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THIS IS A SPOILER THREAD - SO DO NOT READ ANY FURTHER IF YOU DO NOT WANT TO READ SPOILERS

This thread is dedicated to some of the reviews that have been done since I set up the introduction thread.

Book review: ‘Landslide,� LBJ, Reagan and New America, by Jonathan Darman - The Washington Post


Lyndon Johnson, arriving at the Democratic National Convention in 1960, wanted government to play a big role in eliminating social ills. (Edward Kitch/AP)

By Matthew Dallek September 26

Why have millions of Americans turned their backs on civic affairs, trashed elected officials and come to distrust the federal government? What are the sources of our political distempers? Such questions occupy the center of Jonathan Darman’s “Landslide,� and his answers are somewhat novel and even surprising. Scholars, journalists and politicians have typically cited such factors as congressional partisanship, presidential scandals, the growing role of big money in campaigns and each party’s hard-edged ideological tilt. Darman fingers a different culprit: Lyndon Baines Johnson and Ronald Reagan, he writes, propounded dueling political fantasies in the mid-1960s that rested on two visions of government, “two myths in which the federal government could only be America’s salvation or America’s ruin.�

By striving to achieve “total greatness,� he argues, Johnson promised an end to problems that no government, no matter how activist, could possibly eliminate. Johnson declared that the federal government must unshackle the nation from the chains of racism, poverty and urban blight. “The Great Society rests on abundance and liberty for all,� he told University of Michigan students in 1964, and he described his administration as committed to putting “an end to poverty and racial injustice� during his White House years.

Johnson’s political fantasy gave conservative leaders and activists a long-sought opportunity to score points with a scarred electorate, and Reagan, Darman argues, seized his chance. He began in 1964 to serve up his own political fantasy “of limited government� that tapped the rage “on the radical right.� Reagan’s much more dystopian idea that government stood at the root of social problems was as unrealistic and extreme as any vision put forward by Johnson, Darman writes. Unwittingly, the two men joined together and shattered the consensus politics that had once tackled hard problems with realistic policies.

“Landslide� vividly chronicles an oft-told moment � the 1,000 days following John F. Kennedy’s murder when the social structure seemed to come unglued. Drawing on presidential telephone transcripts and making smart use of archival documents, “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 story here moves at a fast clip, but it is at times breezy, overdrawn and tendentious. Darman even writes parts of “Landslide� in the style of a movie script, depicting several scenes with snippets of dialogue, cutaways and a cast of characters including Sargent Shriver and David Brinkley.

The book examines Johnson’s and Reagan’s inner demons and their respective desires to play the hero in the nation’s salvation, injecting a dose of psychology as if each protagonist were lying on a couch.

And the portrait of Johnson and Reagan as twin handmaidens to our current distempers shortchanges how each leader achieved for his side and the country a set of lasting political and policy triumphs. Johnson’s Great Society ushered in Medicare, civil rights, voting rights, consumer and environmental protections, Head Start, federal aid to education, and myriad other initiatives that formed the foundation of the modern welfare state. Even the most muscular leaders of the tea party lack the clout and political support to repeal his still-popular agenda five decades later.

Reagan’s legacy was also multifaceted and hardly confined to his anti-big-government “fantasy.� In the 1980s, he enacted sweeping income tax cuts, rolled back business regulations, undercut union protections, and won two landslide elections based on his appeals to the nation’s optimism, his military build-up and his pragmatic streak. Just as Johnson showed that government could address social problems effectively, Reagan mounted a blistering (and, to millions, persuasive) critique of where government had failed, turning his conservative philosophy into a political juggernaut. Johnson’s and Reagan’s competing visions � in fact, they didn’t spend much time directly addressing each other’s actions � were ultimately an argument about the federal government’s proper role in domestic life, an argument that harks back to the Constitutional Convention.

