Landslide

by Jonathan Darman

  The temperature had been just above freezing when Johnson delivered his inaugural address. The grounds of the Capitol were flooded in a persistent chill wind. At his brother’s grave at Arlington, where he fled after Johnson’s speech, Bobby Kennedy knelt to grab a fistful of snow. But Johnson had insisted on passing the long day outside without a coat or hat. On Friday, two days later, he could feel a distinct pain in his throat.

  By evening he was stricken with illness and he went to bed without dinner. The private quarters of the mansion were uncommonly quiet. Lady Bird had been feeling unwell herself that morning. She had left for Camp David lest she infect the president. From the residence, Johnson summoned the White House physician, complaining to him of a cough and chest pains. The doctor inspected his patient and told him not to worry. It was merely a cold, one that could be treated with aspirin and cough syrup.

  The doctor left Johnson to get some rest. But the president could not sleep. There was nothing he hated so much as a night spent alone. Normally, when Lady Bird traveled, he would ask friends to stay in her bedroom, making them promise to leave their door open and listen for cries in the night. But Lynda, also sick, had accompanied her mother to Camp David, and Luci was out on a date. Even Jack Valenti had left on a late flight to New York for an evening out with his wife. Johnson was totally, horribly alone. As the agonizing, lonely minutes slumped onward, he felt a fever taking hold.

  Eventually, he summoned the doctor back. When the physician arrived, a worried Johnson explained that his condition was deteriorating. The doctor didn’t want to take any chances; he suggested hospitalization. By three o’clock that morning, Johnson was in Bethesda’s seventeenth-floor VIP suite.

  Hours later, the city woke to the news of the president’s illness and panic blossomed everywhere. Press secretary George Reedy was ready with quick reassurances—Johnson was in no danger, he had only gone to the hospital out of an abundance of caution, he had walked out of the White House into the ambulance and through the front door of Bethesda. But the press pack remained skeptical. Kennedy’s assassination was still fresh in their minds. Johnson’s room at Bethesda was in the same suite where Jackie Kennedy had received friends and family while she waited out the long hours of her husband’s autopsy. And many reporters could remember the myriad health crises President Eisenhower had suffered when early, optimistic assurances from aides and doctors always masked a far more grim reality.

  Now, too, the reporters had reason to be suspicious. Briefing the press on the president’s health earlier that month, Johnson’s physician had asserted that the president enjoyed an occasional bourbon and branch water, was able to relax easily, and only “infrequently” was forced to postpone his regular bedtime on account of work. This rosy account struck the press corps as vaguely ridiculous. (For one thing, Newsweek noted, Johnson’s drink was “not bourbon but Scotch.”) They shrugged off Reedy’s happy talk and covered the initial hours of Johnson’s illness as a crisis. They turned the Naval Hospital’s movie theater into a makeshift newsroom. The networks broke in for special bulletins throughout Saturday morning’s broadcasts.

  As soon as Lyndon had arrived at the hospital, he’d called Lady Bird at Camp David. By the following afternoon, the First Lady had come back and checked herself in to the hospital, too. Ostensibly she was there to seek treatment for her own head cold. Really she was there to make sure her husband was all right.

  She always went to Lyndon when he was ailing, to tend his illness and contain his mood. In the late spring of 1948, just as he was launching his campaign for the Senate against former Texas governor Coke Stevenson, Lyndon had felt the staggering pain of a kidney stone. At first he chose to ignore it and kept campaigning full tilt. It was a poor decision, one that resulted in a ghastly, fevered ride on an overnight train, an infection, and eventually an emergency hospitalization in Dallas, where he learned that he would probably have to undergo surgery followed by a long period of recovery. Worse, news of his condition had reached the press. He grew despondent as he considered the implications for his race. He told Warren Woodward, a campaign aide, to take down a statement announcing he was dropping out. Stunned, Woodward ventured that perhaps the president ought to wait for Mrs. Johnson. She would want to be present for her husband’s withdrawal.

