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  Johnson and Reagan, then, were both stars, but stars of different eras. It is difficult to fit them inside a single picture—when the mind focuses on one of them, the other becomes a blur. Even in the lore of practical politics, where both have assumed vaunted status in recent years, they inhabit separate realms. Reagan is the president that politicians from both parties publicly say they admire—principled, noble, and strong. But Johnson is the president they secretly long to be—ruthless, effective, a man who got big things done.

  Yet when we look at Reagan and Johnson as actual human beings, we are left with an odd set of facts. These two heroes of opposite eras were born less than three years apart. They both came of age in the early decades of the twentieth century and were shaped by the same events. Both lived through the Great Depression and served in World War II; both saw the rise of the Cold War and shrewdly maneuvered in their respective fields through the havoc of the McCarthy era. The Reagan who took the oath of office in 1981 was not a young man; he was two weeks shy of his seventieth birthday. And he was not new to presidential politics—he had been running for the office for the better part of two decades. In fact, he’d had his eye on the White House ever since the midsixties, when he’d dreamed of dislodging its occupant: Lyndon Johnson.

  And the vision Reagan articulated in his inaugural address was, in fact, a vision born in the midsixties, a vision made possible by the Johnson years. The ideas he articulated—virulent anticommunism abroad, freeing the individual from the shackles of the state at home—were not new. They had been guiding principles of the right since the Roosevelt administration; they were the ideas Goldwater ran on in 1964. But for a long time, those ideas had been too fantastic and ridiculous for the mainstream. To most Americans, it was self-evident that a modern state facing the complex problems of the modern world needed a robust national government to guide it through.

  But as Johnson’s promises for America’s utopian future moved into the realm of fantasy, the fantasies of limited government on the radical right suddenly became legitimate, too. Reagan, whose career had given him a healthy respect for the mercurial nature of public mood, waited for the right moment—when public trust in Johnson’s promises first began to falter—to unleash his own competing myth. Johnson promised that his government would soon deliver the nation from all troubles, but the nation grew more troubled by the day. Only then did the conservative case against government begin to seem not so crazy after all. Or, at least, no more crazy than the other side. Once the formerly reasonable people took their rhetoric into a new realm of fantasy, politics became about choosing: which fantasy sounded best?

  Is a new world coming? We welcome it and we will bend it to the hopes of man.

  Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.

  Reagan and Johnson were speaking in different eras. But they were speaking to each other.

  Both were telling stories of America and its future. In these stories, the country was facing a historic moment of choice, the consequences of which would be felt for generations. The stakes were high: “Abundance or annihilation,” said Johnson at the dedication of the 1964 World’s Fair, “development or desolation, that is in your hands.” Later that same year, Reagan gave his “Time for Choosing” speech: “We’ll preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we’ll sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.”

  Yet while the consequences of making the wrong choice were severe, to Johnson and Reagan, the right and wrong paths were clear. And each man assured Americans that all they had to do was choose the right path—his path—and they would be delivered from harm, ready for their future of ecstatic possibility. They were confident that the country would make the right choice. After all, there would be someone there to guide them.

  That was what drove them to tell their stories in the first place; each man needed a story in which he could play the hero’s part. For despite all their differences, Reagan and Johnson were at heart driven by the same fundamental need: to be the hero and receive the world’s admiration and acclaim. One was a rancher down in the muck, the other was a cowboy riding along the ridge. But at the end of the day, each of them was a man on horseback, commanding the attention of the world.

  That driving need shaped both of their lives. It propelled them up from lonely childhoods in obscure regions of the country and compelled them to work harder than all their peers. In both of them, it was a need born early, nursed by the love of ambitious, adoring mothers. As they grew older, it was shaped by the cautionary example of their fathers, Jack Reagan and Sam Ealey Johnson, Jr., two men who had also had dreams of being a hero but who had instead chosen paths that led to ruin and disgrace.

  As young adults, their shared need brought them both acclaim and attention. “Heady wine,” Reagan called it, and Johnson would have known exactly what he meant—it tasted so sweet. Each found successively larger stages so that by their late twenties, Johnson and Reagan had become, respectively, a United States congressman and a Hollywood actor with a million-dollar studio contract. Settled in their businesses’ respective capitals on opposite coasts, each spent much of the next two decades in his rightful place, as one of the most recognizable men in town.

  Then, sometime in middle age, the wine dried up and the eyes of the world drifted away, leaving Reagan and Johnson each to contemplate the same future, one in which his purpose for living was gone.

  That was the future that lay ahead of both of them the day that John F. Kennedy went to Dallas. On November 22, 1963, when the story of their thousand days begins, Reagan and Johnson were both well into middle age and far from the limelight. Reagan was working on a troubled movie set, playing the part of a cuckolded gangster in a dark, violent drama—the kind of work he hated but the only work he could get. Johnson was wasting away in the miserable obscurity of the vice presidency. Excluded from the circles of influence, a figure of ridicule in the capital he had once ruled, he had descended into deep depression, convinced he would never hold real power again.

