Landslide (31 page)

On this particular autumn night, however, Jenkins was able to make an unmolested escape. The president, fully engrossed in the fall campaign, was busy barnstorming the Midwest. Mrs. Johnson, too, was away, off on a campaign railway tour of the South. Leaving
word with his secretary that he would be back later that evening, Jenkins headed out into the cool fall air.

Johnson watches election returns at Austin’s Driskill Hotel, November 3, 1964.
©
Cecil Stoughton/LBJ Library

It was a good thing, that October, for Johnson men to get out, to be seen at Washington parties. With just weeks to go before the election, the president was soaring far above Goldwater in the polls. Hungry for the appearance of inevitability, his aides were projecting total confidence. What better way to demonstrate their favored position than to have Johnson lieutenants chatting away at Washington parties as if they had nothing more pressing to do?

You could see that same Johnson assurance on television, in campaign advertisements for the president scattered across the airwaves. Johnson’s face was everywhere—serious, responsible,
presidential
. Long gone was the cautious delicacy the Johnson aides had exercised in the first hours of his presidency. Gone, even, was the old story of those hours, replaced with a new one more to Johnson’s liking.
One campaign advertisement, fittingly titled “Johnson Accomplishments,” reordered the awful events of the previous fall. It began with the familiar image of Air Force One landing at Andrews Air Force Base on that terrible night. But what came next was new. There was no shot of the coffin of John F. Kennedy being carried off the plane; no widow centering the camera as she followed behind; no Bobby Kennedy looking on. All of that had been excised. Instead, viewers saw only the Johnsons coming down from Air Force One. In this story, the president coming off the plane was alive, not dead. He climbed aboard the presidential helicopter, leaving Andrews behind. In the air, he journeyed five days forward in time, skipping neatly over the murder of Lee Oswald and Jackie Kennedy’s passion play. The story skipped straight to Johnson in the Capitol, delivering his “Let us continue!” message of resolve.

An announcer narrated: “The promises made that November day were strong promises. One by one they have been kept …”

The ad ended with a close-up on the back of the president’s Cabinet Room chair. It bore the insignia
THE PRESIDENT, NOVEMBER 22, 1963
. And when the camera pulled back to reveal the chair’s occupant,
Lyndon Johnson, even those words seemed to have a new meaning. In this story, November 22, 1963, was not the day the Kennedy presidency ended but the day the Johnson presidency began.

“Vote for President Johnson on November 3,” said the announcer. “The stakes are too high for you to stay home.”

The ad did not explicitly state what those stakes were. It didn’t have to, for they were thoroughly explicated elsewhere in the fall campaign.
In early September, Americans watching NBC’s
Monday Night at the Movies
saw another ad, an ad that would air only once but that would define Johnson’s campaign for the voters in 1964. This commercial, known as “Daisy,” was so memorable that five decades later, it remains the best-known political advertisement in the history of American television. A little girl pulls petals from a daisy, counting each one as she goes. When she gets to “nine” her words are overtaken by a stern male voice coming over an amplifier, counting down “nine, eight, seven …” As the countdown approaches one, the camera zooms into the pupil of the little girl’s eye until the screen is filled with darkness. From this darkness erupts the fiery mushroom cloud of a massive nuclear explosion. Then comes Johnson’s voice: “These are the stakes: to make a world in which all of God’s children can live or to go into the dark. We must either love each other, or we must die.” The advertisement ended with the familiar refrain: “Vote for President Johnson on November 3. The stakes are too high for you to stay home.”

An enormous audience—perhaps as many as 50 million people—saw “Daisy” on TV that night. Most were shocked by what they saw.
Even the parents of the little girl picking the daisy petals were surprised. They had taken their daughter to shoot a scene for a commercial for an undisclosed client. No one had told them what their daughter would be selling: the possibility of her own annihilation, along with that of the rest of the human race. Many viewers thought the ad far outside the bounds of good taste. Angry callers jammed the White House switchboard. Noting the public reaction, the campaign did not air the ad again.

It didn’t have to. All that “Daisy” had done, in its particularly memorable fashion, was the same thing Johnson had done when kicking off his fall campaign in a rally at Detroit’s Cadillac Square. “
I am not the first president to speak here,” the president told the crowd, “and I do not intend to be the last.” It was the same thing just about every communication from the Johnson campaign sought to do: to take an already anxious electorate and ensure that when it thought of Goldwater, it got so scared so quickly that it didn’t want to think about him ever again. “
FACT,” wrote Jack Valenti in a blunt memo to the president on September 7. “Our main strength lies not so much in the FOR Johnson but in the AGAINST Goldwater.… We must make him ridiculous and a little scary: trigger-happy, a bomb thrower, a radical … not the Nation’s leader, will sell TVA, cancel Social Security, abolish the government, stir trouble in NATO, be the herald of World War III.”
In a memo to the DNC, Bill Moyers laid out the Democrats’ central message: “He
could
do these things—but only if we let him. Vote for President Johnson on November 3. The stakes are too high to stay home.”

Through September and the early weeks of October, the Johnson campaign jammed the airwaves with that message. Another ad, “
Confessions of a Republican,” showed a neatly dressed man smoking a cigarette, looking unsettled, as though even by talking about Goldwater he was inviting some sort of danger. “But when we come to Senator Goldwater,” he said, “this man scares me … President Johnson—now, Johnson, at least, is talking about facts.” Thus the stripped-down message of the president’s campaign: “Goldwater scares me!… Johnson, at least … But Goldwater!” It was not inspiring stuff, but it was remarkably effective. By the end of September, polls showed Johnson beating Goldwater by as much as thirty points.

