Between You and Me Read online

  Johnson glared at me with startled fury and then stalked off. In retrospect, I’m not sure why I asked the question in that manner.

  I suspect my thought process went something like this: Okay, if he refuses to talk about Vietnam, then I’ll remind him, using his own forceful and graphic language, about the terrible damage that war did to him and, through him, to the American people.

  The reactionto my in

  temperate remark was n

  ot what I had

  feared. Eventhough Johnsonwas steamed (to put it mildly), he did not go to Hewitt to complain that I had stepped out of line. Nor did he go through with his threat to send us packing. We proceeded to

  [ 21 ]

  B E T W E E N Y O U A N D M E

  film our story, and whenthe time came for Johnsonto guide us past the exhibits, I honored his request and did not ask about Vietnam.

  But to my astonishment, he brought it up himself. We’d just finished talking about the critical challenges that a commander in chief had to confront in the nuclear age when, out of the blue—without a hint or warning of any kind—the words came pouring out of him in a torrent:

  “Throughout our history, our public has been prone to attach presidents’ names to the international difficulties. You will recall the War of 1812 was branded as Mr. Madison’s War, and the Mexican War was Mr. Polk’s War, and the Civil War or the War Between the States was Mr. Lincoln’s War, and World War One was Mr. Wilson’s War, and World War Two was Mr. Roosevelt’s War, and Korea was Mr. Truman’s War, and President Kennedy was spared that cruel action because his period was known as Mr. McNamara’s War. And then it became Mr. Johnson’s War, and now they refer to it as Mr.

  Nixon’s War in talking about getting out. I think it is very cruel to have that burden placed upon a president, because he is trying to follow a course that he devotedly believes is in the best interest of his nation. And if those presidents hadn’t stood up for what was right during those periods, we wouldn’t have this country what it is today.”

  A few minutes later, after we’d finished shooting and were preparing to leave, Johnson turned to me and said: “Well, god-dammit, Mike, I gave you what you wanted. I hope you’re satisfied.”

  “Oh, I am, Mr. President, I am,” I assured him.

  Johnson’s outburst provided the climax of our story, and when we aired it in a few days, I concluded the piece with the following comment on the man and his presidency:

  “What he hopes most is that he will be remembered for his Great Society and not for Vietnam. But the tragedy of Lyndon Johnson is that, although he accomplished so much for so many while he was in

  [ 22 ]

  P R E S I D E N T S

  office, historians are bound to write of him principally as the president who bogged his country down in Vietnam. It is some measure of the man, I think, that on that matter—Vietnam—he has not wavered.

  He still believes that he was right, and that history will prove it.”

  As we would later learn, it was not quite as simple as that.

  Throughout the mid-1960s, as he ordered one escalation after another, Lyndon Johnson projected the image of a confident president who deeply believed he was pursuing a course that would ultimately lead to a U.S. victory. All his public statements echoed the smug optimism of his military commanders, who kept assuring us that we were winning the war in Vietnam. Although many of us eventually became disillusioned with Johnson and his war policies, we did not question his credentials. We assumed that his various decisions to expand the war were driven by sincere convictions.

  Now, alas, we know how brazenly he lied to the American people. The stunning transcripts in a 2001 book called Reaching for Glory: Lyndon Johnson’s Secret White House Tapes, 1964–1965, com-piled by the historian Michael Beschloss, reveal that as early as 1965—the year he ordered the huge buildup in Vietnam that, in effect, transformed the conflict into a full-scale American war—

  Johnson had reached the despondent conclusion that the war was unwinnable. In a conversation with one of his aides, he lamented that sending “good American boys” to their deaths in a futile war made him feel like a pilot who has to fly a flaming aircraft without a parachute. In an anguished exchange with his onetime mentor, Senator Richard Russell of Georgia, he said that “a man can fight if he can see daylight down the road somewhere. But there ain’t no daylight in Vietnam. There’s not a bit.”

