In November Senator McCarthy announced that he would enter the presidential primaries in Wisconsin, Nebraska, Oregon, and California and might do the same in New Hampshire and Massachusetts. He said he would directly challenge Johnson on the Vietnam War. Allard Lowenstein had been largely responsible for persuading McCarthy to announce.
Lowenstein, in his late thirties, was a brilliant, tireless New York lawyer with an insatiable appetite for politics. He was about as liberal as one could become and still be accepted by the very tolerant Democratic party. He drew a sharp line at the New Left, which he detested. He had worked on the staffs of a number of notable party liberals—Frank Graham, Adlai Stevenson, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Hubert Humphrey. He had been president of the National Student Association in 1951 just before the CIA took it over, and he must have known about it as it occurred. Afterward he kept in close touch with student activists in universities all over the U.S. By 1967 Lowenstein and those students who opposed the war had turned implacably against Lyndon Johnson. By the summer of 1967 Lowenstein had devised a strategy to deal with the LBJ problem. As Chester, Hodgson, and Page wrote, “it had two mutually necessary wings: he had to fan a ‘Dump Johnson’ fire in the grassroots, and he had to corral a candidate.” In fact, the war fed the flames in the grassroots; Lowenstein concentrated on the candidate.
Bobby Kennedy was the obvious choice, but he thought it hopeless to take on a sitting President by dividing the Democratic party. Lowenstein approached a number of congressional doves and even J. K. Galbraith and General James M. Gavin. A number of the legislators faced tough reelection fights and wanted no more trouble; Galbraith was a Canadian by birth; and the general was a Republican. On October 20 Lowenstein and Gerry Hill, a San Francisco peacenik, had breakfast with McCarthy. He said, “You fellows have been talking about three or four names.” He warmed them with a big smile. “I guess you can cut it down to one.” Lowenstein had his candidate.
McCarthy was a country boy, born and raised in Watkins, Minnesota (“Population 760 friendly people plus a few grouches”), in the rich green land and clear lakes west of Minneapolis. He did not forget his origins. When a rich Republican he had run against said that he had sold a bull for 10 cents a pound and lost $600, McCarthy said, “The way I figure it, that’s 6000 pounds. He should have sold it to a circus and made a fortune.” His father was Irish, his mother German, both Roman Catholics. He was a brilliant scholar, an outstanding baseball and hockey player, and a serious student of religion. After the war he taught at St. Thomas College in St. Paul. He got into politics and won a House seat in 1948, moving up to the Senate with the famous Democratic class of 1958.
McCarthy was a loner who treasured his privacy and was an offbeat individualist in the upper house. Perhaps its most intelligent member, he spent much of his time writing—four books and a substantial corpus of poetry. He was not much interested in legislation, was often absent for votes, and most definitely was not a member of the Senate “club.” He did not get on particularly with John Kennedy and many speculated over the reason. Perhaps McCarthy explained it with characteristic ambiguity when he said, “I’m twice as liberal as Hubert Humphrey, and twice as intelligent as Stuart Symington, and twice as Catholic as Jack Kennedy.” He had no use for the President. Johnson had manipulated him during the 1964 Democratic convention when he announced that he had narrowed the choice to the two Minnesotans, Humphrey and McCarthy, when everyone knew it would be Humphrey. McCarthy deeply resented being used this way.
Now he agreed with Allard Lownstein. He thought the war was a calamity for the U.S. and that Johnson must be replaced. The Pope had urged Catholics to work for peace, and his daughter Mary, who was heavily involved in the peace movement, pleaded with her father not to face history as one who had supported Johnson’s war. “There comes a time,” the senator said, “when an honorable man simply has to raise the flag.”
McCarthy decided to enter the New Hampshire primary, scheduled for March 12, 1968. It seemed like a dumb thing to do. The state was traditionally conservative and Republican. The new electronics industry was providing plenty of jobs under war contracts. The Irish and French-Canadian working class was expected to follow the AFL-CIO in supporting the President. The leading Democrats, Governor John W. King and Senator Thomas J. Mclntyre, were stalwarts for Johnson. The first poll showed McCarthy with only 11 percent of the vote. At least his name would be on the ballot; voters would need to write in Johnson’s.
