The decision to call the antipoverty effort a war was made at the Johnson ranch during the Christmas holidays of 1963. Although the choice of language might seem casual, Johnson maintained in his memoirs that it was deliberate. He wrote, "The military image carried with it connotations of victories and defeats that could prove misleading. But I wanted to rally the nation, to sound a call to arms which would stir people in the government, in private industry, and on the campuses to lend their talents to a massive effort to eliminate the evil." His intentions were publicly announced in his first State of the Union message, on January 8, 1964. Perhaps the most newsworthy element of the speech was the president's confident assertion that "this administration, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty."

Instinctively, the president sensed the need to inspire and rally the nation and found in the war metaphor the means to that end. Aroused by President Kennedy's untimely death, many Americans longed for redemption through sacrifice. The Harris Poll reported on December 30, 1963, that Americans massively rejected political extremism and also that many had "an individual sense of guilt for not having worked more for tolerance toward others." Enlisting in the national service during wartime might expiate that guilt. Before the military conflict in Vietnam called into question the patriotism of war, the administration could use war against an ancient, impersonal foe as the means by which to cater to the national need.

Not only was the declaration of war responsive to the national mood after Dallas, but it also was personally and politically valuable to the new president. When he told Walter Heller to continue planning for a program, his decision reflected his own roots: his youth in a region to which poverty had been no stranger, his memory of how poverty debilitated the young, and his knowledge that the New Deal had brought not just relief but a sense of hope. Johnson's background and convictions were not well known among the American people when he took office, however. Only 5 percent of the people thought they knew a great deal about Johnson--compared with 24 percent for Kennedy at the time of his inauguration. On the other hand, 67 percent reported that they knew very little about Johnson, as opposed to 17 percent for Kennedy. Both Republican candidates Nelson Rockefeller and Barry Goldwater had been seen or heard by twice as many people as had Johnson. Clearly the new president needed to establish an identity and create a positive impression among the American people. Aside from averting chaos and panic, developing his image probably was his single greatest need in the days following the assassination.

Moreover, although he disdained such labels, Johnson often had been regarded as a southern conservative whose perspective was limited to his own region. Recent scholarship has clearly demonstrated the influence of Franklin D. Roosevelt on Johnson. But that influence was felt most clearly in the Texan's early years, and the years since World War II seemed to suggest that Johnson had trimmed his liberal sails and had catered to the wishes of the new Texas wealth. Unless he could change this image to become a national politician, Johnson could not depend upon the support of a nationwide majority. Paradoxically, however, his heritage also counted in his favor. His advocacy of a major government program presumably would constitute reluctant testimony to its effectiveness, thereby enhancing his own credibility. This phenomenon illustrated a principle described by his speechwriter, Harry McPherson: "reasonable things could be done best by those whose heritage required that they oppose them."

Other aspects of the new president's image also were important. He needed a transition between his caretaker role after the Kennedy assassination and his own presidency. He had to safeguard and nurture the Kennedy legacy, in keeping with his role as executor of the late president's political will. But as president in his own right, he also needed to define himself as a leader separate and distinct from President Kennedy. This seeming dilemma could be overcome by identifying himself with a program which Kennedy supporters might champion enthusiastically but which was not yet publicly labeled as a Kennedy effort. The new president also could distinguish himself from his predecessor if he could break the congressional logjam. By late July 1963, for example, nearly 40 percent of Kennedy's proposals had not been acted on by either House. By initiating a major program and obtaining prompt congressional action, Johnson could restore a sense of momentum.

Poverty, then, offered Johnson immense benefits as a public issue, but only if he could arouse public and congressional support. Otherwise he could neither respond to the national mood after the assassination nor reap the personal and political dividends. It is easy in retrospect to underestimate the need to generate substantial public support, but in 1963 there existed no sense of national urgency about poverty. Douglass Cater, then national affairs editor of The Reporter, complained that publicists had not made it a national issue. The governor of North Carolina, Terry Sanford, testified in Congress that among the basic problems of poverty was the fact that people were unaware of it. Nor were there organized strong interest groups, either among the poor or in their behalf. Nor were Americans sanguine about the prospects of an antipoverty campaign: the Gallup Poll reported in 1964 that 83 percent of its sample did not believe that poverty could be ended.

Although the public could be described as generally apathetic about poverty, there were occasional expressions of interest and concern from the politically marginal "new left" and from the civil rights movement. The left for some time had shown concern for the poverty problem. Dissent and New America, Lander reports, devoted far more attention to poverty than did the less radical Commentary, the Nation, and the Progressive. Moreover, leftist publications described the conditions of the poor in terms of moral outrage rather than romanticism. Poverty also received mention in the Socialist party platforms of 1960 and 1962 (the latter contained the phrase "war on poverty") and in the 1962 Port Huron statement of Students for a Democratic Society. Probably the most significant event in making the general public aware of poverty, however, was the publication in 1962 of Michael Harrington's The Other America.

Lacking the political leadership of lobbies or the informal political organization of the slums, Harrington argued, the poor themselves could not be expected to launch a movement for their own material improvement. They would need allies, but therein lay the paradox. Because so many Americans enjoyed the luxuries of affluence, they were indifferent or blind to poverty, and would remain that way "until there is a vast social movement, a new period of political creativity."

Harrington's book, however, hardly was received with instant acclaim. But it attracted the attention of Dwight Macdonald, who reviewed the book (and several others) in the January 19, 1963, issue of the New Yorker. Theodore Sorensen reportedly urged President Kennedy to read the Macdonald article; Walter Heller gave the president a copy of The Other America, "although it is not known whether the President read it." The civil rights movement, at about the same time, came to see that widespread social reform would be needed in order to achieve its objectives and that poverty was the issue which would expose this need. Once the nonviolent demonstrations of the early 1960s had kindled what Bayard Rustin called "the resurgence of social conscience," it was easier to see economic deprivation as part of an overall pattern. Once racial discrimination was shown to be national rather than peculiarly southern, it was easier to argue that civil rights laws would be of no avail to those without means. Once the problem of the black was defined as inequality, it was easier to maintain that redistributional policies were necessary.

The experience of its own social programs, the "new left," and the civil rights movement led members of the Kennedy administration in 1963 to redefine poverty as a generic condition underlying many specific social problems. But these efforts failed to incite any significant public interest, and most Americans remained unaware of the problem of poverty at the time that Lyndon Johnson took office. . .