LBJ HAS ACUTE SENSE OF SECRECY
LBJ’S BIGGEST PROBLEM IS LACK OF CREDIBILITY
After a tour of Vietnam in early 1968, Walter Cronkite reports to his audience that “it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy.” … Under duress, Robert S. McNamara resigns as secretary of defense, to be replaced by Clark Clifford at the Pentagon.
In travels across the country, Reagan assailed Johnson’s out-of-control spending, the “matchless boondoggle” that was his War on Poverty, and a “leadership gap” in the White House that was “on a scale we have never known and should no longer tolerate.” He spared no drama in playing up the urgency of the moment, of the crossroads America had reached: “There is a question abroad in the land—what is happening to us?”
WHAT WAS HAPPENING to America? That was the question asked everywhere in 1968. And before long, Johnson’s failure to provide an answer would prove his undoing.
Following the disastrous 1966 midterm results, Washington had entertained the possibility that Johnson would not seek reelection in 1968. He often appeared listless and beaten down. His mood grew darker, his temper shorter, his waistline larger yet again. He watched helplessly as his presidency was swallowed whole by Vietnam—the war he hadn’t wished for, the war he struggled to control, the war he could not win. In late January 1968, the Vietcong and North Vietnamese launched a surprise, coordinated attack on more than a hundred locations in South Vietnam. The attacks marked a new, bloodier phase in the already gruesome conflict. In a single week in February, 543 Americans were killed. The Vietcong and North Vietnamese initiative, which came to be known as the Tet Offensive, deeply damaged morale on the American home front, underscoring the hollowness of the administration’s claims of improving fortunes in the conflict. In a poll taken early in 1968, just 35 percent of Americans approved of Johnson’s handling of the war.
Throughout 1967 and early 1968, Johnson refused to announce himself as a candidate for reelection. He was keeping to the old customs, the ones that had served him well in 1964, by which a president refrained from unseemly politicking until his party commanded him to seek the office again. This time, though, it was unclear if a resounding command from the party would actually come. Johnson quizzed friends on whether he ought to run. Recalling that few Johnson men lived past the age of sixty-five, he wondered if he had four more White House years in him. In January 1973, the end of the next term, he would be sixty-four. Lady Bird made no secret of her desire to leave at the end of the term; John Connally advised Johnson that if he did run, he probably would not win.
It was far from clear that he could even count on the nomination of his party. Eugene McCarthy, the liberal Minnesota senator, launched a campaign for the Democratic nomination centered on his opposition to the Vietnam War. In the March 1968 New Hampshire primary, McCarthy stunned the nation by winning 42 percent of the vote to Johnson’s 49. Shortly thereafter, the dire blow Johnson had always imagined at last was delivered: Bobby Kennedy announced himself as a candidate for the presidency in 1968.
On the last day of March, a weary Lady Bird Johnson found her husband in his bedroom. Their daughter Lynda had just described the harrowing ordeal with the press she’d endured while saying goodbye to her husband, Marine Corps Captain Charles S. Robb, who was leaving to serve a tour of duty in Vietnam. Lyndon’s “face was sagging,” Lady Bird told her diary, “and there was such pain in his eyes as I had not seen since his mother died.” That night, Johnson planned to announce a partial halt in the bombing of North Vietnam in a renewed effort to start peace talks with the Hanoi government. But the pain in Johnson’s face, Lady Bird knew, had a deeper root.
That day, March 31, 1968, would be a river cutting across their lives. Lady Bird passed the day in a nervous bustle. Just before nine that evening, she went to the Oval Office with her children and a gaggle of Johnson aides. Under the glare of the television lights, her husband was waiting to give his speech. “Remember,” Lady Bird told him softly, “pacing and drama.”
Johnson delivered the substance of his Vietnam proposal like a news report: he would introduce limits on bombing as a genuine signal of his desire to reach accommodation with the North Vietnamese. Then the drama came.
