An enormous audience—perhaps as many as 50 million people—saw “Daisy” on TV that night. Most were shocked by what they saw. Even the parents of the little girl picking the daisy petals were surprised. They had taken their daughter to shoot a scene for a commercial for an undisclosed client. No one had told them what their daughter would be selling: the possibility of her own annihilation, along with that of the rest of the human race. Many viewers thought the ad far outside the bounds of good taste. Angry callers jammed the White House switchboard. Noting the public reaction, the campaign did not air the ad again.
It didn’t have to. All that “Daisy” had done, in its particularly memorable fashion, was the same thing Johnson had done when kicking off his fall campaign in a rally at Detroit’s Cadillac Square. “I am not the first president to speak here,” the president told the crowd, “and I do not intend to be the last.” It was the same thing just about every communication from the Johnson campaign sought to do: to take an already anxious electorate and ensure that when it thought of Goldwater, it got so scared so quickly that it didn’t want to think about him ever again. “FACT,” wrote Jack Valenti in a blunt memo to the president on September 7. “Our main strength lies not so much in the FOR Johnson but in the AGAINST Goldwater.… We must make him ridiculous and a little scary: trigger-happy, a bomb thrower, a radical … not the Nation’s leader, will sell TVA, cancel Social Security, abolish the government, stir trouble in NATO, be the herald of World War III.” In a memo to the DNC, Bill Moyers laid out the Democrats’ central message: “He could do these things—but only if we let him. Vote for President Johnson on November 3. The stakes are too high to stay home.”
Through September and the early weeks of October, the Johnson campaign jammed the airwaves with that message. Another ad, “Confessions of a Republican,” showed a neatly dressed man smoking a cigarette, looking unsettled, as though even by talking about Goldwater he was inviting some sort of danger. “But when we come to Senator Goldwater,” he said, “this man scares me … President Johnson—now, Johnson, at least, is talking about facts.” Thus the stripped-down message of the president’s campaign: “Goldwater scares me!… Johnson, at least … But Goldwater!” It was not inspiring stuff, but it was remarkably effective. By the end of September, polls showed Johnson beating Goldwater by as much as thirty points.
Goldwater continued to be the Johnson campaign’s best surrogate. When he attempted to soften his image, he ended up sounding even less appealing. Sucking up to peanut farmers on the campaign trail, he declared himself “probably the most violent advocate of peanut butter in history. On a dare from my son, I even shaved with it once, and it was all right, except that it smelled.”
The press, growing bored with the hapless Republican candidate, tried out new terms—“frontlash” for Republicans abandoning Goldwater for the Democrats—and strained for ever more macho metaphors to describe the president’s triumphs. In Newsweek, Johnson was “this big, booming, leonine Texan, this Paul Bunyan of politicians … gobbl[ing] up cities, crowds, distances, and issues with the uninhibited relish of a cormorant at a smorgasbord. He oozed restraint, responsibility, and reason at every pore—and he exuded confidence like a rooster in a henhouse.”
Outwardly, Johnson seemed to glory in his triumph. Through the fall, he continually frustrated the Secret Service as he plowed into crowds. Some presidents seeking reelection recoil from hand-to-hand politics, finding it drains them of life. But Johnson’s validation, and thus his strength, came only from other people. A crowd was an endless feast. “He needed contact with people,” said his secretary, Marie Fehmer. For Johnson, tactile campaigning “was like a B-12 shot.”
But in Johnson, blissful ecstasy and crushing anxiety were never far apart. He could feed his hunger for affirmation all day long. After a certain point, he would start craving things to fear.
And fear was surprisingly easy to find in that fall’s campaign. When a political candidate is sitting on a comfortable lead in the polls, the final weeks in the election are like a sleepless night in an old, empty house. Time stands still while stray sounds and unaccountable movements gnaw at the nervous mind. Rational adults grow deeply superstitious; responsible professionals become haunted by the memories of races that seemed like sure things—and then weren’t. Everyone obsesses over any small signal that the public mood could be heading for a dramatic shift.
