Landslide (28 page)

His words crackled with resistance, the same resistance that had electrified the living rooms of Southern California. “Those who do not care for our cause we do not expect to enter our ranks in any case.” Then came the two sentences that would live with Goldwater in history: “I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice!” He paused as the crowd rose in sustained applause. “And let me remind you also: that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!” More roars as reporters watched in disbelief. Watching from a remote location, Goldwater’s chief organizer,
Clif White, turned off the television set broadcasting the speech, aware that the Goldwater general election campaign had just died in its infancy.

The nation was shocked by this display of vitriol. The press, feigning horror, was thrilled.
The New York Times
called the Goldwater show “
a disaster for the Republican Party and a blow to the prestige and to the domestic and international interests of the United States.” The broad consensus among journalists now matched Lippmann’s assessment of Goldwater. “He is
not a normal American politician who, as election approaches, is drawn toward the center. He is a radical agitator who must stay with the extremists.… The prospective nomination of Goldwater is a grave threat to the internal peace of the nation.”

From the White House, there was little overt acknowledgment of the Republican horror show. Asked that month about a Goldwater statement that “as of now,” Johnson could beat
any
Republican candidate, the president demurred. “
I think the Republican Party has
enough problems without my adding to them in any way.” Like most presidents of his era, particularly those sitting on a comfortable election year lead, Johnson strove to appear above the sordid business of a presidential campaign. “
We really won’t do any campaigning until after Labor Day,” he told House Speaker John McCormack in June. “So we’ll let them show all their hole cards and then we’ll come in and trump ’em.”

It was an act, of course. Out of the camera’s view, Johnson thought endlessly about the campaign against Goldwater. Shortly after the Republican convention, Congressman Carl Albert escaped Washington for a vacation in Canada with his wife and son. Hoping to really get away, the congressman did not leave any details of his itinerary with his office or anyone else in Washington. One night, while waiting for Mrs. Albert to get ready in their Quebec hotel room, the congressman turned on the television news. He was surprised by what he saw. “
The Canadian Royal Mounted Police are endeavoring to locate Congressman Carl Albert,” said the newscaster, “with license plate number PB827 driving a 1964 Thunderbird.… Anybody knowing anything about the whereabouts of Carl Albert will please immediately notify the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.”

Albert quickly phoned the Mounties, who informed him that they’d been running a national search for him on behalf of the White House. The president, it seemed, was desperate to reach the congressman.

“Boy, you sure are hard to find,” said Johnson when the congressman dutifully called in. “What I want you to do is be chairman of the platform committee at Atlantic City, and I need to make the announcement. I hated to bother you … but we’ve got to put this thing together right away.”

Still, a winking press corps mostly played along with the notion of above-the-fray Johnson. And so, while the Republicans argued over Goldwater proposals to abolish Social Security and sell the Tennessee Valley Authority, the president nonchalantly informed reporters
that
government estimates of deficit spending for fiscal 1964 would be $500 million
less
than previously thought.

Subtly, Johnson sought to make Goldwater the face of the unnamed, lurking fear so many in the nation felt. “
What we really want to do with Goldwater,” he told his press secretary George Reedy, shortly after the meltdown at the Cow Palace, “is … leave the impression we’re not gonna do anything to incite or inflame anybody. And let’s leave the impression he
is
, without saying so.”

A
ND SO, BY
midsummer, it was a truth universally acknowledged that Lyndon Johnson would win in November. Most likely, he would win by a large, even historic, margin. The story he had worked so hard to tell the nation—in which Johnson, with his endless energy and legislative genius, had steered the nation back on a course toward unprecedented prosperity and unimaginable greatness—had taken hold of the nation’s imagination. Washington was becoming a Johnson town again. Washingtonians assumed it would stay a Johnson town for some time, perhaps into the next decade. In Georgetown, the rebel outpost languished. Jackie Kennedy put out word in July that after only half a year in Washington, she would leave the capital to make a new home in New York.

