Prisoners of Hope by Randall B. Woods

Author:Randall B. Woods
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780465098712
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2016-03-01T16:00:00+00:00

IN THE LATE FALL OF 1965, THE “FABULOUS EIGHTY-NINTH,” AS THE press labeled the sitting session of Congress, adjourned. Its record of achievement was unparalleled: Medicare; Medicaid; voting rights; federal aid to education; the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and National Endowment for the Arts (NEA); a massive battery of antipoverty programs; highway beautification; a heart, cancer, and stroke bill that pumped new funds into the National Institutes of Health for research; area redevelopment; and a new department of Housing and Urban Development. LBJ was intensely proud of what he and Congress had done; he desperately wanted to be compared to his hero, FDR.

It was not to be. “The President has been lucky,” Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield told reporters. “Don’t overlook that. If Clarence Cannon were still alive, he’d have plenty of headaches with his appropriation bills. But the House Appropriations Committee is headed by George Mahon of Texas who is a close friend of the President’s.”19 Others pointed out that every measure that Congress had passed had had the support of a majority of Americans. The one item that did not—repeal of section 14b of the Taft-Hartley Act, the so-called right-to-work proviso—was voted down in both houses. The Republican National Committee estimated that the cumulative cost of the top fifty Great Society bills would be $112 billion. “Think of it!—$112 billion!” exclaimed National Committee chair Ray C. Bliss. “This spending program dwarfs into utter insignificance all past spending programs, by all nations, all over the world.”20 Columnists who were willing to give LBJ the credit he felt he deserved for the legislative achievements of 1965 were careful to couple their praise with a critique of the Johnson foreign policies that portrayed them as aimless and reactive.21

Unfortunately, LBJ did not take these blows gracefully. He could not believe that he was not getting credit for resolving some of the great issues of the twentieth century, resolving them in favor of the poor, oppressed, and disadvantaged without polarizing the nation and stoking the flames of class warfare. In the fall of 1965, he agreed to give an interview to political historian William Leuchtenburg, an admirer of Schlesinger. LBJ picked up on Leuchtenburg’s condescension immediately. “Mr. President, this has been a remarkable Congress,” Leuchtenburg said. “It is even arguable whether this isn’t the most significant Congress ever.”22 LBJ responded, “No, it isn’t. It’s not arguable.” He then launched into a two-hour tirade against the press, liberals, and the inflated reputations of both FDR and JFK. Roosevelt, he declared, “was like the fellow who cut cordwood and sold it all at Christmas and then spent it all on firecrackers. . . . Social Security and the Wagner Act were all that really amounted to much, and none of it compares to my education act.” Johnson was aware that his guest was the author of an admiring account of the New Deal. “No man knew less about Congress than John Kennedy,” LBJ followed up. Every press story he read was full of lies.

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