  Then shots rang out from the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas’s Dealey Plaza and everything changed. The sudden, shocking death of President Kennedy left the nation stunned and uncertain how to go on. Americans needed a story to believe in. In the thousand days that followed, Johnson and Reagan would each seize the chance to offer a new way forward. It was a risky proposition—in mythology, a hero who seeks greatness must tempt fate and the wrath of the gods. For Johnson, the bill would come due even before the thousand days were up. Still, it was an opportunity each of them would die to take. For each of them it was one last chance at greatness. One last chance to be the man on the horse.

  “A sad time for all people”: Lyndon B. Johnson addresses the nation from Andrews Air Force Base while his wife, Lady Bird, looks on, November 22, 1963.

  © AP Photo

  CHAPTER ONE

  Stories

  November 23, 1963

  At the beginning, the worst part is the uncertainty. Later, after the mourning dignitaries have come and gone, after the black crape has been taken down from the chandeliers and the funeral geldings have been put out to pasture, people will remember this weekend as a time of great sadness. For years and then decades, they’ll look back and remember their sorrow. They’ll say they knew, instantly, that life would never be the same again. But that will be memory doing memory’s ruthless work, obliterating any discordant details, imposing order where once there was none. In these first hours, there is sadness, but mostly there is chaos and the dreadful unknown: What has happened to America? And what is going to happen next?

  So everyone turns on their television sets, hoping to find out. On NBC’s Today show, the clocks on a wall are comfortingly definitive. On the East Coast, it is just after seven o’clock in the morning. The date is November 23, 1963. Millions of Americans are waking up after a night of troubled sleep. Watching the program, they see the host’s face contort in sudde
n pain as he speaks the words:

  “The president of the United States is dead.”

  Ah, yes, that is certain, too.

  By now there are agreed-upon facts: At lunchtime the previous day, President John F. Kennedy, on a political trip to Texas, rode in an open limousine toward the center of Dallas. At 12:30 Central Time, shots struck his motorcade as it moved through the city’s Dealey Plaza. By 12:45 P.M., CBS, NBC, and ABC had interrupted their programming to bring word of the shooting. At 1:35 P.M., the network Teletypes carried a wire from UPI: “Flash: President Kennedy Dead.” Now, nearly eighteen hours after the shooting, it is impossible to find an American who does not already know the news the host has just delivered—that the president of the United States is dead.

  Still, he says it. It is the first line in a script he must read, timed to a movie montage with carefully selected background music. It is the starting point of an elaborate story he is about to tell, the summary of what is known.

  He goes on:

  “The body of John Fitzgerald Kennedy is at this moment in the White House. And it is a much saddened nation and world that greets this day …”

  The screen switches to scenes from the day. There is the dead president at Dallas’s Love Field, very much alive, gracefully descending from Air Force One. And there is his beautiful wife, Jacqueline, wearing a pink suit and a pillbox hat, brushing the hair out of her face. He smiles and nods at local dignitaries on the tarmac. She clutches a bouquet of red roses to her breast. They climb into an open-topped limousine.

  “At about 12:30 the motorcade turned the corner and approached the triple underpass feeding the Stemons expressway …”

  The smiling Kennedys turn a corner and disappear from view.

  “… and then three shots rang out in quick succession and the pleasant day turned into a nightmare of confusion and horror.”

  The camera jolts and drops to the ground. The narration goes silent and the music is gone.

  “The president died at about one P.M.… Meanwhile Dallas police had captured twenty-four-year-old Lee Oswald, an acknowledged left-wing supporter of Fidel Castro …”

  “He was later charged with the murder of the president … he has thus far admitted nothing.”

  Then a quick cut. Now, onscreen, we see a blurry shot of two large airplane tails, parked on a runway, behind a high fence.

  “Vice President Lyndon Johnson recited the oath of office and assumed the presidency …”

  But we do not see the oath taking. We do not see any pictures of Johnson. All we see is more of the airplane tails and the fence.

  “At 6:05 Eastern Time, the presidential plane landed at Andrews Air Force Base in Washington. The bronze coffin carrying the thirty-fifth president was taken from it and loaded into a Navy ambulance.”

  Onscreen it is now nighttime on another tarmac. From the back of the airplane, Air Force One, we see men emerge, carrying a coffin.

  “Then, a still blood-spattered Mrs. Kennedy was taken down. She seemed still in a state of shock as she was taken to the ambulance.”

  A solid mass of men in uniforms and dark suits parts for Jacqueline Kennedy. She does look dazed, but also regal and poised. The shot lingers on her, beautiful and tragic, as she waits to get into the ambulance. The narration has stopped again, as if out of respect.

  Then there is a quick, disorienting cut to a far less pretty picture. On a nondescript slab of concrete, Kennedy’s vice president stands with his wife. He looks tired and old.

  “A few minutes later, the waiting crowd and the nation at large heard their new president, Lyndon Johnson.”

