Yet Johnson’s foreign war and his domestic ambitions were also interlinked in another, different place that spring: inside Lyndon Johnson’s fearful mind. Whenever the public Johnson attacked some great challenge, the private Johnson fixed his mind on some awful force that might make the challenge impossible. In the summer of 1964, as he’d neared the party convention at Atlantic City, it had been Bobby Kennedy and the fractured South. In the fall, as he’d looked toward his landslide victory, it had been the threat of disgrace in the Jenkins affair. Now, as he rushed through his hundred days, within reach of the greatness to which he’d always aspired, he needed some evil force with the power to destroy it all. And in his private agony, that force had a name: Vietnam.
The truth was that for all his confident talk, for all his swaggering refusal to cower in the face of an enemy’s aggression, even by the winter of 1965 Johnson had grave doubts that the war in Vietnam could be won. He was trying to prop up the Saigon regime, but he had few illusions that Saigon would ever be able to control the country. He was ordering up bombers, but he no longer believed that bombs would persuade the North Vietnamese to come to the peace table. “Now we’re off to bombing these people,” he told McNamara four days before the bombs began to drop. “We’re over that hurdle. I don’t think anything is going to be as bad as losing, and I don’t see any way of winning.” No chance of winning, no hope after losing. In his dark private moments, the certainty of disaster was the only certainty he could see.
That was the real split emerging in the Johnson presidency—not between Vietnam and the Great Society, but between the outward Johnson who proclaimed unmatched greatness ahead and the inward Johnson who saw despair. It was the split between the man who raced through his hundred days and the body that revolted in fevered sweats. Between the president who insisted on marching out of the hospital with a smile on his face and the First Lady who looked on in horror. Johnson was divided between two fantasies—one of utopia, the other of ruin.
In his public meetings he would wave off the dissenters—Mike Mansfield or Undersecretary of State George Ball. But in private, he had a hunger for some of the most uncomfortable aspects of the war. As the Rolling Thunder bombing mission launched in the early morning hours of March 2, he called the White House Situation Room. “How long before you should hear something?” he asked the duty officer. The officer told Johnson it would be 5:00 or 5:30 in the morning before they had an account of any lives lost. “Call me,” Johnson ordered.
And, in private, Johnson was willing to explore the hopelessness of the Vietnam situation in depth. A few days after the Rolling Thunder mission began, he spoke on the phone with his old mentor, Senator Russell. “We’re going to send the Marines in to protect the Hawk battalion, the Hawk outfit at Danang,” he told Russell. “I guess we’ve got no choice, but it scares the death out of me. I think everybody’s going to think, ‘We’re landing the Marines. We’re off to battle.’ ”
“We’ve got so damn far, Mr. President,” Russell said. “It looks to me like we just got in this thing and there’s no way out.”
It was telling that Johnson chose Russell as the rare confidant for his Vietnam doubts. True, he had always looked to the Georgian for counsel in times of need. And he knew that Russell, long a skeptic of U.S. involvement in South Vietnam, could be counted on to give him hard truth. But there were deeper forces guiding their gloomy conferences. By 1965, Russell was old, tired, and defeated. His great cause, defending the white South in the Senate, was lost. His other strong passions—a restrained foreign policy abroad, the promotion of agrarian interests at home—were fading into the past. Everyone else in the capital and the country could talk about the great future that was coming. To Russell, the American future was a sad, bleak thing to behold.
And he saw that bleakness when he looked at Lyndon Johnson. Russell had once embraced Johnson as his heir, a great Southern hope in the Senate. He understood why Johnson had embraced civil rights in his presidency, but it still came as a hard blow. To colleagues, he would describe Johnson as “a turncoat if ever there was one.” He was perhaps the only person close to Lyndon Johnson that spring who looked at the Johnson presidency and saw a great tragedy. When he spoke to Lyndon now, he was helpful and kind. But there was a touch of sadness, too, the pain of a father whose son has traded away his inheritance.
