Landslide Read online

  In just over a thousand days—the time between Johnson’s ascent to the presidency in the wake of Kennedy’s death and Reagan’s election as governor of California—both men’s lives were transformed. A president who had tried for immortality as a latter-day Franklin Roosevelt had watched his liberal majority collapse. An underemployed middle-aged actor with radical conservative views had become his party’s future and the most exciting political story in the United States. Prophecies of a long liberal era in American politics had been cast aside. Now, instead, came the first signs of modern conservatism’s rise to dominance in the decades to come. In those thousand days, Johnson and his party had learned a painful truth: the man who takes the highest spot after a landslide is not standing on solid ground.

  What had really happened to America in those thousand days was bigger than any election—bigger than a party’s legislative majority or a president’s program or a charismatic conservative’s rise to the top, bigger even than the formidable personalities of Reagan and Johnson and the surprising story of their reversal in fortunes.

  In the course of those thousand days, America itself changed forever. In some important ways, it became a better version of itself. During those years, the nonviolent civil rights movement saw its greatest achievements. Its brave campaigns in the Deep South, along with the deaths of movement martyrs in Neshoba County, Mississippi, and Selma, Alabama, forced the country to face what for a hundred years it had ignored: the systematic use of violence to oppress and disenfranchise Southern blacks. In the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Johnson broke the back of the Southern segregationist caucus on Capitol Hill once and for all and ensured the constitutional rights of all Americans, regardless of race. In March 1965, Johnson, the first president elected from the South since the Civil War, spoke three words in the House chamber and changed the course of history: “We shall overcome.”

  With his mastery of the Congress, Johnson also managed to bring home the great progressive achievements a generation of Democrats had failed to deliver. He created programs to provide for the health of the elderly and the poor, and he secured massive federal funding for education of the nation’s young. He had declared war on poverty and for a time convinced his country that that war could actually be won.

  But there were darker changes, too. For most Americans at the beginning of the thousand days, Vietnam was a little-known country in a faraway corner of the world. A thousand days later, Vietnam was an American war with nearly four hundred thousand American troops on the ground and more soon to go. In the course of the thousand days, the Johnson administration made the fateful decision to “Americanize” the Vietnam conflict, despite Johnson’s own doubts about whether the war could be won, locking in a policy that would end up costing fifty-eight thousand American lives.

  At the beginning of the thousand days, intellectuals and urban planners had imagined utopian cities of the future in America where, with the help of good government, all citizens would share in productive, fulfilling lives. By the end, the cities Americans saw on their television screens were terrifying places—ghettos roiled by fire and looting, lawless deserts filled with people leading lives of despair.

  Politics changed, too. Politicians discovered the political power of white rage and white racism, beyond the Democratic Party and beyond the Deep South. At the beginning of the thousand days, the party of Lincoln was an active partner with Northern liberals in legislative efforts to enhance civil rights. By the end of the thousand days, the Republican Party had begun to assemble a new coalition built in part on the resentment white voters felt toward African Americans and other minorities. That coalition would rule the country for several decades to come.

  At the beginning of the thousand days, Americans had heralded the rapid changes coming to the world and looked toward the future with interest, excitement, and desire. But hope and fear are always closer than we think: both concern themselves with a world that is changing, a future that is unknown. After a thousand days and a series of traumas, a sense of foreboding and danger that had long lurked under the comfortable optimism of affluence emerged to dominate the national mood.

  And perhaps the most enduring change was the one that was hardest to see until long after the thousand days had come and gone: how in that moment of taut anxiety, fantasy took hold of American political life. When the thousand days began, America was still ruled by the same consensus politics that both parties had used to govern since the time of Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. That consensus was optimistic in intent. The parties’ leaders agreed that the complexities of modern life required an active federal government that provided its citizens with protection from the ruthlessness of the free market; an enlightened government that sought to improve the quality of American life. But the consensus was also deeply realistic; even presidents like Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy, who had great ambitions for government, took for granted that change was slow and that the future was impossible to predict.

  By the end of the thousand days, the consensus was forever fractured and the tradition of realism and humility in mainstream politics was gone.

  In its place was a new kind of politics in which voters chose between two fantasies of the American future, two myths in which the federal government could only be America’s salvation or America’s ruin. These two myths were born from opposite ideologies, but they promised the same thing: an America where all problems could be conquered and would be conquered soon. Both visions would inspire millions of Americans in the 1960s and in generations to come. But they would also divide and coarsen the country. Over time, the gap between fantasy and reality would grow and grow, leaving government in a state of dysfunction and paralysis.

  The myths endured long past the anxious aftermath of the Kennedy assassination, long past the 1960s, in large part thanks to the two ambitious men who shaped them: Johnson and Reagan. In the course of the thousand days, Johnson and Reagan each captured the nation’s attention by confidently offering a story of America and the path it needed to follow. The stories they told were powerful and compelling ones, and Johnson and Reagan each used his story to accomplish big things. They were inspired to make these myths for the nation by the same force: their shared need to be the hero, the man who led the way.

