The Passage of Power (The Years of Lyndon Johnson, #4)

by Robert A. Caro

“Unfortunately, many Americans live on the outskirts of hope—some because of their poverty, and some because of their color, and all too many because of both,” he said in that State of the Union address. “Our task is to help replace their despair with opportunity. This administration today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America.”

“Our chief weapons … will be better schools, and better health, and better homes, and better training, and better job opportunities to help more Americans, especially young Americans, escape from squalor and misery and unemployment,” he said. And the speech announced also the crusade’s goal, which was revolutionary: “not only to relieve the symptom of poverty, but to cure it and, above all, to prevent it.”

His presidency would, as I have written, be marked by victories: his great personal victory, his election, in November, 1964, to the presidency in his own right by what was then, and, as of this writing almost half a century later, is still, the greatest popular majority ever won by a candidate for the American presidency, and his great legislative victories.

Taken as a whole, the bills passed between the beginning of 1964 and the end of 1968 make the Johnson presidency one which saw the legislative realization of many of the noblest aspirations of the liberal spirit in America. Not only the two great civil rights measures but Medicare and Medicaid, and the sixty separate education laws, including the Act that created Head Start—however inadequately thought through and in some cases flawed and contradictory some of these measures might have been, due to the haste with which he pushed them through, they were laws of which liberals had dreamed for decades, laws that embodied government’s responsibility to fulfill what Johnson’s father, the Populist legislator, believed was the highest duty of government: to help people caught in “the tentacles of circumstance.”

Although there would be many reasons that the poverty war was lost, one of the main reasons was the Asian war.

Everyone on Capitol Hill seemed to know that he lived in a Georgetown house that was so filled with his friends, and with movie industry friends of his father’s, dropping in from out of town, that it seemed like a fraternity house, or, as one friend said, “a Hollywood hotel”; that he had his own cook and a black valet, who delivered his meals to the House Office Building every day. And everyone seemed to know about the glamorous women he dated—one, whom he dated until he told her he couldn’t marry her, was the movie star Gene Tierney; sometimes his charming, apparently carefree smile would be in magazines after he was photographed with these women in New York nightspots, and he would drive them around Washington in a long convertible with the top down: the very picture of a dashing young millionaire bachelor playboy. Watching Jack stroll onto the House floor one day with his hands in his pockets, a colleague said his attitude suggested: “Well, I guess if you don’t want to work for a living, this is as good a job as any.”

His closest friend—“about his only real friend on Capitol Hill”—Florida congressman (later a senator) George Smathers, recalls that “he told me he didn’t like being a politician. He wanted to be a writer.… Politics wasn’t his bag at all.” And, Smathers recalls, “He was so shy … one of the shyest fellows I’d ever seen. If you had to pick a member of that [1947] freshman class who would probably wind up as President, Kennedy was probably the least likely.” The House bored him, said his father’s friend Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas. “He never seemed to get into … political action, or any idea of promoting this or reforming that—nothing. He was sort of drifting.… He became more of a playboy.” The men who ran the House agreed. Sam Rayburn called him “a good boy” but “one of the laziest men I ever talked to.”

McCarthy was a friend of Joseph Kennedy Sr., a friend of the whole Kennedy family; in fact, Kennedy had been the only Democratic senator not to vote for McCarthy’s censure.

“Johnson thinks the campaign is in Washington,” Kennedy said one day to Ted Sorensen. “It’s not. It’s out here.”

Just to the left of the cafeteria entrance was a cash register, and beyond it was a large round table, at which, every morning, Joe McCarthy sat, with three or four staff members from his Senate Investigations Subcommittee, and this morning there was a new staff member at the table: the subcommittee’s newly appointed assistant counsel, twenty-seven-year-old Bobby Kennedy.

Even should Congress wish to, it can’t get around that barrier. “Any formal allocation of power to the Vice President would conflict with the clause in the Constitution vesting the undivided ‘executive power’ in the President,” stated one study of the situation. There was, moreover, a further barrier. The various great departments of government—not only the Department of Agriculture, the Department of the Interior, all the departments whose heads sat as the President’s Cabinet—but other major if non-Cabinet-level federal agencies as well had been established by law: by statutes enacted by Congress. In establishing these departments, Congress had laid out boundaries, statutory boundaries, of their authority. Powers delegated to a Vice President by a President might infringe on those statutory powers. This conflict—and the weakness of the Vice President’s role in it—had become clear during a President’s attempt to give his Vice President what was accurately called “the only big job ever handed a Vice President” during the almost two centuries the United States had been in existence: the executive order that Franklin Roosevelt issued in July, 1941, after, with war looming, he had declared a state of national emergency. “By virtue of the existence of the emergency,” he created an Economic Defense Board to coordinate planning for the looming war with broad powers over areas such as imports, exports and the stockpiling of strategic materials, and made Vice President Henry A. Wal...

“I now know the difference between a caucus and a cactus,” he told Baker. “In a cactus, all the pricks are on the outside.”

“Just when you get Bobby typed as the white hope, compassionate, he’ll do something so bad it’ll jar you completely, destroy your faith in him,” a journalist wrote. “And just as you’re ready to accept the excessive condemnations, to accept him as ruthless and diabolical, he’ll do something so classy it stuns you. The inescapable truth about Robert Kennedy is that the paradoxes are real, the conflicts do exist.” Said another, “From one day to the next, you never know which Bobby Kennedy you’re going to meet.”

“To help that one-fifth of all American families with incomes too small to even meet their basic needs,” he said, “our chief weapons … will be better schools, and better health, and better homes, and better training, and better job opportunities to help more Americans, especially young Americans, escape from squalor and misery and unemployment rolls.”

JFK was more intellectual, urbane, sophisticated, witty. RFK was more passionate, more daring, more radical.”