Sorensen knew all about Heller’s ideas. He had been a chief skeptic of their political viability in the Kennedy White House, and on more than one occasion he had urged Kennedy to deemphasize the issue. When Heller tried to talk about the politics of poverty, Sorensen told him to back off. Up to the last moments of the Kennedy presidency, Sorensen had been focused on the same thing as Kennedy: a second term in the White House.
But since there would be no second Kennedy term, Sorensen now had other priorities. Kennedy’s poverty plan was no longer about election year politics, but instead about Kennedy’s place in history. It was even more clear by the end of December, after the publication of the “Camelot” story in Life, that if history was going to remember Kennedy as a great president, it would not remember him as a centrist pragmatist who’d worried over the men with lunch pails and the shifting American center. The case for Kennedy’s greatness would be made by depicting him as a transformational liberal reformer, a man ahead of his time. To make the case for Kennedy’s greatness, Sorensen and the other loyalists had to remind the country of the great liberal reforms that, but for Oswald’s bullets, President Kennedy had been destined to usher in.
In death, John F. Kennedy would be recast as a man fully determined to end poverty. His disciples were already pushing the revision. In an essay in The Saturday Evening Post that December, Arthur Schlesinger wrote that ending poverty had been a signal aim of the Kennedy administration. He quoted Kennedy in one of their last conversations: “The time has come to organize a national assault on the causes of poverty, a comprehensive program, across the board.” In his office, Bobby Kennedy now had framed a scrap of paper on which Kennedy had doodled a single word over and over at his last cabinet meeting: “poverty.”
And so, as Heller presented the poverty plan that day, Sorensen offered none of the old political objections. He listened approvingly as Heller described a plan for a war on poverty based on “community action,” a program in which the government would provide broad funding for antipoverty centers around the country, run under local control.
It fell to Horace Busby, a Johnson aide of long standing, to voice skepticism about the project’s feasibility. After hearing the plans to convert Washington’s Union Station into a clearinghouse for employers, the poor and out of work, and experts skilled in matching the two, Busby responded with caustic questions. How would the poor people get to Union Station? Where would they park?
This prompted a flash of anger from the president. Taking Busby outside, Johnson scolded his aide harshly. “Why did you say that?” Johnson asked. “Don’t you realize these are Kennedy’s people?”
To Johnson, watching Sorensen assent to Heller’s proposals, the poverty plan began to look like something new: a test. He didn’t object to the substance of Busby’s questions. In truth, he had his own concerns about the plan. But for the moment, those concerns were beside the point. “Johnson realized,” writes the historian Nicholas Lemann, “that the Kennedy people had succeeded in changing the stakes of the poverty program: the question, instead of being whether Johnson could take over what had been a small, stagnating Kennedy idea and make it his first major initiative without one-upping the dead president, became whether Johnson could possibly be as fully committed to fighting poverty as Kennedy had been.” He was not going to lose that game. Back in the meeting, Johnson made sure Busby kept his mouth shut.
But Busby was sufficiently concerned about the domestic program to try once more to get Johnson’s attention. That night, he stayed up writing a memo to the president cautioning him against making transformative social programs a centerpiece of his presidency in its early days. His words echoed the advice Kennedy’s political advisers had given him the previous month, when they had urged him to focus on the men with lunch pails. The poverty program was not fully formed, Busby told Johnson. But more important, it didn’t appeal to “the American in the middle.… People know instinctively these are your kinds of folks—not the extremes. The politics of the extremes is what the typical American expects you to break away from. If you can do so, you can broaden the Democratic Party base as it has not been broadened in two decades.”
If Johnson took the other course, he would face peril. “America’s real majority,” Busby wrote, “is suffering a minority complex of neglect. They have become the real foes of Negro rights, foreign aid, etc., because, as much as anything, they feel forgotten.” If somehow a talented Republican could find a way to speak to those forgotten people, then it would be a very new kind of politics indeed.
