Chapter 7 / THE TRANSITION YEAR

“I took the oath,” Johnson later said, “I became President. But for millions of Americans I was still illegitimate, a naked man with no presidential covering, a pretender to the throne, an illegal usurper. And then there was Texas, my home, the home of both the murder and the murder of the murderer. And then there were the bigots and the dividers and the Eastern intellectuals, who were waiting to knock me down before I could even begin to stand up. The whole thing was almost unbearable.”¹

Yet scarcely four months later the new President, firmly established in office, had effected a transfer of governmental authority so smooth and dignified that his own nomination for the Presidency seemed absolutely assured. How did Lyndon Johnson bring it off? Part of the answer lies in the institutional advantage available to any new President in Johnson’s position. The American system provides a set of well-defined procedures for a Vice President’s succession to office, which ensure unquestioned and immediate acknowledgment of his newly acquired powers. The executive bureaucracies and the institutions of government have a momentum of their own; their activities continue, uninterrupted even by the death of a President.² But an ease of transition was not inevitable. An alternate scenario could be sketched in which the new President, facing a convention in eight months, displayed qualities that created doubts about his abilities, or aroused strong and divisive hostilities in his own party. In the absence of skillful presidential leadership, a legislative stalemate could have developed. Such failures of leadership might well have encouraged the ambitions of others, and the new President could then have confronted a serious struggle for the nomination at the Democratic Convention.

Clearly, there were both opportunities and dangers in Johnson’s situation; the point is that Lyndon Johnson capitalized on the advantages. Here was a case where the exercise of talent joined with personality and opportunity to produce a brilliant display of leadership and political skill. Despite, or perhaps because of, his own fears of illegitimacy (fears, as we have seen, rooted in the conflicts of his childhood, which plagued virtually every step of his political rise), Johnson demonstrated a valuable insight into the national mood, an acute understanding that Kennedy’s assassination had produced a crisis of legitimacy for his country as well as for himself. Kennedy’s death had unexpectedly brought fulfillment of his greatest ambition in circumstances that must have inspired awesome guilt and doubts. For Johnson, the exhilaration of power was nearly always accompanied by deep insecurity, the consequence of a sense, deeply concealed from conscious awareness, that his authority had been wrongfully acquired and would be taken away when its illegitimacy was discovered. The troubling impact of these inaccessible fears could only have been intensified by the events that had now endowed him with the highest authority.

The dominant tone of public sentiment—reflected in television reports, newspaper columns, and public opinion polls—echoed Johnson’s anguish, shame, and vulnerability.³ The people of America responded to the news of Kennedy’s assassination and the continuing televised reports of every subsequent happening with a state of shock that went beyond mourning to something approaching melancholia,⁴ a serious collapse of self-esteem. With the assassination, something more than a man had been lost, something more abstract and more compelling—a part of America’s faith in itself as a good society. Literary critic Irving Howe described the national mood:

Two assassinations, each ghastly in its own right, and each uncovering still another side of our social pathology; callousness, maybe planned negligence on the part of the Dallas police; fourth-grade children in the South cheering the news that a “nigger loving” President had been murdered; subversion of the processes of law enforcement to the demands of television … it is all too much.⁵

It was especially too much for a country that prided itself on the possession of common values and the rule of law. “Everything was in chaos,” Johnson later recalled. “We were all spinning around and around, trying to come to grips with what had happened, but the more we tried to understand it, the more confused we got. We were like a bunch of cattle caught in the swamp, unable to move in either direction, simply circling ’round and ’round. I understood that; I knew what had to be done. There is but one way to get the cattle out of the swamp. And that is for the man on the horse to take the lead, to assume command, to provide direction. In the period of confusion after the assassination, I was that man.”⁶

Johnson expanded on this theme in his memoirs:

I knew I could not allow the tide of grief to overwhelm me. The consequences of all my actions were too great for me to become immobilized now with emotion. I was a man in trouble, in a world that is never more than minutes away from catastrophe.… There were tasks to perform that only I had the authority to perform. A nation stunned, shaken to its very heart, had to be reassured that the government was not in a state of paralysis … that the business of the United States would proceed. I knew that not only the nation but the whole world would be anxiously following every move I made—watching, judging, weighing, balancing.⁷ … It was imperative that I grasp the reins of power and do so without delay. Any hesitation or wavering, any false step, any sign of self-doubt, could have been disastrous.⁸

Johnson understood that a great many Americans were simply incapable of instantly placing their trust in his leadership. An immediate acceptance would have reinforced the vague apprehension that somehow we, because it had occurred in our country, might all be implicated in the crime. Johnson’s own fearful doubts, inevitably reinforced by the fact he had first been Kennedy’s antagonist, then his understudy, and was now his inheritor, demanded relief. He found that relief by achieving a unique synthesis between the two patterns of behavior that had long characterized his approach to authority.

Throughout his life Johnson had most successfully attained power in one of two situations: under conditions that allowed him to play apprentice to a master, whose power, by careful deference and emulation, he would use to increase his own authority until he had surpassed the other man’s accomplishments or position; or under conditions that allowed him to assume the role of the caretaker, the strong protecting the weak. In both cases Johnson saw himself serving others, a perception that allowed him to rationalize his use of the relationship to gain power for himself and to do so without guilt. In the terrible wake of John Kennedy’s assassination, Johnson was able to act as both apprentice and caretaker—faithful agent of Kennedy’s intentions and the healing leader of a stunned and baffled nation.

The living President armored himself with the passionate admiration, intensified by his death, that many felt for John Kennedy and with the still unfulfilled goals of the Kennedy administration.⁹ By carrying out what his predecessor had started, Johnson argued that his call to continue was in effect John Kennedy’s call. Johnson was but “the dutiful executor” of his predecessor’s will. Throughout the transition period the slain President was invoked in a powerful and decisive fashion. In the early weeks and months after the assassination, Johnson’s public addresses were filled with allusions to John Kennedy. In fact, references to his predecessor were more than double the references to anyone or anything else in that period.

Johnson’s storied arrogance, his compulsion to assume center stage, was checked. Without undue self-deprecation or timidity, he conveyed a deep humility, yet one consistent with confident determination that Kennedy’s goals would be pursued and reached.

Now able to transcend the impotent anger at the rejection by Senate colleagues that had kept him away from Capitol Hill throughout his Vice-Presidency, Johnson selected the Congress as the forum for his first major address. For thirty years the Congress had been his home. Now, “in this strange and difficult time,” as Johnson later called it, he felt the need to return to what he considered the source of his own and his country’s strength—its political tradition. On that November 27, 1963, speaking from the rostrum of the House before an assembled body of Senators, Congressmen, and Supreme Court Justices, Johnson sought to reassure the nation: “Let us continue,” he began, striking upon the befuddled nation’s deepest need. “And now,” Johnson went on, “the ideas and the ideals which [Kennedy] so nobly represented must and will be translated into effective action.… In this critical moment, it is our duty, yours and mine, to do away with uncertainty and delay and doubt and to show that we are capable of decisive action; that from the brutal loss of our leader we will derive not weakness but strength, that we can and will act and act now.… John Kennedy’s death commands what his life conveyed—that America must move forward.”

If at the beginning of his address one missed the clipped delivery of John Kennedy, by the end one was grateful for the measured steadiness of Lyndon Johnson. Substantively, that address delineated the new leader’s resolve to urgently implement the priorities of his predecessor in the days ahead. The most important of these was civil rights. On this issue, one that aroused the most complex and intense public feelings, Johnson expressed his views with a direct simplicity, more a profession of faith than a political position. “First,” he said, “no memorial or oration or eulogy could more eloquently honor President Kennedy’s memory than the earliest possible passage of the civil rights bill for which he fought so long. We have talked long enough about equal rights in this country. We have talked for one hundred years or more. It is time now to write the next chapter and write it in the books of law.”

Survey after survey reflected a widespread conviction that extremism was the cause of Kennedy’s death. It was to this sentiment that Johnson spoke in his peroration: “Let us put an end to the teaching and the preaching of hate and evil and violence. Let us turn away from the fanatics of the far left and the far right, from the apostles of bitterness and bigotry, from those defiant of law and those who pour venom into our nation’s bloodstream.”¹⁰

By the time he finished, the audience was on its feet, fervidly applauding the new President for the tradition he had summoned and so well embodied, and for the dead President whose programs he had taken as his own. And also because the formidable and elusive Majority Leader of the United States Senate sounded like a President.

Johnson’s skillful handling of the transition is nowhere better illustrated than in his treatment of the members of the Cabinet and the White House staff. It was a far more delicate and difficult job to strike the right tone with these men than with the public at large. “I constantly had before me the picture that Kennedy had selected me as executor of his will, it was my duty to carry on and this meant his people as well as his programs. They were part of his legacy. I simply couldn’t let the country think that I was all alone.”¹¹ So Johnson met personally with each of the Kennedy men and, through a powerful mixture of rational argument and emotional appeals, convinced all of them to stay on. Although Johnson approached these men differently, according to their various relationships with John Kennedy, and to what he knew of their own feelings and ambitions, all his appeals ended in the same way: “I know how much he needed you. But it must make sense to you that if he needed you I need you that much more. And so does our country.”¹²

In order to conciliate and reassure this inherited Cabinet and the White House staff—Robert Kennedy, Robert McNamara, Theodore Sorensen, McGeorge Bundy, Kenneth O’Donnell, Dean Rusk, Richard Goodwin, Lee White, Lawrence O’Brien, Henry Hall Wilson, and all the others—Johnson showed continuous restraint. Never once did he permit himself even to imply that, however things were done before, this was now his White House. Where one might have expected bitterness—for all the slights received from some of these same men when he was Vice President—Johnson showed only benevolence.¹³ “I knew how they felt,” he later said. “The impact of Kennedy’s death was evident everywhere—in the looks on their faces and the sound of their voices. He was gone and with his going they must have felt that everything had changed. Suddenly they were outsiders just as I had been for almost three years, outsiders on the inside. The White House is small, but if you’re not at the center it seems enormous. You get the feeling that there are all sorts of meetings going on without you, all sorts of people clustered in small groups, whispering, always whispering. I felt that way as Vice President, and after Kennedy’s death I knew that his men would feel the same thing. So I determined to keep them informed. I determined to keep them busy. I constantly requested their advice and asked for their help.”¹⁴

In these early days Johnson spoke to the Kennedy men with a subdued tone. He requested rather than ordered; he spoke of his shortcomings and shared his doubts. This solicitous manner coming from a President disquieted, shamed, and thereby induced in these men the very cooperation and submission that Johnson was after. Although some key men of the former administration were soon to leave (Sorensen resigned and Robert Kennedy rarely showed up for work), the large majority stayed on. Gradually, Johnson added his own men to the White House staff—Walter Jenkins, George Reedy, Jack Valenti, Bill Moyers, and Horace Busby—but they, too, were expected to show nothing but deference to the Kennedy men.