Johnson could hear all of that in Russell’s voice. And perhaps that, too, was why he confided in him. The president had grave doubts about Vietnam. Had he engaged with William Fulbright or George Ball or Lippmann or any of the other prominent skeptics, he could have heard what he could do about those doubts, how he could get out of the war and still be all right. But perhaps that wasn’t what he needed when the darkest thoughts came. Most likely, all he wanted to hear was that it was hopeless. In his moment of greatness, while the world said he was capable of everything, he needed to hear that he was doomed.
Russell would not disappoint him. “I don’t know, Dick,” the president went on. “The great trouble I’m under … A man can fight if he can see daylight down the road somewhere. But there ain’t no daylight in Vietnam. There’s not a bit.”
“There’s no end to the road,” agreed the old man. “There’s just nothing.”
The true breach that spring was within Johnson himself. In public, the president worked through his hundred days, delivering his vision of greatness to the nation, talking of peace on earth. Doubts belonged to the part of himself he believed least worthy, the part he suppressed so the world would not see.
Lady Bird was one of the few people who crossed back and forth between the two sides of her husband. At dinner the night after his conversation with Russell, Johnson was still speaking in dismal tones. “I can’t get out and I can’t finish it with what I’ve got,” he said. “I don’t know what the hell to do.” Her husband’s dark imagery crept into her diary that night: “Lyndon lives in a cloud of troubles, with few rays of light.”
It was agony, living in the valley of the black pig. At times, a far-off future was her consolation. “I am counting the months until March 1968 when, like Truman, it will be possible to say, ‘I don’t want this office, this responsibility, any longer, even if you want me. Find the strongest and most able man and God bless you. Goodbye.’ ”
THEN, FROM THE fog of Johnson’s dueling fantasies, reality broke through. And it summoned a kind of greatness the world had not seen from Lyndon Johnson before.
It came in an Alabama city called Selma. There, in early January 1965, two civil rights groups—the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)—had formed an uneasy alliance to launch a voting rights campaign. As with Mississippi in the summer of 1964, they had chosen their target strategically. Segregation in Selma was vivid and monstrous. It was typified by James Gardner Clark, sheriff of Dallas County, the face of white law enforcement. Clark was a made-for-TV racist, with a bulging waistline and a fondness for the nightstick, which he often waved at television cameras. He did not have the ability to control his impulses, nor did his city. On January 8, Martin Luther King, Jr., arrived at Selma’s segregated King Albert Hotel at the beginning of the campaign, hoping to check in. “Get him! Get him!” a woman in the lobby screamed, and a young man obliged, punching King repeatedly and kicking him in the groin.
Selma’s voter registration practices were grotesquely unjust. Time magazine observed the activists’ efforts in the city in January of 1965:
Negroes stood in line for up to five hours a day waiting to enter Room 122 in the courthouse. During the two weeks only 93 got in, since only one applicant was admitted at a time. Each had to answer a series of biographical questions, then provide written answers in a 20-page test on the Constitution, federal, state and local governments. (Sample questions: Where do presidential electors cast ballots for President? Name two rights a person has after he has been indicted by a grand jury.) To prove literacy, each applicant had to write down passages f
rom the Constitution read to him by the registrar. The registrar was the sole judge of whether the applicant’s writing was passable, and whether his test answers were correct.
Selma was, in other words, the kind of place that could make the country care about the fact that millions of its black citizens had been denied the right to participate in their democracy, the kind of place that could take a country that had turned a blind eye toward the violation of its Constitution for a century and finally force that country to see. As January turned to February, the press became transfixed by the barbarism of Clark’s forces: their eagerness to assault black citizens who were simply waiting in line, their tendency not to calm white mobs but to whip them up. The Johnson administration had made noises about a push for a voting rights law as part of its hundred days agenda. But conventional wisdom was that Johnson would not risk further full-scale combat with the Southern bloc in the Senate so soon after his 1964 civil rights success. The movement activists wanted to make it impossible for Washington to wait. From the pulpit in Selma’s Brown Chapel, King used a familiar phrase to make the case for moral urgency: “We’ve gone too far now to turn back. And in a real sense, we are moving. And we cannot afford to stop because Alabama, and because our nation, has a date with destiny.”