It was the kind of warning that might make another president think twice before acting in a bold, dramatic way. The kind of warning that had made another president think twice, just a few weeks before. But it was not the kind of warning that would naturally catch the attention of Lyndon Johnson. It was too abstract, too conditional. It relied too much on a murky understanding of what was coming. That wasn’t the kind of future Johnson believed in. His visions were always clear ones. Sometimes he saw certain greatness on the horizon, other times certain ruin. But certainty was always there.
He couldn’t hold back just for the sake of caution, not when the stakes were so high. That week’s issue of Newsweek had an article on Jackie Kennedy’s new post–White House life on the cover. By then she had purchased a Washington home of her own, on N Street in Georgetown. There, she would be surrounded by the kind of privileged easterners who had looked down on Lyndon Johnson for thirty years. Her new house had a dining room that could seat forty and a nine-hundred-square-foot drawing room. It was the kind of place where a hostess could entertain on a grand scale, the kind of place where a court in exile could plot its return. In the photograph on Newsweek’s cover, Jackie was peeking out from a doorway. Half her face was hidden, obscured by the large door. But the other half was filled with contained anticipation. Her eyes, twinkling ever so slightly, were staring straight ahead.
Johnson could not let the Kennedy mythmakers do him in. He had to offer his own story, not about the past but about the future, one that was more glorious than anyone had yet dared to imagine. He sent Walter Heller and the other aides back to Washington with clear instructions: in his State of the Union, he would declare unconditional war on poverty. And the war would be over only when poverty had been eradicated once and for all.
AFTER THE NEW year, the flood of visitors to the LBJ Ranch at last began to subside. Soon it would be time for the Johnsons to return to Washington. But before they left, Lyndon and Lady Bird would play host to one more couple: Sally Reston and her husband, James B. “Scotty” Reston of The New York Times.
The senior Times man in Washington, Scotty Reston was the most esteemed newspaper reporter in the country. His values were establishment values and his column reflected the Washington establishment position on a given issue more often than not. But he was a perceptive reporter who sometimes challenged conventional wisdom. Already he had taken such a position on the young presidency of Lyndon Johnson. In mid-December, while most other reporters wrote about the active new president and the seamless harmony between the Kennedy and Johnson teams, Reston offered a discordant note. “People here do not like to compare the old and the new, for the time being,” he wrote, “but they cannot help it. To talk about President Johnson’s genius with Congress somehow seems to imply a criticism of President Kennedy; to dwell on President Kennedy’s grace and style similarly seems to suggest a problem of President Johnson.”
In the column, Reston wondered if, compared with his now-legendary predecessor, Johnson’s emerging presidency might be a practical, placid affair, lacking in the Kennedys’ big dreams. He quoted an unnamed correspondent: “Mr. Johnson now seems Gary Cooper as President—High Noon, the poker game, the easy walk and masculine smile. But even Gary Cooper was growing older, and the companions and adversaries around the poker table reflect a less fresh, if no doubt practical and effective mood. All will be well, I feel sure, but it is August and not June.”
This was a di
rect challenge to the story Johnson was trying to tell, in which the time of big dreams and great adventures had just begun. Before Johnson returned from Texas, he intended to make sure Scotty Reston himself saw the proof. On January 3, Reston received a call from Johnson aide Bill Moyers. The president, Moyers said, was hoping to spend some time with Reston to talk about the campaign and the year ahead. Could he and Sally come for a visit at the ranch?
The Restons, who were in Phoenix, Arizona, watching Barry Goldwater officially kick off his campaign for the presidency, made their way to Texas. Their day with the Johnsons was full: a helicopter trip to Austin for a visit with a recuperating John Connally and then the flight home. But first they had to have the tour of the ranch and its environs. Riding along, Lady Bird had one last chance to tell the story of the Johnson heroes, this time with her husband there to help her and the greatest newspaperman in the country as her audience.
