Voices: Revisiting a scene from LBJ's war on poverty

Rick Hampson | USA TODAY

INEZ, Ky. – Fifty years later, it's still a striking image: the president of the United States squatting on the porch of a ramshackle house, talking to an unemployed man with bad teeth who supported his wife and eight kids on $400 a year.

That was April 24, 1964. The president was Lyndon Johnson. His host was Tom Fletcher, 38, who'd been asked a few hours earlier by advance men if he'd accept a visit from the president.

Johnson was in the hills of eastern Kentucky to promote what he'd describe that day as "a war on poverty in all its forms.'' He meant people such as Fletcher, who'd worked on the railroad, in the mines and for a saw mill with little to show beside the three-room, coal-heated cabin that he'd bought for $100.

After Johnson's visit, Fletcher hoped his luck would change. So did Appalachia, which stood to receive billions in federal aid.

The visit stayed with Johnson. He wrote in his memoirs that Fletcher "regretted more than anything that his two oldest children had already dropped out of school, and he was worried that the same fate would overtake the others. So was I."

As they parted, Johnson recalled, "I told him, 'I want you to keep those kids in school.' But I knew he couldn't do it alone. He had to have help.''

This year Johnson's reputation, virtually destroyed by his disastrous prosecution of the Vietnam War, is making a comeback, thanks to the 50th anniversaries of his wars on poverty and racial discrimination.

And what happened to the other man in the Time magazine photo?

For a while, Fletcher's luck did change. This elementary school dropout got a roadside cleaning job in a federally funded program for jobless fathers. He entered a training program that paid him to learn car mechanics.

But a broken leg and various illnesses set him back, as did his wife's death from cancer. Except for a coal mining boom in the late '70s and early '80s, the region developed few private sector jobs.

Fletcher went on disability, which would become a means of support for a growing number of his fellow Appalachians.

He had to tell journalists who appeared at his porch that he was not among the 13 million Americans lifted out of poverty by Johnson's war. And he insisted his home was never, as often described, "a tarpaper shack.'' He'd put up the brick-pattern siding himself.

In 1992, something worse than poverty visited the Fletcher homestead.

Fletcher's second wife was convicted of murdering their 3-year-old daughter and trying to kill their 4-year-old son by giving them prescription drugs. The girl's cause of death was discovered only after the boy got sick.

In her confession, Mary Fletcher said she wanted insurance money from the children's deaths, "'cause we's fixing up the house, putting a bathroom in, water in and everything." She said her husband had nothing to do with it. She got 25 years.

Fletcher came to rue his brush with celebrity. In 1994, the 30th anniversary of the war on poverty, he told an AP reporter, "I'm getting tired of it. After all this time, I'd think they would be letting it go."

He didn't know why he never broke out of poverty, but he didn't blame Johnson, whom he called "a good president. … He done a good favor to a lot of people."

No doubt. But when I was in school, before the war on poverty, the people of Appalachia were famously self-reliant, sometimes cussedly so.

On two recent reporting trips there, the region's biggest problem didn't seem to be poverty; a society famous for its independence was increasingly dependent, on everything from food stamps to disability checks to prescription painkillers.

Fletcher died in 2004. He was 78. His house is still there between Rockcastle Creek and Highway 3, albeit with different wood siding, a metal fence and a sign: No Trespassing.

Hampson is a New York-based national reporter for USA TODAY