Landslide (20 page)

But for Sam Johnson, there were other indicators of greatness. There were fine clothes and fancy shoes and other expensive things, all of which he wanted. And he wanted one fine thing above all: a bigger ranch. He was proud of his lineage in the Hill Country, proud of the name Johnson City, proud of the time when the Johnsons had ruled the Pedernales River Valley as prosperous landowners. As his reputation as a man of consequence grew, he thought more and more of the days when his forebears had ruled the Hill Country. He wanted to bring those days back.

And he wanted to do it with land. In the years between 1910 and 1920, he bought up acre after acre adjacent to his ranch on the Pedernales. When hard-up relatives sought to unload their own farms, he’d pay a premium for them so that family land would not pass into the hands of strangers. Soon he was in over his head, mortgaged far beyond his means, but he was confident he would be able to cover his debts with the proceeds of prize cattle raised on his bountiful land. He was confident his ranch would deliver.

And of course it didn’t. Like so many ranchers before him, many of them Johnsons, Sam Ealy Johnson, Jr., was devastated by the Hill Country’s harsh soil and unpredictable climate. Before long, he had more creditors than he could keep track of. He fell into financial ruin so great that he had to give up not only his land but his political career, too, just so he could pay the bills. A teenage Lyndon Johnson watched in deep shame as his father took any job he could get, even working on a road gang. The man who’d set out to heal the sick, to
feed the hungry, to bring money and roads to the poor, had ended up laying down pavement himself.

And those were the Hill Country rules, swirling around in Lyndon Johnson’s head as he considered the Kennedy poverty plan. He did not look at the proposal the way Kennedy might have. There was no gray area, no cautious skepticism, no putting off action until the reality became clearer. The story of the Hill Country Johnsons taught that the future could offer only two possibilities: heroic greatness or total disgrace. A great man was the one who could have it all—the ranch, the love of the downtrodden, the dreams. The disgraced man was the one who tried for it all and failed. And when Johnson dreamed for himself and his country, that was what he saw: total greatness. If that vision brought with it a reminder of the other possibility—total disaster and disgrace—well, that was unpleasant but necessary. In Johnson’s life, the suppressed fear of looming disaster was always the price of big dreams.

W
HEN FEAR DID
come to Lyndon Johnson, it usually came with a human face. As he worked with Heller and others that week on the ranch, plotting his great dreams, he did not have to look far for someone to frighten him. He could find him in one of the very men helping to plot the domestic programs on the ranch that Christmas week: Kennedy’s counselor Ted Sorensen.

Since the assassination, Johnson had continued to work tirelessly to win over Sorensen, who was, after Bobby and Jackie, the greatest symbol of continuity with the Kennedy legacy. “
I think he is going to come around,” Katharine Graham told Johnson early in December, “if you just give him a little love.” Johnson replied that he had “done as much as I can and have any pride and self-respect left.”

Meeting with Johnson in the Oval Office that December, Sorensen mentioned in passing that his three sons were downstairs eating in the White House mess. “
Let’s go join them!” said the president. Down they went, where Johnson gamely chatted up the young boys
before returning to the Oval Office. The children, who had their own magical memories of Kennedy, were unimpressed. “He doesn’t look like a president,” young Stephen Sorensen observed.

Soon it was clear that Sorensen could not continue in the White House. Johnson agreed to let him go, but he asked Sorensen to first write the State of the Union address and lead the process that would determine Johnson’s domestic agenda. On the thirtieth of December, Sorensen and a small group of other advisers joined the president at the ranch in a guesthouse in the middle of a cow pasture to discuss the poverty plan.

Sorensen knew all about Heller’s ideas. He had been a chief skeptic of their political viability in the Kennedy White House, and on more than one occasion he had urged Kennedy to deemphasize the issue. When Heller tried to talk about the politics of poverty, Sorensen told him to back off. Up to the last moments of the Kennedy presidency, Sorensen had been focused on the same thing as Kennedy: a second term in the White House.

