Kati Marton (27 page)

In late August, the day after the opening of the Democratic convention, the president finally made up his mind. “Our country faces grave dangers,” Johnson wrote in his prepared statement to the nation. “These dangers must be faced and met by a united people under a leader they do not doubt. After thirty-three years in political life most men acquire enemies, as ships accumulate barnacles. 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.”

The self-pity and the plea for love masked Johnson’s desire to be begged to run. In a moment of remarkable candor, he told Walter Jenkins, “People … think I want great power. And what I want is great solace—and a little love. That is all I want.” For Johnson, votes meant love. Before delivering his statement, he asked the person who best understood him what she thought. “Beloved,” she wrote him, “you are as brave a man as Harry Truman—or FDR—or Lincoln …. 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 be wrong 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, Bird.”

She understood better than anyone else that he needed reassurance more than reasoning. Whether or not he seriously considered withdrawing, Johnson credits his wife’s letter with his final decision to run. “In a few words,” Johnson wrote,

The president’s speechwriter, Harry McPherson, was astonished at the intimacy between the Johnsons.

Richard Nixon was startled when he encountered the Johnsons’ closeness. “As I got off the elevator on the second floor of the White House,” Nixon recalled in his memoirs, “a butler greeted me and escorted me to Johnson’s room. He was sitting in bed in his pajamas. ‘Hello, Dick,’ he said. His voice was extremely hoarse and he looked tired, almost to the point of exhaustion …. I had not been in the room long when the door opened and Mrs. Johnson walked in, wearing a dressing gown. She greeted me warmly, got into bed beside her husband and joined us for the remainder of our conversation.”

The dark side of Johnson’s dependence on his wife was his occasional cruelty toward her. Clark Clifford never forgot one particular family dinner. “From the moment she appeared he began attacking [her] dress, mockingly asking why she was wearing that ‘dreadful yellow thing.’ Finally almost in tears, Lady Bird left the room before we sat down to eat, returning a few minutes later in another dress. The rest of the evening went on as though nothing had happened. As Marny [Mrs. Clifford] and I drove home that night, we could not contain our anger at his treatment of Lady Bird.”

Katharine Graham of the
Washington Post
did not contain her anger during another instance of Johnson’s brutal behavior. Following the 1964 Democratic convention, during a stay at the Johnson ranch, the president obsessively berated his wife for accepting some social obligation without checking with him. He continued to berate Lady Bird until Graham could stand no more. “Yes, she did get you into this thing tonight,” she told the president, “but she also got you where you are today.” Johnson then shifted his attack to Graham until she blurted out, “Oh, shut up!” (Later she wondered if she should have added “Mr. President.”)

He rewarded Lady Bird’s love and loyalty with a growing dependence. The great and dangerous love affair with Alice Glass was long over. In February 1964 Johnson asked an aide to reply to a letter from Alice. “You read this,” he instructed the aide, “and write a nice letter. She’s an old friend. She’s Charlie Marsh’s ex-wife. She’s alone—and an alcoholic.”

During the 1964 campaign, his wife proved she could be much more than the provider of the stable base for Lyndon’s pyrotechnics. She took off on a whistle-stop tour through the South, a region seething after passage of Johnson’s Civil Rights Act. “It was the first time I focused on her as something other than the lady attached to my boss,” McPherson recalled. “She took a dozen women with her—all dressed alike in red, white and blue—in a brilliant stroke to reassure the region it had a presidential nominee who would be attentive to the South.” The train rolled out of Virginia and ended up in New Orleans, picking up politicians and their wives as it wound its leisurely way. In her soft drawl, which seemed to get deeper with each mile away from Washington, Lady Bird told crowds, “I wanted to make this trip because I am proud of the South and I am proud that I am part of the South. I’m fond of the old customs—of keeping up with your kinfolk, of long Sunday dinner after church, of a special brand of gentility and courtesy.” But her message was not all honey and molasses. “We are a nation of laws,” she affirmed, “not men, and our greatness is our ability to adjust to the national consensus. The law to assure equal rights passed by Congress last July with three-fourths of the Republicans joining two-thirds of the Democrats ….
This convinces me of something I have always believed—that there is in this Southland more love than hate.”

In Columbia, South Carolina, however, Lady Bird encountered more hate than love. Before she could begin her speech, there were angry shouts of “We want Barry [Goldwater]! We want Barry!” “My friends,” Lady Bird said, with one hand raised, “in this country we are entitled to many viewpoints. You are entitled to yours. But right now I am entitled to mine.” The crowd grew quiet and that night all three networks featured stories of the first lady’s courage. But LBJ’s reaction to her triumph was ambivalent. “The president was both very pleased with her success,” his friend William S. White commented, “and, I thought, in a slight way somewhat jealous of it. I think he didn’t particularly like it when people suggested that she’d made a major contribution to the campaign.”

