Newsweek summed it up best: “In the space of a single Autumn day … the 1,000 day reign of Lyndon I came to an end: The Emperor of American politics became just a president again.”
Johnson was a man whose myths had left him behind. For progressives, the election was liberation—no longer did they have to qualify their critique of the Vietnam War; no longer did they have to claim Lyndon Johnson as one of their own. In fact, by turning on Johnson, they could cling to their old utopian ideas and simply say it was Johnson and his war that had prevented that utopia from coming to pass. The problem wasn’t the program, they could say; it was Johnson and his war. And so they began. “The election results,” wrote Walter Lippmann, “are a tremendous demonstration of how in the atmosphere of war it is impossible to pursue the tasks of peace.” Johnson, the liberals felt, was incapable of pursuing those tasks. “The feeling is widespread,” observed The Progressive, “that he is much too devious and domineering, too crafty and calculating to capture the admiration and affection he so passionately desires.”
Some were more realistic. Michael Harrington, the journalist whose reporting on poverty in the late fifties and early sixties had punctured his fellow liberals’ breezy confidence, once again was more pessimistic than his peers. He feared that a permanent shift had occurred. The old Goldwater movement had been “a fantastic mood rather than a program,” Harrington wrote in an essay after the election. But the conservatism that voters had embraced in 1966, particularly the “Creative Federalism” Reagan had promoted, was something real: a program that would move resources away from federal projects helping the underprivileged in the cities and toward state programs that benefited more affluent voters in the suburbs. “If the Dixiecrat-Republican coalition adopts a version of ‘Creative Federalism’ they will have come up with a workable and reactionary alternative to social progress.”
Conservatives were eager to describe a version of that “workable alternative”—that the future now belonged to men like Reagan, that a definitive move to the right had begun. William F. Buckley concluded a column in the National Review with an anecdote about a “young conservative” who had run for State Assembly in the ’66 election in a district that included Harlem. “A Negro woman advanced on him and growled that he was a Nazi,” wrote Buckley. “ ‘Look, madam,’ the young and engaging Yale graduate said, ‘it’s not right to call me a Nazi, any more than it would be right for me to call you a Communist.’ ‘But I AM a Communist,’ she answered exultantly.” After long decades in the wilderness, the taint of extremism had shifted to the other side.
The old New Deal consensus had cracked. Johnson’s majority had vanished. There were challenges to his authority everywhere. The day before Johnson spoke with Daley, a caucus of Democratic governors, meeting at the Greenbrier resort in West Virginia, had released an ostentatious statement explicitly saying that Johnson was responsible for the party’s poor showing the month before. Iowa’s Democratic governor, Harold Hughes, serving as a public spokesman for the group, would not even say whether Johnson could win reelection. “I don’t know,” Hughes said. “If he had a respectable opponent who was acceptable to the American people, he would have a very tough race.”
Now here was Mayor Daley: “The Great Society is tarnished,” he said. “It’s been hurt.… I don’t think we can keep pushing this Great Society idea because it hasn’t worked. It’s stumbled and fumbled and in many places, it’s fallen down.”
Johnson breathed deeply while he listened. This was the new reality: he was expected to sit back and take this kind of talk. Two years ago, Daley wouldn’t have dared tell the president what he should call his prized domestic program. He probably would have told him how wonderful he thought the name “Great Society” was.
But no one was thinking about 1964 anymore. As Johnson knew better than anyone, no one in Washington was ever thinking about the last election. They were thinking about the next one, 1968, about the increasing likelihood that Johnson would face a primary challenge, quite possibly from Bobby Kennedy. That would be the ultimate indignity: a sitting president losing his party’s nomination and Bobby triumphing over Johnson in the end.
Johnson had reasons now to placate people like Mayor Daley.
Anyway, Daley wasn’t the only one saying this sort of thing to Johnson. To survive, his advisers told him, he had to find a new message, one that spoke to the Americans in the middle. He had to forget about the editorial writers and heed the message of the voters, to scale back his domestic agenda, to focus his energy, to bring some sort of resolution to the war in Vietnam. And yes, he had to lay off the Great Society, at least for a while, and give people a new story in which they could believe.
Johnson said that he agreed, he would change his story going forward. But his preoccupation was with the past. In the final weeks of 1966, his mind drifted back in time. Back before the miserable midterms. Before people talked about Ronald Reagan as anything other than an actor. Before Vietnam had tainted everything. Before the triumphs: Medicare and the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. Before the crises, before Pleiku and Rolling Thunder and the Gulf of Tonkin; before the marchers on the bridge in Selma, before those kids had gone missing in the Mississippi darkness. Before he’d lost Walter Jenkins. Before that gold-ringed morning in November 1964 when he’d woken up a reelected president, the owner of a record landslide. All the way back to the place where his thousand days had begun.
Back to Dallas.
As 1966 came to an end, the talk of Washington was a new book by the journalist William Manchester, The Death of a President. It was an authoritative recreation of the events before, during, and after the killing of President Kennedy, informed by interviews with one thousand people, including nearly everyone who’d been near the fallen president and his family in those dark days. It was the cooperation of one person in particular that made the book unique. Personally selected by the Kennedy family to write the authoritative account, Manchester had spent long hours in the company of Jacqueline Kennedy in her Georgetown home in the months following the assassination, reliving each moment of November 1963.