  So why did Johnson act against the grain of his own instincts?

  Why did he make the decision to lead America into an all-out war

  [ 23 ]

  B E T W E E N Y O U A N D M E

  that he privately believed could not be won? Politics? To judge from the tapes that Beschloss assembled and other evidence, he did so mainly because he was convinced that if he abandoned the military commitment he had inherited from the Kennedy administration, right-wing Republicans and other militant anti-Communists would destroy him politically. What a sad irony that is, for in the end it was the war—and the fierce opposition it provoked—that demolished his presidency and left an enduring stain on his place in history.

  But in my judgment, that doesn’t mean Vietnam is destined to be LBJ’s ultimate legacy: We should keep in mind that Lyndon Johnson’s presidency was an epic drama that produced both tragedies and triumphs on a grand scale. It’s entirely possible that in the long view of history, the disastrous blunders of his policies in Vietnam will be eclipsed by the towering achievements of his Great Society programs, especially in the areas of civil rights and health care.

  R i c h a r d N i x o n

  I O B S E R V E D T H E C O L L A P S E O F Lyndon Johnson’s presidency from the vantage point of the campaign waged by the man destined to succeed him. Covering Richard Nixon’s triumphant run in 1968

  turned out to be my last major assignment as a general correspondent for CBS News. In September of that year, 60 Minutes made its debut and I began the best, the most fulfilling job a reporter could imagine.

  When I hooked up with the Nixon campaign in the early fall of 1967, the public’s prevailing view was that he was damaged goods, a political has-been. There was no doubt that he had serious image problems. During his years as Dwight Eisenhower’s vice president,

  [ 24 ]

  P R E S I D E N T S

  Nixon was a favorite target of pundits and cartoonists, many of whom routinely portrayed him as a devious opportunist, “Tricky Dick.” Others saw him as a ruthless hatchet man who concealed his natural malice behind a facade of pious platitudes. And to go along with that baggage, he had to bear the stigma of sore loser, which stemmed in part from his narrow defeat by Kennedy in 1960 and even more from his far more decisive loss when he ran for governor of California in

  ’62. It was on the night of that humiliating setback when he held his

  “last press conference,” where, with bitter sarcasm, he told the assembled reporters, “Just think how much you’re going to be missing.

  You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore. . . .”

  Of course, that prophecy turned out to be extravagantly premature, for here he was, five years later, making another run for the White House. For some reason, I had a hunch that Nixon’s prospects were not as dismal as they were judged to be by the heavyweight political reporters who worked out of Washington, and so I found myself drawn to his candidacy. At the least, I was curious to see how far his comeback attempt would carry him. There was a lot of talk that fall about the so-called New Nixon, and no one preached that born-again sermon with more fervor than Len Garment, a partner at the Wall Street law firm that had been Nixon’s professional base during the years when he wasn’t actively engaged in politics. Garment was a key player on Nixon’s newly formed campaign team, and in an effort to learn more about that operation, I had lunch with Len one day in September of ’67. By chance, it happened to be Yom Kippur, the holi-est day on the Jewish calendar. Here were Garment and I, two back-sliding Jews, breaking forbidden bread togeth
er while our more pious brethren observed the traditional rites of prayer and fasting.

  “You’re looking at a lifelong Democrat,” he told me that day. “A couple of years ago I would have been the last person in the world to

  [ 25 ]

  B E T W E E N Y O U A N D M E

  support Richard Nixon. But he’s changed. The years in exile have made him a better man, a more thoughtful and more compassionate man. But don’t take my word for it. Judge for yourself. All I ask is that you come to us with an open mind.”

  I assured Garment that I did my best to bring an open mind to every assignment I undertook. I also reminded him that, unlike the Washington press corps, I had not been exposed to Nixon during the

  “Tricky Dick” phase of his career, so my coverage of his comeback campaign would not be burdened by all those biases and preconcep-tions.

