Means of Ascent (4 page)

“Lyndon Johnson told the nation / Have no fear of escalation.… Though it really isn’t war / We’re sending 50,000 more.” By July, 1965, there were 175,000 men in Vietnam; by August, 219,000; by December, 1966, 385,000. By the time Lyndon Johnson left the presidency, 549,000 American troops were mired in a hopeless jungle war. By the end of 1966, more Americans had died in Vietnam than had been
in
Vietnam when Johnson became
President. By the time the war ended, 58,000 Americans had died there; the polished black granite wall in Washington into which their names are chiseled is five hundred feet long. And that Vietnam Memorial wall commemorates the cost of the Vietnam War only in human lives—not in amputation and blindness and scars. The wall in Washington does not bear the names of young Americans wounded in the war. The wall would be far longer were it to bear those names. There are 288,000 of
them.

How small a fraction of the cost to America of the episode that history has come to remember simply as “Vietnam” is represented even by these figures, moreover? How many American lives were wrecked in other ways, scarred inside with scars that would never heal? And what of the cost to which President Eisenhower referred when he wrote (in words he struck from his memoirs before publication), “
The standing of the United States as the
most powerful of the anti-colonial powers is an asset of incalculable value to the Free World.… Thus the moral position of the United States was more to be guarded than the Tonkin Delta, indeed than all of Indochina.” By the time Lyndon Johnson left the presidency that asset had been squandered; were the American empire to live as long as Rome, would that asset ever be made whole?

And what of another asset, and its squandering?

March, 1965, had been a month of ringing words; April, 1965, was a month of whispers—whispers and lies. Making his decision to commit United States troops to the Asian conflict, Lyndon Johnson had warned participants in a crucial meeting in the White House that there was to be no mention of the new strategy to the press. When the truth crept out, almost two months later—in the words of one typically outraged editorial: “
The
American people were told by a minor State Department official yesterday that, in effect, they were in a land war on the continent of Asia”—Johnson ordered his aides to deny that such a decision had been made.

That had been one of the first duplicities, but it hadn’t been the last. Nor did the duplicities concern only Vietnam. In an attempt to justify sending American troops into another small country, the Dominican Republic
(in that same month, April, 1965), Lyndon Johnson told the press and the American people that the American Ambassador had said that otherwise “
American blood will run in the streets.” (He
hadn’t.) He said that the Ambassador had said that he “
was talking to us from under a desk while bullets were going through his windows.” He hadn’t. Johnson said that fifteen hundred innocent people had been murdered, some by decapitation. They hadn’t. He said that the revolution had been taken over by “
a band of Communist conspirators.” It hadn’t. Nor were the duplicities confined to foreign
affairs. They were present in the President’s discussions of the budget, of politics, of appointments—even of trip schedules. “
Distrust of the President,” as Theodore H. White put it, “was slow in growing.” But the duplicities continued and multiplied; “thus, men paid attention to what he said and began to check his statements.” And when they did, they found that the President lied—lied about big matters
and small, lied not only about policy but about personal matters; his most publicized such misstatement, that his great-grandfather “
died at the Alamo,” although his great-grandparents had not arrived in Texas until years after the Alamo had fallen, was only one of many misleading remarks about his personal history. A new phrase—“Credibility Gap”—entered American political dialogue. It was printed in headlines, and on
buttons, even on buttons pinned to flak jackets; men who had been sent to Vietnam on Lyndon Johnson’s orders went into action wearing a button—“
Ambushed at Credibility Gap”—that called their Commander-in-Chief a liar.

Television made the deceptions more evident, the truth more vivid. To avoid debate in Congress, debate which might have revealed the scope and intent of his conduct of the war, troops were raised by increasing the
draft quotas each month administratively, without calling up the reserves; and the costs of the war were buried, as much as possible, in the Pentagon budget. But Americans could watch, night after night on the newscasts, American boys
hacking their way through the jungles or reloading in the tall grass. The viewers would hear the muffled explosions, and the voice-over would tell them it was mortar fire, and the picture would bounce as the cameraman ran for cover. Viewers could see what napalm looked like, as the flames spread out—and they could see what the flames did to human flesh, to civilians as well as to soldiers. A mood of disillusionment, disillusionment and rage, spread through America, a mood
symbolized by “that horrible song.”

