Landslide Read online

  Copyright © 2014 by Jonathan Darman

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Darman, Jonathan.

  Landslide : LBJ and Ronald Reagan at the dawn of a new America / Jonathan Darman.

  pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN 978-1-4000-6708-4

  eBook ISBN 978-0-8129-9469-8

  1. Johnson, Lyndon B. (Lyndon Baines), 1908–1973—Political and social views. 2. Reagan, Ronald—Political and social views. 3. United States—Politics and government—1963–1969. 4. Liberalism—United States—History—20th century. 5. Conservatism—United States—History—20th century. 6. Politics, Practical—United States—History—20th century. 7. Political culture—United States—History—20th century. 8. Social change—United States—History—20th century. I. Title.

  E846.D37 2014

  320.097309′046—dc23

  2013047619

  www.atrandom.com

  Jacket design: Eric White

  Front-jacket photographs: John Dominis/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images (Lyndon Johnson), John Loengard/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images (Ronald Reagan)

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Prologue: Men on Horseback

  PART I: SHADOWS

  CHAPTER 1 Stories: November 23, 1963

  CHAPTER 2 Watching: November 22–24, 1963

  CHAPTER 3 Myths: November 25–29, 1963

  CHAPTER 4 Home: December 25, 1963–January 6, 1964

  PART II: CHOOSING

  CHAPTER 5 B Movie: February–July 1964

  CHAPTER 6 Everybody’s Scared: Summer 1964

  CHAPTER 7 Sacrifice: October–December 1964

  CHAPTER 8 Valley of the Black Pig: January 23–April 9, 1965

  PART III: THE COST

  CHAPTER 9 Lonely Acres: Summer 1965

  CHAPTER 10 Like a Winner: September 1965–June 1966

  CHAPTER 11 A Thousand Days: August–December 1966

  Epilogue

  Afterword

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Works Consulted

  About the Author

  Prologue

  Men on Horseback

  There is but one way to get the cattle out of the swamp. And that is for the man on the horse to take the lead.

  —LYNDON JOHNSON

  When he woke to great glory, he wanted even more. Midmorning on Wednesday, November 4, 1964, Lyndon Baines Johnson arose from his bed in the familiar surroundings of the LBJ Ranch. He had been president for eleven months. In that time, he had made frequent trips from Washington back to his home in the Texas Hill Country. The ranch offered familiar comforts he could not find in the White House: the live oaks that lined the verdant banks of the Pedernales River, the sprawling Hill Country vistas, and his herd of prized cattle that, as his Texas forebears had done, he would corral from on top of a horse.

  And this particular trip home brought the greatest pleasure of all: a chance to vote for himself as president of the United States. It was a pleasure he had not known before. He had assumed the presidency on November 22, 1963, in an awful, frenzied moment: his Secret Service agent’s knee in his back, his face pressed to the floor of a limousine speeding through the Dallas streets. It was surely the most ignominious ascent in the history of the office. After Kennedy’s death, Johnson would later recall, the American people were “like a bunch of cattle caught in the swamp.” He came from a line of ranchers; he knew what he had to do. “There is but one way to get the cattle out of the swamp,” he said, “and that is for the man on the horse to take the lead.”

  © Bettmann/CORBIS

  © Murray Garrett/Getty Images

  He had led by example, executing his office with force and resolve and such unstoppable energy that no one would ever doubt that he was the president. But all along, he knew the difference. He had never won the presidency.

  Until now. The previous day—Election Day—he had risen with the sun. With his wife, Lady Bird, he was third in line at the polling booth in Johnson City, Texas, casting a ballot for himself and his running mate, Hubert Humphrey. He’d spent the rest of the day nervously quizzing aides for any and all news from the various states. Then, just before seven o’clock that night, NBC News called it—it would be a Johnson victory over the Republican candidate, Barry Goldwater. The margin, the network predicted, would be astounding—something greater than 20 percent. Johnson did not yet know the exact tally, which would turn out to be 43,129,566 votes, 61 percent of the American electorate. And he had not yet heard all the columnists and commentators proclaiming the start of a long liberal era to come. But he knew the most important thing: he had won the White House with the largest portion of the popular vote of any president in American history.

  A landslide. For a man like Lyndon Johnson—a man who had lived and breathed politics since childhood, a man whose greatest ambition was to earn approval from millions of people he would never meet—there was no greater triumph. Years later he would recall the sensation: “For the first time in all my life, I truly felt loved by the American people.”

  He spent that night toasting the returns with family, friends, and supporters at Austin’s Driskill Hotel. As Tuesday night turned to Wednesday morning, he lingered with the well-wishers, drinking in their praise. When at last he closed his eyes back home at the ranch, it was nearly dawn.

  Yet he woke up only a few hours later that Wednesday morning still unsatisfied. Through the night, he had nursed his private resentments. Goldwater, or “that son of a bitch,” as Johnson referred to him that day, had never called to concede. Somehow it was fitting that the Arizona senator would bungle the most important custom in American democracy. He had bungled every other rule of modern presidential campaigns. He hadn’t shown any interest in moderating his hard-line conservative stances after securing his party’s nomination. He hadn’t spent the fall campaign trying to win the favor of the voters in the American middle, the ones who decided elections. He hadn’t shown much interest in winning the favor of any voters at all.