And the grandiosity of their political promises of the mid-�60s was consistent with the oratory of their predecessors, many of whom envisioned government-led eras of peace and prosperity, or individual initiative and small government as the pillars of American greatness. Woodrow Wilson predicted an end to war, after all. When Nazi Germany threatened the Western democracies, Franklin D. Roosevelt said the stakes were nothing so much as achieving for all Americans his Four Freedoms � including freedom from want and fear. Kennedy used his inaugural address to declare that humans now had the power to eliminate disease and “all forms of human poverty.�

Johnson opened the so-called credibility gap, waged a disastrous war in Vietnam and helped dismantle Americans� trust in Washington. Reagan’s program led to rising deficits and tarred the federal government as a toxic institution. Yet their visions, though studded with hyperbole, also inspired millions, expanded even in Reagan’s case the role of government, and addressed the rational hopes and fears of a people divided by class, race and culture who rallied around each man’s ideals and agendas. Johnson’s and Reagan’s legacies include their achievements as well as their flaws, and “Landslide� offers an engaging yet too-polemical account of why Americans hate politics.

About the author of this article:

Matthew Dallek , an assistant professor of political management in George Washington University’s Graduate School of Political Management, is the author of “The Right Moment: Ronald Reagan’s First Victory and the Decisive Turning Point in American Politics.�

Source: The Washington Post

Book Review: Landslide: LBJ and Ronald Reagan at the Dawn of a New America,� by Jonathan Darman- The New York Times


Lyndon B. Johnson, 1967; Ronald Reagan, 1969. Credit AP Photo/File; Fox Photos/Getty Images

By SEAN WILENTZ OCT. 17, 2014

Lyndon Johnson has come to look far more formidable today than he did in 1968. Current commentators yearn for a time when a master partisan politician worked the levers of power in Washington and won numerous victories, including the Voting Rights Act and the creation of Medicare. Amid disappointment over a promised transformational postpartisan leadership under Barack Obama, the canny Johnson looks like a model of White House command.

Nearly forgotten is the brevity of Johnson’s ascendancy and the swiftness with which his presidency crashed and burned. Three years after he took office, the Democrats suffered heavy losses in the 1966 midterm elections. The agonies of the ensuing two years, above all in Vietnam and in the conflagrating inner cities, led, it now seems inexorably, to the pathetic scene of the once-imperious Johnson informing the nation in the spring of 1968 that he would neither seek nor accept his party’s nomination.

Jonathan Darman’s engaging first book, “Landslide,� tells the story of Johnson’s triumphs and precipitous decline, from his succession to the presidency after John F. Kennedy’s murder through the pivotal midterms. It offers a tempering reminder of how Johnson’s notorious insecurities and egotism, as well as his misbegotten policy in Vietnam, brought him down. Much of this history, to be sure, will be familiar to readers of the second volume of Robert Dallek’s biography of Johnson, “Flawed Giant,� just as some of the early portions of “Landslide� describe events covered in greater detail in Robert Caro’s continuing series on Johnson and his times. Darman’s provocative contribution is to interweave his account with the parallel story of the political rise of Johnson’s polar opposite, Ronald Reagan.

Remembrances of Reagan as the glowing, optimistic leader of a resurgent America in the 1980s have come to efface the harder-edged Reagan of the 1960s, when he first appeared on the national political stage. The early Reagan propounded the political views of the radicalized, conservative wing of the Republican Party, whose candidate, Barry Goldwater, Johnson had crushed in 1964. Reagan became the new darling of the right by combining Goldwater’s politics with movie-star good looks and an easy, affable charm.

Darman, though, persuasively points out how Reagan also possessed the kind of hard-nosed pragmatism and cunning that most right-wing true believers disdained as vacillation. “When it came to his own self-interest,� Darman writes, “Reagan the dreamy idealist was a deeply practical man.� Part of his political genius lay in his ability to persuade the broad public that he was somehow above politics.

Between 1964 and 1966, as he shifted from partisan Goldwater supporter to victorious candidate for governor of California, Reagan shrewdly exploited the divisions that were bedeviling Johnson. At times, he could be strident, even inflammatory, as when he told an interviewer, “It’s silly talking about how many years we will have to spend in the jungles of Vietnam when we could pave the whole country and put parking stripes on it and still be home by Christmas.�

On other fractious issues, though, notably those concerning civil rights and racial unrest, Reagan tried to walk a fine line, distancing himself from flat-out appeals to racial bigotry but firmly propounding strict law-and-order and states� rights, while blaming racial disturbances on misguided liberalism. He very quickly helped devise and master the message and tone that would undo the Democrats, and would then underlie conservative Republicans� success for decades to come.

