“We Are Living in Lyndon Johnson’s America”
LBJ speaks with his adviser Joseph Califano (LBJ Library photo by Yoichi Okamoto)
By Amity Shlaes
This essay is adapted from Amity Shlaes’s regular column “The Forgotten Book,” which she pens for “Capital Matters” as a fellow of National Review Institute.
“Bold, persistent experimentation” was what presidential candidate Kamala Harris promised to deliver when she spoke to the Economic Club of Pittsburgh recently. The phrase of course comes from another presidential campaigner, Franklin Roosevelt. Early in his 1932 campaign, feeling feisty, FDR picked a safe venue—a commencement address at a relatively obscure university, Oglethorpe of Atlanta, and tried out the line: “The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent experimentation.”
The vice president’s choice of audience was likewise brave. The Economic Club of Pittsburgh is a business powerhouse. Pittsburgh is a business powerhouse. Business doesn’t like unpredictability.
When, also back in 1932, Roosevelt had his own turn in Pittsburgh, he bowed his head and dutifully recited the liturgy of the era’s fiscal orthodoxy: Deficits were “inexcusable”; it was time for new taxes, perhaps on beer. Such proposals were hardly likely to appeal to Roosevelt’s famous Forgotten Man, especially at a time when two in ten were unemployed.
But give FDR credit for knowing his audience.
And anyhow: The Pittsburgh campaign speech that Harris’s actually resembles is one made by President Lyndon Baines Johnson at the city’s Civic Center Arena just days before the 1964 election. To a crowd of more than 10,000 “happy shouting Democrats—with some Republicans,” as the press politely described it, Johnson made a full-throated case for his own version of “bold, persistent experimentation,” his open-ended Great Society program. After all, as Johnson allowed cheerily, here in America, “we’re as big as our ideas.”
Exactly what is wrong with a president claiming license for lengthy, vast experimentation sessions comes clear in an undertaught book about Johnson by Joseph Califano Jr. Though The Triumph and Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson is a memoir, it has some utility for anyone wondering how much damage a President Harris might do.
LBJ Untethered
Califano commenced his career in Washington as an attorney at the Defense Department during the Kennedy administration, which means he watched Kennedy inaugurate his man-to-the-moon program in real time.
Ambitious though he was, Kennedy refrained from launching a general program of space experimentation. He took care to establish a precise goal—man on the moon—and a deadline of “before the end of this decade.” Kennedy also underscored that the undertaking had a secondary, institutional goal: “to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills.” In other words, tether even a heavenly moon project to the earthly practice of reviewing results.
Johnson scorned the tether.
While he inherited the tail end of a presidential term at Kennedy’s passing, Johnson wanted four more years and believed he had to scale his programs and campaign promises accordingly. At the University of Michigan in the spring of 1964, he announced the Great Society, a larger and more open-ended undertaking than any of Kennedy’s. Johnson vowed to persist until life had improved “in our cities, in our countryside, and in our classrooms.”
The same year, the president also launched his War on Poverty, to cure—“cure,” not alleviate—poverty. Such commitments secured Johnson both victory and the Democratic majorities in the House and Senate that he required to experiment to his heart’s content.
LBJ’s experiments were not experiments in the true sense, for they lacked science and accountability. They were actually Hail Marys.
“There will never be enough for this man”
What happened next reveals the worst weakness of the experiment approach: It is all about inputs. Johnson’s modus operandi was simply to create as many new programs as possible. This suited Johnson to a T, working to his comparative advantage as the old “Master of the Senate.”
After his experience as Senate majority leader, Johnson knew better than anyone how to steward, or ram, laws through Congress.
The result was a storm of new laws, matching Roosevelt’s New Deal in scope and impact.
Califano, who became Johnson’s point man at the White House, recalls a meeting after the 1966 midterms. Though Republicans had gained seats in both houses, Democrats still held the majorities, and Johnson was undaunted: “As we went over a hundred ideas that afternoon,” Califano recalls, “I kept thinking: there will never be enough for this man; he adopts programs the way a child eats rich chocolate-chip cookies. They came to him every which way.”
