they talked tonight it's an explanation of how i got there. the role of government responsibilities of government, that's the theme of this symposium. the focus on lyndon johnson, 36th president of the united states. on lyndon johnson's concept on what the role should be, and that theme detail in the panels tonight and tomorrow, but to begin this conference, i am going to talk about the origins of this concept, about its beginnings and about where lyndon johnson's belief in the role of government came from, about the most fundamental basic beginning of lyndon johnson, not the beginnings in washington, but the beginnings long before washington. and i'll try to talk also about the origins not only of lyndon johnson's general beliefs about the role and responsibility of government, but also about the

origins of the program in which in a way he announced his beliefs to the american people. about the program in which just seven weeks after president kennedy's assassination in his first state of the union address johnson enunciated quite clearly his concept of what the role of government should be. it's the program with which he began his great society, the war on poverty. for lyndon johnson, the beginnings are all in the place he came from. the place in which he was born and raised. the texas hill country. i've talked about the hill country before, but i don't think you can talk about it too much, particularly in new york city. i saw what that meant growing up there myself, and it was quite a shock. i grew up in new york city,

which is this place of fast-paced conversations and busy streets, theaters, and everything else. there was then a 9:00 plane from la guardia to austin. i take that plane, and sometimes when i got off that plane, i felt you rent a car and drive west out of austin into the hill country, and in those days i felt like i was iffing from one end of the earth to the other. i'll never forget the first time i drove out there. about 40 miles out of johnson -- out of austin as you are heading towards johnson city. there's a rise. they call it round mountain, but it's really just a tall hill. as i came to the top, something made me pull my car over to the side of the road to get out on the shoulder and look down in front of me because i was looking at something that i had never seen before in my life. it was just emptiness. i was looking at a valley. i later found out it was 42 miles long and about 15 miles

across. when i stood there first and looked at it, i felt that there wasn't a single human thing in it to be seen. just a tremendous expanse of emptiness, and then something happened. the cloud moved in front of the sun or away or something, and all of a sudden there was a light lifting off a little huddle of houses in the middle of that empty space. that was johnson city, texas. lyndon johnson was growing up there. the population was 367 at one point. when i came along, it was 362. i think i had stopped the car then and got out of it because i realized i was confronting something that i had never seen before and that i really wasn't equipped to deal with. as i have started to interview lyndon johnson, i came -- lyndon johnson died so young at the age of 64, and i came along so quickly after he had died that

although people who knew him, who grew up with lyndon johnson were all about still there. truman force lived in a bigger house, but it was still in johnson city. his first girlfriend was kitty ross, and she actually still lived in her parent's house, and i started to learn about this. the land, it starts just -- it's now, of course -- it's pushed out into -- then the hill country began just at the western edge of austin and rolled west and encompasses 23,000 square miles, which is an area big enough to put all of new england into it and still have room for pennsylvania. and the population at that time was about three people per square mile. at first it was called the land of endless horizons because any time you got to the top of one line of hills, you found that

there was another one beyond it. the johnson for a large part didn't even live in johnson city. they live 18 miles beyond it on the johnson ranch. they were so lonely out there, but one quarter of the ranch came down to what they are called the -- >> he told me how lyndon and he would go down and sit on this corner of the fence hour after hour hoping for one new face to come along and so they would have someone new to talk to. the land of almost incredible poverty. there was almost month cash there. you could get a dime from selling a dozen eggs, but you had to go to marble falls to sell it. marble falls was 22 miles away

across the hills, and a friend of lyndon johnson told me how he used to on saturdays ride those 22 miles carrying a dozen eggs in a basket in front of him and carrying like this so that they wouldn't break. 22 miles like that to get -- i came to realize that being from new york i simply wasn't understanding. i came back and told him one night i'm not understanding these people, and i'm not understanding this country. therefore, i'm not understanding lyndon johnson. would you mind if we moved here? ina said, okay, and for three years we rented a house up in the hill country, but i would spend day after day driving around interviewing these people, every interview seemed to be 1 0 miles from the one before interviewing these people who grew up with lyndon johnson and went to college with lyndon johnson or with members of his first political machine. when you move to a world, it

opens up to you in ways that you can't even imagine. i mean, one thing i heard, you know -- we all heard if you read about lyndon johnson, you steined a wonderful journalist for time magazine, and it has a poignant scene in his book on johnson's presidency. we're following a cabinet meeting. johnson says -- he said following cabinet meetings. johnson would often say, you know, hi two roads skol arz at the table who all these guys from harvard and one graduate of southwest texas state teaches college. and he said johnson would always laugh loudly at that, too loudly. and i didn't really understand what lyndon johnson's education, the affect that it had on him until i went down to the college, found the textbooks that they used and i say, gee, do you like textbooks that you would use in high school and new york? that was his college education.

