Landslide (2 page)

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.

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.