IN EARLY 1965,
Johnson decided to commence the bombing of North Vietnam—Operation Rolling Thunder. What the Pentagon did not tell the commander in chief was that once the heavy bombing was under way, American ground troops would have to follow. Johnson and his closest advisers, especially McNamara, did not push the Pentagon hard enough for full disclosure of the operation’s consequences. McNamara and Dean Rusk, along with Johnson’s national security assistant, McGeorge Bundy, argued for a tough response to Hanoi’s mounting aggression against South Vietnam. Eighty-three percent of the American people supported the bombing. When General William Westmoreland, the new American commander in Vietnam, requested the first American ground troops—ostensibly to protect American air bases—there was little public debate. It was sold to the nation as a defensive measure, when in reality the military was already planning offensive operations. Johnson’s “credibility gap” had begun.

“Domino theory” entered the national lexicon: American withdrawal from South Vietnam would lead to the overthrow of weak democracies in Thailand, Korea, Laos and Cambodia by Soviet-supported Communist regimes. Pressure on the president to escalate was intense. But there was also an opportunity to declare, as Kennedy had done after
the Bay of Pigs, that a mistake had been made, that this was not our war, before another 100,000 American ground troops were dispatched. Historically, the American people have been more likely to accept an open admission of error on the part of their leaders than to accept deception. But Johnson was constitutionally incapable of admitting error. He would not be the first president to lose a war, whatever the cost.

As always, Lady Bird shared her husband’s burdens. By 1965, much of her natural ebullience had evaporated. “For some time I have been swimming upstream against a feeling of depression and relative inertia. I flinch from activity and involvement, and yet I rust without them. Lyndon lives in a cloud of troubles, with few rays of light.” Not only the mounting death toll in Vietnam but the homegrown rage of the South dragged down the presidency. Lady Bird could offer little solace now, as the presidency veered away from Johnson’s dreams. “Sometimes it makes me almost angry because he’s spending himself so,” Lady Bird wrote in her diary on June 10, 1965, “but then I don’t know a better thing in the world to spend yourself for. Today has been one of those days, made up of long sessions with Maxwell Taylor, Rusk, McNamara … it’s really strange the idea the press has of Lyndon’s lack of interest in or grasp of foreign affairs. He spends so many more hours of his day working on foreign affairs than on anything else.”

Johnson’s aides remember a depressed president in 1965. “He would just go within himself,” Moyers said, “just disappear—morose, self-pitying, angry …. He was a tormented man.” His wife worried about his health. “He is much too heavy,” she wrote in her diary. “I do not know whether to lash out in anger or sarcasm, or just remind him for the nine hundred and ninety-ninth time.” He had few illusions about the domestic consequences of the escalating war. But his natural compulsion to win blocked him from doing anything else. “Losing the Great Society was a terrible thought,” he said, “but not so terrible as the thought of being responsible for America’s losing a war to the Communists. Nothing could possibly be worse than that.”

By late summer of 1965, there were two hundred thousand American troops in Vietnam, and still the president had defined neither the mission nor his strategy clearly. The anti-war movement picked up steam. The White House itself was under siege. For Johnson, the blow
was personal. He was crushed that he was losing America’s youth, who chanted, “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” “I guess the saddest thing was to think about all those years when Lyndon was the youngest,” Lady Bird recalled. “He thought of himself as the champion of the young … felt he was one of the young. And then to have them turn against him, that was particularly poignant.”

He continued to get important legislation passed, however, including the Voting Rights Act of 1965. “And we shall overcome,” the president told Congress, dramatically embracing black Americans’ slogan as his own. But there was no relief from the war’s agony. The president and therefore also his wife were not sleeping well. “This day began in the early hours of the morning with a long talk,” Lady Bird wrote in her diary on January 11, 1966. “Lyndon woke up as he often does these nights, and we talked about the prospects for the years ahead. They are so fraught with danger and with decisions whose outcome we cannot see …. And my advice to Lyndon is so mundane and uninspiring: stay healthy, laugh a little, remember you are as tough as other presidents who have lived through the same or worse.” It was impossible for her husband to follow this advice. Late at night a pajama-clad Johnson wandered downstairs to the Situation Room to ask startled duty officers about the latest casualty figures.

“I had coffee with Lyndon about 8:30 this morning,” Lady Bird wrote on March 10, “but these days I feel as if I’m part of a staff meeting …. [His aides] come to his room when he first wakes up and while he drinks cup after cup of tea give him reports, ask decisions, analyze the business of his day, discuss yesterday’s triumphs and troubles and go over the appointments. It is a pattern of intense mental strain, totally unrelated to the luxurious idea of breakfast in bed. And I wait my turn to get a word in edgewise.”

The toughest part was that he was not even sure he was doing the right thing. “It was a thorn stuck in his throat,” his wife recalled. “It wouldn’t come up or go down.” Meanwhile, Lady Bird found release in another cause that suited her—flowers and trees and unspoiled scenery. She persuaded the president to support legislation to clean up the nation’s blighted highways, and the word “beautification” became permanently associated with her. But she achieved far more than what that
word normally implies. In those days, billboards hawking everything from cigarettes to motels lined the highways. Flowers were a rare sight in inner-city neighborhoods. She linked the sixties’ crisis of the spirit with the ugliness of the urban environment. Lady Bird traveled to forty-eight states to promote conservation. She left a permanent mark on Washington, D.C., where each spring a profusion of wildflowers along the Potomac and in parks scattered throughout the city recall her tenure, and a park now carries her name.