he said, you know when, i got to college, i realized i couldn't talk to anybody about neglect. i found out i had been cheated out of an education. so that's part of lyndon johnson's upbringing. but it also showed me living there just how remarkable were his unique abilities to use the powers of government to improve the lives. while i was interviewing in the hill cult, i came to realize that i was hearing the same thing over and over. they would tell me these stories about johnson ruthlessness and his cruelty, often just cruelty for the sake of being cruel. i would hear over and over. i would say no matter what lyndon was like, we loved him because he brought the lights. i knew what brought the lights meant. in 1937 at the age of 28, there was no electricity in the hill

country, and during his term as congressman, he brought electricity to the hill country. because i came from new york city where electricity is always just there, you turn a light switch, and it's on, i understood intellectually what bringing electricity meant, but i didn't really understand what it meant or what the lives of the people of the hill country were like without it. >> because they didn't have electricity or they didn't have movies, they didn't are radios. one of the poignant things they told me is so many of these farmers and ranchers would say when we loved f.d.r., you saved my ranch, you saved my farm. we heard all about these wonderful fireside chats, but we couldn't hear the fireside chats. the only radios they had in the hill country were these crystal sets, and they would describe sitting there while roosevelt was talking, moving the needle back and forth on the dial. trying to make his voice come in

clearly. >> movies and radio are just entertainment. not having electricity means something a lot deeper than that. you can say it all. you don't have washing machines, et cetera, but you can say the most poignant and most basically perhaps in water. for us we just heard a faucet. because of electric pumps water comes out, about ut in the hill country water came from streams and wells. the streams in the hill country are generally small and dried up for a large part of the year. they had to get water out of the wells, and the water cable in the hill country in general is about 75 feet deep. they had to dig wells 75 feet and bring up water from it. if the department of aing culture tells us that the average farm family used 200 gallons of water each day, or 7,300 gallons or 300 tons per year. and that water had to be brought

up from the wells by the women, by the wives of the house because the husband was out many the fields working a little bit. there was so gts cash in the hill country that as soon as the children got old enough to work, boys and girls both, they had to work what they called off the farm. the woman of the house would be left there alone. i couldn't get -- had a hard time getting these women to talk to me at the beginning because incredibly enough they were very shy, very shy about talking to someone from the city, so, i, as a matter of fact, learned -- ida learned to make fig preserves and would become friends with the women, and i would go back to talk to me more freely. they would say to me, you're a city boy. she says you don't know what -- they would say -- they would go to their attic or their garage,

and they would bring out a bucket of water, often with the rope still attached, old rope attached, and they would take me over to the wells which are always covered by these boards and you would push the boards aside and they would say -- they dropped the bucket and would say, you know, or a city boy. you don't know how heavy a bucket of water is. i pull it up. of course, a bucket of water you find out is heavy to be pulled up. many of the, it was too heavy for these women often, so what they would do is they had this metal thing over the well, and they put the rope over it, and they do what they call walking away. they -- they pull up on the rope like this to pull the bucket of water out of the well. and that's the way they had to bring up all this water that they needed for household duties. then they would say to me, you know, it's easier to get into the house if you do it two buckets at a time. you know how we did that? i'll never forget first time a

woman went over to the garage and opened it and showed me her yoke because that's how the women pulled it with the yoke over the cattle. i realized that i was -- another thing. i had been hearing another thing in a lot of these interviews with the women. they would say things like do you see how round shouldered i am? do you see how stooped i am? they would say do you see how bent i am? the word in the hill country was really bebt. do you see how bent i am? in fact, i had sort of noticed that these women had seen a great deal more stupid than city -- but i thought it was just because they were old, but they would say i got bent like this before my time. my back got bent like this when i was young. these women were stooped at 40, stooped at 35.

