Landslide (51 page)

Meanwhile, the results in the congressional elections were as bad as could be for Johnson and the Democrats. In the House, the Democrats had sustained losses far worse than even the twenty-seven or twenty-eight seats Dick Russell had imagined, losing an astounding forty-seven seats altogether. Only fourteen of the seats they’d wrested from the Republicans in the landslide year of 1964 remained in Democratic control. Johnson’s Democrats still controlled the Congress in name, but for the next two years, at the very least, the conservative bloc would be running the show.

The Republicans had also added three Senate seats, along with 557 state legislative seats nationwide. Altogether, the party had received four million more votes than the Democrats in races across the country. Two years after respected commentators had openly wondered if the GOP was finished as a national party, the Republicans seemed poised to form a new majority in American politics.

Most remarkable of all was the face of that resurgent Republican Party: Ronald Reagan. More exciting than any vote margin was the story of how a former actor and a committed Goldwaterite had won the favor of the Golden State. Predictably, the talk of a Reagan for President campaign in 1968 that had surrounded Reagan since his victory in the primary now grew louder. “
In these circumstances,” wrote
The New York Times
, “Ronald Reagan may hold something
like the balance of power. A hero to the Goldwater conservatives, he could assist Mr. Nixon mightily by supporting him early and strongly; or he could cut into the Nixon base and open the way for Governor Romney by becoming a candidate or letting himself be ‘drafted’; or he could even make a party unity move by trying to align himself with Mr. Romney.”

The party’s big names stumbled over each other to get in Reagan’s good graces. Romney called him on election night. “
CONGRATULATIONS ON THAT GREAT VICTORY
,” cabled Nelson Rockefeller. “
THE RESULTS OF THE ELECTION IN CALIFORNIA AND THROUGHOUT THE COUNTRY SIGNAL THE RESURGENCE OF OUR PARTY TO ITS HISTORIC POSITION OF STRENGTH AND INFLUENCE
.”

Nixon stayed in close touch. “
I thought you would be interested to know that since returning to my office after a post-election vacation,” he wrote to Reagan in November, “I have heard a number of very favorable comments from some of the political ‘pros’ in the New York area with regard to your appearance on
Issues and Answers
. I only wish I had the opportunity of seeing it because from all accounts you hit the curves as well as the fast balls over the fence.” Just as before, he was cloyingly obsequious, but this time there was an added edge:
Don’t forget who worked hard in this election, too
.

As always, Reagan was careful not to look as if he wanted the big part. He brushed off the presidential talk and told friends and supporters how daunting he found his pending responsibilities in Sacramento. But he was careful to nurture his party relationships outside California. In response to a congratulatory telegram from Governor James A. Rhodes of Ohio, a state of the utmost importance to Republicans seeking the presidency, Reagan was fawning. “
I think more than any other governor of a major state you have proved that sound, fiscally-responsible government is indeed appreciated by the people,” he wrote. “I hope to see you at the Republican Governors Meeting … and I would like at some time to sit down and discuss with you your approach to state government.”

Behind closed doors, he was already running. Less than two
weeks after the 1966 election, Reagan met at his home with a group of political advisers to discuss a run for the presidency in 1968. Spearheading the effort was Tom Reed, described by Theodore White in
The Making of the President, 1968
as “
a distinguished physicist turned successful industrialist, now urged into politics by his conviction that Lyndon Johnson was an incarnation of evil.” Reed’s first move was to recruit a key strategist for the cause: Clif White, the architect of Goldwater’s 1964 convention strategy, the one man in the country who knew how to take a conservative candidate national. White had been devastated when Goldwater failed to make an appeal to the voters in the middle, presaging his disastrous ’64 loss to Johnson. Reagan, White knew, would not make the same mistake.

While these underlings worried about the details of a campaign, Reagan kept his eyes squarely on Lyndon Johnson. He urged fellow Republicans to make the case that the election results were more than a vague expression of dissatisfaction. They were the public rising up against the administration in Washington. “
I’ve been a little disappointed at how slow we are to respond to all the Liberal pundits who are trying to explain what happened,” he wrote to Senator Carl Curtis of Nebraska. “I think we should start making a case that what happened was a turning away from the Great Society by the people.” Writing to another member of Congress, he was even more direct: “
I think we can claim a mandate from the people; that if any backlash was present, it was a backlash against the Great Society.”

