The History Channel original podcast.
History this week, January 8, 1964.
I'm Sallie Helm. Mrs.
Speaker, the President of the United States.
applause A joint session of Congress.
The chamber is full of men in dark suits.
They all rise to applaud President Lyndon Baines Johnson as he makes his way through the crowd.
Johnson is here to give...
he invokes Kennedy's name early on.
Let us carry forward the plans and programs of John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
Not because of our sorrow or sympathy, but because they are right.
But then, over the course of the next 30 odd minutes, he says Kennedy's name only twice more.
Johnson is at this point immensely popular in the country.
His approval rating is over 75 percent.
He's stepped up to lead in a time of crisis.
And what is the legacy of the war he started?
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On a spring evening in 1967, 24 -year -old Doris Kearns is in a ballroom at the White House.
And President Lyndon Baines Johnson walks right up to her.
That's the first time I'd ever seen him.
And he came over and asked me to dance.
By the time we talked to her for this episode, Doris Kearns Goodwin had come a long way from that young person in the White House ballroom.
She's a Pulitzer Prize -winning presidential historian, a foremost expert on President Johnson.
We were so excited to talk to her for this episode, especially because she really knew LBJ.
She even helped him write his memoirs.
That first meeting, it happened at a celebration for the 16 new members of the White House Fellows Program.
This was a highly competitive opportunity for young Americans to spend a year working in the executive branch.
And Goodwin was one of the fellows.
Only three women, so it wasn't that peculiar.
He asked each one of us to dance, but nonetheless, right away he started talking, and his face came alive.
Goodwin didn't fully agree with Johnson's politics.
She was against the Vietnam War.
In fact, she'd written a yet -to -be -published article critical of LBJ and his handling of the conflict.
And she had a certain idea of the president in her head.
I had this caricature of him, like so many of my generation, with ears hanging down and his eyes squinting, and his expression was always very stern.
But now she's looking at that face in person.
Suddenly, here's this character, you know, who is dancing very well.
Six -person senior class in Johnson City, Texas, and graduated at age 15 in 1924.
Then he drifted around, worked for a while as an elevator operator in California, studied to be a teacher.
And when the Depression hit...
His own family struggled, and many of their neighbors struggled far more.
During this time, Johnson got a job teaching at a segregated school in Catula, Texas, on the Mexican border.
Goodwin said that was the experience that really shaped his views on poverty.
He talked to me about it endlessly.
He talked to everybody who would listen about it endlessly.
And he would say that his students were so poor, they came to school without breakfast, they were hungry.
And he could see the pain on their faces.
Johnson threw himself into the job.
He taught two grades.
He was the band leader.
He was the softball coach.
He gave up part of his first salary to buy sports equipment for them.
He was the chorus leader.
I can't even imagine him as the chorus leader.
You know, he was like a one -man band.
But eventually, he decides that his true calling is in politics.
He gets a job as a congressional aide in Washington, works tirelessly, makes a name for himself as capable and ambitious.
In 1935, he's appointed as the Texas head of the National Youth Administration.
In pursuing it. In 1937, Johnson is elected as one of the youngest congressmen in the country.
After World War II, he's elected to the Senate, where he becomes minority leader, then majority leader, one of the most effective Senate majority leaders in history.
He's ruthless in his use of information.
He knows everything that he can possibly put together about the political interests and the personal foibles of his colleagues.
And he will both appeal to interests but also threaten when necessary.
Even his size can be intimidating, the famous Johnson treatment where he will get into your personal space.
He was about six -foot -four.
It's never violent, but he is physically intimidated.
And with the election of 1960, Johnson's political rise continues when John F.
Kennedy chooses him as his running mate.
Kennedy, Kennedy, Kennedy, Kennedy, Kennedy, Kennedy, Kennedy, Kennedy, Kennedy, Kennedy.
Kennedy doesn't choose Johnson because he likes him particularly.
It's certainly no personal affection for Johnson or even a sense that, you know, he would be an active partner in the presidency.
The two of them come from very different backgrounds.
Kennedy was rich. In 1937, the same year that Johnson became one of the youngest people elected to Congress at 28, a 20 -year -old Jack Kennedy went on a summer tour of Europe in a convertible he had shipped across the Atlantic.
The next year, 1938, Kennedy inherited a million dollars.
So the two men are different, and some of their differences have political advantages.
Johnson is a moderate Southern Democrat.
He's an experienced politician and a Protestant.
Kennedy is young, Catholic, from the North.
So the idea is that Johnson can help deliver voters that Kennedy couldn't reach on his own and especially help deliver LBJ's home state of Texas, which has historically gone for the Democrats but has been trending more and more red.
And it works. Kennedy wins Texas, wins the election, and gets sworn in as president.
And Lyndon Johnson goes from being an extremely powerful voice in the Senate to sitting around.
People keep wondering why in the world did he ever take the job of being vice president?
And I think part of it is that all of his life, he had taken insignificant positions and somehow made them powerful.
From the days when he was in college and he was mopping floors outside the president of the college's office and somehow worked his way into becoming the president's messenger.
