The Kennedy Half-Century (54 page)

On the other side of the aisle, Republicans of moderate and liberal stripes saw the Civil Rights Act as an opportunity to inoculate themselves in advance of a building Democratic tide in the November election. Politically astute GOP legislators realized early that public sentiment about JFK combined with LBJ’s formidable personage would likely deliver victory to the Democrats. Voting for the Civil Rights Act would be one way to avoid being at the top of the Democrats’ list of targets. The impending presidential nomination of conservative U.S. senator Barry Goldwater (R-AZ), who opposed the Civil Rights Act, underlined the electoral concerns of northern GOP members of Congress. Voting for civil rights was one way to separate themselves in the public’s mind from Goldwater.

In the end, Johnson’s legislative victory was as complete as it was historic. In Congress as a whole, 63 percent of Democrats and 81 percent of Republicans voted for the Civil Rights Act.
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(It is surprising but true: Republican legislators were more liberal on civil rights than the Democrats in Congress.) This time, conservatives in the Senate found the filibuster was not sufficient
to thwart the popular bill. Impressively, Johnson had also been able to keep the act strong and intact. At every step LBJ refused easy compromises to water down the bill in exchange for the backing of this or that senior legislator, as he had seen done with earlier civil rights legislation in 1957 and 1960.
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While public opinion had begun to turn in favor of civil rights before LBJ took office, and JFK had proposed a bill in June 1963 that had been approved by the House Judiciary Committee the month before the assassination, there was no question that President Johnson secured a law with far broader reach than one that might have passed had Kennedy lived.

Signing the bill just before Independence Day, a proud LBJ saluted its original author, “our late and beloved President John F. Kennedy,” but he knew history would record the moment as among his own finest. “Let us close the springs of racial poison,” Johnson said. “Let us lay aside irrelevant differences and make our nation whole.”
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A few days after the signing, Johnson noted in a letter, “No doubt President Kennedy’s death provided a dramatic and important catalyst for consideration of the legislation, but I believe he would have been able to pass the legislation had he lived.”
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That was for the public record. No political observer then or historian now would assert that JFK could have wrangled as strong a civil rights bill from a Congress that frustrated so many of his objectives.
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Had Kennedy been reelected handily, though, he might have secured passage of a muscular bill in his second term.

With the revenue act and the civil rights bill, President Johnson had gone a long way toward discharging his obligations to the man who chose him for the vice presidency. But Johnson saw an opening to reach farther, to use the Kennedy imprimatur to create the beginnings of his own program. LBJ was the first in a long line of presidents to realize John Kennedy’s name and image, properly applied, could speed along acceptance of a new proposal. In Johnson’s case, it was his “war on poverty.”

On November 19, 1963, just before President Kennedy left for Texas, he met with Walter Heller, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. Almost a year earlier, Kennedy had asked Heller to look into the poverty problem in America, which JFK had seen up close during his campaigning for the West Virginia primary in May 1960.
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Heller hoped for a major assault on poverty, but Kennedy seemed inclined toward a pilot program, applying to perhaps a handful of cities, to be included in his 1964 legislative package sent to Congress. It was an election year and Kennedy feared that the large, heavy-voting middle class would interpret a larger program as redistribution of income, another welfare subsidy.
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(The echoes of this debate are still with us every time new ideas from health care to immigration reform are proposed.)

The day after the assassination, Heller went to see the new president to tell him about the program and his conversation with JFK the week before.
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Johnson stunned Heller by seizing the idea. Johnson reportedly replied, “That’s my kind of program. It’s a people’s program … Go ahead. Give it the highest priority. Push ahead full tilt.”
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Unlike Kennedy, Johnson was not born to wealth, and he had personally seen extreme poverty as he grew up in Texas. Johnson emotionally identified with the have-nots because he saw himself as one of them, a hardscrabble graduate of Southwest Texas State Teachers College rather than Harvard.

