All the Way with LBJ: Electing Lyndon Johnson

Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson’s ascension to the presidency after John Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963 in Dallas had disheartened many members of JFK’s administration, whose poor opinions of the former U.S. Senate majority leader might have been exacerbated by his being from the state in which their leader had been gunned down and his often antagonistic relationship with Robert Kennedy.

Kennedy’s ambassador to the Dominican Republic, noted freelance reporter John Bartlow Martin, had mourned John Kennedy’s tragic death, but had in his heart he nursed a soft spot for Johnson because of an incident at the 1963 inauguration of Juan Bosch as president of the Dominican Republic. During the festivities, Martin’s son, Dan, had broken his arm after being thrown from his burro. A Dominican doctor had set the arm and put a cast on it, but Martin wanted the arm X-rayed by an American doctor onboard the USS Boxer, an American aircraft carrier on hand to provide helicopter air cover for the vice president.

Martin told Johnson that his wife, Fran, could not accompany the vice president’s wife, Lady Bird, on a scheduled visit to the Dominican School for the Blind because she had to be with Dan when he went to the carrier. “Why don’t you let me take the boy, and his mother, too, up to Washington with me Thursday?” Johnson spontaneously asked Martin. “They can take better care of him at Bethesda [Naval Hospital] than here.”

Ever since that time, whenever anyone asked Martin about his view of Johnson, his mind turned back to that occasion and the vice president’s compassionate gesture. Johnson, he noted, helped save his son’s arm, as the break had occurred near the growth center at the elbow, “and if it had not been reset properly it would not have grown.”

When Johnson asked for Martin’s help in his presidential effort against his Republican opponent, Barry Goldwater, the conservative U.S. Senator from Arizona, Martin agreed. The veteran Democratic speechwriter, who had previously worked on Adlai Stevenson’s presidential efforts in 1952 and 1956, as well as John Kennedy’s in 1960,  had high hopes for the 1964 campaign, believing the  election could be a means to discuss fundamental issues of American policy, including war and peace in the nuclear age and the proper role of government in a free society. Unfortunately, he later observed, the election turned out to be “one of the silliest, most empty, and most boring campaigns in the nation’s history.”

In the late summer of 1964, Bill Moyers, special assistant to Johnson, took Martin to see the president and the two men discussed the upcoming campaign for a few minutes. Johnson believed that Goldwater had a chance to capture the election by winning the South; adding Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa, the conservative Midwest; along with New Mexico, Colorado, and the mountain states.

Martin told the president about his background in the Midwest and agreed with Johnson that the region’s conservatism might swing voters to the Goldwater camp as a backlash against gains being made by African Americans, highlighted by the Civil Rights Act Congress passed on July 2 after much wheeling and dealing from Johnson. White workingmen in the Midwest, said Martin, particularly those of Eastern European extraction, felt threatened by black men, fearing they might lose their jobs to them. There also existed in the region vestiges of the McCarthyism of the 1950s and the isolationism of the 1930s in reaction to America’s growing power and foreign commitments, including troop increases in Vietnam, he added. “At the fringe were lunatics who hated communists, Jews, Catholics, Negroes, waste, or big government (or any government, it sometimes seemed) indiscriminately,” Martin noted.

With all these difficulties, the Midwest might well prove to be “the battleground” in the election, according to Johnson strategists. Martin remembered the president telling him: “We need you. You write it and tell me what to say and I’ll say it.” Martin later observed that Johnson was the easiest candidate he ever worked for, as far as speechwriting was concerned, far easier to write speeches for than either John Kennedy or Stevenson had been because Johnson “would say what you wrote.” As he left his meeting with Johnson, the Texan called out to Martin, “Get some new ideas, John,” words he had heard from past Democratic presidential candidates.

That fall Martin had an office in the Executive Office Building, located next to the White House, where he worked under the direction of Moyers, who was in overall charge of the campaign’s speechwriting staff. Unlike his previous experience with John Kennedy’s presidential campaign, Martin did not always travel with Johnson, but spoke to him occasionally in the White House, as well as passing along strategy recommendations to Moyers. Martin also worked with the other speechwriters, including Dick Goodwin, his companion on the Kennedy campaign plane, and William Wirtz (Secretary of Labor in the Johnson administration), with whom he had worked on Stevenson’s presidential campaigns.

As the incumbent, Johnson had an enormous advantage over his opponent, and he and his advisers decided he should “stay presidential,” initially running his campaign from the White House, ignoring his opponent, touting the surging economy and his legislative successes with Congress, and possibly reassessing his strategy in October. “I guess the best thing for me to do,” said Johnson, “is to stay around here and let people know I’m real busy tending the store, that I’m taking good care of their business.” It seemed to be a sound strategy, as a Gallup poll had 77 percent of eligible voters supporting Johnson to only 20 percent for Goldwater.

Johnson advisers planned, noted Jack Valenti, to treat their GOP rival “not as an equal, who has the credentials to be President, but as a radical, a preposterous candidate.” Not hard to do given Goldwater’s acceptance speech at the Republican convention, where he had said, “I remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you that moderation in the pursuit of justice is not virtue.” Goldwater’s statements about selling the Tennessee Valley Authority, making Social Security voluntary, withdrawing the United States from the United Nations, and using low-yield nuclear weapons against Chinese supply lines in North Vietnam only reinforced his reputation as an extremist. “Our overriding issue in 1964 was very simple,” noted Larry O’Brien, a Kennedy aide who had remained to work with Johnson. “In one word, Goldwater.”

