For Social Change, Forget Politicians : Basic Reforms Come Only From Organized Action of Afflicted

On Inauguration Day in 1960 I left the frigid seats from which members of the incoming Administration were reviewing the Inaugural Parade and wandered back into the West Wing of the White House to the office where, on the morrow, I would begin my duties as assistant special counsel to the President of the United States. (Ah, how resonant a ring that had.)

Leaving the building through a corridor on the first floor, I encountered President Kennedy, presumedly returning from an equally inspirational viewing of his own new office. He motioned to me and, as I approached, asked: “Dick, did you notice the Coast Guard detachment?” And then, before I could reply, “There wasn’t a single black face. Let’s do something about it.”

I turned and began to walk, then run, to my office, suddenly swept by the exhilarating awareness that I could do something--that all the speeches and promises, the interminable futilities of politics, had been replaced by power. We had wanted to change the world. And now, by God, we were going to do it. I picked up the phone, relayed the President’s request to the secretary of the Treasury, who then ordered the Coast Guard Academy integrated.

A minor accomplishment. But the excitement of belief was not small, nor was it mine alone, nor was it unique to the incoming Kennedy Administration. It was grounded in the entire history of a country built on the conviction that the ills and dangers of mankind could be made to yield to human will.

Slightly more than five years later I resigned from the White House where a new President--a man of equally expansive, intense and generous vision--had unluckily been drawn into a war in Vietnam that crushed the spirit of hopeful optimism and would lead the nation along the path of cynicism and sensed impotence toward the present rule of hypocrisy and greed.

If that historic confidence is diminished, the loss is not based on some mutant psychic affliction. We are American realists. Our belief--in government and in ourselves--was founded on a society that, despite its multitudinous differences, retained a core of shared purpose, convictions and moral attitudes. It cannot persist in a nation in which the rich and powerful thrive and rule amid the forgotten majority--the voiceless, impotent working middle class, and its dependents, the unwanted poor.

The modern reality, as it influences government, can be explained in a constitutional parable: A chemical accident revealed two recently enacted amendments to the Constitution, cleverly inscribed in invisible ink. I refer to them as the “Goodwin Amendments”--not because I wrote them, but because I found them.

They are, first, “the military establishment never loses,” and, second, “the rich never pay.”

Illuminated by this discovery, all the confused contradictions of our present politics are dissipated. Our political leaders are simply acting in coherent, rigorous and systematic obedience to their constitutional mandates.

Some examples:

In the guise of “tax reform” Congress is considering legislation that would modestly increase taxes on corporations and lower taxes on wealthy individuals, as well as provide some bonus for the rest of us. We would thus reaffirm the system that has brought about the most unjust distribution of income since the 1920s, bringing us closer to the day when one-fifth of this nation’s people will pocket one-half of its income.

In flagrant violation of the spirit and perhaps the letter of the antitrust laws, giant corporations merge. Yet when GE buys RCA, those who make the deal become very rich, but it does not add one cent to our national wealth. Instead of two companies we have one, now so heavily in debt that it lacks the resources to expand production, to modernize or to innovate.

Congress recently passed a law that automatically cuts spending to reduce the deficit. It has been accompanied by statements from congressional leaders that the law’s virtue was to prove the President responsible for cuts, and by statements from the White House that the law was designed to make Congress take public responsibility. It’s a wonderful game for politicians. But it’s not a game for the American middle class. The programs to be cut--environment, transportation, education and so on--are those that directly affect the conditions of their lives.

Over the last few years the President and Congress together have added hundreds of billions of dollars to the military budget. Yet we are no more secure than before. In fact, as a nation we are weaker--deprived of the resources and skill needed to expand income and opportunity in a competitive world economy.

The result of the government’s obedience to the mythical Goodwin Amendments is a continued downward pressure on the conditions of middle-class life. The majority of Americans must now struggle to hold on to what they have--a battle that destroys the necessary virtues of hope, compassion and shared responsibility for the well-being of our fellow citizens.

The Goodwin Amendments will not be repealed by politicians. Basic changes in society never come from the top. They spring from the organized activity of the afflicted. The large social movements of the 1960s began with Martin Luther King in Birmingham, Betty Friedan and “The Feminine Mystique,” Ralph Nader and “Unsafe at Any Speed.” Only when these movements gained support and power did the politicians enlist.

Freedom is not the absence of discrimination or the right to be left alone. It is the capacity to define the national purpose, the power to demand opportunity for the many and an end to privileges for the few. Those aren’t the new ideas that so many politicians are looking for. They are as old as the country. They are found in the record of our history, not in some dubious study of a subsidized think tank. Their restoration will require an organized effort to shatter the present political structure, which has become little more than a conspiracy against the nation.

Bring on the third parties, the protest movements, the anger at injustice. Perhaps then we can feel again what we once felt--what we always believed--that we, ourselves, can restore an America of justice, opportunity, enterprise and moral purpose.