O
N THE PHONE
from Chicago, Mayor Daley was giving the president forceful advice. “
Some way,” the mayor said, “somehow, you should drop this Great Society. And pick up something else.”

It was December 17, 1966, just over a month after the midterm elections. Through those long weeks, Johnson had heard repeatedly what a disaster the results had been for the party. And how he, Lyndon Johnson, the greatest Democratic president since Roosevelt, was to blame.

To the end, he had dithered over whether or not he should insert himself into the campaign. After returning from his trip to the Pacific, he’d decided to make a last-minute push. From the ranch, where he’d retired in advance of an upcoming hernia operation, he staged a hurried revival of the old Man-in-Motion Johnson Show. In the three days before the election, he flew in an array of cabinet members to try to create the impression of major substantive progress as voters went to the polls. “
The mimeograph machines,” wrote the
Times
, “churned out bullish statements on nearly everything the voters could conceivably have been worried about—white backlash, Vietnam, the draft, high food prices.”

Then the devastating results came in and it was even easier for reporters to pin the blame on him. “
There was no question,” observed the
Times
, “that the Republicans … capitalized on the ‘anti votes’—those who turned against the Johnson Administration and the President himself.” His old enemies spared no extravagance detailing Johnson’s failure. Ted Sorensen, addressing New York Democrats, was near apocalyptic in describing the effects on the party. “It was … far worse than the usual midterm slide,” he said, “far worse than the issues required; and it spread disaster and disarray into our party in every section of the country and in every normally Democratic state.”

Newsweek
summed it up best: “
In the space of a single Autumn day … the 1,000 day reign of Lyndon I came to an end: The Emperor of American politics became just a president again.”

Johnson was a man whose myths had left him behind. For progressives, the election was liberation—no longer did they have to qualify their critique of the Vietnam War; no longer did they have to claim Lyndon Johnson as one of their own. In fact, by turning on Johnson, they could cling to their old utopian ideas and simply say it was Johnson and his war that had prevented that utopia from coming to pass. The problem wasn’t the program, they could say; it was Johnson and his war. And so they began. “
The election results,” wrote Walter Lippmann, “are a tremendous demonstration of how
in the atmosphere of war it is impossible to pursue the tasks of peace.” Johnson, the liberals felt, was incapable of pursuing those tasks. “
The feeling is widespread,” observed
The Progressive
, “that he is much too devious and domineering, too crafty and calculating to capture the admiration and affection he so passionately desires.”

Some were more realistic. Michael Harrington, the journalist whose reporting on poverty in the late fifties and early sixties had punctured his fellow liberals’ breezy confidence, once again was more pessimistic than his peers. He feared that a permanent shift had occurred. The old Goldwater movement had been “
a fantastic mood rather than a program,” Harrington wrote in an essay after the election. But the conservatism that voters had embraced in 1966, particularly the “Creative Federalism” Reagan had promoted, was something real: a program that would move resources away from federal projects helping the underprivileged in the cities and toward state programs that benefited more affluent voters in the suburbs. “
If the Dixiecrat-Republican coalition adopts a version of ‘Creative Federalism’ they will have come up with a workable and reactionary alternative to social progress.”

Conservatives were eager to describe a version of that “workable alternative”—that the future now belonged to men like Reagan, that a definitive move to the right had begun. William F. Buckley concluded a column in the
National Review
with an anecdote about a “
young conservative” who had run for State Assembly in the ’66 election in a district that included Harlem. “A Negro woman advanced on him and growled that he was a Nazi,” wrote Buckley. “ ‘Look, madam,’ the young and engaging Yale graduate said, ‘it’s not right to call me a Nazi, any more than it would be right for me to call you a Communist.’ ‘But I AM a Communist,’ she answered exultantly.” After long decades in the wilderness, the taint of extremism had shifted to the other side.

