Landslide (49 page)

At times, Johnson still indulged dreams of being the peacemaker in Vietnam. As always, his dread about the conflict there was interwoven with his hopes for the Great Society—and now with his fears and his regrets for the Great Society, too. He knew that the disturbances and exertions of the war were draining him, distracting him from focusing on the domestic program he loved so much. There were complaints coming in from all over about the Great Society—of funds that were held up, of programs that were poorly organized, of antipoverty volunteers being corralled together with nothing to do and nowhere to go. Johnson believed these were all solvable problems. And he knew that he could solve them, as long as he had the necessary time.

Once, the country might have believed in that. Now the bristly tangle of Johnson’s foreign and domestic policies had made that kind of faith impossible. For three years, he had told the nation of its favored position in history. This was a country that could solve most any problem it faced. The public had listened to him; some of them had even believed him. And now they were following his prophecies to their logical end. Most Americans understood, vaguely, what their country was doing in Vietnam. What they could not understand was
why such a mighty nation, in such a hopeful time, could still be stuck fighting this war. Voters, Bill Moyers told the president, “
do not understand how a country of our size and power can seemingly make so little progress in Vietnam.”

Everywhere Johnson looked was an unhappy reality, compounded by all the happy promises he’d made that hadn’t come true. And yet, in the face of it all, he still clung to his old grand ambitions. He had even made an effort of late to rival the Kennedys in regal pageantry and pomp. In August 1966, Lyndon and Lady Bird’s younger daughter, Luci Baines, had married Illinois’s Patrick Nugent in an elaborate ceremony at the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception.
It was followed by a White House reception where more than seven hundred guests gawked at a three-hundred-pound, eight-foot-tall wedding cake. The press, briefed in copious detail on every aspect of the occasion, was no longer inclined to indulge the president’s pretensions. The wedding was a “
semimonarchical event,”
Time
said disapprovingly, noting that Luci’s bridegroom had “a modest background and an unchartered future” that set him apart from the “mature, professionally established, wealthy, patrician” mates typically favored by White House brides.

For the occasion, reporters were presented with glowing quotations from the beaming father and mother of the bride. The president volunteered that he was “
as proud as a man can be when his youngest daughter is doing the most wonderful thing in the world: beginning a life with the man she loves.” The First Lady, who’d worked tirelessly on the preparations for the wedding, was pleased as well. “
The wedding day will be something beautiful to remember,” she said, “and I want Luci to have it.”

As always, Lady Bird’s happiness carried with it a tiny suggestion of fatalism—a happy memory might come in handy some day. But this time, the fatalism was understandable and needed no explaining.

For, once, the president’s approval ratings had reached as high as 80 percent. Now he had dipped below 50 in many pollsters’ surveys.
Once, Lyndon Johnson had looked like a man who couldn’t lose. Now, as the fall arrived and he looked toward the midterm elections, it was clear that he could.

T
HERE ARE FEW
things less pleasant for a sitting president to contemplate than the national midterm elections that occur halfway through his term. Even when the inhabitant of the White House is well loved, his party’s results in the midterm congressional races are usually disappointing. Without the president’s name on the ballot, his steadfast supporters stay home. The voters most likely to turn out are the disaffected ones, looking to lodge a vote of protest. A party that has won the presidency two years earlier in a landslide will almost always lose seats at the midterm, giving back the districts the party had no business winning but had collected in the presidential year’s unusual surge.

Nevertheless, the press inevitably interprets the midterm results—not just the results in Senate and House races but also in faraway gubernatorial contests and even battles for control of state legislatures—as the country offering a verdict on the person in the White House. An especially bad set of results can make a president look humbled, weakened, and vulnerable. And in presidential politics, as in all power games, the appearance of vulnerability and the fact of it are usually the same thing.