But McCarthy’s campaign proved a political sensation. While his talent for organization was virtually nonexistent, his mere announcement brought in a flood of money and thousands of volunteers, a few with considerable competence. Even more important, over 10,000 students from as far away as Michigan and Virginia, came to the state to lick envelopes, draw up lists, and, critically, talk to voters in house-to-house canvassing. Two busloads of Yale majors in Romance languages barnstormed in French in Manchester and the northern part of the state. “College students … ,” Mary McGrory wrote in her column, “have suddenly discovered a use for people over thirty—voting for McCarthy.” The boys cut their hair, shaved, and wore neckties; the girls brushed their hair and put on maxi-skirts. McCarthy’s diffident style, which turned off audiences that liked a little passion in their politics, had an appeal in restrained New Hampshire. The fact that 60 percent of the state’s registered Democrats were Catholic did him no harm. His handling of the war was masterful. He destroyed the arguments for it without attacking the President personally. He even borrowed a pair of skates and played hockey with some semi-pros. He had a terrific finish.
On the night before the primary the President asked John P. Roche, who had been following New Hampshire, “What’s Gene going to do?” Roche said, “His name is on the ballot, yours isn’t. I can’t see how you can keep him under a third.” “No,” LBJ said, “he’ll get 40 percent, at least 40 percent. Every son-of-a-bitch in New Hampshire who’s mad at his wife or the postman or anybody is going to vote for Gene McCarthy.” Not a bad forecast.
On March 12 Johnson received 29,021 votes, McCarthy, including write-in Republicans, 28,791. Johnson won by a slim 230 votes. The press treated the New Hampshire results as a McCarthy victory and, more important, as a devastating defeat for the President. Larry O’Brien said Johnson needed 60 to 65 percent of the vote to make his performance look respectable. He did not come close.
Bernard Boutin, an active New Hampshire Democrat, had run Johnson’s campaign and, despite the fact that he and O’Brien were old friends, had never called him. Thus, O’Brien was not well informed about the primary. Being cut out made him uneasy. Eventually Boutin called. “You probably wonder why I haven’t been in regular contact with you.” O’Brien said he did wonder. Boutin: “I’m under instruction not to be involved with you on this.” O’Brien became upset. He said later, “It did not bother me to the extent that I have been loyal, yet, whether it is the President or others, they distrust me.” Despite long association with the Kennedys, “I was not going to do anything but support the guy that I worked for and that was it.” Bobby and Teddy understood this, accepted it, and “were not going to consider this some kind of an affront.” Yet “there is somebody on the Johnson side saying, ‘I don’t know about O’Brien.’ ”
O’Brien busied himself with Massachusetts, for which the filing date was March 5 for the primary on April 30. In January the President had asked him to evaluate the Bay State. He had a poll taken which showed that LBJ could easily defeat McCarthy. But the senator would run a hard campaign and anyone who managed Johnson’s had to do the same to win. The President, therefore, needed someone who would stand in for him and be “prepared to organize and campaign vigorously in Massachusetts.” O’Brien informed Johnson that he “would be prepared to leave the administration and be the stand-in if that was his desire.” The President told him “he didn’t feel that he wanted to have [O’Brien] do that.” O’Brien went down a list of others, all of whom refused to take on the burden. Finally, Mauric
e Donahue, president of the state senate, said that he would stand in. O’Brien notified the White House.
There was no answer. On March 5 he told Donohue to stand by while he phoned everyone he could think of in the White House. “I never was able to make the contact; there was no filing.” The decision, obviously, had been made by Johnson. As McCarthy wrote, “President Johnson had conceded us Massachusetts and its 72 convention votes.”
