- AP File Photo
- President John F. Kennedy, speaking in the House chamber in January 1963, with Vice President Lyndon Johnson behind him. Kennedy put poverty on the presidential agenda, but it was Johnson who set the War on Poverty in motion.
Not everyone was singing Lyndon Johnson’s praises after he declared war on poverty 50 years ago this month.
“Assuming that by spreading a bit of poverty among the rich through taxation, you could spread a bit of richness among the poor, who gets the credit? Not the upper brackets that get soaked. That’s not in the plot—the bows and kudos are reserved for the candidate.”
Republican applause during the State of the Union address was reserved at best, syndicated columnist Doris Fleeson observed in the Boston Globe. But even the Democrats in the audience “were not exactly uproarious over such matters as unconditional war on poverty,” Fleeson noted, and Johnson “frequently had to milk their applause by the well-tried technique of the deliberate pause and hard stare.”
One of the advisers, Census Bureau director Richard Scammon, urged him not to focus on poverty. “You can’t get a single vote more by doing anything for poor people,” Scammon told Kennedy. “Those who vote are already for you.” Scammon advised the president to concentrate instead on issues that appealed to middle-class suburbanites.
In the seven weeks between Kennedy’s assassination and Johnson’s State of the Union address, Johnson seized the momentum from JFK’s death and used it not only to position landmark civil rights measures for passage, Caro writes, but also to launch what he hoped would be “a vast, revolutionary, transformation of America”—the War on Poverty.
