PERSPECTIVE ON CIVIL RIGHTS : Bush’s Veto Makes All Americans Losers : Failure to bring black Americans into the mainstream is immoral; it’s also a further drag on our economy.

From my office in the West Wing of the White House I could see the windows of the adjacent Executive Office Building redden with the first light of a June dawn. I had spent the entire night drafting a speech that Lyndon Johnson was to deliver at the Howard University commencement that very afternoon.

“Now we’ve got voting rights, Dick,” the President had told me, “but that’s just the tail on the pig. Now we’ve got to go for the whole hog.” I had worked closely enough with Johnson to understand the object of his porcine quest. A series of civil-rights laws had swept aside the legal barriers to equal opportunity. The task now was to transform the abstractions of law into reality--jobs, income, standard of living, equal treatment in every sector of life.

Legal equality was not enough. Not for those who had been crippled by generations of gateless poverty, preceded by two centuries of slavery. A few laws could not compensate for so long a heritage of oppression.

So Johnson was ready to take the next step--decisive, far-reaching affirmative action to provide American blacks with the education, jobs, access to income essential to make them full members of American society.

Two months later, American combat troops were on their way to Vietnam. The necessities of war had overwhelmed the President’s profoundly held intention to remedy the single most brutal injustice of American history--the racial oppression that was, and that remains, the great original sin of the American nation.

From that day to this the relative condition of black Americans has worsened by every measure--from infant mortality to income. And we have done virtually nothing about it.

Finally, just the other day, Congress passed a rather mild “civil-rights bill” that takes a few small steps toward the goals so loftily proclaimed on that June day a quarter of a century ago. It is a decent bill, one that will make it somewhat easier for blacks to enter the mainstream of American society. Not full equality, but a step in that direction.

And the President of the United States, one George Bush, has vetoed that bill. Using a series of tendentious rationalizations--too riddled with misstatement and misunderstanding to permit detailed refutation--he has deprived black Americans of their first real glimmer of hope since the moral destruction of the war in Vietnam. Thus the Republican successor to the Great Emancipator has--perhaps unwittingly--become the instrument of the great oppression. Once again the promises made to the ear have been broken to the heart.

It does not require a litany of statistics, the accumulation of evidence from daily life, to prove a self-evident reality--America is a nation riddled with racism. Black Americans live shorter and more impoverished lives, the vitality and intelligence of black children is snuffed out at an early age. Almost all aspects of our national life--those that offer opportunities and rewards for achievement--are at least partially closed to blacks. And for most those doors begin to close from the moment of birth.

There is no rational way to deny this reality. But should you doubt it, visit South-Central Los Angeles or, for that matter, the inner cities of every major urban center. You will see it for yourself--conditions so abysmal, social institutions so defective that mere survival is an achievement and only the strongest and most fortunate can hope to emerge.

Blacks are the sufferers from oppression. But we are all losers. We cannot afford to eliminate a large number of our fellow citizens from the enterprise and production on which the well-being of all Americans is based. The resistant racism that stains America has created a burden and a cost that all of us must bear. And when the history of U.S. economic decline is written--in a not too distant future--the failure to assimilate black Americans will rank high among the causes.

Moral imperatives and practical necessities do not always coincide. But this is such a time. George Bush has not simply made a mistake or done the wrong thing. He has committed an enormous wrong--against blacks, against the founding principles of his own party and against the idea of America itself. He proclaims himself passionately attached to the Pledge of Allegiance. Perhaps he should read it more carefully. It calls for “liberty and justice for all.” Not all whites or all employers, but everyone. And in vetoing the civil-rights act he participates in a denial of that justice to millions. Thus, he joins Ronald Reagan in that mercifully short roll of shame--Presidents who have betrayed their solemn obligation, sworn to before God, to strike down the weapons by which fellow citizens are denied the equality that is amply guaranteed in law but so cruelly deprived in practice.