  Their fantastic visions have outlived them both, shaping our politics to this day. And over time these visions have made it harder for Johnson’s and Reagan’s heirs in government to see the world as it really is, harder for us to see what is real. Today, their lingering myths make the country hard to govern at all. This is the story of the thousand frenzied days in which American politics began its lurch toward fantasy, leaving reality behind. It is the story of a brief, defining moment when the modern era’s iconic liberal and conservative presidents shared the national spotlight, when these two men seized the opportunity to resurrect their careers and play the part of hero. And it is the story of how, in a moment of profound uncertainty, America’s politics began to fracture.

  LOOKING BACK ON the twentieth century, Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan appear as citizens of two distinct ages, men of destiny for two very different times.

  Johnson took the oath of office inside a cramped, sweltering airplane cabin at Dallas’s Love Field on November 22, 1963. His most pressing task was to calm and reassure a nation reeling after the sudden death of its president—and to take charge with a new story of American renewal.

  Grabbing hold of the optimistic, utopian spirit of his age, Johnson spoke of a future of unlimited possibility in which government would solve the great problems of American life—poverty and discrimination, hunger and disease. Not only that, he promised that if the country adopted his Great Society domestic program, this near-perfect future would be at hand. “It’s the time of peace on Earth and good will among men,” he declared in a speech a few days before his landslide election in 1964. “The place is here and the time is now!”

  Johnson’s confident promises echoed t
he utopian visions of progressive intellectuals in the early sixties. To them, the nation’s unprecedented economic affluence, combined with breakthroughs in medical and social science, meant that no problem was beyond the capabilities of rational, competent government.

  Johnson’s countrymen thrilled to this fantastic vision and believed it would soon come to pass. After all, they thought, why shouldn’t it? People living in postwar America were experiencing prosperity previously unknown by citizens of any country in the history of the world. In the last three decades, their government had brought its people back from the ravages of economic depression, reorganized the nation’s economy three times, transformed its infrastructure with new highways, bridges, tunnels, and dams, and defeated the greatest force of tyranny the world had ever known. After the Second World War, the country had assumed a position of global preeminence from which it guaranteed the security of nearly half the world. Why shouldn’t such a great nation be able to ensure prosperity for its citizens for all time? As many as 1.2 million people—a record—stood on the National Mall to watch Johnson take the oath of office after his landslide victory. “Is our world gone?” Johnson asked in his inaugural address. “We say ‘Farewell.’ Is a new world coming? We welcome it—and we will bend it to the hopes of man.”

  That was January 20, 1965—the midway point of the 1960s, that electric and anguished decade. The organizers of the festivities recorded Johnson’s optimism on the front of the inauguration program: “All that has happened in our historic past is but a prelude to the Great Society.” What they did not know was that Lyndon Johnson’s brightest promises usually hinted at a lifelong split within him, his tendency to see only two possibilities in any endeavor: total, transformative victory or utter, disastrous defeat. He made his promises all the more extravagant when trying to will away his fears of catastrophe. And Americans listening to Johnson speak that day had not yet learned the central lesson of the sixties: history never turns out exactly the way we think it’s going to.

  For indeed, when Reagan took the oath of office at his own inauguration sixteen years later, the mood of the country had sharply changed. The intervening years had been a time of war, division, disappointment, and fear. Americans had witnessed some of the lasting social progress Johnson promised—the great legislative achievements of the civil rights movement and the end of racial apartheid in the South along with the rise of the women’s movement and the sexual revolution—but they had also lived through hard years marked by crisis, scandal, and decline. Overseas, they had seen their country’s image of invincibility marred forever—many could still recall the image of an American helicopter hurtling desperately away from the U.S. embassy in Saigon. At home, they had seen the decay of American cities, the gloomy end of the postwar boom, and the rise of economic stagnation and inflation. Their faith in democratic institutions had been shaken by a series of political assassinations and assassination attempts. Their faith in democratic leaders had been damaged by the lies of Vietnam and Watergate. Those sixteen years had been long ones—years that changed America and diminished Americans’ expectations of what their government could do.

  And so when Reagan took the oath that day in 1981 after winning the presidency in a landslide of his own, the country thrilled to his vision, too, a vision that was essentially the opposite of the one Johnson had offered two decades before. Reagan, too, offered an idealized image of America’s future—one in which the nation’s problems could at last be solved and its promise could be renewed. “We have every right,” Reagan said in his inaugural address, “to dream heroic dreams.” But the way to achieve those dreams was the opposite of the path Johnson imagined: limit the power of government so that the creative potential of American individuals could be unleashed. “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem,” he said. “Government is the problem.”

