Landslide (36 page)

The truth was, for all of the optimism she was quick to dole out for Lyndon, Lady Bird was apprehensive by nature. When friends and acquaintances would call to congratulate her or Lyndon on some piece of good news, she would sometimes express her thanks and then remind them that of course less happy days were sure to eventually come. As First Lady, she popularized an old expression—“
The Lord willing and the creek don’t rise.” Many southerners used this expression as affectionate hyperbole. Lady Bird, who along with her daughter had once been trapped inside her home for a full day by a Hill Country flood, knew it to be literally true. More than once in her diary she referred to a good day of Lyndon’s presidency as a peak or pinnacle—an unspoken reminder that a fall back to earth was sure to come.

Long experience had taught her to be wary. As a child who’d lost her mother in an accident, she knew that life could be altered irreparably in an instant. As the wife of a man with heart disease, she knew that that instant could be coming soon. As the wife of a president, she was painfully aware of the perils her husband faced. She
could think of the presidents brought low in her lifetime: Woodrow Wilson, who’d left the White House an invalid; Dwight Eisenhower, who’d left it a victim of stroke and heart attack, his bowels and intestines wrecked; Warren Harding and Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy—who’d left the White House dead.

And as the wife of Lyndon Johnson, she was always ready for the turmoil of an ever-changing mood. She knew that triumph could morph into dejection in a moment, cruel indifference into desperate need. She had spent her life with a man of extremes, who looked to the future and saw total victory or total disgrace. In time, that became her world, too.

Now she had to worry about what this illness might mean. After his first night back in the White House, she expressed concern to her diary. “
Last night was not a good night. An old enemy returned. Lyndon sweated down two or three pair of pajamas. This has been a symptom of his illnesses for all the years I have known him, so I should have expected it.” These words suggest a deeper awareness: that the various ailments of Lyndon Johnson sprang from a common place.

What could this place have been? It was impossible to spend thirty years with Lyndon Johnson and not develop a healthy appreciation for the effect of nervous anxiety on physical well-being. The
1948 kidney stone had come at the outset of a seemingly impossible quest—the Senate race against Stevenson he’d ended up winning by 87 votes found in a box in Jim Wells County. The heart attack had come when floor leader Johnson was entertaining another grand ambition—a run for the president in 1956 against the hero of Normandy, Eisenhower. It was as though when Lyndon Johnson saw a great opportunity in front of him, the forces inside him divided. His mind moved with determination to do the impossible; his body revolted, to ensure that he could not.

These same forces were at war inside Johnson that January, and he was paying the price. “
With LBJ’s history of physical and emotional maladies when he is under political pressure,” Michael Beschloss
writes in his authoritative study of the Johnson White House tapes, “one must wonder whether the illness, coming so soon after the inauguration, has been aggravated by his painful awareness of the challenges he is about to face.”

Lady Bird took the aggravation for granted. “
This week’s mood is not good,” she worried in her diary a week after Lyndon entered the hospital. “It’s sort of a slough of despond … The ‘Valley of the Black Pig.’ The obstacles indeed are no shadows. They are real substance: Vietnam, the biggest. Walter. The need of getting really superior people … and bringing them into the government. The carping of the press.… And someday we may really know a storm.” Johnson resumed his normal manic schedule, but it took him longer than usual to bounce back fully from the illness. As February began, he admitted to reporters that he still felt only “80 percent normal.” Lady Bird bought a new black dress that she did not wear for months and months. Later, she recounted “
the grim, unacknowledged thought” that had compelled its purchase: “I might need a black dress for a funeral.”

T
O MOST OUTSIDE
observers that winter, Lady Bird’s fatalism would have been astounding. What was the impossible challenge facing Lyndon Johnson this time? He was president of a supremely prosperous country in an apparently peaceful world. He had won the largest landslide in American history, on his own terms. He had not retreated from his extravagant expressions of confidence in the nation’s future. “
Is our world gone?” he asked in his January 1965 inaugural address. “We say ‘Farewell.’ Is a new world coming? We welcome it—and we will bend it to the hopes of man.” These were the words of a man at the stunning summit of his presidency, not of a man stuck in “the valley of the black pig.”