  In a panic, the aide bolted for the airport to fetch Lady Bird, who, on news of Lyndon’s hospitalization, had jumped on a flight from Austin. Driving her to the hospital, Woodward gave a frantic account of Lyndon’s mood and his dramatic declaration. Woodward would tell Jan Jarboe Russell years later that Lady Bird had listened coolly. “Settled in her seat,” she “told me to relax, that she would take care of it.” Sure enough, not long after arriving at the hospital, Lady Bird emerged from Lyndon’s room with the news that all was well. There would be no withdrawal.

  It was much the same seven years later in 1955, when Lyndon suffered a massive heart attack on a friend’s plantation in Middleburg, Virginia. At Bethesda Naval Hospital, Lady Bird found her husband, who, for the sake of time, had been rushed in from Middleburg in an undertaker’s hearse. Lyndon, who had always feared an early death from a heart attack, was talking as though the end had surely come. He told Lady Bird that he’d seen a tailor that morning to be fitted for two suits, one blue and one brown. “Tell him to go ahead with the blue,” Lyndon said. “We can use that no matter what happens.” As her husband headed to surgery, Lady Bird insisted on calm. “Honey,” she said, “everything will be all right.”

  So although she herself was still ill and exhausted, when she arrived at Bethesda, she checked on Lyndon straightaway. She found that this time everything was in fact all right. Indeed, Lyndon was trying to do some soothing himself. He had invited four reporters to visit him shortly after noon on the seventeenth floor. There they found the president of the United States leaning over on his elbow so he could get his face close to a vaporizer. “I think we’ll be all right in a day or two,” he told the reporters. “It may just be a bug that all of you get.” The reporters could see pain in the president’s face when he coughed, but he assured them the situation wasn’t serious. “I wouldn’t hesitate at all to put on my britches now and go back to the office if something had to be done. But it is Saturday and a good day to rest.”

  In time, it became clear that the president really was just suffering from a bronchial infection. “By evening,” The New York Times reported, “concern about the president’s health had subsided.” Reedy, briefing reporters that evening, not so subtly underscored that there was no hidden heart attack. He had seen the president only moments before, he told them, enjoying a steak sandwich.

  Johnson’s doctor told the press he’d advised the president to stay in the hospital for five days of recuperation. Johnson lasted three. Discharged on the afternoon of January 26, he insisted on walking out of Bethesda on his own two feet. He did agree, though, to put on a coat and hat. When reporters asked how he was feeling, he winked at them but did not speak. A UPI photographer snapped a photo of the Johnsons leaving Bethesda that ran across several columns in the next day’s New York Times. It was not an entirely comforting image. The president’s face looked drained, gray, and thin. The circles under his eyes drooped deeper, making his whole face seem longer and hollowed out. But the First Lady was a truly arresting sight. Dressed in black, Lady Bird had her eyes fixed on her husband. She seemed pained, clearly holding back anguish—or fear.

  The truth was, for all of the optimism she was quick to dole out for Lyndon, Lady Bird was apprehensive by nature. When friends and acquaintances would call to congratulate her or Lyndon on some piece of good news, she would sometimes express her thanks and then remind them that of course less happy days were sure to eventually come. As First Lady, she popularized an old expression—“The Lord willing and the creek don’t rise.” Many southerners used this expression as affectionate hyperbole. Lady Bird, who along with her daughter had once been trapped inside her home for a full day by a Hill Country flood, knew it t
o be literally true. More than once in her diary she referred to a good day of Lyndon’s presidency as a peak or pinnacle—an unspoken reminder that a fall back to earth was sure to come.

  Long experience had taught her to be wary. As a child who’d lost her mother in an accident, she knew that life could be altered irreparably in an instant. As the wife of a man with heart disease, she knew that that instant could be coming soon. As the wife of a president, she was painfully aware of the perils her husband faced. She could think of the presidents brought low in her lifetime: Woodrow Wilson, who’d left the White House an invalid; Dwight Eisenhower, who’d left it a victim of stroke and heart attack, his bowels and intestines wrecked; Warren Harding and Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy—who’d left the White House dead.

  And as the wife of Lyndon Johnson, she was always ready for the turmoil of an ever-changing mood. She knew that triumph could morph into dejection in a moment, cruel indifference into desperate need. She had spent her life with a man of extremes, who looked to the future and saw total victory or total disgrace. In time, that became her world, too.