one woman said to me, i swore that i wasn't going to look like my mother looked, but then the babies started to come, and i had to bring the water, and i knew i was going to look exactly like my mother looked. they would show me what wash days were like because they didn't have electricity. they would take out four machine threes wash tubs and line them up on your lawn, and you would build a fire under each one, and you transfer -- the first one was the lye soap, and they didn't have enough money to buy store-bought soap, so they had to make their own soap, and there was another expression in the hill country. lye soap peels the skin off your hands like gloves. you put the first load of wash in and use the lye and scrub it out with a l, and you say you are a city boy, and you don't know how heavy it is on the end of a broomstick, do you?

it's very heavy. then after the lye wash tub, the rinse and wash tub, the blueing or starch wash tub, and then the other rinsing wash tub. they had to transfer these between the wash tubs and on an average day, as nears as i could tell, there were eight to ten loads of wash in the hill country family, and this i'll never forget how my back hurt on wash days. i maimed that. they called it. i named it after what they called tuesday. because you didn't have electricity and it was a hunk of metal with a wooden handle that you would transfer from mine to iron, and you would have to get them hot on the stove. that meant you had a select -- to stabbed next to the stove. it's sort of day by day there. these people were living lives

out of the middle ages. they were living like peasants. then it's at the age of 28. he basically says if you elect me, i will bring electricity. they elect to him, and let me just go back and lyndon johnson was a political genius. he gears his campaign to the women. what he said, the line that he uses is if you elect me, you won't look like your mother looks. he can bring electricity. i mean, there is no dam or source of dam in the hill country. a dam has to start at the ed edge -- he ran out of money to do it, and so the dam is stopped, and even if you build a dam, how are you going to get electricity out to be scattered farms? isolated farms.

miles one by one laying lines across the hill. well, to watch lyndon johnson do that, to watch him do what he had to do to get the dam built, then persuade the electric trikz administration to -- all their rules and lay the lindz and to have a minimum of ten people per mile if they wouldn't lay lines, and they didn't have that there, but he gets them to do it. he keeps asking roosevelt for money to build the dam every time he sees him he asks him for money. he asks -- has intermediaries rose. they're always asking, and final roosevelt felt don't give the kid the dam. electricity comes to the hill country. knees people -- the people of the tenth congressional district are brought in a stroke using governmental genius for government. and the fact that he did that

means that we see in the hill country the beginnings of what i'm talking about, the beginnings of something else in lyndon johnson. not just an understanding of what should be done to help people who were fighting forces too big for them to fight themselves and they were never going to get electricity on their own. no company was going to bring it in, and it wasn't profitable, you know? not just an understanding of what should be done to help people, but the ability to help. the gift that he had. quite a rare gift really. a talent that was beyond talent. to use the powers of government, to help people trying to fight forces too big for them to fight themselves. his father served six terms in the texas house of representatives, and he used to say that the proper function of government was to help keep from

getting caught in the t emt acles of circumstance. fighting things too big to fight yourself. joe said and i tried to write about the affect of power on the powerless and how power is used on the powerless. also, you ride to write about how power is used for the powerless. now we go forward to 1963. president kennedy was assassinated, of course, in november 22nd and lyndon johnson has become president. under president kennedy there had been some vague hardly defined early discussions about an anti-poverty program because over one-fifth of the united states and over 33 million people actually in that year 1963 who were still living below the poverty line. on the day after the assassination, saturday november 23rd at the end of the day lyndon johnson meets in his office in the executive office building. he still hasn't moved into the

white house. with four of president kennedy's economic advisors, who channel tiz counsel of economic advisors, gordon, the director of the budget bureau, and was still in the secretary of the treasury, and gardener aptly who was -- whose title escapes me at the moment. the meeting is about budget. johnson is coming in in the middle of the budget. the process, knowing very little about it, has to get brought up to speed. it's -- at the end of the meeting, as heller is leaving, he is walking out the open door.

>> joon son shuts the door. he says that's my kind of program. i'll find money for it one way or the other. heller had up to that point -- johnson had said a lot of things about budget and his various priorities. heller had formed an impression reading from his notes. johnson's other remarks, he said it was "a little calculating, a play for support." there he was. lyndon johnson, the politician. that was so responsible tanus, so immediate, and instinctive and intuitive and calculated response.

