772 Chapter 29 From Camelot to Watergate: 1961–1975
shield from exposure the masterminds who had
engineered the assassination. A special commission
headed by Chief Justice Earl Warren was convened to
analyze the evidence. After a lengthy investigation, it
concluded that Oswald had acted alone.
Instead of dampening charges of conspiracy, the
report of the Warren Commission provoked new
doubts. As word leaked out about the earlier CIA
assassination attempts against Castro, the failure of the
Warren Report even to mention Operation Mongoose
made the commission suspect, all the more so since
several members, including Allen Dulles, former direc-
tor of the CIA, had known of the operation. (On the
day of Kennedy’s assassination, a CIA agent in Paris
gave a Cuban who had volunteered to assassinate
Castro a ballpoint pen containing a poisoned hypoder-
mic needle.) In fact, there is little solid evidence to
suggest that Oswald was part of a wider conspiracy.
But the decision of Dulles and other commissioners to
protect CIA secrets engendered skepticism.
One measure of Kennedy’s hold on the public
imagination was the outpouring of grief that attended
his death. Kennedy had given hope to people who
had none. Young black civil rights activist Anne
Moody, who later wrote Coming of Age in Mississippi,
was working as a waitress in a segregated restaurant.
“Tears were burning my cheeks,” she recalled. Her
boss, a Greek immigrant, gently suggested she take
the rest of the day off. When she looked up, there
were tears in his eyes too.
Lyndon Baines Johnson: The Great Society
John F. Kennedy’s death made Lyndon B. Johnson
president. From 1949 until his election as vice presi-
dent, Johnson had been a senator from Texas and, for
most of that time, Senate Democratic leader. He
could be heavy-handed or subtle, and also devious,
domineering, persistent, and obliging. Many people
swore by him; few had the fortitude to swear at him.
Above all he knew what to do with political power.
“Some men want power so they can strut around to
‘Hail to the Chief,’” he said, “I wanted it to use it.”
Johnson, who had consciously modeled his career
after that of Franklin D. Roosevelt, considered social
welfare legislation his specialty. The contrast with
Kennedy could not have been sharper. In his inau-
gural address, Kennedy had made no mention of
domestic issues. Kennedy’s plans for federal aid for
education, urban renewal, a higher minimum wage,
and medical care for the aged were blocked in
Congress by Republicans and southern Democrats.
The same coalition also defeated his chief economic
initiative—a broad tax cut to stimulate the economy.
But Kennedy had reacted to these defeats mildly,
almost wistfully. He thought the machinery of the
federal government was cumbersome and ineffective.
Johnson knew how to make it work. On becom-
ing president, he pushed hard for Kennedy’s pro-
grams. Early in his career Johnson had voted against
a bill making lynching a federal crime, and he also
had opposed bills outlawing state poll taxes and
establishing the federal Fair Employment Practices
Commission. But after he became an important fig-
ure in national affairs, he consistently championed
racial equality. Now he made it the centerpiece of his
domestic policy. “Civil righters are going to have to
wear sneakers to keep up with me,” he boasted. Bills
long buried in committee sailed through Congress.
Early in 1964 Kennedy’s tax cut was passed. A few
months later, an expanded version of another
Kennedy proposal became law as the Civil Rights
Act of 1964.
The much-strengthened Civil Rights Act out-
lawed discrimination by employers against blacks and
also against women. It broke down legal barriers to
black voting in the southern states and outlawed
racial segregation of all sorts in places of public
accommodation, such as movie theaters, hotels, and
restaurants. In addition, unlike presidents Eisenhower
and Kennedy, Johnson established agencies to enforce
civil rights legislation.
Johnson’s success in steering the Civil Rights Act
through Congress confirmed his belief that he could
be a reformer in the tradition of Franklin Roosevelt.
He declared war on poverty and set out to create a
Great Societyin which poverty no longer would exist.
In 1937 Roosevelt had been accused of exaggera-
tion for claiming that one-third of the nation was “ill-
housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.” In fact Roosevelt had
underestimated the extent of poverty. Wartime eco-
nomic growth reduced the percentage of poor people in
the country substantially, but in 1960 between 20 and
25 percent of all American families—about 40 million
people—were living below the poverty line, a govern-
ment standard of minimum subsistence based on
income and family size.
The presence of so many poor people in an afflu-
ent society was deplorable but not difficult to explain.
In any community a certain number of people cannot
support themselves because of physical, mental, or
emotional problems. The United States also included
entire regions, the best known being Appalachia, that
had been bypassed by economic development and no
longer provided their inhabitants with adequate eco-
nomic opportunities.
Moreover, prosperity and advancing technology
had changed the definition of poverty. Telephones,
radios and electric refrigerators, and other goods