At Canaan's Edge by Taylor Branch

Author:Taylor Branch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2006-03-25T16:00:00+00:00

“A POST-ELECTION silence settled today on the LBJ ranch,” reported the New York Times on November 10. In seclusion, the President groaned, “I don’t think I lost that election. I think the Negroes lost it.” He emerged for a press conference several days later to address the dismal 1966 tally of net loss to Republicans: forty-seven House members, three senators, eight governors, and 677 seats in state legislatures. Johnson first took ten questions about war matters, especially U.S. nuclear missile capabilities versus the China and Soviet Union, then put the best face he could on the results. He said Democrats still controlled both chambers of Congress—the House by 248–187, the Senate by 64–36—with roughly the same margin he enjoyed before the 1964 landslide. Asked directly about the influence of “white backlash,” the President dodged. “I just don’t have the answer to it,” he replied. “I don’t know.” He said the abnormally large shift could be traced to three popular Republican governors in big states: George Romney of Michigan, James Rhodes of Ohio, and Ronald Reagan of California. Privately, however, Johnson saw an adverse trend instead of a fluke. He predicted that most of the new Republicans in Congress would vote with the Southern Democrats while seeking colleagues to replace them. This was the backlash he feared. “It’ll move beyond George Wallace and become respectable,” he told Bill Moyers.

Wallace, for his part, bristled at suggestions that Ronald Reagan surpassed him overnight in presidential stature. “He used to be a liberal,” Wallace warned reporters at a victory celebration. “Now he’s a conservative, and he might change back again.” Wallace claimed to have orchestrated the nation’s most impressive win against the Republican trend despite the handicap of a stand-in novice candidate, his wife, Lurleen, who won 63 percent of the Alabama vote but sat quietly through a press conference devoted mostly to his larger ambitions for 1968. The outgoing governor indignantly rejected any backlash label—“I never made a statement in my political career that reflects on a man’s race”—and presented himself as a crusader for constitutional states’ rights. Wallace said, “My only interest is the restoration of local government.”

In California, Governor-elect Reagan deflected instant clamor that he was destined for the White House, calling it “very flattering that anyone would even suggest such a thing.” His contest drew a record 79 percent of registered Californians to the polls, and he won by 993,739 votes out of 6.5 million, carrying all but three of fifty-eight counties. Reagan acknowledged a groundswell. “It seems to be all over the country,” he said. “The people seem to have shown that maybe we have moved too fast.” He discounted white backlash as a benefit to him or other Republicans, emphasizing his personal abhorrence of bigotry and contrasting the new Negro Republican senator Edward Brooke of Massachusetts with segregationist Democrats Lester Maddox and George Wallace. “For me,” said Reagan, “the vote reflects the great concern of the people with the size and cost of government.” His dubious but genial

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