Soon President Johnson was fashioning an “unconditional war on poverty” as though it had been John F. Kennedy’s final wish, a key proviso in the late president’s last will and testament, with LBJ as the official executor.
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Those familiar with Kennedy’s cautious approach to most domestic matters were supportive but amused; they knew Kennedy had intended no such thing. Yet this extension of the Kennedy legacy could be quite useful, both to JFK’s historical image and LBJ’s own presidency. A marriage of conviction and convenience ensued.

Thus was conceived the Economic Opportunity Act. The idea was carefully nurtured by Johnson until its legislative birth in near-record time for a major, novel bill, with a signing on August 20, 1964, and a billion-dollar budget. The alphabet soup of agencies spawned by its administrative Office of Economic Opportunity rivals the New Deal’s productivity in some ways: the Job Corps, training disadvantaged youth in employment skills; Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA), a domestic form of the Peace Corps; the Model Cities Program to encourage urban redevelopment; Upward Bound, providing educational tutoring to impoverished high school students so that they could compete and gain admission to college; Head Start, organizing preschool training for the disadvantaged; and more besides. Additional billions added throughout the Johnson years generated the traditional left-right split on government expenditures. Democrats hailed LBJ’s initiatives to make society fairer, and cited a significant drop in poverty during the Johnson years as proof they had worked.
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Republicans argued that government was spending too much, overstepping its bounds, and continuing down the road to socialism.
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(Little has changed in partisan terms over fifty years.) Unsurprisingly, later Republican administrations sharply reduced the scope and then the funding of the antipoverty programs, though many of them survive in some form today.

The antipoverty efforts comprised much of the heart of Johnson’s “Great Society,” which he had announced with fanfare, though without much specificity, in a May 22 graduation speech at the University of Michigan.
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Kennedy’s New Frontier had inspired with style more than substance. In Johnson’s view, the New Frontier was a mere appetizer to the Great Society’s ample menu of entrees that would comprise the most transformative era for government
since Franklin Roosevelt. In a way, the behind-the-scenes theme song of Johnson’s nascent administration was, “Anything You Can Do I Can Do Better,”
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though in the fourteen presidential months he had inherited from JFK, Johnson never forgot his mandate of continuity. His choice to head the new Office of Economic Opportunity underlined this. John Kennedy’s brother-in-law, R. Sargent Shriver, was plucked from the directorship of JFK’s Peace Corps to take command of the OEO. Kennedy’s “final wish” was reality, and headed by a member of his family.

The real Lyndon Johnson was emerging from the embers of his predecessor’s consumed presidency. The reminders of John Kennedy were constant—extensive memorial services for what would have been his forty-seventh birthday on May 29, 1964,
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endless books and magazines and dedication ceremonies, photos from time to time of Kennedy family members or dignitaries visiting the Arlington gravesite, Senator Ted Kennedy’s near-fatal plane crash in June 1964 that revived the chatter about a “Kennedy curse.”
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But the work of government and the theater of politics had set schedules, and prompted people to look to the future.

The Democratic National Convention, held in Atlantic City, New Jersey, from August 24 through 27, was a critical turning point for the new president. From the first hours after JFK’s assassination, the sizable political lobe of Lyndon Johnson’s brain had been focused like a laser on securing his own nomination and election. Johnson had reassured liberals with his successful efforts to achieve civil rights and an antipoverty program. Almost as important, conservatives were pleased with his reaction to the Gulf of Tonkin incidents that may (or may not) have taken place in early August off the coast of Vietnam. On August 2, the crew of the USS
Maddox
, engaged in an intelligence mission, reported that North Vietnamese gunboats had fired on them, and two days later the
Maddox
and the USS
Turner Joy
claimed further military provocations had taken place. It is likely that no second attack occurred, and even the first one, though probably real, is disputed. Some senior U.S. officials at the time were skeptical.
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But perhaps recalling the weakness John Kennedy had projected at the Bay of Pigs, Vienna, and Berlin, LBJ saw an opportunity to stake out an early, hawkish position to the Communist world in this, his first major international test.