Eventually, Walter Jenkins became, if not chief of staff—an authority Johnson never allowed to anyone—the first among equals. His was a gentle, quiet presence around which the entire staff, Kennedy and Johnson men alike, could unite. “I’ve often wondered,” Johnson’s private secretary later mused, “what would have happened to them if Walter Jenkins had remained throughout Johnson’s Presidency. He was the only one who knew Johnson well enough to judge when to carry out an order verbatim and when to exercise discretion. He was the only one who had both the entire staff’s and Johnson’s complete trust. He was a natural link between the Johnson and the Kennedy men.”¹⁵

Use of the imperative for a man of Johnson’s turbulent and infantile nature was never difficult. With his own men, Johnson commanded, forbade, insisted, swaggered, and swore. Verbal tirades and fits of temper became an integral part of his image. On occasion, it seemed as if Johnson neededto make his staff look ridiculous; that he was strengthened by his exposure of inadequacies in others. In addition, Johnson’s outbursts with his own men helped him to deal with the Kennedy men from a position of strength. His modesty and deference could command their loyalty, but he wanted their respect as well, the respect due a strong man—although he chose to display this strength by implying a capacity to inflict a fearful revenge for even slight errors.

He defied Machiavelli’s warning that “a new prince should organize the government entirely anew … he should appoint new governors with new titles, new powers and new men … he should leave nothing unchanged in that province so that there will be neither rank, nor grade, nor honor, nor wealth, that should not be recognized as coming from him.”¹⁶ Yet in 1964 Johnson had little opportunity to create this condition. If he had chosen to follow Machiavelli’s advice and Harry Truman’s example—in less than five months after Roosevelt’s death, Truman replaced holdovers with his own appointees—it is likely that he would have had far greater difficulty in recruiting than did Truman. After all, Truman had three years and six months before he had to face the electorate; Johnson, eleven months. Moreover, so flagrant a disavowal of his predecessor’s choices would have been thought to belie his public expressions, and would have endangered his support among those who had allied themselves with Kennedy’s political career, many of them active participants and leaders in the Democratic Party. And, in any event, he had a lot to do in a short time and he needed them.

The puzzling question is not why Johnson kept the Kennedy men during that first year, but rather, why, even after the election, he did not swiftly recruit more of his own men. Part of the answer is supplied by understanding that Johnson had always considered himself a good judge of talent and that he saw a great deal of talent in the Kennedy entourage. He considered Robert McNamara, for example, one of the most talented men he had ever met in public life. “I had a good impression of McNamara from the first day I saw him,” Johnson said in an interview in 1965. “And he has exceeded my expectations. He is always prompt and always prepared. He does his homework. He is an expert on economic matters, prices, strikes, taxes and other things as well as defense. He is the strongest poverty and Head Start man except Shriver. He is the first one at work and the last one to leave. When I wake up, the first one I call is McNamara. He is there at seven every morning, including Saturday. The only difference is that Saturday he wears a sport coat. He is the best utility man. I would make him Secretary of State or Secretary of Transportation tomorrow—he is that qualified. He is smart, patriotic, works hard. I never heard him say, ‘I told you so.’ We usually agree, but he presents his arguments dogmatically. And he always advises me where I am wrong, although most Cabinet officers do not. If I had my way, I wish he would play more, have more personal friends, be a little more sentimental. He’s like a jackhammer. He drills through granite rock till he’s there. Limitations? One would be health. No human can take what he takes, he drives too hard. He is too perfect. Russell says he is too good, that he wishes he would stumble once. He never had a military man bad-mouth McNamara, never had seen one criticize him. He does not impose himself in Rusk’s business; he and Rusk work very well together.… McNamara has a deep understanding of the diplomatic side and Rusk was only twenty minutes from being a professional military man so they understand each other’s job. They know everything there is to know about their departments because they’ve been there a long time. I needed them.”¹⁷

A more revealing answer to the question of why Johnson kept the Kennedy men is supplied by another Johnson statement: “I needed that White House staff. Without them I would have lost my link to John Kennedy, and without that I would have had absolutely no chance of gaining the support of the media or the Easterners or the intellectuals. And without that support I would have had absolutely no chance of governing the country.”¹⁸

And if he needed them, they needed him. “Everything I had ever learned in the history books taught me that martyrs have to die for causes. John Kennedy had died. But his ‘cause’ was not really clear. That was my job. I had to take the dead man’s program and turn it into a martyr’s cause. That way Kennedy would live on forever and so would I.”¹⁹ Nevertheless, gradually, over the next few years most of the Kennedy men departed the White House; none, however, because Johnson had asked them to leave.

As self-styled executor of the legacy, Johnson assumed responsibility for transforming Kennedy’s proposals into legislative victories. With great caution, never permitting himself to depart from the display of deferential humility, he began to create the impression that he, the doer, might succeed where the thinker had failed. He thus gradually de-emphasized his need for Kennedy by hinting that perhaps Kennedy needed him. Thus step by step he made his familiar and predictable shift from a passive to a dominant position, abandoning at a barely perceptible rate his somewhat feigned apprenticeship to a dead man’s image. It was, given the complexity of timing and tone, a difficult shift to make, but Johnson carried it off, becoming more and more his own man in the eyes of the Washington community.

Instinctively, he sought to identify himself with the sources and objects of presidential power.

His energy—so striking in the Senate, so dormant in the Vice-Presidency—seemed redoubled. He talked with chiefs of state; sent messages to the Congress; issued orders to the executive branch; met with businessmen, labor leaders, and civil servants. The hours between 2 and 6 A.M. were all that Johnson grudgingly gave to sleep. Endowed with an encyclopedic memory, he had a command of the details of matters significant to his power and its exercise that was prodigious. In one sitting, he would deal in turn with issues of education, finance, poverty, and housing. His mind remained resilient even when his body was fatigued. He tended to rest from one kind of activity by engaging in another.

The most important decision a President makes concerns what he wants to do with the office, what range of issues he wants to recognize. The challenge is to create boundaries for the office, to select among possible goals. John Kennedy had set that agenda for his successor: tax reduction, the civil rights bill, federal aid to education, executive action to improve life in the cities, medical care for the aged, and plans for a poverty program. In the two years and ten months before November, 1963, Kennedy had denned for himself and for his Presidency a series of purposes, or what Richard Neustadt calls “irreversible commitments to denned courses of action.”²⁰ The commitments implied the selection of a particular clientele and the shaping of an institutional core—a White House staff and a Cabinet—that understood the kind of Presidency John Kennedy wanted.

Commitments, clientele, and core had given the Kennedy Presidency a character that could not be altered in weeks or even in a year. Kennedy’s day-to-day decisions about what to do with his time, how to allocate his resources and where to put his energy, had generated precedents, alliances, symbols, loyalties, and pressures that, taken together, had given life to the structure of the presidential office. And this was the construct that now contained Johnson’s presidential authority.

It would be difficult to imagine circumstances better suited to his peculiar talents. The goals had been set. The immense task now required was the mobilization of political support. Although Kennedy had set forth these goals with a style that attracted the admiration of many Americans, his endeavor to pass legislation that would materialize these goals had been largely obstructed by the congressional opponents of his programs. His death proved a sufficiently powerful explosive to break past that obstruction. Johnson tried, not to conceal or deny the force of that explosion, but to organize and direct its power. He immediately began to focus public attention on the skillfully ordered legislation that was to mark his transition.

The essence of presidential leadership is the ability to appeal publicly to large and widely different constituencies at the same time.²¹ The necessity for this sort of appeal, where one addresses all factions at once, would seem likely to hamper rather than reinforce a President like Johnson whose forte lay in one-to-one relations behind closed doors. How could he now lead his nation, please his party, adopt a regal stance, and knock heads together from such a visible platform? The Senate with its cloakroom mode of operation had allowed him to speak public nothings while the real business was accomplished discreetly.

However, he succeeded, and for many reasons: one, the circumstances of his assumption of office, creating a mood of strong national unity; two, the fortuitous state of Kennedy’s administration at the time he was killed—the legislative programs had been articulated but not passed; and three (the most important reason, but dependent on the first and second), his transformation of the conduct of the Presidency in such a way that he could utilize those techniques that had served him so well in the Senate: one-to-one relations, bargaining, consensus, and insulation from choice. This transformation could not take place overnight. But the unusual unity of national mood, the common desire for some renewal of purpose, permitted Johnson, in the first months of his Presidency, to address the general public as one in mind and spirit, as he would a single group—in terms of their ambiguous but shared interests. At the same time he could deal with a dozen little publics, soothing the leaders of each of the major interest groups with the same flair and skill he had practiced with each of sixty Democratic Senators.