Goldwater continued to be the Johnson campaign’s best surrogate. When he attempted to soften his image, he ended up sounding even less appealing. Sucking up to peanut farmers on the campaign trail, he declared himself “
probably the most violent advocate of
peanut butter in history. On a dare from my son, I even shaved with it once, and it was all right, except that it smelled.”

The press, growing bored with the hapless Republican candidate, tried out new terms—“
frontlash” for Republicans abandoning Goldwater for the Democrats—and strained for ever more macho metaphors to describe the president’s triumphs. In
Newsweek
, Johnson was “
this big, booming, leonine Texan, this Paul Bunyan of politicians … gobbl[ing] up cities, crowds, distances, and issues with the uninhibited relish of a cormorant at a smorgasbord. He oozed restraint, responsibility, and reason at every pore—and he exuded confidence like a rooster in a henhouse.”

Outwardly, Johnson seemed to glory in his triumph. Through the fall, he continually frustrated the Secret Service as he plowed into crowds. Some presidents seeking reelection recoil from hand-to-hand politics, finding it drains them of life. But Johnson’s validation, and thus his strength, came only from other people. A crowd was an endless feast. “
He needed contact with people,” said his secretary, Marie Fehmer. For Johnson, tactile campaigning “was like a B-12 shot.”

But in Johnson, blissful ecstasy and crushing anxiety were never far apart. He could feed his hunger for affirmation all day long. After a certain point, he would start craving things to fear.

And fear was surprisingly easy to find in that fall’s campaign. When a political candidate is sitting on a comfortable lead in the polls, the final weeks in the election are like a sleepless night in an old, empty house. Time stands still while stray sounds and unaccountable movements gnaw at the nervous mind. Rational adults grow deeply superstitious; responsible professionals become haunted by the memories of races that seemed like sure things—and then weren’t. Everyone obsesses over any small signal that the public mood could be heading for a dramatic shift.

And so, like many campaigns enjoying fabulous success from a negative advertising push, the Johnson camp began to worry that they were being too negative, that they had not said enough about
what Johnson was
for
.
People respected Johnson’s performance, his aide Horace Busby told him that fall. But there was danger in the fact that “people don’t fully know this man whose performance they respect.”

This was a notion that had been floating around the Johnson campaign for some time. The polling after Johnson’s convention acceptance speech had been unimpressive. “
There was nothing in particular that people
disliked
about the speech,” reported the campaign adviser Robert T. Bower, but “there was no central focus for the favorable response. The reaction, in sum, was one of moderate undifferentiated approval.”

As the campaign entered its final weeks, Johnson and his aides projected total confidence to the outside world, shaking hands and attending parties and acting as though they intended to remain fixtures in the Washington swirl for some time to come. But internally, they launched an intense debate over how they might be more specific about what electing Johnson would mean, what kind of mandate an elected Johnson would have. How could they make the country
really
love him at last?

Johnson’s aides debated the particulars: How specific should he get? What explicit promises should he make? But the real question was for Johnson alone: What kind of president did he want to be?

It was a new sort of problem for Lyndon Johnson. All his life, he had found his way out of difficult situations by determining what people wanted and then convincing them that he was the best one to provide it. Then he’d go ahead and provide it, even if the providing meant walking the narrowest of paths. But the abundance of his electoral opportunity created an altogether new kind of challenge. There was no narrow path in front of him. There was no path at all. He had to create it. He had to decide what he wanted, and to try, like Kennedy and FDR before him, to persuade the nation to come along.

For Lyndon Johnson, this would have seemed the most frightening proposition of all. He had the opportunity, with his comfortable lead, to tell his people how things really were in America, and how
things might get better from there. But to do so, he would have to turn the same realism on himself: to be not the president people wanted, but the president he really was. And that would mean risk: the risk that once they saw him, they would not want him at all.

F
EW PEOPLE WERE
as intimately familiar with the debate within the Johnson campaign—or any debate concerning the interests of Lyndon Johnson—as was Walter Jenkins. His title—special assistant to the president—was one of those opaque Washington designations. But Jenkins was indeed special. For nearly twenty-five years, he had been Johnson’s keeper of the guard. He could listen to just about any Johnson phone call, give an order to just about any Johnson aide, and read just about any piece of paper headed to or from Johnson’s desk. No one was closer to the president. Johnson once called Jenkins “
my vice president in charge of everything.”

That evening in early October, four weeks before the election, the vice president in charge of everything attended the
Newsweek
party in the company of his wife, Marjorie. Jenkins was a proud family man; he and Marjorie had six children. But Mrs. Jenkins had learned early on that their family would have to sacrifice much in the service of Lyndon Johnson. She and Walter were married in 1945. Three days into their honeymoon, a call came from a certain congressman in Washington. “
I need you badly,” said Johnson. “Can’t you cut it short?” By the time her husband hung up the telephone, Marjorie’s honeymoon was over.

In time, Marjorie would grow friendly with Lady Bird, and her children would grow up alongside the Johnson girls. When the period of mourning for President Kennedy made it impossible to celebrate Lady Bird’s first birthday as First Lady in the White House,
the Jenkinses offered up their own home as an alternative locale. They named a young son Lyndon. They were Johnson people through and through.

Now these two Johnson people made their way through the
Newsweek
party. Walter did not possess flawless social graces. But
in the brutal thrust of a Washington cocktail party, a man had to use whatever assets he could muster.

Alcohol helped. The room was filled with the well groomed, the wellborn, and the well-positioned. Jenkins clutched a martini glass in his hand.