Landslide (54 page)

And yet, in a sense, the campaign he ran had very little to do with his opponent Carter. Really, it was the same campaign he had been running since the mid-sixties. The succession of recent failed presidencies—Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter—allowed Reagan to run not just against the record of the last four years, but against an entire era of broken government promises. The root of the country’s problems, Reagan suggested, was in the arrogant ambitions that the Democratic Party had staked out in the mid-1960s.

Reagan’s 1980 campaign was a campaign against those ambitions, against the myths of Lyndon Johnson’s thousand days. He ran against the Big Government that stifled innovation and threatened freedom. He ran against appeasement of a resurgent Soviet threat. He ran against the liberal promises that had not come to pass. He ran against the government elites who had overtaxed hardworking Americans in the name of helping the poor but had only created a class of dependents living off the government dole. He ran as hard as he could against all of Lyndon Johnson’s dreams.

“
We have a group of elitists in Washington,” he said in 1980, in words that he could just as easily have uttered in 1966, “who … 
think they must control our destiny, make all the rules, tell us how to run our lives and our businesses. And it is time to have a president who will take the government off the people’s backs and turn the great genius of the American people loose once again.”

Sometimes, his campaign against the Johnson-era vision was so literal it was crass. Running against Carter, an evangelical Christian from Georgia, Reagan’s campaign knew that they had to make a hard play for the white vote in the South. Thus for his first stop after the Republican convention in August of 1980, Reagan went to Mississippi. And not just anywhere in Mississippi: Reagan chose to begin his general election campaign at the Neshoba County Fairgrounds, just a few miles from the lonely country road where James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Mickey Schwerner had breathed their last breaths. There, Reagan greeted an almost exclusively white audience and spoke the code words that had signaled resistance to federal civil rights efforts since the sixties: “
I believe in states’ rights.”

Mostly, though, his campaign against the old Johnson vision took place on a higher plane. Like Johnson, he sought to inspire the nation with a mythic promise. “
For those who have abandoned hope,” he said, accepting the Republican nomination, “we’ll restore hope and we’ll welcome them into a great national crusade to make America great again.… Can we doubt that only a Divine Providence placed this land, this island of freedom, here as a refuge for all those people in the world who yearn to breathe freely: Jews and Christians …”

Just as they had for Johnson in 1964, the American people listened to Reagan’s promises of hope, destiny, and the divine and gave him a landslide in return. Carter and Reagan had been close in the polls going into the fall campaign, but after a solid debate performance in which he came across as reasonable and mainstream, voters flocked to Reagan. He swamped Carter on Election Day, securing 489 electoral votes to the incumbent’s 49. Unlike Goldwater, who had made Johnson wait until the next day for his concession in 1964,
Carter didn’t even wait until the polls closed. When he called Reagan to concede, the president-elect was dripping, having just emerged from the shower.

It was clear from the dramatic words in Reagan’s 1981 inaugural address that his presidency would be devoted to undoing the legacy of the past two decades.
In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem, government
is
the problem
. That spring, Reagan was shot by a would-be assassin after a speech in Washington. The president suffered a serious wound but made a full recovery. To some Americans, this seemed a mystical endorsement of the Reagan project. The time of trouble had begun when a president was shot and killed; it would end with a president who was shot and lived.

Reagan’s advisers knew that after the Kennedy assassination, Johnson had used the swell of public support for his administration to force through his ambitious agenda. They moved to do the same after Reagan’s assassination attempt, pushing forward a program that brought Reagan’s vision to life: a defense buildup to more aggressively confront the Soviets abroad, and a shrinking of government at home. The centerpiece of this effort was the largest tax reduction in American history, which Reagan signed into law in the summer of 1981.