“With American sons in the field far away,” the president told his people, “I do not believe that I should devote an hour or a day of my time to any personal partisan causes or to any duties other than the awesome duties of this office, the presidency of your country. Accordingly, I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president.”
The nation was stunned: President Johnson was not going to run again after all. Johnson intimates staggered at the turn. He was giving up on what had once been his grandest ambition—to serve nine great years in the White House, to be as great a president as FDR, to transform his country and the world.
Lady Bird left the Oval Office in a daze, floating on a tide of sadness, shock, and relief. To her, this was a moment of true courage and greatness in her husband’s life. Watching the speech, she thought and later recorded in her diary, “those who love him must have loved him more. And those who hate him must at least have thought: ‘Here is a man.’ ”
LYNDON JOHNSON WAS a man whose ambition could overcome almost any obstacle, save the course of history. History was simply moving too fast. Americans were still absorbing the news that the president had decided not to run when, four days later, even more shocking news came from Memphis: Martin Luther King, Jr., the leader who had survived years of terror and intimidation in the South, had been shot dead while standing on the balcony of a motel.
It was early April, warm enough for rioting, and the nation’s cities braced themselves for a grievous blow. Appearing that night at a campaign stop in a rough neighborhood in Indianapolis, Bobby Kennedy had to inform his audience of the news. “For those of you who are black,” he said, his hands and voice shaking from the deep emotion he felt, “and are tempted to be filled with hatred and distrust at the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I would only say that I can feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man. But we have to make an effort in the United States, we have to make an effort to understand, to go beyond these rather difficult times.”
Soon enough, though, the times would claim Bobby too. Two months later, just after declaring victory over McCarthy in the California primary on June 4, 1968, Bobby Kennedy was shot in the head while exiting his victory party at Los Angeles’s Ambassador Hotel. Like his brother before him, Bobby had been killed by a deranged assassin acting out a fantasy. The fierce and fearsome spirit that had inspired a nation and tormented its president was gone.
“Too horrible for words,” Johnson said when he first learned Bobby had been shot. Though it was quickly apparent his wounds were mortal, Bobby’s body lingered for more than a day before finally succumbing. In those hours of waiting, Johnson was less dignified. “Is he dead?” he asked his aides. “Is he dead yet?” Once again, as the nation mourned a Kennedy struck down in the prime of life, Johnson had to stand by silently as a complex muddle of emotions swirled in his head. Once again, a Kennedy was destined to live on as a martyr, with a posthumous reputation that barely resembled the man Johnson had actually known. Once again, Johnson’s nation was in trouble, and he was helpless to do little more than watch.
The Johnsons attended Bobby’s funeral service in New York. They entered without ceremony and Lyndon did not speak. After the service concluded, Lady Bird found herself face-to-face with Jackie Kennedy. “I called her name and put out my hand,” Lady Bird noted in her diary later. “She looked at me as if from a great distance, as though I were an apparition. I murmured some word of sorrow and walked on.”
The troubles persisted through the last months of Johnson’s presidency. Bob
by’s death left McCarthy as the leader of the antiwar movement within the party. Hubert Humphrey became the stand-in for Johnson, the candidate of the status quo. When the two sides met at the Democratic convention in Chicago that summer, bitter rancor broke out on the convention floor. Outside there was blood. Young dissidents protested the war on the city’s streets; urged on by Mayor Daley, the Chicago police and Illinois National Guard met them with shockingly brutal force. “The whole world is watching,” the protesters screamed, and the whole world was. Americans were watching in horror, wondering if their democracy, their country itself, was coming apart.
Johnson grew more and more weary in the final months of his presidency, thwarted in all his ambitions, beaten down by events. In the end, he at last allowed a bit of reality to temper his grand dreams. “I hope,” he told Congress in a farewell address, “it may be said, a hundred years from now, that by working together we helped to make our country … more just for all of its people, as well as to ensure and guarantee the blessings of liberty for all of our posterity. That is what I hope. But I believe that at least it will be said that we tried.”
