Landslide

by Jonathan Darman

  Yet if there was one clear consequence of the Jenkins affair, it may have been the marked shift in Johnson’s tone in the final days of his campaign. After the news broke, candidate Johnson seemed to grow more manically intense. And, significantly, his promises grew more extravagant, his optimistic prophecies more and more certain. The closer he got to the election, whose outcome was no longer in doubt, the more he dispensed with all responsible caution when describing the great things that were soon to come.

  You could hear it in his words the night after the Jenkins scandal broke. “The Great Society is not something brand new,” he told a huge crowd at Madison Square Garden. “It is a dream as old as our civilization. The difference is, for the first time in man’s history we really have the resources to make it possible, to make the Great Society a reality.”

  The debate over what kind of vision Johnson should run on, it seemed, had been settled. He would not look within himself to see what he truly believed in. He would not ask the country to take on a great risk. He would not echo Kennedy, the old president who’d asked for sacrifice and risk in exchange for a chance at uncertain but unmatched reward. Instead, he would promise a bold and fantastic future that was certain to come.

  It was as if the Jenkins ordeal had given him an out. When it seemed that he couldn’t lose, he had been forced to contemplate talking to the country about reality, to contemplate what was real and true. But the scandal, and its attendant danger, had taken care of all that. He was free to revert to what came naturally to him, saying whatever he had to in order to earn the people’s love. He could give them a fantasy and call it the future.

  His extravagant visions grew and grew until, in the final week of the campaign, they reached the highest heights. On October 27, he began a cross-country campaign swing in Boston, appearing at a rally on behalf of Teddy Kennedy, who was up for reelection as senator from the Bay State. “I am not a prophet,” Johnson told a crowd of 350,000, “but in due time he will lead a lot more people than those of Massachusetts.” But by the time the president reached Pittsburgh, later that day, prophecies were indeed flying out of his mouth. There, The New York Times reported, Johnson described a “utopian society” that was about to arrive. “Here is the Great Society,” he told his audience. “It’s the time—and it’s going to be soon—when nobody in this country is poor.… It’s the time—and there’s no point in waiting—when every boy and every girl in this country … has the right to all the education that he can absorb.… It’s the time when every slum is gone from every city in America, and America is beautiful.”

  There, a week before Election Day, the president promised the people that they could banish uncertainty, that they could triumph even over fate. “It’s the time when man gains full dominion under God over his own destiny,” he said. “It’s the time of peace on Earth and good will among men. The place is here and the time is now.”

  A FEW HOURS after the president had finished speaking that night in Pittsburgh, Americans watching NBC at home heard an altogether different vision of the nation’s future. “Now, one side in this campaign has been telling us that the issues of this election are the maintenance of peace and prosperity,” a speaker told them. “The line has been used, ‘We’ve never had it so good.’ But I have an uncomfortable feeling that this prosperity isn’t something on which we can base our hopes for the future.”

  The broadcast, viewers were told, was paid for by “TV for Goldwater-Miller.” It carried the Goldwater message: the perils of overtaxation, the ballooning national debt, the rapacious spending of the federal government. It emphasized the existential threat to freedom posed by the Communist bloc. But in this broadcast, Goldwater’s best chance to make his final pitch to a national audience, the Goldwater case was not coming from Goldwater. It was coming from Ronald Reagan.

  It was, in fact, not altogether different from the speech Reagan had delivered to the audience of Young Republicans eight months earlier. In basic outline, it was The Speech, the statement of Reagan’s political vision he’d developed while traveling the country for GE. Reagan, who was working again as actor, had been squeezing in appearances for Goldwater when he could that summer and fall. Late in the summer, he’d delivered The Speech to the kind of audience he usually gave it to, a group of wealthy Goldwater backers who had gathered at the Coconut Grove nightclub in Los Angeles. Afterward, a group of the supporters approached the Hollywood star. Barry needed serious help, they believed, help that Reagan could provide. They asked if Reagan would be willing to deliver The Speech again for a television broadcast. “Sure,” said Reagan, “if you think it would do any good.”