uncalculated responses, always in response to social injustice know there was a moment like that in 1949, we learned that a mexican american soldier has been killed in the philippines during world war ii and was denied burial in south texas and the cemetery of the south texas town because he's not white. on the instant, joel connolly and arthur jenkins is standing there when johnson can hand them the telegram. johnson reads it and without a moment's hesitation and says by god, you are in arlington. all through his life there are these moments and here is another one. that christmas, that december, johnson goes down for a two-week vacation on his ranch and heller

finds out that his analysis, his feeling that this was spontaneous, uncalculated, and he finds out that that analysis was correct. johnson is down on the ranch. the johnson ranch and the ranch that his father lost and that he has now brought back and when heller and gordon get there they find that those words were meaningless. johnson has found new money, half a billion dollars for an antipoverty program and he gives it a lesson in political tactics and as a targeted demonstration program with demonstration programs in the limited number of cities. and johnson says -- tries to make them understand and a limited number of districts means that a limited number of congressmen will get benefits from that program. and he says in his memoirs, i

was certain that we could not start small and propel the programs through congress and he tells them -- his quote is something like i knew we had to do it big or we wouldn't get it through congress at all. see, he's very determined. he keeps asking them, how will you spend this money? i've earmarked half a million to get this program started and i'll withdraw unless you fellows come through with something that's workable. very determined. and when you ask where this determination came from, as always with lyndon johnson, part of the explanation is political. he was weak with what he had an election coming up in ten months. he was weak with liberals, weak in the big cities of the northeast and the liberal urban areas. a campaign against poverty would strengthen johnson in these areas. so part of it is political, as always with johnson. but as always, part of the explanation is something more. something that had to do with

the fact that when he was doing this, when he was thinking of this anti-poverty program, he was doing it back in the hill country when his father hadn't gone broke and he had grown up in poverty, back in the ranch, back at his beginnings. how do we know that those beginnings were very much in his mind as he's dealing with the anti-poverty program that christmas? well, he talks very often during those weeks about his boyhood and about a particular thing in his boyhood, having to get up early. most of the books on johnson quote a very cute remark he made to reporters as he's flying down to the ranch. he says i've always been an early riser. my daddy used to come to my bedroom at 4:30 in the morning when i was working on the highway gang right out of high

school and he twists my big toe real hard so it hurt and he'd say get up, lyndon. every other boy in town has a half hour's headstart on you. that's sort of cute, but there's nothing really cute about other things he said about being poor. poor and old, i was interviewing an old hill county ally of his, a guy named e. gabe smith. went back a long way with lyndon johnson. he recalls him saying -- he calls him early one morning and says he hopes he hasn't woken him up. he says, i'm sure i haven't because you were a poor boy, too, and therefore you must have been getting up all your life just like me. this is the quote, that's the only way we can keep up, he said, otherwise they're too far ahead of us. calls an attorney in

fredericksburg and says, we always get up early, don't we when they answer the phone on the first ring. we can't make it unless we do. at the age of 9 and 10 lyndon johnson had worked in the cotton fields beside his cousin adam, pulling cotton on their knees all day under the broiling hill country sun. i asked -- that christmas, we know from the diary, the back-up diary that the aides kept that the presidential aides keep that johnson and lady bird visit aver to bring her to poinsettia and i asked her if she remembered what they talked about, and she said she didn't except she was sure they had talked about the cotton picking. she said whenever she and lyndon got together, the subject of cotton came up. we always talked about the cotton. she said, we just hated that so much.

hate is a word that occurs very frequently when people talk about lyndon johnson's feelings about poverty. in a memoir that was written by his longtime cardiologist that the rule is hearst. dr. hearst writes that he hated poverty and he hated it when a person who wanted to work could not get a job, and then he recounts an incident that occurred when he was accompanying johnson during his vice presidency on a trip to iran and they pass a group of iranian children and somebody remarks that they have rags for clothing. and johnson flies into a rage and says as hearst recalls it, don't say that. i know rags when i see them. they had patched clothes, and that's a lot different from rags. and i suddenly remember when i read this, reminiscence of dr. hearst, something that lyndon's brother sam johnson had

told me about them growing up, and i couldn't quite recall which is why he quoted exactly in the book, but only in general. i hadn't thought to take a note of it at the time, and i remember sam houston saying something like when he was describing their poverty that he and their sister rebecca had to wear patched cloths, and i remember he said something to me like they weren't rags. so these are the beginnings of lyndon johnson on the anti-poverty program, and the war on poverty, and you know how much the war on poverty meant to lyndon johnson if you just listened to the words with which he introduced the war on poverty in the first state of the union speech when he flew back to washington from the ranch to deliver it on january 8, 1964. johnson had persuaded ted sorenson, the late speechwriter to stay on at least a