Just as they had for Johnson in 1964, the American people listened to Reagan’s promises of hope, destiny, and the divine and gave him a landslide in return. Carter and Reagan had been close in the polls going into the fall campaign, but after a solid debate performance in which he came across as reasonable and mainstream, voters flocked to Reagan. He swamped Carter on Election Day, securing 489 electoral votes to the incumbent’s 49. Unlike Goldwater, who had made Johnson wait until the next day for his concession in 1964, Carter didn’t even wait until the polls closed. When he called Reagan to concede, the president-elect was dripping, having just emerged from the shower.
It was clear from the dramatic words in Reagan’s 1981 inaugural address that his presidency would be devoted to undoing the legacy of the past two decades. In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem. That spring, Reagan was shot by a would-be assassin after a speech in Washington. The president suffered a serious wound but made a full recovery. To some Americans, this seemed a mystical endorsement of the Reagan project. The time of trouble had begun when a president was shot and killed; it would end with a president who was shot and lived.
Reagan’s advisers knew that after the Kennedy assassination, Johnson had used the swell of public support for his administration to force through his ambitious agenda. They moved to do the same after Reagan’s assassination attempt, pushing forward a program that brought Reagan’s vision to life: a defense buildup to more aggressively confront the Soviets abroad, and a shrinking of government at home. The centerpiece of this effort was the largest tax reduction in American history, which Reagan signed into law in the summer of 1981.
Like Johnson before him, Reagan applied his mythic vision at the expense of reality. Johnson’s War on Poverty took an untested idea, community action, and applied it on a large scale without waiting to see if it would work. So, too, the Reagan administration brushed off concerns that the massive tax cut would shrink federal revenues to unsustainable levels. Government expenditures could be dramatically reduced, Reagan believed, by eliminating the wasteful programs for the poor that had metastasized since the Great Society. Reagan embraced a faddish conservative theory, supply-side economics, which held that a large reduction in marginal income-tax rates would create such significant economic growth that the federal government would in the end receive greater revenues. There was scant factual support for the theory—running against Reagan in the 1980 primary campaign, George H. W. Bush had dubbed it “voodoo economics.” But as with the Great Society programs, the Reagan administration implemented its theory as though it were fact, willing a fantasy to come true.
The results were catastrophic. The tax cut reduced government revenues to approximately 18.5 percent of gross domestic product. The accompanying cut in federal expenditures never came: while Reagan did cut discretionary spending on Great Society domestic programs for the disadvantaged, he made no serious effort to alter federal spending on middle-class entitlements, and his defense buildup more than offset any cuts he’d made. At the end of his term, federal spending would amount to 22.5 percent of GDP. Reagan’s policies had created unprecedented federal deficits. When Reagan assumed office, government debt was a manageable one third of GDP. During his time as president, Reagan would add more debt to the nation’s ledgers than had all of his predecessors, going back to George Washington, combined. In a moment of crisis, Reagan had promised to restore fiscal responsibility to an out-of-control federal behemoth. But, as with Johnson, the real world never matched the mythic vision he espoused.
Unlike Johnson, however, Reagan did not pay a political price. By the 1980s, the fracture in the nation’s governing consensus—the fracture that began in Johnson’s thousand days—had grown so large that reality was no longer something for which politicians had to account. The public had gotten used to the politics that Reagan and Johnson had pioneered in the mid-sixties, wherein two sides told competing fantastic stories of great days to come and the party with the more enticing and believable story would win. The same qualities that had fueled Reagan’s rise in the sixties—his intuition for the national mood, his ability to tell a clear and dramatic tale—served him well as his policies went into effect. In 1983, when the economy at last began to recover from the 1970s doldrums, Reagan was quick to interpret it as a vindication of his vision. The story of mythic resurgence he prophesied was coming to pass.
As always, he made sure the villain in his story, the same villain that had always been at the center of his story, was exposed: Johnson-era Big Government. Looking toward his campaign for reelection in 1984, Reagan reshaped the story of recent history to fit the contours of his vision. “The simple truth is that low inflation and economic expansion in the years prior to the Great Society meant enormous social and economic progress for the poor of America,” he told an audience in 1983. “But after the gigantic increases in government spending and taxation, that economic progress slowed dramatically … Today, because of our attempts to restrict and cut back on government expansion and to retarget aid toward those most in need, and away from those who can manage without Federal help, the working people of America are directly benefiting.”
In the new political fashion, he expressed certainty that the country had chosen wisely, that the best days were yet to come. The slogans in his 1984 reelection campaign echoed the assured optimism Johnson had used two decades before: “It’s Morning in America,” “America Is Back,” “You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet.” Once more, the country wanted to believe in the grand vision, to believe that the time of endless prosperity had arrived. Reagan won reelection that year with a landslide that in some ways outdid Johnson’s, capturing all but one of the fifty states.
