And that was precisely the point. In the White House, Reagan’s more pragmatic aides quickly perceived that the public that had voted for the conservative revolutionary did not really want conservative revolution. Americans liked the sound of limiting government in theory but had little tolerance for limiting popular government entitlements such as Social Security and Medicare—or for cutting back on national defense. Rather than address this contradiction and risk the president’s popularity, Reagan’s aides simply let it be, puffing up the image of the president as a crusader against Big Government, an image they knew had more basis in fantasy than fact.
It was good politics for Reagan, but soon enough this fantasy would come to haunt his Republican heirs. The first victim was his successor as president, George H. W. Bush, a model citizen of the Republican Party’s realist wing. Looking squarely at the staggering deficits of the Reagan years, Bush violated a campaign pledge and struck a deal with a Democratic-controlled Congress to raise taxes in order to put the country’s fiscal affairs in order. Conservatives in Congress promptly labeled their president a traitor to Reagan’s legacy and broke with him, ensuring Bush’s defeat in the next election.
The lesson was not lost on Bush’s son, who wished his own presidency in the first decade of the twenty-first century to be bathed in Reagan-like glory. George W. Bush’s White House aides obsessively mimicked Reagan’s use of “optics”—eschewing messy and contradictory details in favor of simple, clear, and stirring symbols. The most memorable product of this mimicry came in May 2003 aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, where Bush emerged in a flight suit to proclaim the end of major combat operations in Iraq under a banner reading “Mission Accomplished.” The event would prove a lasting embarrassment: Bush’s Iraq war would, in fact, last for nearly a decade longer, kill and injure thousands of Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis, and cost nearly a trillion dollars.
The “Mission Accomplished” debacle revealed the dangers facing presidents in an age when politics are divorced from reality. In office, Bush and his powerful vice president, Dick Cheney, pursued contradictory policies—two costly wars and the creation of a massive national security surveillance state were matched with a generous tax cut for wealthy Americans, loosening of federal regulations, and the creation of a new entitlement for senior citizens. Advised that this toxic mix would bring on staggering deficits, Cheney shrugged: “Reagan proved deficits don’t matter.”
But while they were eager to relive Reagan’s myth, Bush and Cheney lacked his pragmatic instinct to adjust in the face of shifting public mood. And they also lacked Reagan’s luck. Reality intruded on the latter years of the Bush presidency: the occupation of Iraq unraveled; the federal government appeared powerless to help the citizens of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina destroyed their city; a financial crisis devastated the American economy. By the time Bush and Cheney left office in January 2009, the Republican Party’s national image was more seriously damaged than it had been at any point since Barry Goldwater’s disastrous campaign of 1964.
And yet the Republicans who have come after them have doubled down on the old myth, accepting the Reagan of fantasy as a figure of historical fact. In the contemporary conservative version of history, Reagan dramatically shrank government and earned the public’s everlasting affection and gratitude in return. Big Government persists after Reagan, Reagan’s contemporary admirers admit, but only because liberals and Washington elites have used government programs to buy off the public’s votes and used allies in the media to cloak their unpopular policies. Like the utopian liberals of the Johnson era, who headily promoted untested new programs, thinking they were finishing the work of Roosevelt, these contemporary conservatives seek to drastically shrink government in the belief that they are fulfilling the vision of Reagan and answering the public will.
The result for the Republican Party of the twenty-first century has been the same as for the Democratic Party in the sixties: disaster. Today’s Reagan fantasists, with their hostility to government programs and their distaste for reality, have driven the American middle away. Their message no longer resonates with the centrist, suburban voters who were so influential in the old Reagan coalition. And it has alienated the party from the rising majority coalition of the new millennium. This new majority is younger, more diverse, and more urban than its Reagan-era predecessor, and its constituents appear more disposed to want government services and policies to aid their rise to affluence. Belief in the Reagan myth, that utopia will come from a revolutionary reinvention of government that is near at hand, has left the twenty-first-century GOP as a minority party with no obvious path out of the wilderness.
