Landslide (47 page)

P
AT
B
ROWN WAS
on the phone from California.

“
Are you feeling all right?” President Johnson asked.

“I never felt better in my life and had less,” Brown said. “Between you and me.”

This was not what the president wanted to hear. Brown was underconfident, far removed from the governor who had showered praises on Johnson after his landslide election two years before. It was June 1966, a week since the California primary. “
President Eisenhower and [Republican Party chair] Ray Bliss have already begun to call liberal Republicans … to put the heat on them,” Joe Califano had informed the president in a memo. “Brown is very nervous about the election, is running scared and thinks he will lose many of the votes that Yorty got in the campaign.” The day before, Johnson had watched on television as Yorty continued to criticize the governor,
making it quite clear there would be no happy Democratic unity any time soon. Brown was saying that a race against Reagan would be his toughest as governor.

Now Johnson urged him to buck up.

“
You’re selling everybody on the fact that you can’t win!” he said. “And I’m against that kind of stuff coming out of California. I think we gotta get the tail up, get bushy tailed, and high behind, and chin up and let’s go … I think that we’ve just got to quit thinking about the possibility that they could beat us, because they can’t. You’ve got a good administration, you’ve got the best state in the Union, you’re way out in front and the people know it.”

It sounded as though he was trying to convince himself—and as though he was talking about more than just the troubles of Pat Brown. “
California is the most populous state in the Union,” the
San Diego Union
would observe the next day, “and a Republican victory in November would most certainly signal the beginning of the end of the political extravagances of the Great Society.”

Johnson wasn’t about to let Reagan do that to him. “
We’ve just got to go after him,” he scolded. “And … put him right where he belongs: with Goldwater around his neck.”

Brown agreed. “I spent all day Sunday reviewing Mr. Reagan’s record. And this fellow is a part of the kook crowd in the United States! He’s to the right of Goldwater!”

“No question about that,” said the president. “He’s got a better television personality and he’s more effective. But he’s more dangerous.”

They were making themselves feel better. But the president and the governor were already several steps behind Reagan and the press. As Johnson and Brown spoke, Reagan was headed back to the East Coast. There he would continue his I’m-Not-Goldwater campaign, jumping toward the middle in the most ostentatious fashion possible. Later that week, he’d head to Gettysburg to receive formally the establishment blessing from Eisenhower. Unlike Goldwater’s wretched and desperate performance with the general late in the
1964 campaign, this visit would produce great pictures. “
Here in a brick house on a shaded lawn,” a
Washington Post
correspondent wrote from Gettysburg, “he humbly paid his respects to Gen. Eisenhower, respectfully listened and eagerly posed for photographs with him.”

Reagan continued the theme the next day in Washington, where he addressed a crowd at the National Press Club that included many leading lights of the Eastern media, coming to scout the new talent. He was eager to show that he was no radical. “
I’ve never advocated selling the Post Office or abolishing Social Security,” he said. “Nor do I believe in some conspiracy theory that all who favor increased government planning and control are engaged in a devious plot.”

It worked like a charm. “
Right-winger,” the columnist William S. White observed, was “far too strong” a term for Reagan after Gettysburg. “In consequence,” White wrote, “he enters what has become known as ‘the mainstream of Republicanism’ and cannot be symbolically dislodged from it.”

Indeed, the talk in Washington that week was not whether candidate Ronald Reagan was too extreme to win the governor’s race in 1966, but whether
Governor
Ronald Reagan would be his party’s
presidential
nominee in 1968. At Gettysburg, Ike had said he saw nothing to prevent such a possibility if the circumstances were right. “
Even a Reagan in the clothing of a right-winger,” White wrote, “would have been a strong force at the 1968 Republican National Convention. In such clothing, however, his power would have been largely that of veto. In his present posture of mainstreamism that power could become something else again.”

Richard Nixon, already eyeing 1968 with dogged focus, was nervous about what that something else might be. Once, Reagan had written flowery notes to Nixon offering campaign advice. Now it was Nixon gushing in a lengthy letter to Reagan after the primary. “
I was unable to reach you by telephone Tuesday night and Western Union is on strike. Consequently, I must resort to the uncertain delivery schedules of the U.S. mails,” Nixon wrote. Nixon knew that
as governor of California, Reagan could control the state’s delegation and, if he wished, scuttle Nixon’s chances at the nomination. In characteristic fashion, he tried to suck up to Reagan by speaking what he thought was Reagan’s language. “As I am sure you know the assault on you will reach massive proportions in the press and on TV as Brown and his cohorts realize that they are going to be thrown off the gravy train after eight pretty lush years. There is an old Mid-Western expression (my roots also are in the Mid-West) which I would urge you to bear in mind as the going gets tougher. ‘Just sit tight in the buggy!’ ”

Reagan’s response to the former vice president might as well have been a form letter: “
I won’t try to write much of a letter since we’ll be seeing each other on the 23rd, but I want you to know how much I appreciated hearing from you and how grateful I am for your very good suggestions.”