  He sounded innocent, but Reagan had very specific notions of how to do the telecast. He knew how he benefited from the feel of a crowded room. This speech would work best, he said, in front of a live audience. So his backers purchased airtime on NBC and filled a studio at the network with friendly Republicans who cheered excitedly at the beginning of the actor’s address.

  For a time, it looked as though the studio audience would be the only ones to see Reagan speak. In the final stretch of the campaign, months after they’d lost the battle to define their candidate, Goldwater’s advisers suddenly began to worry about making their candidate look like an extremist. They feared that Reagan’s broadcast hit too shrill a note, that it dwelled too long on the topic of Social Security. Better, the Goldwater high command told the California donors, to use the airtime for a reairing of a different broadcast. In that special, Goldwater appeared with Eisenhower at the ex-president’s Pennsylvania farm. Ike, the voice of reasonable moderation, embraced his party’s nominee and discussed with him the Republicans’ issues in the campaign. It was intended as a rebuttal to the extremist charge, to get voters to think: if I like Ike and Ike likes Goldwater, then maybe I can like Goldwater, too. But neither of its two leading men, aged Ike or irascible Barry, was very good at faking emotion. They spoke nicely of one another, but their faces contorted in pain. The whole thing looked like an excruciating postmodern prison drama in which the audience, scrutinizing two adversaries, is meant to determine who is the prisoner and who is the guard. “I’d seen the film showing Barry’s meeting with Eisenhower at Gettysburg,” Reagan would later write, “and I didn’t think it was all that impressive.”

  Neither did the donors writing the checks for the airtime on NBC. They told the Goldwater campaign to stick with the Reagan plan. But the Goldwater hacks wouldn’t give in; they had their candidate phone Reagan to request he pull out. “Barry,” Reagan said gently when Goldwater called, “I’ve been making the speech all over the state for quite a while and I have to tell you, it’s been very well received.” Goldwater admitted that he hadn’t actually seen the broadcast in question and agreed to review it himself. After listening to the audio, he was confused: “What the hell’s wrong with that?”

  And so, on the night of October 27, millions of Americans watched Reagan give his alternative vision of America’s future. It was indeed unsettling. He used his standard trick of clumping together statistics in rapid succession to make them appear more distressing than they would if presented on their own:

  Today, thirty-seven cents out of every dollar earned in this country is the tax collector’s share, and yet our government continues to spend seventeen million dollars a day more than the government takes in. We haven’t balanced our budget twenty-eight out of the last thirty-four years.

  He barely paused for breath between a string of sinister quotes from his opponents.

  They have voices that say, “The cold war will end through our acceptance of a not undemocratic socialism.” Another voice says, “The profit motive has become outmoded. It must be replaced by the incentives of the welfare state.” Or, “Our traditional system of individual freedom is incapable of solving the complex problems of the twentieth century.”

  But The Speech did more than just confuse, obfuscate, and scare. It also inspired. Reagan framed the conservative cause in a kind of moral urgency t
he nation had not heard much of in the past year:

  You and I know and do not believe that life is so dear and peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery. If nothing in life is worth dying for, when did this begin—just in the face of this enemy?

  It was, to be sure, the hard-line anticommunist message. But it also revived the sentiment of moral clarity that Kennedy had evoked so well—that the purpose of a meaningful life was not to avoid suffering, but to find something that was worth suffering for.

  And as delivered by the handsome actor with his warm, textured voice, the conservative message sounded altogether different from what had been coming from Goldwater. In response to Johnson’s enticing promises, Goldwater had offered only depressing attacks: Don’t you see it’s national suicide? Don’t you see it’s not true? “In Your Heart, You Know He’s Right,” went the Goldwater slogan. But Goldwater failed to see that the electorate of 1964 didn’t want to listen to sinking feelings in its heart. It wanted to believe in something good. Reagan’s speech showed him to be keenly aware of this fact. It offered voters something good to believe in, something different from Johnson but something just as fantastical and fantastic. At the conclusion, Reagan, the man who had imitated the speaker as he listened in awe to the Fireside Chats, imitated Roosevelt once more: “You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We’ll preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we’ll sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.”

