Três grandes presidentes — FDR, Lyndon Johnson e Reagan — e uma grande promessa: Biden - John Kenneth White

  Joe Biden's surprising presidency

John Kenneth White

The Hill, Washington DC – 8.4.2021

 

As Joe Biden approaches the 100-day mark, his presidency has been full of surprises. A $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan replete with life-changing provisions, including a monthly child tax credit, renovations to long-neglected school buildings, help for small businesses and extended unemployment insurance, is on the law books.

And Biden is just getting started. A $2.5 trillion, eight-year American Jobs Plan to repair roads, bridges, rail and water lines; enhance solar and wind development; create highway electrical charging stations; provide high-speed broadband; help manufacturing; promote elderly home care; and develop agricultural plans to capture carbon from the atmosphere is up next. These plans have broad public support. According to a March poll, 75 percent of voters approve of the American Rescue Plan,including 59 percent of Republicans.And 54 percent support infrastructure improvements, even if it means tax increases on those earning more than $400,000 per year. This gives Biden significant political capital, something George W. Bush claimed to have after his 2004 reelection but could never manage to deposit.

In 2020, Biden promised to restore “the soul of America,” a slogan that drew upon Franklin D. Roosevelt’s description of the presidency as a place of “moral leadership.” Biden’s call for restoring traditional values and norms appealed to an exhausted nation, much in the same way that Warren G. Harding won support from a weary nation following World War I.Campaigning in 1920, Harding declared: “America’s present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration; not agitation, but adjustment; not surgery, but serenity; not the dramatic, but the dispassionate; not experiment, but equipoise.”

Like Harding, Biden’s critics saw him as someone who lacked intellectual heft and bent with the shifting political winds. His 1988 presidential campaign ended when Biden plagiarized a speech by British Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock. His opposition to school busing, sponsorship of the 1994 crime bill and handling of Anita Hill’s testimony about Clarence Thomas constructed a case that a Biden presidency would bend to the storms of the moment. Pundits saw Biden as a good retail politician whose cheery persona and story of triumph over tragedy appealed to voters. Democrats saw him as the best candidate to beat Donald Trump. 

Thus, at the start of Biden’s 2020 campaign, restoration, not revolution, was its byword. But the coronavirus pandemic created opportunities for President Biden to do big things that Candidate Biden never quite envisioned. In this, Biden’s presidency bears striking similarities to the surprising presidencies of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Lyndon B. Johnson and Ronald Reagan, who eviscerated preexisting conceptions of how they would behave upon entering the Oval Office. 

Seeking the presidency in 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt was viewed as a political lightweight. New York Herald Tribune columnist Walter Lippmann derisively greeted Roosevelt’s candidacy: “Franklin D. Roosevelt is no crusader. He is no tribune of the people. He is no enemy of entrenched privilege. He is a pleasant man, who, without any important qualifications for the office, would very much like to be President.”

Liberals saw Roosevelt as a privileged dilettante and likened him to a cheerful Boy Scout, a man of “slightly unnatural sunniness” as Edmund Wilson described him. Taking note of these criticisms, H.L. Mencken reported that the Democratic Party nominated “the weakest candidate before it.” These expectations were decidedly off-the-mark, and Roosevelt’s New Deal cemented his legacy in the annals of the all-time great presidents.

Lyndon B. Johnson likewise defied expectations. In a 1949 maiden speech before the U.S. Senate, Johnson led a filibuster to Harry Truman’s civil rights proposals that outlawed lynching, prohibited employment discrimination and eliminated obstacles preventing African Americans from voting. Rising from his desk Johnson declared that “We of the South” saw the filibuster as “the last defense of reason, the sole defense of minorities [i.e., Southerners] who might be victimized by prejudice.”

But as president, this sensitive Southern Democrat spearheaded passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Bill, saying: “I always vowed that if I ever had the power, I’d make sure every Negro had the same chance as every white man. Now I have it. And I’m going to use it.” Johnson’s Great Society and his civil rights program forever changed America.

Ronald Reagan also defied expectations. Pundits saw Reagan as a washed-up, ex-Hollywood actor who was intellectually lazy and spoke only from cue cards. Reagan’s blatant disregard for facts led his critics, in the words of his pollster Richard Wirthlin, to view him as “dumb, dangerous, and a distorter of facts.” Gerald Ford decried Reagan’s “simplistic solutions to hideously complex problems”; “his conviction that he was always right in every argument”; and his penchant to “conserve his energy.” But as Barack Obama later acknowledged, President Reagan “changed the trajectory of America.” From 1980 to 2020, Reagan’s vision of “a smaller government; a greater America” stood as a touchstone.

The surprising presidencies of Roosevelt, Johnson and Reagan have much in common. Historian Robert Caro writes that “power reveals.” In each case, those presidents who changed America harbored deep convictions. Perhaps the most revealing moment of what was to come was Biden’s whisper in Barack Obama’s ear that the Affordable Care Act was “a big f-----g deal.” As president, Biden wants more BFDs, and the American Rescue Plan and American Jobs Plan are just the start. Like Roosevelt, Johnson and Reagan, Biden is an adroit politician who knows how to seize the moment. 

The Great Depression set the stage for Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Civil rights marches and police armed with dogs and billy clubs provided the backdrop for Lyndon Johnson to pass landmark civil rights legislation. Double-digit inflation and unemployment created opportunities for Ronald Reagan to cut taxes and curb government spending. At his press conference, Biden noted that successful presidents “know how to time what they’re doing — order it, decide, and prioritize what needs to be done.” 

