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"Stop Right There." By preshrinking his foreign aid bill to a relatively modest $3.5 billion, he wound up with more money than Congress had given for the previous year's program, though Kennedy had requested $1 billion more. A $375 million mass-transit program that had been stalled in a House committee for two years was passed. A conservation program was enacted along with a food-stamp bill. Then, of course, there was the poverty program.
Johnson admits that his "unconditional war" against poverty, fueled with an appropriation of $784,200,000, is no more than a start, but at least it is something. "I have no illusions," he said, "that $1 billion or $10 billion will wipe out poverty. I don't expect to see it in my lifetime. But we can minimize it, moderate it, and in time eliminate it." Though his last request was cut by nearly $200 million, he may ask Congress for $2 billion for 1965.
To the President, the "most grueling ordeal" of 1964 was the threatened rail strike. In begging the railway brotherhoods to extend their strike deadline, he put on a convincing, if not especially ennobling, performance. "He pleaded beyond reason," said a labor man afterward, "for a President of the U.S." But two weeks later, with the final deadline only hours away, he was at his best. He sat down with the carriers to talk them into accepting the settlement, though he had heard that they were seven to two against it. When one management man began, "I'm just an old country boy . . ." Lyndon broke in. "Hold it, stop right there," said the President. "When I hear that around this town, I put my hand on my billfold. Don't start that with me." Everybody roared, and the country boy declared: "By God, all I was going to say was that I'm ready to sign up." Said Johnson afterward: "That broke the deadlock. Of course, I'll never know what he was going to say when I broke in. I wonder."
But it was civil rights, and not the rail dispute, that proved Johnson's most exacting domestic test. Less than two weeks after Dallas, he was discussing his program at "The Elms," the house he had occupied as Vice President. Several advisers told him the odds were 60 to 40 against passage of the Kennedy-sponsored rights bill, advised him not to risk his still uncertain prestige by pushing too hard for it. For a long moment, Johnson was silent, but then he asked: "What's the presidency for?" Obviously, to command. With his determined driving, the Senate overrode the hard core of Southern Democrats with whom Lyndon had often voted in the past, and on July 2 the President signed into law the most sweeping civil rights bill since Reconstruction.
Murkier Waters. Though Johnson likes domestic politics best, there were times during the year when he found himself totally immersed in the less familiar and murkier waters of foreign policy. Less than two months after he took over, he had to cope with rioting in Panama over U.S. management of the Canal Zone, and in the weeks