And then the next thing you know it, he's the president's chief of staff in a certain sense.
As vice president, he can't really do that.
He's given a few real tasks.
He leads a commission on employment discrimination.
He travels around on foreign policy expeditions.
But he's cut out of the action.
He was miserable. There's no question about that.
I mean he made this crazy statement.
He said, I don't even know exactly what it meant.
He said like he felt like he was a Texas steer.
A Texas steer is evidently a steer who's lost all his social standing.
But he hated the ceremonial duties.
He wanted to be doing something.
He was so used to doing something that mattered.
And he said he detested every minute of being.
We're really floundering around to figure out, you know, what poverty was in a real sense.
You know, the statistically and kind of at the community level.
Let alone how you might approach it programmatically.
President Johnson knew what poverty was from his own upbringing in Texas' Hill Country and his experience in Kautula.
And now he wants his advisors to figure it out quick.
He comes up with an extra $500 million for the anti -poverty effort, bringing the total budget allocation to around $1 billion.
And he decides to announce the program in January at his State of the Union address.
The State of the Union speech is a tremendous opportunity to shape the dialogue and to present your message and your vision to the country.
And that's amplified for Johnson in this situation.
He's just taken over for John F.
Kennedy and has to stand for re -election.
He wants this poverty initiative to sound bold and dramatic and important.
And he and his speechwriters are having trouble striking the right tone.
They were having difficulty coming up with a phrase that would capture what this program would be.
Something that wasn't overly academic, that wasn't pedantic, that wasn't insulting to the people.
It will not be a short or easy struggle.
No single weapon or strategy will suffice.
But we shall not rest until that war is won.
The speech goes over big.
The next day, the New York Times is already calling it a, quote, classic political document.
But McKee says, you have to remember, declaring war on anything comes with big risks.
Shriver and his team draft the Economic Opportunity Act, which creates a brand new executive agency called the Office of Economic Opportunity, the OEO.
Its efforts will center around a brand new concept.
The idea that ultimately comes most associated with the war on poverty is one called community action.
Community action. This was the idea that you would give poor people themselves as the legislation stated, maximum feasible participation in developing the programs that would be implemented in their own communities.
This is really an unprecedented idea in American government at the time.
There had never really been a program like this that shifted authority down to the ground level.
For the time, community action was radical.
It had been tested out in a few small -scale studies around the country.
But this will be the big test.
And when the president first hears about it, Lyndon Johnson initially isn't very enthusiastic about it because he's, you know, what, you can actually give federal money to these committees of poor people.
As Johnson's getting his head around the idea, he reasons that, well, politicians will still be involved.
And sees it as something that will run through the existing political structure, where he took young people, put them to work, maybe funded their education, gave them some basic job skills.
And that's really where his interest in the war on poverty is and his understanding of what the core of the program would be.
McKee has listened through hours and hours of White House tapes where Johnson himself explains this idea.
Here's one from a conversation he had with Texas Representative George Mahon in 1964.
I'm going to put 150 ,000 of them to work in 90 days' time on useful, hardworking projects, teach them some discipline and when to get up and how to work all day.
And in two years, I'll have them train where they can at least drive a truck instead of sit around a pool room.
Johnson also makes clear that he sees this as a signature accomplishment, something that is his program, not President Kennedy's.
This is one I just can't lose.
This is the only Johnson proposal I've gotten, the only bill.
To help write his speech to Congress to introduce this legislation, LBJ actually recruits Doris Kearns Goodwin's future husband, Richard Goodwin, who had been a speechwriter for JFK and was then working in the leadership of the Peace Corps.
There's a tape that we listened to while my husband was still alive with Bill Moyers.
Moyers, who was Johnson's special assistant at the time, suggests that Goodwin should help write the speech.
The only person I know who can and I'm reluctant to ask him to get involved in this because right now it's in our little circle is Goodwin.
Well, I was just asking if he can't put some sex on it.
I asked him if he could put some rhyme in it.
He had some beautiful church alien phrases.
LBJ delivers his message to Congress on March 16, 1964.
It's once again that same underlying argument that he had begun to make in the State of the Union that what poverty represented was not simply a loss of jobs, but for large numbers of people, they were on the outside looking in.
They didn't have a chance because they didn't have the right opportunities to rise to the level of their talent and discipline.
After some classic LBJ wheeling and dealing, he signs the Economic Opportunity Act into law on August 20th.
It is a major victory.
That summer, Johnson has also signed the Civil Rights Act, which is perhaps his most important legacy.
He's showing that he can get things done.
I think it does play into that feeling that he has been a successful president in his first year after taking office in the midst of this intense crisis following the assassination.
In November, Johnson wins re -election on his own terms.
And I just wished he had lived to see that.
But back in LBJ's time, the Office of Economic Opportunity and the idea of community action still remain the centerpiece of the war on poverty.
And soon, cracks begin to form.
As you get into 1965, things started to go wrong pretty quickly.
Every city or community that starts a community action program actually does give authority to the participants in that program.
