Landslide (30 page)

Johnson had been in Washington for the entirety of the Cold War. He had seen the persecution of Dean Acheson over the Truman administration’s China policy. He had lived through the McCarthy period in the Senate. He understood one simple rule about the politics of Cold War foreign policy: Democrats lost when they looked weak. The facts from the Gulf of Tonkin were far from clear. But there was no real debate over what to do: Johnson’s government would treat the incident as an act of calculated belligerent aggression, and Johnson would respond with clear and commanding force.

“
My fellow Americans,” Johnson told the nation in a televised address on the evening of August 4, 1964. “As President and Commander in Chief, it is my duty to the American people to report that renewed hostile actions against United States ships on the high seas in the Gulf of Tonkin have today required me to order the military forces of the United States to take action in reply.… That reply is being given as I speak to you tonight.”

Indeed it was. As Johnson spoke, American bombers from the aircraft carriers
Ticonderoga
and
Constellation
were in the air over North Vietnam. They would fly sixty-four sorties that night, destroying North Vietnamese PT boat bases and an oil depot at a place
called Vinh. There, David Halberstam wrote, “
the smoke was observed rising to 14,000 feet.”

Soon, a resolution that the Johnson administration had prepared in anticipation of an act of North Vietnamese provocation was sailing through the Congress. It would give the president broad war-making powers in Southeast Asia without actually having to declare war.

Soon, no less than Barry Goldwater himself was calling to commend the president on his strong response to the incident. “
You’ve taken the right steps,” said Goldwater, “and I’m sure you’ll find that everybody will be behind you.”

Soon, a triumphant Johnson was bragging to reporters about the American triumph. “
I didn’t just screw Ho Chi Minh, I cut his pecker off.”

It was only years later, after exhaustive examination, that experts determined that there had in fact been no attack on the
Maddox
or the
Turner Joy
by the North Vietnamese.

In the meantime, there was only glory for Lyndon Johnson. The news from Tonkin dominated evening newscasts, the next day’s papers, the newsmagazines the following week. For a moment, at least, the troubles in Vietnam were at the forefront of the American mind. They even obscured an important bulletin that reached Johnson in the White House during the first hours of the American response on August 4. On a tip from an informant, federal agents in Neshoba County had searched in a dense forest not far from Philadelphia, Mississippi. There they’d found the bodies of Andy Goodman, Mickey Schwerner, and James Chaney.

After striking Chaney in the head on the dark country road that night in June, Deputy Price had shoved him into the back of his car with the other two men. Then, followed by the vigilantes, members of the Neshoba County Ku Klux Klan, he had driven his prisoners down a lonely dirt road that cut deep into a dark pine forest. There, the posse pulled each man from the car—first Schwerner, then Goodman,
then Chaney—and murdered them, one by one.
Moments before he was shot, Mickey Schwerner looked into the eyes of his killer. “Are you that nigger-lover?” the killer asked. Schwerner’s studies in nonviolence taught him to be compassionate in the face of aggression. “Sir,” he said to his murderer, “I know just how you feel.”

T
HE NEWS FROM
Mississippi was disturbing, but it did not alter most Americans’ determination to be cheerful, to ignore any lingering anxiety. Tuesday, the twenty-fifth of August, 1964, was bright and hot on the East Coast. In the seaside resort of Atlantic City, New Jersey, delegates to the Democratic Party’s thirty-fourth nominating convention were putting on a gala affair. There was much for them to celebrate. Their nation was the richest and the freest on the planet. Urged on by their president, they imagined a future that was brighter, bigger, and better than any ever before imagined by humankind. And their party, the party of Jackson and FDR, the party that controlled the White House and both houses of Congress, was the clear favorite of the American people to usher in the glorious days to come.

Had it really been only nine months since that awful day in Dallas when shots were fired and the president was killed? Who hadn’t wondered on that appalling November afternoon if things would ever get back to normal? Who hadn’t wondered if there would ever be celebrating again?

Well, they were celebrating now, and for that they had one man to thank: Lyndon Johnson, who had stepped into the presidency and offered steady leadership, who had seized Kennedy’s unfinished program and challenged the nation,
Let us continue!
Continue he had, passing a tax cut and a civil rights bill that had seemed hopelessly marooned in Congress under President Kennedy. He’d urged the nation to dust itself off and get moving, to get back to the business of being America.

And so this convention—the largest one in the nation’s history, all the newspapers said—was all about the wonders of LBJ. Reporters
described it as “
a coronation, not a convention”—there would be none of the usual horse-trading, none of the usual first, second, third ballot suspense. There were no other candidates—Johnson’s picture was the only one on display. And it was everywhere: on handheld signs, on hats and masks, on posters that hung three stories tall beside the giant organ at the center of the convention hall. He had earned the loyalty and respect of his party, and according to every poll, soon enough he would have so much more: his own presidential term. Millions of Americans would be pulling levers, not for Kennedy, but for him. It was the one thing he wanted most in the world. And it was coming soon.

But the president did not share in the joy. As the delegates swarmed the boardwalk that Tuesday afternoon, Johnson, still in Washington, climbed the stairs to his White House bedroom, where he drew the shades and lay down on the bed. His mind drifted to the crowds gathered in Atlantic City. He was weary. What if he didn’t go to accept the nomination? What if it all just went away?