Destiny came on March 7 on Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge. The movement activists had set out on a march to Montgomery, the Alabama capital, where they would demand that the state’s governor provide protection against white mobs, protection that Clark’s forces certainly would not provide. In response, Clark effectively declared a race war, announcing that all of Dallas County’s white male citizenry would be deputized under his command. The two sides met at the bridge. At the front line, the marchers were quiet as they stood erect. At first, when the police force charged them, the nonviolent protesters simply toppled over and let their persecutors tread upon them. Then everything was swallowed up by a high, unified shriek—the sound of a mass of demonstrators suddenly engulfed in chaos. It was the sound of ordinary men and women on a public thoroughfare coming under attack.
For history, that day in Selma would be Bloody Sunday. The mangled faces on the television broadcasts that night showed why. Subsequent generations of American schoolchildren would be shown the footage from the Edmund Pettus Bridge in order to learn what courage looks like, and what evil looks like, too. Johnson watched from Washington. “America didn’t like what it saw,” Johnson aide Richard Goodwin later wrote. “And neither did Lyndon Johnson, who witnessed not a revelation (he had grown up in the South), but an affront to the sensibilities and moral justice of the country he now led.”
He knew he had to act. In an immediate sense, his path forward was treacherous and complex. The situation in Alabama could not be allowed to spin further out of control. The protesters were determined to march to Selma. Alabama governor George Wallace, the great segregationist demagogue of the era, would not rebuke Clark and would not offer protection to the marchers. But he fancied himself the grand ambassador of states’ rights, and he did not want to appear incapable of preventing his state from descending into lawlessness while the world looked on.
That was exactly how it was starting to look. On March 9, Unitarian minister James Reeb, one of many white clergymen who had joined the Selma protest, was savagely beaten by white segregationists chanting “Nigger lover.” Two days later he would succumb to his injuries. Privately, Wallace hoped that Johnson would send federal troops to restore order. Johnson, always wary of reviving the ghosts of Reconstruction in the South, could do no such thing. He would send troops, but only if Wallace asked for them.
The matter was resolved in a legendary showdown between Wallace and the president at the White House on March 13. Wallace had requested the meeting, but on arrival he was sly and noncommittal. He was startled by a full Johnson assault. “What do you want left after you when you die?” the president asked the governor. They were both seated, but Johnson had positioned himself in a high rocking chair and he looked down at the Alabaman as he spoke. “Do you want a great, big, marble monument that reads, ‘George Wallace—He built’?… Or do you want a little piece of scrawny pine board lying across that harsh, caliche soil, that reads, ‘George Wallace—He hated’?”
“Hell,” said Wallace after the meeting concluded, “if I’d stayed in there much longer, he’d have had me coming out for civil rights.” Within days, the governor of Alabama would submit a public request to the president for federal assistance in providing for the court-ordered security of the marchers in Selma.
In a larger sense, Johnson’s path forward from Selma was simple. The men and women on the Pettus Bridge had said everything that needed to be said about the urgency of voting rights. Like the brave men of Lincoln’s Gettysburg, their suffering was above even a president’s power to add or detract. All that was really left for Johnson to do was the hardest thing, the most important thing, that any president can do. He had to look at his country as it really was and not shrink from what he saw. King and the marchers in Selma, the protesters just outside the White House gate—they were all saying they could not wait for justice in the South a moment longer. And suddenly, neither could Lyndon Johnson. He knew he had to act.
