Landslide (17 page)

F
OR A MONTH
, the nation had watched with eager attention as Johnson performed an unending, fast-paced “Let Us Continue!” show. In his first weeks in office, the new president had met with the nation’s governors, the Kennedy cabinet, the congressional leadership, representatives of business and labor, and leaders of the civil rights movement. He had plotted legislative strategy, consulted with his counterparts around the globe, and played host to some two hundred visitors, including much of official Washington.

It seemed he was always working, always moving. “
He assumes that if there is something to be done, it must be done immediately, if not sooner,” wrote James B. Reston in
The New York Times
. “He now 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.” Johnson, Reston wrote, “
has done everything but cut the White House lawn.”

Of course, this sort of showing was nothing new for Johnson. He remembered his goal: seduce the country with a fresh story of all the great things that were soon to come. And when he had his mind set on a goal, Johnson’s labors knew no limit. Washington was a city that ran on the currency of ambition, a city where ostentatious displays of overwork were obligatory. And yet for the last thirty years, people who came across Lyndon Johnson had said the same thing: “
I never saw a man work harder.” In the 1950s, he had amassed enormous power in the Senate by making it a hub of constant activity, a study in contrast to the languid Eisenhower White House. His senators were expected to match their leader’s output. One night, when Hubert Humphrey complained that he really must be getting home for dinner with his family, Johnson lost his patience. “
Dammit, Hubert,” the majority leader said, “you’ve got to make up your mind whether you’re going to be a good father or a good senator.” For Johnson, the answer was self-evident.

Now every waking minute was about proving he was a good president. He seemed to be everywhere. Invited for a breakfast meeting at the White House, Republican Charles Halleck, the House minority leader, accepted the president’s offer of a chauffeured car to bring him to the Executive Mansion.
Opening the door to the limousine, the congressman was surprised to find the president of the United States waiting for him inside. Johnson popped up constantly on Capitol Hill, dropping in at the last minute at a surprise party for the Senate majority leader one day, a Christmas party with the minority leader the next.

Arriving for a meeting with Johnson at the White House one afternoon, two Baltimore
Sun
reporters found him itching to make a jail break. Hurrying the reporters into his car, they headed for lunch with the Texas delegation on Capitol Hill. Walter Lippmann, the columnist and lion of the left, picked up the phone at his Northwest
Washington home one evening in early December and heard Johnson’s voice on the other end of the line: “
Could I drop by and bum a drink from you?”

He was working harder than any president Washington had seen before, and he made sure the country knew it. “
Man-in-Motion Johnson,”
Time
called him, “mixing solid business with image-making busy-ness.” As the Johnson presidency entered its second and third weeks, his staff began feeding morsels to the press about the boss’s punishing routine. Readers soon knew all about the new president’s “
two shift day”: Up by seven with papers in bed, dictating orders to his aide, Jack Valenti. Then over to the Oval Office by nine for meetings that lasted through lunch. Next, a brief nap, followed by a swim in the White House pool, usually accompanied by a coterie of staffers who offered advice on strategy as they paddled around with their boss. (These sessions could get awkward—usually, at Johnson’s insistence, no one wore clothes.) Toweled off and changed into a fresh shirt, he’d work until seven-thirty or eight, barking orders at his secretaries to get this senator or that cabinet secretary on the line. Then a late dinner with Lady Bird and their high-school-age daughter Luci (their elder daughter, Lynda, was studying at the University of Texas) and whatever pack of aides or congressmen he’d chosen to bring in for the occasion. Then more work, maybe a massage just before midnight, with three TVs blaring in the background, then reading until one or two in the morning. Then, four or five hours later, the same thing all over again.

