Landslide

by Jonathan Darman

  In the Pacific, he was not an embattled politician, but the mighty leader of a mighty superpower. He commanded enormous crowds. In Honolulu, four hundred thousand people came to see the president. A two-hour layover in the tiny American Samoan island of Tutuila brought out a quarter of the island’s population. In Seoul, the South Korean city protected from its northern neighbors by a formidable American army, a crowd of two million came to cheer Johnson. Their signs were worshipful: ALL HAIL TO JOHNSON, read one. WELCOME, KING OF DEMOCRACY, another. A band serenaded him with a familiar tune, “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands.” At the Malacanang Palace in Manila, his hosts placed sampaguita flowers around his head. This crown, a writer for The Progressive noted, captured the spirit of the trip: Johnson as Caesar, “conferring with his proconsuls … and accepting the homage of the subject peoples.”

  He accepted it with relish, of course. Johnson treated the trip as an extended campaign stop, handing out his signature LBJ pens, rubbing shoulders and shaking hands until blisters formed on his hands. In the Australian capital of Canberra, he stopped his motorcade nine times for impromptu visits with onlookers. “I’m glad you’re not standing for Prime Minister,” exclaimed the actual inhabitant of that office, Harold Holt.

  His speeches in the Pacific nations were essentially a stump speech, quite possibly the speech he would have given in the midterm campaign had the mood of the country allowed. “I have said so often,” he told an audience in Sydney, “that if you want to know what our foreign policy is, look at our domestic policy.” He went on to list the many gifts he had bestowed on the American people. He had brought “food for hungry people … jobs and good wages … seventy-seven million of our people are working, more than ever in history.” He had guaranteed “medical care for all of our senior citizens, modern hospitalization, increased nursing training, and nursing homes for all of our elderly people.” He had offered “eighteen educational measures … picking [up] the youngster at four years of age and carrying him through a Ph.D. in college, giving him all the education he can take.” Here, for a moment, was a rare glimpse of the old Johnson, showing off his accomplishments, speaking of the better world on the horizon, the miracles soon to come.

  This, perhaps, was what he really sought on his journey. Perhaps he thought that the passage of miles and the expanse of the oceans could take him not just out of his country but out of the present, back in time. Back to that moment, glorious and vanished, when he had promised everything, and people had believed.

  AS ALWAYS, JOHNSON expected the looming danger to come in human form. As the troubled year 1966 wore on, a new face joined the familiar crowd of potential threats. In a confidential memo to Johnson that summer, Robert Kintner related an account from the publisher Walter Ridder of a recent meeting with Ronald Reagan. “He went in,” the memo read “prepared to dislike Reagan but found him interesting, well-informed, articulate, with a political philosophy a bit left of Goldwater, but basically a strong conservative.… He also believes that if Reagan were elected, he would be a good and a strong candidate for the Republican nomination in 1968.”

  As the fall campaign took off, Johnson, reading the press along with everyone else, watched Reagan emerge as the most exciting story in American politics, the icon of resurgent Republicanism. In October, his face was featured on the cover of Time in a long profile titled “California: Ronald for Real.” It was a glowing portrait of the leading man at work. Here was Reagan “engulfed” by adoring crowds. Women exclaimed “You’re wonderful!” and men “Good luck!” Next he was performing “a stagy caricature of an ancient-sounding Pat Brown that is true to the last creaky quaver.” Then he was “hunched over 3-in. by 5-in. index cards, laboriously printing capital letters with a nylon-tip pen—‘my speech for the next town.’ ” And here he was running with a pithy summary of the “citizen-politician” theme: “Don’t forget,” he says, “there weren’t any professional politicians when this country started.”

  The strategy Johnson and Brown had plotted in the early summer, to tag Reagan as the second coming of Barry Goldwater, wasn’t working out so well. Time readers got through eighteen hundred words of the story before the name “Goldwater” even showed up. When it did, it was a chance for Reagan to express that “removed from the passions of 1964,” he’d learned an important lesson: “Perhaps we needed the bloodbath. Perhaps we needed the bitterness on both sides. I think it made us all realize that we have too much in common to be separated by intolerant differences.” Hang him around his neck, indeed.

