Landslide

When he woke to great glory, he wanted even more. Midmorning on Wednesday, November 4, 1964, Lyndon Baines Johnson arose from his bed in the familiar surroundings of the LBJ Ranch. He had been president for eleven months. In that time, he had made frequent trips from Washington back to his home in the Texas Hill Country. The ranch offered familiar comforts he could not find in the White House: the live oaks that lined the verdant banks of the Pedernales River, the sprawling Hill Country vistas, and his herd of prized cattle that, as his Texas forebears had done, he would corral from on top of a horse.

And this particular trip home brought the greatest pleasure of all: a chance to vote for himself as president of the United States. It was a pleasure he had not known before. He had assumed the presidency on November 22, 1963, in an awful, frenzied moment: his Secret Service agent’s knee in his back, his face pressed to the floor of a limousine speeding through the Dallas streets. It was surely the
most ignominious ascent in the history of the office. After Kennedy’s death, Johnson would later recall, the American people were “
like a bunch of cattle caught in the swamp.” He came from a line of ranchers; he knew what he had to do. “There is but one way to get the cattle out of the swamp,” he said, “and that is for the man on the horse to take the lead.”

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He had led by example, executing his office with force and resolve and such unstoppable energy that no one would ever doubt that he was the president. But all along, he knew the difference. He had never
won
the presidency.

Until now.
The previous day—Election Day—he had risen with the sun. With his wife, Lady Bird, he was third in line at the polling booth in Johnson City, Texas, casting a ballot for himself and his running mate, Hubert Humphrey. He’d spent the rest of the day nervously quizzing aides for any and all news from the various states. Then, just before seven o’clock that night, NBC News called it—it would be a Johnson victory over the Republican candidate, Barry Goldwater. The margin, the network predicted, would be astounding—something greater than 20 percent. Johnson did not yet know the exact tally, which would turn out to be 43,129,566 votes, 61 percent of the American electorate. And he had not yet heard all the columnists and commentators proclaiming the start of a long liberal era to come. But he knew the most important thing: he had won the White House with the largest portion of the popular vote of any president in American history.

A landslide
. For a man like Lyndon Johnson—a man who had lived and breathed politics since childhood, a man whose greatest ambition was to earn approval from millions of people he would never meet—there was no greater triumph. Years later he would recall the sensation: “
For the first time in all my life, I truly felt loved by the American people.”

He spent that night toasting the returns with family, friends, and supporters at Austin’s Driskill Hotel. As Tuesday night turned to Wednesday morning, he lingered with the well-wishers, drinking in
their praise. When at last he closed his eyes back home at the ranch, it was nearly dawn.

Yet he woke up only a few hours later that Wednesday morning still unsatisfied. Through the night, he had nursed his private resentments. Goldwater, or “
that son of a bitch,” as Johnson referred to him that day, had never called to concede. Somehow it was fitting that the Arizona senator would bungle the most important custom in American democracy. He had bungled every other rule of modern presidential campaigns. He hadn’t shown any interest in moderating his hard-line conservative stances after securing his party’s nomination. He hadn’t spent the fall campaign trying to win the favor of the voters in the American middle, the ones who decided elections. He hadn’t shown much interest in winning the favor of any voters at all.

And at the end, when it was clear to everyone that he was finished, he hadn’t picked up the phone to call Johnson.
As the hour grew late on Election Day, long after it became obvious that the Goldwater campaign was over, the candidate’s staff sent word that he was analyzing results and would have no further comment that night. In truth, he had simply gone to bed.

Therefore, despite the landslide of Tuesday night, it was not until Wednesday morning that Johnson’s victory became official. He watched from his bedroom at the ranch as “that son of a bitch” read a telegram of concession on TV. And so, the morning after the election, Johnson was still hungry for the outpouring of praise and affection he believed he was due. To find it, he turned to another familiar comfort: the phone. In the days after the election, he reveled in the customary calls of congratulation from elected officials around the country. Chicago’s mayor, Richard J. Daley, knew that Johnson would want to hear numbers. “
By God, we said we would get you seven-fifty in Chicago, and it will be closer to eight fifty or nine hundred thousand.” Daley, perhaps the most powerful and effective boss in the Democratic Party, was no bosom friend of LBJ’s. Earlier that year, Johnson had obsessed over rumors that Daley was aiding a plot to steal the party’s nomination from him and give it to
Johnson’s nemesis, Bobby Kennedy, instead. But Daley knew what power looked like. On the phone with Johnson, he offered praise: “
May the lord shower his blessings upon you and your family.”

For some politicians, these ritualistic exchanges are exhausting and irritating. The endless, empty praise; the “send my love to your wife and give her a kiss for me”; the inflated flattery from “good friends” who would put a knife in your back if the circumstances required. For Johnson, the ritual was the whole point. He had spent his life in a business filled with champion fawners. Now it was time for them to fawn over him.

“Mr. President?” asked California governor Edmund “Pat” Brown, on the phone from the Golden State, ready to fawn away.

Johnson greeted him: “
Well, you oughtta be a banker, Pat.”

“A banker?” asked Brown. “Why?”

“Well,” the president answered, “you’re so damn conservative, you told me we’d carry it by over a million.” He was talking about California, the largest state in the nation. “I think you beat it, didn’t you?”

Like Daley, Brown had his numbers ready to go: “About a million four,” the governor cooed.

“Well, why don’t you go in the banking business?” said the president. “Go to lending money, a fellow that conservative …”

“You were great,” Brown sputtered, “my God!”

Johnson had stepped on Brown’s headline—the better-than-expected margin—leaving him stumbling for other morsels to present. So the governor dived into a more detailed report. He told Johnson that he had failed to carry only three California counties. He’d lost San Diego, the die-hard conservative stronghold, but that was no surprise. He’d lost Sutter County, but that was the smallest county in the state. And he’d lost Orange County, the mass of middle-class suburbs to the south of Los Angeles.