In the car, the Johnsons pointed to the old stone fort where Lyndon’s settler forebears had taken refuge and fired their rifles at invading Indians. They told of Lyndon’s grandmother, Lady Bird later recalled, “hiding with her two infant children in the cellar of the log house, while the Indians stomped outside.” They pointed to the old fort’s commissary, the place where the Hill Country ranchers had gathered their herds at the beginning of an epic drive.
There, under the Texas sky, Lyndon made it clear to Scotty Reston that his own epic drive was just beginning. Moving briskly across the ranch, he grew animated, talking about his high hopes for his presidency, the reforms he would push through, all the ways he would make America a better place. He was worried about high school dropouts, teenage pregnancy, the rural poor. He believed he could solve each of these problems, and he intended to try. As he spoke, he would pull slips of paper from his pocket, with facts and figures to pepper his arguments. And he was most animated when talking about the war on poverty. This was a monumental problem, he argued, but a solvable one, one that would be solved, by him. He was sure.
The point was not lost on Reston. He could see that there would be more to the Johnson presidency than pragmatism and continuity. President Johnson intended to use his office to solve the biggest problems, to do the biggest things.
Soon it was time for the group to depart the ranch. But moments before he was to get into his helicopter, Johnson held the party up. That morning, during the drive around the area, he had noticed that a nearby patch of land was for sale. It was a parcel that, if absorbed, would increase the acreage of the LBJ Ranch. As soon as he saw it, Johnson knew that he wanted it. He sent a ranch hand to inquire about the price. As the rest of his party waited, Johnson gave instructions for a negotiation. Before long, the land was his.
Satisfied, Johnson stepped onto his helicopter and headed to Austin, then on to Washington and the wider world. Like his proud ancestors, he was ready for greatness. And like his father before him, he wanted a bigger ranch.
Reagan at the 1964 Republican Convention.
© Bettmann/CORBIS
CHAPTER FIVE
B Movie
February–July 1964
In mid-February 1964, the Young Republicans of California gathered in a San Diego ballroom for a banquet at their annual convention. On the surface, they looked pleasant enough, clean-faced and closely cropped. But the faces in the crowd were mostly male, and some were not far beyond adolescence. Rage was always near at hand.
Standing in front of them as the evening’s featured speaker, Ronald Reagan knew what they wanted: a confident voice to affirm the outrage they felt. And he was the one to give it to them.
For months, the press had been filled with saintly remembrances of President Kennedy and laudatory praise for his successor, Lyndon Johnson. All the wise men in Washington agreed that the new president had done a remarkable job of continuing the work of his predecessor, of seamlessly picking up where President Kennedy had left off. That, Reagan’s comments suggested, was precisely the problem, a problem worthy of outrage. The work of Kennedy and Johnson was a policy of appeasement and capitulation. A policy of “staving off a direct confrontation with our enemies” in the hope that “Russia eventually will grow to be more democratic, more like us.”
The tragedy of this delusion, Reagan said, was “that it doesn’t give us the choice between peace and war, only between fight and surrender.”
In the hours before Reagan’s speech, these young Republicans had been turning their rage on each other. At the convention, they had been waging fratricidal war, tearing themselves to pieces over a pair of hypotheticals—an endorsement they might give to someone who might win that year’s Republican nomination for the presidency. It was still weeks before the nation’s first primary voters would go to the polls in New Hampshire, months before the voters of California would have a primary of their own. But a majority of these young Republicans, supporters of the conservative standard-bearer Barry Goldwater, were already vowing to withhold their endorsement should the party’s nomination go to Nelson Rockefeller or another moderate Eastern Kennedy-Johnson knockoff, traitor to the cause.
But from the front of the room, these squabbles in the crowd, even the crowd itself, were probably all a blur. Reagan never looked too closely at his audiences. Since childhood, he’d been frightfully nearsighted. His parents paid for thick eyeglasses, which he wore dutifully, but without them, his visible world was mostly blotches of color and drifting shapes. He had adapted without much questioning, the way that children can, forgoing baseball for football, a sport in which you didn’t have to see well enough to hit a tiny ball, only well enough to hit another player.