O’Brien concluded that the White House did not understand the primaries and he sent over a background memorandum on March 6. The system worked for the party that did not have a sitting President. If he was a candidate, however, it created serious problems. In Wisconsin, Nebraska, and Oregon the President’s name was mandatory on the ballot unless he certified that he was not running for reelection. In the other 12 primary states he was free to enter his name or not. Johnson had been inconsistent, entering in New Hampshire and staying out in Massachusetts. The only way he could justify not entering, and not very convincingly, was to assert that he was so busy governing the country that he had no time to campaign. “The debacle has occurred,” O’Brien concluded, “the game is over. There is no point in discussing stand-ins, primaries from here on out.”
He went to Wisconsin at the end of March to assess the primary there. His excuse was an address to 1000 postal employees in Milwaukee. He trooped around the state and talked to knowledgeable people. In his speech he said kind words about the President and the audience applauded mechanically as they supposed they should for the boss. His judgment was that Wisconsin would be a disaster for Johnson. When he visited the state headquarters in Milwaukee he found it shut with the lights out. Theodore White was there about the same date. “Nothing more forlorn, politically, occurs in my memory of the 1968 campaign than Johnson headquarters at 800 North Plankinton in downtown Milwaukee. In a barren store-front headquarters, silent as a funeral parlor, half a dozen people sat at long tables … listlessly turning over papers. No telephones rang.”
By contrast, McCarthy’s headquarters, O’Brien reported, had a hundred people cheerfully at work under blazing lights. For Johnson the rest of the state was no better. The President had seen a snippet of the Milwaukee speech with the audience applauding on TV and phoned O’Brien to say how pleased he was by the enthusiasm. “So I told him candidly that I was very concerned about … Wisconsin.” The applause was meaningless. “I told him he was going to suffer defeat in the Wisconsin primary.” Johnson asked how bad it would be. O’Brien said it would be “substantial.” McCarthy’s campaign was stronger than the one in New Hampshire. On March 25 the Madison Capital Times endorsed him and he packed 18,000 people into the Dane County Memorial Coliseum. McCarthy got 56 percent of the vote, LBJ 35, and Kennedy 6 from write-ins.
O’Brien wrote the President on March 27 that he had in the past several days talked to “large numbers of Democratic officials, leaders and workers around the country.” They were “without exception … your supporters.” They were “fearful of the end result in terms of both the Chicago convention and the November election, if our present Vietnam posture is maintained.”
On March 28 Johnson had McPherson and Califano to lunch. He looked long at both of his loyal aides and asked, “What do you think of my not running for reelection?” Both said he had to be a candidate. But McPherson added, “I wouldn’t run if I were you.” Then why should he enter the race? Johnson asked. “Because you’re the only guy who can get anything done.”
On Saturday evening, March 30, Larry and Elva O’Brien were in New York for a farewell dinner at Toots Shor’s for their boy, who was about to be shipped off to Vietnam. Jimmy Breslin, the columnist, was with them and they ran into an old friend, Jesse Unruh, the California politico. Unruh was hot for peace and Bobby Kennedy and expressed very strong opposition to LBJ, to which O’Brien responded as best he could. Then Unruh made a terrible mistake, saying, “If you feel that strongly, why isn’t your son in Vietnam?” O’Brien said, “As a matter of fact, this is a goodbye dinner we’re having; he’s on his way.” The next day Unruh phoned to apologize.
On Sunday afternoon, March 31, O’Brien was at the White House. Marvin Watson asked him where he would be that evening. O’Brien said he would be at home. In the early evening he received a call from a presidential aide who informed him that at the end of his televised address the President “is going to announce that he will not seek reelection.” “I was,” O’Brien said, “absolutely stunned.”3
Lyndon Johnson had talked about not running for reelection for a long time. Lady Bird had expressed her view as early as the spring of 1964: “She did not want me to be a candidate in 1968.” Luci wanted a father who was alive and urged him to quit. As a daughter, Lynda preferred that he not run, but as a citizen, hoped he would do so. In 1965 he began telling aides and friends that he should get out. In early 1967 Governor Connally told him that he did not want to enter the race again for reelection. But if the President needed him ort the ticket, he would sign on. “I told him,” Johnson wrote, “I felt certain that I would not run and suggested that he base his own decision on that assumption.” In November 1967 he asked General Westmoreland whether the soldiers in Vietnam would think that the commander-in-chief who sent them to the battlefield had let them down if he was not a candidate. Answer: “I do not think so.” Prior to the State of the Union address in January 1968, LBJ asked his former aide Horace Busby to prepare a brief withdrawal statement. It was supposed to be in his pocket when he delivered the speech. But he “forgot” to put it there. During early 1968 he discussed the question with a large number of other people.
