Landslide

by Jonathan Darman

  When he’d finished speaking, Johnson knew he had given one of the great speeches of his life. “It was terrific, magnificent, and impressive,” Mayor Daley told him afterward. “The greatest speech you ever made,” said California’s governor, Pat Brown. “Your speech was beyond belief!” Jackie Kennedy cooed.

  Even Dick Russell called to congratulate his old protégé. Goodwin would recall the smile on Johnson’s face when he got off the phone with the Georgian. “That was Dick Russell,” Johnson announced. “Said that though he can’t be with me on the bill, it was the best speech he ever heard any president give.” Johnson was plainly thrilled: “Let’s have a little whiskey, boys, looks like we’ve got something to celebrate.”

  Indeed they did. By summer, the legislation would pass both houses. The dramatic moment occasioned by the speech reinvigorated Johnson’s entire legislative program, just as he reached the final stretch of his one hundred days. On April 8, the Medicare bill made it out of the House. The next day, four days before the hundred days ended, Johnson reviewed his record with Larry O’Brien. “Roosevelt’s got eleven,” said the president, referring to the number of bills passed. “They were not major bills at all. But you have one major one really with education. Now, Appalachia’s a super-major one, and then the others are about like Roosevelt. But on the twelfth, you’ll have the best Hundred Days. Better than he did!”

  That night, Lady Bird recorded in her diary: “Lyndon talked of the last week. He said, ‘Never has there been such a Hundred Days.’ ” So vast was his triumph that for the moment, Lyndon could see only greatness ahead. For the moment, his persistent visions of ruin were put to bed. It fell to Lady Bird, always careful to be prepared for anything, to remember the other side. “This was a week to put a gold circle around. So let us remember it, because there will be many ringed in black.”

  The world aflame: California National Guard troops took the streets of Los Angeles during the Watts riots of August 1965.

  © Hulton Archive/Getty Images

  CHAPTER NINE

  Lonely Acres

  Summer 1965

  The months that followed were hard on both Johnsons. The bombing of Vietnam continued apace. At night, Lyndon haunted the halls of the White House, often heading for the Situation Room, where a military aide could provide up-to-the-minute reports from the war. From her bed, Lady Bird could hear the ring of the telephone in the earliest hours of the morning, bringing news of a plane shot down on the other side of the world. Lyndon was always eager to answer. Vietnam was now his constant companion, the third party in their marriage. “He can’t separate himself from it,” the First Lady told her diary. “Actually, I don’t want him to, no matter how painful.”

  Lyndon’s anxiety was hard for Lady Bird to bear. She was happy to retreat to the peace of the ranch in Texas. There she spent much of the summer, leaving Lyndon to worry away in Washington, though she knew her absence wore on him. In early July, their daughter Lynda spoke to her father on the phone. He sounded lonesome, Lynda told Lady Bird afterward. “Mother,” she said, “he’s never the same without you.” Lady Bird knew it was true. “I feel selfish,” she told her diary, “as though I was insulating myself from pain and troubles down here. But I know that I need it.” Just as she had foreseen in April, there had been many dark days.

  To be sure, that spring and summer had seen plenty of glorious moments, days that, in another presidency, would have indeed been ringed in gold. There was April 11, when the $1.3 billion elementary and secondary education bill became the first federal law to fund education on a large scale nationwide. Seated on a wooden bench beside the old Junction schoolhouse in Stonewall, Texas, Johnson signed the bill into law, amid an elaborate display of his lifelong commitment to education. In the audience were some of the Mexicans the president had taught in Cotulla, Texas, and at his side was the seventy-two-year-old Mrs. Kate Loney. Mrs. Loney was the former “Miss Kate” Deadrich, the teacher who’d coaxed young Lyndon to read by holding him on her lap in front of her class. For the ceremony, Johnson broke with his usual custom and signed the bill with only one pen, which he then handed gratefully to his teacher. “She seemed not to realize it was meant as a souvenir,” observed The New York Times, “and left it on the table as she walked away.”