  Now she had to worry about what this illness might mean. After his first night back in the White House, she expressed concern to her diary. “Last night was not a good night. An old enemy returned. Lyndon sweated down two or three pair of pajamas. This has been a symptom of his illnesses for all the years I have known him, so I should have expected it.” These words suggest a deeper awareness: that the various ailments of Lyndon Johnson sprang from a common place.

  What could this place have been? It was impossible to spend thirty years with Lyndon Johnson and not develop a healthy appreciation for the effect of nervous anxiety on physical well-being. The 1948 kidney stone had come at the outset of a seemingly impossible quest—the Senate race against Stevenson he’d ended up winning by 87 votes found in a box in Jim Wells County. The heart attack had come when floor leader Johnson was entertaining another grand ambition—a run for the president in 1956 against the hero of Normandy, Eisenhower. It was as though when Lyndon Johnson saw a great opportunity in front of him, the forces inside him divided. His mind moved with determination to do the impossible; his body revolted, to ensure that he could not.

  These same forces were at war inside Johnson that January, and he was paying the price. “With LBJ’s history of physical and emotional maladies when he is under political pressure,” Michael Beschloss writes in his authoritative study of the Johnson White House tapes, “one must wonder whether the illness, coming so soon after the inauguration, has been aggravated by his painful awareness of the challenges he is about to face.”

  Lady Bird took the aggravation for granted. “This week’s mood is not good,” she worried in her diary a week after Lyndon entered the hospital. “It’s sort of a slough of despond … The ‘Valley of the Black Pig.’ The obstacles indeed are no shadows. They are real substance: Vietnam, the biggest. Walter. The need of getting really superior people … and bringing them into the government. The carping of the press.… And someday we may really know a storm.” Johnson resumed his normal manic schedule, but it took him longer than usual to bounce back fully from the illness. As February began, he admitted to reporters that he still felt only “80 percent normal.” Lady Bird bought a new black dress that she did not wear for months and months. Later, she recounted “the grim, unacknowledged thought” that had compelled its purchase: “I might need a black dress for a funeral.”

  TO MOST OUTSIDE observers that winter, Lady Bird’s fatalism would have been astounding. What was the impossible challenge facing Lyndon Johnson this time? He was president of a supremely prosperous country in an apparently peaceful world. He had won the largest landslide in American history, on his own terms. He had not retreated from his extravagant expressions of confidence in the nation’s future. “Is our world gone?” he asked in his January 1965 inaugural address. “We say ‘Farewell.’ Is a new world coming? We welcome it—and we will bend it to the hopes of man.” These were the words of a man at the stunning summit of his presidency, not of a man stuck in “the valley of the black pig.”

  In those first months of 1965, it looked as if he really could bend history to the hopes of man. As the new year began, Johnson and his aides alerted the press to the major areas of focus in their Great Society domestic program. On January 7, Johnson sent a special message to Congress on “Advancing the Nation’s Health,” a plan to create Medicare and grant health insurance coverage to all American senior citizens. Five days later, the Congress received another special message, this one calling for $1.5 billion in federal spending on education. In addition, the administration was pushing a massive $1.1 billion bill aimed at alleviating poverty in Appalachia. And while Johnson’s aides had decided not to press for a voting rights bill—the last remaining legislative opportunity on civil rights—in the first months of the term, most in Washington expected an effort before the end of 1966.

  Getting this extraordinary program through Congress would be no small task. Harry Truman and John Kennedy had tried and failed to pass Medicare, stymied by the powerful efforts of the American Medical Association, a doctors’ trade group that was preparing for an encore performance. In the modern era, no president had produced a major bill for education funding, thanks to the great political might of the Catholic Church, which objected to a large taxpayer expenditure that benefited only students in public schools while neglecting the millions of American families who sent their children to parochial schools. As a Democratic politician who’d grown up outside the party’s Catholic-heavy urban machines, Johnson knew that the Church would be wary of any such push from his administration.

  Still, the odds of his passing a strong progressive package seemed good. His November landslide had extended to the Congress, where Democrats now held a staggering majority of 295 to 140 in the House and 68 to 32 in the Senate. An influx of new blood meant liberals now had the numbers to break the Southern-conservative alliance that had, for all practical purposes, controlled the Congress since Roosevelt’s second term. Among the 91 new House members, 71 were Democrats.