The old New Deal consensus had cracked. Johnson’s majority had vanished. There were challenges to his authority everywhere. The day before Johnson spoke with Daley, a caucus of Democratic
governors, meeting at the Greenbrier resort in West Virginia, had released an ostentatious statement explicitly saying that Johnson was responsible for the party’s poor showing the month before. Iowa’s Democratic governor, Harold Hughes, serving as a public spokesman for the group, would not even say whether Johnson could win reelection. “
I don’t know,” Hughes said. “If he had a respectable opponent who was acceptable to the American people, he would have a very tough race.”

Now here was Mayor Daley: “
The Great Society is tarnished,” he said. “It’s been hurt.… I don’t think we can keep pushing this Great Society idea because it hasn’t worked. It’s stumbled and fumbled and in many places, it’s fallen down.”

Johnson breathed deeply while he listened. This was the new reality: he was expected to sit back and take this kind of talk. Two years ago, Daley wouldn’t have dared tell the president what he should call his prized domestic program. He probably would have told him how wonderful he thought the name “Great Society” was.

But no one was thinking about 1964 anymore. As Johnson knew better than anyone, no one in Washington was ever thinking about the last election. They were thinking about the next one, 1968, about the increasing likelihood that Johnson would face a primary challenge, quite possibly from Bobby Kennedy. That would be the ultimate indignity: a sitting president losing his party’s nomination and Bobby triumphing over Johnson in the end.

Johnson had reasons now to placate people like Mayor Daley.

Anyway, Daley wasn’t the only one saying this sort of thing to Johnson. To survive, his advisers told him, he had to find a new message, one that spoke to the Americans in the middle. He had to forget about the editorial writers and heed the message of the voters, to scale back his domestic agenda, to focus his energy, to bring some sort of resolution to the war in Vietnam. And yes, he had to lay off the Great Society, at least for a while, and give people a new story in which they could believe.

Johnson said that he agreed, he would change his story going
forward. But his preoccupation was with the past. In the final weeks of 1966, his mind drifted back in time. Back before the miserable midterms. Before people talked about Ronald Reagan as anything other than an actor. Before Vietnam had tainted everything. Before the triumphs: Medicare and the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. Before the crises, before Pleiku and Rolling Thunder and the Gulf of Tonkin; before the marchers on the bridge in Selma, before those kids had gone missing in the Mississippi darkness. Before he’d lost Walter Jenkins. Before that gold-ringed morning in November 1964 when he’d woken up a reelected president, the owner of a record landslide. All the way back to the place where his thousand days had begun.

Back to Dallas.

As 1966 came to an end, the talk of Washington was a new book by the journalist William Manchester,
The Death of a President
. It was an authoritative recreation of the events before, during, and after the killing of President Kennedy, informed by interviews with one thousand people, including nearly everyone who’d been near the fallen president and his family in those dark days. It was the cooperation of one person in particular that made the book unique. Personally selected by the Kennedy family to write the authoritative account, Manchester had spent long hours in the company of Jacqueline Kennedy in her Georgetown home in the months following the assassination, reliving each moment of November 1963.

The book was not due out until the spring of 1967, but it was already a sensation.
Look
magazine planned to publish an excerpt in a January issue (it had bought the first serial rights for $665,000 and had already earned back half the purchase price in overseas sales). Jackie’s participation fueled public interest—she had not talked at length about the assassination in public since her Camelot interview with Teddy White. In Washington, fascination with the book swirled around rumors that it revealed tensions between Johnson and the Kennedy family in the first hours of the Johnson presidency.

Indeed it did. Manchester’s 654-page book, which remains the
definitive account of the Kennedy assassination and its immediate aftermath, included the Kennedy loyalists’ version of events in Dallas in which Lyndon Johnson commandeered Air Force One, installed himself in Jackie’s bedroom on the plane, and generally acted like a greedy usurper throughout the long weekend of mourning and transition. There was a lengthy description of Jackie, in a hotel room the night before her husband’s death, listening to her husband berate Vice President Johnson in a nearby room. A strong contempt for all things Texan pervaded Manchester’s emotional prose, suggesting that the culture of the Lone Star State had played a part in Kennedy’s murder. This implied culpability extended to the nation’s most famous Texan, the president of the United States. An early version of the book began with a vignette, provided by Jackie, of JFK visiting the LBJ Ranch in 1960 and growing appalled by the way Johnson hunted deer. The meaning was subtle but clear: the new president practiced the same kind of brutality that had taken the old president’s life.