Random House Publishing Group
Search
Expand Mobile Menu
Landslide
Read an Excerpt

Landslide

LBJ and Ronald Reagan at the Dawn of a New America

About the Book

In politics, the man who takes the highest spot after a landslide is not standing on solid ground.
 
In this riveting work of narrative nonfiction, Jonathan Darman tells the story of two giants of American politics, Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan, and shows how, from 1963 to 1966, these two men—the same age, and driven by the same heroic ambitions—changed American politics forever.
 
The liberal and the conservative. The deal-making arm twister and the cool communicator. The Texas rancher and the Hollywood star. Opposites in politics and style, Johnson and Reagan shared a defining impulse: to set forth a grand story of America, a story in which he could be the hero. In the tumultuous days after the Kennedy assassination, Johnson and Reagan each, in turn, seized the chance to offer the country a new vision for the future. Bringing to life their vivid personalities and the anxious mood of America in a radically transformative time, Darman shows how, in promising the impossible, Johnson and Reagan jointly dismantled the long American tradition of consensus politics and ushered in a new era of fracture. History comes to life in Darman’s vivid, fly-on-the wall storytelling.
 
Even as Johnson publicly revels in his triumphs, we see him grow obsessed with dark forces he believes are out to destroy him, while his wife, Lady Bird, urges her husband to put aside his paranoia and see the world as it really is. And as the war in Vietnam threatens to overtake his presidency, we witness Johnson desperately struggling to compensate with ever more extravagant promises for his Great Society.
 
On the other side of the country, Ronald Reagan, a fading actor years removed from his Hollywood glory, gradually turns toward a new career in California politics. We watch him delivering speeches to crowds who are desperate for a new leader. And we see him wielding his well-honed instinct for timing, waiting for Johnson’s majestic promises to prove empty before he steps back into the spotlight, on his long journey toward the presidency.
 
From Johnson’s election in 1964, the greatest popular-vote landslide in American history, to the pivotal 1966 midterms, when Reagan burst forth onto the national stage, Landslide brings alive a country transformed—by riots, protests, the rise of television, the shattering of consensus—and the two towering personalities whose choices in those moments would reverberate through the country for decades to come.
 
Praise for Landslide
 
“Richly detailed . . . Landslide is a vivid retelling of a tumultuous three years in American history, and Mr. Darman captures in full the personalities and motives of two of the twentieth century’s most consequential politicians.”—The New York Times
 
“Novel and even surprising . . . Landslide deftly reminds readers that Johnson and Reagan both trafficked in grandiose oratory and promoted utopian visions at odds with the social complexity of modern America.”—The Washington Post
 
“Riveting . . . Darman portrays [Johnson and Reagan] as polar opposites of political attraction. . . . Animated by the artful insight that they were men of disappointment headed toward an appointment with history . . . A tale about myths and a nation that believed them, about a world of a half century ago now gone forever.”—The Boston Globe
 
“Alert to the subtleties of politics and political history, Darman, a former correspondent for Newsweek, nimbly explores delusion and self-delusion at the highest levels.”—The New York Times Book Review
Read more
Close

Praise for Landslide

“Richly detailed . . . Landslide is a vivid retelling of a tumultuous three years in American history, and [Jonathan] Darman captures in full the personalities and motives of two of the twentieth century’s most consequential politicians.”—The New York Times
 
“Novel and even surprising . . . Landslide deftly reminds readers that Johnson and Reagan both trafficked in grandiose oratory and promoted utopian visions at odds with the social complexity of modern America.”—The Washington Post
 
“Riveting . . . Darman portrays [Johnson and Reagan] as polar opposites of political attraction. . . . Animated by the artful insight that they were men of disappointment headed toward an appointment with history . . . A tale about myths and a nation that believed them, about a world of a half century ago now gone forever.”—The Boston Globe
 
“Alert to the subtleties of politics and political history, Darman, a former correspondent for Newsweek, nimbly explores delusion and self-delusion at the highest levels.”—The New York Times Book Review
 