While Johnson remained above the fray, using the presidency as his “greatest asset,” his staff set out to convince voters that Goldwater could not be trusted to hold such high office, and used his extreme statements against him. With the assistance of a New York advertising agency—Doyle Dane Bernbach—the Johnson campaign spent $3 million on television advertising hitting Goldwater on his intemperate remarks on Social Security, opposition to the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, and view that the country would be better off if the eastern seaboard could somehow be cut off America.

One commercial in particular, as Martin noted, treated Goldwater “as a bloodthirsty mad bomber,” and has gone done in history as one of the most famous, or infamous given one’s political leanings, in presidential campaign history. The “Daisy” advertisement, as it is now called, featured a young girl in a field picking petals off of a daisy and counting—sometimes inaccurately—from one to nine. When she reached nine, a menacing male voice took over, reciting a countdown. The camera zooms in on the child’s right eye, followed by a bright flash and roar that gives way to a nuclear explosion. As the immense fireball grows and boils in fury, Johnson’s voice can be heard, saying, “These are the stakes, to make a world in which all of God’s children can live, or go into the dark. We must love each other, or we must die.” The spot ends with a voiceover urging, “Vote for President Johnson on November 3. The stakes are too high to stay home.”

According to Martin, Johnson had decreed that no speech of his during the campaign could be longer than seven hundred words. “With commercials like that to explain complicated issues,” asked Martin, “who needs long speeches?” Years later, he learned that while Johnson campaigned as “the candidate of military restraint,” behind the scenes the president had made plans to increase the American combat presence in the Vietnam War. Although he met frequently with such senior presidential advisers as Clark Clifford and Abe Fortas, saw the president occasionally, and Moyers, Goodwin, and Wirtz on a daily basis, Martin said he had no inkling of any such move to widen the war, and he doubted if any of his colleagues did either.

Although many Democrats were extremely confident of victory in November, Martin, still nervous about Johnson’s chances in the Midwest and elsewhere, did some legwork in several states (by car across Wisconsin, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia in early September, and Oklahoma, Texas, New York, and Connecticut in late September), and discovered that almost nobody seemed to be paying much attention to the campaign. He found that Democratic voters admired Johnson and believed him to be the safer candidate than Goldwater, but many did not have the same enthusiasm they had previously displayed for Kennedy. Consequently, Johnson could count on “very broad but rather shallow support,” and Martin worried that the president’s lead in the polls could very well breed “overconfidence and indifference among Democrats.”

Martin wrote a memorandum for the president telling him that people in the Midwest were saying that the election had come down to a choice between “a kook and a crook,” with Goldwater being the kook and Johnson the crook. Martin advised Johnson that he should let the voters see him in action and “convince them he was not a crook; and the best way to do that, I thought, was personal, whistle-stop campaigning.” 

Johnson took action to broaden his support, wishing to win over every possible voter in order to achieve the largest popular vote victory in presidential history, surpassing the 60.3 percent attained by Warren Harding in 1920 and the 60.8 percent garnered by Franklin Roosevelt in 1936. “He not only wished to win bigger than John Kennedy had won in 1960, but bigger than anybody had won ever,” said Martin. “Moreover, he wanted people to vote for him, not against Goldwater; he wanted all the American people to vote for him because they loved him.”

To achieve such a historic victory, Johnson, at the end of September, set out on a whirlwind tour of the country, traveling 60,000 miles over a forty-two-day period and making 200 speeches in the Northeast, Midwest, and Upper South. With bullhorn in hand, the president attracted enormous crowds (70,000 in Peoria, Illinois, and 40,000 in Indianapolis, for example), stopping his presidential motorcade to shake hands and encourage voters, “Come on folks, come on down to the speakin’. You don’t have to dress. Just bring your children and dogs, anything you have with you. It won’t take long. You’ll be back in time to put the kids in bed.” For Johnson’s appearances in the Midwest, Martin did what he had done during John Kennedy’s presidential campaign—producing for the candidate editorial advance memorandums giving information on where the speech would be held, what political notables might be in attendance, and the background on each community.

The Johnson juggernaut rolled on to what seemed to be a certain victory. The only bump along the way occurred in the middle of October, when the story broke that a key Johnson adviser, Walter Jenkins, had been arrested and charged with disorderly conduct with another man in the basement restroom at a Washington, D.C., Young Man’s Christian Association facility. The incident seemed tailor-made for the Goldwater campaign, as its candidate had focusing on the morality issue, including attacking the morals of the president himself. “What had looked like a landslide suddenly promised to be a debacle,” said Martin.

Jenkins, however, resigned and international events, including the fall from power of Soviet Union premier Nikita Khrushchev and the explosion by Communist China of its first nuclear weapon, conspired to knock news about the White House aide’s homosexual tryst from newspaper’s front pages. By the end of October Martin said the Johnson campaign had entered a “holding” pattern, but it probably did not matter as he had received “fantastic” reports from reporters and political insiders about Johnson’s chances in the Midwest, including the key states of Illinois and Ohio, as well as states in the East and the West.

Martin’s reports were accurate; Johnson defeated Goldwater in a landslide, carrying forty-four states and the District of Columbia. Martin’s warning about paying more attention to the Midwest paid off in particular, as the president swept the region, capturing even the normally Republican-leaning Indiana (no Democratic presidential candidate had won the state since Roosevelt in 1936, and none would do so again until Barack Obama in 2008). 

Johnson received more than 43 million votes, or 61.1 percent of the total vote cast, then the largest in American history. Accompanied by Fran, Martin watched the election returns in Moyers’ White House office, while the president learned of his great triumph at his Texas ranch. Martin reflected that the great conservative crusade that year had begun with a slogan about Goldwater of, “In Your Heart You Know He’s Right.” Democrats had responded, “In Your Guts You Know He’s Nuts.” These two slogans “composed a fitting epitaph on the 1964 campaign,” he said