As it turned out, Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan sought the presidency not merely for the honor it bestowed but to change the country. Defending the new office, Alexander Hamilton famously declared, “Energy in the executive is a leading character in the definition of good government.” Like his predecessors, time and chance have made “Sleepy Joe” both energetic and surprising. Once more, the pundits have been proven wrong. And, like his predecessors, Joe Biden is out to change the country. 

 

John Kenneth White is a professor of politics at The Catholic University of America and author of “What Happened to the Republican Party?”

Book review: a politica latino-americana dos EUA nos anos 1960 - Thomas Allcock on Thomas C. Mann (DoState)

Foss on Allcock, 'Thomas C. Mann: President Johnson, the Cold War, and the Restructuring of Latin American Foreign Policy' [review]

by H-Net Reviews

Thomas Tunstall Allcock. Thomas C. Mann: President Johnson, the Cold War, and the Restructuring of Latin American Foreign Policy. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2018. 284 pp. $60.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8131-7615-4.

Reviewed by Chris Foss (University of Portland) 

Published on H-Diplo (May, 2019) 

Commissioned by Seth Offenbach (Bronx Community College, The City University of New York)

Printable Version: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=53794

In a 2012 essay on US president Lyndon Johnson’s Latin American foreign policy, historian Alan McPherson noted the lack of a full-length monograph on the topic. This is true no more, thanks to Thomas Tunstall Allcock. Thomas C. Mann focuses on both Johnson and Mann, who served first as Johnson’s chief Latin American adviser in the State Department, and then as undersecretary of state for economic affairs. Tunstall Allcock succeeds at synthesizing existing literature on the Johnson/Mann years with new findings gleaned from extensive primary source research. In contrast to McPherson’s contention that Johnson was a transitional president on Latin American policy between President John Kennedy’s sunny optimism and emphasis on development and Richard Nixon’s more realistic, cynical approach, Tunstall Allcock argues that Johnson and Mann continued Kennedy’s policies, infusing them with a mix of ideas from the New Deal and Good Neighbor Policy, under which they came of age during the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration.[1]

Often directly addressing critics of Mann, Tunstall Allcock paints him as a staunch anticommunist concerned with maintaining US interests who “also favored sustainable aid programs and regional integration initiatives” (p. 3). This view dovetailed with Johnson’s, for whom Latin America held a lifelong interest. Though he contends Johnson’s record in the region is “mixed” (p. 4), Tunstall Allcock eschews the idea that the Johnson/Mann years were regressive and ineffective. Kennedy partisans who saw Johnson as an imposter president claimed Johnson and Mann abandoned Kennedy’s policies, particularly his Latin American-oriented Alliance for Progress. Tunstall Allcock shows, however, that the Johnson administration “wedded New Deal ideals, aspects of modernization thinking, and traditional summit diplomacy to propose a new direction for hemispheric affairs” (p. 7) while still maintaining the Alliance.

Tunstall Allcock provides a brief biography of Mann that expertly displays his ideological approach and how it not only lined up with Johnson’s, but differed little from Kennedy’s. The author shows how Mann’s pre-Johnson career combined constructive achievements with an overriding commitment to US hemispheric security that carried over into his work with Johnson. Mann grew up learning Spanish and practicing law, credentials that qualified him for many years of Latin American duty during his Foreign Service career. Starting as an adviser to the Uruguayan government during World War II, Mann tried to hew to the Good Neighbor policy of nonintervention as often as possible, while aiding Latin American economic development. In the late 1950s his conviction grew that more should be done to diversify regional economies to avoid either communist revolution or US intervention. It might seem natural that he would mold Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress, but Mann was seen as a Dwight Eisenhower-era holdover and was thus instead dispatched to Mexico, where he was ambassador until Kennedy’s assassination.

Johnson inherited an Alliance that Tunstall Allcock argues was already teetering due to bureaucratic squabbles and myopia. While nominally set up as a multilateral development fund for Latin America, from an early date it was clear that the Alliance was not a multilateral institution, as its funding was controlled by an impatient Congress, which regularly slashed Kennedy’s foreign aid budget. Influential adviser Walt Rostow’s one-size-fits-all modernization theory also hampered the Alliance, influencing policymakers preconditioned to view Latin America as a homogeneous region. Already by Kennedy’s death a new push for private investment in Latin America was underway, along with a shift away from a preference toward democratic governments to more support for anticommunist dictatorships. That did not protect Johnson and Mann from the wrath of critics who felt the new president did not live up to the Alliance’s promise. Press coverage of their Latin American policy hit an early nadir with the March 18, 1964, “Mann Doctrine” speech, reported with the headline “U.S. May Abandon Efforts to Deter Latin Dictators” (p. 82). Although the Kennedy administration had recognized Guatemala’s military dictatorship and was providing $1 billion annually to Latin American militaries in counterinsurgency funds used for internal repression (p. 87), the Mann Doctrine made it seem as though Johnson’s team had regressed in the region.

