Liars (15 page)

From the acquisition of the land, through the management of the community, to its collapse in 1948, Arthurdale demonstrated an utter failure of collectivism. All of the town's holdings were eventually
sold off at steep discounts.

Arthurdale was a fitting tribute to FDR progressivism, but it was an even more fitting tribute to how powerful emotions, like the fear of families falling apart, can result in big government projects that offer hope but deliver nothing.

♠

If only I could take the next step and become dictator of the whole world, then I could really make things happen. Every hungry person would be fed, every ignorant child educated, every jobless man employed.

—LYNDON JOHNSON

Love Field

Dallas

November 22, 1963

Blood was everywhere. The dark, red liquid stained his waking thoughts and haunted him when he closed his eyes. It decorated the leather interior of the limousine that sped toward Parkland Memorial. It was on the gurney that carried his shattered friend. And it was splattered over the pink dress of the dazed woman who stood beside him.

It was a baptism by blood.

Like the state he loved, Lyndon Baines Johnson was large and imposing. His head, his ears, his hands, his voice—they all seemed
to overwhelm those around him, traits that helped him make deals with timid, cowering colleagues. But now, in the two hours since he'd first heard those loud pops, the new president of the United States tried his very best to be small.

At 2:28
P.M.
, aboard a hot and crowded compartment on
Air Force One,
Johnson raised his massive right hand, placed the other on a Bible, and swore “to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.” John F. Kennedy's casket lay next to him, the lifeless body having been rushed to the plane in a hearse within minutes of the president being declared dead. Amid tears and trauma and blood, so much blood, the Kennedy era—what would soon by christened “Camelot”—had come to a violent end.

Unlike others in the administration, it was fair to say that LBJ's love for his fallen leader was not total. It was hard for a man of destiny and greatness—as Johnson had long seen himself—to surrender his powerful Senate seat in order to play second fiddle to a young man from Harvard who'd probably never worked one hard day in his life.

As vice president, LBJ was largely powerless, mostly marginalized. He knew the Kennedy boys made fun of him. Jackie, who now stood humbly at his side, privately referred to him and his wife, Lady Bird, as “
Uncle Cornpone and his little porkchop.” Her deceased husband hadn't been much kinder, once asking her rhetorically, “Oh, God, can you ever imagine what would happen to the country
if Lyndon was president?”

But there was no doubt. Lyndon needed them now, all of them. He needed Jackie, the family, the Cabinet, even his nemesis, Bobby, if he had any hope of leading a nation that didn't know him and of leading a party that had chosen someone else just three years earlier.

LBJ paced restlessly about the aircraft, avoiding eye contact with the grieving widow. He bit his oversized lower lip as he pondered the task before him. How could he claim the Kennedy mantle
when, truth be told, he thought the Kennedy agenda was far too cautious and timid?

He took his seat as the hulking aircraft taxied to the runway. Its four engines soon roared, and the plane shot forward and then up, as if on the trajectory of a rocket. He closed his eyes and relished the blackness.

When he finally opened them a few minutes later, he peered out the window at the endless miles of fluffy clouds beneath him. There, at the top of the world, he decided that the Kennedy presidency would need to be remodeled.

Fortunately, he wouldn't have to spend much time thinking about whom to model it on. His two idols, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt, had already created the template.

Now Lyndon Baines Johnson just had to fill in the blanks.

Lyndon Johnson came from nothing, lived with nothing, and was expected to amount to nothing. His family had helped settle the great state of Texas, a place where people thought big and dreamed big, and his father had served as a state representative.

After their family farm went bust, Lyndon's dad struggled to pay off his crippling debt for much of the rest of his life. The result was that Lyndon never had much money growing up, not like all the rich folks in the big cities or the people he saw on TV. Most of his neighbors and friends didn't have money, either. It all seemed so unfair.

Lyndon was never much of a student, but he did have the gift of gab and the rugged adventurism of the American Southwest. He once described himself to reporters as “a cross between a roughneck cowboy and
a Baptist preacher.”

Johnson caught the political bug at an early age and pounced at the
chance to serve as an aide
to Congressman Richard Kleberg. He arrived at the U.S. capital in the 1930s at an exciting time in Washington, D.C.: a new president named Franklin D. Roosevelt had taken over the reins, and he just so happened to be Lyndon Johnson's lifelong hero.

Johnson spent several years in Kleberg's office getting a crash course in how to get things done—or not done—in Congress. The wheeling and dealing. The backslapping. The late-night heavy drinking. The fondling of the pretty young women who orbited every member of Congress.

He found all the trappings of the political world to be intoxicating, but he also knew that he could do his boss's job ten times better. The only thing standing in his way was the small inconvenience of actually having to win an election.

After a failed attempt at a Georgetown University law degree, lightning struck. Johnson was plucked from obscurity and tapped by the Roosevelt administration to run the Texas division of the National Youth Administration (NYA), one of the dozens of “progressive” programs that Roosevelt promulgated in the 1930s.

Johnson was a true commissar at the NYA, a program that ostensibly provided “education, jobs, recreation, and counseling” for teens and young adults, as well as “financial assistance to students
in exchange for part-time jobs as clerks or maintenance workers.” It sounds admirable, but in reality, it was a giant taxpayer-subsidized welfare program that created jobs that weren't needed. The program also “put non-students to work on public projects such as highways and roadside parks, playgrounds and schools, recreational parks, and
public buildings all over Texas.”

It was at the NYA that Johnson got his most effective training in how to squeeze the most largesse out of a government program—and how someone could use it to get large groups of people (e.g., demographic groups, industries, political factions) to do exactly what he
wanted. Both of these lessons became key ingredients in Johnson's future success.