  The response to the speech, called “A Time for Choosing,” was overwhelming. Goldwater’s campaign headquarters was jammed with calls asking when it would be rebroadcast. Donations came flooding in through the mail. Barry’s campaign reversed itself entirely on Reagan. Dean Burch, running the Republican National Committee, sent Reagan a telegram at home:

  I JUST WANTED YOU TO KNOW THAT YOUR SHOW HAS BEEN WONDERFULLY RECEIVED AND WE APPRECIATE SO MUCH THE FINE WORK THAT YOU HAVE DONE ON OUR BEHALF. WE ARE MAKING EVERY EFFORT TO SEE THAT YOUR SHOW GETS NATIONWIDE COVERAGE BEFORE TUESDAY.

  In the end, it wouldn’t matter what kind of coverage they got before Election Day. For most of the nation, the time for choosing Goldwater had long since passed, if it had ever occurred at all. Reagan’s address seemed to acknowledge as much. In the forty-six-hundred-word speech, the name “Goldwater” appeared only seven times, and the name “Johnson” did not appear at all. On the other hand, Reagan used the word “I” fully thirty-two times. Indeed, at the opening of his remarks, Reagan seemed at pains to make clear he was not just an actor anymore: “The sponsor has been identified, but unlike most television programs, the performer hasn’t been provided with a script. As a matter of fact, I have been permitted to choose my own words and discuss my own ideas regarding the choice that we face in the next few weeks.”

  Something was changing in Ronald Reagan. Perhaps there could be a future in politics after all. For the pragmatic Reagan, so deeply intuitive of the shifts in public mood, could sense that something had changed in America. By propelling politics into the realm of fantasy, Johnson was creating an opportunity for the conservative worldview that hadn’t been there even a few months before.

  Perhaps, in fact, the “time for choosing” was just beginning. In the course of a few hours that night, the country had heard two new and radically different visions of what America was becoming. From Johnson in the East, they’d heard prophecies of a coming era that looked like God’s kingdom on earth, arriving shortly. From Reagan in the West, they’d heard of the potential for calamity and the extinguishing of freedom, coming soon. Both visions could not stand. Here was the beginning of a great drama. The time for choosing would be a time for watching, and waiting, to see which vision would prevail, and to see who would play the hero in the end.

  A JOHNSON VICTORY on November 3 was inevitable. Still, it was spectacular when it came. He beat Goldwater with 61 percent of the vote, the largest popular vote landslide in American history. Goldwater had carried his home state of Arizona, but only by a single percentage point. Other than that, his victories were confined to the Deep South: South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. In Johnson’s home state of Texas, which, since the Kennedy assassination, the country had come to think of as a hotbed of reactionary radicalism, the president outperformed his national margin, securing 63 percent of the vote.

  But Johnson’s appeal had no regional accent. He did well in California, earning 59 percent of the vote, and in the Mountain and Middle West, and in New England—with more than 65 percent of the vote in Vermont and Maine, the two states that had prevented Franklin Roosevelt from securing a national sweep in his reelection year, 1936. (Johnson would be the first Democratic candidate to win the state of Vermont since the founding of the Republican Party, in 1854.) In 1960, Kennedy had won a respectable 60 percent of the vote against Nixon in his home state of Massachusetts. Four years later, Johnson had beaten Kennedy’s margin in the Bay State by a whopping sixteen points. “The returns,” said Newsweek, “read like tall tales from Texas. They spelled the victory of a Southerner who won 97 percent of the country’s Negro vote; of a Protestant who won more Roman Catholic votes than the Catholic President he succeeded.”

