I think that Lyndon Johnson died of a broken heart, physically and emotionally. He was an enormously able and proud man. He desperately wanted, and expected, to be a great President. He drove himself to outdo his predecessor.
After I won the election in 1968, and through the remaining years of Johnson’s life, I saw what some have described as the “better side” of his character. He was courteous, generally soft-spoken, and thoughtful in every way. He was not the pushing, prodding politician or the consummate partisan of his earlier career.
Above all Johnson wanted to be loved—to earn not only the approval but also the affection of every American. Much of his overblown rhetoric and many of his domestic policies were rooted in this compulsive quest for approbation. Johnson should have allowed himself to be guided by his moderately conservative instincts, which would have led him to avoid huge spending programs at a time when America was deeply involved in a costly war. Seeking both guns and butter is a policy that works only in the very short term. I think that Johnson belatedly came to understand this, because through the four years of my first term I cannot recall an instance when he urged me to go forward with any of his Great Society programs.
Johnson’s slogan in the 1964 campaign was “All the way with LBJ.” But he found that where the liberals in the media and the left wing of his own party were concerned, it was either all the way with them or none of the way. They applauded his liberal domestic programs, and they praised the Great Society. But the consensus he worked so hard to develop disintegrated when he would not follow their demands for a U.S. bug-out in Vietnam, and they turned on him with a bitterness and ferocity that depressed him and hurt him deeply. He had catered and almost pandered to them, but he could no longer win them.
The hatefulness of the attacks on Johnson’s Vietnam policy was symbolized by that awful, mindless chant shouted by antiwar demonstrators: “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” First it frustrated him, then it disillusioned him, and finally it destroyed him. Like Herbert Hoover, he had the misfortune of being President at the wrong time. He might have been a great peacetime President, but the combination of war abroad and at home proved too much for him.
I kept in frequent touch with Johnson while I was President, either directly or through mutual friends. When he returned to Texas he was busy with the preparation of his memoirs—a project from which he derived no enjoyment—and the plans for his presidential library—a project from which he drew much satisfaction. He had his wife and family, including his grandchildren, and his beloved Texas land. But he still longed for the popular approval and affection that continued to elude him. He was uniquely able to understand some of the things I was experiencing, particularly with Congress and the media over Vietnam, and we became quite close. Although I was glad that he did not support McGovern, I thought it was sad that his party treated him so badly. I made a diary note at the beginning of October 1972 that captured something of my feelings and something of our relationship.
Diary
LBJ had told Bobby Baker that he felt he only had a couple of months to live. He ought to have an operation but he was afraid that the operation for removing some of his lower intestines—he has suffered from diverticulosis for years—might be fatal as far as his heart was concerned. He apparently finally got a haircut after getting some criticism about the length of his hair. He is terribly sensitive to how people criticize him on a personal basis. He said, according to Bobby Baker, that President Nixon was probably the best President in history. Whether this is a real view held by him or not is irrelevant. He is in one of those rather emotional states which often come over him. He must be terribly depressed because he is such a proud man and is now being left alone by his party. He doesn’t want McGovern under any circumstances but, of course, feels that he can’t leave his party. As he puts it, he has been sucking at the tit of the Democratic Party for years and can’t let go now, even though the milk may have turned a bit sour because of what the poor cow is eating.
A few weeks earlier I had made a note of a message from Johnson that Rogers Morton passed on to me.
Diary
Morton had talked to Johnson by phone. He said that Johnson seemed to be in one of those moods when he was concerned about going into the hospital again for a rather serious operation, and was looking down toward the end of the road. He said that he closed his conversation in a very sentimental vein, and said, “Tell the President I love him.” This, of course, is typical of Johnson who has his violent ups and downs, but is a man strongly motivated by the heart rather than the head.
A week after Johnson’s funeral I learned the answer to a question that had bothered me ever since his death.
Diary
I had an interesting little historical note. I asked Kissinger about whether LBJ really knew that we had an agreement. In addition to the call I had made on the 2nd, Haldeman called him on the 15th and told him that we had stopped the bombing. Johnson had answered, “Well, I know what that means.” Haldeman said there had been a breakthrough in the talks. And Kissinger had sent him some papers with regard to the peace settlement the same day. So actually before he died he did know what had happened.
At 10 P.M. on January 23, I made a brief statement announcing that a settlement had been reached in Paris and that a Vietnam cease-fire would begin on January 27.
After I finished the broadcast in the Oval Office, I went back to the Residence. As I entered the Solarium, Pat came over and put her arms around me. Julie and Tricia and Ed were also there, and we sat talking about how my announcement had made it official that America was finally at peace for the first time in twelve years. I went to the Lincoln Sitting Room and had a light dinner there by myself. I played several records and sat watching the fire. I had specifically asked that all telephone calls be shut off. Just before I went to bed, I wrote a short note:
Dear Lady Bird,
I only wish Lyndon could have lived to hear my announcement of the Vietnam peace settlement tonight.
