Before the Storm

by Rick Perlstein

  The President planned to address the mounting sense of national unease that afternoon in his speech at the Dallas Trade Mart. “In a world of complex and continuing problems, in a world full of frustrations and irritations,” the text ran,

  other voices are heard in the land—voices preaching doctrines wholly unrelated to reality, wholly unsuited to the sixties, doctrines which apparently assume that ... vituperation is as good as victory and that peace is a sign of weakness.... At a time when we are steadily reducing the number of Federal employees serving every thousand citizens, they fear those supposed hordes of civil servants far more than the actual hordes of opposing armies.

  But the first morning stop was Fort Worth, a pleasing sojourn in Democratic territory. The President warned that “without the United States, South Vietnam would collapse overnight.” He repaired to his eighth-floor suite and relaxed with hapless vice president Johnson—who was spending manic hours working to vouchsafe a pleasant reception for his boss in Johnson’s home state. Kennedy was comfortable; the reception so far was fine. “We’re going to carry two states next year if we don’t carry any others: Massachusetts and Texas,” Kennedy, cheered, told Johnson in a rare moment of intimacy with the man who most often had been shunted ruthlessly into the background in the previous three years. Then they left for Dallas. And before the afternoon was through, the bottom had dropped out of the United States of America.

  PART THREE

  12

  NEW MOOD IN POLITICS

  At the offices of the National Draft Goldwater Committee off Farragut Square in Washington, the new publicist was taking his lunch. Lee Edwards had been working his way up conservative movement ranks since signing on as press assistant for Maryland senator John Marshall Butler in 1959: the first editor of YAF’s New Guard; speechwriter for the July 4 rally. Now he had landed the job of a lifetime. November 22 was his first day.

  The secretaries started answering the phones to death threats. “You sons of bitches, you killed him!”—SLAM! “You’ll get yours.”—SLAM!

  They looked up: a mob was banging on the door. “Murderers! Murderers!” They shut the office down—locked the doors, turned off all the lights—and huddled in a back room to take in the broadcasts, nervously. Lee Harvey Oswald: they wracked their brains to remember if they had seen his name before, at some meeting, on one of their mailing lists.

  Denison Kitchel and Tony Smith wound up a lunch at the D.C. Sheraton-Carlton with two columnists. The four hopped into a taxi. They heard about the shooting over the radio. It was a few stunned blocks before Tony Smith broke the silence. “My God, one of those Birchers did it.”

  There was no radio in the cab Richard Nixon found after his flight back east from Dallas. A man leaned into the car window at a stoplight on the Queens side of the 59th Street Bridge and said that Kennedy had been shot. Nixon chose to write it off as a prank. When he got home his doorman rushed out to greet him with tears streaming down his cheeks. Nixon called J. Edgar Hoover. No small talk: “What happened, was it one of the right-wing nuts?”

  Much of the country had already decided it was. The Voice of America’s bulletin announcing the shooting had described Dallas as “the center of the extreme right wing.” Clips of Adlai Stevenson being jabbed with anti-United Nations picket signs a month earlier were shown again and again on TV. Under the headline “DALLAS, LONG A RADICAL’S HAVEN,” the Herald Tribune pointed out, “Texas is one of the few states that has a Senator ranking with Arizona’s Barry Goldwater in conservatism”—that was John Tower, who, in the wake of the assassination, had to put up his family in a hotel because of the threats against them. Senator Maurine Neuberger of Oregon fixed her gaze at the television cameras and pinned the responsibility on H. L. Hunt. Walter Cronkite, on the air nonstop, was handed a slip of paper amid the chaos of CBS’s studios and read aloud that Goldwater’s reaction to the news while hustling to a political function had been a curt “No comment.” (Cronkite skirted libel: Goldwater, in Muncie for the funeral of his mother-in-law, had given no such interview.) A deranged gunman pumped two shots through the window of a John Birch Society office in Phoenix, crying “You killed my man!” In man-in-the-street interviews, a lawyer told the New York Times, “We have allowed certain factions to work up such a furor in the South with fanatic criticism of the office of President that a demented person can feel confident that such atrocious action is justifiable,” and a Russian immigrant said, “I’m angry at these groups who call themselves Americans and don’t know the meaning—the Birchers, General Walker. Is this what they wanted?”

  Before long the news of the arrest of Lee Harvey Oswald, a defector to the Soviet Union, was on the street. But the suspicion that the right was somehow to blame did not go away. In Kentucky the YAF chair resigned. “I am now satisfied that the climate of political degeneracy and moral hysteria masquerading as ‘true Americanism,’ ” he said, “bears substantial culpability for the murder of the President of the United States.” Police had arrested a Communist; the public blamed conservatives. “When right wing racist fanatics are told over and over again that the President is a traitor, a Red, a ‘nigger-lover,’ ” columnist Max Lerner wrote, “that he has traduced the Constitution and is handing America over to a mongrelized world-state, there are bound to be some fanatics dull-witted enough to follow the logic of the indictment all the way and rid America of the man who is betraying it.” As Bishop James A. Pike ruefully said, right-wingers, after all, “have consistently supplied the fuel which would fire up such an assassin.”

