The Presidency: About 80% Normal

THE PRESIDENCY

The President of the U.S. looked rheumy and sounded irritable. He called a press conference on only 35 minutes' notice, after White House correspondents had complained that he was not keeping them informed, and then he made them wait 25 minutes before he showed up. He had admitted that he had not fully recovered from his recent illness and felt about "80% normal."

Earlier in the week, Johnson had seemed to be bouncing back. He more than rose to the occasion at a White House banquet honoring Vice President Hubert Humphrey (see following story], House Speaker John McCormack and Chief Justice Earl Warren. The guest list was impressive. All the Justices of the Supreme Court and most of the members of the Johnson Cabinet were there. The leaders of Congress were well represented. So was the newspaper-publishing industry—the Otis Chandlers of Los Angeles, the Palmer Hoyts of Denver, the Arthur Sulzbergers of New York. Top Washington Lawyers (and sometime Johnson advisers) Abe Fortas and Clark Clifford were present. So were Laurance Rockefeller and Harvard Law School Dean

Erwin Griswold and M.I.T.'s Economics Professor Paul Samuelson and onetime Baseball Star Jackie Robinson—and some 120 others.

Democratic Dishes. The President and Lady Bird were relaxed and gracious hosts. Standing in the reception line, they chatted and shook hands for half an hour. Dinner did not start until 9 p.m., not too long before such ceremonial White House functions ordinarily start to break up. The tables in the State Dining Room and the nearby Blue Room featured strictly Democratic chinaware: the Truman dishes in the dining room, the Wilson and Roosevelt dishes in the Blue Room. The menu honored the principal guests: the seafood was a la Golden Gate for California's Warren; the chicken was a la Bay State for Massachusetts' McCormack; for Humphrey there was wild rice from Minnesota.

Speeches and toasts were followed with readings by Actor Hume Cronyn and his wife Jessica Tandy, who recited from the works of such well-known authors as Sir Winston Churchill, Edmund Burke, T. S. Eliot, William Shakespeare, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lyndon Baines Johnson ("The Great Society asks not only how much, but how good . . ."). For the rest of the evening there was dancing. The President was not at his terpsichorean tops, but he did keep at it until 1 a.m.

Winds & Clouds. Later in the week the President went to a dinner of the B'nai B'rith's Anti-Defamation League to receive the Legacy Award for his "distinguished contribution to the enrichment of our democratic heritage." Lyndon took that public opportunity to answer critics who complain that his preoccupation with preserving a U.S. consensus tends to preclude bold presidential action.