Like Johnson before him, Reagan applied his mythic vision at the expense of reality. Johnson’s War on Poverty took an untested idea, community action, and applied it on a large scale without waiting to see if it would work. So, too, the Reagan administration brushed off concerns that the massive tax cut would shrink federal revenues to unsustainable levels. Government expenditures could be dramatically reduced, Reagan believed, by eliminating the wasteful programs for the poor that had metastasized since the Great Society. Reagan embraced a faddish conservative theory, supply-side economics, which held that a large reduction in marginal income-tax rates would create such significant economic growth that the federal government would in the end receive
greater
revenues. There was
scant factual support for the theory—running against Reagan in the 1980 primary campaign, George H. W. Bush had dubbed it “voodoo economics.” But as with the Great Society programs, the Reagan administration implemented its theory as though it were fact, willing a fantasy to come true.

The results were catastrophic. The tax cut reduced government revenues to approximately 18.5 percent of gross domestic product. The accompanying cut in federal expenditures never came: while Reagan did cut discretionary spending on Great Society domestic programs for the disadvantaged, he made no serious effort to alter federal spending on middle-class entitlements, and his defense buildup more than offset any cuts he’d made. At the end of his term, federal spending would amount to 22.5 percent of GDP. Reagan’s policies had created unprecedented federal deficits. When Reagan assumed office, government debt was a manageable one third of GDP. During his time as president,
Reagan would add more debt to the nation’s ledgers than had all of his predecessors, going back to George Washington, combined. In a moment of crisis, Reagan had promised to restore fiscal responsibility to an out-of-control federal behemoth. But, as with Johnson, the real world never matched the mythic vision he espoused.

Unlike Johnson, however, Reagan did not pay a political price. By the 1980s, the fracture in the nation’s governing consensus—the fracture that began in Johnson’s thousand days—had grown so large that reality was no longer something for which politicians had to account. The public had gotten used to the politics that Reagan and Johnson had pioneered in the mid-sixties, wherein two sides told competing fantastic stories of great days to come and the party with the more enticing and believable story would win. The same qualities that had fueled Reagan’s rise in the sixties—his intuition for the national mood, his ability to tell a clear and dramatic tale—served him well as his policies went into effect. In 1983, when the economy at last began to recover from the 1970s doldrums, Reagan was quick
to interpret it as a vindication of his vision. The story of mythic resurgence he prophesied was coming to pass.

As always, he made sure the villain in his story, the same villain that had always been at the center of his story, was exposed: Johnson-era Big Government. Looking toward his campaign for reelection in 1984, Reagan reshaped the story of recent history to fit the contours of his vision. “
The simple truth is that low inflation and economic expansion in the years prior to the Great Society meant enormous social and economic progress for the poor of America,” he told an audience in 1983. “But after the gigantic increases in government spending and taxation, that economic progress slowed dramatically … Today, because of our attempts to restrict and cut back on government expansion and to retarget aid toward those most in need, and away from those who can manage without Federal help, the working people of America are directly benefiting.”

In the new political fashion, he expressed certainty that the country had chosen wisely, that the best days were yet to come. The slogans in his 1984 reelection campaign echoed the assured optimism Johnson had used two decades before: “It’s Morning in America,” “America Is Back,” “You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet.” Once more, the country wanted to believe in the grand vision, to believe that the time of endless prosperity had arrived. Reagan won reelection that year with a landslide that in some ways outdid Johnson’s, capturing all but one of the fifty states.

L
YNDON
J
OHNSON DID
not live to see that landslide. He did not live to see the dawn of the Reagan presidency and Reagan’s attack, as president, on the Great Society and the prized programs Johnson had passed. After leaving the White House in January 1969, Johnson intended to retire from public life, the heroic rancher returning to his ranch. His life there was quiet, or at least as quiet as anything concerning Lyndon Johnson could be. He became a sort of commander in chief of Stonewall, Texas, taking an interest in everything within his line of sight: the management of the ranch, the
construction of his presidential library, the particulars of Lady Bird’s wardrobe.

