The Presidency: Challenge & Swift Response

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"There's something about the man that reacts to a Kennedy," an aide remarked last week of Lyndon Johnson. To be sure, there is something about the President that reacts to any meaningful challenge to his authority, but the response is reflex and relentless when the defial comes from a Kennedy. True to form, scarcely 48 hours after Robert F. Kennedy became an open rival for the presidency, Johnson launched a massive counterattack. During a week whose pace and tempo seemed more attuned to the windup of a bitter election than to its opening hours, the President made it clear that he was prepared to use all of his immense powers and political wiles to thwart his adversary.

In a foretaste of the campaign to come, the President zipped from his Texas ranch to Minneapolis to Washington with little advance notice. From now until November, this will be the pattern. As one Democratic official noted, "Wherever there's a luncheon or dinner when the President is in flight, there you might get an unscheduled speaker." Back in the capital, he adroitly dominated the headlines. He deployed lieutenants to key primary states. He delivered four tough speeches on the Viet Nam war in six days.

Casually, and with characteristic relish, he announced a series of major appointments guaranteed to make headlines. General William C. Westmoreland, the U.S. commander in Viet Nam, was becoming the Army's new Chief of Staff. Did that signal a shift in the Administration's conduct of the war? Poverty Czar Sargent Shriver, brother-in-law of Bobby Kennedy, was off to Paris as the new U.S. Ambassador to France. Did that signify a move to weaken the Kennedy forces, a new American approach to the intractable Charles de Gaulle, a fresh approach to the war on poverty, or all of them? Wilbur J. Cohen, a Washington veteran dating back to the early days of the New Deal, was becoming the new Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare. Did that presage a new emphasis on domestic programs that have been getting increasingly short shrift as the war has intensified?

Constant Refrain. Whatever the Johnsonian moves meant, they stirred speculation and kept his name and image before the nation. In his speechmaking, the President touched frequently on the myriad crises that have overtaken his ill-starred Administration. He emphasized the "urgent" need for enactment of his 10% surcharge on income taxes and for the adoption of "a program of national austerity to ensure that our economy will prosper and that our fiscal position will be sound." For the first time, he came out with a warm endorsement of the Kerner Commission report on last summer's riots. Having previously all but ignored the commission's exhaustive assessment of the racial crisis, the President somewhat defensively declared: "We thought the report was a very thorough one, very comprehensive, and made many good recommendations."

In speech after speech, his constant refrain was Viet Nam—which, after all, is the issue that prompted Eugene McCarthy to challenge him in the first place and then jet-propelled Kennedy into the race.