Landslide (35 page)

Of perhaps even greater significance, Johnson’s Democratic Party had also won the largest majorities in both houses of Congress of any time since FDR, picking up thirty-six seats in the House. In the Senate, the party retained a two-thirds majority, large enough that if (and it was a big “if”) Johnson could maintain an alliance between Southern conservatives and Northern liberals, there would be a filibuster-proof path for any legislation the president put forward. The incoming class of Democratic senators would include Bobby Kennedy, whose 53.5 percent of the vote in New York paled behind Johnson’s 68.5 percent. (“
Listen, I pulled you through up here,” Bobby self-consciously joked to Johnson in an election night call.) Of twenty-five governor’s races that year, the Republicans managed to win only eight.

It seemed clear that the public had rejected the conservative worldview, completely and perhaps forever. In the press, columnists and scholars competed for who could be more over-the-top in their
predictions of the long liberal era to come. “
Barry Goldwater not only lost the presidential election,” Scotty Reston wrote the next day, “but the conservative cause as well.” In
Newsweek
, the columnist Kenneth Crawford quoted a “Dixie politician” saying that Goldwater’s Deep South route would prove “a one-shot affair” driven by bad blood over the civil rights betrayal. “They were spitting in Johnson’s beer. Now they’ve got that out of their system.” “By every test we have,” said the historian James MacGregor Burns, “this is as surely a liberal epoch as the 19th century was a conservative one.”

Goldwater’s running mate, Bill Miller, saw a more prosaic reality at work: “
The American people were not prepared to assassinate two Presidents within a year.”

Johnson read press accounts of his triumph with relish.
Jack Valenti prepared a packet of postmortems, with selected passages underlined that he thought the president would particularly appreciate:

“J,” Johnson scrawled on the memo, “thanks much—excellent idea L.”

In his postelection messages, Johnson urged unity in the country. But he had a very definite idea of what the country was unifying behind. In his moment of personal triumph, he clung tight to the vision of glory he had promised to his nation. Indeed, he suggested that his promise would soon be fulfilled. In the days after the election,
he set his aides to work, drafting bills to pass in his first days in office in order to bring his Great Society vision to life. On December 18, he appeared triumphant on the Ellipse outside the White House for the lighting of the Christmas tree. The temperature was below freezing, but in the fashion of the Kennedys, he wore no hat or coat. That year’s tree, a two-ton Adirondack, the largest in the history of the White House, sparkled with 7,500 lights. Just before he and Lady Bird pushed the button to illuminate them, the president expressed unbounded optimism for the coming year, 1965.

“
These are the most hopeful times,” he cried, “since Christ was born in Bethlehem.”

“I don’t see any way of winning”: By mid-1965, Johnson (shown in the Cabinet Room with Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara) had grown deeply pessimistic about the war in Vietnam.
©
Yoichi Okamoto/LBJ Library

At nearly half past two in the morning on Saturday, January 23, 1965, a Navy ambulance pulled away from the South Portico of the White House. Escorted by a Secret Service motorcade, it headed north toward Bethesda Naval Hospital, speeding along streets lined with dirty slush, through a slumbering city that was unaware of the ambulance or its patient.
Seated inside, in a robe and pajamas, was an ailing president of the United States.

Three nights earlier, the night of his inauguration, a triumphant Lyndon Johnson had stayed up late celebrating.
At a ball at the Mayflower Hotel, he had danced exuberantly, exchanging partner after partner, nine of them in thirteen minutes. At one point he’d coaxed Harry Truman’s daughter, Margaret Truman Daniel, over the rail of her observer’s box down onto the dance floor. He took her on his arm and they flitted across the floor gaily. The band played “I’ve Got the World on a String.”

The temperature had been just above freezing when Johnson delivered his inaugural address. The grounds of the Capitol were flooded in a persistent chill wind.
At his brother’s grave at Arlington, where he fled after Johnson’s speech, Bobby Kennedy knelt to grab a fistful of snow. But Johnson had insisted on passing the long day outside without a coat or hat. On Friday, two days later, he could feel a distinct pain in his throat.

By evening he was stricken with illness and he went to bed without dinner. The private quarters of the mansion were uncommonly quiet. Lady Bird had been feeling unwell herself that morning. She had left for Camp David lest she infect the president. From the residence, Johnson summoned the White House physician, complaining to him of a cough and chest pains. The doctor inspected his patient and told him not to worry. It was merely a cold, one that could be treated with aspirin and cough syrup.

The doctor left Johnson to get some rest. But the president could not sleep. There was nothing he hated so much as a night spent alone. Normally, when Lady Bird traveled, he would ask friends to stay in her bedroom, making them promise to leave their door open and listen for cries in the night. But Lynda, also sick, had accompanied her mother to Camp David, and Luci was out on a date. Even Jack Valenti had left on a late flight to New York for an evening out with his wife. Johnson was totally, horribly alone. As the agonizing, lonely minutes slumped onward, he felt a fever taking hold.

Eventually, he summoned the doctor back. When the physician arrived, a worried Johnson explained that his condition was deteriorating. The doctor didn’t want to take any chances; he suggested hospitalization. By three o’clock that morning, Johnson was in Bethesda’s seventeenth-floor VIP suite.