“[Darman] has a deft grasp of Reagan’s and Johnson’s biographies and of the last half-century of American political history. Setting the book as a dual story . . . both rescues the story from the fatalism (for Johnson) and pluck (for Reagan) of biography and refreshes both of their stories by contrasting the simultaneous reversals of their respective political fortunes.”—The Daily Beast
 
“Darman’s compelling, sweeping narrative explores the myths that Johnson and Reagan invented about themselves. . . . Reminiscent of such spellbinders as Rick Perlstein’s Before the Storm . . . and Jeff Shesol’s Mutual Contempt. . . . This title will engross readers of political history.”—Library Journal (starred review)
 
“Smart and perceptive . . . Darman sizes up the careers of two political powerhouses and craftsmen, Lyndon B. Johnson and Ronald Reagan, while claiming that each man’s impressive litany of achievements influenced the historical arc of American leadership. . . . Darman’s sincere and informative approach animates these historic figures, bringing them from the nostalgia of old TV clips and fading newsprint to the forefront of an engaging historical discussion.”—Publishers Weekly
 
“A rich, fly-on-the-wall narrative. If the current partisan gridlock has you pulling your hair out, this book will help you understand where these ripples originate.”—Booklist
 
“An intimate chronicle of the 1,000 days after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, during which there was a sea change in the American electorate. . . . The author masterfully conveys LBJ’s agony, as well as former actor Reagan’s freewheeling spirit: He was the ‘Errol Flynn of the B movies’ who had aged out of his previous roles and needed a new gig as an American hero. Ambitious, studious portraits pulled together nicely by Darman.”—Kirkus Reviews

“Jonathan Darman turns fresh eyes on two political giants of the late twentieth century, LBJ and Ronald Reagan. Landslide is full of surprises and new insights on these two presidents, and is written with flair. A delicious feast of a read.”—Lesley Stahl

“Masterly . . . In taking us back to a moment in American history when politics worked, Jonathan Darman provides a resonant reality check on a system that now seems all too dysfunctional. The intertwined stories of Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan offer us a window on the intrinsic give-and-take that makes governing possible. Anyone who cares about politics, biography, and current affairs will find this a delightful and illuminating book.”—Jon Meacham, author of Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power
 
“Jonathan Darman writes with power, sweep, vivacity, and humor. He is at once a gifted storyteller, a keen judge of character, and a genie of political insight. He gives us two giants, Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan, in all their glory and human vanity, and takes us on a breathtaking thousand-day ride. The relevance to today will be achingly obvious to readers—who will be both riveted and disturbed by this moving, memorable book.”—Evan Thomas, author of Ike’s Bluff and Robert Kennedy

“An ingenious and compelling book . . . With astute psychological insight, Jonathan Darman explains the motivations and achievements of these two men, how Lyndon Johnson’s downfall paved the way for Ronald Reagan’s rise, and how their overarching visions of governing became myths that defined the Republican and Democratic parties. Darman connects the dots between the lives of these two iconic characters in a dramatic and original way, offering a fresh perspective as he sweeps the reader through the events of the tumultuous sixties that reverberate to this day.”—Sally Bedell Smith, author of Elizabeth the Queen and Grace and Power
Read more
Close
Close
Excerpt

Landslide

Chapter One

HHH

Stories

November 23, 1963

At the beginning, the worst part is the uncertainty. Later, after the mourning dignitaries have come and gone, after the black crape has been taken down from the chandeliers and the funeral geldings have been put out to pasture, people will remember this weekend as a time of great sadness. For years and then decades, they’ll look back and remember their sorrow. They’ll say they knew, instantly, that life would never be the same again. But that will be memory doing memory’s ruthless work, obliterating any discordant details, imposing order where once there was none. In these first hours, there is sadness, but mostly there is chaos and the dreadful unknown: What has happened to America? And what is going to happen next?

