Too Much Too Soon? : Liberals Ponder Failings, Future of the Great Society

Probably not since the siege of the Alamo has Texas seen such an assemblage of beleaguered underdogs as the liberal notables who gathered here to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the launching of Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society.

With Ronald Reagan riding high in the White House, public opinion appears to have repudiated the faith in government’s problem-solving ability that generated the Great Society’s effort to redress social and economic inequities.

And yet the architects of those sweeping reform programs came here last week, to the Lyndon B. Johnson Library, not to bury the Great Society, nor just to praise those elements of it still in place, such as Medicare and the Voting Rights Act.

Instead, they sought to learn how and why they fell short of fulfilling its ambitious goals, in spite of what former Johnson aide Douglass Cater called “the largest outpouring of political energy in American history with the exception of the New Deal.”

The inquiry at the Johnson Library held more than academic significance because it could help provide guidelines for the Democrats when they once more gain control of the White House.

The overall conclusion that emerged from the two days of speeches and debate among former Johnson aides and prominent scholars seemed to be that the Great Society architects had tried to do too much, too soon, and with insufficient breadth of political support.

The Great Society drive, said R. Sargent Shriver, boss of the War on Poverty, was unique among national political movements because it “was conducted by a majority on behalf of a minority.”

Thus, from the start, it suffered from a handicap that did not afflict Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal or Reagan’s tax-cut campaign, both of which were perceived to be serving the self-interest of the majority of the citizenry.

The disastrous and perhaps inevitable result was what former Johnson Press Secretary Bill Moyers called “the largest political upheaval of our time,” the revolt of the middle class against the taxes and regulations necessary to sustain the Great Society. Members of the middle class came to believe, Moyers said, “that they had more to lose than to gain” from the Johnson Administration’s programs.

“We learned that you cannot bring about social change without the mass of American people supporting it,” Moyers said.

The negative reaction from middle Americans was aggravated, conferees acknowledged, by the intrusion of the the Vietnam War, which created its own divisiveness.

Diminished Popularity

Johnson’s decision to escalate the U.S. role in the war strained the nation’s resources and diminished his own popularity at a time when both were needed to back the Great Society efforts.

Johnson’s response to this threat from abroad was to accelerate what black historian John Hope Franklin called “his feverish, almost frenetic efforts” on behalf of the Great Society at home.

Critics have charged that his rhetoric was overblown and led to unrealistic expectations. But Cater recalled that the President believed he did not have much choice. “You can’t get groups to reach consensus through understated language,” Cater said.

The President’s legislative agenda reached as high and as wide as his rhetoric, noted Joseph A. Califano, Johnson’s top domestic policy adviser.

“We seemed to have a law for everything,” Califano said. “When a pipeline exploded we proposed the Gas Pipeline Safety Act. When my son, Joe, swallowed a bottle of aspirin, President Johnson sent Congress a Child Safety Act.”

In their haste and zeal the Great Society engineers could hardly avoid making mistakes, some of which Califano ticked off.

To assure approval of Medicare and Medicaid, Califano said, the Administration gave in to the demands of hospitals and doctors for an open-ended reimbursement system, which he labeled “inherently wasteful and inefficient.”

And because of suspicion that the average citizen would try to evade the thrust of Great Society laws, government administrators created myriad regulations which Califano contended, “got into too many nooks and crannies of American life” and “created testy resistance and needlessly invited ridicule.”

Some Conservative Critics

To make certain that the Great Society promulgators did not overlook their errors, the sponsors of the symposium--the Johnson Library and the Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas--arranged for participation of some conservative critics.

Stuart Butler of the Heritage Foundation, a think tank influential with the Reagan Administration, credited Great Society programs with making needed changes in the power structure of the 1960s. But he contended that the Great Society created its own “rigid coalitions” which also sought to block change and experimentation.

He cited health care and legal aid programs, in which, he charged, “the agenda is set by the providers, rather than by the beneficiaries.”

Charles Murray, author of “Losing Ground,” a controversial critique of the Great Society, argued that its programs too often amounted to nothing more than “robbing some poor people on behalf of other poor people.”

For all of the candor and criticism in evidence here, the veterans of the heyday of liberalism left Austin still facing some unresolved dilemmas for their party. Chief among them, perhaps, is the difficulty for the Democrats of gaining middle-class support while pursuing their commitment to minorities and the poor.

During a panel on the Great Society’s civil rights record, former Johnson adviser Harry McPherson pointed out that except for Johnson’s landside victory in 1964 the Democrats have not won a majority of the white vote in any presidential election since 1944. And he noted that Democratic nominee Walter F. Mondale received barely more than a third of the white vote in 1984.

“We can’t win the presidency back unless we win those voters back,” McPherson said.

“Wait a minute,” fellow panelist and longtime black leader Vernon E. Jordan, Jr. interjected. “You can’t win without us either.”