  And at the end, when it was clear to everyone that he was finished, he hadn’t picked up the phone to call Johnson. As the hour grew late on Election Day, long after it became obvious that the Goldwater campaign was over, the candidate’s staff sent word that he was analyzing results and would have no further comment that night. In truth, he had simply gone to bed.

  Therefore, despite the landslide of Tuesday night, it was not until Wednesday morning that Johnson’s victory became official. He watched from his bedroom at the ranch as “that son of a bitch” read a telegram of concession on TV. And so, the morning after the election, Johnson was still hungry for the outpouring of praise and affection he believed he was due. To find it, he turned to another familiar comfort: the phone. In the days after the election, he reveled in the customary calls of congratulation from elected officials around the country. Chicago’s mayor, Richard J. Daley, knew that Johnson would want to hear numbers. “By God, we said we would get you seven-fifty in Chicago, and it will be closer to eight fifty or nine hundred thousand.” Daley, perhaps the most powerful and effective boss in the Democratic Party, was no bosom friend of LBJ’s. Earlier that year, Johnson had obsessed over rumors that Daley was aiding a plot to steal the party’s nomination from him and give it to Johnson’s nemesis, Bobby Kennedy, instead. But Daley knew what power looked l
ike. On the phone with Johnson, he offered praise: “May the lord shower his blessings upon you and your family.”

  For some politicians, these ritualistic exchanges are exhausting and irritating. The endless, empty praise; the “send my love to your wife and give her a kiss for me”; the inflated flattery from “good friends” who would put a knife in your back if the circumstances required. For Johnson, the ritual was the whole point. He had spent his life in a business filled with champion fawners. Now it was time for them to fawn over him.

  “Mr. President?” asked California governor Edmund “Pat” Brown, on the phone from the Golden State, ready to fawn away.

  Johnson greeted him: “Well, you oughtta be a banker, Pat.”

  “A banker?” asked Brown. “Why?”

  “Well,” the president answered, “you’re so damn conservative, you told me we’d carry it by over a million.” He was talking about California, the largest state in the nation. “I think you beat it, didn’t you?”

  Like Daley, Brown had his numbers ready to go: “About a million four,” the governor cooed.

  “Well, why don’t you go in the banking business?” said the president. “Go to lending money, a fellow that conservative …”

  “You were great,” Brown sputtered, “my God!”

  Johnson had stepped on Brown’s headline—the better-than-expected margin—leaving him stumbling for other morsels to present. So the governor dived into a more detailed report. He told Johnson that he had failed to carry only three California counties. He’d lost San Diego, the die-hard conservative stronghold, but that was no surprise. He’d lost Sutter County, but that was the smallest county in the state. And he’d lost Orange County, the mass of middle-class suburbs to the south of Los Angeles.

  Brown knew that this last one was strange. Johnson had carried many heavily Republican counties across the country in the election. Yet in Orange County, registered Democrats and Republicans made up roughly equal portions of the electorate. Its voters were solid white-collar professionals, up-and-coming Americans who’d headed to the suburbs to live the good life. On paper, they looked exactly like all the other reasonable-minded middle-class Americans who had recoiled from Goldwater and given Johnson his landslide. “I’m already going to work,” Brown assured the president. “I’ve got the Orange County publishers here for lunch, I’m going to find out what the hell’s wrong. And I’ll make a report to you the first time I see you.”

  But Johnson wasn’t interested in hearing about Orange County. He wasn’t interested in any of the counties he’d lost. “How many counties you got?” he asked.

  “We’ve got fifty-eight counties and you won fifty-five.”

  That was more like it. “Oh,” said Johnson. “That’s wonderful.”

  Then he steered the conversation back to the pleasant interplay of solicitation and praise. They talked of a happy future, of the big things Johnson wanted to do with his huge majority in Congress. Already, Johnson’s staff was developing plans for a great legislative push in the first hundred days of his new term. The president wanted bills providing massive funding for education, a health insurance program for the aged, and programs that would end poverty in America once and for all.

  And that was just the beginning. In Congress, he had the most formidable progressive majority of any president in modern American history, and he intended to use it. By the end of his term, he wanted to fulfill the sweeping promises of the Great Society, his domestic program, securing a record that would make him as significant a progressive president as his personal hero, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and earn him a place of immortal greatness in American history.

  He was ready to get to work. “You’ve got to help a lot,” he told Brown, generously. “We’ll do some plotting and planning as soon as we can get recuperated and get our marbles back.”

  Brown agreed. And he wanted to talk about his own future, too. That future, everyone in politics seemed sure, was bright. He was about to start his seventh year as governor. He’d been a national star ever since his last race in 1962, when he’d defeated Richard Nixon, the former vice president of the United States. As governor of the nation’s largest state, he had spearheaded projects in housing, education, and infrastructure that were of a piece with Johnson’s grand ambitions for the country.

