Landslide

by Jonathan Darman

  Lady Bird was pleased, one night after dinner, to see her daughter Lynda engage with Johnson’s economic adviser, Walter Heller, in a lively conversation by the fire. “Lynda Bird,” the First Lady observed, “was deep in conversation with him about economics, the economy of Texas and the University of Texas … I could see Dr. Walter Heller responding to her, not only with interest but with respect. It was fun to watch.”

  The arrival in Texas of Dr. Heller, chairman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers, had not merited much attention in the press that week. Though he stood six feet four inches tall, his clunky spectacles and less-than-thrilling field of interest made him the sort of figure reporters used to fill out the lower paragraphs of their stories. No one would have guessed that the meetings he led on the ranch that week would be among the most consequential of Johnson’s presidency—the setting in which the biggest dreams of the Johnson presidency would begin to form.

  Heller was not the sort of man to whom Johnson was naturally drawn. A tenured faculty member at the University of Minnesota, his views on public policy had been shaped by academic textbooks, not by the rough-and-tumble of practical politics. He was exactly the sort of credentialed, liberal academic toward whom the Southwest Texas State Teachers’ College graduate in the White House took a natural dislike.

  But when Heller first met with President Johnson one day after Kennedy’s assassination, he received a surprisingly warm welcome. He briefed Johnson on the state of the economy and the current forecasts for growth and inflation and then mentioned a plan he’d been developing for a broad “attack on poverty” under President Kennedy. Johnson lit up. He ordered the adviser to fast-track a proposal, saying, “That’s my kind of program!”

  My kind of program. Heller was pleased. In his years in the Kennedy administration, he had grown passionate about the issue of poverty and its root causes. He believed there was meaningful action that government could take to address the issue, but he had struggled to gain favor for his ideas in the White House. With their minds focused on the reelection in 1964, Kennedy’s political aides had grown irritated by Heller’s poverty talk and his pleas for action. A broad public campaign drawing attention to the poorest Americans, they believed, was the last thing a president running for reelection needed.

  In truth, the issue of poverty was as vivid an illustration as any of the gap between the aims of the era’s progressives and the governing philosophy of the consensus-minded President Kennedy. Ending poverty had been a nominal goal of progressives since the New Deal. For a time, it was a goal that they claimed nearly to have achieved. In 1958, the economist John Kenneth Galbraith published The Affluent Society, a vision of the challenges and opportunities presented by abundance. A seminal text of utopian postwar liberalism, Galbraith’s book sought to reveal “the way our economic attitudes are rooted in the poverty, inequality, and economic peril of the past.” Poverty in America, Galbraith said, was no longer “a massive affliction” but “nearly an afterthought.” Five years later, in a classic essay in The New Yorker, “Our Invisible Poor,” the writer Dwight Macdonald would recall Galbraith’s assurance: “The interesting thing about his pronouncement, aside from the fact that it is inaccurate, is that it was generally accepted as obvious.”

  That attitude changed in the early 1960s, thanks to the publication of Michael Harrington’s book The Other America. With statistics and harrowing anecdotes, the book revealed how, beneath the opulent middle-class affluence of postwar America, millions of Americans were living in a Depression-era state of deprivation. The news was jarring to the country. How could they let so many children starve in a nation of such plenty? Scrambling to account for their previous lack of concern with the issue, liberal intellectuals responded to Harrington’s revelations by claiming the book demonstrated not a failure of progressive policy, but a failure of public will. Quickly, they absorbed the Harrington critique into the optimistic spirit of the age: with the right policies, nearly all of America’s poor could be lifted up into lives free of want, straightaway.

  John Kennedy felt strongly about the plight of the nation’s poor. As a Catholic skeptic, he was compelled to look out for the suffering of the disadvantaged, in times of abundance as much as in times of scarcity. And as a Kennedy, taught from birth of his special obligation to the least of these, he felt obliged to ease the poor’s suffering, wherever he could. In the last year of his presidency, he eagerly digested Heller’s alarming statistics and expressed his desire to act. Kennedy “wanted to do the right thing,” writes his biographer Richard Reeves. He believed that “poverty was a problem that could be managed. He intended to do something about it—when he was sure of reelection.”