Reagan knew it was bad politics to indulge the presidential chatter. With the press, the citizen-politician made sure, as always, to keep his ambitions hidden. “
It has taken me all of my life to get up the nerve to do what I am now doing,” he answered when asked about the ’68 talk. “I just feel there are problems I’d like to clean up in California. That’s as far as my dreams go.”

But it was plain from listening to him in Washington that June of 1966 that his dreams went much further. At the Press Club, he offered his most explicit attacks on Johnson yet. “
The Great Society grows greater every day,” he said. “Greater in cost, greater in inefficiency and greater in waste.”

Summer had arrived. The images from Vietnam were awful. The cities were more on edge than they had been in either of the summers before. Reagan looked toward November and then beyond. Timing and shifting public tastes—the forces he revered most—at last were on his side. He was fifty-five years old. For the first time in a long time, he looked like a winner.

Another landslide: The Reagans celebrate victory in the California governor’s race, November 8, 1966.
Courtesy Ronald Reagan Library

Johnson in the Oval Office in early 1966. The 1966 election brought an end to the grand ambitions of the Johnson presidency.
©
Yoichi Okamoto/LBJ Library

Wednesday, August 17, 1966, was Lyndon Johnson’s thousandth day as president of the United States. The administration did not acknowledge the occasion publicly, but inside the White House the date loomed large. To mark the event, Johnson aide Robert Kintner asked each member of the cabinet to write a lengthy summary of what his department had accomplished in the course of the thousand days. He arranged these summaries into a formally divided book and presented it to Johnson on the evening of the seventeenth. He knew to tread carefully. “
While this period constitutes a thousand days,” Kintner wrote in a memo to the president, “I would doubt if this title should ever be used in any public way because of the connotation re President Kennedy.”

A thousand days later, it was still the same story: Johnson people horrified at the thought of public comparison to the Kennedys. Johnson people privately obsessing over how they measured up against the Kennedys all the same.

On paper, it was not even close. By any standard of material accomplishment, Johnson’s tenure in office through August 17, 1966, far outshone his predecessor’s
gilded thousand days. Kennedy had won the presidency by the tiniest of margins, with heavy debts to the unsightly practices of urban Democratic machines. Johnson had won with the largest popular margin of any president in history,
with support that cut across age and ethnic groups, geographic regions, and even political parties. Kennedy had struggled to get even trivial legislation out of the Congress. Johnson had amassed a string of legislative successes that rivaled the glorious domestic record of FDR’s first term. Kennedy had dithered and dragged his heels on civil rights; he had at times scorned the movement’s activists as a distracting nuisance and had died without any major legislative accomplishment in the fight against state-sanctioned segregation. Johnson had committed his presidency to the cause of racial equality, had embraced the movement for racial justice in dramatic fashion on a national stage, and had won more rights for black Americans than any other president since Lincoln. Kennedy had spoken in inspiring tones about teaching the young, healing the sick, feeding the poor. Johnson had passed programs to see that it was done.

Yet Kennedy belonged to the angels, while Johnson was sinking on earth. No one seemed inclined to make the case for his greatness. He wanted the Eighty-Ninth Congress—the Congress he had ushered in with his 1964 landslide, the Congress he had dominated like no president had before or since—to be known as “
the Great Congress.” Historians would in time come to view the Eighty-Ninth Congress as perhaps the most productive legislative session in American history, and for later generations of progressives, the Congress that produced the Voting Rights Act, Medicare, and so many other programs would come to seem the greatest Congress of all time. But in the fall of 1966, as chaos engulfed the nation’s cities and the war in Vietnam raged, the Eighty-Ninth Congress was deeply unpopular. Even the liberal commentators who shared its goals were qualified in their assessments.
The “B plus Congress,”
The New Republic
called it, “not excellent, better than fair, very good.” The journal
The Progressive
concurred: “
We prefer to call it the foot in the door Congress, because so many of the laws it passed represent a significant if modest effort to cross a threshold of social welfare legislation.”

Johnson faced the reverse fortune of his predecessor. At the end of his thousand days, Kennedy became instantly greater than his accomplishments.
Johnson, at the end of his thousand days, was somehow less.

To the Johnson loyalists, this revealed the same old double standard. He was being measured against a man that the Kennedy family and the Eastern media had conspired to make a saint. It was unfair, they protested, and some in the press were inclined to agree. In
The New York Times Magazine
, the presidential scholar Thomas A. Bailey wrote a long essay on Johnson’s thousand days, arguing that Johnson’s substantive accomplishments in the period were remarkable. Still, he said, “
Historians in future decades will probably rate Kennedy somewhat above and Johnson somewhat below their deserts. History is written by intellectuals, and Kennedy’s style, crowned by mysterious martyrdom, has an irresistible appeal.”