And so, like many campaigns enjoying fabulous success from a negative advertising push, the Johnson camp began to worry that they were being too negative, that they had not said enough about what Johnson was for. People respected Johnson’s performance, his aide Horace Busby told him that fall. But there was danger in the fact that “people don’t fully know this man whose performance they respect.”
This was a notion that had been floating around the Johnson campaign for some time. The polling after Johnson’s convention acceptance speech had been unimpressive. “There was nothing in particular that people disliked about the speech,” reported the campaign adviser Robert T. Bower, but “there was no central focus for the favorable response. The reaction, in sum, was one of moderate undifferentiated approval.”
As the campaign entered its final weeks, Johnson and his aides projected total confidence to the outside world, shaking hands and attending parties and acting as though they intended to remain fixtures in the Washington swirl for some time to come. But internally, they launched an intense debate over how they might be more specific about what electing Johnson would mean, what kind of mandate an elected Johnson would have. How could they make the country really love him at last?
Johnson’s aides debated the particulars: How specific should he get? What explicit promises should he make? But the real question was for Johnson alone: What kind of president did he want to be?
It was a new sort of problem for Lyndon Johnson. All his life, he had found his way out of difficult situations by determining what people wanted and then convincing them that he was the best one to provide it. Then he’d go ahead and provide it, even if the providing meant walking the narrowest of paths. But the abundance of his electoral opportunity created an altogether new kind of challenge. There was no narrow path in front of him. There was no path at all. He had to create it. He had to decide what he wanted, and to try, like Kennedy and FDR before him, to persuade the nation to come along.
For Lyndon Johnson, this would have seemed the most frightening proposition of all. He had the opportunity, with his comfortable lead, to tell his people how things really were in America, and how things might get better from there. But to do so, he would have to turn the same realism on himself: to be not the president people wanted, but the president he really was. And that would mean risk: the risk that once they saw him, they would not want him at all.
FEW PEOPLE WERE as intimately familiar with the debate within the Johnson campaign—or any debate concerning the interests of Lyndon Johnson—as was Walter Jenkins. His title—special assistant to the president—was one of those opaque Washington designations. But Jenkins was indeed special. For nearly twenty-five years, he had been Johnson’s keeper of the guard. He could listen to just about any Johnson phone call, give an order to just about any Johnson aide, and read just about any piece of paper headed to or from Johnson’s desk. No one was closer to the president. Johnson once called Jenkins “my vice president in charge of everything.”
That evening in early October, four weeks before the election, the vice president in charge of everything attended the Newsweek party in the company of his wife, Marjorie. Jenkins was a proud family man; he and Marjorie had six children. But Mrs. Jenkins had learned early on that their family would have to sacrifice much in the service of Lyndon Johnson. She and Walter were married in 1945. Three days into their honeymoon, a call came from a certain congressman in Washington. “I need you badly,” said Johnson. “Can’t you cut it short?” By the time her husband hung up the telephone, Marjorie’s honeymoon was over.
In time, Marjorie
would grow friendly with Lady Bird, and her children would grow up alongside the Johnson girls. When the period of mourning for President Kennedy made it impossible to celebrate Lady Bird’s first birthday as First Lady in the White House, the Jenkinses offered up their own home as an alternative locale. They named a young son Lyndon. They were Johnson people through and through.
Now these two Johnson people made their way through the Newsweek party. Walter did not possess flawless social graces. But in the brutal thrust of a Washington cocktail party, a man had to use whatever assets he could muster.
Alcohol helped. The room was filled with the well groomed, the wellborn, and the well-positioned. Jenkins clutched a martini glass in his hand.