  There was July 30, when Johnson signed the bill establishing a system of Medicare for seniors. “No longer will older Americans be denied the healing miracle of modern medicine,” Johnson proclaimed in the auditorium at the Harry Truman Library in Independence, Missouri. “No longer will illness crush and destroy the savings that they have so carefully put away over a lifetime so that they might enjoy dignity in their later years.”

  Johnson had chosen the Truman Library out of respect for his only living Democratic predecessor. As president, Truman had felt the fury of the medical lobby when he’d tried to pass Medicare himself. As Johnson signed the bill, he was joined by the eighty-one-year-old Truman, a man whose own later years had not been entirely happy. Johnson felt a special affection for the only other living Democratic president. So much of Truman’s story was his own: an oldschool politician thrust into the White House by a charismatic president’s death; a president who came from humble origins and fought for the common man; a man weighed down by an awful Asian war. Johnson’s praise for the ex-president was sincere and generous, and revealing. “The people of the United States love and voted for Harry Truman,” he said, “not because he gave them hell but because he gave them hope.” Truman was so moved he could barely speak. “I thank you all most highly for coming here,” he told the crowd. “It’s an honor that I haven’t had done to me—well, quite a while, I’ll say that to you.”

  And there was August 6, when, under a glittering chandelier in the President’s Room off the Senate chamber, Johnson signed the voting rights bill into law. On the same day a hundred and four years earlier, the White House staff informed the press, Abraham Lincoln had signed a bill emancipating black slaves who had been conscripted to fight in the Confederate Army. Moments earlier, Johnson had addressed the nation from the Rotunda. “Today is a triumph for history as huge as any victory won on any battlefield,” he said. “Today we strike away the last major shackle of those fierce and ancient bonds. Today the Negro story and the American story fuse and blend.” He spoke in front of John Trumbull’s oil painting Surrender of Lord Cornwallis, depicting George Washington astride his horse as the British army capitulated at Yorktown. On Johnson’s left as he spoke was a likeness of the head of Lincoln sculpted by Gutzon Borglum for Mount Rushmore. On his right was a standing marble statue of Lincoln by the nineteenth-century sculptor Vinnie Ream.

  Washington standing over him, Lincoln on either side—subtlety was not the order of the day. But for once Johnson’s extravagant stagecraft didn’t feel like overkill. With the stroke of a pen—or, rather, the strokes of several pens—Johnson had ended poll taxes and literacy tests and all of the violent indignities that for nearly two centuries had denied millions of American citizens the greatest promise of their nation. For a moment, Lyndon Johnson had earned the right to be mentioned in the same breath as the father of the nation and the man who had ensured it did not perish from the earth.

  Yet he could not remain with them. And in the long story of America, the summer of 1965 would not be ringed in gold. In that story, as we now know it, the summer of 1965 would be the moment when troubles overtook the country, troubles that would remain for years to come. We have come to think of that summer—the middle of the year in the middle of the decade—as the moment when Americans began to choose sides. Hope or fear, young or old, black or white, violent or nonviolent, radical or reactionary, student dissident or silent majority.

  To Americans living through the summer of 1965, however, things were not so clear. In many respects, their lives looked the same as they had the summer before. Most of them were not fighting or dying in Vietnam. Most of them still enjoyed the benefits of a prosperous country with a stable government—their tra
sh was collected, the water ran clear in their pipes, order was kept, and domestic peace was preserved. Most Americans still expected the policemen and the politicians to be trustworthy, decent, and good.

  But, as in the previous summer, there remained a nagging fear that things were changing too fast, that some catastrophe loomed. The pitch of the anxiety had grown higher in the intervening year. Now everyone was talking about it, the causes of mistrust and worry, all the possible reasons for fear. Despite all the assurances of the prior twenty months, despite all the talk of the powerful president with his glad tidings of great joy, there was no use pretending anymore. Something was wrong in America. They could see it with their own eyes.