So everyone turns on their television sets, hoping to find out. On NBC’s Today show, the clocks on a wall are comfortingly definitive. On the East Coast, it is just after seven o’clock in the morning. The date is November 23, 1963. Millions of Americans are waking up after a night of troubled sleep. Watching the program, they see the host’s face contort in sudden pain as he speaks the words:

“The president of the United States is dead.”

Ah, yes, that is certain, too.

By now there are agreed-upon facts: At lunchtime the previous day, President John F. Kennedy, on a political trip to Texas, rode in an open limousine toward the center of Dallas. At 12:30 Central Time, shots struck his motorcade as it moved through the city’s Dealey Plaza. By 12:45 p.m., CBS, NBC, and ABC had interrupted their programming to bring word of the shooting. At 1:35 p.m., the network Teletypes carried a wire from UPI: “Flash: President Kennedy Dead.” Now, nearly eighteen hours after the shooting, it is impossible to find an American who does not already know the news the host has just delivered—that the president of the United States is dead.

Still, he says it. It is the first line in a script he must read, timed to a movie montage with carefully selected background music. It is the starting point of an elaborate story he is about to tell, the summary of what is known.

He goes on:

“The body of John Fitzgerald Kennedy is at this moment in the White House. And it is a much saddened nation and world that greets this day . . .”

The screen switches to scenes from the day. There is the dead president at Dallas’s Love Field, very much alive, gracefully descending from Air Force One. And there is his beautiful wife, Jacqueline, wearing a pink suit and a pillbox hat, brushing the hair out of her face. He smiles and nods at local dignitaries on the tarmac. She clutches a bouquet of red roses to her breast. They climb into an open-topped limousine.

“At about 12:30 the motorcade turned the corner and approached the triple underpass feeding the Stemons expressway . . .”

The smiling Kennedys turn a corner and disappear from view.

“. . . and then three shots rang out in quick succession and the pleasant day turned into a nightmare of confusion and horror.”

The camera jolts and drops to the ground. The narration goes silent and the music is gone.

“The president died at about one p.m. . . . Meanwhile Dallas police had captured twenty-four-year-old Lee Oswald, an acknowledged left-wing supporter of Fidel Castro . . .”

“He was later charged with the murder of the president . . . he has thus far admitted nothing.”

Then a quick cut. Now, onscreen, we see a blurry shot of two large airplane tails, parked on a runway, behind a high fence.

“Vice President Lyndon Johnson recited the oath of office and assumed the presidency . . .”

But we do not see the oath taking. We do not see any pictures of Johnson. All we see is more of the airplane tails and the fence.

“At 6:05 Eastern Time, the presidential plane landed at Andrews Air Force Base in Washington. The bronze coffin carrying the thirty-fifth president was taken from it and loaded into a Navy ambulance.”

Onscreen it is now nighttime on another tarmac. From the back of the airplane, Air Force One, we see men emerge, carrying a coffin.

“Then, a still blood-spattered Mrs. Kennedy was taken down. She seemed still in a state of shock as she was taken to the ambulance.”

A solid mass of men in uniforms and dark suits parts for Jacqueline Kennedy. She does look dazed, but also regal and poised. The shot lingers on her, beautiful and tragic, as she waits to get into the ambulance. The narration has stopped again, as if out of respect.

Then there is a quick, disorienting cut to a far less pretty picture. On a nondescript slab of concrete, Kennedy’s vice president stands with his wife. He looks tired and old.

“A few minutes later, the waiting crowd and the nation at large heard their new president, Lyndon Johnson.”

Johnson seems confused. Before speaking he looks to both sides and then down at his notes, exposing a balding head. He is speaking but we can’t hear him, there is too much background noise. We hear principally the roar of airplane engines. Only when they deign to pause can we catch Johnson, midsentence—

“. . . time for all people.”

The shot switches to a wider camera angle. At the greater distance, he is hard to make out—there is a glare off his glasses, and the camera picks up only dark circles where his eyes should be.

“For me it is a deep personal tragedy . . .”

An anonymous figure walks into the shot just behind Johnson, as though unaware he is even there.