  Already, he was on a short list of Democratic politicians who might succeed Johnson in the White House in the long liberal era to come. He wasn’t particularly telegenic, he wasn’t a naturally likable guy, but, well, neither was Lyndon Johnson, and look what the party and the people had given him. Brown could go far. To prove it, he was contemplating a run for the governorship in two years’ time. It would be a historic achievement—no Democrat had ever won the California governor’s mansion for three consecutive terms—but Brown was a heavy favorite. “We ought to talk about keeping this governorship,” he told Johnson that day, “which I think is going to be key.”

  “I’ve already told you what I’m going to do about that,” said Johnson. “My whole stack is in—money, marbles and chalk—with Brown.”

  Johnson was sincere that day when he promised Brown he would do whatever he could to help in the next election. But he didn’t know, couldn’t know, that day in November, just how much his world would change in two years’ time. And he could never have imagined how much of his own legacy to the country would be shaped by the winner of Brown’s governor’s race.

  One week before Brown and Johnson spoke on the phone, the week before the election, the actor Ronald Reagan appeared in a special prime-time broadcast on NBC. Reagan’s was a well-known face. Older Americans remembered his brief career as a Hollywood heartthrob in the early 1940s, and millions of younger viewers knew him as the longtime host of the popular evening television program General Electric Theater. In his eight years on the broadcast, he’d rested secure in the knowledge that he had the thing he wanted most: millions of eyes looking at his handsome face.

  By the autumn of 1964, however, those eyes had moved on to someone else. GE Theater had been canceled two years earlier, a victim of shifting public taste. Since then Reagan had struggled to find work. He’d tried to make another run in films, but the jobs were few and far between. “You’ve been around this business long enough,” the studio boss, Lew Wasserman, told him, “to know that I can’t force someone on a producer if he doesn’t want to use him.”

  The only place he was still reliably treated like a star was in the country’s marginalized conservative movement. Politics had been a passion for Reagan since his youth. In the 1930s, he, too, had idolized FDR, listening closely and imitating the president as he delivered his Fireside Chats. But in the past decade, his passionate anticommunism had drawn him toward right-wing politics, where campaigns were happy to use a handsome movie actor as a public surrogate. In the last weeks of the Goldwater campaign, a group of wealthy California businessmen purchased national airtime to broadcast Reagan making the case for Goldwater in a speech.

  He made for great TV, and his half-hour pitch probably did more for Goldwater than the GOP’s entire yearlong campaign. Still, the title given to the speech—“A Time for Choosing”—was odd and even a little pathetic. No one thought Barry Goldwater had a chance of winning. For most voters that year, the time for choosing had long since passed. They were not going to choose Goldwater. If conservative politics was Reagan’s path to stardom, it seemed he had better get used to a life of obscurity.

  Reagan, too, spent time in that late fall of 1964 on his own ranch in the Santa Monica mountains, Yearling Row, where he raised thoroughbred horses, dashing hunters and jumpers with shiny coats and long sinewy legs. Leaning his flat back forward as he rode his mare over a jump, the handsome actor looked like a noble general or a hero of the Old West, the kind of parts he liked to play. But he was alone in the mountains and there was no one around to watch.

  Soon, though, the title of Reagan’s Goldwater speech would prove apt. For America in the mid-1960s, the time for choosing had
only just begun. Only two years after his landslide, Johnson’s dreams of immortal greatness would vanish for good. In the midterm election of 1966, American voters would deliver a powerful rebuke to Johnson at the ballot box. That year, Democrats lost a staggering forty-seven House seats. The Republicans, so recently written off for dead, won nine new governorships, three new Senate seats, and 557 seats in state legislatures nationwide.

  Johnson’s era of progressive reform was over, his power forever diminished. “In the space of a single Autumn day,” Newsweek would write, “the 1,000 day reign of Lyndon I came to an end: The Emperor of American politics became just a president again.”

  And from California, there were signs of even greater troubles to come. Pat Brown had been right to dwell on those voters in Orange County. They, along with millions of white middle-class suburbanites like them across the country, would fuel a powerful national backlash against Johnson’s party and policies. The mysterious citizens of Orange County voted for Brown’s Republican opponent for governor by a three-to-one margin. And they worked, passionately, for that Republican candidate across the state that year, helping him to defeat Brown by nearly a million votes. Now this new Republican governor had a landslide of his own.

  That new governor was Ronald Reagan, the man from B movies and GE Theater.

  He had campaigned that year as a Western white knight, a “citizen-politician” riding down from his mountain retreat to save his state from the encroaching government and the corrupt men who ran it. He’d won the race not just by attacking Brown, but by attacking Johnson, too, detailing all the ways that the president’s promises of liberal utopia had failed to come to pass. The movie star governor, with his movie star looks, had become a sensation in the national press. It was clear his rise was only beginning. As Reagan basked in his victory that November, some in the press wondered if he might just be the next president of the United States.