Landslide (21 page)

The point was not lost on Reston. He could see that there would be more to the Johnson presidency than pragmatism and continuity. President Johnson intended to use his office to solve the biggest problems, to do the biggest things.

Soon it was time for the group to depart the ranch. But moments before he was to get into his helicopter, Johnson held the party up. That morning, during the drive around the area, he had noticed that a nearby patch of land was for sale. It was a parcel that, if absorbed, would increase the acreage of the LBJ Ranch. As soon as he saw it, Johnson knew that he wanted it. He sent a ranch hand to inquire about the price. As the rest of his party waited, Johnson gave instructions for a negotiation. Before long, the land was his.

Satisfied, Johnson stepped onto his helicopter and headed to Austin, then on to Washington and the wider world. Like his proud ancestors, he was ready for greatness. And like his father before him, he wanted a bigger ranch.

Reagan at the 1964 Republican Convention.
©
Bettmann/CORBIS

In mid-February 1964, the Young Republicans of California gathered in a San Diego ballroom for a banquet at their annual convention. On the surface, they looked pleasant enough, clean-faced and closely cropped. But the faces in the crowd were mostly male, and some were not far beyond adolescence. Rage was always near at hand.

Standing in front of them as the evening’s featured speaker, Ronald Reagan knew what they wanted: a confident voice to affirm the outrage they felt. And he was the one to give it to them.

For months, the press had been filled with saintly remembrances of President Kennedy and laudatory praise for his successor, Lyndon Johnson. All the wise men in Washington agreed that the new president had done a remarkable job of continuing the work of his predecessor, of seamlessly picking up where President Kennedy had left off. That, Reagan’s comments suggested, was precisely the problem, a problem worthy of outrage. The work of Kennedy and Johnson was a policy of appeasement and capitulation.
A policy of “staving off a direct confrontation with our enemies” in the hope that “Russia eventually will grow to be more democratic, more like us.”

The tragedy of this delusion, Reagan said, was “
that it doesn’t
give us the choice between peace and war, only between fight and surrender.”

In the hours before Reagan’s speech, these young Republicans had been turning their rage on each other. At the convention, they had been waging fratricidal war, tearing themselves to pieces over a pair of hypotheticals—an endorsement they
might
give to someone who
might
win that year’s Republican nomination for the presidency. It was still weeks before the nation’s first primary voters would go to the polls in New Hampshire, months before the voters of California would have a primary of their own. But a majority of these young Republicans, supporters of the conservative standard-bearer Barry Goldwater, were already vowing to withhold their endorsement should the party’s nomination go to Nelson Rockefeller or another moderate Eastern Kennedy-Johnson knockoff, traitor to the cause.

But from the front of the room, these squabbles in the crowd, even the crowd itself, were probably all a blur. Reagan never looked too closely at his audiences. Since childhood, he’d been frightfully nearsighted.
His parents paid for thick eyeglasses, which he wore dutifully, but without them, his visible world was mostly blotches of color and drifting shapes. He had adapted without much questioning, the way that children can, forgoing baseball for football, a sport in which you didn’t have to see well enough to hit a tiny ball, only well enough to hit another player.

He’d started his show business career on radio, where his audience was invisible. At the audition for his first job at the Davenport, Iowa, station WOC, the Scottish-born program director had explained how things worked. “
That’s the mike in front of ye,” he said. “Ye won’t be able to see me but I’ll be listenin’. Good luck.”

In Hollywood, too, seeing had never been that important. Arriving in Southern California in the late 1930s, he’d looked up Joy Hodges, an acquaintance from back home who was working as an actress in the film colony. “
I have visions of becoming an actor,” he confessed to her. “What I really want is a screen test.” Hodges looked
at the man in front of her—dressed like the Midwest, unsophisticated in the ways of the world, but tall, broad-shouldered, and undeniably handsome. “
I think I might be able to fix something,” she said. “Just don’t ever put those glasses on again.”

So he’d learned to get by without seeing things too closely. In time, it became the habit of his life. Eventually, he’d gotten contact lenses. Though they could correct his vision, their effect was strangely limited.
His children, rushing into a room at day’s end to greet their father, would find him looking puzzled, as if they were strangers.
Have we met?
It was as if, after all the years of seeing ill-defined blotches, the part of his brain that processed the particulars of a person’s face had corroded irreparably due to lack of use. Or maybe it had never been there at all. Once, at his son Michael’s high school graduation, where he was the commencement speaker, he’d greeted a line of graduates. “
My name is Ronald Reagan,” he said to a grinning boy in cap and gown. “What’s yours?” The graduate removed his cap. “Remember me? I’m your son Mike.”

