Great Society and the Rise of Rights-Consciousness

As Johnson departed from his inaugural ball in January 1965, he warned his aides, "Don't stay up late. There's work to be done. We're on our way to the Great Society."
¹

Both the phrase "Great Society" and the planning for it dated to May 1964, when Johnson addressed the graduating class of the University of Michigan. "We have the opportunity," he proclaimed, "to move not only toward the rich society and the powerful society, but upward to the Great Society." That was "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. . . . It is a place where men are more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods."
²

Some of Johnson's efforts at that time, notably the war on poverty, were already being readied to advance the Great Society. Starting in that summer, he also established the first of what ultimately became 135 "task forces" to study a wide range of social problems.
³
After the election Johnson drove ahead with all of his legendary energy, for he was certain that his mandate would not last on Capitol Hill. "You've got to give it all you can, that first year," he told an aide. "Doesn't matter what kind of a majority you come in with. You've got just one year when they treat you right, and before they start worrying about themselves."
⁴

In pushing for congressional action Johnson amassed very great authority in his own hands. Immediately following the election he cut back drastically on the size of the Democratic National Committee, even removing long-distance phone lines from its offices. He ordered aides and Cabinet heads to say nothing to the media about strategies—all releases would come from the White House.
⁵
His quest for personal control sought among other things to plug leaks and to curb the unruly federal bureaucracy. It accelerated a long-range postwar trend toward the weakening of party organizations in America and the centering of decision-making in the White House.
⁶
It also reflected an increasingly imperious and dissimulative manner that distressed his friends and outraged others. Journalists began writing in the spring of 1965 about a "credibility gap" emanating from the Oval Office.

In 1965, however, Johnson's imperiousness did not damage his effectiveness as a leader of domestic policy. Never had a chief executive seemed so much in control of things. Johnson sent sixty-five separate messages to Capitol Hill between January and August and never let up. Much of what he requested aimed to go beyond the bread-and-butter liberalism of the New Deal in order to create a Great Society that would be
qualitatively
better and that would guarantee "rights" and government entitlements. And Congress did his bidding, enacting the most significant domestic legislation since FDR's first term and accelerating the rights-consciousness of the people. The GOP Congressional Committee grumbled that it was the "Three-B Congress—bullied, badgered, and brainwashed." The journalist James Reston marveled that LBJ was "getting everything through the Congress but the abolition of the Republican party, and he hasn't tried that yet."
⁷

C
OMMENTS SUCH AS THESE
reflected a tendency of political observers to personalize the policy-making process. According to such analyses, legislation gets enacted—or foreign policy gets implemented—when and if a President rises above mediocrity to make his mark on the nation. As an explanation of Johnson's successful domestic leadership in 1965 this is useful up to a point. In that historic session LBJ demonstrated many of the traits that make for effective congressional action: advance preparation, thoughtful timing, amazing attention to detail, an unbending sense of purpose, and The Treatment. Behind all of these was his vision, inspiring to liberals, of a Great Society that would establish larger opportunities and entitlements for the disadvantaged.

Other, broader advantages, however, greatly facilitated his strong leadership. Chief among them, as he well recognized, was the nature of Congress in 1965. Here the disastrously impolitic campaign of Goldwater in 1964 had significant consequences. Not only was the new Congress more Democratic than at any time since 1938; it also had sixty-five freshmen, most of them young liberals who arrived in Washington ready and willing to follow their party leaders. These, majority leader Mike Mansfield of Montana in the Senate and Speaker John McCormack of Massachusetts and majority leader Carl Albert of Oklahoma in the House, were mostly loyal to LBJ.
⁸
The loose but normally formidable coalition of conservatives that had dominated Capitol Hill since the late 1930s was so weak in 1965 that any reasonably competent liberal President would have done well.

Pressure groups, always central to the congressional process, further aided the President. Labor unions were becoming increasingly divided on issues of race and foreign policy and were not always reliable allies of the administration, but they remained the strongest single lobby for some of LBJ's liberal measures.
⁹
The well-organized National Education Association (NEA) worked hard for federal aid to schools. In addition, liberal "public interest groups" began to come into their own in 1965. Many of the activists who led these groups had been inspired in the Kennedy years. They were young, energetic, politically independent, suspicious of what they called "politics as usual" and of the "tired old bureaucracy" of Washington. They did not always lobby in the sawiest fashion. But by 1965 they were publicizing a range of programs, including measures to clean up the environment, improve the delivery of health care, reform the schools, and crack down on what they considered the excesses of big business. They wanted to go beyond the bread-and-butter liberalism of the 1930s to improve the quality of life. Their more aggressive involvement in national affairs broadened the nature of pressure group politics in the United States.
¹⁰

Decisions of the Supreme Court in the early 1960s gave yet another push to rights-consciousness by 1965. Starting in 1962 the Court delivered a series of landmark decisions that delighted many Americans on the left and infuriated most on the right. In that year it issued the first of a number of rulings that forced states to redraw the lines of rurally weighted voting districts—at both the state and congressional levels—so as to give urban and suburban voters a representation appropriate to their growth in numbers.
¹¹
By 1965 states were scrambling to do so, thereby (reformers hoped) reducing the power of rural conservatives in legislatures and in Congress. In
Engel v. Vitale
, also decided in 1962, the Court held that it was unconstitutional—a violation of the separation of church and state—for public schools in New York to require children to recite a non-denominational State Board of Regents prayer. A year later it ruled against the practice of daily readings of the Bible in the public schools.
¹²