  None of Brown’s tactics against Reagan worked, mostly because they weren’t any good. He mocked the notion of a citizen-politician—should Californians have citizen-doctors, too? What about citizen-pilots? It was sort of funny, for a minute. But it missed Reagan’s true meaning, which voters instantly understood. Reagan wasn’t using “citizen-politician” to emphasize the special virtues of the citizenry. He was drawing attention to the fact that there were professional politicians, people whose only career had been subsidized on the taxpayer dime. Brown, he said, was the worst of that bunch. And with his analogies to doctors and pilots, people with lifelong, specialized professions, Brown was conceding the point.

  Even more disastrous was Brown’s attempt to make use of the actor problem. He started off okay, drawing attention to the slick, overproduced qualities of Reagan’s campaign. “The governor’s office … is not a movie set with painted doors and an artificial fire in the fireplace,” a Brown ad noted, bringing to mind the stage set from which Reagan had announced his gubernatorial campaign. “It’s a real room. And into this room, every day, come real people—Californians—to discuss real problems with a real governor.”

  But then Brown’s campaign took it too far. Trying to make up for its candidate’s communications deficit in comparison with his opponent, the campaign ordered up a thirty-minute documentary that it broadcast on TV. The film, titled Man v. Actor, showed Brown addressing a group of black and white children. “I’m running against an actor,” the governor told the children, “and you know who shot Lincoln, don’t ya?”

  These were costly, amateur mistakes, the kind a candidate makes when his opponent has gotten deep inside his head. Brown’s problem was a fatal one in politics: he didn’t respect the man he was losing to, and it showed. When Brown looked at Reagan he saw the ultimate phony and fraud, a man who would clearly be a disaster for the state. He felt the same way fringe conservatives had felt in the Kennedy era—that the voters had somehow allowed themselves to be duped. The conclusion served him just as poorly as it had served conservatives before. To voters, Brown looked contemptuous, suggesting that he was somehow more serious, that he knew better than they.

  From Washington, the Johnson administration could see Brown flailing. Aware of how bad it would look if the Democrats lost the nation’s most populous state to a candidate from the reactionary right, they sent Hubert Humphrey to California to try to help. Appearing beside Brown, Humphrey recalled some of the old, extremist Reagan’s greatest hits: “Who was it,” Humphrey asked, “who said, ‘It is a strange paradox, with our complete tradition of individual freedom, parents being forced to educate children’? Who was it who called California’s elderly citizens and children and the maimed and the handicapped receiving welfare payments ‘a faceless mass waiting for handouts’?”

  But it was too late. After more than a year of campaigning, Reagan had convinced Californians that he was no radical, not in personality and not in politics. To the last, establishment Democrats underestimated his ability in both realms. They thought Reagan was hoodwinking good California Democrats into supporting an antigovernment orthodoxy to which they couldn’t possibly subscribe. “Reagan is anti-labor, anti-Negro, anti-intellectual, anti-planning, anti-20th Century,” wrote The New Republic. “We rather suspect Brown will take him. We can’t really believe the old bogey of federal government still scares Californians.”

  It wasn’t an old bogey, though. It was a new one. What the
establishment left could not understand was that Reagan’s campaign against the state was different from the paranoid Goldwater attack on the New Deal consensus. Reagan wasn’t urging Californians to reject the evils of Social Security or internationalist foreign policy, to turn away from federal spending on highways and dams and power plants. He could, when necessary, talk to a conservative audience about how any of those things were an affront to liberty, and he would mean it. But he was realistic enough to understand that those government functions were there to stay. Instead, Reagan told Californians all the ways the contemporary federal government, the government Johnson had built, had turned away from them. It had rejected them in favor of new programs, programs that were meant to help minorities but actually left them no better off.

