The Presidency: Protecting the Flank

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enlisted men's chow hall, Johnson picked up a partitioned tray, protested, "I'm watching my waistline" as it was heaped. with baked ham, macaroni, cole slaw, salad, mashed potatoes and apple pie. For a moment he sat alone at a special long table laid out for him with a white tablecloth and yellow roses. Then Westmoreland shouted to his subordinates:

"He wants some men to eat with." A number of soldiers, many of them wearing helmets and toting M-16 rifles, were steered to the President's table. "Y'all come back safe and sound, y' hear?" he told the men as he left. At the Officers' Club, Westmoreland had assembled his combat commanders. There the President said: "General Westmoreland told me that you were the best Army ever. If this is the best Army, you are the best leaders. I thank you. I salute you. Come home with that coonskin on the wall."

By now, darkness was enveloping the bay, turning the mountains beyond it a deep purple and leaving only a golden-orange ribbon at the rim of the horizon. Just 2 hours and 24 minutes after he arrived, the President boarded his big Boeing 707. Scarcely six hours after leaving Manila, he was back—and only then was the news of his historic trip broken. In Saigon, newsmen got wind of it a couple of hours earlier, but the government pulled the plug on all press circuits for 21 hours to make sure that the President was safely back in the Philippines.

The round of 20-hour days was beginning to tell on the President; when he flew into the big U.S. airbase at Sattahip on the Gulf of Siam the next day, he was visibly exhausted. Helicoptering to Kittikachorn's summer residence at the sparkling seaside resort of Bang Saen, the President spent a day relaxing, then headed with Lady Bird into Bangkok for a new round of ceremonies.

Nowhere were the protocol problems thornier than in Thailand, but U.S. diplomats succeeded in persuading the Thais to relax a few of the rules. At Borombinam Mansion, a yellow stucco building where the Johnsons were put up inside the mile-square Grand Palace compound built by the founders of Thailand's Chakri dynasty two centuries ago, the U.S. was allowed to erect a giant antenna for the President's worldwide communications; normally, the Thais are reluctant to permit structures to soar higher than their ubiquitous Buddhist temples. When Johnson choppered into the Royal Plaza near Chitra-lada Palace for his audience with King Bhumibol Adulyadej and the lovely Queen Sirikit, he was allowed to wear a business suit instead of the traditional cutaway.

The motorcade that followed was un like anything that Lyndon Johnson had ever seen in 28 years of politicking. As the King and the President drove past in a long yellow Mercedes, with Sirikit and Lady Bird following in a yellow Daimler, schoolchildren daintily waved flags and cried softly, "Cha yo [hurrah]." Not once did Lyndon yield to the temptation to stop the show and press some flesh. In contrast to the placard-waving scenes from Melbourne to Manila, there were no demonstrations. "Such an act," said General Praphas Charusathien, the Interior Minister, "is against the law."

Falling Rain. That night, the President played an unwontedly modest supporting role in an updated King and I spectacle. The show belonged wholly