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introduced a terrifying possibility: that the people watching would see him as himself.
    Johnson and Reagan, then, were both stars, but stars of different eras. It is difficult to fit them inside a single picture—when the mind focuses on one of them, the other becomes a blur. Even in the lore of practical politics, where both have assumed vaunted status in recent years, they inhabit separate realms. Reagan is the president that politicians from both parties publicly say they admire—principled, noble, and strong. But Johnson is the president they secretly long to be—ruthless, effective, a man who got big things done.
    Yet when we look at Reagan and Johnson as actual human beings, we are left with an odd set of facts. These two heroes of opposite eras were born less than three years apart. They both came of age in the early decades of the twentieth century and were shaped by the same events. Both lived through the Great Depression and served in World War II; both saw the rise of the Cold War and shrewdly maneuvered in their respective fields through the havoc of the McCarthy era. The Reagan who took the oath of office in 1981 was not a young man; he was two weeks shy of his seventieth birthday. And he was not new to presidential politics—he had been running for the office for the better part of two decades. In fact, he’d had his eye on the White House ever since the midsixties, when he’d dreamed of dislodging its occupant: Lyndon Johnson.
    And the vision Reagan articulated in his inaugural address was, in fact, a vision born in the midsixties, a vision made possible by the Johnson years. The ideas he articulated—virulent anticommunism abroad, freeing the individual from the shackles of the state at home—were not new. They had been guiding principles of the right since the Roosevelt administration; they were the ideas Goldwater ran on in 1964. But for a long time, those ideas had been too fantasticand ridiculous for the mainstream. To most Americans, it was self-evident that a modern state facing the complex problems of the modern world needed a robust national government to guide it through.
    But as Johnson’s promises for America’s utopian future moved into the realm of fantasy, the fantasies of limited government on the radical right suddenly became legitimate, too. Reagan, whose career had given him a healthy respect for the mercurial nature of public mood, waited for the right moment—when public trust in Johnson’s promises first began to falter—to unleash his own competing myth. Johnson promised that his government would soon deliver the nation from all troubles, but the nation grew more troubled by the day. Only then did the conservative case against government begin to seem not so crazy after all. Or, at least, no more crazy than the other side. Once the formerly reasonable people took their rhetoric into a new realm of fantasy, politics became about choosing: which fantasy sounded best?
    Is a new world coming? We welcome it and we will bend it to the hopes of man
.
    Government is not the solution to our problem. Government
is
the problem
.
    Reagan and Johnson were speaking in different eras. But they were speaking to each other.
    Both were telling stories of America and its future. In these stories, the country was facing a historic moment of choice, the consequences of which would be felt for generations. The stakes were high: “Abundance or annihilation,” said Johnson at the dedication of the 1964 World’s Fair, “development or desolation, that is in your hands.” Later that same year, Reagan gave his “Time for Choosing” speech: “We’ll preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we’ll sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.”
    Yet while the consequences of making the wrong choice were severe, to Johnson and Reagan, the right and wrong paths were clear.And each man assured Americans that all they had to do was choose the