LYNDON JOHNSON DID not live to see that landslide. He did not live to see the dawn of the Reagan presidency and Reagan’s attack, as president, on the Great Society and the prized programs Johnson had passed. After leaving the White House in January 1969, Johnson intended to retire from public life, the heroic rancher returning to his ranch. His life there was quiet, or at least as quiet as anything concerning Lyndon Johnson could be. He became a sort of commander in chief of Stonewall, Texas, taking an interest in everything within his line of sight: the management of the ranch, the construction of his presidential library, the particulars of Lady Bird’s wardrobe.
Unsure what to do with his golden years, he seemed determined to make them brief. After leaving the White House, his health declined, and his habits of healthy living, always tenuous, disappeared. He’d given up smoking after his 1955 heart attack when doctors warned him that cigarettes could kill him, but he resumed the habit in his final years. When his daughters implored him to stop, Johnson simply refused. “I’ve raised you girls,” he told them, “I’ve been president, and now it’s my time.”
One January evening in 1973, viewers of CBS News watched Walter Cronkite sit in somber silence, clutching a phone to his ear. It was nearly a decade after the awful weekend that followed the Kennedy assassination. That had been a grotesque and mesmerizing new experience: the whole country learning something awful and unexpected from their television sets minutes after it occurred. But over the course of ten years, so much had happened that was awful and unexpected, and almost all of it had been captured on TV. Now, when the CBS anchor clutched the phone to his ear, viewers knew the cue: something momentous had happened, most likely something bad.
“I’m talking to Tom Johnson,” Cronkite told the nation, “the press secretary for Lyndon Johnson, who has reported that the thirty-sixth president of the United States died this afternoon in an ambulance plane on the way to San Antonio, where he was taken after being stricken at his ranch.”
Johnson had spent his last morning on earth like so many others: talking on the telephone and touring the LBJ Ranch. After returning from an inspection of a cattle fence, he ate lunch and retired to his bedroom to take a nap. There he suffered the coronary attack that took his life. Lady Bird was at a meeting i
n Austin when she learned of the episode. She flew immediately to San Antonio, where she was told her husband had died. As always, she maintained her composure. “Well,” she said simply, “we expected it.”
Lyndon Johnson was not meant for retirement. His plan for his life was to serve as president and then go home to Texas and die, most likely in the fashion of Johnson men, before he turned sixty-five. Johnson had lived his life in a storm of warring fantasies, torn between dreams of greatness and fears of disgrace. To the end, he never quite let go of his grandest dream: of serving longer, and better, than any president save FDR. The day he died, January 22, 1973, was two days after what would have been his last day as president had he run for reelection in 1968. He was seven months short of his sixty-fifth birthday. And to the end, cruel fate never quite let go of Lyndon Johnson. The day after Johnson died, President Nixon announced to the nation that he had secured a “peace with honor” settlement with the North Vietnamese government, ending the war in Vietnam.
LADY BIRD JOHNSON was sixty years old and healthy when her husband died. She devoted many of her remaining years to work on conservation and beautification, heralding the rise of the environmental movement in the 1970s and ’80s. She continued to reside at the LBJ Ranch, even after it was donated to the government as a national historic site.
She lived another thirty-four years after her husband’s death. She outlived many of the people who had loomed large during the years of her husband’s presidency: Jackie Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Barry Goldwater, Pat Brown, Richard Daley, George Wallace. When Walter Jenkins, who had lived a quiet life in Texas after resigning from the Johnson administration, died in 1985, she released a statement that echoed the kindness she had shown him in his moment of disgrace. “Walter was a good friend and a capable person,” she said. “He is one of the dearest people I know.”
Her greatest service was always to her husband. She tended the Johnson legacy as best she could and spoke frequently of how much she would have loved to talk to Lyndon about this or hear what Lyndon had to say about that. But it was only when Lady Bird emerged from the shadow of her husband’s commanding personality that the country fully came to understand her remarkable contributions and gifts. In 1988, she was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, one of the two highest civilian honors the United States bestows (the other being the Presidential Medal of Freedom), in a ceremony at the White House. Presenting her with the award on behalf of the United States Congress, President Ronald Reagan was generous and warm. “I remember one story,” said Reagan, “of the time that LBJ was speaking to a group in North Carolina, and after about fifty minutes, the audience became restless. Lady Bird wrote a note on a piece of paper saying ‘close soon’ and slipped it to him. LBJ took it, held it up, and read it aloud to the audience. And then, after the laughter died down, he continued with his speech.”
Reagan paused, taking in some laughter of his own. Then he continued: “Well, before someone hands me a note, I will close these remarks.”
AS ALWAYS, REAGAN’S sense of timing was better than Johnson’s. That sense served him well throughout his presidency. In his second term in office, the Iran-Contra scandal, in which officials in the Reagan White House were revealed to have defied an embargo and sold arms to Iran in order to fund rebels illegally in Nicaragua, shook the nation’s confidence in Reagan. But the course of history, which had worked against Johnson so spectacularly at the end of his presidency, boosted Reagan at the end of his. As Reagan prepared to leave office, the Soviet bloc in Eastern Europe fractured and the Soviet Union itself began to show signs of mortal strain. It was the total victory over the Communist menace that Reagan had hoped for, envisioned, and promised since the beginning of his political career. He left office a beloved president, the first sitting president since Roosevelt to see his party win the White House for a third consecutive term. And, thanks in large part to devoted disciples in later generations who still thrill to his story, his reputation for greatness continues to grow.