  But not before. Nine days before his death, Kennedy met with a group of political advisers to plan for the 1964 presidential campaign. The theme for the effort would be “Peace and Prosperity.” Kennedy wondered if he might advertise his efforts to expand that prosperity to society’s lower rungs by posing for photographs with poor coal miners and underprivileged blacks. “I wouldn’t do that,” advised Richard Scammon, his Census Bureau director. “You can’t get a single vote by doing anything for poor people.”

  The gold mine for Kennedy, Scammon went on, was in “the new shopping centers on the highways. The voters you need, your people, men with lunch pails, are moving out to the suburbs.”

  Scammon had Kennedy’s attention. Would his people stay his in their new lives? When a Democrat started to earn more money and moved his family to the suburbs, at what point did he become a Republican? While Scammon did not have precise figures, he guessed that “it might be less than $10,000 a year.”

  Kennedy grasped the vast implications of what he was hearing. Those criteria applied to millions upon millions of Americans. He knew what it meant: “It’s going to be a new kind of politics.”

  It was still too early to see exactly what that new politics would be. All that was clear was that it was not the time for a broad call to action. Not with so much in flux; not in 1964. Not when the civil rights movement was poised to finally push the South from the Democrats’ coalition once and for all. Not when Republicans seemed poised to break their pattern and nominate a red-meat conservative for the presidency, leaving the center, shrunken as it was, for the Democrats to take. Not when those men with lunch pails, his people, were moving out to the suburbs and moving up the income ladder. Not when his governing consensus itself was hanging by a thread.

  1964 was decidedly not the year for an incumbent Democrat to be daring. Kennedy wanted to do something to help the poor, and he believed that he could. But he did not believe he would help them by making confident, unrealistic promises to the nation about ending the plight of poor people forever. Meeting with Heller just before he left for his ill-fated trip to Texas, Kennedy was encouraging but vague on the poverty plan: “I’m still very much in favor of doing something on the poverty theme if we can get a good program,” he said, “but I also think it’s important to make clear that we’re doing something for the middle income man in the suburbs.”

  By the conventional rules of Washington, if Kennedy had kept his eye on the middle, there was every reason to believe that his successor would do the same. No one needed to explain to Lyndon Johnson how consensus politics worked. His instinctive sense for its contours had helped him pivot effortlessly back and forth across the acceptable range of political opinion for most of his adult life.

  He was an ardent New Dealer when he served as Texas administrator of Roosevelt’s National Youth Administration. Courting poor Hill Country voters who revered FDR, he ran for Congress from Texas’s Tenth District as a New Deal evangelist. In the midterm elections of 1938, when Southern Democrats were fleeing their president in droves, Johnson made a public show of standing by him, earning lasting favor from FDR in the process. When Roosevelt died in April 1945, Johnson wept. “I thought of all the little folks,” he said later, “and what they had lost. He was just like a daddy to me always.”

/>   Yet no sooner had he wiped his tears away than his New Deal passions began to cool. As soon as he was elected to the Senate in 1948, the “little folks” seemed to fade in his mind. More powerful patrons had emerged. He now had to think about pleasing a statewide electorate in increasingly reactionary Texas and pleasing the wealthy oilmen who had bankrolled his campaigns. And he had to think about pleasing the Southern legislators who, thanks to one-party rule in the old Confederacy, held seniority on every important committee in the Senate and would thus be indispensable to his rise. So the young senator Johnson quickly and enthusiastically ingratiated himself not just to the Senate’s conservative budget hawks, but to its racists and Red-baiters, too. Even by the late 1950s, when his national ambitions required him to get liberal religion on civil rights, he kept his eye on his obstructionist base. “Listen,” he said to Senator James Eastland, a notorious segregationist from Mississippi, in 1957, “we might as well face it. We’re not gonna be able to get out of here until we’ve got some kind of nigger bill.”

