Landslide (48 page)

If Johnson was being overshadowed by the enduring power of the Kennedy myth, though, he had himself to blame. He had, after all, accepted the terms of that myth in the earliest hours of his presidency. That was the deal he had struck: he would encourage the myth of Kennedy the martyr so that he could be the martyr’s redeemer.
That way Kennedy would live on forever, and so would I
. He had seen his country searching for a story to believe in, and, seizing a moment of opportunity in the chaotic aftermath of the assassination, he had promised it the grandest story of all.

A myth’s allure and authority depend on its power to explain the mysteries of the world. In some cases, this power is self-sustaining: the story of Helios driving his sun chariot across the heavens can endure through the centuries as it literally illuminates the visible world every single day. But most myths lack this certainty. Indeed, myths are often born when certainty is most absent. In a parched land, a man who offers a story to explain the drought makes good use of people’s anxiety. They feel powerless and ignorant. Why have the gods forsaken them, when will they be delivered? In comes the would-be mythmaker to offer the people assurance. Some unseen mystical force, he explains, is the cause of their suffering. He offers the steps they can take to make it end. And as the days go by and the
ground grows harder, the mythmaker’s power at first increases, for there are more people desperate for relief.

But if enough time goes by and the skies still do not open, the power of uncertainty starts to work against the mythmaker. The people begin to contemplate the worst possibilities—they see their lives given over to famine, their lands aflame, their livestock slaughtered, their children dying of thirst. They are more anxious than ever, and now they are angry, too, angry at the man who offered them false prophecies and grand promises. Both fear and hope depend on an uncertain future. The man who seeks to profit from uncertainty with seductive, hopeful promises is ultimately vulnerable to the ungovernable force of human terror.

So it was in America in 1966—the year that
Time
asked on its cover, “Is God Dead?” Fear about the future was not a new thing for Americans. It had been present for some time, at least as long as Lyndon Johnson had been president. Johnson had assumed the presidency as a fearful nation faced the greatest uncertainty in the awful hours after the death of President Kennedy. How would they make their way forward in a rapidly changing world without their vital young leader in the White House? Johnson, desperate to start a new story, had taken advantage of that anxiety, and that unknown future, to craft his original mythic vision: the nation would have nothing to fear from the future, as long as it followed him.

And the nation did follow him as he set about passing his program of liberal dreams. Americans embraced their active, ambitious president and convinced themselves that the transformative future would be something great. Only rarely did people acknowledge the lingering anxiety that had been pushed to the edge of consciousness but not eradicated. “That’s what’s the matter now,” said James Chaney, “everybody’s scared.” Johnson had been far more scared than he’d ever let on. But he had not acknowledged the fear, neither the nation’s nor his own, and he had offered no wisdom on how to live with it as his Democratic predecessors, Roosevelt and Kennedy, had done. Instead, he had tried to root fear out, promising an end to
all worry straightaway. “It’s the time of peace on Earth and good will among men,” he said the week before his landslide. “The place is here and the time is now!”

The people had wanted to believe he was right, even though, deep down, they suspected he was not. So the uncertainty persisted and spread, and with it, of course, the fear. And in the months and years that followed Johnson’s grand proclamations, tension over what the future might bring continued to accrue. By the latter half of 1966, that tension was impossible to ignore. Fear itself became a subject of national concern. “
Disunity, frustration, suspicion and fear permeate the nation,”
The Saturday Evening Post
editorialized that fall. “It seems as if an air of unreality is settling over us all. For, very clearly, things are not what they had seemed two years ago.”

Suddenly, Lyndon Johnson was the man who had promised the rain that did not come. The country could not believe his story any longer. There was simply too much reality for which he could not account. He was on the unfavorable end of the comparison that every sitting politician must face: between what he had once promised and what had actually come to pass. And, thanks to his mythic ambitions, Johnson was held responsible for an even broader deficit, one he had little ability to address: the gap between the way things had once seemed and the way they now were.

