Johnson, witnessing the impressive progress of the Kennedy mythmaking machine, was more convinced than ever that if only he had a similar apparatus, his public image problems would be solved. Johnson envied Kennedy’s press coverage and was convinced that his predecessor had earned it through brilliant, strategic stage management. His staff encouraged the perception. “Images do not spring full-blown,” Jack Valenti wrote in a memo to the president after the 1964 election. “President Kennedy was conscious of this—and courted newspapers and magazines that had been screened by his people. In the doing, he began the creation of the Kennedy legend.”
Any problems with Johnson’s public image, Valenti told his boss, came from his lack of a similar strategy. How could it be otherwise, for a president whose “style” was “Jacksonian and Rooseveltian in the mainstream of American tradition and scope rather than Ivy League gloss and splendor”? Valenti suggested that “if the President will allow the construction and execution of carefully prepared programs of public imagery we can begin now to establish the real and enduring Lyndon Johnson instead of the callous and the spiteful sketching that will spill out from cynics in the White House lobby.” Valenti knew his audience. “Excellent Approved” Johnson scrawled across the memo.
But manipulating the press is rather like training a goat—possible, but not worth the bother if you don’t enjoy spending time with farm animals. Kennedy did enjoy it. He liked joking with reporters and canvassing them for gossip. He wooed them for strategic reasons, but he wasn’t faking it when he acted interested in what they had to say. His congenital confidence helped him to see that the best way to control his press was to give up control. He acted as though he didn’t expect anything from reporters, except a chance to say his piece and, of course, to enjoy the pleasure of their company. They liked him, because everyone liked him. And, because he hadn’t asked them to, they protected him in their prose.
Harnessing power by surrendering control—that would never work for Lyndon Johnson. For him, life was transactional. He was capable of dogged loyalty and sincere friendship, but only to those he knew would be 110 percent loyal to him. He was a funny, engrossing storyteller, but his stories did not exist to amuse or entertain, they drove home a Johnson point. As Senate majority leader, transactional relations with the press had served him well. They needed a way to bring the byzantine legislative process to life. He gave them conflict and drama, access and color, and wicked off-the-record asides. In return, they wrote stories in which he was the brilliant master legislator hero. And woe to the offending reporter who dared to write a negative Johnson story when the majority leader came to settle the account.
Johnson never fully grasped that a president cannot count on the same tidy commerce with his press corps. The presidency is inherently interesting, whether the president cooperates with the press or not. And even presidents who tend to the care and feeding of their press corps must resign themselves to their share of nasty, unfair stories. Johnson was stung early in his presidency, when he’d taken a group of female reporters for a ride in his convertible on the LBJ Ranch, popping open a beer can as he drove. His guests had seemed to enjoy themselves. But the result was a disastrous story in Time with the sneering title “Mr. President, You’re Fun!”
Valenti’s “image” campaign was doomed before it began. On a moment’s notice, reporters would learn they had been granted some special audience with the president, watching him as he went about his life or performed the solemn duties of his job. Usually, they’d find they’d been invited to observe a president who was annoyed by their presence, or a president who was obviously false or intolerably controlling. Helen Thomas, a correspondent covering the president, recalled marches around the White House lawn behind the president. “He first called his dogs, and then he called us. He’d talk in a whisper, which was deliberately sadistic, and then he’d put everything either on background or off the record, which left everybody totally confused.… The whole thing was, I thought, an exercise in showing us who was boss.”
Television proved especially frustrating. Everyone in the White House understood the tremendous power of the emerging medium. And everyone in the White House understood that it was a miserable format for the president. He looked smaller on the screen. His eyes narrowed, his voice extended like a high school orator’s. His aides and family members tried everything to fix his performance: new venues for press conferences, instructions on pacing, thicker or thinner eyeglasses. None of it worked. They often gave him so many contradictory directions before television appearances it’s a wonder he was able to summon his words.
Inevitably, a staff member became a casualty of the president’s nasty publicity. That summer, Johnson’s long-suffering press secretary, George Reedy, announced that he was leaving to address long-festering health issues. He was replaced by no less a figure than Bill Moyers—the best face Johnson could present to the press.
Moyers could see that all the manipulating and dissembling were the problem. In his new post, he absorbed Johnson’s conspiracy theories about Kennedy-friendly staffers speaking out of turn to Kennedy-friendly press. Mac Bundy was saying things he shouldn’t. Time’s White House correspondent was “an awfully strong Kennedy man.”
Moyers clearly did not want to spend his time chasing down Kennedy plots. “I think there’s a lot can be done with just more candidness,” he ventured. “I think that’s our basic problem.… Our images do result primarily through their interpretation of our being overly secretive.” The best way to help the president’s image was not loyalty probes or publicity campaigns. Johnson could best help himself with “more candid, sincere discussion.”