At the same time, the administration badly handled rioting in the Panama Canal Zone and a military coup in Brazil. In Panama, although Tunstall Allcock contends that “the skill and flexibility with which Johnson and Mann would steer the crisis to a satisfactory conclusion would be impressive” (p. 91), the United States was committed to security above all else. Reports that Johnson was ready to invade Panama if its government collapsed amid the rioting, combined with press leaks of contradictory early reports on the progress of talks between the US and Panamanian governments, suggested that Johnson and Mann did not have a clear strategy. In Brazil, Johnson welcomed General Humberto Castelo Branco when he was installed as president, believing military rule would be temporary. Short-term economic prosperity—fueled in part by Alliance aid—followed under a US-friendly regime. But Branco installed a repressive military dictatorship, confirming critics’ fears that dictatorships were acceptable to the Johnson administration. Tunstall Allcock counters that the coup was largely driven by domestic Brazilian factors. To the extent that the United States played a role, Kennedy’s CIA funded Brazilian state governors who opposed former president Joào Goulart. But he also notes that because Johnson hastily expressed public support for Branco, he limited US ability to restrain the military in the future, while providing “those looking for evidence that US support for democracy in the hemisphere was dead and buried … with a perfect example” (p. 115).

The 1965 US intervention in the Dominican Republic is oft-examined by historians of Johnson’s Latin American policy, but Tunstall Allcock adds a useful analysis. Johnson intervened in the civil war between military leaders and rebel supporters of the ousted president Juan Bosch because “domestic pressures and global credibility outweighed the importance of continuing to rebuild his administration’s reputation in Latin America” (p. 148). Mann contended the intervention was “self-defense” (p. 150), arguing that subversion by nonstate actors, even if it appeared to be in the name of a domestic revolution, justified US intervention. What was really nothing more than a civil war “was quickly subsumed into dominant Cold War paradigms” built on shaky justifications (p. 152). Tunstall Allcock adds a discussion of Mann’s visit to Santo Domingo to urge the warring sides to negotiate, arguing that he rejected a compromise plan hatched there by national security adviser McGeorge Bundy not because he favored military rule—as critics would later claim—but because he thought it was a bad plan that would lead to another coup or indefinite US occupation. He did himself no favors, however, in testimony to Senate Foreign Relations Committee chair J. William Fulbright, by taking a hard-line anticommunist tack. Fulbright accused the Johnson administration of lying and overreacting, and thus it was amid the Dominican crisis that the credibility gap opened which consumed the Johnson presidency. Even the triumph of Joaquín Balaguer over Bosch in fresh elections in 1966 involved deceit, as Johnson and Mann funneled CIA support to Balaguer. The author urges the reader to see Johnson as more than just an imperialist, that the president and Mann tried to hew a middle way between communism and a return to military rule. In the end, though, the Cold War security doctrine came first, and Tunstall Allcock rightly concludes that the Dominican crisis was disastrous for all parties.

If Tunstall Allcock’s focus on Mann is one of this book’s unique contributions to the historiography of Johnson in Latin America, the other is his analysis of Johnson’s post-Dominican inter-American policy: from 1965 to 1968, he contends Johnson was more engaged in Latin America than is commonly believed. At a conference in Rio de Janeiro in November 1965, Secretary of State Dean Rusk advocated for making some Alliance programs permanent. In 1967, Johnson—with behind-the-scenes support from the now-retired Mann—tried to make another big splash with a conference at Punta del Este, Uruguay. There Johnson pushed for multinational development projects and a hemispheric common market, and held bilateral meetings with Latin American leaders. In 1968, the United States achieved a coffee-price stabilization agreement Mann had long hoped for, and in July the president visited Central American leaders in El Salvador. These heads of state worried, though, that the US commitment to the Alliance was tenuous, and they were correct, as Congress slashed Johnson’s final Alliance aid request in half. Even so, Tunstall Allcock emphasizes that Johnson’s efforts “reflect a genuine, if flawed, attempt by a beleaguered administration to breathe some life back into” the Alliance (p. 203).

A continued emphasis on security over development stunted the Alliance in the Johnson administration’s waning years. Tunstall Allcock believes the United States invited the 1966 military coup against Argentine president Arturo Illia through its policy of orienting Latin American militaries away from external defense and toward rooting out internal subversion. When the Peruvian military deposed President Fernando Belaúnde Terry, Johnson suspended diplomatic relations only temporarily. When Omar Torrijos seized power in Panama, Mann advised Johnson to extend recognition after a brief delay, not wanting to jeopardize the Panama Canal renegotiations he had painstakingly started in 1964. In the end, for Johnson, “Latin America had proved another frustrating foreign policy challenge” (p. 212), representing “the last significant effort of an era characterized by the belief that the United States could further its own interests by encouraging Latin American modernization and economic development through various forms of aid and assistance” (p. 214). As his successor, Richard Nixon, stated bluntly: “Latin America doesn’t matter” (p. 214).

Thomas C. Mann is an enjoyable and informative read. In just 220 pages—many adorned with excellent illustrations—Tunstall Allcock provides broad and deep coverage, putting his own spin on well-worn historiographical turf, while highlighting Johnson and Mann’s hemisphere-wide strategy. Although Tunstall Allcock is sympathetic to his subjects, he is hardly a gadfly revisionist. The argument is carefully crafted and often repeated, emphasizing that while Johnson and Mann were more committed to the Alliance than their critics believed, they should still be taken to task for their shortcomings. Tunstall Allcock also does well to acknowledge other Latin American historians as his Beltway-centered work often draws on their multi-archival scholarship. The book also points toward exciting new directions in the literature of Johnson and Latin America. For instance, Tunstall Allcock analyzes Mann’s professional background and Latin American policy, but does not offer a comprehensive biography. In an era in which most prominent State Department employees are political appointees, a work highlighting a career Foreign Service officer would be welcome. More also needs to be written on the Johnson administration’s Latin American interventions beyond Panama, Brazil, and the Dominican Republic. The Johnson team’s failure to prevent a military coup in Argentina, in particular, bears closer inspection, as it triggered economic instability, civil war, and brutal military rule that vexed Americans and Argentines for nearly two decades. Dustin Walcher’s forthcoming manuscript will hopefully close this gap, but as Tunstall Allcock’s all-too-brief discussions of Bolivia and Peru demonstrate, others remain.[2]

