Once again they were denied the chance. The generals were content to cruise. “Having been on the campaign trail with Barry ever since he started this activity,” Kitchel wrote a friend back in Arizona, “I can assure you that the campaign is going very well and that, contrary to the indications in the polls, we have something really going which is going to produce a victory on November 3rd.” On one occasion Burch decamped from riding shotgun on the campaign plane so intoxicated by the enthusiasm of Barry’s supporters that he declared, “I know we’re on the verge of victory.” He was thinking of the crowds in the stands at the evening rallies, packed with conservatives; he ignored the fact that the general public was leaving bare patches at the sides of streets through which Goldwater motorcaded to the venues. Burch, for his part, decided that the traveling intelligence team’s reports were negative and misleading and banned their circulation. He also fired the pollsters.
Lyndon Johnson, who knew how to hunt where the ducks were, was ready to write off the Deep South altogether. His wife decided that was unacceptable.
The former Claudia Alta Taylor was born a Southern belle, and she felt the Southland’s glories in her bones—things like “keeping up with your kinfolk,” as she put it, “long Sunday dinners after church ... a special brand of courtesy.” She was also a woman without illusions. She understood that her beloved land was not just a paradise of courtesy with a crust of sin on top, that the cult of politeness served also as a daily reminder to blacks to keep to their place—a sinister cultural matrix structured by images of the virgin on her pedestal, keeping up with kinfolk, cooking big Sunday dinners, and the savage black rapist against whom she needed constant protection. The legend Dieu et les Dames painted on the ceiling of the Mississippi capitol told the story at its most benign; the segregated bathroom signs—“WHITE LADIES” and “COLORED WOMEN”—at its most casually inhumane. Lady Bird understood, as other liberals—Yankees—did not, Southern fears that in sweeping away its ingrained racial hierarchies, the South would be swept away, too: no more family bonds thick as kudzu, no more delicacies soaked through with the fat of a freshly butchered pig, no more ladies, no more gentlemen—just assimilation into the desiccated, instrumentalist, thin Yankee civilization Southerners had despised since the beginning of the nineteenth century. To unvex the mind of the South, Lady Bird knew, would take the delicate, agonizing work of decades. And she felt the work as a calling.
It took physical courage for Lady Bird to do what she did—arrange a campaign tour for herself through eight Southern states. The original idea was to co-host a reception in the rotunda of each statehouse. The Secret Service nixed that proposal: closed circular spaces were a sniper’s heaven. Hers would surely be the first whistle-stop in history to travel with its own minesweeper: a second train engine, traveling fifteen minutes ahead of the first, to detonate any bombs placed in its path.
The planning had been painful. Lady Bird spent eleven-hour days in September working the phones asking politicians for their participation. For the most part, only those not up for reelection offered hospitality. The Democratic nominee for North Carolina’s governorship didn’t return her calls. A Virginia senator scheduled a convenient hunting trip. Senator Byrd had been “jovial and courteous and darling,” she reported to her husband—until she mentioned the purpose of her call, whereupon “an invisible silken curtain fell across his voice.” Louisiana’s governor John McKeithan embarrassedly explained that he “was working for the Democrats, you understand”—just after his own fashion. Strom Thurmond mumbled that “a really basic decision within the next two weeks” precluded his participation. As for George Wallace, she thought it would be rude even to bother.
She was unfazed. No candidate’s wife had taken such a tour without her husband before. But she knew her people needed to hear some hard truths. Her husband could not do the job if he wanted to: the assassination threat was too great. But Southerners, she knew, would never shoot a lady off her pedestal.
She weighed anchor on Columbus Day, October 6. Federal employees were given time off to swell the crowd. She wouldn’t stop until she’d covered 1,628 miles and made 47 stops in four days. At each depot fifteen hostesses—wives of senators and congressmen, decked out in blue shirtwaists with “LBJ” embroidered on the front—led what willing local pols they could into a Pullman car set up as a traditional Southern sitting room, where photographs would be taken and gifts exchanged. The dining car was opened for feasting upon local delicacies: shrimp Creole, biscuits and burgoo, deer-meat sausage, Mrs. Eugene Talmadge’s famous Coca-Cola-marinated ham. The networks loved it. This time no one said anything about whistle-stops being nostalgic throwbacks.