In those first months of 1965, it looked as if he really
could
bend history to the hopes of man. As the new year began, Johnson and his aides alerted the press to the major areas of focus in their Great Society domestic program.
On January 7, Johnson sent a special message
to Congress on “Advancing the Nation’s Health,” a plan to create Medicare and grant health insurance coverage to all American senior citizens. Five days later, the Congress received another special message, this one calling for $1.5 billion in federal spending on education. In addition, the administration was pushing a massive $1.1 billion bill aimed at alleviating poverty in Appalachia. And while Johnson’s aides had decided not to press for a voting rights bill—the last remaining legislative opportunity on civil rights—in the first months of the term, most in Washington expected an effort before the end of 1966.

Getting this extraordinary program through Congress would be no small task. Harry Truman and John Kennedy had tried and failed to pass Medicare, stymied by the powerful efforts of the American Medical Association, a doctors’ trade group that was preparing for an encore performance. In the modern era, no president had produced a major bill for education funding, thanks to the great political might of the Catholic Church, which objected to a large taxpayer expenditure that benefited only students in public schools while neglecting the millions of American families who sent their children to parochial schools. As a Democratic politician who’d grown up outside the party’s Catholic-heavy urban machines, Johnson knew that the Church would be wary of any such push from his administration.

Still, the odds of his passing a strong progressive package seemed good. His November landslide had extended to the Congress, where Democrats now held a staggering majority of 295 to 140 in the House and 68 to 32 in the Senate. An influx of new blood meant liberals now had the numbers to break the Southern-conservative alliance that had, for all practical purposes, controlled the Congress since Roosevelt’s second term. Among the 91 new House members, 71 were Democrats.

The strong majorities meant that Appropriations and Ways and Means—the key House committees where generations of progressive bills had gone to die—would now be stacked with Great Society
liberals. The Ways and Means chairman, the Arkansan Wilbur Mills, was cautious and conservative. He had successfully blocked a Medicare bill in the Kennedy administration. But Mills could sense that public opinion favored action. Early in the year he signaled he would be willing to make a deal.

Everywhere in Washington that winter, people were comparing the first days of Johnson’s new term to the famed one hundred days of concerted action with which Franklin Roosevelt had commenced his presidency in 1933. It was an imperfect analogy: Roosevelt had urged swift action in his first hundred days in response to the consuming crisis of the Great Depression, while Johnson was urging swift, strong action in a time of unprecedented prosperity. Also, there was the small fact that at the time of his 1965 inauguration, Johnson had already
been
president for well over four hundred days. Still, the comparison was one that Johnson’s aides, mindful of the boss’s Rooseveltian ambitions, encouraged. In the White House, two consecutives dates loomed largest on the calendar: April 12, the twentieth anniversary of Roosevelt’s death, and
April 13, the hundredth day of the new term. The goal was rarely stated but known to all: have a record by that date that could stand up against FDR’s. Or surpass it.

To the press, it seemed that the president faced little danger in pursuing such grand ambitions. Certainly the Republicans could pose no immediate threat. Their new House leader, genial Gerald Ford from Michigan, had let it be known that obstructing the Democrats’ agenda would not do; the
Republicans must instead offer a “constructive” alternative. But given the paltry size of the Republican caucus, the press took few of these alternatives seriously. To some in the Eastern media, the party’s problems seemed epitomized by ever-growing chatter out in California that the actor Ronald Reagan would mount a serious campaign to be the party’s nominee for governor in 1966. “
Republican rank-and-file enthusiasm for [Reagan] continues to swell,”
Newsweek
reported in early February, “but the party pros feel differently. They find three things wrong with
Reagan: 1) his close ties with the right wing; 2) possible anti-Hollywood feeling in view of the fact that song-and-dance man George Murphy is already in the Senate; and 3) Reagan’s refusal to fly—a tough campaign hurdle in a state almost 800 miles long.” Writing in
Life
magazine, the journalist Shana Alexander found the idea laughable. Reagan, she said, “
shouldn’t even be
cast
as governor.”