Hours later, the city woke to the news of the president’s illness and panic blossomed everywhere. Press secretary George Reedy was ready with quick reassurances—Johnson was in no danger, he had only gone to the hospital out of an abundance of caution, he had
walked
out of the White House into the ambulance and through the front door of Bethesda. But the press pack remained skeptical. Kennedy’s assassination was still fresh in their minds. Johnson’s room at Bethesda was in the same suite where Jackie Kennedy had received friends and family while she waited out the long hours of her husband’s autopsy. And many reporters could remember the myriad health crises President Eisenhower had suffered when early, optimistic assurances from aides and doctors always masked a far more grim reality.

Now, too, the reporters had reason to be suspicious.
Briefing the press on the president’s health earlier that month, Johnson’s physician had asserted that the president enjoyed an occasional bourbon and branch water, was able to relax easily, and only “infrequently” was forced to postpone his regular bedtime on account of work. This rosy account struck the press corps as vaguely ridiculous. (For one thing,
Newsweek
noted, Johnson’s drink was “
not bourbon but Scotch.”) They shrugged off Reedy’s happy talk and covered the initial hours of Johnson’s illness as a crisis. They turned the Naval Hospital’s movie theater into a makeshift newsroom. The networks broke in for special bulletins throughout Saturday morning’s broadcasts.

As soon as Lyndon had arrived at the hospital, he’d called Lady Bird at Camp David. By the following afternoon,
the First Lady had come back and checked herself in to the hospital, too. Ostensibly she was there to seek treatment for her own head cold. Really she was there to make sure her husband was all right.

She always went to Lyndon when he was ailing, to tend his illness and contain his mood.
In the late spring of 1948, just as he was launching his campaign for the Senate against former Texas governor Coke Stevenson, Lyndon had felt the staggering pain of a kidney stone. At first he chose to ignore it and kept campaigning full tilt. It was a poor decision, one that resulted in a ghastly, fevered ride on an overnight train, an infection, and eventually an emergency hospitalization in Dallas, where he learned that he would probably have to undergo surgery followed by a long period of recovery. Worse, news of his condition had reached the press. He grew despondent as he considered the implications for his race.
He told Warren Woodward, a campaign aide, to take down a statement announcing he was dropping out. Stunned, Woodward ventured that perhaps the president ought to wait for Mrs. Johnson. She would want to be present for her husband’s withdrawal.

In a panic, the aide bolted for the airport to fetch Lady Bird, who, on news of Lyndon’s hospitalization, had jumped on a flight
from Austin. Driving her to the hospital, Woodward gave a frantic account of Lyndon’s mood and his dramatic declaration. Woodward would tell Jan Jarboe Russell years later that Lady Bird had listened coolly. “
Settled in her seat,” she “told me to relax, that she would take care of it.” Sure enough, not long after arriving at the hospital, Lady Bird emerged from Lyndon’s room with the news that all was well. There would be no withdrawal.

It was much the same seven years later in 1955, when Lyndon suffered a massive heart attack on a friend’s plantation in Middleburg, Virginia. At Bethesda Naval Hospital, Lady Bird found her husband, who, for the sake of time, had been rushed in from Middleburg in an undertaker’s hearse. Lyndon, who had always feared an early death from a heart attack, was talking as though the end had surely come. He told Lady Bird that he’d seen a tailor that morning to be fitted for two suits, one blue and one brown. “
Tell him to go ahead with the blue,” Lyndon said. “We can use that no matter what happens.” As her husband headed to surgery, Lady Bird insisted on calm. “Honey,” she said, “
everything will be all right.”

So although she herself was still ill and exhausted, when she arrived at Bethesda, she checked on Lyndon straightaway. She found that this time everything was in fact all right. Indeed, Lyndon was trying to do some soothing himself. He had invited four reporters to visit him shortly after noon on the seventeenth floor. There they found the president of the United States leaning over on his elbow so he could get his face close to a vaporizer. “
I think we’ll be all right in a day or two,” he told the reporters. “It may just be a bug that all of you get.” The reporters could see pain in the president’s face when he coughed, but he assured them the situation wasn’t serious. “
I wouldn’t hesitate at all to put on my britches now and go back to the office if something had to be done. But it is Saturday and a good day to rest.”

In time, it became clear that the president really was just suffering from a bronchial infection.
“By evening,”
The New York Times
reported, “concern about the president’s health had subsided.”
Reedy, briefing reporters that evening, not so subtly underscored that there was no hidden heart attack.
He had seen the president only moments before, he told them, enjoying a steak sandwich.

Johnson’s doctor told the press he’d advised the president to stay in the hospital for five days of recuperation. Johnson lasted three. Discharged on the afternoon of January 26, he insisted on walking out of Bethesda on his own two feet. He did agree, though, to put on a coat and hat.
When reporters asked how he was feeling, he winked at them but did not speak. A UPI photographer snapped a photo of the Johnsons leaving Bethesda that ran across several columns in the next day’s
New York Times
. It was not an entirely comforting image. The president’s face looked drained, gray, and thin. The circles under his eyes drooped deeper, making his whole face seem longer and hollowed out. But the First Lady was a truly arresting sight. Dressed in black, Lady Bird had her eyes fixed on her husband. She seemed pained, clearly holding back anguish—or fear.