The speaker’s platform—the caboose—would be taken up first by Congressman Hale Boggs of Louisiana for a round of courthouse-style introductions. “How many of you-all know what red-eye gravy is?” he would say. “Well, so do I, and so does Lyndon Johnson.” And then—forty times that first day—the nation’s Southern Belle-in-Chief mounted her pedestal, cleared her throat, looked out at the picket signs (“FLY AWAY LADY BIRD, HERE IN RICHMOND BARRY IS THE CAT’S MEOW”; “LYNDON, WE WILL BARRY YOU”; “BRINKMANSHIP IS BETTER THAN CHICKENSHIP,” a phrase Goldwater, Kitchel, and Hess happened to have pasted on a bulkhead of the Republican campaign plane), took in a few moments of “We Want Barry!” chants—and thrust her secret weapon into the air: a single, white-gloved hand. That usually was enough. If it wasn’t, she would drawl, “This is a campaign trip, and I would like to ask for your vote for both Johnsons”—so they knew they were insulting both Johnsons, not just the husband. She was a lady; one continued heckling on pain of one’s manhood.
She told her audience that “to this Democratic candidate and his wife, the South is a respected, valued, and beloved part of this country.” She reeled off a list of what the Democrats had done for Culpeper—the roads, the factories, the navy yards, the dams—and raised the specter of Republican soup lines. And she was never too shy to remind them how proud Democrats should be of the Civil Rights Act of 1964—leavening the remark with a joke: “You might not like all I am saying, but at least you understand the way ah’m sayin’ it.”
It was in South Carolina where white gloves and sugared words finally failed Lady Bird Johnson. South Carolina air was now being paved over by Strom Thurmond’s radio ads—“A vote for Barry Goldwater is a vote to end judicial tyranny”—and the evangelism of true believers like the minister Bob Jones Jr., whose college refused to bow to any “agnostic or materialist accrediting association,” and who had adopted for his independent campaign for Barry Goldwater the apparently defeatist slogan “Turn Back America, Turn Back—Only a Divine Miracle Can Save America Now.” Thanks to four years of softening by the RNC’s Operation Dixie, GOP organizations were going strong in 42 of 46 South Carolina counties.
In Columbia only a maternal bark brought peace from the hecklers: “This is a country of many viewpoints. I respect your right to express your own. Now it is my turn to express mine. Thank you.” The next stop, Charleston, had been chosen by Lady Bird because it had given 57 percent to the Republicans in 1960. And as her train approached, the tough old port was taking on a menacing aspect that recalled Dallas in November of 1963. Whispers shuddered through town: a band was ready to strike up a “hot beat” to incite Negroes to riot as Lady Bird arrived. The local paper pleaded with its readers for “courtesy towards the First Lady,” as Nixon had pleaded with Texans for a “courteous reception” for Kennedy in Dallas papers on November 22. Twenty-four merchants failed to receive an emergency injunction to stop a rally at their shopping mall. She entered at dusk. The space in front of the platform at the mall was monopolized by the massed forces of the local John Birch Society chapters—and their children, who bore signs reading “BLACK BIRD GO HOME”; “JOHNSON IS A COMMUNIST”; “JOHNSON IS A NIGGER-LOVER.”
“Jobs and a better community ... prosperity for Charleston.... Polaris missile base ... shipyard”—the words could be heard only
intermittently for the wall of boos. Hale Boggs took the microphone and cried out in anguish: “This is reminiscent of Hitler! This is a Democratic gathering, not a Nazi gathering!”
Lady Bird and her entourage pressed on, shaken. In courtly Savannah, it was Johnson’s seventeen-year-old daughter who was booed. That night the FBI made a yard-by-yard sweep of a seven-mile-long bridge that would convey the First Lady across a marshy expanse in north Florida.