Today’s Democrats have clearly benefited politically from the Republicans’ problems. They have won the popular vote in five out of the last six presidential elections. But in governing, the old visions haunt them still. This springs in part from the great damage that the lingering myths of Reagan and Johnson have done to government itself. Each of the myths discredited government. Reagan’s did it overtly, maintaining that government was the source of America’s problems. Johnson’s did it by example, making promises for government that it could not possibly fulfill. As a result, a generation of Americans has come of age with little faith in government’s ability to do much of anything. Today’s America faces a host of complex problems that demand strong federal action. Among them are the catastrophic potential of global climate change, the strain on the nation’s finances of an aging population, and the disruptive effects on the workforce caused by the transition to a technology-based economy. But the memory of the old myths makes it nearly impossible to summon the political support for large-scale government action of any kind.
At first it seems bizarre that Reagan’s and Johnson’s visions should have such staying power. After all, they were the product of unique moments in time. Indeed it can seem that Johnson’s and Reagan’s thousand days never would have happened were it not for the coincidence of unique, utterly unpredictable events.
Who could have predicted that the greatest legislator in modern history would be thrust suddenly into the presidency and presented with the greatest legislative opportunity of any president since FDR?
Who could have predicted that a man who won the largest landslide in American history would lose his popularity and control of his presidency in just two years’ time?
Who could have predicted that a middle-aged actor playing a supporting character in a troubled Hollywood film would rise, in the space of just a thousand days, to transform his country’s politics for generations?
And yet, as we have seen, none of these strange coincidences was accidental—they were all tied up in one another, each one both cause and effect. And with the distance of history, we can see that they are all connected by a single strand: the tension that thrives in a nation with its eyes on an uncertain future, the promise, and the terror, of a world that is changing fast. A thousand days is not a long time, but it is more than long enough for a country’s people to journey from fear to hope and back again.
It makes sense, then, that today’s America, gripped once again by profound anxieties about its future, would still reach for the old myths. Reagan’s and Johnson’s visions were specifically designed to reassure a country that was sometimes terrified about what was coming next. The old myths, for all their flaws, offer comfort in a time of uncertainty. The problem for today’s political system—and it is an existential one—is that people no longer believe those myths.
To fix its broken politics, today’s America needs new stories. Or perhaps it just needs a new version of an old one. The shared vision that Johnson and Reagan discarded in the course of their thousand days—the old consensus vision of Roosevelt and Kennedy—contained lasting wisdom that today’s leaders would do well to adopt. In that worldview, politicians had to be deeply realistic and humble when making promises for the future, for they knew that the future never turns out exactly the way we think it’s going to. But they also h
ad to have the courage to tell the people that though government would never be able to solve all its people’s problems, it had a sacred obligation to try.
That old vision could serve America well in an often frightening new century. The answer to our problems may come from a leader who brings such a simple message. It is a message that neither Reagan nor Johnson had much use for but that the story of both of their lives confirms: what lies ahead of us is not the certain promise of utopia, but the infinite possibilities of life itself.
For Julie Granum
Acknowledgments
In the preceding pages, I have set out to tell the story of how two iconic presidents took hold of the American imagination over a period of three years. To understand how Americans in the mid-1960s saw the world, I immersed myself in their media. Much of the texture in my story comes from television newscasts and broadcasts, Hollywood films, print and television advertising, and magazine and daily newspaper coverage from the period. I took great pleasure in the long hours I spent reading issues of Time and Newsweek from the 1960s, a golden age of newsmagazines in which writers crafted sweeping stories from a wealth of small but significant details. Those details proved a treasure trove in my research.