An unprecedented number of public leaders were summoned to the White House the first ninety days—congressional leaders, union leaders, governors, mayors, businessmen, and civil rights spokesmen.²² Everyone with a substantial constituency was invited in, one by one, group by group. These meetings served a variety of purposes. Through them, Johnson acquired information about each of the men with whom he would have to deal—George Meany, Roy Wilkins, Frederick Kappel, Martin Luther King, Henry Ford, and so on. He was interested in their conceptions of themselves and their hopes for their organizations, their range of skills, and, most importantly, their feelings and attitudes toward him. In the immediate presence of another man, Johnson felt utterly confident of his ability to judge what that man really wanted.

Johnson understood that the first impression of his Presidency would be crucial. Even though, as Senator or Vice President, he had previously met most of these men, as President he would now have to start over again, and it would have to be right. He knew they were looking at him afresh; he knew they would be thinking what he would have been thinking on seeing an old friend or an associate suddenly become President.²³ The initial definition of the situation would provide the basis for all future meetings. Before every meeting, Johnson was briefed by one of his aides; together they would mull over the facts and the figures of the political landscape. About each visitor, a dozen questions were discussed: How strong was his base of power? Who was his opposition? Who were his friends? Where had he staked his future? What issues were critical to him, and in what sense?

All these conversations in these early days were appropriately staged: for some the Oval Office was best; for others, the small room to the right of the office, an intimate walk around the White House grounds, or a group meeting in the somewhat austere Cabinet Room proved more relaxing or suitable. The key to Johnson’s success in these meetings was his ability to communicate something unique to each and every person. Even if Johnson had spoken the same words of praise ten minutes before to someone else, the words still held a fresh and spontaneous quality. In a meeting of four or five important persons at once, Johnson managed at some point to take each one aside and say something special. The repetitive and stylized nature of the performance, therefore, was never perceived unless one stayed by his side as one audience left and a new one entered.

After the meetings Johnson would send each visitor a photograph to commemorate the event and to remind him that this was just the beginning of a long line of services. Over time, depending on the rhythm of the relationship, the mode of address on the pictures would shift. If the alliance prospered, the original form of signing—“To Roy Wilkins, from Lyndon Johnson”—would give way to “Dear Roy, My best, Lyndon”; within a couple of years “Roy” was addressed as “My Esteemed Friend” and two years later “Lyndon” became “Your friend and admirer, Lyndon.” If things soured, as they did with Wilbur Mills over the course of the surtax struggle, the salutation—“To my friend and colleague Wilbur, from your good friend and greatest admirer, Lyndon”—was devaluated—“To Wilbur Mills from Lyndon Johnson”—to finally “To Mr. Chairman from Mr. President.”

Eventually, Johnson created for himself a mental dossier of data portraits to remind him, for example, that union leader George Meany “liked the visible signs of consultation, the formal appointments to commissions and boards and delegations, the invitations to White House functions, the pictures of the two of us together,” whereas business leader Henry Ford “preferred for the most part that our meeting remain strictly informal and off the record.”²⁴ So during the course of his administration, Meany served on over a dozen commissions. His constant appearances at the White House always found their way into the mass media, and his invitations to White House social events doubled each year; whereas Henry Ford’s visits, while nearly as numerous, received little mention in the papers and his name appeared on only two commissions.

Johnson understood that Roy Wilkins would fidget uncomfortably in a conversation if the main point of the meeting was to ask for a favor, whereas Everett Dirksen would blatantly and without hesitation send long memos to the White House detailing his requests for that week: a judgeship in the 5th District, a post office in Peoria, a presidential speech in Springfield, a tax exemption for peanuts. The following interchange well shows the serious nature of the banter between Johnson and Dirksen. It took place on June 23, 1964:

DIRKSEN: General Graham is going to appear before the Public Works Appropriations Subcommittee tomorrow. There is planning money in the bill for the Kaskaskia River navigation project. Now all I want him to do is say that the engineers do have construction capability for fiscal year 1965 and it is only $25,000 to $50,000. Now it is in that area of Illinois that is distressed. The total cost of the project is $30 million. And it is going to be the making of the southern thirty counties of the state.

PRESIDENT: Let me get on that and I will call you back. Now you are not going to beat me on excises and ruin my budget this year. Please do not beat me on that. You can do it if you want to and you can ruin my budget but you are hollering economy and trying to balance it.

DIRKSEN: Well, look at the pressure I’m under.

PRESIDENT: I know it, but you are also for good fiscal prudence and you know that the way to do this is through Ways and Means. You know they are not going to let you write a bill over in the Senate on taxes. Please do not press me on that. Give me a few of your Republicans because I just do not have the votes to do it without you.

DIRKSEN: You never talked that way when you were sitting in that front seat.

PRESIDENT: Yes, I did, when my country was involved. I voted for Ike many times when Knowland voted against him.

DIRKSEN: You are a hard bargainer.

PRESIDENT: No, I’m not. I will look at this and see what I can do and call you right back.

DIRKSEN: That’ll be fine.

Early that same evening the President phoned Dirksen:

PRESIDENT: I got in touch with Major General Graham and he says that if I want him to he will testify … that the engineers have a construction capability for 1965 contingent on favorable restudy of the economics of the project and that he believes it’ll be a favorable restudy because he’s got $100,000 wrapped up in it. I told him to go as strong as he could and he said he’d go $60,000. So please don’t tell anybody now that you have a back door to the White House. But you go up there and please do not kill my tax bill tomorrow.

DIRKSEN: You left me upset 100 days on that civil rights bill.

PRESIDENT: You got yourself in debt. You are the hero of the hour now. They have forgotten that anybody else is around. Every time I pick up a paper, it’s “Dirksen” in the magazines. The NAACP is flying Dirksen banners and picketing the White House tomorrow.

DIRKSEN: I could not even get you to change your tune about that damned House bill.

PRESIDENT: The hell you couldn’t. I told them whatever Dirksen and the AG agree on, I am for. This is what I sent him up there to agree for. You know you never got a call from me during the whole outfit. But do not mess up that tax bill tomorrow, Everett, please don’t.

DIRKSEN: Well, I have to offer this, but we shall see.

PRESIDENT: Offer it, but John Williams is not for raiding the Treasury—so get him to save you. Okay. Goodbye.²⁵

For Dirksen, Johnson was Tammany Hall—their brazen exchange of memos stretches six inches in the LBJ Library files. The character of these transactions was not so much an expression of Johnson’s nature as an accommodation to Dirksen’s. If he could easily, in private, share the candor of such manipulations, he could cut a very different figure in the presence of a different personality.

In a conversation with Roy Wilkins, Johnson spoke of his “desperate” need for Wilkins’ advice on a matter he had obviously decided—recalling black Ambassador to Finland Carl Rowan, in order to appoint him head of the United States Information Agency.

PRESIDENT: I want to do something a little unusual and I’m going to get me in some trouble, but I want to get you behind me before I do it. Be sure I’m doing the right thing and nobody will know I ever talked to you except you. I want to bring Rowan back from Finland to run this shop. He has good judgment, he’s worked with me around the world and he started out peeved at me and prejudiced toward me and he wound up being a real devotee of mine and a real friend. Now what is your reaction and your judgment of Carl and tell me frankly.

WILKINS: He has excellent training as a newspaperman and is familiar with the media. The only chink in the armor I can think of right now is that he lacks the radio and communications media. I know he’s a good administrator and furthermore he’s a Southerner. I think he’s a good man and able to survive personal antagonism.… Yes, yes, a good man.²⁶

By the end of the conversation, Wilkins was somehow asking Johnson to appoint the very man Johnson had been planning to appoint all along and Johnson was letting the civil rights leader know that at some point in the future the President might ask a return favor from him. Two dilemmas remained: the current head of the USIA, Ed Murrow, though dying, was still alive, and the appointment was bound to meet opposition in the Appropriations Committee, whose chairman was John McClelland, a conservative Democrat from Arkansas. Later that day Johnson called McClelland:

PRESIDENT: John, I’ve got a little problem. I don’t want to embarrass you in any way and the best way to avoid it is to talk to you about [it] beforehand so you know what the problem is. Ed Murrow is dying with cancer of the lung. I’ve got to get another man. I’ve got a good solid man that’s gone around the world with me and spent a good deal of time working with me and writing stuff for me and helping me and he’s a good administrator and he’ll listen to me, but he’s a Negro. His name is Carl Rowan. He’s the Ambassador to Finland. USIA is in your department under Appropriations and I don’t want you to cut his guts out because he’s a Negro. I’ve seen you operate with a knife.

MCCLELLAND: I wouldn’t say that. I wouldn’t put it on that account.… On things like this, when you tell me, I always show every leverage, I appreciate your calling me and I know you have problems and you’re going to do a lot of things I wouldn’t do—unless I was President.²⁷

And so, with Rowan sounded out, Murrow still living, Wilkins searching black attitudes toward Rowan as head of the USIA, and McClelland willing to “show every leverage,” the way was clear, its potential for serious controversy defused by this seeming collaboration, and upon Murrow’s death, Carl Rowan was appointed and confirmed as Director of the USIA.

Black appointments remained a chronic source of irritation among Johnson’s former colleagues from the South. His achievements in the field of civil rights were made possible by his intimate knowledge of these men, on which he could base his capacities to influence or manipulate. In private with Richard Russell, Allen Ellender, John McClelland, Harry Byrd, and others, his Southern accent deepened, his manner suggested that although he understood or even shared their attitudes toward blacks, he was the President, and, as they well knew, in the difficult position of having to answer for the entire nation. Such dissembling could be accompanied, even made more credible, by a teasing humor that also implied intimacy. He told me of one such conversation with Senator Russell Long of Louisiana.

