regulation in the white house: the johnson presidencyby david h. welborn

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Regulation in the White House: The Johnson Presidency by David H. Welborn Review by: Robert M. Collins The American Historical Review, Vol. 100, No. 1 (Feb., 1995), p. 261 Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2168168 . Accessed: 19/12/2014 12:19 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . Oxford University Press and American Historical Association are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The American Historical Review. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Fri, 19 Dec 2014 12:19:35 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

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Page 1: Regulation in the White House: The Johnson Presidencyby David H. Welborn

Regulation in the White House: The Johnson Presidency by David H. WelbornReview by: Robert M. CollinsThe American Historical Review, Vol. 100, No. 1 (Feb., 1995), p. 261Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2168168 .

Accessed: 19/12/2014 12:19

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Oxford University Press and American Historical Association are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize,preserve and extend access to The American Historical Review.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Fri, 19 Dec 2014 12:19:35 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 2: Regulation in the White House: The Johnson Presidencyby David H. Welborn

United States 261

racial-economic system of the city; the rallying cry being to "end slums" (p. 51). The economic issues that lay at the heart of Chicago's poverty-stricken and dispirited black ghettoes were certainly to an impor- tant degree the result of direct economic discrimina- tion, but they also stemmed from a host of educa- tional, structural, cultural, and financial issues that could not even be readily understood, much less acted on. When the SCLC narrowed its focus to open housing, the issue quickly became enmeshed in larger social, economic, and cultural arguments that lacked the moral clarity of the South's Jim Crow laws or the denial of the right to vote. King's great achievement was the elimination of legal segregation. When he turned to de facto segregation, open housing, jobs, and poverty in a huge city like Chicago, his movement stumbled in the socioeconomic labyrinth they had entered. Ralph's excellent study of the manner in which King, Daley, and a wide variety of Chicago's men and women interacted to address the racial components of these very intricate issues makes a fine contribution to the history of the civil rights move- ment and to the incredibly complex saga of American race relations.

JOSEPH L. ARNOLD

University of Maryland, Baltimore

DAVID H. WELBORN. Regulation in the White House: The Johnson Presidency. (An Administrative History of the Johnson Presidency Series.) Austin: University of Texas Press. 1993. Pp. x, 354. $45.00.

Twentieth-century U.S. history has produced a num- ber of formidable political figures, but none has been so identified with the exercise of power as Lyndon B. Johnson. After leaving the White House, Johnson observed proudly that he had used every ounce of presidential power available to him. The so-called 'Johnson treatment" appeared to be only the most visible manifestation of a powerful urge to dominate others and produce results. Johnson's admirers ex- tolled him as a workaholic master of the governmen- tal process, and his detractors inverted the image to see a hyperactive wheeler-dealer; power was central to both conceptions. David M. Welborn provides yet another take on Johnson's exercise of power in a detailed examination of LBJ's performance as man- ager of the regulatory state.

Welborn brings a political scientist's perspective to the study of federal regulation during the Johnson years, and he accordingly emphasizes structure and process more than a historian might. The regulatory system he analyzes connects the White House to the independent regulatory commissions (such as the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Trade Commission) and to those executive agencies charged with regulatory responsibilities (such as the departments of Justice and Agriculture). In his dis- cussion of substantive policy issues, the author gives

special attention to antitrust and to the administra- tion's regulatory innovations, which included both foreshadowings of deregulation and the development of "new" social regulation that addressed environ- mental concerns and consumer issues.

Although the new regulation owed much to con- gressional champions such as Edmund Muskie and consumer gadflies such as Ralph Nader, Welborn locates a distinctly Johnsonian policy agenda in its emergence. On the whole, however, Johnson was largely indifferent to routine regulatory matters. Those that touched on macroeconomic concerns, especially economic stability, sometimes elicited strong presidential interest and intervention, but LBJ's regulatory style remained essentially ad hoc and desultory.

In the spirit of his discipline, Welborn concludes by elaborating a model that seeks to isolate the factors that determined presidential involvement in regula- tory activity: duty, political compulsion, and the need to resolve disagreements elsewhere in the system. The greater the combined weight of these factors in any instance, the greater the likelihood of Johnson's involvement. Not surprisingly, duty and compulsion were determinative. In other words, what counted was "what the president was required to handle and what seemed politically necessary to handle" (p. 266).

Historians will likely be less impressed with Wel- born's explanatory model than with his wide-ranging archival research and his subtle overall portrait of Johnson's shrewd, adept, sophisticated, and reticent use of power. As a regulator, Johnson wielded his power sparingly and with considerable discretion, and Welborn concludes that the administration "was much more relaxed and less convoluted and compul- sive in regulation than it is depicted to have been in other areas" (p. 275). Welborn's assessment is thus at odds with conventional wisdom, but it is one that biographers and historians of theJohnson presidency will in the future have to take into account.

ROBERT M. COLLINS University of Missouri, Columbia

ROBERT D. KAPLAN. The Arabists: The Romance of an American Elite. New York: Free Press. 1993. Pp. xi, 333. $24.95.

If we accept Robert D. Kaplan's interpretation, an "Ugly American" is not one who cares too little about a foreign culture, but rather too much. Kaplan at- tributes many failures of U.S. policy in the Middle East to Arabists, those "men and-women . . . who read and speak Arabic and who have passed many years of their professional lives, with their families, in the Arab world" (p. 7). These American missionaries and educators, and later on diplomats, suffered from "localitis." More comfortable with Arabs than with fellow Americans, they lost sight of the interests of

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW FEBRUARY 1995

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