Landslide (39 page)

That weekend, word came from the White House that the president would address a joint session of Congress on the evening of Monday, March 15. Before a televised audience, he would ask the Congress to take immediate action on a sweeping voting rights bill. Lady Bird marveled at the swiftness with which her husband would need to pull together a speech. Still, she said in her diary, “
I am glad that he is launched, that he is being intensely active. It is the milieu for him. It is his life. He is loosed from the bonds of depression.”

It fell to Richard Goodwin, the talented speechwriter and former
Kennedy aide, to craft Johnson’s text. Arriving at his office that Monday, the very day Johnson would give the speech, Goodwin felt the terrible pressure of his task and the terror of his approaching deadline. But then he started to think of Selma, and the busy world hushed. Years later, in his memoir
Remembering America
, Goodwin would remember the rare speechwriter’s gift he had been given that day: “
There was, uniquely, no need to temper conviction with the reconciling realities of politics, admit to the complexities of debate and the merits of ‘the other side.’ There was no other side. Only justice—upheld or denied.”

“
I speak tonight,” Johnson said that evening from the House floor, “for the dignity of man and the destiny of democracy.… At times history and fate meet at a single time in a single place to shape a turning point in man’s unending search for freedom. So it was last week in Selma, Alabama.”

The room was deathly quiet. “
Pulses quickened,”
Time
would later note, “as it became obvious that Johnson had discarded the syrupy quality that has marked many of his earlier speeches. With painful poignancy, he pricked his country’s conscience, uttering the unutterable”:

From a gallery high above, Lady Bird scanned the chamber as her husband spoke. So many of the Southern senators she and Lyndon knew well had stayed away from this speech. Richard Russell was gone. Harry Byrd was nowhere to be seen.

The break from the Southern Democrats was not easy for Lady Bird. She was descended on her mother’s side from a proud Alabama family. When she’d come to the strange new world of Washington, she had found her way by making friends with the wives of other Southern congressmen, women whose warmth and easy intimacy she had easily understood.

But now this was Lyndon’s cause, and her cause as well. Earlier that winter,
Lady Bird had convened a meeting in the Queen’s Sitting Room of the White House to discuss the new program she had launched to improve the beauty of the American landscape. Outside it was cold and snowy. Waiting for the First Lady to arrive, Sharon Francis, an Interior Department employee, heard the sound of civil rights protesters singing outside the gate. When Lady Bird entered, she heard the sound as well. “What are they doing?” the First Lady asked. Francis turned to a window, pulled back the curtain, and looked out. “They’re singing ‘We Shall Overcome,’ ” she said, “and they’re kneeling in the snow.” Francis turned back toward the First Lady. A tear was running down Lady Bird’s face.

For a moment, all was silent. Then Johnson was engulfed by that greatest of treasures, applause from the hundreds of listeners he could see and the millions he could not. Watching from a living room in distant Birmingham, Martin Luther King, Jr., began to
weep. By adopting the words of the civil rights anthem, the president had changed the movement forever. Its leaders were now American heroes. Its dead were now martyrs for the American idea. The story of civil rights was now part of the American story.

And part of Lyndon Johnson’s story, too. As he concluded his speech,
Johnson recalled the young Mexicans he had taught in Cotulla, Texas, in the school year 1928–29. Those students were poor and hungry and “they knew even in their youth the pain of prejudice.” As their teacher, Johnson said, it had never occurred to him that he would one day “have the chance to help the sons and daughters of those students, and to help people like them all over this country. But now I do have that chance. And I’ll let you in on a secret
—I mean to use it
.”

When he’d finished speaking, Johnson knew he had given one of the great speeches of his life. “
It was terrific, magnificent, and impressive,” Mayor Daley told him afterward. “
The greatest speech you ever made,” said California’s governor, Pat Brown. “
Your speech was beyond belief!” Jackie Kennedy cooed.

Even Dick Russell called to congratulate his old protégé.
Goodwin would recall the smile on Johnson’s face when he got off the phone with the Georgian. “That was Dick Russell,” Johnson announced. “Said that though he can’t be with me on the bill, it was the best speech he ever heard any president give.” Johnson was plainly thrilled: “
Let’s have a little whiskey, boys, looks like we’ve got something to celebrate.”

Indeed they did. By summer, the legislation would pass both houses. The dramatic moment occasioned by the speech reinvigorated Johnson’s entire legislative program, just as he reached the final stretch of his one hundred days. On April 8, the Medicare bill made it out of the House. The next day, four days before the hundred days ended, Johnson reviewed his record with Larry O’Brien. “
Roosevelt’s got eleven,” said the president, referring to the number of bills passed. “They were not major bills at all. But you have one
major one really with education. Now, Appalachia’s a super-major one, and then the others are about like Roosevelt. But on the twelfth, you’ll have the best Hundred Days. Better than
he
did!”