That would have pleased Reagan. He carried his dream—to be the hero—with him to the end. Shortly before leaving the White House, he wrote to Joy Hodges, the old friend who’d wangled him a screen test in his first days in Hollywood, urging Reagan never to put on his glasses again. “There will be some things of course that we will miss when we leave here,” he told her, “but we are really looking forward to California and boots and saddles. I have a horse waiting for me at the ranch. I hope he’s ready for a lot of riding.”
But sitting atop a horse was not how Reagan would spend his final days. Nearly six years after leaving the White House, Reagan announced that he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease and was retiring from public life. The man who liked nothing so much as the “heady wine” feel of the eyes of the world upon him was never seen in a formal capacity again. He died in 2004 at the age of ninety-three. His state funeral was the grandest send-off for any president since the funeral of President Kennedy four decades before.
Reagan wanted his country to believe in the story he told. Four decades before his death, in the midst of a turbulent thousand days, he had warned his country that it faced a momentous choice: “We’ll preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we’ll sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.” At the end, Reagan believed that the danger had passed, that the country had made the right choice. “I now begin the journey that will lead me into the sunset of my life,” Reagan wrote at the end of his farewell letter to the country. “I know that for America there will always be a bright dawn ahead.”
Leaving the stage for the last time, Reagan wanted his people to believe the same thing that, forty years earlier, Lyndon Johnson had sought so desperately to prove—that the time of trial was over, that from now on, all would be well. That was what each of them wanted, always: to tell the story of a noble hero, a story with a happy end.
Afterword
“I know that for America there will always be a bright dawn ahead.”
From Reagan’s pen, the words look reassuring, capturing the sunny optimism that was his specialty as president. But in the mouths of today’s politicians, where similar words often appear, they sound hollow, at best an improbable wish, at worst an insane delusion.
Indeed, so much of Johnson’s and Reagan’s grand visions for the country ring false when today’s leaders call on them. Those visions have persisted over the past half century, shaping the political debate. But neither Reagan’s nor Johnson’s myth has served its respective party, or its country, well.
Johnson’s promises of a government-led utopia haunted his Democratic Party for the remainder of the twentieth century—years of trial and trauma in which the government too often failed its people. For decades, liberals clung to the story they’d embraced after the stinging 1966 midterm defeat—the story that cast off Lyndon Johnson, his Vietnam policy, and the hawkish side of Cold War liberalism but retained Johnson’s utopian vision of government. Up against the Reagan vision—Believe in America, limit the government, unleash the transformative power of individuals pursuing the American dream—the liberal story proved a political disaster. Outside of the extraordinary post-Watergate elections of 1974 and 1976, the Democrats failed for more than two decades to find a plausible strategy to connect with the American middle. The party surrendered the White House to the Republicans for twenty out of twenty-four years.
Courtesy Richard Nixon Library
Finally, in 1992, a Democratic candidate, Bill Clinton, won the White House by offering a “third way,” distinct from the governing visions of both right and left. Yet Clinton quickly discovered that the old myths were not easy to escape. When, early in his term, Clinton attempted to pass a program for universal health care, Republicans decried the return of Great Society overreach. The public listened. In the congressional elections halfway through Clinton’s first term, the GOP ran against the president as an old-style Big Government liberal and captured both houses of Congr
ess, a stunning rebuke that echoed the one Johnson had suffered at the midterm nearly thirty years earlier.
Clinton had much in common with his fellow southerner Johnson: a rare empathy and a genius for interpersonal politics, a host of insatiable appetites, a voluble temperament.
But in crucial ways Clinton was also like Reagan, with a keen sense for where public mood was headed and how to speak to the public’s hopes and fears. And perhaps most crucially, Clinton possessed Reagan’s uncanny capacity for pragmatism in matters of his own self-interest. He responded to his midterm loss by co-opting the Reagan vision, declaring “The era of Big Government is over” in his 1996 State of the Union address. That same year he signed into law his signal domestic achievement, a welfare reform law aimed at limiting the government safety net. When he won reelection for the presidency in the fall of that year, it was a return from the wilderness for the Democrats—Clinton was the first reelected Democratic president since FDR. But the triumph owed much to Reagan’s vision, and very little to Johnson’s.
Despite its long string of electoral successes, the Reagan myth had its limitations as well. These were apparent even while Reagan was still president. In office, Reagan struggled to produce a positive governing agenda that complemented his antigovernment rhetoric. “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet,” his campaign for reelection promised, but both his political and policy advisers knew that Reagan had no substantive domestic program in place for a second term. The great achievement of that term would be tax reform, an effort that lowered corporate tax rates but attacked business-friendly tax breaks and maintained the status quo size of government. It was not the stuff of conservative revolution.
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