These were but a few of many decisions that sought to enhance civil liberties in the early 1960s. In
Gideon
v.
Wainwright
(1963) and
Escobedo
v.
Illinois
(1964) the Court expanded the constitutional rights of alleged criminals.
¹³
In
Jacobellis
v.
Ohio
(1964) it complicated the the enforcement of laws against pornography; henceforth, the Court said, prosecutors must prove that such material was "utterly without redeeming social importance."
¹⁴
In the midst of the 1965 congressional session the Court ruled, 7 to 2, that an 1879 Connecticut statute prohibiting not only the sale but also the use (by married as well as unmarried people) of contraceptive devices violated a constitutional right of people to privacy.
¹⁵

In
New York Times υ. Sullivan
(1964) the Court unanimously overruled an Alabama court decision that had found the
Times
and four black clergymen guilty of libel because of an ad, containing errors of fact, that the clergymen had run in the paper to back a legal fight then being waged by Martin Luther King. To hold the newspaper guilty, the high court ruled, was to inhibit discussion of public issues. "Erroneous statement is inevitable in free debate," the judges said, and "must be protected if the freedoms of expression are to have the 'breathing space' that they . . . need to survive." The Court concluded by ruling that public figures and officials could recover damages for libelous statements by the news media only if they could prove that the statements were published as a result of "actual malice." Civil libertarians hailed the decision, which had great importance in later years, as a ringing defense of First Amendment freedom.
¹⁶

In another series of cases the Court proclaimed its continuing opposition to racially discriminatory practices. In
Garner
υ.
Louisiana
(1961) it had upheld the constitutional rights of protestors to conduct peaceful sitins; in
Edwards
υ.
South Carolina
(1963) it ruled that states could not legitimately arrest civil rights demonstrators who had peacefully protested on the grounds of the statehouse; in
Shuttlesworth
υ.
City of Birmingham
(1963) it decided that Jim Crow ordinances in the city could not be enforced; in
Heart of Atlanta Motel
υ.
United States
(1964) it unanimously upheld the public accommodations sections of the 1964 Civil Rights Act; and in
Griffin
υ.
County School Board of Prince Edward County
(1964) it overturned the discriminatory ruses of school segregationists in Prince Edward County, Virginia.
¹⁷
In 1964 it began a judicial assault on racist state laws by overturning a Florida statute that had forbidden cohabitation between whites and blacks in the state, and in 1965, again while Congress was in session, it overturned a Mississippi law that discriminated against blacks who wanted to vote.
¹⁸

Many of these decisions aroused loud and abrasive controversy. Conservatives and police officials complained bitterly that the Court was coddling criminals. Southern officials resisted the decisions regarding race and civil rights. The
Jacobellis
and other rulings regarding pornography excited incredulous reactions from people across the political spectrum. The Connecticut birth control case was too much even for Justice Hugo Black, one of the most ardent defenders of civil liberties on the Court. He dissented testily, maintaining that there was no constitutional justification for the notion that people had a right to "privacy." Justices Felix Frankfurter (who left the Court in 1962) and John Marshall Harlan dissented from the majority decisions on reapportionment. Their argument, like that of many later critics of the activist Warren Court, rested on their belief in the necessity for judicial restraint. Frankfurter complained in 1962 that the Court was entering a "political thicket." It should seek "complete detachment" and abstain from "political entanglements." Harlan added that the Court "is not a panacea for every blot upon the public welfare, nor should this court, ordained as a
judicial
body, be thought of as a general haven for reform movement."
¹⁹

No decisions unleashed more lasting controversy than those involving religion. Cardinal Richard Cushing of Boston exclaimed, "The Communists are enjoying their day." The theologian Reinhold Niebuhr observed that the
Engel
decision "practically suppresses all religion, especially in the public schools."
Engel
and other cases did more than anything else over time to arouse the religious Right from its political quietism. Other Americans, too, thought that the justices had lost their minds.
²⁰

Liberals, however, were greatly inspired by the Court. At last, they said, the judges were construing the law so as to extend the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment to all kinds of Americans, even blacks, non-believers, Jews, and criminals. What a change in constitutional approaches to civil rights and civil liberties since the days of McCarthyism a decade earlier! The Court, moreover, did not bend under criticism; it hewed to its liberal path in the next few years. Advocates of a Great Society rejoiced that liberal programs of the 1960s, unlike those in the 1930s, were safe from judicial assault. Liberals controlled all three branches of American government.

The decisions of the Warren Court reflected and accelerated one of the major trends of the era: the rise of rights-consciousness. This, given special urgency already by the moral power of the civil rights movement, began to seem all-conquering by 1965. It was bolstered by the ever more infectious optimism of liberal social scientists who were certain that the economy, booming in the mid-1960s, could afford to sustain major policy initiatives. Liberal policy-makers, equally optimistic, were sure that the State could engineer political solutions to social and economic problems. Polls suggested that the American people had unprecedented faith in politicians and in the State.
²¹
The convergence of these ideas and assumptions promoted an increasingly powerful—and ultimately near-irresistible—drive for the expansion of individual rights in the United States. The drive came from the bottom up—from ordinary people demanding justice—and from the top down. A Rights Revolution was at hand.
²²