“I will do my best. It is all I can do. I ask for your help. And God’s.”

Finally, the roaring airplanes have their way and the camera cuts away from this lonely old man.

Then the narration picks up again:

“It was about 4:30 this morning when President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was returned to the White House.”

Now words and image and music are once again aligned. In place of the unsettled tarmac scene, we have a splendid tableau—a hearse approaching the north entrance of the White House, led by an honor guard, the great house lit up with lanterns, the president coming home.

It is a short but compelling montage, and Americans will watch it again and again this day. Broadcasters have suspended regular programming and advertising. Every second of airtime across three networks belongs to the news divisions.

This is how it works in America this weekend—the normal rituals and routines have been thrown out. Outside the NBC studios, midtown Manhattan, America’s mass media capital, has been transformed by the events of the past twenty-four hours. The department stores have taken down their Christmas decorations and replaced them with black mourning scenes. From St. Patrick’s Cathedral, the sound of an organ playing “The Star-Spangled Banner” slips out onto the street. Most theaters, movie houses, and restaurants in the city have closed their doors. The Stork Club, a hub of café society, stays open but is mostly empty. “The people here . . . are like the people out on Christmas Eve,” the headwaiter explains. “They have no home.”

The balance between cause and effect seems off, reason itself suspended. Kennedy had led the West and harnessed the most terrible arsenal of weapons ever known to man. Now he has been shot down by an anonymous madman who stored his rifle in a suburban garage. Kennedy had invited the nation to join him on a thrilling journey toward the future. Now he has become the past.

No one seems to be in charge. The president is dead. His successor is out of sight. Only a single White House photographer, snapping pictures in a hurry, has captured his swearing in. For a while, the phones in Washington don’t even work.

Americans need to look for authority somewhere new. They know where to find it. Most turned on the television the moment they heard what happened in Dallas and they haven’t turned it off since. On average this weekend, American households will watch 8.5 hours of television each day. Everyone is looking to the people on their screen for answers. NBC’s David Brinkley calls the White House to see if staffers there have any news. “No,” comes the reply, “we were watching you to see if you had any.”

For the networks, this new authority is a daunting challenge. There are still few hard facts from Dallas, a meager diet for so many hours of airtime. TV programmers experiment with other ways to fill the time—broadcasts of memorial concerts or prayer vigils—but viewers at home aren’t interested. They prefer news, even the same, sad facts, even if they’ve heard them before. The repetition is comforting. TV anchors that weekend, one viewer will later write to NBC’s Chet Huntley, are like “old friends . . . telling us about the tragedy until we could absorb it.”

So that’s what the anchors do: tell the country what they know, over and over again. This morning, NBC will replay the same montage, with the same background music, the same pictures, and roughly the same script, at least once every half hour.

This Saturday morning, when everything is uncertain, this is one thing Americans have. They do not have their president, they do not have normal life, they do not have faith that everything will be okay. All they have for certain is a story:

The president went to Dallas on a bright autumn day.

There, a madman shot and killed him.

He returned to his capital in a coffin.

In her agony, his widow has shown unimaginable strength.

The vice president has recited the oath of office and assumed the presidency.

But that isn’t the point of the story. The point of the story is the first thing the news host told them, the one thing everyone knows for sure: the president of the United States is dead.

At 8:40 that Saturday morning, two iron gates opened outside an imposing gray mansion in the Spring Valley section of Washington. A black limousine slid down a driveway scattered with dead leaves. Under police escort, the car turned south and sped swiftly through the capital’s near-deserted streets. Lyndon Baines Johnson, the living president of the United States, was en route to the White House.

Most Americans did not witness this procession. The networks had sent crews to stand outside the Johnson family home, where Johnson had spent the night after returning from Dallas. Earlier in the hour, a host had promised Today’s viewers that the program would show the new president leaving his home for the White House. But when the gates opened, NBC was in the midst of its montage, and the program’s producers chose to stick with their scripted story. By the time it was over, Johnson’s car had disappeared.