  Johnson seems confused. Before speaking he looks to both sides and then down at his notes, exposing a balding head. He is speaking but we can’t hear him, there is too much background noise. We hear principally the roar of airplane engines. Only when they deign to pause can we catch Johnson, midsentence—

  “… time for all people.”

  The shot switches to a wider camera angle. At the greater distance, he is hard to make out—there is a glare off his glasses, and the camera picks up only dark circles where his eyes should be.

  “For me it is a deep personal tragedy …”

  An anonymous figure walks into the shot just behind Johnson, as though unaware he is even there.

  “I will do my best. It is all I can do. I ask for your help. And God’s.”

  Finally, the roaring airplanes have their way and the camera cuts away from this lonely old man.

  Then the narration picks up again:

  “It was about 4:30 this morning when President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was returned to the White House.”

  Now words and image and music are once again aligned. In place of the unsettled tarmac scene, we have a splendid tableau—a hearse approaching the north entrance of the White House, led by an honor guard, the great house lit up with lanterns, the president coming home.

  It is a short but compelling montage, and Americans will watch it again and again this day. Broadcasters have suspended regular programming and advertising. Every second of airtime across three networks belongs to the news divisions.

  This is how it works in America this weekend—the normal rituals and routines have been thrown out. Outside the NBC studios, midtown Manhattan, America’s mass media capital, has been transformed by the events of the past twenty-four hours. The department stores have taken down their Christmas decorations and replaced them with black mourning scenes. From St. Patrick’s Cathedral, the sound of an organ playing “The Star-Spangled Banner” slips out onto the street. Most theaters, movie houses, and restaurants in the city have closed their doors. The Stork Club, a hub of café society, stays open but is mostly empty. “The people here … are like the people out on Christmas Eve,” the headwaiter explains. “They have no home.”

  The balance between cause and effect seems off, reason itself suspended. Kennedy had led the West and harnessed the most terrible arsenal of weapons ever known to man. Now he has been shot down by an anonymous madman who stored his rifle in a suburban garage. Kennedy had invited the nation to join him on a thrilling journey toward the future. Now he has become the past.

  No one seems to be in charge. The president is dead. His successor is out of sight. Only a single White House photographer, snapping pictures in a hurry, has captured his swearing in. For a while, the phones in Washington don’t even work.

  Americans need to look for authority somewhere new. They know where to find it. Most turned on the television the moment they heard what happened in Dallas and they haven’t turned it off since. On average this weekend, American households will watch 8.5 hours of television each day. Everyone is looking to the people on their screen for answers. NBC’s David Brinkley calls the White House to see if staffers there have any news. “No,” comes the reply, “we were watching you to see if you had any.”

  For the networks, this new authority is a daunting challenge. There are still few hard facts from Dallas, a meager diet for so many hours of airtime. TV programmers experiment with other ways to fill the time—broadcasts of memorial concerts or prayer vigils—but viewers at home aren’t interested. They prefer news, even the same, sad facts, even if they’ve heard them before. The repetition is comforting. TV anchors that weekend, one viewer will later write to NBC’s Chet Huntley, are like “old friends … telling us about the tragedy until we could absorb it.”

  So that’s what the anchors do: tell the country what they know, over and over again. This morning, NBC will replay the same montage, with the same background music, the same pictures, and roughly the same script, at least once every half hour.

  This Saturday morning, when everything is uncertain, this is one thing Americans have. They do not have their president, they do not have normal life, they do not have faith that everything will be okay. All they have for certain is a story:

  The president went to Dallas on a bright autumn day.

  There, a madman shot and killed him.

 
He returned to his capital in a coffin.

  In her agony, his widow has shown unimaginable strength.

  The vice president has recited the oath of office and assumed the presidency.

  But that isn’t the point of the story. The point of the story is the first thing the news host told them, the one thing everyone knows for sure: the president of the United States is dead.

  AT 8:40 THAT Saturday morning, two iron gates opened outside an imposing gray mansion in the Spring Valley section of Washington. A black limousine slid down a driveway scattered with dead leaves. Under police escort, the car turned south and sped swiftly through the capital’s near-deserted streets. Lyndon Baines Johnson, the living president of the United States, was en route to the White House.

  Most Americans did not witness this procession. The networks had sent crews to stand outside the Johnson family home, where Johnson had spent the night after returning from Dallas. Earlier in the hour, a host had promised Today’s viewers that the program would show the new president leaving his home for the White House. But when the gates opened, NBC was in the midst of its montage, and the program’s producers chose to stick with their scripted story. By the time it was over, Johnson’s car had disappeared.

  A day earlier, the man inside the limousine had been the vice president, touring his home state of Texas with Kennedy. He and his wife, Lady Bird, had planned to host the Kennedys at their ranch in the Hill Country, west of Austin, that Saturday morning. To think of the things they’d been worried about just a day earlier—which champagne and cigarettes to procure for Mrs. Kennedy; how to accommodate the special plywood and horsehair mattress favored by the commander in chief.