Landslide Read Online Free

Landslide
Book: Landslide Read Online Free
Author: Jonathan Darman
Pages:
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gloomy end of the postwar boom, and the rise of economic stagnation and inflation. Their faith in democratic institutions had been shaken by a series of political assassinations and assassination attempts. Their faith in democratic leaders had been damaged by the lies of Vietnam and Watergate. Those sixteen years had been long ones—years that changed America and diminished Americans’ expectations of what their government could do.
    And so when Reagan took the oath that day in 1981 after winning the presidency in a landslide of his own, the country thrilled to his vision, too, a vision that was essentially the opposite of the one Johnson had offered two decades before. Reagan, too, offered an idealized image of America’s future—one in which the nation’s problems could at last be solved and its promise could be renewed. “We have every right,” Reagan said in his inaugural address, “to dream heroic dreams.” But the way to achieve those dreams was theopposite of the path Johnson imagined: limit the power of government so that the creative potential of American individuals could be unleashed. “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem,” he said. “Government
is
the problem.”
    Through the long telescope of history, then, the ground between Reagan and Johnson appears vast, the distance between two opposite visions from two opposite moments in time. And it is the distance, as well, between two opposite types of men. It is hard to think of two presidents in modern history, after all, who approached the office more differently than Reagan and Johnson. Johnson was among the most hyperactive executives the White House had ever seen, always seeking to put his fingerprints on every last scrap of administration business no matter how large or small. Early in the Johnson presidency, James B. Reston, the Washington correspondent for
The New York Times
, worried over the punishing regime the president was observing in the White House. Johnson, wrote the columnist, “has three telephones in his car, with five circuits, and the amazing thing about it is that he seems able to talk on all five at once, carry on a conversation in the back seat, and direct traffic on the side.” In his short time as president, Reston wrote, Johnson “had done everything but cut the White House lawn.”
    This was hyperbole, but not by much. Like both John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon, his predecessor and his successor, Johnson secretly recorded many of his White House telephone conversations. (The recordings of Johnson’s conversations were released to the public in the 1990s and are a key source for this narrative.) His conversations reveal a president who insisted on personally selecting and approving everything—the locations of bombing targets in Vietnam, the line items in billion-dollar spending bills, the hairstyles of the secretaries sitting outside his door. He wanted to be involved in all of it. Learning that a White House aide failed to wake him in the night to inform him of an administration defeat on Capitol Hill, Johnson was upset. “When you’re bleeding up on that Hill,” the president explained, “I want to bleed with you.”
    That would never be Reagan—an actor learns early the benefits of a good night’s sleep. From his earliest days in politics, Reagan was supremely confident in his own abilities as an executive. He had come to prominence in a career in which he constantly had to
give up
control—to producers and directors and studio bosses, to makeup designers and camera operators and press agents, to critics and millions of anonymous strangers who would form consequential opinions of him as they watched on distant screens. When he began his political career in the mid-1960s, he took to the disaggregated life of a political candidate quickly. Most first-time candidates struggle to adapt to an existence in which they must surrender control of their lives to other people. Reagan had
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