He’d stayed up much of the previous night, scrawling a short and stunning statement on a yellow lined pad:

He thought about doing something with the statement. He could go downstairs to the press room, gather the newsmen with their cameras, and announce: he would not be going to Atlantic City, he
would not be a candidate in 1964, he would simply serve out the rest of President Kennedy’s term and then retire.

And then it would be done. The eyes of the party, the love of the nation, all of it would move on to someone else. Most likely, it would be Bobby, Johnson knew. But maybe even that didn’t matter. What mattered was that the presidency would soon belong to another man. In the darkness, Johnson imagined what that would feel like.

On the other side of the White House, Johnson’s aides were starting to get nervous. The president had been in a funk for several days. He was obsessed with a festering dispute on the convention floor. Members of Mississippi’s renegade Democratic Freedom Party, an integrated alternative to the state’s all-white Democratic Party, were protesting the seating of an all-white Mississippi delegation. The dispute had turned into a televised spectacle, highlighting the competing pressures weighing on the Democratic Party around the difficult issue of race.

It was an ordeal, but in the long run, it would be a blip, a footnote in the wearying but worthy struggle over civil rights. And yet, bizarrely, Johnson was talking as if his presidency itself was at stake. In fact, he was talking as if his presidency had already been ruined. That morning, he’d been making cryptic calls to West Wing staffers. “
I’m just writing out a little statement that I’m gonna make,” he’d said, his voice straining to sound casual, even bored, “either at press conference here or go up to Atlantic City this afternoon to make.” He wasn’t asking for their advice on this statement. He was acting as though it were a fait accompli. His questions were about process, as though this was just another matter for the schedulers: have a chopper ready, at some point this afternoon I need to go up to Atlantic City and blow up the Democratic Party.

Experience had taught Johnson’s aides not to be overly concerned. The president had a terror of public failure. It was just like him to convince people he didn’t want something—even the presidency—until he was sure he was going to get it. He would try
to convince even himself. When you worked for Lyndon Johnson, you learned to live with empty threats.

But if the aides had listened closely to Johnson, they would have heard something else, something more unsettling: fear of the presidency itself. He returned to the list of threats he’d kept track of all summer—the cities exploding with racial tension, right-wing agitators urging it along, Vietnam spinning into a nuclear conflict with China or the Soviets, Bobby scheming and plotting. He was worried about that word in the newspapers, “backlash.” It was all too much for him, he told one of his lieutenants. “
I do not believe I can physically and mentally carry the responsibilities of the bomb and the world and the Negroes and the South.”

He reached back into history for affirmation of a curse on his head. He thought about that other Johnson, Andrew, who’d been thrown into the presidency after the death of the heroic Lincoln. Andrew Johnson, who’d left the White House a failure and disgrace. “
I deeply feared,” he would later recall, “that I would not be able to keep the country consolidated and bound together.” His mind moved toward frightening fantasies. In the darkness, he envisioned catastrophe coming to his country, to his presidency, to himself.

Someone had to pull the president back into reality. Not for the first time, nor for the last, the duty fell to Lady Bird. In the darkness of his bedroom, Lyndon talked to his wife of his troubles. She implored him to get out of his funk, but he persisted, saying he wanted it all just to be done. It was painful to listen to, Lady Bird later told her diary. “
I do not remember hours I ever found harder.”

After a time she left him, but she did not let the matter go. She wrote him a letter, telling him it was beneath his dignity to drop out now. As always, she was loving and admiring, but this time she was forceful, too. “
To step out now would be wrong for your country,” she wrote, “and I can see nothing but a lonely wasteland in your future. Your friends would be frozen in embarrassed silence and your enemies jeering.” She could not force him to be president. She could
only force him to see the world as it was. “
I can’t carry any of the burdens you talked of,” she said; “it’s only your choice.”

Eventually, he made the right one. Johnson sent word to his aides that he would go to Atlantic City after all. He did go, and he saw the crowds and the giant portraits and the thousands of faces cheering for him. At the climax of the week, the convention hall echoed with applause for Johnson and his newly announced running mate, Hubert Humphrey. Years later, Johnson would remember how he felt as he accepted his party’s nomination, staring out into the crowd. “
As I stood there warmed by the waves of applause that rolled in on us, touched to the heart by the display of affection, I could only hope that this harmonious spirit would endure times of trouble and discouragement as well.” But for Lyndon Johnson, waves of hope always signaled a larger storm of fear, out of sight but arriving soon.

On the evening of October 7, 1964, Walter Jenkins, special assistant to President Johnson, left his White House office and turned onto Pennsylvania Avenue. He was leaving work at an unusually early hour, headed toward what was, for him, an unusual destination: a party to celebrate the opening of a new Washington bureau for
Newsweek
.

Jenkins was not a habitué of parties thrown by the press. Really, he was not in the habit of doing much of anything besides working for Lyndon Johnson, an obligation that consumed nearly every hour of his day. He was often the first Johnson aide to arrive at the White House in the morning, and he was known to stay at his desk until midnight or beyond. Even when he did leave the office, he knew he was never free of it. He’d long since grown accustomed to getting calls from Johnson at any hour, asking him to track down so-and-so and make sure he knew such-and-such.
For a while he’d enjoyed a brief nightly reprieve from presidential interruption on his short drive from work to home. But then Johnson had him put a phone in his car, and the peaceful interlude came to an end.