In focusing on a brief period in the careers of Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan, two men who, between them, played a significant part in national politics for half a century, I have necessarily relied on the existing scholarship on both men’s lives. Luckily, both have been blessed with fantastic biographers. My understanding of Johnson owes a great deal especially to the work of Robert Caro and to informative biographies by Robert Dallek and Doris Kearns Goodwin. Michael Beschloss’s masterly study of the Johnson White House recordings first drew me into the mesmerizing mind of LBJ, and in returning to the recordings for this project, my appreciation grew for the scope and skill of Beschloss’s undertaking. My work on Reagan was illuminated by a number of biographies, most significantly those by two formidable chroniclers, Lou Cannon and Edmund Morris. My understanding of decision-making in the Vietnam War was shaped by enduring works by Stanley Karnow and David Halberstam.
In my research, I was lucky to have the help of a talented archivist, Jessica Gallagher. In spite of her training as a medievalist (or perhaps because of it), Jessica quickly took a shine to the unique personage of Lyndon Baines Johnson and became an expert on the topic. She offered vital assistance throughout the project, and her work on the chapter notes and bibliography was brilliant and heroic. Melissa Carson Thomas is a gifted researcher who provided fantastic fact-checking with remarkable thoroughness, efficiency, and good cheer.
In writing this book, I have looked to the example of two great teachers from my career in journalism. I have been fortunate to have an esteemed biographer, Jon Meacham, as a friend and wise editor for the past decade. Jon helped me find my way to this topic and offered sage advice and reassurance at crucial moments in the process. At Newsweek, I watched Evan Thomas turn the mess of the busy world into gripping, elegant drama for the magazine’s pages each week, and from him, I learned so much about storytelling. A distinguished historian of the period I write about, Evan provided helpful advice and encouragement, and I am thankful for both.
At Random House, it is my great good fortune to have Kate Medina as an editor. Kate’s wisdom and her extraordinary sense for the shape of a book, combined with her graceful, generous spirit, make her an ideal guide, protector, and champion of a writer publishing a book for the first time. Like Kate, Anna Pitoniak manages to match uncommon insight with unfailing kindness, and the combination makes her a brilliant editor. Every page of this book is better because of her. I am thankful for the talented professionals at Random House who have published this book with creativity, foresight, and style. Thanks especially to Tom Perry, Sally Marvin, London King, Leigh Marchant, Selby McRae, Robbin Schiff, and Janet Wygal.
I am grateful to Andrew Wylie, whose high standards, sharp thinking, and lively wit make him an invaluable agent and a wonderful ally. Many thanks to Sarah Chalfant, who helped bring me to Random House. Thanks as well to Diego Nunez and Jacqueline Ko.
Thanks to friends and colleagues for kindnesses large and small offered in the writing of this book. I am especially obliged to Oscie Thomas, Louisa Thomas, Julie Bosman, Ceridwen Dovey, Kate Burch and Gary Belkin, Elliott Holt, Katherine Marino, Mark Kirby and Erin Owens, Madeleine Sackler, and Rachel Ptak. Will Darman and Elizabeth Holt provided comfortable and congenial accommodations in Washington and I am grateful to them, and to Emmet Darman, for encouragement along the way. James Lawler read, pondered, and lived this book from conception to publication and I am grateful for all of his contributions and for everything else.
My mother, Kathleen Emmet, is a gifted storyteller who first introduced me to the captivating story of America in the 1960s. My late father, Richard Darman, taught me that politics can be noble and that the drama of politics can reveal deep, human truths. I am grateful to my parents for encouraging me as a writer and for introducing me to the questions posed in the 1960s, still the most important questions of all.
Notes
Prologue: Men on Horseback
1 “There is but one way to get the cattle out of the swamp” Goodwin, Lyndon Johnson, 172.
2 “like a bunch of cattle caught in the swamp” Ibid.
3 The previous day—Election Day Mohr, “President Sees a Unity Mandate,” New York Times.
4 “For the first time in all my life” Goodwin, Lyndon Johnson, 209.
5 “He spent the night” “The Presidency: A Different Man,” Time.
6 “that son of a bitch” Telephone conversation between LBJ and John Connally, November 4, 1964, Citation $6145.