That night, Lady Bird recorded in her diary: “
Lyndon talked of the last week. He said, ‘Never has there been such a Hundred Days.’ ” So vast was his triumph that for the moment, Lyndon could see only greatness ahead. For the moment, his persistent visions of ruin were put to bed. It fell to Lady Bird, always careful to be prepared for anything, to remember the other side. “This was a week to put a gold circle around. So let us remember it, because there will be many ringed in black.”

The world aflame: California National Guard troops took the streets of Los Angeles during the Watts riots of August 1965.
©
Hulton Archive/Getty Images

The months that followed were hard on both Johnsons. The bombing of Vietnam continued apace. At night, Lyndon haunted the halls of the White House, often heading for the Situation Room, where a military aide could provide up-to-the-minute reports from the war. From her bed, Lady Bird could hear the ring of the telephone in the earliest hours of the morning, bringing news of a plane shot down on the other side of the world. Lyndon was always eager to answer. Vietnam was now his constant companion, the third party in their marriage. “
He can’t separate himself from it,” the First Lady told her diary. “Actually, I don’t want him to, no matter how painful.”

Lyndon’s anxiety was hard for Lady Bird to bear. She was happy to retreat to the peace of the ranch in Texas. There she spent much of the summer, leaving Lyndon to worry away in Washington, though she knew her absence wore on him. In early July, their daughter Lynda spoke to her father on the phone. He sounded lonesome, Lynda told Lady Bird afterward. “Mother,” she said, “
he’s never the same without you.” Lady Bird knew it was true. “
I feel selfish,” she told her diary, “as though I was insulating myself from pain and troubles down here. But I know that I need it.” Just as she had foreseen in April, there had been many dark days.

To be sure, that spring and summer had seen plenty of glorious moments, days that, in another presidency, would have indeed been ringed in gold. There was April 11, when the $1.3 billion elementary and secondary education bill became the first federal law to fund education on a large scale nationwide. Seated on a wooden bench beside the old Junction schoolhouse in Stonewall, Texas, Johnson signed the bill into law, amid an elaborate display of his lifelong commitment to education.
In the audience were some of the Mexicans the president had taught in Cotulla, Texas, and at his side was the seventy-two-year-old Mrs. Kate Loney. Mrs. Loney was the former “Miss Kate” Deadrich, the teacher who’d coaxed young Lyndon to read by holding him on her lap in front of her class. For the ceremony, Johnson broke with his usual custom and signed the bill with only one pen, which he then handed gratefully to his teacher. “
She seemed not to realize it was meant as a souvenir,” observed
The New York Times
, “and left it on the table as she walked away.”

There was July 30, when Johnson signed the bill establishing a system of Medicare for seniors. “
No longer will older Americans be denied the healing miracle of modern medicine,” Johnson proclaimed in the auditorium at the Harry Truman Library in Independence, Missouri. “No longer will illness crush and destroy the savings that they have so carefully put away over a lifetime so that they might enjoy dignity in their later years.”

Johnson had chosen the Truman Library out of respect for his only living Democratic predecessor. As president, Truman had felt the fury of the medical lobby when he’d tried to pass Medicare himself. As Johnson signed the bill, he was joined by the eighty-one-year-old Truman, a man whose own later years had not been entirely happy. Johnson felt a special affection for the only other living Democratic president. So much of Truman’s story was his own: an oldschool politician thrust into the White House by a charismatic president’s death; a president who came from humble origins and fought for the common man; a man weighed down by an awful Asian war. Johnson’s praise for the ex-president was sincere and generous,
and revealing. “
The people of the United States love and voted for Harry Truman,” he said, “not because he gave them hell but because he gave them hope.” Truman was so moved he could barely speak. “I thank you all most highly for coming here,” he told the crowd. “It’s an honor that I haven’t had done to me—well, quite a while, I’ll say that to you.”

And there was August 6, when, under a glittering chandelier in the President’s Room off the Senate chamber, Johnson signed the voting rights bill into law.
On the same day a hundred and four years earlier, the White House staff informed the press, Abraham Lincoln had signed a bill emancipating black slaves who had been conscripted to fight in the Confederate Army. Moments earlier, Johnson had addressed the nation from the Rotunda. “
Today is a triumph for history as huge as any victory won on any battlefield,” he said. “Today we strike away the last major shackle of those fierce and ancient bonds. Today the Negro story and the American story fuse and blend.”
He spoke in front of John Trumbull’s oil painting
Surrender of Lord Cornwallis
, depicting George Washington astride his horse as the British army capitulated at Yorktown. On Johnson’s left as he spoke was a likeness of the head of Lincoln sculpted by Gutzon Borglum for Mount Rushmore. On his right was a standing marble statue of Lincoln by the nineteenth-century sculptor Vinnie Ream.