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. With Johnson, for example, he shows how the Vietnam intervention could, at least for a time, appear to be wholly compatible with the Great Society, extending liberal Cold War internationalism while warding off attacks on the right about the Democrats� softness on Communism. Johnson emerges as neither political mastermind nor stubborn fool, but a tragic combination of the two.

Darman does go overboard when, in his preoccupation with political fictions, he describes the politics of the 1960s as a continuing battle to control a dominant narrative. A conceit of our media age, more the preoccupation of pundits than historians, the idea goes too far toward equating effective government with the presentation of compelling stories.

But there is a more serious drawback in the pairing of Johnson and Reagan. By tracing the rise of one large political figure with the fall of another, Darman offers a fascinating dialectic. Yet he also slights the man who actually picked up the pieces in 1968, a very different political animal from Ronald Reagan, but without whom Reagan’s political career would have been impossible � Richard Nixon.

It was, after all, Nixon, not Reagan, who rode the backlash and alienation of the 1960s into the White House. While similar to Reagan in his appeal to what he called the “silent majority� against rioting minorities and raucous students, Nixon also clashed with Reagan � not least in his belief in Keynesian economics and his desire to reach diplomatic détente with the Soviet Union and China.

Except for Watergate, as Darman recognizes, Reagan would almost certainly have remained a footnote in presidential history. Instead, Nixon’s disgrace opened the way for Reagan to reassemble Nixon’s majority under his own aegis, with the crucial additions of supply-side economics and the religious right, along with the rejection of détente. Nixon’s importance renders Johnson and Reagan’s historical counterpoint far messier than Darman allows.

Darman goes astray particularly when he argues that for all of their achievements, Johnson and Reagan left unfortunate utopian legacies: Johnson a fantasy vision of federal action and uplift, Reagan a fantasy vision of rugged individualism and positive thinking. Democrats and Republicans still cling to those visions, Darman asserts, resulting in our own polarized politics and dysfunctional government. “Today’s America,� Darman contends, “needs new stories.�

In fact, Lyndon Johnson’s political crisis had nothing to do with public rejection of his Great Society programs like Medicare; nor, even at the time of the fateful midterm elections, did it have to do mainly with American involvement in Vietnam. (The public, despite growing discontent, then still largely approved of the war.) Johnson’s decline coincided with intensifying racial tensions across the nation.

In October 1964, following a long hot summer of riots in Northern cities, a Gallup poll found that 73 percent of Americans agreed that blacks should stop their protests “now that they have made their point.� But the rioting continued in 1965 and 1966, arising from local conflicts about the police, over which Johnson had as little control as President Obama has had over the events in Ferguson, Mo. Seized upon by Nixon, Reagan and others, white reaction to the disturbances, and the associated fear of urban crime, became for Republicans the perfect weapon for blasting big government liberalism as the cause, not the solution, of the nation’s problems.

Nor have today’s Republicans suffered because they have cleaved to Reaganism as their standard. Rather, beginning with Newt Gingrich’s attacks on Reagan’s anointed successor, George H. W. Bush, a string of ever more radical and doctrinaire Republicans have led their party further to the right than where Reagan stood. Although they claim his mantle, today’s conservative Republicans would have considered President Ronald Reagan � who, after all, raised taxes no fewer than 11 times and tripled the deficit � a cryptoliberal heretic, or RINO (Republican in Name Only). The confrontation of this ever more radicalized party with progressive Democrats since the election of Bill Clinton � hardly a deluded utopian � explains today’s distemper more than any other single factor, including the political legacy of Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan.

About the author of this article:

Sean Wilentz teaches at Princeton. He is currently writing a history of antislavery politics in the United States.

Source: The New York Times Book Review

History review: ‘Landslide: LBJ and Ronald Reagan at the Dawn of a New America,� by Jonathan Darman - Dallas Morning News

By TOD ROBBERSON Staff Writer [email protected]
Published: 20 September 2014 04:24 PM
Updated: 23 September 2014 09:52 AM

Dallas has long tended to view the aftermath of Nov. 22, 1963 through the singular lens of the sniper’s scope that jutted from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository that fateful day. A president died here, and nothing else seemed to matter.

