JFK, LBJ, and the Democratic Party

CHAPTER SIX. The Politics of Consensus: 1962–1964

CHAPTER SIX The Politics of Consensus: 1962–1964 The suprapartisan, centrist policy consensus that contributed to the eventual passage of the “Big Four” New Frontier bills, the initial Great Society legislation, and the landslide Democratic presidential and congressional election results of 1964 actually originated in the middle of Kennedy’s brief presidency. JFK was less likely than LBJ to explicitly and consistently dismiss ideological and partisan differences in order to promote bipartisan cooperation and compromise in Congress for the sake of legislative productivity. Influenced by his state’s competitive , two-party system in statewide elections, JFK understood and valued the need for party cohesion in order to defeat strong Republican opponents. In a 1964 interview, DNC chairman John M. Bailey noted that, as a Democrat from Massachusetts , JFK understood that the Democratic party “stands for certain things, it is a liberal party, and for the most part, more than a majority party.”1 The presidential and congressional elections of 1960 had yielded a razorthin popular vote plurality for JFK despite an unusually high voter turnout. The Republicans gained twenty House seats, JFK carried eleven states by margins of less than 1 percent of their popular votes, and there was a prolonged controversy over credible Republican allegations of Democratic ballot fraud and irregularities in Illinois and Texas. Despite these political liabilities, most nonsouthern Democrats expected JFK as chief policymaker and party leader to achieve enactment of the 1960 Democratic national platform, the most liberal in the party’s history. Kennedy was faced with the task of co-opting enough votes from southern and border state Democrats in the House to gain passage of his minimum wage increase, extension of Social Security efforts, and other early domestic legislation that modernized or expanded the policy legacy of the New Deal and Fair Deal. Even in the Senate, where nonsouthern Democrats held a stronger position in the party’s majority status and committee chairmanships than in the House, JFK had to regularly rely on the support of Senator Robert Kerr of Oklahoma because of his seat on the Senate Finance Committee. Consequently, during JFK’s first year and a half as president, he needed to mend fences and develop a broad 183 JFK, LBJ, AND THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY 184 base of intraparty support in Congress for legislation that often created strict, nearly exclusive divisions between Democrats and Republicans. He needed to prevent or at least discourage a resurgence of the bipartisan conservative coalition in Congress that diluted or defeated almost all of Harry Truman’s Fair Deal proposals. JFK mostly concentrated on social welfare and economic stimulus legislation during the Eighty-seventh Congress of 1961 to 1962 and nurtured a cooperative relationship between his party leadership of Democrats in Congress and his legislative leadership of such bills as those for area redevelopment and accelerated public works. In a speech given in Trenton, New Jersey, on November 2, 1961, JFK stated that the president’s “responsibilities as a legislative leader” are inextricably entwined with his responsibility as the “head of a political party.”2 Kennedy elaborated further that “a political party, as Woodrow Wilson so often pointed out, is the means by which the people are served, the means by which those programs of benefit to our country are written into the statutes.”3 In his memoirs, Lawrence F. O’Brien proudly noted that Congress passed thirty-three of the fifty-three major bills submitted or endorsed by JFK and forty of JFK’s fifty-one proposals in 1962.4 O’Brien attributed much of this legislative success, especially in the House of Representatives, to JFK’s diligent yet tactful cultivation of southern and border state Democrats in the House.5 This presidential effort improved party unity enough among House Democrats so that their roll-call support for JFK’s bills increased from 81 percent in 1961 to 85 percent in 1963. By contrast, only about 52 percent of House Democrats opposed Eisenhower on roll-call votes in 1960.6 O’Brien observed that, in the House of Representatives, “by 1962 we were lucky to pick up four or five Republican votes on most bills and often we got none. Thus, we now needed half the Southerners to pass any given bill and more often than not we got them.”7 JFK and O’Brien both understood that such party unity and intraparty consensus in Congress could only be sustained if most of the administration’s bills focused on nonracial, social welfare, public...