When he spoke to large audiences, he didn’t focus on the faces before him. Years later, after he’d become a national politician, his aides persuaded him to use a teleprompter. He’d always preferred note cards, filled with his shorthand block writing. But he was not afraid to improve his performance, and he accepted the new technology.
Just before going onstage, he would remove the contact lens from his right eye. From the corrected left eye, he read the words from the moving monitor. With his right eye, the one without the lens, he looked at the crowd. He wanted to look at his audience, but he did not want too much detail. Seeing their faces was not important.

What mattered was knowing,
feeling
, just exactly what they wanted most. This was Reagan’s great gift. Over the past decade, in his role as GE spokesman, he’d spent countless hours traveling the country. Each day brought a new blur of strangers, more than two hundred thousand of them over the eight years he’d spent in the job.
To get a good reception from these anonymous crowds, he’d learned to intuit quickly who they were and what they longed for—and what they feared.

He didn’t have to focus much on the faces of the seething young precinct captains and party chairs who had gathered in the banquet hall that night. He didn’t have to dwell on their internecine struggle, their endorsement contretemps. To be sure, he was a conservative and an ardent Goldwater man. He agreed that the party couldn’t afford to take a risk on one of those moderates from the East. But there had been plenty of that kind of talk already at the convention, of Republicans fighting Republicans, plenty of proclamations of Goldwaterism as the one true faith.

That wasn’t precisely what an audience like this wanted, anyway. They wanted something bigger, something deeper. What conservative crowds like this needed in the spring of 1964 was someone to affirm what they felt most deeply: that things in America had gone terribly, unmistakably wrong. They wanted someone to tell a story they could believe in, a story of a country in mortal danger, and a story of how that country could be saved.

It was a story they could not find in the establishment press. The people in the newspapers, the men on the television screens, they missed no opportunity to tell the country about the splendid job President Johnson was doing, about the broad support he was enjoying in all the polls, about the happy aura that had settled on Washington as both parties put aside their differences. In the press, Johnson quoted Isaiah: “
Come now, let us reason together.” Goldwater and his angry right-wing maniacs, the press said, had little chance of taking over their party, let alone the White House in November. They were out of touch with the most important fact of American life: that despite the horrors of last November, things in the country were going to be fine.

But the angry young people in the audience didn’t feel that way. Things in America were not fine. They weren’t fine under President
Johnson, just like they hadn’t been fine under President Kennedy, or Presidents Eisenhower, Truman, or Roosevelt, for that matter.

So Reagan gave them what they wanted. That night in San Diego, he delivered a version of the standard political speech he’d been giving in recent years. That speech was a stirring tale of an America in deep trouble, a land desperately in need of salvation before it was too late. It evoked the grandest themes: good struggling against evil, pernicious darkness trying to cover the light. Good was America and its honest, hardworking people. Evil was the totalitarian Communism of the Soviet state. This communism, he told his audiences, sought either to enslave the free world or to destroy it. And it might well succeed unless the creeping socialism of the liberals in Washington was named, condemned, and stopped.

Reagan would name it. He warned his San Diego audience of the dangerous folly of the country’s foreign aid program. America was now sending millions of dollars to some hundred and seven countries, including countries that were on the Communists’ side. As was his custom, he made his point with vivid proper nouns and precise statistics and facts:

“
Our money in Bolivia was simply a means by which the Bolivian government nationalized the economy and went socialist …

“We can’t justify foreign aid funds which went for the purchase of extra wives for some tribal chiefs in Kenya …

“Just as we can’t justify the purchase of dress suits for some undertakers in Greece.…

“Or just as we cannot justify the purchase of a two-million-dollar yacht for Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia simply by calling it a command vessel.”

All of these embarrassments were part of a broader foreign policy that was veering “
dangerously close to appeasement.” The wise men in Washington, he implied, were making the same mistakes as the men who had appeased Hitler at Munich. They wanted the country to believe that everything was fine, that the days ahead were
placid, that peace for all time was at hand. But, Reagan suggested, just as at Munich, the choice between fight and surrender was coming, far sooner than those men could see.

When he finished talking, the room filled with applause. They were all watching him.

L
ATER IN LIFE
, Reagan would give a pithy assessment of his career in Hollywood: “
I was the Errol Flynn of the Bs”—the low-budget B movies that ran as the bottom half of a double feature. Performing for the crowd in San Diego that night, he captured his audience’s imagination, worked his listeners up, and sent them home happy, just like an A-list heartthrob. But the program itself was unimpressive. In February 1964, a gathering of conservatives in Southern California, or a gathering of conservatives anywhere in America, was a B movie, little loved or seen.