In a series of private sessions with reporters just before his inauguration, Johnson was careful to stress the lessons he’d gleaned from history about taking little for granted in ensuring passage of the legislation. “
The history that interests Mr. Johnson,” wrote the columnist Drew Pearson, a sometime Johnson favorite, “is how Roosevelt, re-elected by a landslide vote in 1936, slipped so badly that he lost 88 congressional seats to the Republicans.” LBJ was determined “
not to make Roosevelt’s error and squander the great potential of his landslide over Goldwater,” wrote Evans and Novak in their 1966 book
Lyndon B. Johnson: The Exercise of Power
. “The power derived from his election victory, Johnson felt, must be employed judiciously. To a visitor at the LBJ Ranch shortly after the 1964 election, Johnson compared that power to a bottle of bourbon. ‘If you take it a glass at a time,’ he said, ‘it’s fine. But if you drop the whole bottle you have troubles. I plan to take it a sip at a time and enjoy myself.’ ”

But the reality in the Johnson White House that winter and spring of 1965 was not conscientious caution but panicked urgency. Meeting with his congressional liaisons in the Fish Room of the White House in early January, Johnson impressed on them how easily the tide could turn. “
I was just elected by the biggest popular margin in the history of the country—sixteen million votes,” he said. “Just by the way people naturally think and because Goldwater had simply scared hell out of them, I’ve already lost about three of those sixteen. After a fight with Congress or something else, I’ll lose another couple of million. I could be down to eight million in a couple of months.” The sense of accomplishment Johnson had felt after the election had seemingly vanished. “
I knew from the start that the
’64 election had given me a loophole rather than a mandate,” he told Doris Kearns Goodwin, “and that I had to move quickly before my support disappeared.”

Larry O’Brien, a rare Kennedy aide who had decided to stay on for the new Johnson term in his role as congressional liaison, would later compare the attitudes of Kennedy and Johnson with regard to the Congress. In selling the New Frontier to recalcitrant congressmen, O’Brien would have to make special requests for more of Kennedy’s time. “
With Lyndon Johnson it was the reverse,” O’Brien would later say. “He felt that I ought to be using him more, that I ought to have him more deeply involved.” Johnson could grow irritated if O’Brien “
wasn’t informing him on an hourly basis.” Johnson was the rare president who began each day perusing the
Congressional Record
and who wanted summaries of staffers’ daily contact with legislators each night. This, he believed, was the only way for a president to operate. “
If it’s really going to work, the relationship between the President and the Congress has got to be almost incestuous,” Johnson would later tell Doris Kearns Goodwin. “He’s got to know them even better than they know themselves.”

Staffers learned to keep the president in the loop on all things pertaining to the Congress. O’Brien recalled one occasion when a bill he was shepherding for Johnson went down to defeat well after midnight. Heading home, O’Brien found a sandwich shop that was open at that late hour and stopped in for a bite. “
I didn’t need anything to eat,” he recalled, “it was just a matter of trying to unwind. Then I waited until 6:30 or 7:00
A.M
. to call the president … I wanted to wait until he would have awakened.” Finally, he called Johnson, who wanted to know when the vote had come in. When O’Brien told him, Johnson was surprised. “
God, you should have called me right then and there,” he admonished. “When you’re bleeding up on that Hill … I want to bleed with you.”

This president—bleeding for his program, working the Congress day and night, convinced that his tenuous majority could easily slip away—was not the president seen by the press, much less the public.
Mostly what people saw of Johnson that winter and spring was a man with ever more glowing words about the coming conquest of man’s ills. Heralding a raft of encouraging economic data that spring, Johnson suggested that, thanks to the wonders of Keynesian economics, economic downturns might be a thing of the past. The unprecedented prosperity the nation was enjoying could go on and on. “
Economic policy can more than ever become the servant of our quest to make American society not only prosperous but progressive,” he said. “Not only affluent but humane, offering not only higher incomes but wider opportunities, its people enjoying not only full employment but fuller lives.”