In all, Tunstall Allcock has crafted an excellent monograph that should be required reading for Johnson and foreign relations scholars. It is also timely, as President Donald Trump becomes further embroiled in Latin America. His support for Venezuela’s Juan Guaidó, on the one hand, harkens to earlier visions Washington once held for hemispheric uplift. On the other hand, Trump’s divisive anti-immigration rhetoric, mainly projected toward Mexico and Central America, reminds us of the legacy of Cold War-era presidential administrations that US security should matter above all else. Even with all the inter-American changes since the end of the Cold War, that doctrine—whether named for Mann, Johnson, or even Trump—has remained.

Notes

[1]. Alan MacPherson, “Latin America,” in A Companion to Lyndon B. Johnson, ed. Mitchell B. Lerner (Hoboken, NJ: Blackwell Publishing, 2012), 400.

[2]. See David M.K. Sheinin, Argentina and the United States: An Alliance Contained (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006); William Michael Schmidli, The Fate of Freedom Elsewhere: Human Rights and U.S. Cold War Policy toward Argentina (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013); and Dustin Walcher, Containing Social Revolution: Argentina and the International Liberal Order, 1955-1969 (book manuscript in preparation).

Chris Foss is an adjunct history professor at the University of Portland and Tokyo International University of America. Foss received his PhD in US foreign relations history from the University of Colorado in 2016. His book manuscript, Facing the World: National Security and International Trade in the Pacific Northwest since World War II, will be published by Oregon State University Press in spring 2020. Foss has written for Oregon Historical Quarterly, Pacific Northwest Quarterly, Passport, The History Teacher, and Oregon Encyclopedia. Foss is researching a manuscript on Edith Green, who represented Oregon’s Third Congressional District from 1955 to 1974.

Citation: Chris Foss. Review of Allcock, Thomas Tunstall, Thomas C. Mann: President Johnson, the Cold War, and the Restructuring of Latin American Foreign Policy. H-Diplo, H-Net Reviews. May, 2019. URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=53794

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

USA: The Great Society at Fifty, a historical reappraisal, by Karen Tumulty (The Washington Post)

The Great Society at 50

LBJ’s unprecedented and ambitious domestic vision changed the nation. Half a century later, it continues to define politics and power in America.

Written by Karen Tumulty

The Washington Post, May 17, 2014

http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2014/05/17/the-great-society-at-50/?wpisrc=nl_hdln

Interactive Table with the achievements:  http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/national/great-society-at-50/

President Lyndon B. Johnson launched the most ambitious set of social programs ever undertaken in the United States. In just a few years, Congress churned out nearly 200 new laws. The "Great Society," as the effort became known, also launched a decades-long political battle that still rages over the size and role of the federal government. This is the first of four stories examining the legacy of the "Great Society". 

One day shortly after starting his new job as presidential adviser and speechwriter, Richard N. Goodwin was summoned to see the boss. Not to the Oval Office, but to the White House swimming pool, where Lyndon B. Johnson often went to ruminate.

Goodwin found the leader of the free world naked, doing a languorous sidestroke. Johnson invited him and top aide Bill Moyers to doff their own clothes: “Come on in, boys. It’ll do you good.”

It was an unorthodox manner of conducting official business. As they bobbed in the tepid water, the president “began to talk as if he were addressing some larger, imagined audience of the mind,” Goodwin later wrote in his memoir.

The 32-year-old speechwriter forgot his chagrin as he was drawn by “the powerful flow of Johnson’s will, exhorting, explaining, trying to tell me something about himself, seeking not agreement — he knew he had that — butbelief.”

This happened in early April 1964, just a little more than four months after a tragedy in Dallas had made Johnson the 36th president of the United States.

“I never thought I’d have the power,” Johnson told Goodwin and Moyers. “I wanted power to use it. And I’m going to use it.”

 “We’ve got to use the Kennedy program as a springboard to take on the Congress, summon the states to new heights, create a Johnson program, different in tone, fighting and aggressive,” he said. “Hell, we’ve barely begun to solve our problems. And we can do it all.”

Johnson’s vision would come to be known as the Great Society — the most ambitious effort ever to test what American government is capable of achieving. And in doing so, to discover what it is not.

In laying it out, LBJ even set out a specific time frame for it to come to fruition — 50 years, a mark that will be reached on Thursday. Johnson launched his program with a University of Michigan commencement address, delivered on the clear, humid morning of May 22, 1964, in Ann Arbor.

Today, the laws enacted between 1964 and 1968 are woven into the fabric of American life, in ways big and small. They have knocked down racial barriers, provided health care for the elderly and food for the poor, sustained orchestras and museums in cities across the country, put seat belts and padded dashboards in every automobile, garnished Connecticut Avenue in Northwest Washington with red oaks.

“We are living in Lyndon Johnson’s America,” said Joseph A. Califano Jr., who was LBJ’s top domestic policy adviser from 1965 through the end of his presidency. “This country is more the country of Lyndon Johnson than any other president.”

