Landslide (38 page)

And that was the same president of the United States who spoke of the bright future on the first day of March. When Johnson addressed the science prizewinners and spoke of peace in their time, he echoed Neville Chamberlain because he could. Soon the bombs would be dropped. Who would dare call him an appeaser then? He was encouraging the contrast: Chamberlain had refused force and gotten war; he would use force and get his glorious peace. There was no coincidence: Vietnam would be the handmaiden of the Great Society to come.

Yet Johnson’s foreign war and his domestic ambitions were also interlinked in another, different place that spring: inside Lyndon Johnson’s fearful mind. Whenever the public Johnson attacked some great challenge, the private Johnson fixed his mind on some awful
force that might make the challenge impossible. In the summer of 1964, as he’d neared the party convention at Atlantic City, it had been Bobby Kennedy and the fractured South. In the fall, as he’d looked toward his landslide victory, it had been the threat of disgrace in the Jenkins affair. Now, as he rushed through his hundred days, within reach of the greatness to which he’d always aspired, he needed some evil force with the power to destroy it all. And in his private agony, that force had a name: Vietnam.

The truth was that for all his confident talk, for all his swaggering refusal to cower in the face of an enemy’s aggression, even by the winter of 1965 Johnson had grave doubts that the war in Vietnam could be won. He was trying to prop up the Saigon regime, but he had few illusions that Saigon would ever be able to control the country. He was ordering up bombers, but he no longer believed that bombs would persuade the North Vietnamese to come to the peace table. “
Now we’re off to bombing these people,” he told McNamara four days before the bombs began to drop. “We’re over that hurdle. I don’t think anything is going to be as bad as losing, and I don’t see any way of winning.” No chance of winning, no hope after losing. In his dark private moments, the certainty of disaster was the only certainty he could see.

That was the real split emerging in the Johnson presidency—not between Vietnam and the Great Society, but between the outward Johnson who proclaimed unmatched greatness ahead and the inward Johnson who saw despair. It was the split between the man who raced through his hundred days and the body that revolted in fevered sweats. Between the president who insisted on marching out of the hospital with a smile on his face and the First Lady who looked on in horror. Johnson was divided between two fantasies—one of utopia, the other of ruin.

In his public meetings he would wave off the dissenters—Mike Mansfield or Undersecretary of State George Ball. But in private, he had a hunger for some of the most uncomfortable aspects of the war. As the Rolling Thunder bombing mission launched in the early
morning hours of March 2, he called the White House Situation Room. “
How long before you should hear something?” he asked the duty officer. The officer told Johnson it would be 5:00 or 5:30 in the morning before they had an account of any lives lost. “Call me,” Johnson ordered.

And, in private, Johnson was willing to explore the hopelessness of the Vietnam situation in depth. A few days after the Rolling Thunder mission began, he spoke on the phone with his old mentor, Senator Russell. “
We’re going to send the Marines in to protect the Hawk battalion, the Hawk outfit at Danang,” he told Russell. “I guess we’ve got no choice, but it scares the death out of me. I think everybody’s going to think, ‘We’re landing the Marines. We’re off to battle.’ ”

“We’ve got so damn far, Mr. President,” Russell said. “It looks to me like we just got in this thing and there’s no way out.”

It was telling that Johnson chose Russell as the rare confidant for his Vietnam doubts. True, he had always looked to the Georgian for counsel in times of need. And he knew that Russell, long a skeptic of U.S. involvement in South Vietnam, could be counted on to give him hard truth. But there were deeper forces guiding their gloomy conferences. By 1965, Russell was old, tired, and defeated. His great cause, defending the white South in the Senate, was lost. His other strong passions—a restrained foreign policy abroad, the promotion of agrarian interests at home—were fading into the past. Everyone else in the capital and the country could talk about the great future that was coming. To Russell, the American future was a sad, bleak thing to behold.

And he saw that bleakness when he looked at Lyndon Johnson. Russell had once embraced Johnson as his heir, a great Southern hope in the Senate. He understood why Johnson had embraced civil rights in his presidency, but it still came as a hard blow. To colleagues, he would describe Johnson as “
a turncoat if ever there was one.” He was perhaps the only person close to Lyndon Johnson that spring who looked at the Johnson presidency and saw a great tragedy. When
he spoke to Lyndon now, he was helpful and kind. But there was a touch of sadness, too, the pain of a father whose son has traded away his inheritance.

Johnson could hear all of that in Russell’s voice. And perhaps that, too, was why he confided in him. The president had grave doubts about Vietnam. Had he engaged with William Fulbright or George Ball or Lippmann or any of the other prominent skeptics, he could have heard what he could do about those doubts, how he could get out of the war and still be all right. But perhaps that wasn’t what he needed when the darkest thoughts came. Most likely, all he wanted to hear was that it was hopeless. In his moment of greatness, while the world said he was capable of everything, he needed to hear that he was doomed.

Russell would not disappoint him. “
I don’t know, Dick,” the president went on. “The great trouble I’m under … A man can fight if he can see daylight down the road somewhere. But there ain’t no daylight in Vietnam. There’s not a bit.”

“
There’s no end to the road,” agreed the old man. “There’s just nothing.”

The true breach that spring was within Johnson himself. In public, the president worked through his hundred days, delivering his vision of greatness to the nation, talking of peace on earth. Doubts belonged to the part of himself he believed least worthy, the part he suppressed so the world would not see.

Lady Bird was one of the few people who crossed back and forth between the two sides of her husband. At dinner the night after his conversation with Russell, Johnson was still speaking in dismal tones. “
I can’t get out and I can’t finish it with what I’ve got,” he said. “I don’t know what the hell to do.” Her husband’s dark imagery crept into her diary that night: “
Lyndon lives in a cloud of troubles, with few rays of light.”