“Russell Long had recommended some man from Louisiana for a position on the Federal Reserve Board. I had him checked out. McChesney Martin [head of the Board] didn’t want him. Besides, there was no vacancy in Louisiana and you had to appoint members from particular districts. One night Long came to see me about it. I knew he’d be mad as hell, always was mad when he’d had a couple of drinks, and that night he had already had a couple before he came and he wanted some more as soon as he sat down, and he started talking right away about his man. I explained about the district problem. He said, ‘Hell, why, I’m chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. I’ll get that amended.’ ‘It won’t do no good,’ I responded. ‘I can’t name your man. I’ve already made up my mind. It’s going to be Andrew Brimmer.’ ‘Brimmer? Who the hell is he?’ ‘Why, Russell, he comes from your state, from———you see, I am naming a Louisianian after all, but you see he doesn’t live there any more, he moved away.’ ‘Why, that’s KKK territory,’ Russell said; ‘by God, I never heard of him.’ ‘Hell, Russell, you’ve already approved of him as Assistant Secretary of Commerce. The Senate confirmed that appointment. I know. I’ve got a picture of him in my drawer. I know you’ll recognize him when I show it to you.’ I opened the drawer, took out the picture, and showed it to Russell. ‘That’s who you’re going to name?’ he asked. ‘Really?’ ‘Oh, yes, I just wanted you to know ahead of time.’ ‘You better give me another drink,’ he said and then he smiled and said somewhat less gruffly, ‘My God, do you realize what this means?… When they all jump on me because I couldn’t get one Louisianian on the FRB, I can say I did get one—a nigger.’”²⁸

Often he could make his own choices appear as favors to others. Those “favors” became credit to be drawn upon in some future bind. Opposition to his decisions might be placated by the promise of future favors or the collection of past debts. In this manner he was able to create a coherent mosaic consisting of a prodigious number of incongruous bits and pieces.

Johnson’s willingness to compromise in order to achieve results, his political malleability, was confined within limits imposed by the requirements of the Presidency and his knowledge of just how far a particular man or group could be pushed. “The challenge,” as Johnson later described it, “was to learn what it was that mattered to each of these men, understand which issues were critical to whom and why. Without that understanding nothing is possible. Knowing the leaders and understanding their organizational needs let me shape my legislative program to fit both their needs and mine.”²⁹

Over time, each of the leaders most important to his leadership had made tentative claim to influence matters that were vital to him but not immediately critical to others. In exchange for this, he would remain silent or uncommitted on matters important to others but not immediately important to him. And Johnson also attempted to tie the leaders together in a host of ways. As he described it, “I wanted each of these men to participate in my administration in a dozen different ways. The key was to get men from different groups so involved with each other on so many committees and delegations covering so many issues that no one could afford to be uncompromising on any one issue alone.”³⁰

In cementing ties among the group leaders, Johnson was at the same time laying the foundation for the politics of consensus, which, before the end of 1964, would yield a major tax cut, a billion-dollar antipoverty program, and a sweeping civil rights bill.

Kennedy had left behind a tax reduction bill that had already passed the House and was awaiting action in the Senate. But it was not known whether the new administration could mobilize the support of the business community behind the tax cut; if not, it would be difficult to get the bill through the Senate Finance Committee. From the beginning of his Presidency, when he insisted, with great public drama, on keeping the budget below $100 billion, Johnson had his eye on the business community. He recognized how important fiscal responsibility was to the leaders of industry and commerce. Johnson’s legerdemain with the budget thus set the stage for a series of meetings to discuss the tax cut with the Business Council—a group of one hundred corporate and financial executives, chaired by AT&T chairman Frederick Kappel.

In these meetings, Johnson marshaled argument and forestalled objections so well that he astounded the businessmen, who had expected a fairly crude piece of jawboning. He began by demonstrating that, with the stimulus provided by the tax cut, there would be a general increase in resources, which, in turn, would significantly reduce the possibility of class conflict. So long as the economic pie continues to grow, Johnson argued, there will be few disputes about its distribution among labor, business, and other groups. But as soon as it begins to slow down, the conflict over who gets what begins: “I want you to make just as much profit as you reasonably can. If you make 100 million instead of 100 thousand, then Johnson gets 50 million instead of 50 thousand. There is no need to worry because I’m not going to be going around telling you how to run your business. I think that you know better than I do how to do that and I believe that I know how to run the government, so let’s leave it at that. You’re not afraid of me and I’m not afraid of you.”³¹

Thus Johnson established an immediate rapport with the leaders of business. The tax cut was signed into law on February 8, 1964, and two months later Fortune magazine addressed this encomium to the President:

Lyndon Johnson … has achieved a breadth of public acceptance and approval that few observers would have believed possible when he took office.… Without alienating organized labor or the anti-business intellectuals in his own party, he has won more applause from the business community than any President in this century.… A large part of Johnson’s success can be summed up by saying that he is the Democratic President who drew his party closest to the traditional Republican position of an active, effective federal government encouraging the development of a free enterprise economy.³²

In the year before Kennedy’s death, the issue of poverty had attracted the attention of the President himself and of high-level bureaucrats in the Council of Economic Advisers and the Department of Labor. Plans for a poverty program were in the preliminary stage of development when Johnson took office. Learning of these, Johnson responded instinctively: “Go ahead. Give it the highest priority. Push ahead full tilt.”³³

When Johnson spoke of poverty, he spoke, he claimed, “from experience, the experience of a boy who knew what it was like to go hungry, the experience of a boy who saw sickness and disease day after day.” Through this revised, and exaggerated, picture of his past, he better accommodated the American dream of rags to riches. It is said that in the 1950s, when Rebekah Johnson first heard about Johnson’s descriptions of his childhood, she felt hurt and angry. She had worked to give her son everything; why was he now telling the world that he had had nothing?

Yet the tales should not be dismissed entirely. In spite of the distortions and exaggerations, there were, nonetheless, times of hardship during his childhood when his father went bust, and he had witnessed real poverty during his brief teaching career at Cotulla. To Johnson, the poor would never be “the disadvantaged,” an abstract class whose problems must be solved. They were familiar men and women suffering a circumstance he well understood.

Johnson worked incessantly to make poverty an issue of public concern. He met with groups ranging from the Daughters of the American Revolution to the Socialist Party, from the Business Council to the AFL-CIO. He made dozens of speeches. He made personal visits to poverty-stricken regions. What had been largely the concern of a small number of liberal intellectuals and government bureaucrats became within six months the national disgrace that shattered the complacency of a people who always considered their country a land of equal opportunity for all. From this base, Johnson went to the Congress to declare an “unconditional war on poverty.” “This program,” he said, “is much more than a beginning. It is a total commitment by this President and this Congress and this nation to pursue victory over the most ancient of mankind’s enemies.… On similar occasions in the past we have often been called upon to wage war against foreign enemies which threaten our freedom today. Now we are asked to declare war on a domestic enemy which threatens the strength of our nation and the welfare of our people. If we now move forward against this enemy—if we can bring to the challenges of peace the same determination and strength which has brought us victory in war—then this day and this Congress will have won a more secure and honorable place in the history of the nation and the enduring gratitude of generations of Americans to come.”³⁴

This genuinely dynamic conception of political responsibility foreshadowed the Great Society, his ultimate expression of “good works.” And here, as with the tax cut, Johnson handled the issue with remarkable deftness. By shaping the political consensus beforehand through an elaborate courtship of leaders of the relevant groups, he paved the way for legislative success. On August 20, 1964, the Economic Opportunity Act became the law of the land.

Yet if consensus produced legislation, it also exacted its price by limiting the range of the possible. Alternatives were necessarily excluded from the outset. The first of these discarded alternatives called for stimulating the economy, not by accepting the existing tax structure and simply cutting taxes across the board, but by reforming its structure: closing loopholes, reducing inequitable benefits for the few, lowering the burden of rates on the many. Another rejected alternative—and one also rejected by Kennedy—was massive public spending that could stimulate the economy while simultaneously improving the conditions of life, especially among the poor. Tax-cutting, it was argued, would accomplish only half as much; it was reactionary Keynesianism, providing what the country needed least—more conspicuous consumption—at the expense of the things it needed most—schools, housing, hospitals, and environmental protection.

Either of these alternatives—tax reform or massive spending—required difficult choice and promised substantial conflict. But Johnson stubbornly maintained a conception of America in which no one seriously disagreed with what was to be sought, retaining to the end a belief that so long as the Gross National Product continued to rise, all conflict could be contained; although perhaps more important was the political judgment that it would be impossible to enact either alternative. “Helping some will increase the prosperity of all”—this was the administration’s refrain as it embarked on a contradictory course: reducing taxes and cutting the budget with one hand, while fighting poverty and raising spending with the other. As seen through Johnson’s eyes, however, the two courses were perfectly compatible, and in this vision he was not alone. The best known of America’s columnists, among many others, fully agreed. “This is,” Walter Lippmann remarked,

the post-Marxian age. A generation ago it would have been taken for granted that a war on poverty meant taxing money away from the haves and turning it over to the have nots. For until recently, it was assumed that there was only so much pie and the social question was how to divide it. But in this generation, a revolutionary idea has taken hold. The size of the pie can be increased by intention, by organized fiscal policy and then a whole society, not just one part of it will grow richer.³⁵

And so Johnson could wage war against poverty and at the same time win substantial backing among the well-to-do. “He is the only President,” remarked Leonard Hall, chairman of the Republican National Committee, “to have prosperity and poverty going for him at the same time.”³⁶

“Both the period of mourning for Kennedy and of experimentation for Johnson are over,” James Reston wrote in the spring of 1964.