The President would meet the train at its final stop in New Orleans. He was halfway through a trip of his own. Gone was the plan to campaign from his rocking chair on the White House porch; he hit fifteen states in the two weeks after touring New England. He needed the crowd. The crowd needed him.
A tour apparatus was hustled up from the West Wing. Advance reports (“Young—young men on the assembly line at Warner Gear in Muncie are pro-Goldwater.... White workers called the local union president ‘the nigger president’ ”) and speech drafts blizzarded through Bill Moyers’s office. “Lay low on civil rights,” the strategy memos advised, suggesting instead the themes “Economic Bill of Rights for All Americans”; “Patriotism and Prosperity”; “The wrecker can wreck in a day what it takes years for the builder to build”; and “The Year 2000.” The latter was the President’s new favorite subject: “Think of how wonderful the year 2000 will be,” he would gush. “And it is already so exciting to me that I am just hoping that my heart and stroke and cancer committee can come up with some good results that will insure that all of us can live beyond a hundred so we can participate in that glorious day when all the fruits of our labors and our imaginations today are a reality! ... I just hope the doctors hurry up and get busy and let me live that long.”
Occasionally he gave the speeches that were written for him. More often he spoke off the top of his head. Sometimes he sounded strange. In Cleveland he burbled to the $100-a-plate diners at the Convention Center: “You don’t get peace by rattling your rockets. You don’t get peace by threatening to drop your bombs ... you must always have your hand out and be willing to go anywhere, talk to anybody, listen to anything they have to say, do anything that is honorable, in order to avoid pulling that trigger”—he twitched a thumb like an epileptic—“or mashing that button that will blow up the world.” (This was an irony. Goldwater’s obsession with manned bombers over missiles rested largely on the fact that he believed push-button warfare was hazardous and irresponsible; bombers, at least, could be called back at the last minute. And little that Goldwater said in 1964 surpassed the apocalypticism of Kennedy utterances such as “The enemy is the Communist system itself—implacable, insatiable, unceasing in its drive for world domination.”) In Louisville (where, two weeks earlier, Goldwater had let loose on Vietnam: “Has there ever been a more mishandled conflict in U.S. history?”), standing at a dais bedecked with former Kentucky governors, Johnson said:We can’t pick other people’s governments. We have enough trouble picking our own.... Those folks who think you can have government by ultimatum are wrong.... There is not an ultimatum that any President can issue that could have produced one of these former governors on this platform, not a single ultimatum. You could take all the tanks in our combat divisions and all the planes in the sky, and all the Polaris missiles, and you couldn’t have made a one of ’em come up here.
Sometimes he said that the nuclear holocaust would kill 100 million people; other times, like Joe McCarthy with his famous list of subversives in the State Department, the number was revised to 300 million. Then he would say, “I want to conclude by reminding you that you still have three more days to register.”
The aide responsible for gauging crowd reaction noted “an unusual, even sometimes awe-inspiring, intensity from the audiences when he even gets close to the general theme of peace in the world.” Johnson did so about as often as he drew breath. (His case was bolstered by a new picture out in theaters, Fail-Safe-another horrifying, helpless depiction of the nuclear Armageddon that would ensue from even the smallest error in judgment, the most minuscule breakdown in communication.) So frequently did he praise the good, decent Republicans who stood up to Goldwater—“the Republican party today,” he would say, “is in temporary receivership; responsible Republicans can’t do anything about it”—it was as if Dwight D. Eisenhower were the Democratic running mate. And peace. Peace was everything. “Vote for peace in the United States between labor and business and government ... vote for peace among all people.”
The President held crowds to a hush as he dramatically related the tale of sitting beside Kennedy (he hadn’t) in October of 1962, as Khrushchev and Kennedy came “eyeball to eyeball, and their thumbs started getting closer to mash that nuclear button, the knife was in each other’s ribs, almost literally speaking, and neither of them were flinching or quivering”—“until Mr. Khrushchev picked up his missiles and put them on his ships and took them back home.” He told, in other words, bedtime stories: the child’s deepest fears are aroused, to be safely assuaged when the scary monster under the bed is vanquished and everything turns out right at the end.