And thus the challenge facing President Johnson was a familiar one: in a time of great peril, he could save himself by leveling with the American people. It was clear to Americans, watching the awful scenes from Vietnam and witnessing the appalling conditions of their cities, that their president was no longer the Lyndon Johnson of Texas Tall Tales, the Man-in-Motion who could do no wrong. But he still had his hulking majority in a Congress that he knew better how to maneuver than perhaps any of his predecessors. The momentum for the Great Society had slowed, but not stopped. His massive store of political capital from the election was depleted, but not gone. The decline in his image was, in fact, an opportunity. He could put aside the mythmaking and the gauzy promises and say what he really wanted to do. He could say who he really was.
JUST BEFORE DAWN one morning that summer, Lady Bird was awakened by the sound of Lyndon’s voice. “I don’t want to get in a war and I don’t see any way out of it,” he said. “I’ve got to call up six hundred thousand boys and make them leave their homes and their families.” Lady Bird listened to her husband with wonder. “It was as though,” she later told her diary, “he were talking out loud, not especially to me.”
At other low moments of Lyndon’s presidency—the panicked hours before the Democratic convention, the morning after he’d let Walter Jenkins go—Lady Bird had summoned the strength to cut through her husband’s warring fears and fantasies and force him to see the world as it was. Now again he was grappling. Should he summon the strength to rise to another challenge? Or should he give in to his fear that he was doomed?
But this time, as he pondered the request for additional forces in Vietnam, she would not be the strong voice urging him to see the hard truth. Lyndon already had so many people he consulted on Vietnam—McNamara, Mac Bundy, Rusk. There were generals with statistics and cool certainty. Lady Bird was not an expert on guerrilla warfare or the domino theory. She did not question her husband’s handling of the war. Sometimes that summer, when the phone rang and Lyndon tossed and turned with Vietnam worries, she would leave to go sleep in another room.
Officially, Westmoreland’s request was for fifty thousand more troops. Really, he was asking for assurances from Johnson that he would deploy a hundred thousand additional forces and then perhaps an additional hundred thousand a year after that. (Thus Johnson’s fears
of calling up six hundred thousand boys.) The order was a loaded gun. All Johnson had to do was pull the trigger. As the end of July neared, the decision-making scenario was set to play out much as it had before. McNamara and Rusk and Bundy were advocating that he accede to the request from the field—more bombing, more troops. George Ball was the voice of dissent. Johnson was expected to hear both sides, to weigh the options. The Goldilocks Principle had been reduced from three options to two—too small, and just right.
This time, at least, Ball would have an ally: Johnson’s confidant, Clark Clifford. In a series of National Security Council meetings, culminating with a dramatic debate against McNamara at Camp David, Clifford passionately argued the case against escalation:
I hate this war. I do not believe we can win. If we send in a hundred thousand more men, the North Vietnamese will match us. If the North Vietnamese run out of men, the Chinese will send in “volunteers.” Russia and China don’t intend for us to win this war. If we “won,” we would face a long occupation with constant trouble. And if we don’t win after a big buildup, it will be a huge catastrophe. We could lose more than fifty thousand men in Vietnam. It will ruin us. Five years, fifty thousand men killed, hundreds of billions of dollars—it is just not for us.
But Johnson’s mind was made up. He felt he had no other choice. Earlier that summer, Lady Bird recalled to her diary a conversation with Lyndon. “He said, ‘Things are not going well here … Vietnam is getting worse every day. I have the choice to go in with great casualty lists or to get out with disgrace. It’s like being in an airplane and I have to choose between crashing the plane or jumping out. I do not have a parachute.’ ”
On July 28, Johnson told the nation that he would grant the request to send additional forces to Vietnam. He spoke in a midafternoon press conference rather than a televised address in prime time. This time, he did not want the nation’s eyes on him.
In his speech, he used the same florid prose that had bogged down his past speeches. It compounded the unpleasantness of the message he had to deliver. “I do not find it easy to send the flower of our youth, our finest young men, into battle,” he said. “I have seen them in a thousand streets, of a hundred towns, in every State in this Union—working and laughing and building, and filled with hope and life.”
Once more, as he spoke of Vietnam, his grand ambitions and bold promises for the home front were on his mind. In the speech, he recalled his great goals: “healing to the sick and dignity to the old,” education for the young and equal rights for blacks. “That is what I have lived for, that is what I have wanted all my life since I was a little boy, and I do not want to see all those hopes and all those dreams of so many people for so many years now drowned in the wasteful ravages of cruel wars. I am going to do all I can do to see that that never happens.”
TWO WEEKS LATER, the awful, inevitable calamity the country had been waiting for that summer finally came to pass in the Watts section of Los Angeles. In that predominantly black neighborhood, a white highway patrolman arrested a young black man on suspicion of drunk driving. When the young man’s mother arrived at the scene, she got into an altercation with the officers and was arrested herself. By then, hundreds of residents of the neighborhood had flooded its streets to witness the commotion. Their agitation quickly boiled over. By the next night, five thousand people were rioting in Los Angeles. The city was in flames. Over the next five days the rioting mushroomed—a combined force of fifteen thousand National Guard and police troops could not bring the city under control.