The book was not due out until the spring of 1967, but it was already a sensation. Look magazine planned to publish an excerpt in a January issue (it had bought the first serial rights for $665,000 and had already earned back half the purchase price in overseas sales). Jackie’s participation fueled public interest—she had not talked at length about the assassination in public since her Camelot interview with Teddy White. In Washington, fascination with the book swirled around rumors that it revealed tensions between Johnson and the Kennedy family in the first hours of the Johnson presidency.
Indeed it did. Manchester’s 654-page book, which remains the definitive account of the Kennedy assassination and its immediate aftermath, included the Kennedy loyalists’ version of events in Dallas in which Lyndon Johnson commandeered Air Force One, installed himself in Jackie’s bedroom on the plane, and generally acted like a greedy usurper throughout the long weekend of mourning and transition. There was a lengthy description of Jackie, in a hotel room the night before her husband’s death, listening to her husband berate Vice President Johnson in a nearby room. A strong contempt for all things Texan pervaded Manchester’s emotional prose, suggesting that the culture of the Lone Star State had played a part in Kennedy’s murder. This implied culpability extended to the nation’s most famous Texan, the president of the United States. An early version of the book began with a vignette, provided by Jackie, of JFK visiting the LBJ Ranch in 1960 and growing appalled by the way Johnson hunted deer. The meaning was subtle but clear: the new president practiced the same kind of brutality that had taken the old president’s life.
Never once in Manchester’s story did Jackie Kennedy put a foot wrong. And yet she and the Kennedy family quickly realized that the human messiness of Manchester’s account was a threat to their most valuable asset: the Camelot myth. Relying on reports of the book’s contents from Kennedy family loyalists,
Jackie filed suit to prohibit its publication, an ultimately unsuccessful effort that only increased the public’s appetite for the tale. The advance orders reached four hundred thousand.
In public, Johnson acted as though he’d paid little mind to the entire affair. He wrote to Jackie, telling her not to think that he’d taken any offense:
My dear Mrs. Kennedy,
Mrs. Johnson and I have been distressed to read the press accounts of your unhappiness about the Manchester book. Some of these accounts attribute your concern to passages in the book which are critical or defamatory of us. If this is so, I want you to know that while we deeply appreciate your characteristic kindness and sensitivity, we hope you will not subject yourself to any discomfort or distress on our account. One never becomes completely inured to slander, but we have learned to live with it.
This was a familiar Washington transaction—political families papering over an embarrassing incident by blaming the wretched jackals of the press. There were hints that Johnson still longed for intimacy with the former First Lady: the typed “Mrs. Kennedy” was crossed out and replaced with a handwritten “Jackie”; “Mrs. Johnson” was replaced with “Lady Bird.” But the cool, businesslike tone, compared with Johnson’s extravagant courtship in days of old, showed he was not quite so untroubled as he protested. His line “one never becomes completely inured to slander” contained a perhaps unconscious slip that may have revealed how Johnson really felt about all the things Jackie had told Manchester. A person who writes untruth is guilty of libel. “Slander” comes from the person who speaks it.
In private, of course, Johnson was obsessed with the Manchester book. He pressed for any intelligence his associates could gather on the contents. “What are the damaging things to us in there?” he asked Abe Fortas. “Is it the plane incident in Dallas?” Fortas struggled to narrow down a long list of damaging material. “The basic damage of the thing is the portrayal of you.” Johnson devoured gossip about Manchester, whom he denounced as “a fraud.” Naturally, Johnson assumed Bobby was responsible for the entire project. The book was “vicious, mean, dirty, low-down stuff,” Johnson said, planted by Bobby to delegitimize Johnson’s claim for reelection in 1968.
But what was truly damaging about the Manchester book was not its implication for the future—it was what it said about the past. Whatever the public thought of Johnson’s program—and in late 1966, they did not seem to think much of it—most Americans had always appreciated the way Johnson had handled himself in the first, difficult hours of his presidency. In his nation’s time of sorrow, Johnson had been silent but strong, and then at just the right moment he had urged the country to continue. Now, through Manchester, the Kennedys were denying him even that achievement. They were taking the heroic beginning of Johnson’s story away.
Perhaps for the first time, Johnson fully realized what had been clear in the last line of Teddy White and Jackie’s story in Life magazine: for one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot. He couldn’t be a hero in that story. There was no place for him in the Kennedy myth. His bitterness toward the family was total. “They’re going to write history as they want it written, as they can buy it written,” he said. “And I think the best way we can write it is to try to refrain from getting into an argument or a fight or a knockdown, and go on and do our job every day.”
But for how long? That was what the political world wondered as 1966 came to an end. Two years before, when he’d won his landslide, it was unthinkable that Lyndon Johnson could be scared out of running for reelection. In that moment of triumph, it was a near certainty that Johnson would choose to run for reelection in 1968, win another landslide, and stay in the White House for a remarkable nine-year run. But after the Republican triumph in the midterms, it seemed possible that the president would not seek reelection after all.