Once, standing in front of that enormous White House Christmas tree, Johnson had declared his moment in history was “the most hopeful … since Christ was born in Bethlehem.” Now he was living in a country where everything was filtered through the possibility of coming catastrophe.
The New Republic
captured the mood well that fall: “
You have a home, but what about interest rates? You live in a fairly orderly community, but how about the riots nearby, or a thousand miles away?”

Once, Johnson had declared war on poverty and had promised “
we shall not rest until that war is won.” Now riots in the worst neighborhoods of the nation’s cities had revealed people living in conditions irreconcilable with America’s early-sixties self-image as a
land of unprecedented affluence and opportunity. The conditions in the cities were not in fact much worse than they had been three years earlier, when Kennedy was president, but three years earlier, the collapsing urban centers hadn’t been on television every night. Now they were, and as a result, a thousand days after Johnson had launched his poverty efforts, it seemed that poverty in America had actually gotten worse.

Once, the press had published sensational stories, wondering about a psychotic madness festering in the nation, ready to strike at random, God knows when. Now, it seemed, the madmen had arrived.
Late that summer of 1966 at the University of Texas at Austin, Charles Joseph Whitman, a twenty-five-year-old architectural engineering student, climbed to the observation deck of a three-hundred-foot limestone tower overlooking the university. From his perch, he shot indiscriminately at the busy crowds below. During the tower assault, he struck forty-four people, killing fourteen. Earlier that day, Whitman had purchased ammunition at a local hardware store. What did he need the bullets for? the clerk asked. “To shoot some pigs,” the killer replied.

Once, white “backlash” against policies that benefited minorities had been something the press and the pollsters warned about, but it was a phenomenon that had failed to show up on Election Day. Now, with astonishing speed, that backlash had become the country’s dominant political force. In a survey in 1966, two out of three Americans would say that the cause of racial equality was being pushed “too fast” in America.

That summer, the Congress considered another Johnson administration–backed civil rights bill, this one attacking the issue of housing discrimination. As was his custom on these matters, the eighty-three-year-old Virginia segregationist Howard Smith had spoken against the bill in the House. “
Now we come here with mobs in the streets,” the Virginian warned, “with further mob violence threatened, and no word is spoken of courage to defend the American way of Government.” When he’d finished speaking, his colleagues
in the House gave him a standing ovation. On the Senate side, the Republican leader Everett Dirksen, who had broken the dam for Johnson’s first civil rights bill, now took the opposite view of the administration on the new civil rights effort.

Once, Democrats had hoped that the newly enfranchised blacks in the South could come together with moderate, reasonable-minded whites to begin a postracial era in Southern politics. Now white backlash was empowering the very worst kind of racists of all. In Georgia, once home to moderate white politicians like former governor Ellis Arnall, the new face of the Democratic Party was a man named Lester Maddox. Maddox, an ardent segregationist, was well known to the Northern press thanks to his operatic racism—he had chased blacks away from his Atlanta restaurant with an ax handle. Maddox,
Newsweek
observed, “
had never won anything much grander than the Fourth Annual East Point, Ga. bicycle race and the chairmanships of a succession of right-wing citizens’ committees he organized himself.” But after defeating Arnall by seventy thousand votes in a runoff for that year’s Democratic primary, Maddox was the sure favorite to be the state’s next governor.

The national face of the resurgent segregationists was Alabama governor George Wallace. Prevented from seeking reelection by term limits,
Wallace was backing his wife, Lurleen, in that year’s Democratic primary for governor. Once, at the height of the Selma crisis, Johnson had forced Wallace to back down, prompting hopes that the governor’s power in Southern politics would begin to wane. Now Wallace was looking toward a run for the presidency in 1968, offering himself up as the choice of white backlash voters, not just in the South but nationwide.