  Through the long telescope of history, then, the ground between Reagan and Johnson appears vast, the distance between two opposite visions from two opposite moments in time. And it is the distance, as well, between two opposite types of men. It is hard to think of two presidents in modern history, after all, who approached the office more differently than Reagan and Johnson. Johnson was among the most hyperactive executives the White House had ever seen, always seeking to put his fingerprints on every last scrap of administration business no matter how large or small. Early in the Johnson presidency, James B. Reston, the Washington correspondent for The New York Times, worried over the punishing regime the president was observing in the White House. Johnson, wrote the columnist, “has three telephones in his car, with five circuits, and the amazing thing about it is that he seems able to talk on all five at once, carry on a conversation in the back seat, and direct traffic on the side.” In his short time as president, Reston wrote, Johnson “had done everything but cut the White House lawn.”

  This was hyperbole, but not by much. Like both John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon, his predecessor and his successor, Johnson secretly recorded many of his White House telephone conversations. (The recordings of Johnson’s conversations were released to the public in the 1990s and are a key source for this narrative.) His conversations reveal a president who insisted on personally selecting and approving everything—the locations of bombing targets in Vietnam, the line items in billion-dollar spending bills, the hairstyles of the secretaries sitting outside his door. He wanted to be involved in all of it. Learning that a White House aide failed to wake him in the night to inform him of an administration defeat on Capitol Hill, Johnson was upset. “When you’re bleeding up on that Hill,” the president explained, “I want to bleed with you.”

  That would never be Reagan—an actor learns early the benefits of a good night’s sleep. From his earliest days in politics, Reagan was supremely confident in his own abilities as an executive. He had come to prominence in a career in which he constantly had to give up control—to producers and directors and studio bosses, to makeup designers and camera operators and press agents, to critics and millions of anonymous strangers who would form consequential opinions of him as they watched on distant screens. When he began his political career in the mid-1960s, he took to the disaggregated life of a political candidate quickly. Most first-time candidates struggle to adapt to an existence in which they must surrender control of their lives to other people. Reagan had been doing it for years. He understood an important distinction that Johnson never grasped: being in control and being successful aren’t always the same thing.

  And so, as president, Reagan often seemed only vaguely aware of the pressing business of his own administration. Americans grew accustomed to a leader who liked naps and long vacations and days spent ambling on horseback on his mountain ranch above the Pacific. His aides worried at times over the cumulative effect in the press that he appeared too detached from decision making, too much a figurehead. They wondered if they ought to brief reporters on the more punishing aspects of the president’s working regime. Reagan advised them to keep quiet; in the long run, it was always better to appear above it all. Like Johnson, he was a rancher, but he stayed out of the swampy muck.

  Each was a gifted performer and raconteur who could captivate an audience. But they excelled in different settings. Johnson was best in person. He was overwhelming, always, and his conversations hummed with transactional momentum. He told involved and engaging Texas tall tales, but he usually told them in order to drive home a pertinent point. He made use of his large girth and six-foot-three-inch frame. All the clichéd metaphors of politics—glad-handing, buttonholing, back stroking, arm twisting—were things Johnson actually, physically did in order to get his way. His greatest asset was his intuitive sensitivity to human emotion, his unmatched ability to spot people’s highest ambitions and their darkest fears. Even Alabama governor George Wallace, one of the twentieth century’s most notorious racial demagogues, found himself mesmerized by an impassioned Oval Office conference with Johnson in the midst of a tense 1965 standoff o
ver racial protests in Wallace’s home state. “Hell,” said Wallace afterward, “if I’d stayed in there much longer, he’d have had me coming out for civil rights.”

  A conversation with Reagan, on the other hand, was usually pleasant and entirely superficial. In his early days as a politician, supporters would often walk away from first encounters with candidate Reagan disappointed. He’d told funny jokes, they’d laughed heartily, they’d had a ball. But they couldn’t remember much if any substance to what he’d said. The problem wasn’t that Reagan was an empty suit; rather, he struggled to connect with people when they came too close. Even his own children encountered a fog in their father’s eyes when they greeted him in a room. He was friendly, but he gave the impression that he was meeting them for the first time.

  He was better with an audience watching him. Better still if they were watching him on a television screen from the comfort of their own homes. In these moments, he was great. He launched his 1966 campaign for governor with a thirty-minute television advertisement in which he pensively strolled around a comfortable living room. It was all so wonderfully familiar and authentic. There were pictures on the wall and a fire in the fireplace; Reagan’s sharp, pithy summation of California’s and the nation’s problems seemed to come to him spontaneously, a kindly father figure opining on issues of the day. None of it was real—the sentences were scripted and the living room was a studio set. But Californians didn’t mind; they were starting to expect their politicians to be great performers on TV.

  Television was taking over politics in the midsixties. Anyone who’d lived through the Kennedy years could see that. Johnson could see it, and he worked tirelessly to adapt, but never with much success. As president, he obsessed over his televised press conferences, bringing in a shifting cast of experts for coaching on his diction, his posture, his eyewear. But his problem was fundamental: performing for a TV camera, he could never do what he did in person, he couldn’t see his audience and adapt his personality accordingly. And that introduced a terrifying possibility: that the people watching would see him as himself.