  Partly the irrationality was rooted in fear; the thought that the killer was an agent of the Communist conspiracy was almost too awful to contemplate. (Desperate to close off such suspicions, which he thought might pin him to a commitment to retaliate against the Soviet Union, Lyndon Johnson spent much of his first weeks in office maneuvering hurriedly to close the books on the case by putting together a commission of inquiry led by Chief Justice Warren.) When the news of Oswald’s arrest and Communist ties arrived, the public seemed almost willfully to forget the lessons of eighteen years—that Communism was a devious, unitary global conspiracy that would stop at nothing to accomplish its aims—and gladly chose another, less threatening scapegoat. Against the shocks of the recent past—the civil rights uprising, the nuclear close calls—Americans had inoculated themselves by repeating ever more fervidly that we were a good nation, a unified nation, peaceful, safe. The assassination was experienced as a sign that somehow America had let herself become the opposite. A word was repeated again and again, on the streets, before the television cameras, in the newspapers: hate. Americans read an indictment on themselves: hate killed Kennedy, our own hate—hate that might consume us in violence, hate rife on both sides of the ideological spectrum, hate bred precisely by the act of veering too close to the extremes of the ideological spectrum. Extremism had killed Kennedy.

  A typical expression of the sentiment can be seen in a letter the Episcopal bishop of Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, wrote to his flock: “I know that very often each of us did not just disagree, we poured forth our vituperation. The accumulation of this hatred expressed itself in the bullet that killed John Kennedy. I think we know this, and I think it makes us realize just how dreadful we people can be.” A young journalist, Hunter S. Thompson, wrote a friend, “The savage nuts have destroyed the great myth of American decency.” Senator Frank Church’s Intelligence Committee hearings blamed a “conspiratorial atmosphere of violence” for the assassination. Chief Justice Warren—a prominent target of right-wing agitation—said in a service in the Capitol Rotunda that we might never know exactly why Lee Harvey Oswald had shot John F. Kennedy, “but we do know that such acts are commonly stimulated by forces of hatred and malevolence, such as today are eating their way into the bloodstream of American life. What a price we pay for such fanaticism!”

  With the far left but a feeble remnant in 1963, the right received the brunt of the outrage; they were the fanatics closest to hand. The fallo
ut would do much to shape the politics of 1964.

  The new president was a perfect match for a traumatized nation. Consensus was Lyndon Johnson’s religion.

  He was a liberal—a liberal in an older, Southern sense of the word: liberalism as liberality, as the large-souled dispensing of generosities. Only twenty-seven when he became Texas administrator for the National Youth Administration, a subsidiary of Franklin Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration, he had been shaped by watching dirt-poor districts bloom under the touch of the New Deal. His forte became cultivating relationships with businessmen who could help broker the WPA’s largesse. He saw nothing in liberalism that need conflict with businessmen of goodwill, which was why, when he became a congressman in 1937, one liberal tenet he could never embrace was ending the oil depletion allowance. It enriched his district and gave him a hand with the power brokers; what was the harm in that? With business help, his district got the largest rural electrical cooperative in the country (Washington remitted $14 million in four years for the dams), four new hospitals, an air base, a highway. Lyndon Johnson, unlike the young department store owner in Arizona, saw no reason to resent the Southwest’s special relationship with the federal government.

  Johnson had lost a bid for the Senate in 1941 because of his loyalty to the New Deal. It did nothing to dull his ardor. In his mind, liberals were beaten not by an opposing ideology but by recalcitrant fat cats conspiring against the public interest—which interest was liberalism, liberality, the haves sharing with the have-nots and emerging better-off for doing so. By the time Johnson acceded to the Senate in 1948, the Employment Act of 1946 had formalized the federal government’s responsibility to do what Johnson had tried to do in his congressional district: guarantee prosperity for all by rising the tide to lift all boats. His own ideology—in its substance as much as in its refusal to recognize itself as an ideology—was now the nation’s. The Dallas Morning News marveled at this new species, the consensus politician: “Business tycoons, leftwing laborites, corporation lawyers, New Dealers, anti—New Dealers, etc.”—all, somehow, supported Lyndon Johnson. As Johnson somehow supported all of them.

  As Senate majority leader in the 1950s, he concentrated his prodigious energy into dissolving any visible signs of discord—and, some said, of deliberation—in the world’s greatest deliberative body. Exploiting party leaders’ sovereign power to “motion up” bills for consideration, Johnson kept the number of contested roll calls in the Eighty-fourth Congress under a dozen. Real conflict was taken care of behind the scenes: substituting this favor for that, disbursing from the majority leader’s overflowing store of liberalities, compromising. A secret to Johnson’s success was known around the Capitol as “The Treatment”: he planted his gunboat-feet straight in front of your toes, grabbed at your lapel, breathed down on you with hot Texas breath the message that your one vote was what stood between hell everlasting and paradise on earth (or at least between your biggest donor and a federal paving contract). Wheeling and dealing, for him, was nearly the sum of politics. Ideologues baffled him. Under Johnson, the Senate was a machine for getting things done and bringing people together, not for making lots of partisan noise. So, Lyndon Johnson was determined, would be his presidency.