“Elmo Roper, polling privately for Luce,” John Bartlow Martin scrawled to Moyers, “says LBJ is farther ahead than FDR in 1936. Can’t believe it, is worried, but there it is.” Johnson behaved as if he hadn’t received the word. He constantly ordered up new billboards and ads and polls; get-out-the-vote ads ran in newspapers as early as October 1 (“No matter how good the prospect for victory on Election Day ... a huge landslide vote will really show where our nation stands on the great issues of modern times which so deeply affect all our people and all mankind ... a chance to eradicate the fanatical right-wing influence in our political life”). He returned to Detroit and, of course, the crowds went wild again; it wasn’t enough to satisfy him. The next morning Johnson breathed fire into the phone of Chief of Staff Walter Jenkins: “Didn’t I tell you I wanted every worker to have a button or an LBJ hat or sticker?” he roared. “Do you want me to lose the labor vote? I ask for things, and I expect to see them done.”
Jenkins had begun working for Johnson in 1939, and had seen twenty-five years of fifteen-hour days. He was used to the abuse. He had never had another boss. If Moyers was the President’s spare brain, Jenkins was his walking IBM computer. He had adopted Johnson’s ambitions and made them his own—even naming his son Lyndon. Johnson reciprocated by entrusting Jenkins with about as much as a man could be entrusted with: Congressman Johnson’s income taxes (Jenkins had power of signature), treasurership of Senator Johnson’s holding company, presence at National Security Council meetings. “They’re trying to make Walter Jenkins a criminal,” Johnson complained to Bob Anderson in January as Republicans were trying to bring the aide before their tribunal on the Baker case, “and he’s the best man that ever lived.” Jenkins told people he was put on this earth to help make this great man’s life easier. Even if that meant he was so frazzled that office wags liked to bark “Walter!” when he napped to see how high he would jump.
People’s response to seeing Johnson in the flesh was primal. Sometimes security men used their fists to keep crowds from smothering the President; sometimes they had to reach for their guns when rope lines snapped. Everywhere it was the same: people packed shoulder to shoulder as far as the eye could see. The President stood on his limousine seat and seemed to float above the crowd. Photos looked like laboratory demonstrations—a million iron filings massing around an electric charge, bodies falling inward, arms outstretched, as if the President was the center of the world and his magnetism could give them life.
In the spectacle liberal intellectuals spied Newtonian perfection: the pull toward consensus, the push away from extremism, a system regressing toward a safe, steady equilibrium. The architecture of their thoughts allowing little place for such things, they missed the more mystical aspects of the transaction—the feelings sweeping these throngs that Americans, because America was not a monarchy, were not supposed to feel: their young ruler had died, and they reached out to the new one with ra
w, naked need, to fill an empty place, as if with his touch he could, just as he had promised, let us continue, as if the bad things hadn’t happened at all.
And since the South was but a soon-to-be vestigial aberration from the main story of American life, the propagandists of consensus did not consider the bumpers of Southern truckers in their investigations. Their most popular new gag license plate pictured a black woman monstrous with child, admitting, “I went all de way wif LBJ.”
When Lady Bird’s train was about to arrive in New Orleans, the President took a dramatic half-mile walk down the track to meet it. A crowd of blacks followed alongside, doing the leaning, the reaching, the crying out. Beyond them a white crowd recoiled in disgust.
Lay low on civil rights. Especially in New Orleans. Imperatively in New Orleans: that had been the advice. Johnson ignored it. There was nothing about the year 2000 in the evening’s speech, broadcast live throughout Louisiana and Mississippi from the Jung Hotel banquet hall. Nor was there any rambling on the rattling of rockets, or on responsible Republicans, or on Molly and the babies. An old shame rose up in the candidate, and he spoke to that instead. He glanced over at Senator Long and poured it on thick, singing songs of praise for his father, Huey, that made the old senator blush. He talked about the North—and how much Southerners should resent it. “All these years they have kept their foot on our necks by appealing to our animosities and dividing us.” Then he twisted the knife.
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