Jonathan Darman argues in Landslide: LBJ and Ronald Reagan at the Dawn of a New America that far greater historical consequences are rooted in events that day. The assassination ended one president’s life, but for two others, it marked a political rebirth.

Both Lyndon B. Johnson and Reagan were on steep downward career trajectories when JFK’s death shook the nation. A single moment reversed their fortunes.

At first glance, the Johnson and Reagan presidencies wouldn’t seem to have enough common thread to hang a book on, given the lengthy time span that separated them. Rick Perlstein, author of the newly released The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan, takes on the more obvious topic of how Reagan capitalized on Nixon’s political demise.

Darman tackles a tougher literary challenge. Reagan’s path to the White House had less to do with Nixon’s misfortunes, he argues, than with the assassination in Dallas, the national turmoil of the 1960s and the disaster of Johnson’s presidency.

Johnson had risen steadily through the political ranks to become a two-term Senate majority leader and Washington’s top power broker. When Kennedy selected LBJ as his running mate in 1960, it wasn’t that he wanted Johnson as his wingman, Darman writes. The powerless vice presidency was a way to politically defang LBJ.

JFK’s family members and advisers detested Johnson. Rarely did Kennedy consult him. By late 1963, Johnson had been rendered isolated, powerless, depressed. There was open speculation that Kennedy might dump him.

Likewise for Reagan, the future was looking exceedingly bleak at the time of the assassination. He was an aging B-movie actor in Hollywood who couldn’t land a leading role. Desperate for work, Reagan had turned to television, hosting Death Valley Days and serving as a paid motivational speaker for General Electric.

As JFK’s successor, Johnson saw an immediate need to restore calm and ensure the continuation of stable governance. But he also confronted a cantankerous Cabinet and staff left over from Kennedy, people who distrusted Johnson and suspected he was capitalizing on JFK’s death.

Johnson calculated that his best chance for success was to adopt Kennedy’s banner as his own, declaring that his whirlwind legislative offensive � the Great Society anti-poverty program and civil rights overhaul of 1964-65 � was a completion of JFK’s agenda.

Political backlash was harsh. White voters angered by the civil rights program rebelled across the South. Street protests erupted over Johnson’s escalation in Vietnam. The GOP stood ready to pounce but was still licking its wounds over Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater’s disastrous showing in the 1964 presidential election.

The party needed someone to harness the anger and present the Republican agenda in a friendly but firm, take-charge way. That’s when Reagan’s conservative motivational speaking for General Electric, coupled with his national fame from his weekly television appearances, inspired the GOP leadership to rethink his political potential.

Most of this book focuses on Johnson. It isn’t until the epilogue and afterword chapters that Darman really ties the two presidents into a single narrative, not only from a historical perspective but also from the viewpoint of their combined impact on the politics of today.

All politicians make promises they can’t deliver. Johnson and Reagan inflicted real damage by their reckless use of power, Darman argues.

Johnson promised, impossibly, to make government the savior of the poor and righter of all civil wrongs. Reagan pledged to lower taxes and reduce the size of government. Instead, he broke the budget and ran up a huge deficit with no regard to the political or economic consequences.

Today, we suffer the national political divide that LBJ birthed among Southern whites. And the deficit-without-consequence leadership style Reagan birthed, to paraphrase another president, will live in infamy.

About the author of this article:

Tod Robberson is a Dallas Morning News editorial writer.

Source: Dallas Morning News

BOOK REVIEW
‘Landslide� by Jonathan Darman - The Boston Globe


HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES (LEFT); KEYSTONE/GETTY IMAGES

California governor Ronald Reagan (left) in 1967. President Lyndon Johnson (right) addresses the nation on his first Thanksgiving Day after taking office following the assassination of President Kennedy.

The phrase “thousand days’� when applied to the 1960s has a special resonance and meaning, all revolving around the Kennedy aura: New Frontier idealism, important initiatives like Project Mercury and the Peace Corps, impatient minorities whose demands for justice finally are acknowledged. But there is another thousand days in that decade that bears examination: the period between the Kennedy assassination and the election of Ronald Reagan as governor of California � and in some ways it is more important.