  The more that Brown and the visiting Johnson administration officials painted Reagan as a threat, the more they fed the backlash. Reagan wants to destroy government programs, they said, thinking that good New Deal voters would understand that an attack on government programs was an attack on them. But these weren’t New Deal voters anymore. The people who gave Reagan his majority in the polls were white workers in the suburbs whose top issues were crime, drugs, juvenile delinquency, racial concerns, state taxes, and welfare programs. Reagan was winning with the men with lunch pails Kennedy had worried about all those years ago.

  THE CAMPAIGN HAD been a thrilling ride for Reagan, the kind of adventure in which he had always longed to be the star. It was probably too much to expect that Election Day would bring more drama. The Reagans had planned to have dinner that night with friends before heading to a party with supporters. As they drove from dinner to the party at the Century Plaza Hotel, they heard the news come over the radio: Ronald Reagan had defeated Pat Brown and would be the next governor of California. “I had always thought you waited up all night listening to the returns,” Nancy would write, “and although this may sound silly, I felt let down. After so much hard work, Ronnie’s early and overwhelming victory seemed almost an anticlimax.”

  Reagan had not only won, he’d won big. The B-movie actor, the extremist, the citizen-politician, had won the largest state in the nation by nearly a million votes—a landslide. Orange County, the funny anomaly Brown had idly mentioned to Johnson after Election Day in 1964, no longer seemed so strange. Reagan had secured an astounding 72 percent of the vote in Orange County—despite the fact that half of the county’s voters were still registered Democrats.

  It had been a great night for Republicans across the country. The GOP had defended all but two of their existing governorships and added eight new ones nationwide. (“I AM LOOKING FORWARD TO WORKING WITH YOU IN THE REPUBLICAN GOVERNORS’ ASSOCIATION,” another new winner, Spiro T. Agnew of Maryland, cabled Reagan on November 9.) Republican governors were winning in all sorts of strange new places. In Arkansas, Winthrop Rockefeller became the first Republican elected statewide since Reconstruction. In Massachusetts, John Volpe was reelected with a commanding margin, winning even the city of Boston, homeland of Kennedy Democrats. In governor’s races across the country, the GOP received 54 percent of the statewide vote, a showing not seen since 1952, the year of Eisenhower’s first sweeping presidential victory.

  Meanwhile, the results in the congressional elections were as bad as could be for Johnson and the Democrats. In the House, the Democrats had sustained losses far worse than even the twenty-seven or twenty-eight seats Dick Russell had imagined, losing an astounding forty-seven seats altogether. Only fourteen of the seats they’d wrested from the Republicans in the landslide year of 1964 remained in Democratic control. Johnson’s Democrats still controlled the Congress in name, but for the next two years, at the very least, the conservative bloc would be running the show.

  The Republicans had also added three Senate seats, along with 557 state legislative seats nationwide. Altogether, the party had received four million more votes than the Democrats in races across the country. Two years after respected commentators had openly wondered if the GOP was finished as a national party, the Republicans seemed poised to form a new majority in American politics.

  Most remarkable of all was the face of that resurgent Republican Party: Ronald Reagan. More exciting than any vote margin was the story of how a former actor and a committed Goldwaterite had won the favor of the Golden State. Predictably, the talk of a Reagan for President campaign in 1968 that had surrounded Reagan since his victory in the primary now grew louder. “In these circumstances,” wrote The New York Times, “Ronald Reagan may hold something like the balance of power. A hero to the Goldwater conservatives, he could assist Mr. Nixon mightily by supporting him early and strongly; or he could cut into the Nixon base and open the way for Governor Romney by becoming a candidate or letting himself be ‘drafted’; or he could even make a party unity move by trying to align himself with Mr. Romney.”

  The party’s big names stumbled over each other to get in Reagan’s good graces. Romney called him on election night. “CONGRATULATIONS ON THAT GREAT VICTORY,” cabled Nelson Rockefeller. “THE RESULTS OF THE ELECTION IN CALIFORNIA AND THROUGHOUT THE COUNTRY SIGNAL THE RESURGENCE OF OUR PARTY TO ITS HISTORIC POSITION OF STRENGTH AND INFLUENCE.”

