Man Of The Year: Lyndon B. Johnson, The Paradox of Power

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Notable Dropout. The very men who most fervently endorsed his domestic programs were largely those who most passionately deplored his commitment in Viet Nam. They felt that, as Yale Economist James Tobin, a former presidential adviser, put it, "the butter to be sacrificed because of the war always turns out to be the margarine of the poor." The President appeared to have broken finally with such Democratic stalwarts as Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman J. William Fulbright, New York's Senator Robert Kennedy and Minnesota's Senator Eugene McCarthy. Much of the anger directed at Johnson spilled over onto Vice President Hubert Humphrey as well, largely because of his unwavering support of the Viet Nam war and of the feeling among his erstwhile friends in the Americans for Democratic Action that he had "deserted" them. The result has been to diminish drastically Humphrey's hopes of ever succeeding Johnson on his own.

Democrats abandoned the President in droves, forming Dump-L.B.J. movements or rallying behind Gene McCarthy as an alternative for 1968. Said Michigan's former Democratic State Chairman Zoltan Ferency, who quit over Johnson's war policies: "The youth, the academicians, the women, the intellectuals they are dropping out of politics, they are turned off." A notable dropout was liberal Pundit Walter Lippmann, long since disaffected with L.B.J., who went so far as to declare that it would be in the "national interest" for the Johnson Democratic Party to "be ousted by a rejuvenated Republican Party." Notes TIME'S Washington Bureau Chief John L. Steele: "Historical generalizations are dangerous, but one is tempted to suggest that not even Lincoln who had to fight a civil war to preserve the Union faced such internal questioning, such intense and wide-ranging dissent as did Lyndon Johnson in 1967."