The Passage of Power (113 page)

Immediately upon Heller and Gordon’s arrival at the ranch, however, that clarity vanished. The two economists found that Johnson had found new money for the program—that he had meant what he said when he blurted out, “I’ll take money away from things to get money for people.” The overall budget was, of course, coming down; Johnson didn’t want it to start going back up. McNamara’s Defense Department economies had started to add up, however, and out of these savings, they found, Johnson had reserved money for the anti-poverty program—and the amount he had thus reserved was $500 million, which, added to the $500
million from existing programs, meant there would be twice as much, a billion dollars for anti-poverty, as they had been thinking about. And inadequate though the total might still be—1 percent of a nation’s spending specifically directed at the 20 percent of its people who most needed help—a “billion-dollar” figure had a symbolic, significant, ring to it.
“Gordon
and Heller had been thinking of a pilot venture to be carried out in a limited number of ‘demonstration project’ cities,” Johnson would write in his memoirs. “But I urged them to broaden their scope. [The program] had to be big and bold, and hit the whole nation with real impact.” As he had earlier explained the congressional realities of the tax cut to Heller and Gordon, now he laid out for them a basic congressional reality that would confront an anti-poverty program: why a “limited number” of smaller projects would never pass; why the program would have to be “big and bold” if it was to have a chance of enactment. A small number of projects, he explained, meant that only a small number of congressional districts would receive the new federal funds, and the number of congressmen with a vested interest in supporting the program would therefore be small. “I was certain that we could not start small and propel a program through Congress,” he was to say.

He wanted them to find new programs in which to spend it. There was a new urgency. He kept asking,
“How
are you going to spend all this money?,” Heller recalls.
“He
was extremely demanding. Time and time again … he said,
‘Look
, I’ve earmarked half a billion dollars to get this program started, but I’ll withdraw that unless you fellows come through with something that’s workable.’ ”

There was a new demand for specifics.
“He
wanted something concrete,” Heller was to recall. “He made it very clear that they
[
the programs] had to have some hard, bedrock content, and he kept referring time and again to his NYA [National Youth Administration] experience. He liked the idea of learning while doing, learning through doing.” But he didn’t want to go just back, but forward.
“The
challenge I presented to my advisors was the development of a new concept,” he was to write. “I didn’t want to paste together a lot of existing approaches. I wanted original, inspiring ideas.”

Part of the explanation for Lyndon Johnson’s enthusiasm for the anti-poverty program was, as was always the case with Lyndon Johnson, political.

All his efforts on behalf of the tax cut and civil rights bills had not come close to erasing liberal suspicions about him. On the day Johnson flew back to Washington from Texas, the liberal columnist
William V. Shannon would tell his readers that the credit for anything the new President might have accomplished belonged not to him but to John F. Kennedy, that now the honeymoon was over and it was time for him to produce on his own—and that, judging from his record, it was doubtful that he could.

“All
of us have been grateful to our new President,” Shannon wrote, in a tone that suggested that he himself had not been overwhelmed by that emotion, “for the magisterial way in which he took hold of his responsibilities. His energy, self-confidence and natural energy have been therapeutic in a disheartening and
troubled time. His conduct in the past several weeks which impressed everyone is already part of the history of the Kennedy period. It was a fitting epilogue to the Kennedy story.”

Now, Shannon said, the time had come to view the
Johnson Administration on its own. “It is time to examine President Johnson in the cold winter light of the problems and opportunities which confront him.” The view was not reassuring. “History suggests that the martyrdom of a great man does not necessarily have positive political consequences.” Lincoln’s, for example, “led only to the failures of Reconstruction.… What was the political sequel to [Woodrow Wilson’s] personal sacrifice” when he “broke his health in a stumping tour on behalf of the
League of Nations? The isolation and corruption of the
Harding Administration.”