An endless cycle of work, work, work, not just for the president, but also for his staff. The papers were full of details about the circle of able men Johnson had brought in for his White House staff—men like Valenti, the former Texas adman; Walter Jenkins, the first-among-equals aide of long standing; Bill Moyers, the polished twenty-nine-year-old Texan who, since Dallas, had never been far from Johnson’s sight. These men, the press noted, had designed their lives so they could do their boss’s bidding at all times. They’d learned it was best not to lunch outside the White House, lest they look up
from their meals to find an alarmed maître d’ rushing over to alert them to the very important person calling on the phone. They installed telephones beside their beds. In time, they would receive special cars with radio-phones so that there would never be a minute when they were out of reach. “
The LBJ phone calls would catch people in the most intimate circumstances,” Johnson aide Liz Carpenter would later write. “Shaving, bathing, pulling a new girdle over the knee-bones.… Suffice it to say that my husband more than once shouted into the night, ‘I don’t care if he is President of the United States! Does he have to butt into
everything?’
 ”

Just about. After a photo op in the White House Treaty Room, Johnson asked the assembled reporters if they’d care to walk back to the West Wing with him. Soon they found themselves on an impromptu tour of the residence, following him into the quiet splendor of the Queen’s and Lincoln bedrooms. This was unknown territory. Jackie Kennedy had allowed reporters into the residence only on special occasions, during which every step had been carefully stage-managed. Now things felt considerably more ad hoc. “
Isn’t that bed a little short for you?” a reporter asked Johnson. “I don’t know,” the president replied. “I haven’t slept in it.”

At least not yet. If he had his way, it seemed, the new occupant of the White House would ruffle every bedspread in the residence, stamp on every piece of grass on the White House lawn, and personally inspect every piece of state silver.

And, most important, sign every bill he could get the Congress to pass. For Johnson, there was no more pressing task than proving he could get the Congress to act. Only by getting the Kennedy bills out of the Congress could his new story start to look real. The press profiles that December invariably described the new president as a master legislator, just as they invariably noted that most of the Kennedy program had been hopelessly stalled on Capitol Hill for the better part of a year. “
We shall be wrong … if we look upon the Kennedy program as if they were an architect’s plans for a building which is begun but only partly completed,” Walter Lippmann wrote
on December 3. “The truth is that Johnson has suddenly become president at a time of deadlock and standstill.…”

If Johnson didn’t do something, fast, the whole mood of rapid reanimation in the country would be at risk. He spent December signing bills, puffing them up with all the drama of his office. He held grand White House signing ceremonies for billion-dollar bills subsidizing college construction, vocational training, and the fight against air pollution. He’d ostentatiously hand out pens marked “President of the United States—The White House” to grinning members of Congress. (“
You’re the
y
in Lyndon,” he told one senator.) “Altogether,”
Newsweek
noted just before Christmas, “
the President used and gave away 169 pens (cost $177.45) last week and dispensed more energy than a man half his age of 55.”

In exchange for those pens, he got that most valuable commodity for a president: momentum. Every new bill that Johnson signed in Kennedy’s name made Johnson look like more of a winner, easing the way for an even easier victory to come. Opposition was nearly nonexistent, so determined was the country to join in the spirit of moving on. The conservative intellectual William F. Buckley was a rare voice of dismay: “
Are we now being emotionally stampeded into believing that Kennedy was the incarnation … and that respect for him requires that we treat his program like the laws of the Medes and the Persians?”

But Johnson knew that the biggest prize—passage of Kennedy’s civil rights bill—would not come nearly so easily. Over Thanksgiving, Johnson had asked Larry O’Brien, Kennedy’s chief vote counter, about the prospects of the civil rights bill. O’Brien delivered a bleak report. The bill was stuck in the House Rules Committee, thanks to the committee’s obstinate chairman, Howard Smith of Virginia. The White House would have to break a coalition of conservative Southern Democrats and Northern Republicans to get it out. Johnson advised a strong public campaign of moral pressure against the GOP. “Say to the Republicans,
you’re either the party of Lincoln or you ain’t.”

The message from the administration was simple: this time would be different, this civil rights bill wasn’t going away. Johnson pressed the point in the most personal of ways. On December 7, he greeted Dick Russell at the White House. Throughout the difficult period of transition Johnson had leaned on his old mentor for counsel. (“
Nobody ever has been more to me than you have, Dick, except my mother,” he reminded the distinguished Georgian on the twenty-ninth of November.) But now, when Russell appeared at the White House, Johnson greeted him as an adversary.

