Known and Unknown - Donald Rumsfeld [46]
Though I admired President Johnson’s important role in the civil rights battle, that was about as far as I went in supporting his legislative programs. A self-described Roosevelt New Dealer, he wanted the initials “LBJ” to be remembered as fondly as FDR’s in the history books, and promptly proposed a host of big government programs under the rubrics of the War on Poverty and the Great Society. I thought most of his initiatives, which promised more power for bureaucrats in Washington, were not well considered. But Republicans did not have large enough numbers in Congress to slow even marginally the rush of Great Society legislation.
Moving into the presidential election less than a year after John Kennedy’s assassination, LBJ was on a quest for his own validation, an electoral triumph that he hoped would shatter all records. The year 1964 was my first reelection campaign and the first presidential campaign I was involved in as an elected official. As it turned out, I had a front-row ticket to a Titanic-sized defeat.
The Democrats knew it would be hard for a still-grieving country to turn its back on the man who had been John F. Kennedy’s handpicked vice president, and they made the most of their advantage. At the 1964 Democratic National Convention, the slogan emblazoned across the stage wasn’t exactly subtle. Playing off of a line in Kennedy’s well-known inaugural address—“Let us begin”—the Johnson convention theme was: “Let us continue.” LBJ’s acceptance speech referenced his predecessor six times. Notably the word that would be his eventual undoing—“Vietnam”—did not merit a single mention, despite the 23,300 American troops there on the ground.
If it seemed like voting against LBJ would be a vote against John F. Kennedy, Johnson apparently was fine with that. The Republicans, in effect, were battling two presidents at once: one martyred and one sitting. That meant the GOP needed to run a pitch-perfect campaign. What we got was quite the opposite.
The Republicans did not have many outstanding widely known contenders in 1964. The man who once had seemed likely to be the front-runner, Richard Nixon, had suffered an embarrassing defeat in his race for governor of California two years earlier. By all accounts, including his own, he was through with politics. After losing his bruising gubernatorial bid, Nixon bitterly told the assembled press corps, “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore.”17 He seemed to reiterate the sentiment in the congratulatory note he sent to me (and, I assume, to other victorious Republican candidates) that year. “As I leave the political arena,” Nixon wrote, “I am greatly heartened by the fact that you will be in there fighting for our cause.”18
Nelson Rockefeller, the governor of New York, was making his second run for the presidency but was considered too liberal to win the nomination. Governor Bill Scranton of Pennsylvania, a former member of Congress and a fine public servant, started too late to make a viable run. That left Senator Barry M. Goldwater, who locked up the delegates needed to win the nomination after a long, well-organized effort.
I didn’t know Barry Goldwater at the time, though I had been uncomfortable with his opposition to the 1964 civil rights legislation. Goldwater believed that moral issues were not the business of the legislative branch. I saw his point but thought that if we sat back and waited for good intentions to kick in on civil rights, we might be waiting a long time. I generally agreed with him, however, on economic issues and on national security. I had no doubt in my mind that his administration would have been considerably better for our country than a rerun of President