I know what abuse he took—particularly from members of his own party—in standing firm for peace with honor.
Now that we have such a settlement, we shall do everything we can to make it last so that he and other brave men who sacrificed their lives for this cause will not have died in vain.
On January 25 I met with Kissinger.
Diary
I had a good talk with Kissinger, sitting over by the fireplace in the Oval Room. I told him what a superb job he had done.
He told me about his daughter, who had been approached in Cambridge to sign a resolution against the bombing. He said that to try to involve a thirteen-year-old was a terribly vicious thing.
He seems at the moment convinced that he should talk to our friends and not try to pander to our enemies. I told him that I didn’t want us to have any hatred or anything of that sort toward our enemies. On the other hand, we had to recognize—and that’s one of the things that our terribly difficult decision in December meant—we had to recognize that our enemies had now been exposed for what they really are. They are disturbed, distressed, and really discouraged because we succeeded, and now we have to start to play to those who are willing to give us somewhat of a break in writing the history of these times.
At midnight on January 27 the cease-fire went into effect and the killing stopped—at least for a time. I had always expected that I would feel an immense sense of relief and satisfaction when the war was finally ended. But I also felt a surprising sense of sadness, apprehension, and impatience. Sadness, because Lyndon Johnson had not lived a few extra days to share the moment with me and receive the tribute I would have paid him. Apprehension, because I had no illusions about the fragile nature of the agreement or about the Communists’ true motives in signing it. And impatience, because I was acutely aware of all the things we had postponed or put off because of the war.
On January 28 I convened a special Cabinet meeting. Commenting on Johnson’s death, I remarked that this was th
e first time in years that we did not have a living former President, and I talked a little about the ages of various Presidents when they died. “TR was sixty-one,” I said, and FDR was only sixty-two or -three. Coolidge was sixty-one. In fact it looks like the sixties are the dangerous age! I don’t have any fears for myself in that regard. Whatever happens will happen. The important thing is that each of us has to approach each day as if it might be our last day here. That’s why each of us has to make every day count and do something with it.”
Then I passed around the table leather binders that I had asked Haldeman to have made. Inside each was a large desk calendar covering the four years from January 20, 1973, to January 20, 1977. Next to each of the dates was printed the number of days left in my administration.
I had written a special message for the front of each calendar.
1973
In an interview just before the 1972 election I said that over the next four years my administration would become known as having advocated the most significant reforms of any administration since that of Franklin Roosevelt in 1932. But the reforms I had in mind would be very different from those of the New Deal. I told my interviewer, Garnett Horner of the Washington Star, “Roosevelt’s reforms led to bigger and bigger power in Washington. It was perhaps needed then. . . . The reforms that we are instituting are ones which will . . . diffuse the power throughout the country and which will make government leaner but in a sense will make it stronger. After all, fat government is weak, weak in handling the problems.” In a brief talk to the White House staff on the day after the election I put it more simply: “There are no sacred cows,” I said. “We will tear up the pea patch.”
At the beginning of my second term, Congress, the bureaucracy, and the media were still working in concert to maintain the ideas and ideology of the traditional Eastern liberal establishment that had come down to 1973 through the New Deal, the New Frontier, and the Great Society. Now I planned to give expression to the more conservative values and beliefs of the New Majority throughout the country and use my power to put some teeth into my New American Revolution. As I noted in my diary, “This is going to be quite a shock to the establishment, but it is the only way, and probably the last time, that we can get government under control before it gets so big that it submerges the individual completely and destroys the dynamism which makes the American system what it is.”
During my first term, all my attempts at reorganizing or reforming the federal government along more efficient and effective lines had been resisted by the combined and determined inertia of Congress and the bureaucracy. This was partly for partisan reasons: Democratic institutions naturally resist a Republican President. But it was also because the plans and programs I submitted threatened the entrenched powers and prerogatives that they had built up over many decades through several administrations. For various reasons I had had to acquiesce in this situation and accept the fact that no major reorganization reform or voluntary fiscal restraint would come from Congress during my first term. Now, however, armed with my landslide mandate and knowing that I had only four years in which to make my mark, I planned to force Congress and the federal bureaucracy to defend their obstructionism and their irresponsible spending in the open arena of public opinion.
In my first press conference of the second term, on January 31, 1973, I minced no words. I said, “The problem we have here is basically that the Congress wants responsibility. . . . But if you are going to have responsibility, you have to be responsible, and this Congress . . . has not been responsible on money. The difficulty, of course, and I have been a member of Congress, is that Congress represents special interests.”
During the first term I had also had to contend with the increasing hostility of the media. Agnew had told some home truths about their power and their bias, but I had had to observe the official fiction that the President and the media do not have a fundamentally adversary relationship. Now in the second term, however, I planned to let them know that I would no longer uncomplainingly accept their barbs or allow their unaccountable power to go unchallenged.