  John F. Kennedy’s complicated legacy—soaring liberal rhetoric competing with stalled legislative initiatives, stirring preachments of peace with apocalyptic Cold War bellicosity—was dissolving in a warm bath of nostalgia. Jacqueline Kennedy gave her first post-assassination interview to Teddy White, whose The Making of the President 1960 had clearly preferred JFK to Nixon. She regaled him with tales of how she and Jack used to play their favorite song on an old record player:

  Don’t let it be forgot

  That once there was a spot

  For one brief shining moment

  That was known as Camelot.

  And so the next article Teddy White filed for Life, after his dark speculation that racial holocaust was around the corner, retroactively crowned a king who was supposed to have presided over a golden age. Within the month, the JFK fifty-cent coin was approved, New York’s Idlewild Field was renamed for him, and three or four Kennedy books were on the best-seller list. Lyndon Johnson was too practical a politician not to spot an opportunity.

  “All that I have I would have gladly given not to be standing here today,” he began his televised speech to a joint session of Congress two days after the funeral. “On the 20th day of January, in 1961, John F. Kennedy told his countrymen that our national work would not be finished ‘in the first thousand days, nor in the life of this administration, nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet. But,’ he said, ‘let us begin.’ ” The President leaned forward, sticking out his neck for emphasis, as was his wont, as if pecking the audience like a chicken, his Southern drawl smoothed for the occasion. “Today, in this moment of new resolve, I would say to all my fellow Americans, let us continue!”

  Decisive legislative action would redeem the martyr. Johnson called for expeditious passage of the historic civil rights bill, the education bill, bills for employing youth, developing impoverished areas—passage “with the utmost thrift and frugality.”

  “This does not mean that we will not meet our unfilled needs or that we will not honor our commitments,” he said. “We will do both.”

  Both: it was shaping up as the one-word motto of the new Administration. The hottest political book of 1963—President Kennedy studied it—had been James MacGregor Burns’s The Deadlock of Democracy. It decried the impossibility of passing substantive new laws because of built-in structural impasses between the legislative and executive branches. Under Johnson the supposed deadlock promptly yielded. He played Congress like a 535-stop church organ. He was the first President to come from the inner circle of the Senate, the first Southerner since Zachary Taylor, a drinking buddy of the Dixiecrats who controlled Congress through their committee chairmanships. Shortly before his death, Kennedy had sought to cement goodwill from the test-ban treaty by letting the Soviet Union buy U.S. wheat on credit. There was no issue more controversial than foreign aid to Communists. Calling the House into emergency session on Christmas Eve—breaking his own call for a one-month political moratorium—Johnson made controversy melt: House members, dozens returning from home districts to make the vote, answered their President’s call to honor the memory of John F. Kennedy by approving the sale. In turn Johnson gave conservatives a relatively frugal $97 billion budget (until they got it below a hundred, he had warned his economic advisers, they “wouldn’t pee a drop”)—and began with a symbolic effort to cut costs in the White House, most conspicuously by turning off lights in empty rooms. LBJ, Barry Goldwater joked cuttingly, now stood for “Light Bulb Johnson.”

  Another thing was evident those first few weeks of the Johnson presidency. Two great humiliations had scarred this vain man, this nurser of grievances. The first had come in 1948, when he “won” his Senate seat by 87 votes—the difference coming in a Spanish-speaking rotten borough controlled by a friendly boss. It earned him the nickname “Landslide Lyndon.” The second came in 1961. It was, simply, his demotion from his job as the second most powerful man in the United States to the vice presidency, a job he found so depressing—almost clinically so—that he sometimes had to be prodded out of bed in the morning. Now Johnson was President—with Kennedy’s advisers, Kennedy’s program, and Kennedy’s cabinet (including, as attorney general, Kennedy’s brother, whom Johnson detested). Johnson had not honestly won a contested election since 1937. He was haunted by feelings of illegitimacy. Before that black November evening in 1963 was over, he realized when he might redeem them both: a November day in 1964. His first calls for guidance were to General Eisenhower and Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg. The next was to a man of considerably less stature: the DNC’s chief fund-raiser, Richard Maguire. “You be giving some thought to what needs to be done,” the President told him, “and we’ll get together in the next day or two.”

  In Republica
n circles that fancied themselves polite, the conclusion was drawn quietly. The press, less courtly, didn’t let a decent interval pass: Lee Harvey Oswald had cut down Barry Goldwater’s chances as surely as he had John Kennedy’s life. Dixie would never reject one of their own for President in the voting booth. And without a member of the Eastern Establishment as his opponent, it was thought, Goldwater lost much of his appeal. No, said the Herald Tribune’s Robert Novak, the new front-runner would have to be “a proper Republican candidate”—a moderate who could win the Big Six. Gallup confirmed the trend: Goldwater’s approval rating since the assassination was down sixteen points. And so, one by one, proper—moderate—Republicans began floating to the fore.