Washington is now a little girl settling down with the old boyfriend. The mad and wonderful infatuation with the handsome young stranger from Boston is over—somehow she always knew it wouldn’t last—so she is adjusting to reality. Everything is less romantic and more practical, part regret and part relief; beer instead of champagne; not fancy but plain; and in many ways more natural and hopefully more durable. This may not be the most attractive quality of the new Administration but it works.… The lovers of style are not too happy with the new Administration but the lovers of substance are not complaining.³⁷

Johnson’s greatest exertions in his first months as President were made in the field of civil rights. There, consensus politics would not be enough. He recognized that retreat on this issue would jeopardize not only the transition but the approaching nomination. Before Kennedy’s death, it was generally thought that the civil rights bill as finally enacted would fall considerably short of the original Kennedy draft. Johnson shared this view: “Even the strongest supporters of President Kennedy’s civil rights bill in 1963 expected parts of it to be watered down in order to avert a Senate filibuster. The most vulnerable sections were those guaranteeing equal access to public accommodations and equal employment opportunity. I had seen this ‘moderating’ process at work for many years. I had seen it happen in 1957. I had seen it happen in 1960. I did not want to see it happen again.”³⁸

There is in this statement more than a little dissembling; in saying that he “had seen” the moderating process at work, Johnson leaves the impression that he was outside looking in, when in fact he was the very instrument of the process. Sitting in the White House in 1963, he demanded a different, and far more difficult, approach. Populist instincts about the equality of men, inherited fears of national fragmentation, fond dreams about ending the Civil War once and for all—all these combined with the responsibilities of the Presidency to invest his conduct with an unusual steadiness of conviction about a public issue. This time Johnson’s personal means were committed to an unconditional victory. While still making use of his capacity to convey privately subtle differences in tone with the liberal Democrats, the blacks, the Southerners, and the Republicans, Johnson openly proclaimed a unifying and consistent purpose—to secure a strong, sweeping civil rights bill.

In pledging that there would be “no deal” on civil rights, even if it required suspending all other activity in the Senate for months, Johnson replaced his practiced methods of maneuver with an untypical, inflexible determination. “I knew,” Johnson later said, “that if I didn’t get out in front on this issue, they [the liberals] would get me. They’d throw up my background against me, they’d use it to prove that I was incapable of bringing unity to the land I loved so much.… I couldn’t let that happen. I had to produce a civil rights bill that was even stronger than the one they’d have gotten if Kennedy had lived. Without this, I’d be dead before I could even begin.”³⁹

So Johnson did on civil rights the thing he always feared the most. He refused to bargain his position with his onetime mentor, Richard Russell. Johnson’s steadfast refusal gave positive shape to the six-month struggle. Accepting Johnson’s firmness, Russell, too, “went for broke.” He mobilized his troops for a filibuster, hoping the liberals could not organize a two-thirds vote for cloture, but knowing that if they did, the bill would pass intact. Although Russell and Johnson split on this decisive issue, the tone of the separation was more of sorrow than of anger. Johnson approached Russell with sympathetic understanding, not vindictiveness, manifesting his hope for a future when Southerners would no longer stand against the rest of the nation.

While reaching out to the South in hope of eventual reconciliation, Johnson also reached out to the Republicans. “I knew right away that without Republican support we’d have absolutely no chance of securing the two-thirds vote to defeat the filibuster. And I knew there was but one man who could secure us that support, the Senator from Illinois, Everett Dirksen.”⁴⁰ In working on Dirksen, Johnson used both subtle and blatant devices of politics. He turned first not just to Dirksen himself but to Roy Wilkins and Whitney Young. “When are you going to get down here and start civil-righting?” he asked them. “I think you are all going to have to sit down and persuade Dirksen this is in the interest of the Republican Party and I think that he must know that if he helps you then you’re going to go along and help him. And let [the Republicans] know that you’re going to the presidential candidate that offers you the best hope and the best chance of dignity and decency in this country and you’re going with a senatorial man who does the same thing.”⁴¹

While fostering this indirect tactic, Johnson also approached Dirksen on a direct level, offering, as we have seen, favors which ranged from personal notes to federal projects, from photographs to judge-ships. On June 10, 1964, Dirksen joined the forces for cloture, thereby defeating the Southern filibuster and opening the way for Congress to pass the most sweeping civil rights bill in history. On July 2, 1964, in the presence of the leaders of all the major civil rights groups, Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Only two weeks later, the strength of Johnson’s alliance with the civil rights groups was severely tested when large-scale rioting broke out in Harlem. Johnson immediately called a meeting at the White House. There, he persuaded Roy Wilkins, Whitney Young, and Martin Luther King of the necessity to join together against the forces of chaos. At the end of the meeting a surprising statement emerged in which the leaders of the various civil rights groups called on “their people” to stay off the street.

Our own estimate of the present situation is that it presents such a serious threat to the implementation of the civil rights act … that we recommend a voluntary temporary alteration in strategy and procedures.… The greatest need now is for political action.… We call on our members voluntarily to observe a broad curtailment if not total moratorium of all mass marches, picketing and demonstrations until after Election Day, November 3.⁴²

That statement assumed a sharing of interests between officials in government and rioting youth in the streets, an assumption that, within two years, would become untenable. But at the time both Lyndon Johnson and the civil rights leaders were confident—and they seemed to have good reason for their confidence—that leaders and followers alike were united by common goals and common agreement on the rules of the game.

Johnson took office at a time when cold war tensions and fear of military conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union had diminished substantially. Many knowledgeable observers believed that the resolution of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 and the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty that followed in 1963 were preludes to an eventual deténte with the Soviet Union. There was no sign of approaching crisis in Berlin or Cuba, those earlier hot spots of the cold war. In South Vietnam, there were only eighteen thousand American advisers; and although there had been considerable political upheaval in the wake of Diem’s assassination, very few Americans foresaw that Vietnam might become the arena for serious international crisis. “It was,” as Johnson later described it, “almost as if the world had provided a breathing space within which I could concentrate on domestic affairs.”⁴³

Obviously, no twentieth-century President could ignore foreign policy completely. There were speeches to be made, meetings to be chaired, and leaders to be met. And even though there were no international difficulties of urgent public concern, there are always problems, and continual need for presidential decisions. And the American people still wanted to be both beloved and envied by those in other countries. And when Johnson told them it was so, no one could have realized that this was the last Presidency for some time and almost the last year in the decade when Americans would hear or believe such words. “My plane has landed in many continents,” Johnson said in a speech in February, 1964, “touched down in more than thirty countries in the last three years. The wheels have never stopped and the door has never opened and I have never looked upon any faces that I didn’t think would like to trade citizenship with me.… Since World War II we have spent a hundred billion dollars trying to help other people … so, regardless of what you hear and regardless of what some of the bellyachers say, we are a much beloved people throughout the world.”⁴⁴

This statement is not simply an expression of nationalism; it hints at a belief in the universal applicability of American values, the existence of a global consensus. In Johnson’s first meeting with a group of foreign diplomats, he described his visit with an African family during his Vice-Presidency, letting them know that he was gratified, but not surprised, to discover in the heart of the continent a replication of Americana. “I stood,” Johnson said, “in a mud hut in African Senegal, and I saw an African mother with a baby on her breast, one in her stomach, one on her back, and eight on the floor, that she was trying to feed off of $8 per month. As I looked into her determined eyes, I saw the same expression that I saw in my mother’s eyes when she, the wife of a tenant farmer, looked down on me and my little brother and sisters, determined that I should have my chance and my opportunity, believing that where there was a will, there was a way.”⁴⁵

To Johnson there were foreign customs, foreign religions, foreign governments, but there were no foreign cultures, only different ways of pursuing universal desires—in this case, the transition from rags to riches. He knew about poor mothers with children—what else but determination could he see in her eyes? This defect, almost an inability to conceive of societies with basically different values, was the source of his greatest weakness as President.

Naturally, economic development was Johnson’s panacea for the ills of the planet. America was the missionary nation, destined to defeat the ancient enemies of mankind—poverty, ignorance, and disease—and in so doing to serve as a model and a source of determination to the world. “When I first became President,” Johnson told me, “I realized that 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. And then I knew I could accomplish my greatest wish, the wish for eternal peace.”⁴⁶

It was this belief in universal values, combined with his confidence in his powers of persuasion, that led Johnson to conclude that he need only arrange a meeting, face to face, in order to straighten out American disagreements with other countries. “I always believed,” Johnson later said, “that as long as I could take someone into a room with me, I could make him my friend, and that included anybody, even Nikita Khrushchev. From the start of my Presidency I believed that if I handled him right, he would go along with me. Deep down, hidden way below, he, too, wanted what was good, but every now and then, this terrible urge for world domination would get into him and take control and then he’d go off on some crazy jag like putting those missiles in Cuba. I saw all that in him and I knew I could cope with it so long as he and I were in the same room.”⁴⁷

In January, 1964, Panama broke diplomatic relations with the United States. American students illegally had raised the American flag over their high school, precipitating a riot that led to the death of several American soldiers. Johnson’s initial reaction was prompt and man-to-man. “Hey, get me the President of Panama—what’s his name, anyway?—I want to talk to him.”⁴⁸

As seen through Johnson’s eyes, the behavior of world leaders was influenced by the same grammar of power; whatever their countries’ sizes or shapes, they shared a common concern with questions of ruler-ship: which groups to rely on, which advisers to rely on, and how to conduct themselves amid the complex intrigues of politics. “When Chancellor Erhard came to my ranch at Christmas time in 1963, we knew very little about one another, but before he left we’d come to understand each other so fully that I knew that no matter what issue came between us we’d be able to sit down and reason it out. This is what I wanted to happen with every leader I met and most of the time I was successful. President de Gaulle was the hardest to get to. I always had trouble with people like him, who let high rhetoric and big issues take the place of accomplishments. But even with De Gaulle I refused to get my back up and eventually we learned to live with each other.”⁴⁹

Without personal contact, Johnson tended to see foreign leaders as remote, uncanny figures and was uncomfortable with their strangeness. During three decades at the seat of the government, he had learned the accepted concepts of international conflict, containment, bipolarity, limited war. But he didn’t think in that language. He thought in terms of personalities, power, and good works.