As for Johnson, Shannon wrote, he “is politically weak in the northeast and in the big cities generally … in the liberal, urban areas,” and, he wrote, there was good reason for that weakness. “We have already witnessed the failures that occurred last month”—Shannon was classifying as failures the new President’s inability to get the tax and civil rights bills through Congress before the end of the year—and, he said, those failures might be symptomatic of disturbing qualities in Johnson. “There are genuine ambiguities in his legislative record,” and “moreover, as a legislator he overemphasized his talent for adjustment and compromise at the expense of … commitment.… We have to acknowledge that there are valid grounds for apprehension regarding Mr. Johnson or any other public man whose emphasis is almost wholly on means rather than ends.… The broker concept is inadequate for the far more demanding office of the presidency. What are a man’s values, his moral ends, his vision of justice? These are the important questions.” Shannon’s was far from the only liberal voice still asking such questions. A campaign against
poverty would strengthen Johnson in the “liberal, urban areas” in which he was weakest. And there was a political reason for launching the campaign quickly: an election that was now just ten months away.

But part of the explanation was, as always with Johnson, something more, something that had to do less with strategy than with memories. The ranch, with the pathetic frame house and the road across the river, was, after all, an appropriate setting for him to be thinking about poverty. And allusions in his conversation both in person and over the telephone—sentences, phrases, reminiscences—allusions that started to be heard as he chatted on the plane ride down to Texas, and that continued to sprinkle his speech during the two weeks on the ranch, show how fresh his youth was in his mind during that time. Talking to reporters on the plane about the federal budget, he had suddenly stopped and begun talking about himself.
“I’ve
always been an early riser,” he said. “My daddy used to come to my bedroom at four-thirty in the morning when I was workin’ on the highway gang, right out of high school, and he’d twist my big toe, real hard so it hurt, and he’d say, ‘Git up, Lyndon, every other boy in town’s got a half hour’s head start on you.’ ” Making an early-morning call to an old Hill Country ally,
E. Babe Smith of Marble Falls, he said he hoped he hadn’t woken him up—and
then said he was sure he hadn’t because Smith had been “a poor boy,” too, and therefore must have been getting up early all his life, as he himself did. “That’s the only way we can keep up,” he said. “Otherwise, they’re too far ahead of us.” Other old acquaintances recall similar early-morning calls from the
Johnson Ranch that vacation.
“We
always get up early, don’t we?” he told Fredericksburg attorney
Arthur Stehling. “We can’t make it unless we do.” And at the age of nine and ten he had worked beside his cousin Ava, hauling the heavy bags of cotton, their backs stooped over in the burning sun, Ava to whom he had whispered as they worked, “Boy, there’s got to be a better way to make a living than this. There’s got to be a better way.” Asked by the author twelve years after that Christmas trip what she and Lyndon had talked about that Christmas, Ava said she didn’t remember, except that they had reminisced about their youth, and about the cotton picking. Whenever she and Lyndon reminisced, that subject came up, she said.
“We
always talked about the cotton. We just [had] hated that so much.”

“Hate” is, in fact, a word that occurs frequently in descriptions of Lyndon Johnson’s feelings about poverty. He
“hated
poverty and illiteracy,” Dr. Hurst would say. “He
hated
it when a person who wanted to work could not get a job.” Accompanying Johnson on a vice presidential trip to
Iran, Hurst had seen his reaction when someone in the party said that a group of Iranian children they passed had
“rags
” for clothing.

“They
did not,” Johnson said. “Don’t say that. I know rags when I see them. They had patched clothes. That is a lot different than rags.” Hurst says that “I noted as the years passed that he reacted in the same way whenever he heard the word ‘rags.’ I realized that to him rags were the ultimate symbol of the poverty he detested.” There had, after all, been patches on clothing worn by his brother and youngest sister, who had still been small when Sam Johnson went broke on the ranch, and that clothing certainly hadn’t been
rags
!

