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been doing it for years. He understood an important distinction that Johnson never grasped: being in control and being successful aren’t always the same thing.
    And so, as president, Reagan often seemed only vaguely aware of the pressing business of his own administration. Americans grew accustomed to a leader who liked naps and long vacations and days spent ambling on horseback on his mountain ranch above the Pacific. His aides worried at times over the cumulative effect in the press that he appeared too detached from decision making, too much a figurehead. They wondered if they ought to brief reporters on the more punishing aspects of the president’s working regime. Reagan advised them to keep quiet; in the long run, it was always better to appear above it all. Like Johnson, he was a rancher, but he stayed out of the swampy muck.
    Each was a gifted performer and raconteur who could captivate an audience. But they excelled in different settings. Johnson was best in person. He was overwhelming, always, and his conversations hummed with transactional momentum. He told involved and engaging Texas tall tales, but he usually told them in order to drive home a pertinent point. He made use of his large girth and six-foot-three-inch frame. All the clichéd metaphors of politics—glad-handing, buttonholing, back stroking, arm twisting—were things Johnson actually, physically did in order to get his way. Hisgreatest asset was his intuitive sensitivity to human emotion, his unmatched ability to spot people’s highest ambitions and their darkest fears. Even Alabama governor George Wallace, one of the twentieth century’s most notorious racial demagogues, found himself mesmerized by an impassioned Oval Office conference with Johnson in the midst of a tense 1965 standoff over racial protests in Wallace’s home state. “Hell,” said Wallace afterward, “if I’d stayed in there much longer, he’d have had me coming out for civil rights.”
    A conversation with Reagan, on the other hand, was usually pleasant and entirely superficial. In his early days as a politician, supporters would often walk away from first encounters with candidate Reagan disappointed. He’d told funny jokes, they’d laughed heartily, they’d had a ball. But they couldn’t remember much if any
substance
to what he’d said. The problem wasn’t that Reagan was an empty suit; rather, he struggled to connect with people when they came too close. Even his own children encountered a fog in their father’s eyes when they greeted him in a room. He was friendly, but he gave the impression that he was meeting them for the first time.
    He was better with an audience watching him. Better still if they were watching him on a television screen from the comfort of their own homes. In these moments, he was great. He launched his 1966 campaign for governor with a thirty-minute television advertisement in which he pensively strolled around a comfortable living room. It was all so wonderfully familiar and authentic. There were pictures on the wall and a fire in the fireplace; Reagan’s sharp, pithy summation of California’s and the nation’s problems seemed to come to him spontaneously, a kindly father figure opining on issues of the day. None of it was real—the sentences were scripted and the living room was a studio set. But Californians didn’t mind; they were starting to expect their politicians to be great performers on TV.
    Television was taking over politics in the midsixties. Anyone who’d lived through the Kennedy years could see that. Johnson could see it, and he worked tirelessly to adapt, but never with much success. As president, he obsessed over his televised press conferences,bringing in a shifting cast of experts for coaching on his diction, his posture, his eyewear. But his problem was fundamental: performing for a TV camera, he could never do what he did in person, he couldn’t see his audience and adapt his personality accordingly. And that