The backlash against the Great Society has been as enduring as its successes.

Virtually every political battle that rages today has roots in the federal expansion and experimentation that began in the 1960s. It set terms of engagement for ideological warfare over how to grapple with income inequality, whether to encourage a common curriculum in schools, affirmative action, immigration, even whether to strip federal funding for National Public Radio. (Yes, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is another Great Society program.)

Many Great Society programs are now so popular it is hard to imagine the country as we know it without them. Others — including some of its more grandiose urban renewal efforts — are generally regarded as failures. Poverty remains with us, with the two parties in deep disagreement over whether government has alleviated it or made it harder to escape.

When Johnson spoke that day in Michigan, before a crowd of 70,000, the country was enjoying unprecedented affluence.

So he beckoned Americans to consider what they could do with their riches, to imagine ahead — to today — a time that many who heard his words have lived to see.

“The challenge of the next half-century is whether we have the wisdom to use that wealth to enrich and elevate our national life and to advance the quality of our American civilization,” the president said. “Your imagination and your initiative and your indignation will determine whether we build a society where progress is the servant of our needs or a society where old values and new visions are buried under unbridled growth. For in your time, we have the opportunity to move not only toward the rich society and the powerful society but upward to the Great Society.”

The import of that pronouncement was lost on the graduates of the Michigan Class of 1964. Their college years had been framed by the thrill of John F. Kennedy’s election when they were freshman and the heartbreak of his death when they were seniors. They graduated six months to the day after his assassination; their speaker was a stand-in for the president they had originally invited.

Undergraduate student-body president Roger Lowenstein sat onstage behind Johnson. When he saw the words “GREAT SOCIETY” roll by on the teleprompter — in his recollection, the phrase was underlined and written in big letters — Lowenstein snickered with Michigan Daily newspaper editor Ron Wilton, who was next to him.

“It did sound corny, and it wasn’t catchy,” said Lowenstein, who went on to become an attorney, then write for the hit TV show “L.A. Law,” and now runs a charter school in Los Angeles.

“We were just typical 21-year-old wise guys,” he said, “with complete ignorance that history was happening in front of us.”

Goodwin still has his first draft of the Great Society speech. For decades, it was boxed away in the Concord, Mass., home he shares with his wife, the historian and author Doris Kearns Goodwin.

Settled in a comfortable chair in his study, Dick Goodwin pulled eight typewritten pages from a folder. They show a work in progress: notes penciled in the margins, phrases underlined for emphasis, entire paragraphs scratched out.

“He knew his ambitions,” Goodwin said of Johnson. “When I first drafted that speech, somebody else on the staff took it upon himself to redo it so it became just another anti-poverty speech. In fact, it was rewritten. I went in to see Johnson. This was intended to be much more than anti-poverty. It was a grand master plan. Johnson had it changed back to what it had been.”

The transformation

LBJ’s brand of government activism was inspired by his idol, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the New Deal of his Depression-era youth. (At 26, he had run FDR’s National Youth Administration work and training program in Texas.)

But the reach of Johnson’s Great Society was broader, its premise even more idealistic.

“Roosevelt did not set out to start a revolution in this country. He was trying to put out the fire” of an economic catastrophe, said political scientist Norman J. Ornstein, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. “Coming at a time of prosperity, Johnson really was looking for a way to transform America.”

LBJ prodded the 89th Congress , which was seated from January 1965 to January 1967, to churn out nearly 200 major bills. It is regarded by many as the most productive legislative body in American history — and the starkest contrast imaginable to the Capitol Hill paralysis of today.

In the space of a few years came an avalanche of new laws, many of which were part of LBJ’sWar on Poverty: Civil rights protections. Medicare and Medicaid. Food stamps. Urban renewal. The first broad federal investment in elementary and high school education. Head Start and college aid. An end to what was essentially a whites-only immigration policy. Landmark consumer safety and environmental regulations. Funding that gave voice to community action groups.

Before the 1965 passage of the Voting Rights Act, which sought to bring blacks to the polls, there were believed to be about 300 African American elected officials in this country. By 1970, there were 1,469. As of 2011, there were more than 10,500, according to the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies.

One of them sits in the Oval Office.

Critics said some of the Great Society programs perpetuated the problems they aimed to solve, stirred social discontent and worked mostly to the benefit of the massive, intractable bureaucracies they created.

Enormous sums were spent on ideas that had never been tested outside of social-science theory, and some proved unworkable in the real world.

The Model Cities program, for instance, was shut down in 1974. Dick Lee, the slum-clearing mayor New Haven, Conn., who had overseen one of the most ambitious of the federally financed initiatives, once said, “If New Haven is a model city, God help America’s cities.”

The Office of Economic Opportunity, which ran the War on Poverty, was abolished in 1981.

“We were coming up with programs so fast, even Johnson could barely remember what he proposed,” Goodwin said.

Disillusionment gained force as the Vietnam War sapped Johnson of his political capital and his moral authority, and squeezed his budget.

In a 1978 book, Henry Aaron of the Brookings Institution wrote that the speed and intensity with which the country shifted gears “is unique in American political history.”

Johnson was acutely aware of that. “He was conscious of how limited time there was to get things done,” Califano said, “and how he was spending capital all the time.”

LBJ was elected in 1964 with what was then the biggest landslide in U.S. history. Just two years later in the midterm contests, his party lost three seats in the Senate, 47 in the House and eight governorships. Republicans would win five of the next six presidential elections.