“
It is difficult today to remember, much less … to understand, the extent to which ‘the President’—any President—was then revered, respected, feared,” Tom Wicker, who covered the White House for the
New York Times
, recalled in 1983. In times of foreign crisis, Wicker pointed out, the last two Presidents before Johnson, right or wrong, had been able to count on that reverence:
Eisenhower after the U-2 incident, Kennedy
despite the Bay of Pigs; Kennedy until the very day he died could be certain of the nation’s loyalty, almost fealty, in summit confrontation or missile crisis. And therefore when, in late 1965 or early 1966, while accompanying President Johnson to a speech in New York, Wicker for the first time saw protesters massed behind police barricades shouting, “Hey! Hey! LBJ! How many kids did you kill today?”
the journalist says he “
could hardly believe my ears.”

But that was in 1965 or 1966. By 1968, reporters who followed the President had grown accustomed to the chant—for the chant followed the President, too: by the final year of his term, the only appearances that Lyndon Johnson, elected only four years earlier by the largest popular majority in history, could make without being hounded by pickets were at military bases.

With a note of sadness, Wicker wrote in 1983 that “
the reverence, the childlike dependence, the willingness to follow where the President leads, the
trust
, are long gone—gone, surely, with Watergate, but gone before that.… After Lyndon Johnson, after the ugly war that consumed him, trust in ‘the President’ was tarnished forever.”

That tarnishing revolutionized politics and government in the United States. The shredding of the delicate yet crucial fabric of credence and faith between the people of the United States and the man they had placed in the White House occurred during the presidency of Lyndon Johnson. Until the day of Kennedy’s death—until, in other words, the day Johnson took office—the fabric was whole. By the time Johnson left office, the fabric was in shreds,
destroyed by lies and duplicity that went beyond permissible political license, destroyed so thoroughly that Wicker could write that “The tragic irony of Lyndon Johnson is that the lowering of the presidency, not the Great Society of which he dreamed, is his most obvious legacy.”

“We Shall Overcome.” “Hey! Hey! LBJ!” The War on Poverty. Vietnam. The Great Society. Credibility Gap. The presidency, thirty-sixth in the history of the Republic, of Lyndon Baines Johnson was a watershed presidency, one of the great divides in American history, in the evolution not only of the country’s policies both foreign and domestic, but also of its image both in the eyes of the world and in its own eyes. But it was not a
triumphant presidency. Beside the bright thread, symbolized by the Voting Rights speech, that gleams through its tangled course runs a thread much darker.

T
HOSE THREADS
, bright and dark, run side by side through most of Lyndon Johnson’s life. In the first volume of this biography, a tall, gangling youth, humiliated and ridiculed during an impoverished boyhood in a tiny,
isolated Texas Hill Country town that felt like “the end of the earth,” earns at twenty-one a reputation as a “wonder kid of politics,” and rises with spectacular speed
both to a seat in Congress and to a toehold on national power, in his ascent displaying not only a genius for discerning a path to power but an utter
ruthlessness in destroying obstacles in that path, and a seemingly bottomless capacity for deceit, deception and betrayal. Once he was in Congress, these traits were accentuated rather than softened—but along with them there was displayed a rare gift for mobilizing the powers of government to raise up the
downtrodden. When he was elected—in 1937, at the age of twenty-eight—the two hundred thousand farmers and ranchers of Texas’ Tenth Congressional District had no electricity, and, without it, were living a life of terrible drudgery, a life almost as bleak and hard as that of peasants in the Middle Ages. His victory in his long, difficult fight to “bring the lights” to the vast Texas Hill Country carried his constituents into the twentieth century.
Johnson had displayed that capacity for compassion, and for the accomplishment that made compassion meaningful, before he was a Congressman, in fact; had displayed it as a twenty-year-old teacher in the “Mexican School” on the wrong—the Mexican—side of the railroad tracks in the desolate South Texas town of Cotulla. No teacher in that school had ever really cared if the Mexican children learned or not. He cared.
Believing
that speaking the
language of their new country was crucial to their success, he insisted that his pupils speak English, spanked the boys and tongue-lashed the girls if they didn’t, arrived at the school early and stayed late. And he didn’t merely teach. He persuaded a reluctant school board to buy bats and balls and volleyball nets so that, although these children had no lunch, they could at least play games at lunch hour. He arranged activities with other schools—baseball games
and track meets like the white kids had. To encourage his students to learn English, he formed a debating team, scheduled debates with other schools, and managed to arrange transportation, since for the Mexican School there was no bus. His coming to Cotulla, one of his students was to recall decades later—“It was like a blessing from a clear sky.”