But since there would be no second Kennedy term, Sorensen now had other priorities. Kennedy’s poverty plan was no longer about election year politics, but instead about Kennedy’s place in history. It was even more clear by the end of December, after the publication of the “Camelot” story in
Life
, that if history was going to remember Kennedy as a great president, it would not remember him as a centrist pragmatist who’d worried over the men with lunch pails and the shifting American center. The case for Kennedy’s greatness would be made by depicting him as a transformational liberal reformer, a man ahead of his time. To make the case for Kennedy’s greatness, Sorensen and the other loyalists had to remind the country of the great liberal reforms that, but for Oswald’s bullets, President Kennedy had been destined to usher in.

In death, John F. Kennedy would be recast as a man fully determined to end poverty. His disciples were already pushing the revision. In an essay in
The Saturday Evening Post
that December, Arthur Schlesinger wrote that ending poverty had been a signal aim of the
Kennedy administration. He quoted Kennedy in one of their last conversations: “
The time has come to organize a national assault on the causes of poverty, a comprehensive program, across the board.”
In his office, Bobby Kennedy now had framed a scrap of paper on which Kennedy had doodled a single word over and over at his last cabinet meeting: “poverty.”

And so, as Heller presented the poverty plan that day, Sorensen offered none of the old political objections. He listened approvingly as Heller described a plan for a war on poverty based on “community action,” a program in which the government would provide broad funding for antipoverty centers around the country, run under local control.

It fell to Horace Busby, a Johnson aide of long standing, to voice skepticism about the project’s feasibility. After hearing the plans to convert Washington’s Union Station into a clearinghouse for employers, the poor and out of work, and experts skilled in matching the two, Busby responded with caustic questions. How would the poor people get to Union Station? Where would they park?

This prompted a flash of anger from the president. Taking Busby outside, Johnson scolded his aide harshly. “
Why did you say that?” Johnson asked. “Don’t you realize these are
Kennedy’s people
?”

To Johnson, watching Sorensen assent to Heller’s proposals, the poverty plan began to look like something new: a test. He didn’t object to the substance of Busby’s questions. In truth, he had his own concerns about the plan. But for the moment, those concerns were beside the point. “
Johnson realized,” writes the historian Nicholas Lemann, “that the Kennedy people had succeeded in changing the stakes of the poverty program: the question, instead of being whether Johnson could take over what had been a small, stagnating Kennedy idea and make it his first major initiative without one-upping the dead president, became whether Johnson could possibly be as fully committed to fighting poverty as Kennedy had been.” He was not going to lose that game. Back in the meeting, Johnson made sure Busby kept his mouth shut.

But Busby was sufficiently concerned about the domestic program to try once more to get Johnson’s attention. That night, he stayed up writing a memo to the president cautioning him against making transformative social programs a centerpiece of his presidency in its early days. His words echoed the advice Kennedy’s political advisers had given him the previous month, when they had urged him to focus on the men with lunch pails. The poverty program was not fully formed, Busby told Johnson. But more important, it didn’t appeal to “
the American in the middle.… People know instinctively these are your kinds of folks—not the extremes. The politics of the extremes is what the typical American expects you to break away from. If you can do so, you can broaden the Democratic Party base as it has not been broadened in two decades.”

If Johnson took the other course, he would face peril. “
America’s real majority,” Busby wrote, “is suffering a minority complex of neglect. They have become the real foes of Negro rights, foreign aid, etc., because, as much as anything, they feel forgotten.” If somehow a talented Republican could find a way to speak to those forgotten people, then it would be a very new kind of politics indeed.

It was the kind of warning that might make another president think twice before acting in a bold, dramatic way. The kind of warning that
had
made another president think twice, just a few weeks before. But it was not the kind of warning that would naturally catch the attention of Lyndon Johnson. It was too abstract, too conditional. It relied too much on a murky understanding of what was coming. That wasn’t the kind of future Johnson believed in. His visions were always clear ones. Sometimes he saw certain greatness on the horizon, other times certain ruin. But certainty was always there.