That weekend, word came from the White House that the president would address a joint session of Congress on the evening of Monday, March 15. Before a televised audience, he would ask the Congress to take immediate action on a sweeping voting rights bill. Lady Bird marveled at the swiftness with which her husband would need to pull together a speech. Still, she said in her diary, “I am glad that he is launched, that he is being intensely active. It is the milieu for him. It is his life. He is loosed from the bonds of depression.”
It fell to Richard Goodwin, the talented speechwriter and former Kennedy aide, to craft Johnson’s text. Arriving at his office that Monday, the very day Johnson would give the speech, Goodwin felt the terrible pressure of his task and the terror of his approaching deadline. But then he started to think of Selma, and the busy world hushed. Years later, in his memoir Remembering America, Goodwin would remember the rare speechwriter’s gift he had been given that day: “There was, uniquely, no need to temper conviction with the reconciling realities of politics, admit to the complexities of debate and the merits of ‘the other side.’ There was no other side. Only justice—upheld or denied.”
“I speak tonight,” Johnson said that evening from the House floor, “for the dignity of man and the destiny of democracy.… At times history and fate meet at a single time in a single place to shape a turning point in man’s unending search for freedom. So it was last week in Selma, Alabama.”
The room was deathly quiet. “Pulses quickened,” Time would later note, “as it became obvious that Johnson had discarded the syrupy quality that has marked many of his earlier speeches. With painful poignancy, he pricked his country’s conscience, uttering the unutterable”:
Rarely in any time does an issue lay bare the secret heart of America itself. Equal rights for American Negroes is such an issue. And should we defeat every enemy, and should we double our wealth and conquer the stars, and still be unequal to this issue, then we will have failed as a people and as a nation. For with a country as with a person, “what is a man profited if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul?”
From a gallery high above, Lady Bird scanned the chamber as her husband spoke. So many of the Southern senators she and Lyndon knew well had stayed away from this speech. Richard Russell was gone. Harry Byrd was nowhere to be seen.
This time on this issue there must be no delay, or no hesitation, or no compromise with our purpose. We cannot, we must not, refuse to protect the right of every American to vote in every election that he may desire to participate in …
The break from the Southern Democrats was not easy for Lady Bird. She was descended on her mother’s side from a proud Alabama family. When she’d come to the strange new world of Washington, she had found her way by making friends with the wi
ves of other Southern congressmen, women whose warmth and easy intimacy she had easily understood.
But now this was Lyndon’s cause, and her cause as well. Earlier that winter, Lady Bird had convened a meeting in the Queen’s Sitting Room of the White House to discuss the new program she had launched to improve the beauty of the American landscape. Outside it was cold and snowy. Waiting for the First Lady to arrive, Sharon Francis, an Interior Department employee, heard the sound of civil rights protesters singing outside the gate. When Lady Bird entered, she heard the sound as well. “What are they doing?” the First Lady asked. Francis turned to a window, pulled back the curtain, and looked out. “They’re singing ‘We Shall Overcome,’ ” she said, “and they’re kneeling in the snow.” Francis turned back toward the First Lady. A tear was running down Lady Bird’s face.
Their cause must be our cause too. Because it’s not just Negroes, but, really, it’s all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice.
And we shall overcome.
For a moment, all was silent. Then Johnson was engulfed by that greatest of treasures, applause from the hundreds of listeners he could see and the millions he could not. Watching from a living room in distant Birmingham, Martin Luther King, Jr., began to weep. By adopting the words of the civil rights anthem, the president had changed the movement forever. Its leaders were now American heroes. Its dead were now martyrs for the American idea. The story of civil rights was now part of the American story.
And part of Lyndon Johnson’s story, too. As he concluded his speech, Johnson recalled the young Mexicans he had taught in Cotulla, Texas, in the school year 1928–29. Those students were poor and hungry and “they knew even in their youth the pain of prejudice.” As their teacher, Johnson said, it had never occurred to him that he would one day “have the chance to help the sons and daughters of those students, and to help people like them all over this country. But now I do have that chance. And I’ll let you in on a secret—I mean to use it.”
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