It helped, too, to have a familiar face. Jenkins certainly had that. Practically all of official Washington knew him. He had stumbled into town in the late 1930s, twenty-one years old, just out of the University of Texas at Austin. At the university, he’d fallen into the orbit of John Connally, the tall, handsome student body president. After graduation, Connally was headed to Washington, where he had a job in the office of a young, ambitious Texas congressman. Jenkins, without a better plan, followed along. In that congressman’s office, Walter Jenkins would find a calling. And in that congressman—Lyndon Johnson—he would find a cause to define his life.
In Jenkins, meanwhile, Johnson found a man with any number of invaluable qualities: a strong work ethic and cool efficiency, a fierce loyalty and perfect discretion. And, perhaps most important, Walter Jenkins had an uncommonly high tolerance for pain. By the time Johnson reached the Senate, Jenkins was his closest aide. Officially, he was in charge of the “Texas office”—Johnson’s Senate Office building lair—but unofficially he was a second set of eyes for every aspect of Johnson’s life. He dealt with the Johnson family’s taxes, their Texas business holdings, the LBJ Ranch. In time, Jenkins earned a reputation around town as the man to see on all things Johnson, a man who knew Johnson’s mind well enough to answer questions and fulfill requests on his behalf. For the other guests at the Newsweek party, Jenkins’s face was indeed familiar. It was the face you saw when you needed something from Lyndon Johnson but weren’t quite up to facing Lyndon Johnson himself.
There is one asset, however, that provides greater confidence at a Washington cocktail party than any other: power. And despite all the things he had seen, despite his extraordinary ability to get things done, power was not the first thing anyone would think of when they looked at Walter Jenkins. Too many people in Washington had watched Lyndon Johnson berate Jenkins in their presence. Too many had seen Johnson treat him, as one Jenkins friend put it, “like a nigger slave.” Too many people had seen the way Jenkins jumped when Johnson gave an order. Too many had heard the old knock on Johnson—he was such an awful boss, he could only keep mediocre men, like Walter Jenkins, on his staff. Washington is a ruthlessly transactional city. As Jenkins made his way through the Newsweek reception, people smiled. But they were smiling at the proximity to power, not at power itself.
To the people who worked for Johnson, however, Jenkins did have power—the power of mercy, and salvation. Over the years, more than one hapless staffer was saved when Jenkins decided to pocket an order Johnson had given in the heat of anger. They knew that Jenkins could be counted on to pick up the slack if something came up, or, if they were in the doghouse, to put in a kind word with the boss on their behalf. And they knew that when Johnson’s rage came raining down, Jenkins would stand in the full force of it, absorbing as much as he could.
That was what Walter Jenkins did better than anyone else: suffer, and carry on. The sacrifice was physical. His body grew hunched, his face became covered in blotches. In time, the agony of Walter Jenkins became an insiders’ joke. Tax time was always a stressful period for Jenkins. He had to ensure that the Johnsons’ complicated business interests did not leave an impolitic paper trail. One year, as April 15 approached, an exhausted Jenkins stole a quick nap on an office couch. Entering the room, Bill Moyers discovered the slumbering Jenkins and crept back outside. Then, Harry McPherson would later say, he threw open the door and, in an impersonation of Johnson, bellowed: “Goddamn it, Walter, what are you doing out here? Aren’t you working on my taxes?” Jenkins, said McPherson, “came off the sofa, levitating … just came right straight up off of it in total terror of Lyndon Johnson.”
It was perhaps this capacity for suffering that made Walter Jenkins so uniquely valuable to Lyndon Johnson. In three decades in Washington, Johnson had worked harder than anyone else, ruffled more feathers than anyone else, encountered pressure that would have toppled anyone else. It had come with a cost—harsh attacks, wounding criticism—that he had counted on Jenkins to bear. In Bill Moyers, Scotty Reston once wrote, Johnson saw his “ideal of what the President himself would have liked to be at 29”: quick-witted, composed, and urbane, a polished Texan who was going places. Jenkins was the other side of the coin. When Johnson looked at him—lumpy and provincial, weak and worn down—he saw the man that he secretly feared he was. He would do anything not to be that man in the eyes of the world. He hated that man. And he let Jenkins know how much.