  They could see it on their television screens, in the unsettling images coming out of Vietnam. The Rolling Thunder campaign had earned the conflict a regular spot at the top of evening newscasts and on the front pages of the papers. Fighting on the ground had been sporadic all spring, but Americans were warned of a coming summer offensive in which guerrilla fighters would emerge from the jungle to attack American holdings in South Vietnam with terrible force. Sure enough, in mid-June, Vietcong battalions had appeared as if from nowhere. They proceeded to destroy much of the South Vietnamese army, barely reconstituted from the offensive of the previous year. From the sky, Saigon’s American allies continued to pound targets in the north, but the bombardment seemed to have little effect on the Vietcong’s morale. If anything, the bombing had brought more recruits into the Vietcong ranks. It was clear that without further American intervention, the Saigon government would fall. In July, the press reported that the number of troops in Vietnam would soon top 75,000. For the moment, Johnson announced no further commitments, but he looked truly grim on television. “Incidents are going up,” he told the nation. “The casualties are going up.… We expect that it will get worse before it gets better.”

  It was clear that the South Vietnamese would not be able to charge through to victory on their own. So tenuous was Saigon’s hold on the country that it was barely safe for Johnson administration officials to visit. In July, McNamara arrived for a fact-finding mission. While he was there, Vietnamese security officials learned of a plot, mere moments from being launched, to assassinate Ambassador Maxwell Taylor. The more the public learned about Vietnam, the more it seemed rigged with trip wires that extended far out from the jungle. There were Soviet-piloted jets on the ground just north of Hanoi; there were Chinese air defenses massing on the island of Hainan. That summer, the frightful reality sank in—the fighting in this faraway land could somehow trigger a nuclear war.

  Criticism of the war was starting to come from more and more respectable quarters. The press complained about the lack of candor from the Johnson administration. “Vietnam is a different kind of a war from Korea,” editorialized The New York Times, “but it is a war—one the nation must recognize as such; and it is time to say so.” In June, Senator William Fulbright, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, declared that “military victory in Vietnam, though theoretically attainable, can in fact be attained only at a cost far exceeding the requirements of our interest and our honor.” He thought further escalation would only lead to “a bloody and protracted jungle war in which the strategic advantages would be with the other side.”

  The sharpest establishment critic was Walter Lippmann. The progressive lion had been cheered by Johnson’s landslide the previous November and thrilled by his hundred days’ domestic push in the spring of 1965. But he was quicker to sound a note of caution on the Johnson presidency than younger liberal intellectuals, who were still confidently predicting in the summer of 1965 that a progressive golden age had arrived. At the age of seventy-five, Lippmann had lived through two previous hours of liberal triumph, during the presidencies of Woodrow Wilson and FDR. The twentieth century had taught him that progressive golden ages are always shorter than predicted. By summer, he was writing columns that got at the heart of the Johnson administration’s problems: its unwillingness to accept its own fallibility. In Vietnam, he wrote, “we have set ourselves a task, which, like squaring the circle or perpetual motion or living 200 years, is impossible to do.… To say that something ought to be done does not make it possible to do it.”

  Lippmann knew that his words did not please the president. He was in frequent contact with enough administration officials, including an old protégé, Mac Bundy. It was painful for the century’s greatest progressive writer to take a hard line against the most effective progressive politician in a generation. Still, he wrote with moral clarity, and foreboding, “it is essential that the President should not talk himself into a position where he has foreclosed a rational and workable solution of the war. He will be doing just that if he continues to say that our honor is at stake.”

  Johnson acted as if the criticism didn’t bother him. He assured the country that he was doing everything he could to sue for peace. He looked, as always, for the deal. He tried to entice Ho Chi Minh to the peace table with promises of American investment in a giant Mekong Delta Project, modeled on the TVA. In May, he announced a pause in the bombing in hopes of jump-starting negotiations. Through his ambassador in Moscow he sent word to the North Vietnamese that he hoped they would reciprocate with an “equally constructive” act of good faith. The message came back to the ambassador unopened. Before long, the American bombers were back in the air.