Once, Johnson had seemed to erase the distance between the nation’s political leaders and the civil rights movement simply by uttering three words in the House chamber: “We shall overcome.” Now Martin Luther King, Jr., was in a state of open warfare with the Democratic Party’s most formidable power broker, Mayor Daley of Chicago, a city where white mobs were using physical violence to
prevent African Americans from integrating all-white neighborhoods. “
They’re just out here for no other purpose than to have a race riot,” Daley complained to Johnson that August about King’s protesters. He warned the president that his white constituents would be willing to exact a price. “They put all of this on the Democratic Party. [People say] ‘Oh, what the hell. If we get rid of Johnson … and we get rid of Daley and the whole outfit because … they’re not doing anything for us, and they’re doing everything for the Negro.’ ”

Once, presiding over the greatest boom the country had ever known, Johnson had wondered aloud if the marvels of modern economics had made recessions a thing of the past. Now prices were rising and people were worried about paying their bills. Economists warned that heavy government spending on Vietnam was overheating the economy, causing inflation that would lead to a recession. Walter Heller, architect of the Kennedy-Johnson tax cut, now returned to academic life, was arguing for the necessity of a tax hike to cool the economy down. President Harry S Truman, to whom Johnson had extended so many kindnesses, was setting off loud alarm bells. “
There is a matter,” he said, “about which I am so deeply concerned that I feel it has become necessary for me to speak out.” In imagining the dire effects of a tight monetary policy, he used the one word any president dreaded most: “The result could be a serious depression.”

And, in the end, everything came back to Vietnam. Once, worries about America’s involvement in that faraway land had only hovered somewhere in the ether. Now Vietnam had become the ether itself, the awful atmosphere, touching everything. “
From Vietnam,” Bailey wrote in his essay on Johnson’s thousand days, “flows a river of woe: inflation, the price-wage pinch, mounting strikes, restrictions on credit, the need for increased taxes, the further drain of gold, pressure for calling up the Reserves, dissatisfaction with the draft, and a drumfire of world criticism, much of it from allies.”

The bombing continued over North Vietnam, tonnage falling
from the sky on a scale Johnson could not have imagined when he’d commenced Operation Rolling Thunder a year and a half before. On the ground, the Army and Marines continued to sustain heavy losses. More than six thousand American men would die in Southeast Asia in 1966. Once, Johnson had suggested to a group of high school students that they could live to old age and say “I knew only peace in my time.” Now young men who were contemporaries of those students were being sent off to distant jungles where they would fight, and where many of them would die.

Once, Johnson had been able to manipulate Vietnam politics effortlessly, using the conflict and the Tonkin Gulf incident to demonstrate his toughness in the 1964 campaign. Now the politics of Vietnam had become a shifting mirage. The antiwar movement was getting all the attention in the press. Angry students demonstrated against the administration at colleges and universities, and protesters were now stationed at the White House gates. But that wasn’t what made Johnson worry. “
Don’t pay any attention to what those little shits on the campuses do,” he’d said to George Ball. “The great beast is the reactionary elements in this country. Those are the people we have to fear.”

He was largely right. In mid-1966, large majorities of American voters still broadly supported the war. In fact, Johnson’s polling showed that a majority of those who disapproved of his handling of the war felt that he “
should go all out, short of nuclear attack” in order to win it. Republican candidates shrewdly handled public opinion on Vietnam. They voiced a general frustration with Johnson’s war even as they suggested that the way to end that frustration would be to fight harder. “
Bomb the devil out of Haiphong Harbor!” urged Minority Leader Dirksen. President Eisenhower, who himself had been a master of talking tough and doing very little in Southeast Asia, now told reporters that the United States ought to consider any means necessary to secure victory, including the use of nuclear weapons. Richard Nixon, in the midst of a remarkable comeback as a national political figure, appointed himself a spokesman
for the hard-liners. He visited South Vietnam that summer. “
For the first time now,” he said, “I am leaving Vietnam with confidence that it is not possible for us to lose this war from a military standpoint.”

Johnson would never say it publicly, but he did not share Nixon’s confidence. He wasn’t sure it would ever be possible to win the war. He had not been sure for some time. And lately, it wasn’t clear who was. McNamara, for so long his brilliant hawk, had started to go wobbly. What Johnson did know was that he was under tremendous pressure from the Joint Chiefs to call up the reserves. He knew that at some point he would probably give in. And he knew that if the current estimates were correct, by the next year there would be more than half a million Americans on the ground in Vietnam. And even then, Nixon and the hawks would keep telling him
Fight harder!