The Johnsons left the White House on January 20, 1969. They arrived at the LBJ Ranch in Texas as night was falling. A group of five hundred Hill Country neighbors had come to welcome them. Happy as always to have a crowd, Lyndon lingered with them in the ranch’s airplane hangar. He was glad, he told the visitors, to be home. That evening, after five years of often sleepless nights, Lady Bird retired early to the comfort of her own bed. As she drifted off she recalled a line of poetry: “I seek to celebrate my glad release, the tents of silence and the camp of peace.”
AMERICANS HELD THE Democrats to blame for much of what was happening in the late 1960s. But Reagan would not be the one to profit from the other party’s collapse, not in 1968. His strategy was all wrong for the moment. It was not a year to run quietly for the presidency, not a year to do much of anything quiet at all. While Reagan dropped hints and winked at the press, Richard Nixon went straight to Reagan’s strongest supporters—Southern conservatives—and sewed up commitments for support. No doubt the sons of Dixie loved Ronald Reagan far more than they would ever love Dick Nixon, but there was more than personal feeling to consider. “The Southerners,” wrote Theodore White, “had had enough of gallant lost causes; they wanted winners.” Nixon, for all of his defects, was a former vice president who had come within a hair’s breadth of the presidency eight years before. Reagan was two years out from Death Valley Days. By early August 1968, when the party gathered in Miami Beach for its convention, it was clear that Nixon would be their choice.
Some of Reagan’s aides urged him to make the best of the situation in his signature dramatic form, turning away from his supporters on the convention floor and asking the convention to nominate Nixon straightaway. It was good advice that would have earned Reagan a morsel of goodwill with Nixon, possessor of one of the longest memories in American politics. But for once, Reagan’s knack for timing was absent. Uncharacteristically, he failed to intuit when it was time to subvert his ambition in the name of self-preservation. As the delegates gathered in Miami, he clung to his dream and suddenly announced his intention to be considered as a candidate.
Reality intervened fast. Nixon won the nomination on the first ballot, swamping Reagan, who came in an embarrassing third behind Rockefeller. He scrambled to clean things up, quickly proclaiming his support for the nominee. For the rest of his career, he would downplay his efforts to seek the presidency in 1968, suggesting he had simply allowed his name to be put forward as a “favorite son” candidate of the California delegation.
But the damage was done. Nixon defeated Humphrey in the November election. He was backed by disaffected members of the white middle class, the men with lunch pails Kennedy and his aides had worried about, the concerned suburbanites Reagan had so artfully courted. It was the beginning of a generational realignment. In five of the six presidential elections in the period 1968–88, these voters would deliver the White House to the Republicans, just as they had delivered it again and again to the New Deal Democrats in the generation before. The sixties closed out in appalling style. The decay persisted in the cities, the new president expanded the war in Vietnam, violence and killing continued at home. But Nixon so effectively channeled the resentments of the forgotten middle—the “silent majority,” as his base came to be known—that he entered the 1970s a popular president, well on his way to reelection.
In California, Reagan remained popular as well; he was elected to a second term as governor in 1970, albeit with a smaller margin than he’d enjoyed in his 1966 landslide. But his ultimate dream, the White House, seemed to have slipped from his grasp. Nixon was governing not as a new, Reagan-style conservative, but as a sort of Southern fried modern Republican. His White House was friendly to business and to whites in the Old Confederacy, hostile to what was left of the civil rights movement. But it was expansive in its vision for the federal government, taking on broad projects in education, public works, and environmental regulation. Overseas, Nixon shocked the hard-line anticommunists by visiting Red China and reaching an accord with the Soviets on reduction of antiballistic-missile systems.
None of this was the glorious future Reagan had imagined. After winning reelection in 1972, Nixon even envisioned the rise of a new majority party in the United States that eschewed the influence of both the radical left and the reactionary right, Reagan’s hard-line base. Nixon had no intention of letting a conservative like Ronald Reagan follow him in the White House. In fact, his preferred successor was Lyndon Johnson’s old protégé John Connally. Connally, like so many other southerners of his generation, became a member of the Republican Party in the 1970s. After Nixon’s resounding reelection victory in 1972, Reagan’s dream of the presidency seemed increasingly far-fetched.