As the story unfolds in succeeding volumes, the threads will, again, run side by side. As Senate
Majority Leader during the 1950s, Lyndon Johnson displayed a genius for manipulation and domination for the sake of his ambition, and for
power for its own sake—he wrested from the Senate barons power no Leader had ever enjoyed before—but he also displayed a capacity for achievement on behalf of the dispossessed,
beginning to pass social-welfare legislation for which liberals had long been yearning. And, of course, during his presidency, in the 1960s, the threads run side by side, darker and brighter than ever.

The two threads do not run side by side in this volume. The bright
one is missing. For this volume is about a seven-year period in the life of Lyndon Johnson in which his headlong race for power was halted.

These seven years, the most extended such period in his adult life, begin in July, 1941, after his defeat in his first campaign for the United States Senate. During the next seven years, it appeared that he would never reach the Senate, much less realize the great ambition beyond the Senate of which he always dreamed but almost never spoke. During these years, he lost his toehold on national power. And with the death of his greatest patron, President Franklin D.
Roosevelt, he lost even the aura of a White House favorite. For seven years, he appeared doomed to live out his political life as one of the 435 members of the House of Representatives; it seemed that the highest goal he could ever reach would be the chairmanship of a House committee. These were years of hopelessness and despair, seven years in what was for Lyndon Johnson the bleakest possible wilderness: a life without any political power that he considered meaningful. During these
years, he came to the very verge of abandoning politics for a full-time business career, of leaving perhaps forever the world that was, in terms of his temperament and training and love, the world he was born to rule. Journalists would later write that Lyndon Johnson’s years
as Vice President were the worst years of his political life. They wrote that only because they hadn’t known Lyndon Johnson during his later years in the House of
Representatives.

During these seven years Johnson’s lack of interest in the general legislative work of the Congress in which he sat, a lack of interest conspicuous since his earliest days in that body, became increasingly pronounced. And while he had previously done much for his district—had been not only a diligent and energetic but a creative representative—now, with his programs in place and being carried forward by an efficient staff, he implemented no
significant new programs. In a state which returned its congressmen to office for decades, there was no realistic chance he would lose his seat, and there was, increasingly, a lack of enthusiasm in his representation of his district. He had been interested, involved in work for the district so long as that work held out the prospect—the imminent prospect—of leading to something more, but his interest waned the moment it appeared that the work might have to be the end in
itself. Without the lure of new, greater power, the power he possessed was meaningless to him. Lyndon Johnson’s interest in governmental accomplishment will return, dramatically, later. Here, in the years covered by this book, it scarcely exists at all. These seven years are years in which Johnson was all but totally consumed by his need for power, and by his efforts to obtain it. So in this volume can be seen—stark and unadorned—the traits which were later to
divide a nation.

T
HESE YEARS
include the genesis of Lyndon Johnson’s fortune. He had always wanted money, but so long as the path to political power lay open before him, the other desire had been deferred. Now, with that path closed—perhaps forever—the deferring was over. He grabbed for money as greedily as he had grabbed for power, and his financial rise was as rapid and spectacular as his political rise had been. At the close of the
first volume of this biography, Lyndon Johnson had less than a thousand dollars in the bank. By the end of this volume, he is telling intimates that he is worth a million, a substantial fortune at the time.