Landslide (43 page)

California’s governor, Pat Brown, was on vacation in Greece at the time the rioting broke out. After being alerted to the initial incident, he thought things were under control and continued to enjoy himself, unaware that a full-fledged crisis was breaking out. When he did realize the gravity of the situation, he scrambled to get back home. But the long journey took two days, during which time he was largely unreachable.

In his absence, the public face of authority in Los Angeles was Chief William Parker of the LAPD, who fanned the flames of racial conflict on television as well as any sheriff of the Deep South. The black rioters, he said, were acting like “
monkeys in a zoo.” Rioting of this sort was inevitable, Parker suggested, “when you keep telling people they are unfairly treated and teach them disrespect for the law.”

Clearly, the president had to do something about the crisis. Johnson
was spending the weekend at the LBJ Ranch, so his aide Joseph Califano monitored the situation in Los Angeles. Through Bill Moyers, Johnson released a statement that the events in Watts were “
tragic and shocking.” On Saturday, the rioting reached its worst. The pictures on television were gripping—the skies themselves seemed to be on fire. Califano frantically called down to Texas, trying to reach the president. But he was told the president was unavailable. He waited for Johnson to call him back with direction, but the call never came. It was not a busy day filled with other meetings and decisions—Johnson spent that day walking with Lady Bird and driving alone in his car. Califano dialed the ranch again and again. But Johnson never came to the line.

In a matter of a few short days, the Watts riots would deal a grievous blow to Johnson’s presidency and the story he had been trying to tell the nation. Los Angeles, whose population had boomed in recent decades with middle-class Americans seeking a better life, was the embodiment of postwar American affluence. With its modern architecture and its carefully planned communities, the glittering suburban metropolis looked like the magnificent future to come. Its descent into chaos and carnage was not what was supposed to happen in an America that, according to the president, was on the brink of the greatest glories in the history of civilization. Even worse, the riots attacked the most basic project Johnson had pursued since the first hours of his presidency: to assure the country that he was in control, that security and stability reigned. For the scenes from Watts left viewers all over the country with one unmistakable impression: there was no one in charge.

The next day, Califano finally reached Johnson on the telephone. The president was “
deeply distressed” and “sorrowful” but strangely detached from what was happening to his country. The sense of foreboding he had described to Lady Bird earlier that summer was at last coming to fruition. His plane was crashing. All summer, he had been hurtling toward the ground. Here at last was the impact—and the fire.

On the trail in 1966: Reagan’s training as an actor made for an easy adjustment to the candidate’s life.
©
Bill Ray/Getty Images

In late September 1965, Ronald Reagan was back onstage. It was twenty months since he’d appeared before the California Young Republicans in San Diego. The crowd in front of him was still a blur, but everything else had changed.

He had a different kind of audience now. He’d come to the Statler Hilton in Boston to appear before the New England convention of the Federation of Republican Women. Now he was wooing comfortable middle-aged ladies, not anxious young men. His message was different, too. He was deep in the belly of moderate and liberal Republicanism, sharing the dais with the Massachusetts party’s establishment—Governor John Volpe and Lieutenant Governor Elliot Richardson. And Reagan himself was different, too. Twenty months earlier, feeling the rush of standing in front of a crowd this size, he’d had to wonder how much longer it would last. But ever since “A Time for Choosing”—known everywhere now as “The Speech”—the requests for appearances before big Republican crowds had been constant. Now he could look to the future and see bigger and grander crowds to come. For the third time in his life, he had become a star.

Thanks to some wealthy benefactors and the political consulting firm Spencer-Roberts, he had also become a politician. Back home in California, where he was running an unannounced but nonetheless
intense campaign for governor, he liked to stress that he was a citizen called to service, not a professional politician. But it was clear, listening to him that night in Boston, that he had learned all of the politician’s tricks. His speech showed a perfect mastery of all the obligatory little rituals in which a politician seeking office must engage.

First, he heaps praise on the high official sharing the dais with him.

And then heaps a little patronizing chauvinism on the high official’s wife:

He loosens the crowd up with some self-deprecating humor. He’s a film actor? Fine, he’ll mention some of his old films:

He plays to his strengths, always. He’s a handsome movie star. It’s a room filled mostly with women:

But he doesn’t take it too far. He brings it back to the realm of respectability with a little more of that patronizing gender talk:

And then he pivots into the meat of his speech:

He had mastered all these tricks so that the words seemed to come effortlessly off his lips. This was the easy part. These little rituals came as naturally to him now as they did to any seasoned pol. And the rest was fairly straightforward, too. It was what he’d been doing since he’d launched his unofficial campaign for the governorship earlier that year, the same thing he’d done all those months ago in San Diego, the same thing he’d been doing, really, since he’d addressed the students and faculty of Eureka College all those years ago. Standing in front of the nice ladies of New England, he felt the energy coming off his audience. And he gave them what they wanted most.

It wasn’t hard for him to figure out what that was. The audience needed a new hero. All through that fall of 1965, the Errol Flynn of the B movies watched as the feature attraction team in Washington
continued to sputter out duds. The plotlines were depressing, the characters’ motivations convoluted, the scripts increasingly irrelevant and absurd. They still had the grand set pieces. They still had the highly produced shots. But growing clamor from offscreen intruded and spoiled the effect:

SCENE ONE

SCENE TWO

It was not a movie in which Reagan would have wanted to star.

There was another movie coming, with a more enticing script. Reagan was a conservative politician from Southern California, where, a month earlier, the horror of the Watts riots had so vividly punctured the promises of utopia that Johnson and the liberals had
made. In the immediate aftermath of the riots, some of Reagan’s fellow conservatives had tried to encourage backlash and tastelessly overdid it. (The managing editor of the conservative magazine
American Opinion
, visiting Los Angeles, joked about
making millions by selling spears in Watts.) Reagan, meanwhile, took the opportunity to reach out immediately to black businessmen in Watts, saying that these upright, respectable citizens, not bureaucrats from the government, were the neighborhood’s best hope of recovery and revival. On his trip to Boston, he posed for pictures with Ed Brooke, the Republican who would soon launch a campaign to be the first African American elected to the U.S. Senate since Reconstruction. In the process, he’d instantly established himself as a respectable and authoritative voice—an alternative to the reactionary crazies and an alternative to the tired leadership coming out of Washington. He was beginning to sound like the kind of person these respectable New England Republicans could not just approve of, but follow.

He knew his partisan Republican audience was rooting for him. A year earlier, after the Goldwater debacle, they had resigned themselves to a fate of losing national elections for some time to come. But now, for the first time in a while, they were beginning to believe they could regain power in Washington. He knew what they wanted from their hero: a stirring attack on the sitting president of the United States. So he gave it to them with his usual assortment of tools.