The Presidency: Visitors' Week

The last White House banquet of 1965 was in many ways the most memorable —if only because Lyndon Johnson was plainly in robust health again.

The occasion was a state dinner for West Germany's Chancellor Ludwig Erhard. In his honor the White House invited a spirited, varied list of 140 guests, ranging from Dean Acheson to Gene Autry, George Meany to Thomas Dewey. By candlelight in the evergreen-decked state dining room, they feasted on roast duckling, Bibb lettuce salad, lobster imperial and "Yule log" dessert (chocolate cake coated with mocha butter)—the last culinary triumph of White House Chef René Verdon, a Kennedy find who heatedly gave notice a week before the party that he was leaving

(TIME, Dec. 24). Renaissance-costumed madrigal singers wandered among the tables during dessert, and Metropolitan Opera Star Robert Merrill led everyone in a post-dinner sing-along of both English and German lyrics to Silent Night. Afterward Lyndon Johnson and his guests sipped champagne and danced until 1:30 a.m.

The evening climaxed the President's first full week of work in Washington since his Oct. 8 gall-bladder operation. Belying the frequent criticism that he has little skill or patience for subtle foreign-policy negotiations, Johnson dealt firmly but diplomatically with three heads of state.

First had come Pakistan's President Mohammed Ayub Khan, who explained to Johnson that his government regards warm relations with Communist China as a strategic necessity. Though he protested that he was more pro-U.S. than proCommunist, Ayub was disappointed in his hopes of winning U.S. support for Pakistan's view that Kashmir's fate should be determined by the people of that disputed state.

Like Winston & F.D.R. Britain's Prime Minister Harold Wilson followed Ayub by a few hours. On his fifth visit to Washington since Johnson took office, Wilson felt sufficiently at home to josh the President on a sensitive subject. When Johnson commented lightly on the Labor Party's precarious two-seat margin in Parliament, the Prime Minister shot back with a remark about Johnson's "86 votes"—a nearly accurate reference to the scandal-tinged 1948 Texas senatorial primary in which Lyndon squeaked through by 87 votes. The President protested: "You haven't been here six hours, and you've already taken one vote away from me." Retorted Wilson: "Mr. President, you can afford to lose one vote. I can't."

Wilson's most important assurance was a pledge to Johnson that Britain would not add to the U.S. military burden in Southeast Asia by dismantling any of its own major bases east of Suez. Johnson, in turn, promised to support Britain's embargo on oil shipments to Rhodesia by offering U.S. aircraft to fly oil into landlocked Zambia during the crisis. Prime Minister Wilson was so cheered by his rapport with the President that he confided after the talks: "We are as close together as Churchill and Roosevelt ever were."