  Not that it seemed to matter much, because at the time hardly anyone was paying close attention to Nixon. In fact, his campaign had attracted so little notice that I was one of a mere handful of reporters bothering to cover it. In that early autumn of ’67, most of the big media guns were trained on the acknowledged front-runner for the Republican nomination, the popular governor of Michigan, George Romney. And that was exactly how Nixon wanted it. In the early stages of the campaign, he clearly welcomed our neglect. When one of his aides expressed concern about all the coverage Romney was attracting, Nixon replied, “Good, I want him to get the exposure.

  We have to keep him out at the point.”

  To sharpen the contrast, Nixon maintained such a low profile that through most of that fall, his was almost a stealth campaign. Because the atmosphere was so subdued and laid-back, gaining access to the candidate was not the problem it would become in later months, after the campaign had shifted into high gear and begun to move with bandwagon force. I recall in particular a long flight to Ore-gon one day in November. (That state’s primary loomed as a pivotal test the following spring.) As it happened, I was the only reporter who made that trip, and not long after we took off from New York,

  [ 26 ]

  P R E S I D E N T S

  Nixon invited me to sit with him. For the next hour or so, he and I talked in a relaxed and rambling vein about the campaign, the various issues, and what he hoped to accomplish as president. I had other casual conversations with him from time to time, and I gradually began to form my own impressions of the man and his candidacy.

  Most of them, I must admit, were favorable. The Nixon I came to know in 1967 did not strike me as devious or ruthless or any of the other negative things I’d heard or read about him over the years. I had no idea if this was because he had undergone some radical change—

  had actually metamorphosed into a “New Nixon”—and frankly, I didn’t care all that much. But I can say that if it was a new persona, it did not include the kind of warm and ebullient disposition we normally find in politicians. Nixon was always courteous and sometimes even cordial, in his stiff and formal way; still, when it came to charm or charisma, he was a far cry from contemporary rivals like Hubert Humphrey and Nelson Rockefeller, both so congenitally outgoing that either could—and invariably did—brighten and invigorate a room simply by entering it.

  Nixon had other strengths. I was especially impressed by his pen-etrating intelligence, his broad and sophisticated view of history, and his profound grasp of the difficult challenges he would confront in the White House. And at that point, I saw no reason to doubt his sincerity or question his character.

  I also had respect for his political savvy. He certainly had the right take on poor George Romney, who was indeed flummoxed by all the glare and pressure of the day-to-day scrutiny that is inevitably directed at a front-running candidate for president. All through the waning weeks of 1967 and the first two months of 1968, Romney committed one blunder after another, and more often than not, when he tried to talk his way out of some gaffe, he only made it worse. His

  [ 27 ]

  B E T W E E N Y O U A N D M E

  campaign was so inept that it prompted a fellow Republican governor—James Rhodes of Ohio—to observe that “watching George Romney run for the presidency was like watching a duck try to make love to a football.”

  Meanwhile, Nixon was charging out of the shadows, and as the campaign approached its first critical test—the New Hampshire primary—he had built a commanding lead over Romney. Moreover, other polls indicated that he had substantial leads in states where primaries were scheduled for later that spring, and although George Romney may not have known how to run for president, he did know when to quit. Rather than go through the ordeal of getting trounced by Nixon, the governor abruptly pulled out of the race just two weeks before the voters in New Hampshire registered their official verdict.

  So all of a sudden, Richard Nixon—the notorious loser and presumed has-been—had the Republican playing field to himself. It’s true that in the months to come, he would have to withstand the challenges of two other Republican governors, Nelson Rockefeller of New York and Ronald Reagan of California, but by the time they announced their candidacies, it was too late to enter any of the primaries—and thus too late to inflict any serious damage on Nixon.

  A week or so after Nixon cruised to his undisputed victory in New Hampshire, Len Garment came to me with a proposition: “The boss would like you to join up, to come aboard and work with us.”