But once a man starts running for president, he never really stops. He keeps running until he wins or he dies. And in the 1970s, the country would learn the same simple fact it had learned in the sixties: the future never turns out the way people think it’s going to. The Watergate scandal and Nixon’s subsequent resignation in August 1974 left the Republican Party decimated. For Reagan, the GOP’s decline was yet another moment of opportunity. Just as he had after the Goldwater disaster of 1964, Reagan positioned himself as a fresh face, someone who could bring the party back from the brink. He challenged Nixon’s successor, Gerald Ford, for the GOP nomination in 1976, running a serious and spirited primary campaign. At the party’s convention in Kansas City, he lost the nomination to Ford by only 117 votes. When Ford went on to lose the November election to Democrat Jimmy Carter, many in the party wondered if they hadn’t made a mistake in passing Reagan by.
Reagan was eager to show them they had a chance to rectify their mistake. He turned sixty-nine in 1980, the year of the next election, but he ran again anyway and finally captured the party’s nomination. The mood in the country that year was similar in many ways to the mood in 1966, when Reagan had won his first California landslide. The American economy was in trouble, roiled by inflation and unemployment. The country’s position in the world was in doubt, as was painfully illustrated by the humiliating failed attempt to rescue Americans being held hostage inside the U.S. embassy in Tehran. America seemed to have lost its way.
Reagan, by then an old pro at presidential politics, ran an artful campaign against the unpopular Carter. He tossed aside the academic question of whether the country’s economic woes were best described as a recession or a depression with a clever pivot: “A recession is when your neighbor loses his job. A depression is when you lose yours. A recovery is when Jimmy Carter loses his.”
And yet, in a sense, the campaign he ran had very little to do with his opponent Carter. Really, it was the same campaign he had been running since the mid-sixties. The succession of recent failed presidencies—Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter—allowed Reagan to run not just against the record of the last four years, but against an entire era of
broken government promises. The root of the country’s problems, Reagan suggested, was in the arrogant ambitions that the Democratic Party had staked out in the mid-1960s.
Reagan’s 1980 campaign was a campaign against those ambitions, against the myths of Lyndon Johnson’s thousand days. He ran against the Big Government that stifled innovation and threatened freedom. He ran against appeasement of a resurgent Soviet threat. He ran against the liberal promises that had not come to pass. He ran against the government elites who had overtaxed hardworking Americans in the name of helping the poor but had only created a class of dependents living off the government dole. He ran as hard as he could against all of Lyndon Johnson’s dreams.
“We have a group of elitists in Washington,” he said in 1980, in words that he could just as easily have uttered in 1966, “who … think they must control our destiny, make all the rules, tell us how to run our lives and our businesses. And it is time to have a president who will take the government off the people’s backs and turn the great genius of the American people loose once again.”
Sometimes, his campaign against the Johnson-era vision was so literal it was crass. Running against Carter, an evangelical Christian from Georgia, Reagan’s campaign knew that they had to make a hard play for the white vote in the South. Thus for his first stop after the Republican convention in August of 1980, Reagan went to Mississippi. And not just anywhere in Mississippi: Reagan chose to begin his general election campaign at the Neshoba County Fairgrounds, just a few miles from the lonely country road where James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Mickey Schwerner had breathed their last breaths. There, Reagan greeted an almost exclusively white audience and spoke the code words that had signaled resistance to federal civil rights efforts since the sixties: “I believe in states’ rights.”
Mostly, though, his campaign against the old Johnson vision took place on a higher plane. Like Johnson, he sought to inspire the nation with a mythic promise. “For those who have abandoned hope,” he said, accepting the Republican nomination, “we’ll restore hope and we’ll welcome them into a great national crusade to make America great again.… Can we doubt that only a Divine Providence placed this land, this island of freedom, here as a refuge for all those people in the world who yearn to breathe freely: Jews and Christians …”
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