Landslide (52 page)

Never once in Manchester’s story did Jackie Kennedy put a foot wrong. And yet she and the Kennedy family quickly realized that the human messiness of Manchester’s account was a threat to their most valuable asset: the Camelot myth. Relying on reports of the book’s contents from Kennedy family loyalists, Jackie filed suit to prohibit its publication, an ultimately unsuccessful effort that only increased the public’s appetite for the tale. The advance orders reached four hundred thousand.

In public, Johnson acted as though he’d paid little mind to the entire affair. He wrote to Jackie, telling her not to think that he’d taken any offense:

This was a familiar Washington transaction—political families papering over an embarrassing incident by blaming the wretched jackals of the press. There were hints that Johnson still longed for intimacy with the former First Lady: the typed “Mrs. Kennedy” was crossed out and replaced with a handwritten “Jackie”; “Mrs. Johnson” was replaced with “Lady Bird.” But the cool, businesslike tone, compared with Johnson’s extravagant courtship in days of old, showed he was not quite so untroubled as he protested. His line “one never becomes completely inured to slander” contained a perhaps unconscious slip that may have revealed how Johnson really felt about all the things Jackie had told Manchester. A person who writes untruth is guilty of libel. “Slander” comes from the person who speaks it.

In private, of course, Johnson was obsessed with the Manchester book. He pressed for any intelligence his associates could gather on the contents. “What are the damaging things to us in there?” he asked Abe Fortas. “Is it the plane incident in Dallas?” Fortas struggled to narrow down a long list of damaging material. “The basic damage of the thing is the portrayal of you.” Johnson devoured gossip about Manchester, whom he denounced as “
a fraud.” Naturally, Johnson assumed Bobby was responsible for the entire project. The book was “
vicious, mean, dirty, low-down stuff,” Johnson said, planted by Bobby to delegitimize Johnson’s claim for reelection in 1968.

But what was truly damaging about the Manchester book was not its implication for the future—it was what it said about the past. Whatever the public thought of Johnson’s program—and in late 1966, they did not seem to think much of it—most Americans had
always appreciated the way Johnson had handled himself in the first, difficult hours of his presidency. In his nation’s time of sorrow, Johnson had been silent but strong, and then at just the right moment he had urged the country to continue. Now, through Manchester, the Kennedys were denying him even that achievement. They were taking the heroic beginning of Johnson’s story away.

Perhaps for the first time, Johnson fully realized what had been clear in the last line of Teddy White and Jackie’s story in
Life
magazine:
for one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot
. He couldn’t be a hero in that story. There was no place for him in the Kennedy myth. His bitterness toward the family was total. “
They’re going to write history as they want it written, as they can buy it written,” he said. “And I think the best way we can write it is to try to refrain from getting into an argument or a fight or a knockdown, and go on and do our job every day.”

But for how long? That was what the political world wondered as 1966 came to an end. Two years before, when he’d won his landslide, it was unthinkable that Lyndon Johnson could be scared out of running for reelection. In that moment of triumph, it was a near certainty that Johnson would choose to run for reelection in 1968, win another landslide, and stay in the White House for a remarkable nine-year run. But after the Republican triumph in the midterms, it seemed possible that the president would not seek reelection after all.

Lady Bird found that prospect appealing. Earlier that fall,
she had met with the landscape architect Lawrence Halprin about a project he was to design as part of her efforts to beautify Washington, D.C. At one point, she asked Halprin how long it had taken him to design a similar project, San Francisco’s Ghirardelli Square. Listening in, Sharon Francis, a staff assistant on the beautification project, knew why the First Lady was interested in timing. Lady Bird was always a careful planner. She wanted to know whether this project could be completed before she left the capital in two years’ time.

Lyndon’s thoughts about the future were harder to read. He nodded
along when his aides talked about a shift in strategy, the course of prudence that would win public opinion back. He agreed vacantly. But then he would talk about some big new bill he wanted to get through Congress, some new program he needed to start. It was as if he believed that if he could only get one more great accomplishment under his belt, one more remarkable program, then people would forget about the war and the riots and the heavy fear they felt. Then they would see that all the great things he had promised were coming to pass. If only he could do something bigger and better, then they would love him again. His instinct at the end of the thousand days was just the same as it had been at the beginning: all would be well if he could just capture the nation’s attention, if he could just start his story over.

There was, however, one small hint that his perspective on the future had changed. It came when people asked him to explain himself. Why was he trying to accomplish the big things now, why not slow things down and wait for a while?
What was his hurry?
The answer should have been obvious. The Man-in-Motion had always been in a hurry, ever since that day in November when he’d spied morning light on the White House as president for the first time. It was his natural state of being. He was Lyndon Baines Johnson, he had been in a hurry all his life, hurrying toward greater and greater things. Now, though, something was different. He hurried, he said, because “
I have so little time.”