And yet the more certain his victory became that summer—the more it seemed that there was nothing and no one who could topple him—the more Lyndon Johnson grew consumed by fear. On the phone with aides, his breathing grew heavier and louder. He complained of sleepless nights. His puzzled friends wondered if perhaps the president was in ill health.
Time
reported a rumor “
swiftly spread[ing] through the capital and its environs that Johnson, who suffered a massive heart attack in 1955, was ailing again.”

His weight, which had dropped considerably during his action-packed first months in office, now soared. An expanding Johnson waistline was always a sure sign of psychological distress. For him, food was not an indulgence but an intoxicant, an object he reached for to fill a gaping void, one that he could never fill up. At lunch
meetings in the White House, his secretary Marie Fehmer would often lay a plate of sandwiches on the table in front of him and his guests. Johnson would quickly devour the entire plate and then say to Fehmer, “I’m kind of hungry. Have you got anything to eat?” “But sir,” Fehmer would reply, “
you had a whole plate of sandwiches.” Johnson would show no recollection.

So, too, he devoured any morsel of news that seemed to suggest catastrophe was near at hand, and he’d still want more. The network newscasts on his three television screens and the papers and newsmagazines were all reliable sources of worries. There were more stories in the press that summer about senseless crime and brutal killings. There were mounting fears about the inner cities. The same week as the Republican convention, a black student was shot by police in a predominantly white section of Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Riots followed, first in Harlem, then in parts of Brooklyn and the Bronx. Days after Goldwater’s warnings about a country descending into lawlessness, the television networks showed images that suggested his vision was coming true.

For white people already on edge, the riots hit a sweet spot of anxiety—the unnamed fear that soon the poor black mobs would stop burning and looting their own neighborhoods and come for them. The riots provided the press with a vivid illustration of the fear the nation was feeling.
On its cover the following week,
Newsweek
showed three grim black faces above the headline “
HARLEM: HATRED IN THE STREETS
.” That was the establishment press consensus: it was hatred, deep and irrational—not a racist police force or employment discrimination or substandard housing and schools—that had caused these mobs to riot and loot.

A new word, “backlash,” was appearing in the press. The pollster Lewis Harris explained that white ethnics in Northern cities would be particularly susceptible to this phenomenon. By a two-to-one margin, these voters “
feel that most Negroes want to take jobs held by whites.”
Fertile territory for resentment could also be found in the suburbs, where whites “tend to feel that the pace of civil rights
is too fast” and “that Negroes are getting ‘too uppity for their own good.’ ”

Johnson lapped up these kinds of dispatches. He was quick to imagine the worst. “
If we aren’t careful,” he told Reedy, “we’re just gonna be presiding over a country that’s so badly split-up that they’ll vote for anybody that isn’t us.” When Goldwater requested a White House meeting to discuss responses to the riots, Johnson begrudgingly agreed, but he was paranoid about the outcome. “
He wants to use this as a forum,” Johnson told John Connally. “He wants to encourage a backlash. That’s where his future is. It’s not in peace and harmony.” The president gorged on conspiracy theories. He hoarded rumors that the Texas oilman H. L. Hunt was funding the riots, trying to get the backlash started. Hoover fed him morsels suggesting Communist agitation was to blame. “
Hell, these folks have got walkie-talkies,” Johnson told John Connally, speaking of the riots. “Somebody’s financing them big.”

But though it could fuel hours of nervous chatter in White House meetings that summer, the politics of backlash was still too hazy to be a real threat. Fear and resentment in the white American mind were still too removed from its rational decision-making regions to change votes. White Americans in the summer of 1964, looking objectively at their situation, could see that their quality of life was just as Johnson’s story had it: quite good, indeed better than it had ever been before. They could stare all they wanted at the horizon, but the black mob was not coming. The looting in the inner cities was happening in black neighborhoods, not white ones. Not yet. “
The white backlash itself exists,” Harris wrote that summer in
Newsweek
, “lurking more or less menacingly in the background, but it is not yet a major force in the land.”

Not major enough to sate Johnson’s hunger for fear. And besides, “backlash” was too abstract a concept to embody the anxiety that Johnson felt. He understood the world in human terms. The greatest prize he could imagine was human: winning the votes and the admiring eyes of as many Americans as possible. So, too, his
greatest fear had to take human form. Goldwater, hapless and hopeless, was not terrible enough. Johnson needed a man more worthy of his growing worry. That man, once again, would be the attorney general of the United States.

