Landslide (42 page)

Sorensen would say four decades later that Jackie had also asked him “to
tone down my references to JFK’s praise of LBJ.” As Sorensen himself was hardly inclined to write anything admiring of Lyndon Johnson, Jackie’s standard of “praise” must have been very low indeed. In the end, little Kennedy affection for Johnson graced
Sorensen’s pages. Self-consciously, Sorensen sought to rebut the notion that Kennedy’s presidency had lacked substance, that compared with Johnson’s emerging record as a progressive reformer Kennedy lacked liberal greatness. “
Most insidious,” Sorensen at one point told a reporter, “is the myth that Kennedy’s cool, analytical manner meant that he had no heart, that he didn’t commit his heart, that he didn’t feel passionately about issues. This just wasn’t true.”

Schlesinger produced the better book. He understood that the case for Kennedy’s greatness would be found in his more human moments, not the ones where he’d resembled a marble god (though
Newsweek
clucked over the “
mawkish, tasteless” ending to the Bay of Pigs section in which Kennedy, “distraught over the defeat in Cuba, went into the bedroom with Jacqueline, ‘put his head into his hands, almost sobbed and then took her in his arms’ ”). But the ultimate project was the same as Sorensen and Jackie’s. The book recalled the Kennedy presidency as a golden age of mythic promise, cut tragically short after just 1,036 days in office, an age followed by days less vital, graceful, and true. The image was cemented by the book’s mystical title, featured on the cover of
Life
that July above a portrait of the smiling, living Kennedy:
A Thousand Days
.

Johnson, witnessing the impressive progress of the Kennedy mythmaking machine, was more convinced than ever that if only he had a similar apparatus, his public image problems would be solved. Johnson envied Kennedy’s press coverage and was convinced that his predecessor had earned it through brilliant, strategic stage management. His staff encouraged the perception. “
Images do not spring full-blown,” Jack Valenti wrote in a memo to the president after the 1964 election. “President Kennedy was conscious of this—and courted newspapers and magazines that had been screened by his people. In the doing, he began the creation of the Kennedy legend.”

Any problems with Johnson’s public image, Valenti told his boss, came from his lack of a similar strategy. How could it be otherwise, for a president whose “style” was “
Jacksonian and Rooseveltian in the mainstream of American tradition and scope rather than Ivy
League gloss and splendor”? Valenti suggested that “if the President will allow the construction and execution of carefully prepared programs of public imagery we can begin now to establish the real and enduring Lyndon Johnson instead of the callous and the spiteful sketching that will spill out from cynics in the White House lobby.” Valenti knew his audience. “Excellent Approved” Johnson scrawled across the memo.

But manipulating the press is rather like training a goat—possible, but not worth the bother if you don’t enjoy spending time with farm animals. Kennedy did enjoy it. He liked joking with reporters and canvassing them for gossip. He wooed them for strategic reasons, but he wasn’t faking it when he acted interested in what they had to say. His congenital confidence helped him to see that the best way to control his press was to give up control. He acted as though he didn’t expect anything from reporters, except a chance to say his piece and, of course, to enjoy the pleasure of their company. They liked him, because everyone liked him. And, because he hadn’t asked them to, they protected him in their prose.

Harnessing power by surrendering control—that would never work for Lyndon Johnson. For him, life was transactional. He was capable of dogged loyalty and sincere friendship, but only to those he knew would be 110 percent loyal to him. He was a funny, engrossing storyteller, but his stories did not exist to amuse or entertain, they drove home a Johnson point. As Senate majority leader, transactional relations with the press had served him well. They needed a way to bring the byzantine legislative process to life. He gave them conflict and drama, access and color, and wicked off-the-record asides. In return, they wrote stories in which he was the brilliant master legislator hero. And woe to the offending reporter who dared to write a negative Johnson story when the majority leader came to settle the account.

Johnson never fully grasped that a president cannot count on the same tidy commerce with his press corps. The presidency is inherently interesting, whether the president cooperates with the press or
not. And even presidents who tend to the care and feeding of their press corps must resign themselves to their share of nasty, unfair stories. Johnson was stung early in his presidency, when he’d taken a group of female reporters for a ride in his convertible on the LBJ Ranch, popping open a beer can as he drove. His guests had seemed to enjoy themselves. But the result was a disastrous story in
Time
with the sneering title “
Mr. President, You’re Fun!”

Valenti’s “image” campaign was doomed before it began. On a moment’s notice, reporters would learn they had been granted some special audience with the president, watching him as he went about his life or performed the solemn duties of his job. Usually, they’d find they’d been invited to observe a president who was annoyed by their presence, or a president who was obviously false or intolerably controlling. Helen Thomas, a correspondent covering the president, recalled marches around the White House lawn behind the president. “
He first called his dogs, and then he called us. He’d talk in a whisper, which was deliberately sadistic, and then he’d put everything either on background or off the record, which left everybody totally confused.… The whole thing was, I thought, an exercise in showing us who was boss.”

Television proved especially frustrating. Everyone in the White House understood the tremendous power of the emerging medium. And everyone in the White House understood that it was a miserable format for the president. He looked smaller on the screen. His eyes narrowed, his voice extended like a high school orator’s. His aides and family members tried everything to fix his performance: new venues for press conferences, instructions on pacing, thicker or thinner eyeglasses. None of it worked. They often gave him so many contradictory directions before television appearances it’s a wonder he was able to summon his words.