Endless experimentation requires endless staff support, and to keep up, Califano found himself consuming four packs of cigarettes a day, first regular, and then menthol—“when my throat grew raw.” The grateful Johnson gave Califano a gold Zippo lighter embossed with the presidential seal.
Whenever Califano disappeared, his frenetic boss tracked him down—once, even, at Washington’s Sibley Hospital. “What are you doing at the hospital?” Johnson asked Califano. Califano reported that his young son Joe had consumed a bottle of aspirin. “There ought to be a law that makes druggists use safe containers,” the president responded. Joe III survived, and Congress eventually enacted LBJ’s proposal.
Small wonder that Califano, much later, as secretary of health, education, and welfare under Jimmy Carter, put his shoulder into a national anti-smoking campaign.
Johnson continued to churn out laws and programs by the dozen. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the subsequent Voting Rights Act of 1965 were only the beginning; there were social-welfare benefits and a vast variety of programs tailored to specific groups that live on today: Head Start for preschoolers, food stamps, Medicare. Few of these programs were carefully defined, and few devoted resources to measuring their own success.
Sweeping Away Accountability
Trouble emerged right away. Counterintuitive as it is to recall, the riots that ripped up Los Angeles and Detroit in the Johnson years came after passage of Johnson’s two great civil-rights laws, not before. As Califano reports, the Watts riots so distressed Johnson that he chose to disappear for more than twenty-four hours, an eternity for a chief executive.
The Saturday after the riots commenced, the president ignored Califano’s frantic calls, leaving his aide and cabinet members to organize the dubious mechanics of calling out the National Guard without a chief executive. Rather than consider the possibility that African Americans were saying they needed something beyond more federal laws, Johnson, upon his return, simply passed further measures, including the Model Cities program, another Washington try at bettering the life of cities’ middle classes and the urban poor.
In short, these experiments were not experiments in the true sense, for they lacked science and accountability. They were actually plays, or Hail Marys, or political forays.
The recklessness was not lost on Johnson’s entourage. Califano attempted logic with Johnson, sending, for example, a memo to focus the president. One suggestion was that the administration suspend the effort to get to the moon.
“It is more important for prestige purposes to show the world that a democratic society of different races can live together peacefully,” advised Califano.
“I don’t agree,” scribbled Johnson on the document—correct in that case.
Desperate, Califano also suggested that Johnson should present himself and speak before both houses of Congress, a way of coaxing the president to a reckoning with the consequences of his work.
“Forget it,” wrote Johnson.
Others, such as Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then a professor at Harvard, tried to characterize what was wrong with Johnson’s approach. In 1965, Moynihan published an ambivalent landmark article titled “The Professionalization of Reform.” Moynihan warned against the danger of handing policy to educated bureaucrats, fostering what political scientist Harold Lasswell termed a “monocracy of power.” But Moynihan also pointed out that, with the volume of knowledge now available, it might be possible for government to depoliticize itself. It was time to task experts in departments with responsibility for monitoring results and “the type of decision-making that is suited to the techniques of modern organizations.”
The Costs
While in office, Johnson, all politician, never saw the value of such analysis. He never took time to parse the downside of welfare-state expansion, or to consider that inflation caused by his spending might ravage paychecks. He did not consider that basing American immigration policy on compassion rather than logic or trade-offs would make it difficult for future lawmakers to control the nation’s borders. He did not ponder what increasing longevity would do to the fiscal outlook of his most beloved program, Medicare. In 1966 or 1967, he was too busy to think about all that.
Nor would he think about it later. Though a failure of Johnson’s great military buildup in Vietnam is usually offered as the reason he did not choose to run again in 1968, one suspects that an eagerness to avoid seeing the ugly outputs, the results of his domestic work, played a role. Back on his ranch, the former president penned his memoirs, decorating the endpapers of his book with the names of the laws he had passed.
“We are living in Lyndon Johnson’s America,” Califano notes. All too true, alas, and a warning of the cost of non-experiments.
Amity Shlaes chairs the Coolidge Foundation, is the author of Great Society, and is a fellow of National Review Institute. A version of this article first appeared in National Review’s “Capital Matters.”