The Return of the New Deal | Center for Equal Opportunity

For one of LBJ’s advisers, a great society was one in which there would be no poverty, hunger or illiteracy; nor would leisure time be wasted.

In February I reviewed for the Wall Street Journal Joshua Zeitz’s insightful book, Building the Great Society. That was LBJ’s big, domestic-side endeavor, which he pursued throughout his five-year presidency. And it led to the use of racial preferences in federal hiring and contracting. The government still pushes for preferential treatment in those areas. But it is past time for the government to get out of the business of counting and hiring by race. A job for the Trump administration? Perhaps so. It could be assigned to the president’s talented deregulators.

Soon after Lyndon Johnson was sworn into the presidency, following John F. Kennedy’s assassination, he took inspiration from his hero, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and decided that he would finish FDR’s New Deal by building the Great Society. The idea owed something to Johnson’s background as a Southerner who had opposed civil rights early in his political career but who had become a strong supporter. Then, too, there was the historical moment, one of increasing concern for poverty across the country, with the socialist Michael Harrington arguing in “The Other America” (1962) that a quarter of the population lived in a “system designed to be impervious to hope.”

More than a dozen task forces composed of experts and scholars recommended a broad range of legislative programs. Johnson wound up making 87 legislative requests, all but three of which were passed. The programs addressed education, health care, civil rights, urban problems, rural poverty, transportation and even media offerings: It was the Great Society that created public television and radio. Thus Lyndon Johnson could be said to be the progenitor of “Sesame Street,” as Joshua Zeitz reminds us in “Building the Great Society,” his well-researched and readable history of a vast governmental effort to make America anew.

In large part, Mr. Zeitz’s story is a group portrait of the aides who helped the president realize his grand project. There were as many as 20 of them over the course of the presidency—all “talented and energetic,” according to Mr. Zeitz. Horace Busby, one of many Texans in the White House, was known as an ideas man, and his idea of a great society was one in which there would be no poverty, hunger or illiteracy; nor would leisure time ever be wasted. Busby exerted, writes Mr. Zeitz, “a strong and decidedly liberal” influence on the president. LBJ regarded Jack Valenti, another Texan, as an intellectual, and Valenti was indeed a voracious consumer of books—“so much so that he installed a machine in his bathroom that enabled him to read while in the shower,” Mr. Zeitz writes. Valenti urged an open process in which meeting participants could freely argue with each other—a team-of-rivals approach to governing. Joe Califano, a highly regarded young lawyer who had held a top staff position at the Pentagon, joined the team in 1965 and was charged with getting the programs through Congress. It helped that Democrats controlled both elective branches.

Even so, Johnson is the dominant figure in the story, his overpowering personality evident throughout. When Mr. Califano, negotiating the terms of a shift in transportation infrastructure, concedes too much to a powerful senator, Johnson glares at him and says: “Unzip your fly, because there’s nothing there.” He then calls the senator and revokes the concession. “I’m calling about Joe Califano,” he says. “You cut his p—-r off and put it in your desk drawer. Now I’m sending him back up there to get it from you.”

BUILDING THE GREAT SOCIETY

By Joshua Zeitz

Viking, 378 pages, $30

The Great Society pursued what Mr. Zeitz calls “qualitative measures”—those aimed at creating “a level playing field and equal opportunity” (e.g., workforce training, access to health care). But LBJ and his aides, Mr. Zeitz says, never seriously considered quantitative measures meant to enforce “equality of income, wealth, or condition” (e.g., cash transfers). Nor was there interest in cost-benefit analysis of the sort that would track the real-world effects of good intentions.

And little wonder. Johnson became president in the still-prosperous postwar era, and the economists advising him claimed, according to Mr. Zeitz, “that through close management of fiscal and monetary policy, the government could sustain economic growth indefinitely.”

We know what happened. The economy slowed to such an extent that by 1967—with the Vietnam War nearing its bloodiest phase—it was clear “that the country could not afford guns and butter—that permanent growth without inflation was in fact an elusive dream,” as Mr. Zeitz puts it. It had also become clear that “equal opportunity often fails to deliver equal results.” The intellectual and financial foundation of the Great Society was coming apart.

In the end, Mr. Zeitz concedes, the Great Society failed in many ways. It didn’t “save urban America from blight or depressed rural areas from further decline.” Indeed, it “disappointed liberal aspirations and only confirmed the worst of conservative fears.” Still, he notes, it is hard to imagine the U.S. today without the initiatives that Johnson set in motion. Among much else, Mr. Zeitz mentions federal money for primary and secondary schools, as well as government-guaranteed college loans—and, yes, PBS and NPR.

Mr. Zeitz observes that, over the years, certain social statistics have moved in the right direction in part because of the Great Society. The poverty rate in particular fell by 26% from 1960 to 2010. Other numbers, though, go unmentioned that have moved the other way: In 1960, roughly 5% of children were born to single mothers. In the half-century since, the number has climbed to nearly 40%. More than a few analysts have argued that government programs, in their subsidizing, paternalistic role, have contributed to this family breakdown.

As for the Great Society’s pursuit of racial justice, there can be no doubting the value of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Those laws and others affirmed the principle of nondiscrimination. Unfortunately, many Great Society programs embraced racial preferences in stark contradiction of that principle.

Whatever might be said of the Great Society’s successes and failures, it surely marked an enormous expansion of the role of government in American life—a change that often feels permanent. In a kind of coda, Mr. Zeitz claims that President Donald Trump’s staff is so unprepared and undisciplined that, even if Mr. Trump wanted to make America great again by dismantling the Great Society, he would fail.

Mr. Eastland is a senior fellow at the Center for Equal Opportunity and a contributing editor at the Weekly Standard.

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