Unsure what to do with his golden years, he seemed determined to make them brief. After leaving the White House, his health declined, and his habits of healthy living, always tenuous, disappeared. He’d given up smoking after his 1955 heart attack when doctors warned him that cigarettes could kill him, but he resumed the habit in his final years. When his daughters implored him to stop, Johnson simply refused. “
I’ve raised you girls,” he told them, “I’ve been president, and now it’s my time.”

One January evening in 1973, viewers of
CBS News
watched Walter Cronkite sit in somber silence, clutching a phone to his ear. It was nearly a decade after the awful weekend that followed the Kennedy assassination. That had been a grotesque and mesmerizing new experience: the whole country learning something awful and unexpected from their television sets minutes after it occurred. But over the course of ten years, so much had happened that was awful and unexpected, and almost all of it had been captured on TV. Now, when the CBS anchor clutched the phone to his ear, viewers knew the cue: something momentous had happened, most likely something bad.

“
I’m talking to Tom Johnson,” Cronkite told the nation, “the press secretary for Lyndon Johnson, who has reported that the thirty-sixth president of the United States died this afternoon in an ambulance plane on the way to San Antonio, where he was taken after being stricken at his ranch.”

Johnson had spent his last morning on earth like so many others: talking on the telephone and touring the LBJ Ranch. After returning from an inspection of a cattle fence, he ate lunch and retired to his bedroom to take a nap. There he suffered the coronary attack that took his life. Lady Bird was at a meeting in Austin when she learned of the episode. She flew immediately to San Antonio, where she was told her husband had died. As always, she maintained her composure. “
Well,” she said simply, “we expected it.”

Lyndon Johnson was not meant for retirement. His plan for his life was to serve as president and then go home to Texas and die,
most likely in the fashion of Johnson men, before he turned sixty-five. Johnson had lived his life in a storm of warring fantasies, torn between dreams of greatness and fears of disgrace. To the end, he never quite let go of his grandest dream: of serving longer, and better, than any president save FDR. The day he died, January 22, 1973, was two days after what would have been his last day as president had he run for reelection in 1968. He was seven months short of his sixty-fifth birthday. And to the end, cruel fate never quite let go of Lyndon Johnson. The day after Johnson died, President Nixon announced to the nation that he had secured a “peace with honor” settlement with the North Vietnamese government, ending the war in Vietnam.

L
ADY
B
IRD
J
OHNSON
was sixty years old and healthy when her husband died. She devoted many of her remaining years to work on conservation and beautification, heralding the rise of the environmental movement in the 1970s and ’80s. She continued to reside at the LBJ Ranch, even after it was donated to the government as a national historic site.

She lived another thirty-four years after her husband’s death. She outlived many of the people who had loomed large during the years of her husband’s presidency: Jackie Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Barry Goldwater, Pat Brown, Richard Daley, George Wallace. When Walter Jenkins, who had lived a quiet life in Texas after resigning from the Johnson administration, died in 1985, she released a statement that echoed the kindness she had shown him in his moment of disgrace. “
Walter was a good friend and a capable person,” she said. “He is one of the dearest people I know.”

Her greatest service was always to her husband. She tended the Johnson legacy as best she could and spoke frequently of how much she would have loved to talk to Lyndon about this or hear what Lyndon had to say about that. But it was only when Lady Bird emerged
from the shadow of her husband’s commanding personality that the country fully came to understand her remarkable contributions and gifts. In 1988, she was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, one of the two highest civilian honors the United States bestows (the other being the Presidential Medal of Freedom), in a ceremony at the White House. Presenting her with the award on behalf of the United States Congress, President Ronald Reagan was generous and warm. “
I remember one story,” said Reagan, “of the time that LBJ was speaking to a group in North Carolina, and after about fifty minutes, the audience became restless. Lady Bird wrote a note on a piece of paper saying ‘close soon’ and slipped it to him. LBJ took it, held it up, and read it aloud to the audience. And then, after the laughter died down, he continued with his speech.”