This was all talk and many who knew him did not believe him. He did not make a commitment. An admirer of President Truman, who had faced the same problem in 1952, Johnson attached significance to the end of March. Clark Clifford had worked in the Truman White House. In the fall of 1967 Johnson had asked him to prepare a memorandum on Truman’s decision to withdraw, which he did. The President told Clifford, “I may do the same thing as Truman.” Clifford did not think he would.
But now in late March 1968 the weight on the President had increased enormously. Tet had turned the war into a catastrophe and Johnson could find no way out. McCarthy was doing splendidly running against him. Johnson was certain that Kennedy would soon join the race. He was losing the early primaries in humiliating fashion and the prospect was no brighter. His ability to move the Congress, as the tax bill proved, had almost vanished. He could hardly leave the secure White House without inciting a riot. The FBI expected serious racial violence in the cities during the summer. What would happen if he went to the Democratic convention in Chicago in August?
Johnson’s health gave way under the punishing pressure he endured. In a few entries in Lady Bird Johnson’s published diary for March she refers briefly to his condition. March 10 was a “day of deep gloom,” March 14 “one of those terrific, pummeling White House days that can stretch and grind and use you,” and on March 17 she had a “growing feeling of Prometheus Bound, just as though we were lying there on the rock, exposed to the vultures, and restrained from fighting back.” Lyndon was “bone weary,” “dead tired,” and unable to sleep. “Those sties are coming back on Lyndon’s eyes. First one and then the other, red and swollen and painful. … His life sounded more and more like the tribulations of Job.” Even on March 31, the day of the big speech, “his face was sagging and there was such pain in his eyes as I had not seen since his mother died.”
On March 28 the President kept Califano in the Oval Office with one of his long, rambling discourses. Johnson said he wanted to put him into a big job. “But,” Califano said, “I have decided to leave next year even if you win.” Johnson looked at him “as though [he] were crazy.” He wished Califano to continue in his present job and also take over the poverty program now that Shriver was leaving to become ambassador to France. Califano was not interested. “The Italians [Congressman Peter Rodino and Frank Annunzio] are always telling me to put you on the Supreme Cou
rt, but I think you’d make a better Attorney General.” Califano could make no sense of this. Johnson went on about Gene, Hubert, and Bobby. “The President was slumped in his chair and he looked very tired. He said he knew he was tired because of his eyes. ‘They hurt and they always hurt when I’m tired.’ ”
After Kennedy announced on March 16, Isaacson and Thomas wrote, “Johnson could not sleep. His face was ashen, his eyes sunk and bleary. Folds of flesh hung down from his cheeks. Angry red sties began to pop out along his raw eyelids.” Theodore White, who interviewed Johnson on March 26, found him overcome with weariness.
Doris Kearns reported that Johnson dreaded being alone. He needed to be surrounded by people. If they were not available, he had high-tech telephones, three television receivers playing simultaneously, a squawking radio to carry about, and, most important, the AP, UP, and Reuters tickers, “friends tapping at my door for attention. … I could stand beside the tickers for hours on end and never get lonely.” That took care of the daytime, but the nights were much worse. He was a poor sleeper and was “terrified at lying alone in the dark.” He would arise in the middle of the night and, with a small flashlight, pad through the dark halls to the Red Room, in which a portrait of Woodrow Wilson hung.
The Johnson family had a medical history of strokes. As a child, Lyndon would be seated next to his paralyzed grandmother, who sat wizened, speechless, and perfectly still. During the night he had a terrifying dream: He was seated in a straight chair in the middle of an open plain. Stampeding cattle descended upon him. He tried to run away but could not move. He called for help and no one came. Johnson developed a life-long fear of stroke and paralysis.
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