Among those presidents was Ronald Reagan, who memorably said that the United States had waged a war on poverty and poverty won.

Reagan wrote in his diary on Jan. 28, 1982: “The press is dying to paint me as now trying to undo the New Deal. I remind them I voted for F.D.R. 4 times. I’m trying to undo the ‘Great Society.’ It was L.B.J.’s war on poverty that led to our present mess.”

The irony, of course, is that while Reagan and other presidents tried to eradicate Great Society programs, nearly all survived in some form, and spending on them continued to rise. The federal government has grown even larger — more than five times as big as it was in 1960, in real dollars — while public faith in it stands near all-time lows.

“That’s the paradox of the Great Society,” said Peter Berkowitz, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s conservative Hoover Institution. “It has never been more entrenched.”

The right time

The debate over the proper size and role of the federal government is a distinctly American one. In no other country has that question been argued for so long and with such intensity, going all the way back to Alexander Hamilton (who wanted a powerful central authority) and Thomas Jefferson (who feared one).

But there have also been eras when the country has opened its arms to a more expansive, muscular Washington. Sometimes, it has been because of a thirst for reform, as happened during the progressive movement of the early 20th century. At others, because the problems are so dire, as was the case with the New Deal in the 1930s.

LBJ recognized that, in the early 1960s, another set of atmospheric forces was building a storm system for government activism.

The economy was booming, ginned up by a big tax cut. America was mourning a slain president who had ignited its idealism. The civil rights movement had awakened its conscience. The nation was led by a president of unmatched legislative skills. And confidence in Washington was as high as pollsters have ever seen it.

Back then, when Americans were asked how often they trusted the federal government to do what is right, nearly 80 percent said just about always or most of the time, according to data compiled by the Pew Research Center.

That confidence would begin to erode dramatically in the mid-1960s as Vietnam and social disruption surrounding the Great Society shook Americans’ faith in the government that had brought them through the Depression and World War II.

By the end of 1966, their favorable view of Washington had declined sharply, to 65 percent — and it had a lot farther to go. It stood at 19 percent after last year’s government shutdown.

Yale Law School emeritus professor Peter Schuck, who was an official at the Department of Health, Education and Welfare during the Jimmy Carter administration, argues that the extension of the government’s reach and ambitions has deepened public cynicism.

“In short, the public views the federal government as a chronically clumsy, ineffectual, bloated giant that cannot be counted upon to do the right thing, much less do it well,” Schuck wrote in his new book, “Why Government Fails So Often.” “It does not seem to matter much to them whether the government that fails them is liberal or conservative, or how earnestly our leaders promise to remedy these failures.”

The Great Society promised too much. Sargent Shriver, whom LBJ put in charge of the War on Poverty, said that “ending poverty in this land” was actually achievable by 1976.

Decades later, Shriver reflected on why such a righteous undertaking should have become so reviled. One reason was the explosion of disorder, even riots, that followed.

“We weren’t quite prepared for the bitterness and the antagonism and the violence — in some cases, the emotional outbursts — that accompanied an effort to alleviate poverty,” Shriver told Michael Gillette, director of the LBJ Presidential Library’s oral-history program.

“There were an awful lot of people, both white and black, who had generations of pent-up feelings,” Shriver said. “. . . The placid life of most middle-class Americans was stunned, shocked, by all this social explosion, and then a lot of fear came into the hearts and minds of a lot of middle-class people — not only fear, but then real hostility.”

“There were an awful lot of people, both white and black, who had generations of pent-up feelings. . . . The placid life of most middle-class Americans was stunned, shocked, by all this social explosion, and then a lot of fear came into the hearts and minds of a lot of middle-class people — not only fear, but then real hostility.”

Liberals and conservatives disagree on why the War on Poverty fell short — whether it was abandoned or was destined to fail from the start.

“Government has crowded out civil society in many ways, inadvertently,” said House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.). “. . . The federal government has a very important role to play here. I’m not suggesting they don’t. But it needs to be a supporting role, not a commanding role, not a displacing role.”

In the past few years, the plight of those on the bottom has gotten new attention as the country has struggled to reach escape velocity from its latest recession. The disparity between the rich and the poor has grown.

Ryan, who was on the 2012 GOP presidential ticket as Mitt Romney’s running mate, said his committee did a yearlong study of federal anti-poverty initiatives and discovered that Washington is spending $800 billion on nearly 100 programs, with no accountability for results.

In March, Ryan’s committee issued a reportnoting that the official poverty rate in 2012 was 15 percent, just a couple of points lower than where it stood in 1965.

But the president’s Council of Economic Advisers uses a broader measure — including tax credits and benefits such as food assistance — that estimates that poverty has dropped by more than a third, from more than 25 percent of the population in the mid-1960s to 16 percent in 2012.

So who is right?

“Economists always argue over the ‘counterfactual’ outcome,” said Austin Nichols, senior research associate at the Urban Institute’s Income and Benefits Policy Center. “You don’t know what things would have looked like if the programs hadn’t existed, and how many external factors there are, like economic growth.”

“It’s even harder with the Great Society programs, since a lot of them were constantly being modified,” he added.

For instance, Nichols noted in a recent blog post, federal spending on food stamps “mushroomed in size in the 2000s as it was called on to replace shrinking cash welfare programs.”

For some, the Great Society clearly made life better. In 1964, despite Social Security, more than one out of three Americans over 65 were living below the poverty line, in no small part because of their medical bills. (Forty-four percent had no coverage.) Today, with Medicare available, fewer than one out of seven do.