Inevitably, a staff member became a casualty of the president’s nasty publicity. That summer, Johnson’s long-suffering press secretary, George Reedy, announced that he was leaving to address long-festering
health issues. He was replaced by no less a figure than Bill Moyers—the best face Johnson could present to the press.

Moyers could see that all the manipulating and dissembling were the problem. In his new post, he absorbed Johnson’s conspiracy theories about Kennedy-friendly staffers speaking out of turn to Kennedy-friendly press. Mac Bundy was saying things he shouldn’t.
Time
’s White House correspondent was “
an awfully strong Kennedy man.”

Moyers clearly did not want to spend his time chasing down Kennedy plots. “
I think there’s a lot can be done with just more candidness,” he ventured. “I think that’s our basic problem.… Our images do result primarily through their interpretation of our being overly secretive.” The best way to help the president’s image was not loyalty probes or publicity campaigns. Johnson could best help himself with “more candid, sincere discussion.”

And thus the challenge facing President Johnson was a familiar one: in a time of great peril, he could save himself by leveling with the American people. It was clear to Americans, watching the awful scenes from Vietnam and witnessing the appalling conditions of their cities, that their president was no longer the Lyndon Johnson of Texas Tall Tales, the Man-in-Motion who could do no wrong. But he still had his hulking majority in a Congress that he knew better how to maneuver than perhaps any of his predecessors. The momentum for the Great Society had slowed, but not stopped. His massive store of political capital from the election was depleted, but not gone. The decline in his image was, in fact, an opportunity. He could put aside the mythmaking and the gauzy promises and say what he really wanted to do. He could say who he really was.

J
UST BEFORE DAWN
one morning that summer, Lady Bird was awakened by the sound of Lyndon’s voice. “
I don’t want to get in a war and I don’t see any way out of it,” he said. “I’ve got to call up six hundred thousand boys and make them leave their homes and their
families.” Lady Bird listened to her husband with wonder. “It was as though,” she later told her diary, “he were talking out loud, not especially to me.”

At other low moments of Lyndon’s presidency—the panicked hours before the Democratic convention, the morning after he’d let Walter Jenkins go—Lady Bird had summoned the strength to cut through her husband’s warring fears and fantasies and force him to see the world as it was. Now again he was grappling. Should he summon the strength to rise to another challenge? Or should he give in to his fear that he was doomed?

But this time, as he pondered the request for additional forces in Vietnam, she would not be the strong voice urging him to see the hard truth. Lyndon already had so many people he consulted on Vietnam—McNamara, Mac Bundy, Rusk. There were generals with statistics and cool certainty. Lady Bird was not an expert on guerrilla warfare or the domino theory. She did not question her husband’s handling of the war. Sometimes that summer, when the phone rang and Lyndon tossed and turned with Vietnam worries, she would leave to go sleep in another room.

Officially, Westmoreland’s request was for fifty thousand more troops. Really, he was asking for assurances from Johnson that he would deploy a hundred thousand additional forces and then perhaps an additional hundred thousand a year after that. (Thus Johnson’s fears of calling up six hundred thousand boys.) The order was a loaded gun. All Johnson had to do was pull the trigger. As the end of July neared, the decision-making scenario was set to play out much as it had before. McNamara and Rusk and Bundy were advocating that he accede to the request from the field—more bombing, more troops. George Ball was the voice of dissent. Johnson was expected to hear both sides, to weigh the options. The Goldilocks Principle had been reduced from three options to two—too small, and just right.

This time, at least, Ball would have an ally: Johnson’s confidant, Clark Clifford. In a series of National Security Council meetings,
culminating with a dramatic debate against McNamara at Camp David, Clifford passionately argued the case against escalation:

But Johnson’s mind was made up. He felt he had no other choice. Earlier that summer, Lady Bird recalled to her diary a conversation with Lyndon. “
He said, ‘Things are not going well here … Vietnam is getting worse every day. I have the choice to go in with great casualty lists or to get out with disgrace. It’s like being in an airplane and I have to choose between crashing the plane or jumping out. I do not have a parachute.’ ”

On July 28, Johnson told the nation that he would grant the request to send additional forces to Vietnam. He spoke in a midafternoon press conference rather than a televised address in prime time. This time, he did not want the nation’s eyes on him.

In his speech, he used the same florid prose that had bogged down his past speeches. It compounded the unpleasantness of the message he had to deliver. “
I do not find it easy to send the flower of our youth, our finest young men, into battle,” he said. “I have seen them in a thousand streets, of a hundred towns, in every State in this Union—working and laughing and building, and filled with hope and life.”

Once more, as he spoke of Vietnam, his grand ambitions and bold promises for the home front were on his mind. In the speech, he
recalled his great goals: “healing to the sick and dignity to the old,” education for the young and equal rights for blacks. “That is what I have lived for, that is what I have wanted all my life since I was a little boy, and I do not want to see all those hopes and all those dreams of so many people for so many years now drowned in the wasteful ravages of cruel wars. I am going to do all I can do to see that that never happens.”

T
WO WEEKS LATER
, the awful, inevitable calamity the country had been waiting for that summer finally came to pass in the Watts section of Los Angeles. In that predominantly black neighborhood, a white highway patrolman arrested a young black man on suspicion of drunk driving. When the young man’s mother arrived at the scene, she got into an altercation with the officers and was arrested herself. By then, hundreds of residents of the neighborhood had flooded its streets to witness the commotion. Their agitation quickly boiled over. By the next night, five thousand people were rioting in Los Angeles. The city was in flames. Over the next five days the rioting mushroomed—a combined force of fifteen thousand National Guard and police troops could not bring the city under control.