South Vietnam was ten thousand miles away. Johnson had visited it once, for three days. He had then met Ngo Dinh Diem, but now Diem was dead and he knew almost nothing about his successor. Skeptical of his own ability to sort out the complicated strands of religion, party, and culture, Johnson turned to others for guidance, in particular to John Kennedy’s men: Robert McNamara, McGeorge Bundy, Dean Rusk, and Maxwell Taylor. All these men had previously committed themselves to the maintenance of an independent non-Communist South Vietnam. All of them shared the view that Vietnam was a critical testing ground of America’s ability to counter Communist support for wars of national liberation. Moreover, they reflected the generally held position of the foreign policy establishment that had dominated America’s conduct of foreign affairs since the cold war began.

That Johnson was strongly influenced by these advisers is clear; they were Kennedy’s men and they had expertise in the one area he knew the least about. But he was not, as some have pictured, a passive figure, a dupe to their advice. He accepted their advice to continue the policy of supporting South Vietnam because it accorded with a set of assumptions he had long held about the nature of Communism and the importance of Southeast Asia.⁵⁰ These assumptions are delineated in this conversation with William Fulbright on March 2, 1964:

PRESIDENT: If we can just get our foreign policy straightened out.

FULBRIGHT: Get that damn Vietnam straightened out. Any hope?

PRESIDENT: Well, we’ve got about four possibilities. The only thing I know to do is more of the same and do it more efficiently and effectively and we got a problem out there that I inherited with Lodge. I wire him every day and say what else do you recommend? Here is the best summary we have. (1) In Southeast Asia the free world is facing an attempt by the Communists of North Vietnam to subvert and overthrow the non-Communist government of South Vietnam. North Vietnam has been providing direction, control, and training for 25,000 Vietcong guerrillas. (2) Our objective, our purpose in South Vietnam, is to help the Vietnamese maintain their independence. We are providing the training and logistic support they cannot provide themselves. We will continue to provide that support as long as it is required. As soon as the mission is complete our troops can be withdrawn. There’s no reason to keep our military police there when the Vietnamese are trained for that purpose. (3) In the past four months there’ve been three governments in South Vietnam. The Vietcong have taken advantage of this confusion. Their increased activity has had success. At least four alternatives are open to us: (1) Withdraw from South Vietnam. Without our support the government will be unable to counter the aid from the North to the Vietcong. Vietnam will collapse and the ripple effect will be felt throughout Southeast Asia, endangering independent governments in Thailand, Malaysia and extending as far as India and Indonesia and the Philippines. (2) We can seek a formula that will neutralize South Vietnam à la Mansfield and De Gaulle but any such formula will only lead in the end to the same results as withdrawing support. We all know the Communist attitude that what’s mine is mine, what’s yours is negotiable. True neutralization would have to extend to North Vietnam and this has been specifically rejected by North Vietnam and the Communist China government, and we believe if we attempted to neutralize, the Commies would stay in North Vietnam. We would abandon South Vietnam. The Communists would take over South Vietnam. (3) We can send Marines à la Goldwater and other U.S. forces against the sources of these aggressions but our men may well be bogged down in a long war against numerically superior North Vietnamese and Chicom forces 100,000 miles from home. (4) We continue our present policy of providing training and logistical support of South Vietnamese forces. This policy has not failed. We propose to continue it. Secretary McNamara’s trip to South Vietnam will provide us with an opportunity to again appraise the prospects of the policy and the future alternatives open to us.

FULBRIGHT: I think that’s right … that’s exactly what I’d arrive at under these circumstances at least for the foreseeable future.

PRESIDENT: Now when he comes back though and if we’re losing with what we’re doing, we’ve got to decide whether to send them in or whether to come out and let the dominoes fall. That’s where the tough one is going to be. And you do some heavy thinking and let’s decide what we do.

FULBRIGHT: Righto.⁵¹

Although Johnson shared the general outlook of his advisers, he was far from deciding what means should be employed—whether, indeed, the objectives were possible of fulfillment. He had, after all, not approved an earlier proposal to use American military force to prevent Ho Chi Minh’s victory over the French. He did know that these were difficult decisions to be made. But he needed time, and in any event an election year was no time to make them. The word went out that tough decisions on Vietnam should be deferred as long as possible. The glimpses of the President revealed in The Pentagon Papers show a man determined to achieve the goal of an independent non-Communist South Vietnam, yet holding back on actions to achieve that goal until he believed they were desperately, absolutely necessary.

In the spring of 1964, opinion surveys showed that more than two-thirds of the American public said they paid little or no attention to what was going on in Vietnam. Johnson wanted to keep it that way. Rejecting proposals to expand the war into North Vietnam, or to introduce combat troops in the South, Johnson believed that he was, for now, left with only one choice: incremental and covert escalation of military pressure, designed to convince Hanoi that the United States was serious and to reassure Saigon. Nonetheless, in the next few months, the situation in South Vietnam continued to deteriorate and the Saigon regime was shaken by one crisis after another. Yet the established official consensus on Vietnam and its significance held firm.

The only time his will seemed fully engaged in Vietnam policy came in August when an American destroyer was supposedly attacked by the North Vietnamese. He saw it as an opportunity to show the seriousness of our commitment to South Vietnam. Within twelve hours after news of the incident reached Washington, American bombers were dispatched on a reprisal raid over North Vietnam. Two days later, the administration asked the Congress “to approve and support the determination of the President as Commander in Chief to take all the necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States to prevent further aggression.… The United States regards Vietnam as vital to its national interest and to world peace and security in Southeast Asia.”⁵²

William Fulbright guided the Tonkin Gulf Resolution through the Senate, with only Wayne Morse and Ernest Gruening in dissent. In the House, the vote was unanimous, 416 to 0. Congress had, without knowing, established the formal foundation that would later be used to support a full-scale war.

In one stroke, Johnson had been able both to flex his muscles and to show restraint, to act abroad as he had done at home with the tax cut and the poverty program: pursue contradictory policies and apparently make them work. Running as the “man of peace,” the man who would “never send American boys to do the fighting that Asian boys should do themselves,” Johnson nonetheless had no intention of permitting Goldwater to usurp the role of defending America’s pride and patriotism. The single bombing raid against Communist attackers of United States ships provided an ideal opportunity. He was able to demonstrate that the “man of peace” was not a man of weakness or timidity. And on the verge of the campaign, the Tonkin affair allowed this consensus President to speak by his actions to each of his constituencies, satisfying all of them in one stroke.

But the rhetoric of restrained commitment to South Vietnam, so effective during the campaign, later provoked serious difficulties when Johnson finally had to choose between massive escalation or the defeat of Saigon. As the country learned the less innocent reality of the United States role at the Gulf of Tonkin and saw hundreds of thousands of their fellow Americans being sent to war, millions of Americans came to feel that the President had betrayed them, lied, and deliberately tricked them to get their votes.

“The virtues of the politician,” Hans Morgenthau writes, “can easily become vices when they are brought to bear upon the statesman’s task.”⁵³ The politician, Johnson’s experience had taught him, could make promises without keeping them; words spoken in public had little relation to the practical conduct of daily life. But whatever justification a politician may claim for deceptions, the statesman must align his words with his action.

At the time, however, Johnson’s action at the Gulf of Tonkin, along with his campaign statements, constituted a political master stroke. Though some uneasiness about Vietnam was reflected in letters to the editor in a few papers, in the two lonely Senate votes against the Tonkin Resolution, and in a handful of demonstrations and peace rallies, the American people and their politicians praised Johnson for the feat of riding two horses in different directions at the same time. Some wanted peace, even at the price of withdrawal. Some wanted victory, even at the price of a wider war. Others wanted, if not victory, at least to avoid defeat while keeping the peace. And most did not want to pay attention to the issue.

With unexpected elegance, Lyndon Johnson had done what few observers had imagined possible at his accidental accession: he had taken complete control of the levers of power; he had made himself the unquestioned choice of the Democratic Party for the presidential nomination. Yet even during this public acclaim Johnson was preoccupied with what became known in the White House as “the Bobby problem,” the issue of the vice-presidential nomination.

“Every day,” Johnson recalled, “as soon as I opened the papers or turned on the television, there was something about Bobby Kennedy; there was some person or group talking about what a great Vice President he’d make. Somehow it just didn’t seem fair. I’d given three years of loyal service to Jack Kennedy. During all that time I’d willingly stayed in the background; I knew that it was his Presidency, not mine. If I disagreed with him, I did it in private, not in public. And then Kennedy was killed and I became the custodian of his will. I became the President. But none of this seemed to register with Bobby Kennedy, who acted like he was the custodian of the Kennedy dream, some kind of rightful heir to the throne. It just didn’t seem fair. I’d waited for my turn. Bobby should’ve waited for his. But he and the Kennedy people wanted it now. A tidal wave of letters and memos about how great a Vice President Bobby would be swept over me. But no matter what, I simply couldn’t let it happen. With Bobby on the ticket, I’d never know if I could be elected on my own.”⁵⁴

Johnson spent days and nights discussing “the Bobby problem.” As Eric Goldman described it, Robert Kennedy commanded more attention and consumed more energy and raw emotion than any other single concern of state that the new President confronted after Dallas.⁵⁵ There was between them a dislike so strong that it seemed almost as if each had been created for the purpose of exasperating the other.