A day earlier, the man inside the limousine had been the vice president, touring his home state of Texas with Kennedy. He and his wife, Lady Bird, had planned to host the Kennedys at their ranch in the Hill Country, west of Austin, that Saturday morning. To think of the things they’d been worried about just a day earlier—which champagne and cigarettes to procure for Mrs. Kennedy; how to accommodate the special plywood and horsehair mattress favored by the commander in chief.

How quickly it had all changed. The Johnsons had been riding several cars behind the Kennedys as the presidential motorcade made its way through Dallas. They were waving at the crowds when they heard a loud explosion. As the smell of gunpowder filled the air, Johnson looked up and saw a body hurtling toward him. It was Rufus Youngblood, the Secret Service agent charged with protecting the vice president’s life. Youngblood ordered Johnson to get down and the vice president obeyed, pressing his face to the floor. Another shot echoed through Dealey Plaza. Johnson wouldn’t know it for another hour, but in that moment, John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s life ended. As he stared at the floor of the limousine and felt the weight of Youngblood digging into his back, Lyndon Johnson became the thirty-sixth president of the United States.

For a moment, all was silent, and then a ghostly voice came over the Secret Service radio: “Let’s get out of here.” The limousines careened through the streets of Dallas until at last they reached Parkland Hospital. There, doctors worked over Kennedy’s body, still trying to save his life, but Jacqueline Kennedy, looking on, knew that these efforts were in vain. Her pink suit was covered in her husband’s blood and brain tissue, and she had held a piece of his skull in her hand. “They’ve killed him,” she had repeated over and over again.

At the instruction of his security detail, Johnson took shelter in a warren of inner offices away from the operating table, where he and Lady Bird huddled and waited for news. Johnson stood six feet three inches, weighed more than two hundred pounds, and was, by long reputation, one of the most willful and powerful men Washington had ever seen. But under Parkland’s harsh lights, he was strangely passive, almost childlike, complying with Secret Service orders, refusing to make any decisions, asking repeatedly for direction from Kennedy’s staff. Finally came Kennedy’s stricken assistant, Kenneth O’Donnell, with the news: “He’s gone.”

He was President Johnson now. All his adult life, Johnson had striven for the presidency—worked for it, obsessed over it, longed for it above all else. He had sought his party’s nomination twice—unofficially but aggressively in 1956, officially and even more aggressively in 1960—but never managed to win it. The failure was the great disappointment of his life. Now, at last, it had happened—he had secured the office, but in a manner such as this.

The Secret Service was anxious to get him out of Texas, unsure what danger remained. Johnson needed little convincing. He worried that Kennedy’s assassination might be the first step in a Communist plot that could also include his own murder and possibly even nuclear war. Hunkered down in the security of Air Force One, he waited at Love Field long enough to collect Kennedy’s widow and to see the dead president’s coffin loaded into the rear of the plane. And, at his insistence, he recited the oath of office before the five-hour flight back to Washington. But no sooner had he spoken the words “so help me God” than he ordered the plane into the sky.

Greeted at Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy, he’d asked for any news of further crisis in the world. There was none, no wider threat. Still, when, well after midnight, he finally climbed into his own bed, he asked several aides to stay with him. In the darkness, he made sure they understood: They were not to leave him alone.

About the Author

Jonathan Darman
Jonathan Darman is the author of Landslide: LBJ and Ronald Reagan at the Dawn of a New America. He is a former correspondent for Newsweek, where he covered national politics, including John Kerry’s and Hillary Clinton's presidential campaigns. More by Jonathan Darman
Decorative Carat

By clicking submit, I acknowledge that I have read and agree to Penguin Random House's Privacy Policy and Terms of Use and understand that Penguin Random House collects certain categories of personal information for the purposes listed in that policy, discloses, sells, or shares certain personal information and retains personal information in accordance with the policy. You can opt-out of the sale or sharing of personal information anytime.

Random House Publishing Group