  And from his time as majority leader of the Senate, Johnson learned just how powerful a politician who planted his feet in the center could be. His strategy as leader of Eisenhower’s loyal opposition was to pay as much attention to the word “loyal” as he did to “opposition.” Again and again in the Eisenhower years, Johnson and the Democrats would enthusiastically join the Republican president on major issues, skillfully separating Ike from his own party and making the GOP look outside the mainstream.

  Outwardly, there was every indication in late December 1963 that the Johnson presidency would be more of the same consensus politics. After Johnson exclaimed “Let us continue!” he invited just about everyone who mattered, across the spectrum of respectable opinion, to offer counsel for the way ahead. If, by chance, these well-wishers ran into reporters on their way to and from the White House—well, there was nothing Johnson could do about that.

  So the nation heard Sidney Weinberg, the managing partner of Goldman Sachs, raving about the “personal magnetism” of the new president. “If he asked you to do something—anything, you’d want to do it,” Weinberg gushed. Labor was just as approving as capital. United Auto Workers president Walter Reuther, emerging from his tête-à-tête with Johnson, said that the president “puts the emphasis on all the right things.” A Chicago public relations executive, quoted in Time a few weeks after the assassination, described the result: “Everyone in the country thinks he has a winner in Lyndon Johnson, the Southerners, the Negros, the budget cutters.”

  The Time article wondered who the real Lyndon Johnson would be. Good luck figuring that out. He sounded so sincere in his first meeting with Heller, in which he protested he was “no budget slasher” and that “John F. Kennedy was a little too conservative to suit my taste.” But he sounded equally sincere when he phoned Eisenhower on Christmas Day: “What are we going to do, Mr. President?” he said, sounding exasperated. “We can’t get our budget down as much as you’d like.… The Kennedy administration has added one hundred thirty-three thousand employees in three years!” (The three years, he didn’t need to mention, since he and Ike had run the show.)

  On the surface, there was no reason to put any stock in Johnson’s professed enthusiasm for progressive ideas. No reason to think that however warm his reception—That’s my kind of program!—Johnson would be any more inclined to pursue a broad public attack on poverty in 1964 than had been his predecessor. Heller had come to the LBJ Ranch to present plans for the program to Johnson, to see if Johnson would make the eradication of poverty a cornerstone of his presidency. If he did, he would be starting on a course far more daring than any Kennedy had ever attempted. All the rules of Washington, the rules that had governed American politics for thirty years, the rules that Johnson knew better than anyone alive, suggested that Heller would go home disappointed.

  But they weren’t in Washington that last week in December. They were in the Hill Country, a place where there were other rules, and other forces, that had a powerful effect on Lyndon Johnson. No one in the Hill Country would think to doubt Johnson when he proclaimed that an attack on poverty was his kind of program. He was a Johnson, and for the Johnsons, helping the little people was what politics was all about.

  Lyndon had learned this politics in the cradle. His grandfather Sam Ealy Johnson was a member of the Texas People’s Party. He was a gregarious, popular man who ran, unsuccessfully, for the Texas legislature in 1892 as a radical populist. The cause of his life was the sorry lot of Texas tenant farmers, alienated from the spoils of their labors by corrupt businessmen, predatory bankers, and greedy railroad barons. He taught the populist gospel to his son Sam Jr., who would in turn teach it to his son Lyndon.

  The call to public life was part of their shared inheritance as well. In 1904, Sam Jr. also ran for the legislature, and this Sam Ealy Johnson won.

  In office, he took up the cause of the rural poor: working to fix their rents, get them federal aid for droughts, and protect them from the conniving oil companies. He worked to build roads to reach the isolated rural poor and secured funds to help them keep their children clothed and fed.

  He wanted to be their voice. It was a solitary, heroic calling, one that was his alone. Robert Caro evokes Sam Johnson’s world in vivid detail, quoting W. D. McFarlane, a colleague of Sam Johnson’s in the legislature. McFarlane recalls a man possessed with helping “the farming people and the working people.… They had no one else to look after their interests. And Sam Johnson did speak up on their behalf. I remember Sam Johnson as a man who truly wanted to help the people who he felt needed help.”