Moreover, Johnson identified Bobby as the agent of an effort to destroy his political career. At the 1960 convention, Bobby was sent to see Johnson when John Kennedy became increasingly concerned about the mounting liberal opposition to Johnson as his vice-presidential choice. But before Bobby arrived at Johnson’s suite, Kennedy had decided to insist upon his choice of Johnson as his running mate. Unaware of his brother’s resolve, Bobby subtly suggested to Johnson the possibility of taking himself out of the vice-presidential picture. Johnson took the discussion to mean one thing: Bobby and his friends had persuaded Jack to change his mind. And now Bobby was here to tell him that he was being dumped. Before Bobby finished, Johnson picked up the phone and called Kennedy, demanding a definitive answer. Kennedy, of course, gave him the assurance he sought. But the memory of that humiliating moment would never be erased. Unable, then or later, during the miseries of his time as Vice President, to express anger toward John Kennedy in public, or even in many private settings, Johnson projected his bad feelings onto the nearest target, and that was Bobby.

The response Robert Kennedy evoked in Lyndon Johnson was hugely disproportionate to the political realities. Robert Kennedy could not threaten Lyndon Johnson’s power; not until 1968, after Johnson himself had virtually destroyed his own public support. Something beyond politics was at stake. Throughout his life, Johnson had desperately tried to keep alive the distinction between the doer and the thinker; a man was either one or the other. For years this dichotomy was Johnson’s way of justifying his failure in becoming what Rebekah had wanted. Yet here was a man who seemed to combine both intellect and will. John Kennedy had never seemed to constitute the same kind of threat. From their first meeting, Johnson had typed the Massachusetts Senator as “weak and pallid,” “a scrawny man with a bad back, a weak and indecisive politician, a nice man, a gentle man, but not a man’s man.”⁵⁶ With Bobby, it was different. If he was smaller, he was tougher, and a brutal bargainer. Johnson was nettled by pictures showing Bobby shooting rapids, climbing mountains, surrounded by the horde of children he had fathered. At the same time, the reports that Bobby liked to read, quote poems, and take long walks by himself connoted to Johnson a man of the mind.

Johnson made it absolutely clear to his friends that Robert Kennedy would, under no circumstances, be the vice-presidential choice. “If they try to push Bobby Kennedy down my throat for Vice President, I’ll tell them to nominate him for the Presidency and leave me out of it.”⁵⁷ But the speculation continued until Johnson could take it no longer. On July 29 he invited Kennedy to a private meeting in the Oval Office. The conversation is on record:

I have asked you to come over to discuss with me a subject that is an important one to you and me.

As you might suppose, I have been giving a great deal of thought and consideration to the selection of the Democratic candidate for Vice President.…

I have reached a decision in this regard and I wanted you to learn of my decision directly from me.… I have concluded, for a number of reasons, that it would be inadvisable for you to be the Democratic candidate for Vice President in this years’s election.…

I believe strongly that the Democratic ticket must be constituted so as to have as much appeal as possible in the Middle West and the Border States; also it should be so constituted as to create as little an adverse reaction as possible upon the Southern States.…

I am sure that you will understand the basis of my decision and the factors that have entered into it, because President Kennedy had to make a similar decision in 1960.⁵⁸

The meeting lasted forty minutes; afterward, Johnson was euphoric. “It was,” as Theodore White described it, “as if a coup had been accomplished, as if a tenuous control had been reinforced and confirmed by a stroke of action.”⁵⁹ The larger problem of informing the public and the press remained, until Johnson hit upon what seemed to him the perfect evasion—a general principle to cover the specific case. On July 30, in a special television broadcast, he announced that he had reached the conclusion that “it would be inadvisable for me to recommend to the convention [as my running mate] any member of my Cabinet or any of those who meet regularly with the Cabinet.”⁶⁰ In the writing of his memoirs, Johnson insisted upon turning this sequence upside down, as if general principle came first and then, and only as a necessary consequence, the elimination of Robert Kennedy.

With all Cabinet officers eliminated from consideration, the list of vice-presidential possibilities narrowed to Hubert Humphrey, Eugene McCarthy, and Thomas Dodd, the latter two serving as stage props in the President’s drama, designed to conceal to the end Johnson’s inevitable choice of Hubert Humphrey. Johnson himself admitted that all along he had been 90 percent sure that Humphrey was the man he wanted. Humphrey, with his open, ebullient nature and his unswerving loyalty, had great appeal for Johnson. Yet with his own nomination already secured, Johnson wanted to provide some element of suspense that would strengthen interest in the convention, so Johnson would give Humphrey warm and visible signs of encouragement one day and back off on the next, engaging in speculation about McCarthy or Dodd.

This emotional seesaw took its toll on Humphrey. In the final weeks before the convention, Humphrey, seemingly drained of pride and dignity, repeated the poignant story of the girl whose hero was the handsome captain of the football team. He would keep phoning her—always to ask her opinion of some other girl and never for a date. His present political dependency only reinforced the psychological dependency long rooted in Humphrey’s relationship with Johnson.

When the convention opened on August 24, 1964, Johnson still had not revealed his choice. Furthermore, Johnson’s mood had led him to raise seemingly incredible doubts concerning his own availability for the presidential nomination. Always subject to extreme oscillations of mood, throughout the summer of 1964 Johnson had continued to alternate between periods of elation, excitement, and self-confidence and periods of severe depression, inhibition, and doubt. In depression, he invariably would turn his attention to running away. This was neither the first nor the last time that Johnson would contemplate leaving public life. He was nearing fifty-six. It was nine years since his heart attack. The thought of total responsibility for another four years was unsettling.

“I had,” Johnson later recounted,

decidedly mixed feelings about whether I wanted to seek a four-year term … in my own right.… I knew clearly enough, in those early months in the White House, that the Presidency of the U.S. was a prize with a heavy price. Scathing attacks had begun almost immediately, not only on me but on members of my family. I knew that unfounded rumors, crass speculations, remorseless criticism, and even insult would intensify in a political campaign.

There was, in addition, the constant uncertainty as to whether my health would stand up through a full four-year term.… I felt a strong inclination to go back to Texas while there still was time—time to enjoy life with my wife and daughters, to work in earnest at being a rancher on the land I loved, to slow down, to reflect, to live.⁶¹

At first, it is hard to take this statement seriously. Politics and work went together for Johnson. What would he do back in Texas? How would he live without politics? “I believed,” Johnson wrote,

that the nation could successfully weather the ordeals it faced only if the people were united. I deeply feared that I would not be able to keep the country consolidated and bound together.…

The burden of national unity rests heaviest on one man, the President. And I did not believe, any more than I ever had, that the nation would unite indefinitely behind any Southerner … the metropolitan press of the Eastern seaboard would never permit it. My experience in office had confirmed this reaction. I was not thinking just of the derisive articles about my style, my clothes, my manner, my accent, and my family.… I was also thinking of a more deep-seated and far-reaching attitude—a disdain for the South that seems to be woven into the fabric of Northern experience … an automatic reflex, unconscious or deliberate, on the part of opinion molders of the North and East in the press and television.⁶²

Johnson may have been correct in asserting that America somehow resented a Southerner; yet he was unquestionably popular, and in a position to quash such resentment. In fact, personal insecurity more than political analysis informed Johnson’s assessment. As we have seen, he felt a recurring anxiety about losing hold, a sense of being scorned in some unexpected and dreadful way by those people whose love and respect he so consistently required. So once again the familiar pattern emerged; he controlled his anxiety by creating the possibility of his withdrawal: I don’t want you. Do you need me? All right: but if you don’t, I have already told you I don’t want you.

On August 25, 1964, the day after the Democratic Convention opened, Johnson scrawled the following statement on a yellow pad:

… For nine months I’ve carried on as effectively as I could.

Our country faces grave dangers. These dangers must be faced and met by a united people under a leader they do not doubt.… The times require leadership about which there is no doubt and a voice that men of all parties, sections and color can follow. I have learned after trying very hard that I am not that voice or that leader.

Therefore, I shall carry forward with your help until the new President is sworn in next January and then go back home as I’ve wanted to since the day I took this job.⁶³

These must have been painful words for Johnson to write or even to think. But in the act of writing them and even more in the act of taking them back, Johnson found a way to control his anxiety. I’m strong enough to give it up, but I won’t give you the satisfaction. When he finished the draft, he showed it to Lady Bird, whose response demonstrated as profound an understanding of her husband as Rebekah had demonstrated of her son:

Beloved—

You are as brave a man as Harry Truman—or FDR—or Lincoln. You can go on to find some peace, some achievement amidst all the pain. You have been strong, patient, determined beyond any words of mine to express. I honor you for it. So does most of the country. To step out now would bewrong for your country, and I can see nothing but a lonely wasteland for your future. Your friends would be frozen in embarrassed silence and your enemies jeering.

I am not afraid of Time or lies or losing money or defeat.

In the final analysis I can’t carry any of the burdens you talked of—so I know it’s only your choice. But I know you are as brave as any of the thirty-five.

I love you always.