It was agony, living in the valley of the black pig. At times, a far-off future was her consolation. “
I am counting the months until March 1968 when, like Truman, it will be possible to say, ‘I don’t
want this office, this responsibility, any longer, even if you want me. Find the strongest and most able man and God bless you. Goodbye.’ ”

T
HEN, FROM THE
fog of Johnson’s dueling fantasies, reality broke through. And it summoned a kind of greatness the world had not seen from Lyndon Johnson before.

It came in an Alabama city called Selma. There, in early January 1965, two civil rights groups—the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)—had formed an uneasy alliance to launch a voting rights campaign. As with Mississippi in the summer of 1964, they had chosen their target strategically. Segregation in Selma was vivid and monstrous. It was typified by James Gardner Clark, sheriff of Dallas County, the face of white law enforcement. Clark was a made-for-TV racist, with a bulging waistline and a fondness for the nightstick, which he often waved at television cameras. He did not have the ability to control his impulses, nor did his city. On January 8, Martin Luther King, Jr., arrived at Selma’s segregated King Albert Hotel at the beginning of the campaign, hoping to check in. “
Get him! Get him!” a woman in the lobby screamed, and a young man obliged, punching King repeatedly and kicking him in the groin.

Selma’s voter registration practices were grotesquely unjust.
Time
magazine observed the activists’ efforts in the city in January of 1965:

Selma was, in other words, the kind of place that could make the country care about the fact that millions of its black citizens had been denied the right to participate in their democracy, the kind of place that could take a country that had turned a blind eye toward the violation of its Constitution for a century and finally force that country to see. As January turned to February, the press became transfixed by the barbarism of Clark’s forces: their eagerness to assault black citizens who were simply waiting in line, their tendency not to calm white mobs but to whip them up. The Johnson administration had made noises about a push for a voting rights law as part of its hundred days agenda. But conventional wisdom was that Johnson would not risk further full-scale combat with the Southern bloc in the Senate so soon after his 1964 civil rights success. The movement activists wanted to make it impossible for Washington to wait. From the pulpit in Selma’s Brown Chapel, King used a familiar phrase to make the case for moral urgency: “
We’ve gone too far now to turn back. And in a real sense, we are moving. And we cannot afford to stop because Alabama, and because our nation, has a date with destiny.”

Destiny came on March 7 on Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge. The movement activists had set out on a march to Montgomery, the Alabama capital, where they would demand that the state’s governor provide protection against white mobs, protection that Clark’s forces certainly would not provide. In response, Clark effectively declared a race war, announcing that all of Dallas County’s white male citizenry would be deputized under his command. The two sides met at the bridge. At the front line, the marchers were quiet as they stood erect. At first, when the police force charged them, the nonviolent protesters simply toppled over and let their persecutors tread upon
them. Then everything was swallowed up by a high, unified shriek—the sound of a mass of demonstrators suddenly engulfed in chaos. It was the sound of ordinary men and women on a public thoroughfare coming under attack.

For history, that day in Selma would be Bloody Sunday. The mangled faces on the television broadcasts that night showed why. Subsequent generations of American schoolchildren would be shown the footage from the Edmund Pettus Bridge in order to learn what courage looks like, and what evil looks like, too. Johnson watched from Washington. “
America didn’t like what it saw,” Johnson aide Richard Goodwin later wrote. “And neither did Lyndon Johnson, who witnessed not a revelation (he had grown up in the South), but an affront to the sensibilities and moral justice of the country he now led.”

He knew he had to act. In an immediate sense, his path forward was treacherous and complex. The situation in Alabama could not be allowed to spin further out of control. The protesters were determined to march to Selma. Alabama governor George Wallace, the great segregationist demagogue of the era, would not rebuke Clark and would not offer protection to the marchers. But he fancied himself the grand ambassador of states’ rights, and he did not want to appear incapable of preventing his state from descending into lawlessness while the world looked on.

That was exactly how it was starting to look. On March 9, Unitarian minister James Reeb, one of many white clergymen who had joined the Selma protest, was savagely beaten by white segregationists chanting “Nigger lover.” Two days later he would succumb to his injuries. Privately, Wallace hoped that Johnson would send federal troops to restore order. Johnson, always wary of reviving the ghosts of Reconstruction in the South, could do no such thing. He would send troops, but only if Wallace asked for them.

The matter was resolved in a legendary showdown between Wallace and the president at the White House on March 13. Wallace had requested the meeting, but on arrival he was sly and noncommittal.
He was startled by a full Johnson assault. “
What do you want left after you when you die?” the president asked the governor. They were both seated, but Johnson had positioned himself in a high rocking chair and he looked down at the Alabaman as he spoke. “Do you want a
great, big, marble
monument that reads, ‘George Wallace—He built’?… Or do you want a little piece of scrawny pine board lying across that harsh, caliche soil, that reads, ‘George Wallace—He hated’?”

“Hell,” said Wallace after the meeting concluded, “if I’d stayed in there much longer, he’d have had me coming out for civil rights.” Within days, the governor of Alabama would submit a public request to the president for federal assistance in providing for the court-ordered security of the marchers in Selma.

In a larger sense, Johnson’s path forward from Selma was simple. The men and women on the Pettus Bridge had said everything that needed to be said about the urgency of voting rights. Like the brave men of Lincoln’s Gettysburg, their suffering was above even a president’s power to add or detract. All that was really left for Johnson to do was the hardest thing, the most important thing, that any president can do. He had to look at his country as it really was and not shrink from what he saw. King and the marchers in Selma, the protesters just outside the White House gate—they were all saying they could not wait for justice in the South a moment longer. And suddenly, neither could Lyndon Johnson. He knew he had to act.