  I was flabbergasted. I had never given any thought to a move in that direction. “To do what, exactly?” I asked.

  “I’m not sure,” said Garment. “You know we’re not that well organized yet. But I imagine it would be press secretary or communica-tions director, or something like that.”

  I admit that I seriously considered accepting the offer. I was now convinced that Nixon had a virtual lock on his party’s nomination and

  [ 28 ]

  P R E S I D E N T S

  a better-than-even chance of winning the election in November. If that proved to be the case, then I’d be joining the team headed for the White House. I was intrigued by the prospect of becoming involved in the adventure of a new presidency. I talked it over with my wife and also with a few close friends and colleagues whose judgment I respected.

  In the end, I decided it was not for me. I wrote Nixon a letter thanking him for the offer, but said I couldn’t accept it because I didn’t think I had the proper temperament to serve as a spokesman or apologist for any politician. Elaborating, I wrote that I would find it difficult to “put a good face on bad facts.” Only later, when the Nixon White House was rocked by scandal and crisis, would I fully realize just how sound—and lucky—my decision had been. I’ve often shuddered at the thought of how I might have fared if I’d been the president’s spokesman when the Watergate dam broke in the tumultuous spring of 1973.

  I continued to cover the Nixon campaign as it glided serenely through the spring primaries and across the summer of 1968. In early August, the Republicans assembled at their convention in Miami Beach, where Nixon had to contend with the late challenges by Rockefeller and Reagan. Though their strenuous efforts to pry delegates away from Nixon enlivened the proceedings with a certain superficial suspense, I remained convinced that neither governor had a chance of wresting the nomination away from the old pro. From my front-row seat on the Nixon bandwagon, I had seen enough to appreciate how thorough and adept the candidate and his team had been in putting together their broad coalition of moderates and conservatives from all regions of the country. So, while others seemed surprised by how easily Nixon won the nomination on the first ballot, I was not.

  [ 29 ]

  B E T W E E N Y O U A N D M E

  Once the convention was over, I left the Nixon campaign. Don Hewitt had been given the green light to proceed with his innovative plan for a magazine show, and I’d accepted his offer to cohost the new program with my good friend Harry Reasoner. I confess that when Hewitt first came to me with his proposal, I was so unim-pressed that I nearly turned him down. At the t
ime, the idea of a magazine for television was an alien concept that was not easy to envision. The TV journalism that existed then was neatly divided into two distinct and traditional formats. One was the daily or nightly news show, and the other was the documentary, and never the twain did meet. Hewitt’s scheme was to merge the two formats into some kind of multisubject hodgepodge, and I didn’t believe he could make it work; even if he did, I thought, he’d be lucky to keep the new program going through one full season, two at the most. (So much for my prophetic talents.)

  Still, I was reluctant to say no to Hewitt, who already had a reputation for being one of the most creative producers in the history of television news. As a young pioneer in the early days of the medium, he’d invented the evening news show at CBS and had nurtured it through its formative years. What’s more, when Don Hewitt is delivering a sales pitch at full cry, it is almost impossible to resist him.

  Once he had brought all of his evangelical powers into play, he soon won me over, and I agreed to be part of his experimental new broadcast, which he had decided to call 60 Minutes.

  At some point during the week of the Republican convention, I informed Garment and some of Nixon’s other deputies that I was moving on to another assignment, but that message must not have been relayed to the candidate himself. When Nixon came to the hall on the last night of the convention to deliver his acceptance speech, I was standing near the podium with some other reporters. As he

  [ 30 ]

  P R E S I D E N T S

  passed by, he peered into our group looking for familiar faces and tossed personal greetings to some of us who had been with him since—as he liked to put it—“the snows of New Hampshire and before.” When his gaze fell on me, he said, “Hi, Mike, I’ll see you in California next week. We’ll be out there planning the campaign.”