In 1937, Johnson got his next big break when a vacancy occurred in the Tenth Congressional District of Texas. He ran for election in a large field of hopefuls as the most Roosevelt-infatuated candidate. “
I support Franklin Roosevelt the full way,” he said. “All the way, every day. That's what I intend to do when elected as your representative in Congress.”

Johnson's campaign motto was “
Franklin D. and Lyndon B.”—and he tied his own successful election directly to the president's agenda. “This is not a personal triumph,” he said. “This is but approval of the president's program . . . the people of the 10th district [of Texas] are sending to Washington the message that they are . . . as strong as
horse radish for Roosevelt.”

During the time between 1937 and 1945, Johnson
met with the president no fewer than twenty-three times (at least officially; the unofficial number is likely significantly higher). And when Johnson was scolded for being Roosevelt's “water boy” on Capitol Hill, he claimed he would “be glad to carry a bucket of water to the Commander in Chief any time his thirsty throat or his thirsty
soul needed support.”

FDR was like a second father to Johnson, so Roosevelt's death in 1945 left him devastated. “He was just like a daddy to me always,” Johnson said. “He always talked to me just that way. I don't know that I'd ever have come to Congress if it hadn't been for him. But I do know I got my first great desire for public office
because of him.”

Once in the House, LBJ quickly became a protégé of Texas-born and all-powerful Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn. From Rayburn, he learned how to wield absolute power, but, unlike “gentleman Sam,” Johnson was, for most of his adult life, a crude and grotesque monster. When you got past the suit and tie, LBJ was nothing more than a bully who threatened and intimidated people who didn't agree with him, a sexual predator who would paw people right
in front of his wife, and a graceless oaf who sometimes made staffers meet with him while he sat on the toilet.

Lady Bird Johnson was his long-suffering spouse; her husband's philandering was not just notorious, it was legendary. Biographer Robert Dallek called Johnson a “competitive womanizer” and noted that “when people mentioned Kennedy's many affairs, Johnson would bang the table and declare that he
had more women by accident than Kennedy ever had on purpose.”

LBJ wasn't even particularly discreet about his womanizing. At a NATO meeting in Paris in 1960, LBJ, Lady Bird, and others were having dinner. The vice president got drunk and ended up with a diplomat's wife sitting in his lap, “
groping” her. Lady Bird just had to deal with it. When he wasn't cheating on her,
he was treating her as if she was invisible in public, berating her, or speaking ill about her cooking, housekeeping, or clothes.

Johnson's philandering was evidence of his deep-seated need to dominate and humiliate people through bullying, cajoling, or outright humiliation. This need both informed and fed his disdain for others, including those in his Secret Service detail who had pledged their lives to protect him. Johnson reportedly once “asked a Secret Serviceman to shield him while he peed outside,” and then he “purposely peed on the agent's trouser leg.” When “the agent mentioned how gross
that was,” Johnson was unapologetic. “I know,” he said. “That's my prerogative.” Dealing with the president's bodily functions was just a part of life in the Johnson administration. Speechwriter Richard Goodwin was once summoned to Johnson's bathroom for a “meeting.” “I remained standing,” Goodwin remembered, because “Johnson had
the only seat in the room.” The president was sitting on the toilet.

Johnson quickly established himself as a D.C. natural, but it wasn't until he was elected to Congress's upper chamber in 1949 that his legend as “Master of the Senate” began. In this, the world's most “elite club,” Johnson thrived as he perfected the bullying tactics and
overbearing style that would win him so many battles—and help usher in countless progressive programs.

LBJ's main aspiration was power. Control. He would improve the lives of his fellow sad sacks in the failed farmlands of Texas by running things from Washington with a massive federal government that would build a better America. How he'd obtain that power was simple. He'd prey on the American people's fear while harnessing his own. He'd leverage his own personal childhood anxiety about being destitute, broke, abandoned, and alone to make sure others felt those same powerful emotions.

Modern society, with its “vast wasteland” of televisions, dreary office cubicles, and the constant threat of nuclear war with the Soviet Union, could be scary. What everyone needed was a “daddy” (as FDR had been to him) in their lives. Someone to smile. Someone to reassure them. Someone to take them by the hand and tell them that they're from the government and they're here to help.

Always looking for a bigger desk—and more influence—Johnson ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1960. He lost, but despite misgivings, John F. Kennedy asked Johnson to be his running mate. Kennedy, an Irish-Catholic from Massachusetts, believed he needed support from Southern Democrats to win what was projected to be a close race between himself and sitting vice president Richard Nixon. Kennedy's instincts were right.
Their ticket barely beat Nixon (it was the type of election where dead people voted for the Democrats in Chicago) and took over the White House in 1961.

After Kennedy's assassination, LBJ finally had the chance to live up to the legacy of his second daddy and make the spirit of Roosevelt proud. He “had a specific objective in mind that guided his presidency from the start,” one reporter noted. “To out-do Franklin D. Roosevelt as the
champion of everyday Americans.”

He would be the next generation's FDR. He would be their daddy. Whether they liked it or not.

What Wilson had done to organize progressivism as a political force in the first place and what FDR had done to build new progressive economic institutions during the crisis of the Great Depression and World War II, LBJ would now do by spreading progressivism into the mainstream at a time of similar tumult and disorder. And in doing so, he would set in motion the destructive forces of nihilism, hedonism, and blasphemy that marked the 1960s, a decade that would change America forever.

Johnson's presidency is primarily remembered for two things, both of them massive failures: the Vietnam War and the Great Society. Both exacted a horrific human toll on America. The war scarred an entire generation, and its consequences can be measured in lives lost or irreparably destroyed. The Great Society, however, left its mark on several generations, pushed America farther toward progressivism, and can only be measured in lives ruined.