#jonathan darman

If Only More Americans Could See This Place | NY Times Opinion

you mentioned a book about a year ago called Landslide: LBJ and Ronald Reagan at the Dawn of a New America. Is it worth reading and would you recommend it?

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... ...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 the existence in which they must surrender control of their lives to other people. Reagan had 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... 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. His greatest 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 that, 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 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 names 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.