  The strong majorities meant that Appropriations and Ways and Means—the key House committees where generations of progressive bills had gone to die—would now be stacked with Great Society liberals. The Ways and Means chairman, the Arkansan Wilbur Mills, was cautious and conservative. He had successfully blocked a Medicare bill in the Kennedy administration. But Mills could sense that public opinion favored action. Early in the year he signaled he would be willing to make a deal.

  Everywhere in Washington that winter, people were comparing the first days of Johnson’s new term to the famed one hundred days of concerted action with which Franklin Roosevelt had commenced his presidency in 1933. It was an imperfect analogy: Roosevelt had urged swift action in his first hundred days in response to the consuming crisis of the Great Depression, while Johnson was urging swift, strong action in a time of unprecedented prosperity. Also, there was the small fact that at the time of his 1965 inauguration, Johnson had already been president for well over four hundred days. Still, the comparison was one that Johnson’s aides, mindful of the boss’s Rooseveltian ambitions, encouraged. In the White House, two consecutives dates loomed largest on the calendar: April 12, the twentieth anniversary of Roosevelt’s death, and April 13, the hundredth day of the new term. The goal was rarely stated but known to all: have a record by that date that could stand up against FDR’s. Or surpass it.

  To the press, it seemed that the president faced little danger in pursuing such grand ambitions. Certainly the Republicans could pose no immediate threat. Their new House leader, genial Gerald Ford from Michigan, had let it be known that obstructing the Democrats’ agenda would not do; the Republicans must instead offer a “constructive” alternative. But given the paltry size of the Republican caucus, the press took few of these alternatives seriously. To some in the Eastern media, the party’s problems seemed epitomized by ever-growing chatter out in California that the actor
Ronald Reagan would mount a serious campaign to be the party’s nominee for governor in 1966. “Republican rank-and-file enthusiasm for [Reagan] continues to swell,” Newsweek reported in early February, “but the party pros feel differently. They find three things wrong with Reagan: 1) his close ties with the right wing; 2) possible anti-Hollywood feeling in view of the fact that song-and-dance man George Murphy is already in the Senate; and 3) Reagan’s refusal to fly—a tough campaign hurdle in a state almost 800 miles long.” Writing in Life magazine, the journalist Shana Alexander found the idea laughable. Reagan, she said, “shouldn’t even be cast as governor.”

  In a series of private sessions with reporters just before his inauguration, Johnson was careful to stress the lessons he’d gleaned from history about taking little for granted in ensuring passage of the legislation. “The history that interests Mr. Johnson,” wrote the columnist Drew Pearson, a sometime Johnson favorite, “is how Roosevelt, re-elected by a landslide vote in 1936, slipped so badly that he lost 88 congressional seats to the Republicans.” LBJ was determined “not to make Roosevelt’s error and squander the great potential of his landslide over Goldwater,” wrote Evans and Novak in their 1966 book Lyndon B. Johnson: The Exercise of Power. “The power derived from his election victory, Johnson felt, must be employed judiciously. To a visitor at the LBJ Ranch shortly after the 1964 election, Johnson compared that power to a bottle of bourbon. ‘If you take it a glass at a time,’ he said, ‘it’s fine. But if you drop the whole bottle you have troubles. I plan to take it a sip at a time and enjoy myself.’ ”

  But the reality in the Johnson White House that winter and spring of 1965 was not conscientious caution but panicked urgency. Meeting with his congressional liaisons in the Fish Room of the White House in early January, Johnson impressed on them how easily the tide could turn. “I was just elected by the biggest popular margin in the history of the country—sixteen million votes,” he said. “Just by the way people naturally think and because Goldwater had simply scared hell out of them, I’ve already lost about three of those sixteen. After a fight with Congress or something else, I’ll lose another couple of million. I could be down to eight million in a couple of months.” The sense of accomplishment Johnson had felt after the election had seemingly vanished. “I knew from the start that the ’64 election had given me a loophole rather than a mandate,” he told Doris Kearns Goodwin, “and that I had to move quickly before my support disappeared.”