“
I’m not going to cavil and I’m not going to compromise,” Johnson told the senator. “I’m going to pass it just as it is, Dick, and if you get in my way, I’m going to run you down. I just want you to know that, because I care about you.”

“Mr. President, you may be right,” Russell replied, coolly. “But if you do run over me, it will not only cost you the South, it will cost you the election.”

For Johnson, though, Russell was a more potent reminder of the danger he faced if he
didn’t
secure a victory on civil rights. The Georgian’s devotion to segregation had come at the expense of his own ambitions for the White House. “
If Dick Russell hadn’t had to wear Jim Crow’s collar,” Johnson told an aide in the early days of his presidency, “Dick Russell would be sitting here now instead of me.”

But Johnson was the one who was president. And as he looked to the new year that last week in December at the LBJ Ranch, he knew the challenge still facing him. He had to convince the country he was not just moving quickly, but moving toward great things.

A
S PROMISED, TWO
days after Christmas, the national press corps reappeared at the ranch for the barbecue with the First Family. This time, Lady Bird was ready to play the gracious hostess. After the reporters arrived, she joined them on a school bus for a guided tour of the ranch. She told the story of Lyndon’s brave and illustrious forebears, the ranchers who had settled the Hill Country, how Lyndon’s
grandfather had settled there after the Civil War and how in time his children and grandchildren had taken over the land. She drew a link from this proud heritage straight to her husband and herself—in 1951 they had bought and renovated what became the LBJ Ranch from a Johnson aunt. “
You enjoy talking about what you love,” she later told her diary, “and I love this place.”

Even if she hadn’t enjoyed talking about it, of course, she would have done it all the same. Nearly every day in her twenty-nine years of marriage, Lady Bird had worked to understand her husband’s needs and help however she could. Now was no exception: she would do her part to make sure her husband’s new story took hold. She was diligent about it: “
I keep reminding myself of Lyndon, for whom it is hardest of all to carry on,” she told her diary in early December. “I find myself repeating that ‘new resolve,’ which he urged on all of us last week in his speech to Congress.”

Lady Bird understood better than anyone else in the nation that whatever the people on television were saying, whatever she and her husband
wanted
them to say, the transition in the White House had in fact been far from seamless. A day after the funeral, Lady Bird had arrived at the mansion for a visit with Jackie Kennedy to discuss what life in the White House would be like. She found the widow to be “
orderly, composed and radiating her particular sort of aliveness and charm and warmth.” She marveled as Jackie showed her around, remarking over the trompe-l’oeils in Jackie’s sitting room—“one of the most exquisite rooms I have ever seen”—and the Cézannes hanging on the wall. Still, at times the darkness crept in. Lady Bird noticed the boots that had been in the stirrups of Black Jack, the funeral procession’s riderless horse, on a table in the Yellow Oval Room. “Don’t be frightened of this house,” Jackie told her, sounding rather like a departing mistress at the outset of a gothic tale.

That evening, Lady Bird returned to The Elms, crestfallen. Looking around at the home she had made for her family, she spoke of how much she’d miss it. It was a much more comfortable house than the White House would ever be.

In thirty years of politics, she’d endured her share of uncomfortable homes. Shortly after marrying Lyndon in 1934, she’d arrived in Washington to find that they would live in a dreary bedroom in the dingy Dodge Hotel. It was a tiny, unpleasant nest, but not so tiny as to prevent Lyndon from filling it with young congressional aides, blustering on at all hours of the day and night.

The undulations of Lyndon’s advancing career would take the Johnsons to
ten different homes in the next eight years of their marriage. Lady Bird suffered through the constant upheaval. Finally, in 1942,
the Johnsons purchased a two-story colonial on Thirtieth Place in the sleepy outer reaches of Northwest Washington. Having at last a space of her own, she’d looked forward to taking her time decorating. But Lyndon Johnson had never taken his time with much of anything, and he quickly grew impatient with the empty rooms.
Seized by impulse one day, he found a furniture auction and, all at once, bought an entire house’s worth of Victorian furniture. In fact, he’d bought enough to fill a much larger home, leaving the home to sink under the weight of its own decor.