From the beginning, FDR took a shine to LBJ. He told Harold Ickes that Johnson might well be the first southern president of the postwar generation. Johnson was a fanatically loyal FDR man. As a congressional aide, he threatened to resign more than once when his boss contemplated voting contrary to Roosevelt. In 1935 he was the head of the Texas branch of the National Youth Administration, winning the attention of the future Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn and singling himself out as a star among the young New Dealers. In 1937, at the age of twenty-eight, he was elected to represent Texas's Tenth District. He caught FDR's attention while the president was in Texas, where they met and spent considerable time together. When FDR returned to Washington, he called his aide Thomas Corcoran and informed him, "I've just met the most remarkable young man. Now I like this boy, and you're going to help him with anything you can." FDR became Johnson's "political Daddy," in Johnson's own words, and more than any other elected official LBJ mastered the art of working the New Deal. Johnson brought a staggering amount of pork to his constituents in his first year alone. "He got more projects, and more money for his district, than anybody else," Corcoran recalled. He was "the best Congressman for a district that ever was."47
However, once elected, Johnson didn't brag about his support for the New Deal. He learned from the defeat of the Texas congressman Maury Maverick that getting praise from East Coast liberals didn't help you much in Texas. When he heard that the New Republic was going to profile him along with other influential New Deal congressmen, LBJ panicked. He called a friend at the International Labor Organization and implored her: "You must have some friend in the labor movement. Can't you call him and have him denounce me? [If] they put out that...I'm a liberal hero up here, I'll get killed. You've got to find somebody to denounce me!"48
When he became president in his own right, he no longer had to keep his true feelings secret. He could finally and unabashedly come out of the closet as a liberal. JFK's death, meanwhile, was the perfect psychological crisis for liberalism's new phase. Woodrow Wilson used war to achieve his social ends. FDR used economic depression and war. JFK used the threat of war and Soviet domination. Johnson's crisis mechanism came in the form of spiritual anguish and alienation. And he exploited it to the hilt.
When Johnson picked up the fallen flag of liberalism, he did so with the succinct, almost biblical phrase "let us continue." But continue what? Surely not mere whiz-kid wonkery or touch football games at Hyannis Port. Johnson was tasked with building the church of liberalism on the rock of Kennedy's memory, only he needed to do so in the psychological buzz phrases of "meaning" and "healing." He cast himself — or allowed himself to be cast — as the secular Saint Paul to the fallen liberal Messiah. LBJ's Great Society would be the church built upon the imagined "word" of Camelot.
On May 22, 1964, Johnson offered his first description of the Great Society: "The Great Society rests on abundance and liberty for all. It demands an end to poverty and racial injustice, to which we are totally committed in our time. But that is just the beginning...The Great Society is a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and to enlarge his talents. It is a place where leisure is a welcome chance to build and reflect, not a feared cause of boredom and restlessness. It is a place where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community."49
It was an ambitious project, to put it mildly. In the Great Society all wants would be fulfilled, all needs satisfied. No good thing would come at the cost of another good thing. The state would foster, nurture, and guarantee every legitimate happiness. Even leisure would be maximized so that every citizen would find "meaning" in life.
Johnson conceded that such a subsidized nirvana couldn't materialize overnight. It would require the single-minded loyalty and effort of every American citizen and the talents of a new wave of experts. "I do not pretend that we have the full answer to those problems," he admitted. "But I do promise this: We are going to assemble the best thought and the broadest knowledge from all over the world to find those answers for America."50 Johnson established some fifteen committees to answer the question, what is the Great Society?
The renaissance in liberal ambition transpired even as America's intrinsic antistatist antibodies were reaching a critical mass. In 1955 National Review was born, giving an intellectual home to a heterodox collection of thinkers who would form modern conservatism. It's revealing that while William F. Buckley had always been a classical liberal and Catholic traditionalist, nearly all of the intellectual co-founders of National Review were former socialists and communists who'd soured on the god that failed.
In 1964 Senator Barry Goldwater was National Review's candidate of choice rather than of compromise. Goldwater was the first Republican presidential candidate since Coolidge to break with the core assumptions of Progressivism, including what Goldwater called "me-too Republicanism." As a result, Goldwater was demonized as the candidate of "hate" and nascent fascism. LBJ accused him of "preach[ing] hate" and consistently tried to tie him to terrorist "hate groups" like the Klan (whose constituency was, of course, traditionally Democratic). In a speech before steelworkers in September 1964, Johnson denounced Goldwater's philosophy of the "soup line" — as if free-market capitalism's ideal is to send men to the poorhouse — and scorned the "prejudice and bigotry and hatred and division" represented by the affable Arizonan.51 Needless to say, this was a gross distortion. Goldwater was a champion of limited government who put his faith in the decency of the American people rather than in a bunch of bureaucrats in Washington. His one great mistake, which he later admitted and apologized for, was to vote against the Civil Rights Act.
Few liberals, then or now, would dispute that the Great Society was premised on love and unity. "We will do all these things because we love people instead of hate them...because you know it takes a man who loves his country to build a house instead of a raving, ranting demagogue who wants to tear down one. Beware of those who fear and doubt and those who rave and rant about the dangers of progress," Johnson railed. Meanwhile, the establishment worked overtime to insinuate that Goldwater was an architect of the "climate of hate" that had claimed Kennedy's life. As befitted the newly psychologized zeitgeist, Goldwater was denounced as, quite literally, insane. An ad in the New York Times reported that 1,189 psychiatrists had diagnosed him as not "psychologically fit" to be president. The charge was then recycled in excessive "free media" coverage. Dan Rather's colleague Daniel Schorr (now a senior correspondent with National Public Radio) reported on the CBS Evening News, with no factual basis whatsoever, that candidate Goldwater's vacation to Germany was "a move by Senator Goldwater to link up" with neo-Nazi elements.52
Goldwater lost in a landslide. And given LBJ's monumental ego as well as the hubris of his intellectual coterie, it's no wonder that the election results were greeted as an overwhelming endorsement of the Great Society project.
Again, Johnson was in many ways a perfect incarnation of liberalism's passions and contradictions. His first job (tellingly enough) was as a schoolteacher during the rising tide of the Deweyan revolution in education. Indeed, as some observed during the debates over the Great Society, the roots of the phrase stretched back to Dewey himself. The phrase appears over and over in Dewey's 1927 The Public and Its Problems.53 Ultimate credit, however, should properly go to the co-founder of Fabian socialism, Graham Wallas, who in 1914 published The Great Society, a book familiar to the two Johnson aides who claimed credit for coining Johnson's "the Great Society."