All of this creates a dilemma for a president. The midterms can have a significant impact on his ability to pass legislation, to win reelection, and to secure a favorable place in history. And yet if he actively inserts himself in the campaign—campaigning for party candidates, using the bully pulpit to remind the country of why the elections matter—he raises the stakes even more. The hacks’ political columns write themselves: “The results were a particularly stunning rebuke to a president who had invested significant time and the prestige of the presidency in the results.” Many presidents conclude it isn’t worth the risk. Publicly, they act dimly aware that there is some sort of election coming in November. Privately, they obsess
over it and demand all the intelligence they can get on what particular issues are helping or hurting particular party candidates in particular districts around the country.

Thus, for much of 1966, the public President Johnson appeared far too concerned with Vietnam and the burdens of governing at home to think about partisan politics. Meanwhile, the private Lyndon Johnson was brooding over the same thing Lyndon Johnson always thought about: whether the voters would still love him come next Election Day. “
What do you think about the elections?” he had asked Dick Russell in June. “How many seats you think I’m going to lose in the House?”

“In the House?” replied Russell. “About twenty-eight.”

Johnson was surprised. “Our boys say that we’re going to pick up eight or ten, going to lose ten or twelve.” That would mean a net loss of at most four seats.

“Well,” said Russell, “I think you’ll lose twenty-seven, twenty-eight seats in the House. And I don’t think you’re going to lose anything in the Senate.”

It was significant, the difference between losing four seats and losing twenty-eight. Four seats was entirely manageable, not a bad showing for a president’s party at the midterm. It might mean some diminished expectations for the next Congress, that they might get fewer bills passed in the next two years than they had in the two before. But it was survivable. Twenty-eight seats, on the other hand, would be a disaster. It would mean, effectively, losing control of the House to a revived alliance between conservative Southern Democrats and Republicans. If true, Russell’s offhand prediction of a loss of twenty-eight seats would prove the end of the Great Society.

Back then, in June 1966, it just sounded like Dick Russell being Dick Russell—the tragic conscientious objector to Johnson’s triumphs. Now, as summer ended, it looked as if Russell was going to be right, at least about the House. During July and August, as the cities burned and the fears rose and the war dragged on and on, Johnson had lost all control of his story. Now there was more of the
kind of talk that had cropped up after Ronald Reagan’s surprising primary victory in California. Reporters were talking about the November elections as a national referendum on Johnson’s presidency. “
This is the off-year,”
Life
observed that fall, “and thus the issues … ought to be local, regional and variously personal. Instead, by a strange sort of political transmutation, the biggest issues looming over most of them have become singularly personalized in the tall Texas shadow of Lyndon Baines Johnson.”

Johnson’s aides scrambled to come up with a national strategy for the fall campaign. “
John Gardner has talked to Bill Moyers and me about a problem of great concern to him,” Douglass Cater wrote to the president, referring to Johnson’s secretary of health, education, and welfare. “He is worried that the Administration is suffering from a feeling in the nation that the domestic program has lost its momentum. He fears that when momentum slows down, people become pre-occupied with selfish problems. He has submitted a memorandum on this, suggesting ways that you may create the spirit of a new burst of momentum that will carry the nation into the 1970s. He thinks the time is now to create a ‘Spirit of 1976.’ ”

It was the same old Johnson message: the future is coming, and it will be beyond your wildest dreams. Yet it was hard to find anyone who truly believed in that message, even on Johnson’s staff. Bill Moyers would soon leave the White House, nursing grave private doubts about the justness of the cause in Vietnam. But the president would accept no strategy that deviated from his orthodox policy. He was left to get political advice from the likes of Walt Rostow, his ultra-hard-line national security adviser. “
My proposed theme is: We are on the way to solving great national and international problems; we are making great progress: let’s stick together and see it through.”

Meanwhile, after years of silence, Republicans were tripping over each other to make the case against Johnson’s vision. The most prominent was Nixon, who had spent most of 1966 appearing on behalf of Republican candidates around the country. By Labor Day,
he had visited thirty out of fifty states. The press, so certain that Nixon’s political career was over after the disastrous 1962 gubernatorial loss to Pat Brown, was at first stunned and then ultimately charmed by Nixon’s refusal to accept the verdict. “
This stubborn, yearning man,” marveled Tom Wicker, “plunging on in the loneliness of the long-distance runner, somehow is out there in front of the pack again.” Older reporters could see that Nixon was following a strategy similar to the one he’d used to secure the Republican nomination in 1960—travel the country, swearing off any talk of higher office, all the while accruing debts from delegates and party organizers nationwide. On the stump in 1966, he declared himself “
a dropout from the electoral college” and asked audiences to “forget about 1968 for now and concentrate on 1966.”

