The Presidency: Protecting the Flank

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THE PRESIDENCY

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For two weeks the great silver-and-blue jet had chased the sun. Then, carrying Lyndon Johnson on the last leg of his Asian odyssey, Air Force One changed course. Soaring over the slender, gilded spires of Bangkok's temples, it wheeled south for a brief stopover in Kuala Lumpur, was subsequently scheduled to head northeast for Seoul, the last Asian capital on the President's itinerary. Behind lay the summit conference in Manila and Johnson's his toric visit to South Viet Nam, the first trip ever made by a U.S. President to a foreign battlefield save for Franklin Roosevelt's call at Casablanca in 1943.

For Johnson, the 20-hour-a-day grind of sightseeing and ceremony, of conferences with Presidentstand Premiers, audiences with a semidivine king (Thailand's Bhumibol Adulyadej) and a politician-prince (Malaysia's Tunku Abdul Rahman) had been "the hardest work of my life." And other self-set labors awaited him back home. After one day's rest in the capital, the President was scheduled to hit the road again for a whirlwind windup to the 1966 election campaign.

In effect, Johnson has been on the campaign trail ever since he left Washington to start his 17-day, seven-nation swing through Asia. He went to Australia and New Zealand, the Philippines and Thailand, Malaysia and Korea as a Western leader in quest of a solution to the war in Viet Nam. In Viet Nam itself, he went as Commander in Chief to thank his troops for serving "in the front line of a contest as far-reaching and as vital as any we have ever waged." But he also went to Asia as an American politician whose party is embroiled in a major campaign, knowing well that the voters' decisions next week will be examined as closely by Ho Chi Minh, looking for indications of U.S. irresolution about the war, as by G.O.P. Chairman Ray Bliss.

72% to 48%. When he left Washington, the President was thoroughly aware that his trip was something of a long-distance whistle-stop tour, an exercise in diplomacy that could help burnish his tarnished image. Johnson has manipulated most of the levers of presidential power with a skill matched by few of his predecessors, and in the process has achieved a legislative record second to none. But he has been unable to budge the lever that in the end controls all of the others: public opinion.

Ultimately, a President's greatest power is in inspiring people to follow his lead. Because he has signally failed to do this despite his landslide victory in 1964, Johnson's Great Society so far looks better in the record books than in the nation's neighborhoods and schoolrooms. Far from giving him the ultimate power that goes with their assent, most Americans have withheld it be cause they vaguely fear that he already has too much power.

While Johnson is accorded high marks for getting things done, he has not thereby endeared himself to his constituents. Each new public-opinion sampling brings evidence of an ever-widening "affection gap": last week the Minneapolis Tribune reported an eleven-month slippage from 72% to 48% in Minnesotans' approval of his performance. The credibility gap, fostered by the President's often devious ways, also keeps growing. An airline executive fresh from a visit to Lyndon's home state reported last week that "in Texas,