Remember, Johnson had been skeptical of that idea from the start, but community action goes ahead.
The participants set up programs that they think will be good for their communities.
In Louisville, Kentucky, for example, community action boards set up programs for youth counseling, remedial reading, after -school recreation.
Some of those programs are pretty successful.
Here's a documentary that OEO recorded in the late 60s in Avery County, North Carolina.
It's called Beyond These Hills.
They began to hear about something called community action.
People getting together to improve their lives through a chain of concern that reached out from their own valley all the way back to Washington.
In less than two years, through this new idea of community action, they have built a water system, begun a handcraft industry, and changed the pattern of education for themselves and their children.
But community action also creates some political issues.
This very quickly comes in the conflict with the political establishment at the local level.
You know, mayors, county leaders really resist this approach because this is essentially the federal government is coming in and shifting power and authority away from local governments and local agencies where it's traditionally been located and putting it at the community level.
Johnson gets blamed by political leaders for disrupting their power and for whatever problems arise from these new programs.
For example, there were some issues with the Job Corps program where young people were brought from cities to work in rural areas.
They're called riots.
I think that's a little strong.
But basically bored kids with nothing to do and access to beer and stuff goes wrong.
In Morganfield, Kentucky, young men from the city working in the Job Corps living in Camp Breckenridge, quote, rioted.
A newspaper article from the time makes it sound like their big complaint was that the food was bad.
One of the people running Camp Breckenridge said they were upset about everything from, quote, poor potatoes in the cafeteria to not enough girls.
They end up vandalizing some property and actually even injuring a firefighter who responds to the scene.
All these things, whether they're major incidents or not, get a lot of press attention.
And by mid -1965, late 1965, there's kind of a growing public perception and political perception that the war on poverty has gone off the rails.
And Lyndon Johnson starts to have serious doubts about his own administration's policies.
Johnson himself has never bought into community action.
He bitterly resents the fact that this has slipped into his own signature policy initiative.
So there are a number of conversations all through this period where he is ranting against community action.
Poverty and especially community action for Johnson becomes kind of a symbol of this.
It's this remarkable situation where you have a president pushing back against a program that his own administration has created that just a few years before was seen as kind of one of his major accomplishments.
In 1966, Congress passes amendments to the Economic Opportunity Act, stripping community action boards of much of their power.
The boards still exist, even to this day, but in a much more watered -down form than what was originally intended.
There's this kind of public sense that this idealistic vision a few years before isn't actually playing out.
And of course, that connects to backlash against the Civil Rights Act and the movement, urban revolts, the Vietnam War and the anti -war movement.
By 1968, things have gotten so bad for LBJ that he chooses not to run for re -election.
He doesn't even try to hold onto the office he had sought for decades.
He felt that he wasn't effective anymore at passing key legislation.
There's a recorded conversation.
I think it's about two days before he gives the televised address where he withdraws his name from consideration.
He's talking to an advisor about getting a bill passed, and the advisor says, Yeah, sir, you can get this done.
You're the master of the Senate.
And Johnson pauses and responds to him and says, I ain't the master of the Senate.
I ain't the master of nothing.
So I'm not master of nothing.
I just haven't got it.
And we cannot make this Congress do one damn thing that I know of.
Hubert Humphrey becomes the Democratic nominee and loses to Richard Nixon.
At first, Nixon actually keeps the Office of Economic Opportunity running, but Ronald Reagan formally dissolves it in 1981.
Still, many of its programs get absorbed into other departments and are still around today.
Programs like the Job Corps, Head Start, and even the Community Action Program.
And beyond these programs, that broader war on poverty, a large part of Johnson's Great Society, had a massive impact.
Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, enhanced social security, all of that really brought poverty down.
As of 2019, the poverty rate in the U .S.
was around half what it was before the war on poverty began.
Yet in many ways, the effort is seen as a failure, because poverty is still such an issue in the country.
Especially today, when you think that, you know, COVID has made so clear to all of us that poverty is still heartbreakingly widespread.
It's not simply that people, as a more thought -out program, they might have had even more effect and more success.
Doris Kearns Goodwin heard that basic argument from LBJ himself.
He explained it in a way that only he could.
The metaphor that he constantly used that, you know, both the war on poverty and the Great Society were somehow going to turn into a beautiful woman.
I mean, he kept talking about this with me, that he figured her growth would be as natural as any small child.
You know, in the first year, she would start, you know, crawling, and then she'd start walking, and then she'd start running.
And then someday she'd be so beautiful that everyone would fall in love with her, and that once they did, they'd want to keep her around forever and make her a permanent part of American life, even more than the New Deal.
So that was his dream, that somehow all of these programs would come together and they would deal with the structural inequities in the country.
So he was way ahead on all of this, and I think deserves to be remembered for that.
The war on poverty is still being waged, but it's worth remembering.
Its programs did help lift millions of people out of poverty, which is a victory, even if we haven't won the war.
Thanks for listening to History This Week.
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This episode was produced by Ben Dikstein.
History This Week is also produced by McCamey Lynn, Julie McGruder, and me, Sally Helm.
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