“These endeavors didn’t just make us a better country,” President Obama said earlier this year. “They reaffirmed that we are a great country.”

The Great Society did not just seek to redistribute wealth.

Johnson also set out to shift power in America — from states to Washington, from the legislative branch to the executive, from corporations to federal regulators, from big-city political machines to community groups.

That latter concept of “community action” — funding residents of poor communities so they could organize and mobilize — was one of the Great Society’s most controversial ideas. The concept was to put the poor in a position to help themselves, but it frequently played out in tense and even violent confrontations with the existing local power structure.

It also created a new generation of up-and-coming leaders, rising from the ranks of those who had previously been disenfranchised.

“My mother was clearly the person Lyndon Johnson had in mind with civic action, and she took full advantage of that,” said Ron Kirk, the former mayor of Dallas who served as U.S. trade representative in the Obama administration.

Willie Mae Kirk, who died in September, became a renowned community organizer whose victories included stopping the city of Austin from shutting down its only library branch in a black neighborhood. (One there now is named for her.)

“Part of President Johnson’s absolute genius was putting in place a mechanism that said: ‘You know what? You’re not going to have to be dependent on these, in many cases, biased political bodies,’ ” her son said. “They wouldn’t pay you lip service, give you an audience, much less put power in the hands of the people.”

For others, the Great Society opened up horizons, as well as opportunities.

When Rodney Ellis was 17, a Great Society program gave him a summer job in a hospital.

“It let me know I could do something other than what my dad did,” Ellis said. “My dad was a yard man.”

He became a slide-rule-team star as part of the Houston’s Inner-City Leadership Development Program — part of Model Cities. At 29, he was elected to the Houston City Council, taking a seat that was created because of the Voting Rights Act. Ellis is now a Texas state senator.

“All of the things that we aspire for in our country really ended up being implemented to some extent in the Great Society,” Ellis said.

Yet in his final years, Johnson mourned what was becoming of his domestic legacy.

“I figured when my legislative program passed the Congress that the Great Society had a real chance to grow into a beautiful woman,” Johnson told biographer Doris Kearns in 1971. “I figured she’d be so big and beautiful that the American people couldn’t help but fall in love with her, and once they did, they’d want to keep her around forever, making her a permanent part of American life, more permanent even than the New Deal.”

“It’s a terrible thing for me to sit by and watch someone else starve my Great Society to death,” Johnson said. “Soon she’ll be so ugly that the American people will refuse to look at her; they’ll stick her in a closet to hide her away and there she’ll die.”

The legacy

With 50 years’ perspective, there are things that liberals and conservatives agree the Great Society got right, including some that were politically costly in their day.

After signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Johnson gloomily observed to Moyers, “I think we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come.”

Few now, however, would dispute that it was a good thing to remove barriers to racial equality — or that government dictate was the only way to do it.

“The anti-discrimination laws that were passed in the 1960s have probably done more to reduce economic inequality than have government programs,” said Diana Furchtgott-Roth, who was the Labor Department’s chief economist during the George W. Bush administration and who is now a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute for Policy Research.

In addition to tackling the oldest problems, the Great Society took the federal government into realms where it had never gone before.

Chief among them was education. Until the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, Washington had never provided comprehensive funding for education below the college level. Its aid to college students was largely limited to helping veterans through the GI Bill.

Where the federal government spent less than $150 per elementary and high school student in 1960, in inflation-adjusted dollars, the figure by 2011 had reached about $1,600. In 2008, more than 64 percent of undergraduates on college campuses were receiving federal financial assistance of some kind.

The federal role “has remained controversial to this day,” said Margaret Spellings, education secretary under Bush, whose No Child Left Behind initiative attempted to hold schools more accountable for student achievement.

In the Great Society, “what succeeded is resourcing around poor, minority and disadvantaged students, an acknowledgment that there was a role for the federal government to level the playing field,” Spellings said. “. . . What I think has not worked is thinking that that was enough, that just that input would do the job. That’s why things like accountability and No Child Left Behind — fast-forward 40 years — were important, to deliver on the promise.”

Yet the political battle over the Common Core — a set of achievement standards developed by governors and encouraged by the Obama administration — is the latest example of the tension that arises when the federal government puts its finger on the scale in education. Criticism of the Common Core has come from an diverse chorus that includes tea party activists and teachers unions.

Some of the Great Society’s biggest accomplishments are rarely acknowledged today. For instance, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 scrapped a 1920s-era quota system that had effectively shut out most of the world, except for blond, blue-eyed Western Europe.

The 1965 law inviting in Africans, Latin Americans and Asians “was in some ways the most important determinant of our ethnic composition,” said Schuck, who taught immigration law and policy at Yale Law School.

Other Great Society initiatives are being whittled away. In 2013, the Supreme Court struck down a key part of the Voting Rights Act, saying that some of its restrictions are outdated, in light of the racial progress that has been made.

And last month, the court upheld Michigan’s constitutional amendment banning affirmative action in college admissions — a blow to another Great Society program that some believe has outlived its usefulness. (Johnson himself thought of affirmative action as a limited, temporary measure, necessary for only a generation or so, Califano said.) Since the ban passed in 2006, black enrollment at the University of Michigan has dropped by a third.

For Gwendolyn Calvert Baker, there was a poignancy in that court decision.

She had been sitting near the front of her 1964 University of Michigan graduating class when Johnson delivered his Great Society speech.