Yet, while the broad outlines of Nixon’s strategy might have been similar to his earlier effort, he understood that his party and the country had changed since 1960. His strategy would have to change, too. He could not count on the support of the Republican establishment to win the nomination; the party’s moderate and liberal wings would most likely offer their support to George Romney. To overcome Romney, Nixon would need to appeal to a new, more conservative Republican majority with its roots in the South and West. He had to offer warm refuge to the white southerners fleeing Johnson’s Democratic Party. That summer, Nixon traveled to the Municipal Auditorium in Birmingham to appear at a dinner for the Republican Party of Alabama. John Grenier, the party’s candidate for Senate that year, saw great things in Nixon’s future. Should the party select Nixon “
to lead this great country from the swampland of socialism to the bright sunshine of liberty,” Grenier told the crowd, “the electoral vote of Alabama would be cast for Dick Nixon.” Wealthy white folks in Birmingham speaking of threats to
their
liberty: a year earlier, with the awful images of Selma’s Bloody Sunday still fresh in everyone’s mind, a statement like that would have been farcically ironic. Now it was the reality of American politics. And the odd sight of Richard Nixon listening earnestly while those wealthy white
southerners spoke of those threats? That was a glimpse of the America to come.

Meanwhile, to Johnson’s left, Bobby Kennedy was making his own audacious claims. By the fall of 1966, it seemed that the moment for Bobby’s national ambitions had at last arrived. He was a ubiquitous presence on the midterm campaign trail, stumping for Democratic candidates. Traveling with a large contingent of the national press corps, he prompted ecstatic reactions from crowds. They mobbed his car and pulled at his clothing. In Columbus, Ohio, a group of young people waiting to greet him at the airport grew so enthusiastic it overturned a snow fence. Bobby, whose politics was moving further and further to the left, was becoming a symbol of progressives’ distaste for Johnson.
RFK MINUS LBJ IN
1972 read one sign in a Kennedy crowd. Another was more pointed:
KENNEDY FOR PRESIDENT ANYTIME
. Pat Brown, fighting hard for his political life against Reagan, grew increasingly irritated that summer when the aid that Johnson had promised after Reagan’s primary victory failed to materialize. Brown knew how to sting Johnson. When asked by reporters if he’d appreciate a visit from the president of the United States, the governor replied, “
We need help wherever we can get it, but the guy I’d really like to see come to California is Bobby Kennedy.”

Bobby still had a lot to learn about being a presidential candidate. In West Virginia, the state whose primary had proven crucial for President Kennedy’s campaign, Bobby announced that “
there is no Kennedy who does not feel that West Virginia is his second home.” A good line, until you thought about it. Bobby kept his primary home in one state (Virginia), hailed from another state (Massachusetts) where his family had its famed compound, spent sun-drenched winter holidays at another sprawling estate in a third state (Florida), and served as the junior senator from a fourth state (New York). For another patrician candidate—like Bill Scranton or Nelson Rockefeller—this kind of error would merit a fistful of mockery from the national press. But with Bobby, reporters were
endlessly forgiving.
Newsweek
tsk-tsked the “unrealistically far-out school that feels Kennedy might even be contemplating a coup so grand as to displace Mr. Johnson from the ticket … two years hence.”

From inside the Johnson White House, that possibility looked not so far out.
By mid-1966, the Harris and Gallup polls both showed Bobby leading the president as a favorite for the Democratic nomination in 1968. There would be no more talk of softening tensions between the president and his former attorney general. Johnson was convinced that Bobby would be his mortal enemy for life. He even abandoned the theme of continuity in the “Kennedy-Johnson program” around which he had once shaped his presidency. When speaking of his own White House record, Johnson now talked up improvements over the performance of the “previous administration”—the administration that came to an end on November 22, 1963.