He’d started his show business career on radio, where his audience was invisible. At the audition for his first job at the Davenport, Iowa, station WOC, the Scottish-born program director had explained how things worked. “That’s the mike in front of ye,” he said. “Ye won’t be able to see me but I’ll be listenin’. Good luck.”
In Hollywood, too, seeing had never been that important. Arriving in Southern California in the late 1930s, he’d looked up Joy Hodges, an acquaintance from back home who was working as an actress in the film colony. “I have visions of becoming an actor,” he confessed to her. “What I really want is a screen test.” Hodges looked at the man in front of her—dressed like the Midwest, unsophisticated in the ways of the world, but tall, broad-shouldered, and undeniably handsome. “I think I might be able to fix something,” she said. “Just don’t ever put those glasses on again.”
So he’d learned to get by without seeing things too closely. In time, it became the habit of his life. Eventually, he’d gotten contact lenses. Though they could correct his vision, their effect was strangely limited. His children, rushing into a room at day’s end to greet their father, would find him looking puzzled, as if they were strangers. Have we met? It was as if, after all the years of seeing ill-defined blotches, the part of his brain that processed the particulars of a person’s face had corroded irreparably due to lack of use. Or maybe it had never been there at all. Once, at his son Michael’s high school graduation, where he was the commencement speaker, he’d greeted a line of graduates. “My name is Ronald Reagan,” he said to a grinning boy in cap and gown. “What’s yours?” The graduate removed his cap. “Remember me? I’m your son Mike.”
When he spoke to large audiences, he didn’t focus on the faces before him. Years later, after he’d become a national politician, his aides persuaded him to use a teleprompter. He’d always preferred note cards, filled with his shorthand block writing. But he was not afraid to improve his performance, and he accepted the new technology. Just before going onstage, he would remove the contact lens from his right eye. From the corrected left eye, he read the words from the moving monitor. With his right eye, the one without the lens, he looked at the crowd. He wanted to look at his audience, but he did not want too much detail. Seeing their faces was not important.
What mattered was knowing, feeling, just exactly what they wanted most. This was
Reagan’s great gift. Over the past decade, in his role as GE spokesman, he’d spent countless hours traveling the country. Each day brought a new blur of strangers, more than two hundred thousand of them over the eight years he’d spent in the job. To get a good reception from these anonymous crowds, he’d learned to intuit quickly who they were and what they longed for—and what they feared.
He didn’t have to focus much on the faces of the seething young precinct captains and party chairs who had gathered in the banquet hall that night. He didn’t have to dwell on their internecine struggle, their endorsement contretemps. To be sure, he was a conservative and an ardent Goldwater man. He agreed that the party couldn’t afford to take a risk on one of those moderates from the East. But there had been plenty of that kind of talk already at the convention, of Republicans fighting Republicans, plenty of proclamations of Goldwaterism as the one true faith.
That wasn’t precisely what an audience like this wanted, anyway. They wanted something bigger, something deeper. What conservative crowds like this needed in the spring of 1964 was someone to affirm what they felt most deeply: that things in America had gone terribly, unmistakably wrong. They wanted someone to tell a story they could believe in, a story of a country in mortal danger, and a story of how that country could be saved.
It was a story they could not find in the establishment press. The people in the newspapers, the men on the television screens, they missed no opportunity to tell the country about the splendid job President Johnson was doing, about the broad support he was enjoying in all the polls, about the happy aura that had settled on Washington as both parties put aside their differences. In the press, Johnson quoted Isaiah: “Come now, let us reason together.” Goldwater and his angry right-wing maniacs, the press said, had little chance of taking over their party, let alone the White House in November. They were out of touch with the most important fact of American life: that despite the horrors of last November, things in the country were going to be fine.
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