The Newsweek party wore on. There was Katharine Graham, the evening’s hostess, the owner of the magazine and of The Washington Post. There were seven members of the cabinet, and leading lights of the press. Jenkins had another martini and then another after that.
Marjorie had dinner plans in another part of town. At eight o’clock, Walter took her downstairs and put her in a taxi. He then returned to the gathering. But when a man filled with alcohol steps out of a party and then reenters, he can find the room subtly but irrevocably altered. Friends have vanished; something darker reigns. After just a few minutes, Jenkins was back outside again on Pennsylvania Avenue, alone.
It was not yet nine o’clock. He did not go to join Marjorie at dinner. He did not head home to his children. He did not return to his office, to the pile of papers and to the ringing telephone and to the voice at the other end of the line that very well might be the president of the United States. He was steps away from the White House, the pulsing center from which Lyndon Johnson ruled over the city, over the country, and over him. And for once, he turned away.
For there was another city near at hand, a city that only certain men could see. It was a city where strangers sat quietly on the benches of Lafayette Park after nightfall, waiting. A city where anonymous faces, peering through the glass of telephone booths, made brief eye contact and then quickly darted their glance away. A city filled with strangers hurrying into alleys, stairwells, and restrooms. A dark city where Walter Jenkins had no famous boss and no important title saying just how special he was. It was a city where he did not even have a name.
It was toward that other city that Jenkins now turned. As he stepped onto G Street, he could see it in the sign over the entrance to the YMCA. He knew this place; it had been the scene of a great catastrophe in his past. And he had some idea what he would find inside. He passed through the doorway, walking toward danger, self-destruction, and desire. For certain men, on certain nights, they are all the same thing.
ONE WEEK LATER, Lyndon Johnson was resting in his hotel room at Manhattan’s Waldorf Tower when he received a phone call from Abe Fortas, his old friend and counselor. Explaining that Clark Clifford was in the room with him, Fortas told the president they had a “very serious problem” to discuss.
Johnson listened, weary and weak. It had been an exhausting fall of flying back and forth across the country, trying to run up his margin against Goldwater. At stop after stop he’d refused to leave until he’d shaken nearly every hand. Inevitably, he’d come down with a bad cold.
He was trying to get some rest before leaving for an evening at Jackie Kennedy’s new apartment with his predecessor’s widow and brother. It didn’t promise to be an easy event. Leaving the Justice Department a few weeks earlier to launch a campaign for a Senate seat from New York, Bobby had written an almost hostile letter of resigna
tion. The best that Johnson could hope from the evening ahead was civility.
The truth was, he needed the Kennedys less now than ever before. Three weeks earlier, on September 27, the Warren Commission had published its final report on the events in Dallas. The next day, twelve thousand people crowded the Government Printing Office to buy copies of the 888-page report. Most were there to buy a piece of history. Hardcover copies—at a cost of $3.25—outsold $2.50 paperbacks by a two-to-one margin.
“WARREN COMMISSION FINDS OSWALD GUILTY AND SAYS ASSASSIN AND RUBY ACTED ALONE” read the banner headline in that day’s New York Times. Press coverage of the report was almost exclusively adulatory. In the write-up of the report that led the Times, Anthony Lewis claimed “the commission analyzed every issued [sic] in exhaustive, almost archeological detail.” “From Mexico City to Moscow and Minsk,” wrote David Kraslow in the Los Angeles Times, “the Warren Commission probed for any shred of evidence to support the theory that Lee Harvey Oswald did the bidding of others. The commission found none.” In a twenty-four-page cover story on the report, Newsweek declared that “most Americans … will probably agree with Lyndon Johnson’s words discharging the commission last week: ‘You have earned the gratitude of your countrymen.’ ” The cover image for the story was a new bronze bust of JFK by the artist Robert Berks. The late president looked like a figure of antiquity. The Kennedys were the past.
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