A
FTER THE DEBACLE
at the Cow Palace, the press had one final chance at drama in the odd political year of 1964: the mystery of who would fill out the Democratic ticket as Johnson’s running mate. The logical choices were Minnesota’s two senators, Hubert Humphrey and Eugene McCarthy. But as is often the case, the prospect the press found most exciting was the least likely one. As summer wore on, Washington grew obsessed with the question of whether Johnson’s running mate would be Bobby Kennedy.

The speculation made Johnson frantic. It was the worst thing he could imagine. He devoured intelligence reports from aides that suggested Bobby was trying to enlist power brokers like Chicago mayor Richard Daley to force Bobby’s name on the ticket. In late July, Johnson told Connally he had barely slept the night before, his mind had been so preoccupied by the threat from Bobby. “
When this fellow looks at me,” Johnson said, “he looks like he’s going to look a hole through me.”

By then, the tension between the president and his attorney general had long been out in the open. Kennedy’s friends in the press had kept his constant muttering about Johnson out of print for the first months of the new administration. But the split went public in February when Paul Corbin, a freewheeling Kennedy operative in the Democratic National Committee, took the independent initiative to organize a write-in campaign for Bobby on the New Hampshire primary ballot. His goal was to secure the vice presidency for Kennedy, but Johnson, rightly, viewed the effort as a public challenge to his legitimacy.
In a tense Oval Office meeting, he demanded that Bobby remove Corbin from New Hampshire and, for that matter, from the DNC. When Bobby protested that Corbin had been a favorite of President Kennedy’s, Johnson lost his patience. “Do it,” he ordered.
“President Kennedy isn’t president any more.” Bobby was stunned by the challenge. He jabbed back: “I know you’re president, and don’t you ever talk like that to me again.”

A flurry of mutual pettiness followed. Corbin was let go. Kennedy’s friends wrote columns suggesting that Johnson was freezing out JFK’s staff in favor of his own whoop-hollering Texas posse. Johnson-friendly reporters wrote that the ego and occasionally even insubordination on the part of the Kennedy men was slowing the progress of the Kennedy-Johnson agenda. Kennedy remained Johnson’s attorney general, but the two men mostly kept their distance that spring. Johnson’s periodic attempts at reconciliation were always rebuffed.

The alienation was inevitable, for Johnson and Bobby were living in different worlds. The death of Bobby’s older brother had made him the heir to his family’s political hopes. But unlike Jack, Bobby had not been groomed to be a candidate, and he was constitutionally incapable of the empty flattery and false praise with which politicians like Johnson got others to do their daily bidding. Further on in the decade, Bobby’s raw emotion and reflexive honesty—what political professionals of a later age would call “authenticity”—would become his greatest asset. But in 1964, it mostly made for uncomfortable scenes. At one point that year, Lady Bird Johnson found herself waiting at Union Station alongside the attorney general, where they were scheduled to greet an arriving dignitary. “
We waited quite a while and he leaned over to me and said, ‘You’re doing a good job,’ ” Lady Bird would later recall. “Then there was a perceptible pause, and with what seemed like real effort he said, ‘And your husband is too.’ ”

Deeper down, Johnson and Kennedy saw the world through very different eyes. While Johnson was out promoting his wonderful visions of the American future, Bobby was still living in the darkest frontiers of grief. The journalist Murray Kempton, visiting Bobby a few months after the assassination, thought of the epitaph for the three hundred dead at Thermopylae: “
Stranger, when you see the
Lacedaemonians, tell them we lie here faithful to their orders.” The comparison inverted reality—the
living
Bobby was being faithful to orders, his brother was the one in the tomb. But that was the inverted world Bobby knew. “
I’m sure Jack liked it,” Bobby wrote to Kempton after his piece appeared.
As a belated Christmas gift for aides in the Justice Department, he gave gold cuff links inscribed “Robert Kennedy 1961–1964.” It was as though he had died on seeing the first New Year without his brother as president.