From the moment Heller and Gordon arrived at the ranch that Christmas, Johnson “hounded” them to get him an anti-poverty package with hard, concrete, specific programs that would produce results. The two economists were quartered in the green frame guest house, and in the late evenings, when they, and perhaps Moyers and Valenti, were sitting around a little kitchen table littered with papers and coffee cups, its ashtray overflowing with cigarette butts, the President would suddenly appear in the doorway. He found the scene amusing, he was to recall:
“Just
a few feet from the window several of my white-faced Herefords were grazing placidly and a little noisily. It was an incongruous setting for Gordon and Heller, those two urbane scholars.” Gordon was wearing one of his host’s khaki western shirts, far too large for him, with “what we Texans called ‘city-bought’ trousers and low city shoes. Sitting down at the table, Johnson bantered with him about his half-hearted attempt … to blend in with his … surroundings.” Johnson’s mind was on the anti-poverty legislative program, however; when he was with the men working on it, all subjects, even their attire, were seen in their relation to that. When Gordon replied to the joking about his
clothes by saying he was trying to blend urban and cattle country,
“it
struck me that the poverty program itself was a blend of the same: of the needs and desperate desires of the poor in the city ghettos and the poor in obscure rural hollows”—and that the new program must therefore include provisions not only for the urban slums on which attention was focused but also for rural areas, scattered, “obscure,” in which needs were just as desperate.

Eager for new ideas, he even accepted one that had emerged from the
President’s Committee on Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Crime, chaired by a longtime Robert Kennedy friend,
David Hackett.

While Johnson was talking about concrete, bulldozer projects, Hackett’s committee had been urging him to make a concept called “community action”—a vague proposal to involve the residents of impoverished neighborhoods in programs that affected them—a key part of the program. Opposed to the idea at first as being too vague, not something that would give people jobs or children an education, Johnson changed his mind, according to
Busby partly because it had emerged from a “Kennedy committee” and opposing it would therefore conflict with the continuity theme. “People would have said, ‘Oh, he’s not really sincere.’ ” Johnson’s own explanation was that while
“I
realized that” the community action concept “might shake up many existing institutions, but I decided that some shaking up might be needed to get a bold new program moving.”

While few specifics of the anti-poverty program had been decided upon when, on January 3, the two economists flew back to Washington from the ranch, by the time they left, the atmosphere surrounding the program bore little resemblance to the atmosphere that had existed before November 22. There was no more talk about “coming back in a couple of weeks.” Instead, there were orders to have the
Budget Bureau and the other government agencies involved draw up detailed recommendations, and to draw them up fast. By Monday, January 6, they were ready, and the two economists sent them to Cabinet members with a covering memo.
“Your
preliminary written reactions are required before the close of business, Thursday, January 9th,” the memo said. Other deadlines were set—also tight deadlines. And by the end of the vacation, the program had a name. The “1964
State
of the Union Message—First Draft” was completed in the little house on the Lewis Ranch on December 30, and a secretary was driven up to decipher and transcribe Ted Sorensen’s tiny handwriting, and the draft’s first page contained the words “Let this session of Congress be known as the session which … declared all-out war on human poverty and misery and unemployment in these United States,” and the fifth page contained the words “This Administration hereby declares unconditional war on poverty in America.”

While during the next week the message would go through many drafts, those sentences were to remain, essentially unchanged, in all of them. The
provenance of the phrase “War on Poverty” is difficult to determine. When the author of this book asked Sorensen about it, Sorensen said that
“it
doesn’t sound like something President Kennedy would have been comfortable saying, or that I would have been comfortable writing.” In fact, however, President Kennedy
had
said it—in a little-noticed campaign speech in 1960, which, it appears, Sorensen wrote. Whether the phrase sprang from Sorensen’s pen as he scribbled away in the guest house, or whether it was suggested to him by Lyndon Johnson in their early discussions about the speech, it caught Johnson’s fancy—because it caught Johnson’s feelings. Why wouldn’t it? Lyndon Johnson knew what to do with enemies. And if, to destroy them, war was necessary, war it would be.