Flawed Giant: Lyndon Johnson and His Times, 1961-1973 by Robert Dallek

Author:Robert Dallek [Dallek, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, pdf
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 1998-03-18T16:00:00+00:00

8

A Sea of Troubles

BY the beginning of 1967, the dissent over Vietnam, urban riots, political reverses, and doubts about administration programs to elevate poor folks into the middle class and transform America into a Great Society made Johnson wonder why he had ever wanted to be President. He took some solace from the knowledge that all his predecessors had shouldered heavy burdens. “Men of ordinary physique and discretion cannot be Presidents and live, if the strain be not somehow relieved,” Woodrow Wilson had complained. Herbert Hoover had called the office “a compound hell.”1

During 1967 continuing and intensifying problems subjected Johnson to an ordeal that, in the words of one sympathetic columnist, “seems more than a man should have to bear.” In the winter of 1966—67, even before a host of new difficulties appeared, he found himself defending his administration from attacks by friends and foes alike. Governor Warren Hearnes of Missouri told Johnson that if he were running in his state now he would lose by 100,000 votes, despite a half-million margin in 1964. “Frustration over Vietnam; too much federal spending and … taxation; no great public support for your Great Society programs; and … public disenchantment with the civil rights programs” had eroded the President’s standing. Democratic senators echoed the same complaints at a White House meeting in January,

However much the criticism hurt and agitated him, he refused to show his true feelings in public. Any confirmation of dismay would encourage opponents at home and abroad. The attacks on him were “unfair,” Johnson had told the governors in December, and he cautioned them “to wash our dirty linen outside of the newspapers.” The columnist said: Johnson “loathes with all the fury of his giant physique, hyperactive mentality and volcanic temper” pictures of him “as downcast in spirit.” He put the best possible face on everything.2

The economy was a case in point. During the first half of the 1960s an amazing 96 percent of Americans believed that their standard of living would improve. In January 1967, when Johnson told the country that wages were the highest in history, unemployment was at a thirteen-year low, and corporate profits and farm incomes were greater than ever, Americans nodded in agreement. True, a 4.5 percent jump in consumer prices over the previous eighteen months and an “excessive rise” in interest rates were disturbing elements in the national economic picture. But, the President reassured the country, “as 1966 ended, price stability was seemingly being restored,” while interest rates were retreating from their earlier peaks.3

Johnson knew, however, that his public rhetoric masked potential budget deficits. Additional defense outlays and cost-of-living increases might lead to a recession and political defeat in 1968. But no one in the administration was sure. Their watchwords on the economy in early 1967 were: “Where are we headed?”

Mixed advice and confusing statistics were the answers given Johnson. The economist Paul Samuelson publicly warned that doing too much or too little could produce dire results. The additional bad news was that economists sharply disagreed on which way to turn.

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