  In private, Johnson raged at his domestic critics. The Communists were holding out, he believed, precisely because they believed Americans lacked the will to stay and fight. Any critical word, any suggestion that military victory was hopeless offered strength to the Vietcong. A story circulated of a testy exchange between the president and Frank Church, a senator from Idaho and an emerging Democratic critic of the war. At a White House reception, the president had buttonholed Church to complain about a recent antiwar speech. “Mr. President,” Church protested, “if you read the speech all the way through, it isn’t the same as the headlines.”

  Johnson was unimpressed: “The headlines are all I read and all anybody reads.” He could remember when Church had been a green freshman and had to learn the ways of the Senate from the master of the Democratic caucus, Lyndon Johnson. “When you were in trouble out in your state, Frank, I used to come out and give you a hand, didn’t I?”

  Church tried again to defend himself: “Mr. President, what I’ve been saying isn’t much different from what Walter Lippmann has been writing.”

  “Walter Lippmann is a fine man,” Johnson replied. “Next time you’re in trouble out in Idaho, Frank, you ask Walter to come help.”

  Polls showed a consistent majority of Americans supported the president’s course in the war. This was true in part because for most Americans, the war was not yet a question of life or death. Some 1,928 Americans would die in Southeast Asia by the end of 1965, an alarmingly high figure, nine times as many as had died there the year before. But most on the home front could hardly imagine that the death toll in the conflict would eventually exceed 58,000.

  The war was hell for those fighting it; as yet, it was only confusing and unsettling for those back home. The newspapers were filled with strange Asian names with misplaced vowels and extraneous consonants. The fortunes of the United States depended on a rotating cast of shady figures who made up the Saigon government. Buddhist monks were incinerating themselves in protest of suppression by the Catholic government. Catholics suspected the premier of having Buddhist sympathies. American men fighting to keep South Vietnam free faced an enemy whose ranks were swelling with South Vietnamese recruits. All of it was an indecipherable jumble that left the nation confused, and uneasy about what was coming next.

  War correspondents, meanwhile, were growing pessimistic about the whole enterprise. The gap between the conflict they saw and the one described in official communiqués had grown appallingly large. From their reports, American readers began to sense that this war was different from others—deteriorating, disorganized, and altogether foul. “Th
e sky over Saigon is alive with noisy aerial boxcars, stuttering helicopters and flashing Skyhawk fighter-bombers,” wrote Scotty Reston during a late summer visit to Southeast Asia. “The airports, the bars and the restaurants are now all a little high—not to mention the G.I.’s on leave—and even the fancy hotels are beginning to smell like a men’s locker room.”

  Bleak as the situation in Vietnam was, the most vividly frightening tales in the papers that summer came from much closer to home. In early July, the national press grew fascinated with the troubles of the O’Neal family of Los Angeles. Nineteen-year-old Shirley O’Neal had been brutally raped by a gang of young men on June 29 in the suburb of Northridge. She had been going door to door selling cookbooks when a young man lured her into his home on the premise that his “uncle” would want to buy one. Inside, five men dragged her into a bedroom, where they threw her onto the floor and proceeded to torture and rape her. She escaped with her life but was psychologically shattered. A few days later, her father, a lieutenant with the Los Angeles Police Department, entered the department’s West Valley station where her assailants were being held. Mistaking a young man with a “Hellbound” tattoo for one of his daughter’s attackers, Lieutenant O’Neal pulled his service revolver and began to shoot. As he fired, fellow officers would later say, he looked “like a man in a dream.”

  Something was happening to the nation. Neighbors could no longer be trusted, good people were at their breaking point, sick minds roamed the land. A report showed that in the course of the year 1964, serious crime had risen 13 percent over the prior year. In August, Newsweek ran a cover story on “Crime in the Streets.” The story began with the tale of one Chester E. Pierce, Jr., of Worcester, Massachusetts, who’d “strolled coolly” into a police station and announced that “that very morning” he had stolen from the sidewalk a five-year-old boy whom he had sexually abused and strangled to death and stuffed into a closet.