Baker would have been easy to spot in that sea of caps and gowns. She was older than most of the students, a mom who had returned to college on a Rotary Club scholarship. And she was one of only about 200 African Americans on Michigan’s campus of nearly 28,000 students.

Baker got her PhD in 1972, joined the Michigan faculty as an education professor, and went on to run the University of Michigan affirmative-action program that in more recent years came under court challenge.

“The content of that speech, I really can’t say I remember a lot of it,” said Baker, who is now retired and living in Florida. “But it had meaning. I was feeling good that he was at least thinking in some of the ways I had been thinking.”

A half-century later, Baker said, she is pretty sure she knows what LBJ would think of how it all turned out.

“He would say we’ve come a long way, but we’ve still got a long way to go.”

Alice Crites contributed to this report.

50 anos da Great Society nos EUA: crescimento da dependencia e preservacao da pobreza

A criação de programas de assistência aos desprovidos nos EUA, em 1964, representou uma dramática alteração dos comportamentos sociais, com a preservação, não a eliminação, da pobreza. 

40 anos depois, o Brasil também tomava o mesmo caminho. 10 anos depois da criação do curral eleitoral do Bolsa Família, já se conseguiu consolidar um exército de assistidos significativamente maior: um terço da população vive da caridade pública.

 É essa a nação que gostaríamos de ter?

Paulo Roberto de Almeida 

Opinions

The slow decline of America since LBJ launched the Great Society

George F. Will

The Washington Post, May 16 at 7:34 PM

Standing on his presidential limousine, Lyndon Johnson, campaigning in Providence, R.I., in September 1964, bellowed through a bullhorn: “We’re in favor of a lot of things and we’re against mighty few.” This was a synopsis of what he had said four months earlier.

Fifty years ago this Thursday, at the University of Michigan, Johnson had proposed legislating into existence a Great Society. It would end poverty and racial injustice, “but that is just the beginning.” It would “rebuild the entire urban United States” while fending off “boredom and restlessness,” slaking “the hunger for community” and enhancing “the meaning of our lives” — all by assembling “the best thought and the broadest knowledge.”

In 1964, 76 percent of Americanstrusted government to do the right thing “just about always or most of the time”; today, 19 percent do. The former number is one reason Johnson did so much; the latter is one consequence of his doing so.

Barry Goldwater, Johnson’s 1964 opponent who assumed that Americans would vote to have a third president in 14 months, suffered a landslide defeat. After voters rebuked FDR in 1938 for attempting to “pack” the Supreme Court, Republicans and Southern Democrats prevented any liberal legislating majority in Congress until 1965. That year, however, when 68 senators and 295 representatives were Democrats, Johnson was unfettered.

He remains, regarding government’s role, much the most consequential 20th-century president. Indeed, the American Enterprise Institute’s Nicholas Eberstadt, in his measured new booklet “The Great Society at Fifty: The Triumph and the Tragedy,” says LBJ, more than FDR, “profoundly recast the common understanding of the ends of governance.”

When Johnson became president in 1963, Social Security was America’s only nationwide social program. His programs and those they subsequently legitimated put the nation on the path to the present, in which changed social norms — dependency on government has been destigmatized — have changed America’s national character.

Between 1959 and 1966 — before the War on Poverty was implemented — the percentage of Americans living in poverty plunged by about one-third, from 22.4 to 14.7, slightly lower than in 2012. But, Eberstadt cautions, the poverty rate is “incorrigibly misleading” because government transfer payments have made income levels and consumption levels significantly different. Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, disability payments, heating assistance and other entitlements have, Eberstadt says, made income “a poor predictor of spending power for lower-income groups.” Stark material deprivation is now rare:

“By 2011 . . . average per capita housing space for people in poverty was higher than the U.S. average for 1980. . . . [Many] appliances were more common in officially impoverished homes in 2011 than in the typical American home of 1980.. . . DVD players, personal computers, and home Internet access are now typical in them — amenities not even the richest U.S. households could avail themselves of at the start of the War on Poverty.”

But the institutionalization of anti-poverty policy has been, Eberstadt says carefully, “attended” by the dramatic spread of a “tangle of pathologies.” Daniel Patrick Moynihan coined that phrase in his 1965 report calling attention to family disintegration among African Americans. The tangle, which now ensnares all races and ethnicities, includes welfare dependency and “flight from work.”

Twenty-nine percent of Americans — about 47 percent of blacks and 48 percent of Hispanics — live in households receiving means-tested benefits. And “the proportion of men 20 and older who are employed has dramatically and almost steadily dropped since the start of the War on Poverty, falling from 80.6 percent in January 1964 to 67.6 percent 50 years later.” Because work — independence, self-reliance — is essential to the culture of freedom, ominous developments have coincided with Great Society policies:

For every adult man ages 20 to 64 who is between jobs and looking for work, more than three are neither working nor seeking work, a trend that began with the Great Society. And what Eberstadt calls “the earthquake that shook family structure in the era of expansive anti-poverty policies” has seen out-of-wedlock births increase from 7.7 percent in 1965 to more than 40 percent in 2012, including 72 percent of black babies.

LBJ’s starkly bifurcated legacy includes the triumphant Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 — and the tragic aftermath of much of his other works. Eberstadt asks: Is it “simply a coincidence” that male flight from work and family breakdown have coincided with Great Society policies, and that dependence on government is more widespread and perhaps more habitual than ever? Goldwater’s insistent 1964 question is increasingly pertinent: “What’s happening to this country of ours?”

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