With little debate and a nearly unanimous vote in Congress, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was passed on August 7. It gave carte blanche to Johnson to use conventional military force in Southeast Asia and, as interpreted by Johnson, became essentially a declaration of war that produced the massive troop buildup in Vietnam during LBJ’s tenure. This saber rattling assisted Johnson’s short-term political needs as he faced a virulently anticommunist Republican challenger, but it led to long-term political disaster.

The other preconvention business was even more directly related to John F. Kennedy. It was Lyndon Johnson’s turn to pick a running mate. In these pre-Twenty-fifth Amendment days, Johnson had no vice president. This selection would define him and his judgment as much or more than anything else he had done since succeeding JFK. There was no question which candidate Democrats preferred.
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They wanted a return to a ticket of Kennedy and Johnson, except in reverse order and with a Kennedy named Robert. As attorney general and his brother’s closest adviser, RFK had supported Jackie Kennedy throughout those four solemn days in November. His grief was palpable and, much as Mrs. Kennedy did, he had the nation’s sympathy and support.

Letters poured into the Johnson White House urging the selection of RFK for VP, starting within weeks of Kennedy’s death. Catherine Emrick of Oakland, California, wrote to President Johnson in January: “Isn’t it possible to have Robert Kennedy as your Vice President? His loyalty and dignity during his late brother’s tragedy won the hearts of all who saw him …”
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In March, Mary Emily’s letter not only pushed RFK but warned LBJ off another choice: “I certainly feel Robert Kennedy—with his three years experience with his wonderful brother at the White House—is qualified to be Vice President … Senator Hubert Humphrey does not seem to have the world-wide appeal of Robert Kennedy.”
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By July the correspondence was even more insistent. A Jesuit priest, Father Joseph F. X. Erhart, fairly begged the president to choose Kennedy:

Mr. President, if you announced Bobby as your choice, a surge of joy would go around the world. I have been back in the United States for six weeks after spending a year in Europe. I talked with hundreds of Europeans, with Africans, Arabs, Indians, Poles, Russians, South Americans; from this sample I judge that President Kennedy had transformed the image of the U.S. around the world. People identified with him personally. Their hope for peace and a better world was placed in him personally. I don’t want to make John Kennedy greater than he was; but the attitude of these people is a fact—a fact to be reckoned with. People need heroes; John Kennedy was an authentic world hero. But they don’t know you well, Mr. President; they are uncertain about you; your image is incomplete. By selecting Bobby as your running mate, you would identify yourself emphatically with the Kennedy tradition. I suggest that paradoxically, only thus can you establish your own international political identity.
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President Johnson was well aware of the groundswell, but he made it clear privately to his team that he would never put Robert Kennedy on his ticket.
The animosity between the two had been intense from the start. Bobby did not want his brother to put LBJ on the ticket in 1960. He and his friends had been especially dismissive of Johnson during his term as vice president, and his combined fury and grief on November 22 led him to rush right past Johnson on Air Force One without so much as a nod to the new president—a slight that Johnson never forgot.
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In an extraordinary postpresidency confession to the historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, LBJ unloaded on Robert Kennedy:

Somehow it just didn’t seem fair. I’d given three years of loyal service to Jack Kennedy. During all that time I’d willingly stayed in the background; I knew that it was
his
Presidency, not mine. If I disagreed with him, I did it in private, not in public. And then Kennedy was killed and I became the custodian of his will. I became the President. But none of this seemed to register with Bobby Kennedy, who acted like
he
was the custodian of the Kennedy dream, some kind of rightful heir to the throne … I’d waited for my turn. Bobby should’ve waited for his. But he and the Kennedy people wanted it now. A tidal wave of letters and memos about how great a Vice President Bobby would be swept over me. But no matter what, I simply couldn’t let it happen. With Bobby on the ticket, I’d never know if I could be elected on my own … If they tr[ied] to push Bobby Kennedy down my throat for Vice President, I’[d] tell them to nominate him for the Presidency and leave me out of it.
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