Ronald Reagan was sworn in as governor of California shortly after midnight on January 2, 1967, in the rotunda of the state’s capitol building. Already, however, his mind was drawn to an even higher office. With Reagan’s blessing, Clif White and Tom Reed had developed a detailed campaign timeline for the coming year, leading up to the Republican convention in the summer of 1968. There, Reagan hoped to win his party’s nomination and challenge Johnson for the presidency.

Throughout his first year as governor, Reagan declared himself focused on his substantial duties in Sacramento, too busy to consider a run for the presidency. But reporters noted that he never offered an outright refusal to run in 1968. Press interest in a Reagan candidacy grew steadily, thanks in part to not-so-subtle encouragement from Reagan himself. At a meeting of the nation’s governors aboard the SS
Independence
in October 1967, a tanned and smiling Reagan appeared before the national press. “
Governor Rockefeller of New York said yesterday that he does not want to be president,” said one reporter. “Do
you
want to be president?” Reagan laughed and paused. “Well,” he said, “there’s one carry-over I have from my previous occupation: I never take the other fellow’s lines.”

Final days: Johnson at the LBJ Ranch in 1972.
©
Frank Wolfe/LBJ Library

The long run: Reagan with supporters in 1968.
©
AP Photo

Off camera, he was more overt. Despite the demands of his office, he found time for periodic trips around the country, gathering support for a potential run. His aim, in part, was to recreate Goldwater’s strategy for capturing the nomination: secure the overwhelming support of the conservative grass roots, and of the white voters flocking to the party in the South. “
Most South Carolinians are, as I am, relatively new converts to Republicanism,” he told an audience in the Palmetto State in 1967. “Somehow the Democratic Party went away and left us. It left us when it switched to philosophies and policies that we could not accept … the philosophy that whoever the Democratic president may be, he knows best.”

Lyndon Johnson was always on his mind. As an unannounced candidate, Reagan could not overtly criticize his more moderate rivals for the Republican nomination—Richard Nixon, George Romney, and Nelson Rockefeller. Instead, he stirred conservative passions with an unrelenting critique of the Johnson administration.
His office maintained a thick file of index cards to aid in the effort. Each card contained a thematic title printed in capital letters followed by a statistic, quotation, or set of facts that illustrated some aspect of the Johnson administration’s record of failure. Strung together, the titles formed a scripted account of the Johnson presidency for Reagan to perform. Reagan was a B actor no longer; now the script on his cards told the main story of American politics and the declining fortunes of the Johnson presidency:

Meanwhile, on their TV screens, viewers see that rioting becomes the norm in cities across America in 1967.… A presidential task force reports to Johnson that if current trends continue, by 1983, the nation’s major cities will be 40 percent poor
.

Facing a projected 1968 budget deficit of $28 billion, Johnson announces he will request that Congress pass a tax surcharge.… LBJ, fearing a political backlash against government spending, tells aides he is prepared to “slash the hell out of domestic programs if necessary.”

After a tour of Vietnam in early 1968, Walter Cronkite reports to his audience that “
it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy.” … Under duress, Robert S. McNamara resigns as secretary of defense, to be replaced by Clark Clifford at the Pentagon
.

In travels across the country, Reagan assailed Johnson’s out-of-control spending, the “
matchless boondoggle” that was his War on Poverty, and a “
leadership gap” in the White House that was “on a scale we have never known and should no longer tolerate.” He spared no drama in playing up the urgency of the moment, of the crossroads America had reached: “
There is a question abroad in the land—what is happening to us?”

W
HAT WAS HAPPENING
to America? That
was
the question asked everywhere in 1968. And before long, Johnson’s failure to provide an answer would prove his undoing.

Following the disastrous 1966 midterm results, Washington had entertained the possibility that Johnson would not seek reelection in 1968. He often appeared listless and beaten down. His mood grew darker, his temper shorter, his waistline larger yet again. He watched helplessly as his presidency was swallowed whole by Vietnam—the war he hadn’t wished for, the war he struggled to control, the war he could not win. In late January 1968, the Vietcong and North Vietnamese launched a surprise, coordinated attack on more than a hundred locations in South Vietnam. The attacks marked a new, bloodier phase in the already gruesome conflict. In a single week in February, 543 Americans were killed. The Vietcong and North Vietnamese initiative, which came to be known as the Tet Offensive, deeply damaged morale on the American home front, underscoring the hollowness of the administration’s claims of improving fortunes in the conflict. In a poll taken early in 1968, just 35 percent of Americans approved of Johnson’s handling of the war.