  Nixon stayed in close touch. “I thought you would be interested to know that since returning to my office after a post-election vacation,” he wrote to Reagan in November, “I have heard a number of very favorable comments from some of the political ‘pros’ in the New York area with regard to your appearance on Issues and Answers. I only wish I had the opportunity of seeing it because from all accounts you hit the curves as well as the fast balls over the fence.” Just as before, he was cloyingly obsequious, but this time there was an added edge: Don’t forget who worked hard in this election, too.

  As always, Reagan was careful not to look as if he wanted the big part. He brushed off the presidential talk and told friends and supporters how daunting he found his pending responsibilities in Sacramento. But he was careful to nurture his party relationships outside California. In response to a congratulatory telegram from Governor James A. Rhodes of Ohio, a state of the utmost importance to Republicans seeking the presidency, Reagan was fawning. “I think more than any other governor of a major state you have proved that sound, fiscally-responsible government is indeed appreciated by the people,” he wrote. “I hope to see you at the Republican Governors Meeting … and I would like at some time to sit down and discuss with you your approach to state government.”

  Behind closed doors, he was already running. Less than two weeks after the 1966 election, Reagan met at his home with a group of political advisers to discuss a run for the presidency in 1968. Spearheading the effort was Tom Reed, described by Theodore White in The Making of the President, 1968 as “a distinguished physicist turned successful industrialist, now urged into politics by his conviction that Lyndon Johnson was an incarnation of evil.” Reed’s first move was to recruit a key strategist for the cause: Clif White, the architect of Goldwater’s 1964 convention strategy, the one man in the country who knew how to take a conservative candidate national. White had been devastated when Goldwater failed to make an appeal to the voters in the middle, presaging his disastrous ’64 loss to Johnson. Reagan, White knew, would not make the same mistake.

  While these underlings worried about the details of a campaign, Reagan kept his eyes squarely on Lyndon Johnson. He urged fellow Republicans to make the case that the election results were more than a vague expression of dissatisfaction. They were the public rising up against the administration in Washington. “I’ve been a little disappointed at how slow we are to respond to all the Liberal pundits who are trying to explain what happened,” he wrote to Senator Carl Curtis of Nebraska. “I think we should start making a case that what happened was a turning away from the Great Society by the people.” Writing to another member of Congress, he was even more direct: “I think we can claim a mandate from the people; that if any backlash was present, it was a backlash against the Great Society.”

  ON THE
PHONE from Chicago, Mayor Daley was giving the president forceful advice. “Some way,” the mayor said, “somehow, you should drop this Great Society. And pick up something else.”

  It was December 17, 1966, just over a month after the midterm elections. Through those long weeks, Johnson had heard repeatedly what a disaster the results had been for the party. And how he, Lyndon Johnson, the greatest Democratic president since Roosevelt, was to blame.

  To the end, he had dithered over whether or not he should insert himself into the campaign. After returning from his trip to the Pacific, he’d decided to make a last-minute push. From the ranch, where he’d retired in advance of an upcoming hernia operation, he staged a hurried revival of the old Man-in-Motion Johnson Show. In the three days before the election, he flew in an array of cabinet members to try to create the impression of major substantive progress as voters went to the polls. “The mimeograph machines,” wrote the Times, “churned out bullish statements on nearly everything the voters could conceivably have been worried about—white backlash, Vietnam, the draft, high food prices.”

  Then the devastating results came in and it was even easier for reporters to pin the blame on him. “There was no question,” observed the Times, “that the Republicans … capitalized on the ‘anti votes’—those who turned against the Johnson Administration and the President himself.” His old enemies spared no extravagance detailing Johnson’s failure. Ted Sorensen, addressing New York Democrats, was near apocalyptic in describing the effects on the party. “It was … far worse than the usual midterm slide,” he said, “far worse than the issues required; and it spread disaster and disarray into our party in every section of the country and in every normally Democratic state.”