California’s governor, Pat Brown, was on vacation in Greece at the time the rioting broke out. After being alerted to the initial incident, he thought things were under control and continued to enjoy himself, unaware that a full-fledged crisis was breaking out. When he did realize the gravity of the situation, he scrambled to get back home. But the long journey took two days, during which time he was largely unreachable.
In his absence, the public face of authority in Los Angeles was Chief William Parker of the LAPD, who fanned the flames of racial conflict on television as well as any sheriff of the Deep South. The black rioters, he said, were acting like “monkeys in a zoo.” Rioting of this sort was inevitable, Parker suggested, “when you keep telling people they are unfairly treated and teach them disrespect for the law.”
Clearly, the president had to do something about the crisis. Johnson was spending the weekend at the LBJ Ranch, so his aide Joseph Califano monitored the situation in Los Angeles. Through Bill Moyers, Johnson released a statement that the events in Watts were “tragic and shocking.” On Saturday, the rioting reached its worst. The pictures on television were gripping—the skies themselves seemed to be on fire. Califano frantically called down to Texas, trying to reach the president. But he was told the president was unavailable. He waited for Johnson to call him back with direction, but the call never came. It was not a busy day filled with other meetings and decisions—Johnson spent that day walking with Lady Bird and driving alone in his car. Califano dialed the ranch again and again. But Johnson never came to the line.
In a matter of a few short days, the Watts riots would deal a grievous blow to Johnson’s presidency and the story he had been trying to tell the nation. Los Angeles, whose population had boomed in recent decades with middle-class Americans seeking a better life, was the embodiment of postwar American affluence. With its modern architecture and its carefully planned communities, the glittering suburban metropolis looked like the magnificent future to come. Its descent into chaos and carnage was not what was supposed to happen in an America that, according to the president, was on the brink of the greatest glories in the history of civilization. Even worse, the riots attacked the most basic project Johnson had pursued since the first hours of his presidency: to assure the country that he was in control, that security and stability reigned. For the scenes from Watts left viewers all over the country with one unmistakable impression: there was no one in charge.
The next day, Califano finally reached Johnson on the telephone. The president was “deeply distressed” and “sorrowful” but strangely detached from what was happening to his country. The sense of foreboding he had described to Lady Bird earlier that summer was at last coming to fruition. His plane was crashing. All summer, he had been hurtling toward the ground. Here at last was the impact—and the fire.
On the trail in 1966: Reagan’s training as an actor made for an easy adjustment to the candidate’s life.
© Bill Ray/Getty Images
CHAPTER TEN
Like a Winner
September 1965–June 1966
In late September 1965, Ronald Reagan was back onstage. It was twenty months since he’d appeared before the California Young Republicans in San Diego. The crowd in front of him was still a blur, but everything else had changed.
He had a different kind of audience now. He’d come to the Statler Hilton in Boston to appear before the New England convention of the Federation of Republican Women. Now he was wooing comfortable middle-aged ladies, not anxious young men. His message was different, too. He was deep in the belly of moderate and liberal Republicanism, sharing the dais with the Massachusetts party’s establishment—Governor John Volpe and Lieutenant Governor Elliot Richardson. And Reagan himself was different, too. Twenty months earlier, feeling the rush of standing in front of a crowd this size, he’d had to wonder how much longer it would last. But ever since “A Time for Choosing”—known everywhere now as “The Speech”—the requests for appearances before big Republican crowds had been constant. Now he could look to the future and see bigger and grander crowds to come. For the third time in his life, he had become a star.
Thanks to some wealthy benefactors and the political consulting firm Spencer-Roberts, he had also become a politician. Back home in California, where he was running an unannounced but nonetheless intense campaign for governor, he liked to stress that he was a citizen called to service, not a professional politician. But it was clear, listening to
him that night in Boston, that he had learned all of the politician’s tricks. His speech showed a perfect mastery of all the obligatory little rituals in which a politician seeking office must engage.
First, he heaps praise on the high official sharing the dais with him.
Governor Volpe—
And then heaps a little patronizing chauvinism on the high official’s wife:
—and she who governs the governor, Mrs. Volpe.
He loosens the crowd up with some self-deprecating humor. He’s a film actor? Fine, he’ll mention some of his old films:
There [were] some that the studio didn’t want good—it wanted them Thursday. And in the old days we could always count on the passing years taking all of the [less than good] pictures out of your mind. Now you just stay up late enough at night in front of the TV set and they all come back to haunt us.… I’ve got a friend in the business who stays up late at night just to watch his hairline recede.
He plays to his strengths, always. He’s a handsome movie star. It’s a room filled mostly with women:
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