Charlton Heston by Marc Eliot

Author:Marc Eliot
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2017-02-02T05:00:00+00:00

Charlton Heston, Linda Harrison, and Roddy McDowall in Planet of the Apes (1968). (Courtesy of Rebel Road Archives)

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

In his first full term as president, to which he was elected by a landslide over Barry Goldwater, Lyndon B. Johnson was determined to lead the country back to greatness. To show what a Johnson presidency could do for his country, he wanted to continue the progress Kennedy had made with civil rights, expanding the realm of the Peace Corps, moving ahead with the space race, and, above all, maintaining America’s hard line against the spread of communism in Southeast Asia. He did some good things in the early years of his self-titled Great Society, before his manic escalation of the Vietnam War.

Those good things are worth looking at, especially the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities Act of 1965, whose origins began with JFK, and the creation of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) that acknowledged the importance of “hundreds of thousands of devoted musicians, painters, architects, those who work to bring about changes in our cities, whose talents are just as important a part of the United States as any of our perhaps more publicized accomplishments.”*

Just before Kennedy’s assassination, he had appointed veteran theatrical producer and real estate developer Roger L. Stevens to help the administration establish a national cultural center. Stevens, a Detroit native, had been the general administrator of New York’s famed Actors Studio, a producer at the Playwrights Company, a board member of the American National Theatre and Academy, and a founding member of a Broadway company that produced some of the finest shows of the ’50s and ’60s, including Bus Stop, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and West Side Story. Stevens became chairman of the board of trustees that, at Johnson’s directive, oversaw the development of what eventually became the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.

The seed of the National Council on the Arts (NCA) was planted in JFK’s first year, when he invited the distinguished TV and radio journalist Edward R. Murrow to head up the U.S. Information Agency (USIA), a propaganda organization dedicated to helping tell “America’s story” overseas. Murrow then met with some of Hollywood’s most important figures, including George Stevens Jr., the son of the Academy Award–winning director and an author, playwright, director, and producer, who agreed to join the USIA as director of its motion picture service and supervised the production of more than 1,500 government-funded films.

The core work of the USIA laid the foundation for what, under LBJ, became the NEA. On January 8, 1964, less than two months after he took office, Johnson urged Congress to rededicate D.C.’s National Cultural Center as the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and to establish the NCA to assist in the growth and development of the arts in the United States. The bill was passed through both houses in 1965, and on September 29 of that year, in the White House Rose Garden, Johnson officially signed it into existence.

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