Bird⁶⁴

“In a few words,” Johnson later maintained, crediting Lady Bird with his reversal, “she hit me on two most sensitive and compelling points, telling me what I planned to do would be wrong for my country and that it would show a lack of courage on my part.”⁶⁵But something more than a note from his wife was involved in this decision; the situation bears the marks of what Freud has called “the repetition compulsion,” which leads an individual to unconsciously arrange for variations of an original theme that he has not learned either to overcome or to live with. Like the child who repeatedly flings his toys into the corner when his mother leaves in the morning only to retrieve them in the afternoon as a way of “making her” come back, so Johnson, when he felt that he was losing hold, typically issued and then retrieved statements of withdrawal, as he did, for example, shortly before his election to the Senate—thereby mastering what seemed at first an unbearable situation. By escaping and returning, if only in fantasy, Johnson could reassert his personal and political autonomy; and thereby seem to himself the determining force of his own destiny.

Having reconfirmed his desire to run, on the next day Johnson summoned Humphrey to his office. He wanted both Humphrey and Dodd to fly with him to Atlantic City. His plan was to keep up the suspense for one more day, so that he could make the announcement in person in front of five thousand delegates and a national television audience. But the intoxication of the internal drama of the previous day diminished his self-control. Standing on the runway, minutes before the takeoff, surrounded by reporters, Johnson suddenly took Humphrey by the arm and announced: “I want you to meet the next Vice President of the United States.”

Atlantic City in August, 1964, was, as Johnson said in his memoirs, a “place of happy, surging crowds and thundering cheers. To a man as troubled as I was by party and national divisions, this display of unity was welcome indeed.… As I stood there warmed by the waves of applause that rolled in on us, touched to the heart by the display of affection, I could only hope that this harmonious spirit would endure times of trouble and discouragement as well.”⁶⁶

In the months before the conventions, it seemed almost inconceivable that Lyndon Johnson’s shining political prospects could be improved—until the Republicans nominated Barry Goldwater. For any Democratic candidate, at any time, the candidacy of a Republican from the right wing of the party would have presented an unusual opportunity. For John Kennedy’s successor in 1964, in an atmosphere permeated with a desire for continuity, Goldwater’s nomination made a Johnson landslide inevitable. Johnson was urged by most of his advisers to conduct a low-key campaign. But the man who had been haunted for years by his first senatorial margin of eighty-seven votes wanted, not just any landslide, but the largest landslide in history. He wanted to prove that he was loved. Moreover, to sit in the Oval Office during the campaign for his own election as President, knowing victory was certain, would have required him to subdue every impulse of his restless nature. So Johnson began what one observer has called “the most peripatetic campaign in the history of the Republic. Eighteen hours a day … twenty speeches a week … motorcades … dinners … handshakes. Andy Jackson in a jetliner.”⁶⁷

The contours of the campaign exactly fit Lyndon Johnson’s personality. When in the White House, he could project his presidential image, serenely coping with the business of the nation and the world, acting the nonpolitical administrator. On the stump, raw and natural, casting away prepared texts, forgetting the lessons of elocution, Johnson gesticulated wildly, shouting out the plain, blunt idiom of everyday America. Reaching out to touch and feel, Johnson recreated with the many an air of intimacy resembling the one he had once shared with the few in the corridors of the U.S. Senate. By focusing his gaze on one friendly face and knowing that this face represented most of the crowd, Johnson conquered his fear of large numbers. Gone was the stilted Southern preacher; here was a Southern rouser. The crowds, infused by the vigor and the sheer power of his performance, reacted with spontaneous enthusiasm.

Johnson was jubilant. The fall of 1964 seemed to him a perfect Indian summer, a moment of golden health and personal satisfaction when everything went exactly as planned. All Johnson’s youth and political life had been spent in reconciling conflict; the desire for personal synthesis had lent momentum to the development of his consensual skills. Now with the candidacy of Barry Goldwater, these skills and this talent would become the central element in the 1964 campaign.

The campaign allowed Johnson to pursue his candidacy in the terms of his favorite political choice: the philosophy of consensus or the philosophy of extremism. The one, he believed, was rooted in the American way; it rested on the belief that all interests could be conciliated by persuasion and satisfied by compromise. The other was rooted in a belief hostile to American values and experience—that some conflicts were irreconcilable and could be resolved only by the total defeat of one or more contending powers. The philosophy that Johnson represented—the philosophy of progress and construction—had yielded, he told his audience, “a generation of democracy, social security, minimum wage and strong unions.” “Where’d we be,” he asked, “if the other—the philosophy of opposition and destruction—had prevailed? The wrecker can wreck in a day what it takes years for the builder to build.… And if the only choice before us is between surrender and nuclear war, then we’ll all be dead.”⁶⁸

Through September and into October, Johnson remained in an expansive mood. Because the polls showed that his majority was overwhelming, it was unnecessary for Johnson to do what he never did well—to engage his opponent. Never in his life had Johnson fought a partisan campaign; politics in Texas had made this possible. Now Barry Goldwater was making possible a presidential campaign in which Johnson could run for peace, harmony, and prosperity, and the voters would gratefully accept his generalities—although television spots (in which Johnson did not appear) levied harsh assaults against Goldwater, even implying that his election would mean nuclear war.

Then came the only cloud of the entire campaign. On October 14 the news media picked up the fact, until then unknown to Johnson, that the week before Walter Jenkins had been arrested in the men’s room at the YMCA for “disorderly conduct.” The Special Assistant to the President of the United States had been found engaging in homosexual activity with a sixty-year-old veteran who lived in an old-soldiers’ home. Moreover, the media had discovered that Jenkins had been arrested on the same charge in the same washroom five years before.

Johnson heard the news that night in New York City just as he was about to make a speech on foreign policy. His first reaction was shock. He denied the story, substituting for it a conspiratorial theory of his own. “I couldn’t have been more shocked about Walter Jenkins if I’d heard that Lady Bird had killed the Pope. It just wasn’t possible. And then I started piecing things together. The Republicans believed that the question of morality was their trump card. This was their only chance at winning; anyone who got in the way wound up as corpses. Well, the night of October 7, the night of the arrest, I had been invited to a party given by Newsweek which had been owned by Phil Graham, my good friend, who had told Kennedy to make me Vice President. I couldn’t go, so I asked Walter to go in my place. Now the waiters at the party were from the Republican National Committee and I know Walter had one drink and started on another and doesn’t remember anything after that. So that must be the explanation.”⁶⁹

Whether Johnson actually believed his own statement here is questionable, but his overreaction to the question of homosexuality and his fantasy of conspiracy testify to the disturbance he must have felt. He was also disturbed—and pained—at the recognition that this had been Jenkins’ way of committing political suicide. Overworked, tense, and exhausted, Jenkins was, as one of Johnson’s aides put it, “a desperate man seeking a way out of the kind of life he had been living.”⁷⁰

Johnson’s second reaction was caution. Before making a statement he wanted to gauge the impact of the incident on public opinion and to determine whether the national security was in any way involved. Lady Bird, however, did not wait for politics. She issued a statement at once filled with compassion and love: “My heart is aching today for someone who has reached the end point of exhaustion in dedicated service to his country.”⁷¹

In the span of seventy hours after the Jenkins story hit the papers, the Labour Party won the national election in Britain for the first time in thirteen years and China exploded its first nuclear bomb—events which dominated the front pages. The Jenkins incident faded swiftly, and the campaign continued on course.

Yet Mrs. Johnson’s sadness over the fate of Walter Jenkins remained. “Today is our 30th wedding anniversary,” she wrote weeks later in her diary. “But in spite of that a curious pall of sadness and inertia, a feeling of having come to a standstill and being bound up in gloom, which has enshrouded me for several days, does not abate.… In the afternoon I went out to see Marjorie and Walter Jenkins, who are going home to Texas. It was a strange hour—very much the same, and very different. To me, Walter is as much acasualty of the incredible hours and burdens he has carried in government service as a soldier in action.”⁷²

Lady Bird’s reaction to Jenkins was characteristic. “If President Johnson was the long arm,” Liz Carpenter wrote, “Lady Bird Johnson’s was the gentle hand,”⁷³ often softening the hurts her husband inflicted on the members of his staff, mediating quarrels between aides, and winning over her husband’s opponents. “People often compared her to Mrs. Roosevelt,” Liz Carpenter continued. “While she admired Mrs. Roosevelt greatly, she was very different. Mrs. Roosevelt was an instigator, an innovator, willing to air a cause without her husband’s endorsement. Mrs. Johnson was an implementer and translator of her husband and his purposes … a WIFE in capital letters.”⁷⁴

Yet if her main role was one of complementing her husband, Lady Bird Johnson also developed a few important projects of her own. She became an active champion of highway beautification; she used the White House as a forum for bringing the issue of the environment to national attention; she created the First Lady’s Committee for a More Beautiful Capital: the many new gardens and flowers along the streets of Washington today remain a daily testament to Lady Bird Johnson’s life and work. And whatever her feelings about the painful aspects of public life, and the burdens of campaigning, she always remained by her husband’s side—indeed, her whistle-stop tour through the South in the 1964 campaign proved an enormous success.

On election day Johnson flew to Austin; he wanted to be home to hear the results. “It seems to me tonight,” he said to one friend, “that I have spent my whole life getting ready for this moment.”⁷⁵ By the time the last poll had closed, Johnson had gathered what was, until then, the greatest popular majority in history. And his margin in the electoral college, 486–52, had been exceeded only once in the twentieth century—by Franklin Roosevelt. He carried every state in the North, the Midwest, the Far West, and, excepting Goldwater’s native Arizona, the entire Southwest. And in the South, the only area of the country where Goldwater had substantial support, Johnson still carried six of the eleven states.

“It was,” Johnson later recalled, “a night I shall never forget. Millions upon millions of people, each one marking my name on their ballot, each one wanting me as their President.… For the first time in all my life I truly felt loved by the American people.”⁷⁶ Once again the same expression: the connection of votes and love.