7 As the hour grew late on Election Day Perlstein, Before the Storm, 512.
8 “By God, we said we would get you seven-fifty” Telephone conversation between Richard Daley and LBJ, November 4, 1964, Citation $6167.
9 “May the Lord shower his blessings upon you” Ibid.
10 “Well, you oughtta be a banker, Pat” Telephone conversation between Edmund G. Brown and LBJ, November 5, 1964, Citation $6237.
11 “You’ve been around this business long enough” Morris, Dutch, 323.
12 “In the space of a single Autumn day” “GOP ’66: Back on the Map,” Newsweek.
13 “We shall overcome” Lyndon B. Johnson, “Special Message to Congress: The American Promise” (speech, Washington, DC, March 15, 1965), Public Papers of the Presidents, 1965, vol. I, 284.
14 “It’s the time of peace on Earth and good will among men” Lyndon B. Johnson, “Remarks at the Civic Center Arena in Pittsburgh” (speech, Pittsburgh, PA, October 27, 1964), Public Papers of the Presidents, 1963–64, vol. II, 1479.
15 “Is our world gone?” Lyndon B. Johnson, “Inaugural Address” (speech, Washington, DC, January 20, 1965), Public Papers of the Presidents, 1965, vol. I, 74.
16 All that has happened in our historic past “Lyndon Johnson’s Pledge,” Newsweek.
17 “We have every right” Ronald Reagan, “Inaugural Address” (speech, Washington, DC, January 20, 1981), Public Papers of the Presidents, 1981, 2.
18 “has three telephones in his car” Reston, “The Three Telephone Man in the White House,” New York Times.
19 “When you’re bleeding up on that Hill” Lawrence (Larry) O’Brien OH VI.
20 “Hell … if I’d stayed in there much longer” Miller, Lyndon: An Oral Biography, 524–25; Goodwin, Remembering America, 320–24.
21 “Abundance or annihilation” Lyndon B. Johnson, “Remarks at the Opening of the World’s Fair” (speech, New York, April 22, 1964), Public Papers of the Presidents, 1963–64, vol. I, 515.
22 “We’ll preserve for our children this” Ronald Reagan, “Campaign Address for Goldwater Presidential Campaign: A Time for Choosing” (speech, October 27, 1964), Rendezvous with Destiny Recorded Program.
23 “Heady wine” Reagan, Where’s the Rest of Me?, 28–29.
Chapter One: Storie
s
1 “The president of the United States is dead” Today, NBC, November 23, 1963.
2 At 1:35 P.M., the network Teletypes carried a wire Manchester, Death of a President, 221.
3 “The body of John Fitzgerald Kennedy is at this moment in the White House” Today, NBC, November 23, 1963.
4 The department stores have taken down their Christmas decorations Caro, Passage of Power, 355.
5 “The people here … are like the people out on Christmas Eve,” Today, NBC, November 23, 1963.
6 only a single White House photographer See Manchester, Death of a President, 324–26 and Caro, Passage of Power, 322 and 333.
7 For a while the phones in Washington don’t even work Manchester, Death of a President, 254–55.
8 On average this weekend, American households will watch 8.5 hours of television each day Feldman and Sheatsley, “The Assassination of President Kennedy” 197, and “National Survey on Public Reactions and Behavior,” 159.
9 “we were watching you to see if you had any” Watson, Expanding Vista, 215; “America’s Long Vigil,” TV Guide, January 25, 1964.
10 “old friends … telling us about the tragedy until we could absorb it” Watson, Expanding Vista, 216.
11 At 8:40 that Saturday morning Semple, Four Days in November, 203.
12 To think of the things they’d been worried about See Manchester, Death of a President, 6–7, for preparations for the Kennedy visit to the ranch.
13 The Johnsons had been riding several cars behind the Kennedys See Manchester, Death of a President, 155–56 and 166–67; Lady Bird Johnson, White House Diary, 3–7; Caro, Passage of Power, for accounts of Johnson during events of the assassination.
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