  As a young child, Lyndon Johnson couldn’t get enough of his father’s political world. One night when the governor of Texas came to visit, nine-year-old Lyndon stowed away under the dining room table so he could listen to the talk. A politician could have greatness, young Lyndon understood, the greatness that came from transforming other people’s lives.

  But for Sam Johnson, there were other indicators of greatness. There were fine clothes and fancy shoes and other expensive things, all of which he wanted. And he wanted one fine thing above all: a bigger ranch. He was proud of his lineage in the Hill Country, proud of the name Johnson City, proud of the time when the Johnsons had ruled the Pedernales River Valley as prosperous landowners. As his reputation as a man of consequence grew, he thought more and more of the days when his forebears had ruled the Hill Country. He wanted to bring those days back.

  And he wanted to do it with land. In the years between 1910 and 1920, he bought up acre after acre adjacent to his ranch on the Pedernales. When hard-up relatives sought to unload their own farms, he’d pay a premium for them so that family land would not pass into the hands of strangers. Soon he was in over his head, mortgaged far beyond his means, but he was confident he would be able to cover his debts with the proceeds of prize cattle raised on his bountiful land. He was confident his ranch would deliver.

  And of course it didn’t. Like so many ranchers before him, many of them Johnsons, Sam Ealy Johnson, Jr., was devastated by the Hill Country’s harsh soil and unpredictable climate. Before long, he had more creditors than he could keep track of. He fell into financial ruin so great that he had to give up not only his land but his political career, too, just so he could pay the bills. A teenage Lyndon Johnson watched in deep shame as his father took any job he could get, even working on a road gang. The man who’d set out to heal the sick, to feed the hungry, to bring money and roads to the poor, had ended up laying down pavement himself.

  And those were the Hill Country rules, swirling around in Lyndon Johnson’s head as he considered the Kennedy poverty plan. He did not look at the proposal the way Kennedy might have. There was no gray area, no cautious skepticism, no putting off action until the reality became clearer. The story of the Hill Country Johnsons taught that the future could offer only two possibilities: heroic greatness or total disgrace. A great man was the one who could have it all—the ranch, the love of the down
trodden, the dreams. The disgraced man was the one who tried for it all and failed. And when Johnson dreamed for himself and his country, that was what he saw: total greatness. If that vision brought with it a reminder of the other possibility—total disaster and disgrace—well, that was unpleasant but necessary. In Johnson’s life, the suppressed fear of looming disaster was always the price of big dreams.

  WHEN FEAR DID come to Lyndon Johnson, it usually came with a human face. As he worked with Heller and others that week on the ranch, plotting his great dreams, he did not have to look far for someone to frighten him. He could find him in one of the very men helping to plot the domestic programs on the ranch that Christmas week: Kennedy’s counselor Ted Sorensen.

  Since the assassination, Johnson had continued to work tirelessly to win over Sorensen, who was, after Bobby and Jackie, the greatest symbol of continuity with the Kennedy legacy. “I think he is going to come around,” Katharine Graham told Johnson early in December, “if you just give him a little love.” Johnson replied that he had “done as much as I can and have any pride and self-respect left.”

  Meeting with Johnson in the Oval Office that December, Sorensen mentioned in passing that his three sons were downstairs eating in the White House mess. “Let’s go join them!” said the president. Down they went, where Johnson gamely chatted up the young boys before returning to the Oval Office. The children, who had their own magical memories of Kennedy, were unimpressed. “He doesn’t look like a president,” young Stephen Sorensen observed.

  Soon it was clear that Sorensen could not continue in the White House. Johnson agreed to let him go, but he asked Sorensen to first write the State of the Union address and lead the process that would determine Johnson’s domestic agenda. On the thirtieth of December, Sorensen and a small group of other advisers joined the president at the ranch in a guesthouse in the middle of a cow pasture to discuss the poverty plan.