I took off the gloves in the January 31 press conference when I announced the peace settlement in Vietnam. I said that we had done the best we could against great obstacles and had finally achieved a peace with honor. “I know it gags some of you to write that phrase,” I said, “but it is true, and most Americans realize it is true.”
By the time a new President was elected in the bicentennial year of 1976, I hoped to have given America the beginning of a new leadership class whose values and aspirations were more truly reflective of the rest of the country. This was not a uniquely conservative perspective. Pat Moynihan had written gloomily in 1969, “Since about 1840 the cultural elite in America have pretty generally rejected the values and activities of the larger society.”
My fears about the American leadership classes had been confirmed and deepened by what I had seen and experienced during my first four years as President. In politics, academics, and the arts, and even in the business community and the churches, there was a successful and fashionable negativism which, in my judgment, reflected an underlying loss of will, an estrangement from traditional American outlooks and attitudes. The Vietnam war had completed the alienation for this group by undermining the traditional concept of patriotism.
I had watched this malaise continue to grow and spread during my first term. I saw it in the way the media made heroes out of student rebels while either ignoring those who held to traditional values or presenting them as uninformed or unenlightened. In 1970 Pat Moynihan had added another observant note: “Someone should be pointing out that when an upper-middle-class Ivy Leaguer says something particularly outrageous, official America is supposed to respond that ‘he is trying to tell us something.’ But when a young construction worker says something in response, we are to conclude that he is a dangerous neo-fascist who must be silenced.”
I also saw it in the more subtle attitudes that permeated the liberal-dominated cultural milieu. The fact that they seemed to be less significant did not, in my opinion, make them any less disturbing. During the campaign, for example, I had been annoyed by something I saw in a film we watched one night at Camp David.
Diary
We saw an interesting movie last night called The Man, and what really struck me about it was the way that they had an American flag in the lapel of the Secretary of State—who was, of course, depicted as a very bad character. Haldeman told me that he had seen the picture The Candidate and that in that case too they put an American flag on the Republican candidate. I told Haldeman that I was going to wear the flag, come hell or high water, from now on, and he said that MacGregor was now letting people know that since the President wore a flag many of them might want to do so also to show their support of the President and their support of the country. Of course, this must be carefully done so that there is no indication of throwing doubts on the patriotism of people who are on the other side. It’s really curious how people have come to run down the country the way they do.
This was not a politically motivated prejudice on my part. I felt that we were at a historical turning point. My reading of history taught me that when all the leadership institutions of a nation become paralyzed by self-doubt and second thoughts, that nation cannot long survive unless those institutions are either reformed, replaced, or circumvented. In my second term I was prepared to adopt whichever of these three methods—or whichever combination of them—was necessary.
I thought that America needed a new sense and spirit of positive pride, and now that the Vietnam war was over I felt that I could be instrumental in creating it. I felt that the Silent Majority of Americans, with its roots mainly in the Midwest, the West, and the South, had simply never been encouraged to give the Eastern liberal elite a run for its money for control of the nation’s key institutions.
It may seem ironic in view of the scandal that was about to overtake me and my administration and bring my presidency
to an untimely end, but in the first weeks and months of 1973 I was planning to provide America with a positive and, I hoped, inspirational example of leadership that would be both a background and an impetus for a new rebirth of optimism and decisiveness and national pride.
I had three main areas of reform in mind for my second term. I wanted to reform the budget and terminate wasteful and ineffective programs, and I planned a massive reorganization and reduction of the federal bureaucracy and White House staff. As columnist Nicholas von Hoffman later wrote, “What Richard Nixon contemplated doing was actually running the government, something no President in seven decades had attempted.” Finally, I intended to revitalize the Republican Party along New Majority lines. I had no illusions about the reaction such reforms would provoke from the bureaucracy and Congress or the kind of coverage they would receive from the media. But I was ready, willing, and, I felt, able to do battle for them because I believed in them and because I thought they were the right thing for America.
I summarized all my hopes and plans in some notes I made on January 11 on my large desk blotter in my study at Key Biscayne. This was to have been the blueprint for my second term as President.
Before the election I had asked Caspar Weinberger, Director of the Office of Management and Budget, and John Ehrlichman to make a review of the federal grant programs. They found that of the more than a thousand programs they studied, at least 115 were riddled with waste. For example, the federal farm subsidy program was making 42 percent of its payments to the richest 7 percent of the farmers. Another federal program was still promoting student enrollment in teaching programs, even though we now had a national surplus of 70,000 teachers that was causing serious unemployment problems. Despite a surplus of hospital beds, we were still subsidizing hospital construction. All told, the budget cutbacks I proposed in the first federal budget of my second term, which I sent to Congress on January 29, would have saved $6.5 billion in 1973 and $16.3 billion in 1974. It was a bold suggestion to cut programs that were receiving millions of dollars a year and represented thousands of jobs and government contracts, but I was prepared to take that heat. “Cynics,” wrote Eileen Shanahan in the New York Times, “who never believe that anyone is committed to anything, have had a hard time grasping the seriousness that Mr. Nixon accords these goals.”
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