Lady Bird found that prospect appealing. Earlier that fall, she had met with the landscape architect Lawrence Halprin about a project he was to design as part of her efforts to beautify Washington, D.C. At one point, she asked Halprin how long it had taken him to design a similar project, San Francisco’s Ghirardelli Square. Listening in, Sharon Francis, a staff assistant on the beautification project, knew why the First Lady was interested in timing. Lady Bird was always a careful planner. She wanted to know whether this project could be completed before she left the capital in two years’ time.
Lyndon’s thoughts about the future were harder to read. He nodded along when his aides talked about a shift in strategy, the course of prudence that would win public opinion back. He agreed vacantly. But then he would talk about some big new bill he wanted to get through Congress, some new program he needed to start. It was as if he believed that if he could only get one more great accomplishment under his belt, one more remarkable program, then people would forget about the war and the riots and the heavy fear they felt. Then they would see that all the great things he had promised were coming to pass. If only he could do something bigger and better, then they would love him again. His instinct at the end of the thousand days was just the same as it had been at the beginning: all would be well if he could just capture the nation’s attention, if he could just start his story over.
There was, however, one small hint that his perspective on the future had changed. It came when people asked him to explain himself. Why was he trying to accomplish the big things now, why not slow things down and wait for a while? What was his hurry? The answer should have been obvious. The Man-in-Motion had always been in a hurry, ever since that day in November when he’d spied morning light on the White House as president for the first time. It was his natural state of being. He was Lyndon Baines Johnson, he had been in a hurry all his life, hurrying toward greater and greater things. Now, though, something was different. He hurried, he said, because “I have so little time.”
Epilogue
Ronald Reagan was sworn in as governor of California shortly after midnight on January 2, 1967, in the rotunda of the state’s capitol building. Already, however, his mind was drawn to an even higher office. With Reagan’s blessing, Clif White and Tom Reed had developed a detailed campaign timeline for the coming year, leading up to the Republican convention in the summer of 1968. There, Reagan hoped to win his party’s nomination and challenge Johnson for the presidency.
Throughout his first year as governor, Reagan declared himself focused on his substantial duties in Sacramento, too busy to consider a run for the presidency. But reporters noted that he never offered an outright refusal to run in 1968. Press interest in a Reagan candidacy grew steadily, thanks in part to not-so-subtle encouragement from Reagan himself. At a meeting of the nation’s governors aboard the SS Independence in October 1967, a tanned and smiling Reagan appeared before the national press. “Governor Rockefeller of New York said yesterday that he does not want to be president,” said one reporter. “Do you want to be president?” Reagan laughed and paused. “Well,” he said, “there’s one carry-over I have from my previous occupation: I never take the other fellow’s lines.”
Final days: Johnson at the LBJ Ranch in 1972.
© Frank Wolfe/LBJ Library
The long run: Reagan with supporters in 1968.
© AP Photo
Off camera, he was more overt. Despite the demands of his office, he found time for periodic trips around the country, gathering support for a potential run. His aim, in part, was to recreate Goldwater’s strategy for capturing the nomination: secure the overwhelming support of the conservative grass roots, and of the white voters flocking to the party in the South. “Most South Carolinians are, as I am, relatively new converts to Republicanism,” he told an audience in the Palmetto State in 1967. “Somehow the Democratic Party went away and left us. It left us when it switched to philosophies and policies that we could not accept … the philosophy that whoever the Democratic president may be, he knows best.”
Lyndon Johnson was always on his mind. As an unannounced candidate, Reagan could not overtly criticize his mo
re moderate rivals for the Republican nomination—Richard Nixon, George Romney, and Nelson Rockefeller. Instead, he stirred conservative passions with an unrelenting critique of the Johnson administration. His office maintained a thick file of index cards to aid in the effort. Each card contained a thematic title printed in capital letters followed by a statistic, quotation, or set of facts that illustrated some aspect of the Johnson administration’s record of failure. Strung together, the titles formed a scripted account of the Johnson presidency for Reagan to perform. Reagan was a B actor no longer; now the script on his cards told the main story of American politics and the declining fortunes of the Johnson presidency:
POVERTY NEEDS TOO EXPENSIVE
ADMINISTRATION SHORTCOMINGS ENHANCE RIOTING
LBJ HAS NOT FULFILLED GREAT SOCIETY CLAIMS
Meanwhile, on their TV screens, viewers see that rioting becomes the norm in cities across America in 1967.… A presidential task force reports to Johnson that if current trends continue, by 1983, the nation’s major cities will be 40 percent poor.
HARMS OF INFLATION ON FULL EMPLOYMENT ECONOMY
YOUTH UNEMPLOYMENT GOING UP
LBJ INCREASES FEDERAL SPENDING
Facing a projected 1968 budget deficit of $28 billion, Johnson announces he will request that Congress pass a tax surcharge.… LBJ, fearing a political backlash against government spending, tells aides he is prepared to “slash the hell out of domestic programs if necessary.”
“ADMINISTRATION HAS MISLED THE PUBLIC ABOUT VIETNAM”—W. CRONKITE
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