  Of perhaps even greater significance, Johnson’s Democratic Party had also won the largest majorities in both houses of Congress of any time since FDR, picking up thirty-six seats in the House. In the Senate, the party retained a two-thirds majority, large enough that if (and it was a big “if”) Johnson could maintain an alliance between Southern conservatives and Northern liberals, there would be a filibuster-proof path for any legislation the president put forward. The incoming class of Democratic senators would include Bobby Kennedy, whose 53.5 percent of the vote in New York paled behind Johnson’s 68.5 percent. (“Listen, I pulled you through up here,” Bobby self-consciously joked to Johnson in an election night call.) Of twenty-five governor’s races that year, the Republicans managed to win only eight.

  It seemed clear that the public had rejected the conservative worldview, completely and perhaps forever. In the press, columnists and scholars competed for who could be more over-the-top in their predictions of the long liberal era to come. “Barry Goldwater not only lost the presidential election,” Scotty Reston wrote the next day, “but the conservative cause as well.” In Newsweek, the columnist Kenneth Crawford quoted a “Dixie politician” saying that Goldwater’s Deep South route would prove “a one-shot affair” driven by bad blood over the civil rights betrayal. “They were spitting in Johnson’s beer. Now they’ve got that out of their system.” “By every test we have,” said the historian James MacGregor Burns, “this is as surely a liberal epoch as the 19th century was a conservative one.”

  Goldwater’s running mate, Bill Miller, saw a more prosaic reality at work: “The American people were not prepared to assassinate two Presidents within a year.”

  Johnson read press accounts of his triumph with relish. Jack Valenti prepared a packet of postmortems, with selected passages underlined that he thought the president would particularly appreciate:

  His margin of victory was greater in each of twenty-two states than Kennedy’s was in the entire nation …

  Had it not been for Johnson, such Democratic Senators as Young, Yarborough, Cannon, Proxmire, and Robert Kennedy, who ran far behind the national ticket, would probably not be there at all …

  Despite the physical resemblance, Mr. Kennedy is a less attractive figure than his brother.

  “J,” Johnson scrawled on the memo, “thanks much—excellent idea L.”

  In his postelection messages, Johnson urged unity in the country. But he had a very definite idea of what the country was unifying behind. In his moment of personal triumph, he clung tight to the vision of glory he had promised to his nation. Indeed, he suggested that his promise would soon be fulfilled. In the days after the election, he set his aides to work, drafting bills to pass in his first days in office in order to bring his Great Soc
iety vision to life. On December 18, he appeared triumphant on the Ellipse outside the White House for the lighting of the Christmas tree. The temperature was below freezing, but in the fashion of the Kennedys, he wore no hat or coat. That year’s tree, a two-ton Adirondack, the largest in the history of the White House, sparkled with 7,500 lights. Just before he and Lady Bird pushed the button to illuminate them, the president expressed unbounded optimism for the coming year, 1965.

  “These are the most hopeful times,” he cried, “since Christ was born in Bethlehem.”

  “I don’t see any way of winning”: By mid-1965, Johnson (shown in the Cabinet Room with Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara) had grown deeply pessimistic about the war in Vietnam.

  © Yoichi Okamoto/LBJ Library

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Valley of the Black Pig

  January 23–April 9, 1965

  At nearly half past two in the morning on Saturday, January 23, 1965, a Navy ambulance pulled away from the South Portico of the White House. Escorted by a Secret Service motorcade, it headed north toward Bethesda Naval Hospital, speeding along streets lined with dirty slush, through a slumbering city that was unaware of the ambulance or its patient. Seated inside, in a robe and pajamas, was an ailing president of the United States.

  Three nights earlier, the night of his inauguration, a triumphant Lyndon Johnson had stayed up late celebrating. At a ball at the Mayflower Hotel, he had danced exuberantly, exchanging partner after partner, nine of them in thirteen minutes. At one point he’d coaxed Harry Truman’s daughter, Margaret Truman Daniel, over the rail of her observer’s box down onto the dance floor. He took her on his arm and they flitted across the floor gaily. The band played “I’ve Got the World on a String.”