Those thousand days are the subject of journalist Jonathan Darman’s imaginative debut history, “Landslide,’� so titled because it explores two political landslides that shook the nation, one setting the country tentatively on a liberal path, the other preparing the way for a second more enduring track, that of modern conservatism.

It is, of course, those parallel paths that have defined our time, especially the gap between the two, which seems as wide today as it did in 1966, when the once-triumphant Democrats lost 47 US House seats and 3 Senate seats in the midterm elections that also catapulted Reagan to power in Sacramento.

“A president who had tried for immortality as a latter-day Franklin Roosevelt had watched his liberal majority collapse,’� Darman writes. “An underemployed middle-aged actor with radical conservative views had become his party’s future and the most exciting political story in the United States.’�

Those thousand days certainly were not bad ones for liberals � two vital civil-rights bills, huge poverty and health programs � but they held foreboding signs. The country grew tired of conflict (over civil rights, primarily) even as it stepped deeper into conflict (against Communism, in Vietnam principally). The New Deal coalition was pulling apart; the new conservative coalition was coming together. By the time Reagan took his oath of office as president, a mere 18 years after Johnson had, the country and its governing assumptions had been completely transformed.

Darman portrays the two principals in this clash of principles as different in important ways. Yes, both were ambitious, great performers, reared in difficult childhoods, and shaped by the Great Depression. But one was a magnet for detail, and the other repelled by it; one fought for control, and the other, whose destiny had been controlled by producers and studios, was accustomed to relinquishing it.

“One was a rancher down in the muck, the other was a cowboy riding along the ridge,’� he writes. “But at the end of the day, each of them was a man on horseback, commanding the attention of the world.’�

Darman might have seen this defining difference as well: LBJ was a man in the muck, Reagan a man of great luck. Indeed, Darman portrays them as polar opposites of political attraction.

In these pages are conventional accounts of both men’s lives, animated by the artful insight that they were men of disappointment headed toward an appointment with history. But these conventional portraits were crafted by a new generation � forgive the phrase � of narrator. In Darman’s eyes, the Kennedy years provided a “golden adolescence for men with gray hair.’� The Johnson years, by contrast, were defined by an older man enacting, and then exceeding, the younger man’s dreams.

Both Johnson and Reagan were hungry, and both responded to conflicting American hungers � Johnson to the desire to carry on (which accounted for the iconic ‘’Let us continue’� proclamation in November 1963) and Reagan to a growing desire to start anew.

Reagan, Darman argues, was in the right place at the right time. “What conservative crowds . . . needed in the spring of 1964 was someone to affirm what they felt most deeply: that things in America had gone terribly, unmistakably wrong. They wanted to someone to tell a story they could believe in, a story of a country in mortal danger, and a story of how that country could be saved.’�

Prepared for this 50th anniversary year, this book offers a brisk retrospective on 1964 and its unforgettable events: the presidential jockeying with Robert Kennedy, the ascent of Barry Goldwater, the disappearance of the three civil-rights workers in Mississippi, the Chinese atomic bomb � and the Reagan speech on Goldwater’s behalf, delivered to a live audience on NBC television.

“I have an uncomfortable feeling that this [Johnson-era] prosperity isn’t something on which we can base our hopes for the future,’� Reagan said in that speech, which included a strong recitation of the conservative credo in the middle years of the Cold War: “You and I know and do not believe that life is so dear and peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery.’�

While Reagan was blithe, LBJ was tortured � tortured by guns and butter, tortured over his own image and his vision, tortured increasingly over his Vietnam war, the possessive pronoun itself torturing to him.

Darman’s story is, like all history, the tale of struggle and change, and the tale of struggle over change. “Reagan’s and Johnson’s visions were specifically designed to reassure a country that was sometimes terrified about what was coming next,’� he writes. “The old myths, for all their flaws, offer comfort in a time of uncertainty. The problem for today’s political system � and it is an existential one � is that people no longer believe those myths.’�

That’s one reason why Darman’s account is so riveting. It is a tale about myths and a nation that believed them, about a world of a half century ago now gone forever.

About the author of this article:

David M. Shribman, for a decade the Globe’s Washington bureau chief, is executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Source: The Boston Globe