He couldn’t hold back just for the sake of caution, not when the stakes were so high. That week’s issue of
Newsweek
had an article on Jackie Kennedy’s new post–White House life on the cover. By then she had purchased a Washington home of her own, on N Street in Georgetown. There, she would be surrounded by the kind of privileged easterners who had looked down on Lyndon Johnson for
thirty years. Her new house had a dining room that could seat forty and a nine-hundred-square-foot drawing room. It was the kind of place where a hostess could entertain on a grand scale, the kind of place where a court in exile could plot its return. In the photograph on
Newsweek’
s cover, Jackie was peeking out from a doorway. Half her face was hidden, obscured by the large door. But the other half was filled with contained anticipation. Her eyes, twinkling ever so slightly, were staring straight ahead.

Johnson could not let the Kennedy mythmakers do him in. He had to offer his own story, not about the past but about the future, one that was more glorious than anyone had yet dared to imagine. He sent Walter Heller and the other aides back to Washington with clear instructions: in his State of the Union, he would declare unconditional war on poverty. And the war would be over only when poverty had been eradicated once and for all.

A
FTER THE NEW
year, the flood of visitors to the LBJ Ranch at last began to subside. Soon it would be time for the Johnsons to return to Washington. But before they left, Lyndon and Lady Bird would play host to one more couple: Sally Reston and her husband, James B. “Scotty” Reston of
The New York Times
.

The senior
Times
man in Washington, Scotty Reston was the most esteemed newspaper reporter in the country. His values were establishment values and his column reflected the Washington establishment position on a given issue more often than not. But he was a perceptive reporter who sometimes challenged conventional wisdom. Already he had taken such a position on the young presidency of Lyndon Johnson. In mid-December, while most other reporters wrote about the active new president and the seamless harmony between the Kennedy and Johnson teams, Reston offered a discordant note. “
People here do not like to compare the old and the new, for the time being,” he wrote, “but they cannot help it. To talk about President Johnson’s genius with Congress somehow seems to imply a criticism of President Kennedy; to dwell on President Kennedy’s
grace and style similarly seems to suggest a problem of President Johnson.”

In the column, Reston wondered if, compared with his now-legendary predecessor, Johnson’s emerging presidency might be a practical, placid affair, lacking in the Kennedys’ big dreams. He quoted an unnamed correspondent: “
Mr. Johnson now seems Gary Cooper as President—High Noon, the poker game, the easy walk and masculine smile. But even Gary Cooper was growing older, and the companions and adversaries around the poker table reflect a less fresh, if no doubt practical and effective mood. All will be well, I feel sure, but it is August and not June.”

This was a direct challenge to the story Johnson was trying to tell, in which the time of big dreams and great adventures had just begun. Before Johnson returned from Texas, he intended to make sure Scotty Reston himself saw the proof. On January 3,
Reston received a call from Johnson aide Bill Moyers. The president, Moyers said, was hoping to spend some time with Reston to talk about the campaign and the year ahead. Could he and Sally come for a visit at the ranch?

The Restons, who were in Phoenix, Arizona, watching Barry Goldwater officially kick off his campaign for the presidency, made their way to Texas. Their day with the Johnsons was full: a helicopter trip to Austin for a visit with a recuperating John Connally and then the flight home. But first they had to have the tour of the ranch and its environs. Riding along, Lady Bird had one last chance to tell the story of the Johnson heroes, this time with her husband there to help her and the greatest newspaperman in the country as her audience.

In the car, the Johnsons pointed to the old stone fort where Lyndon’s settler forebears had taken refuge and fired their rifles at invading Indians. They told of Lyndon’s grandmother, Lady Bird later recalled, “
hiding with her two infant children in the cellar of the log house, while the Indians stomped outside.” They pointed to the old
fort’s commissary, the place where the Hill Country ranchers had gathered their herds at the beginning of an epic drive.

There, under the Texas sky, Lyndon made it clear to Scotty Reston that his own epic drive was just beginning. Moving briskly across the ranch, he grew animated, talking about his high hopes for his presidency, the reforms he would push through, all the ways he would make America a better place. He was worried about high school dropouts, teenage pregnancy, the rural poor. He believed he could solve each of these problems, and he intended to try. As he spoke, he would pull slips of paper from his pocket, with facts and figures to pepper his arguments. And he was most animated when talking about the war on poverty. This was a monumental problem, he argued, but a solvable one, one that would be solved, by him. He was sure.