The Presidency: The Mortarcade

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THE PRESIDENCY

It was cap-and-gown week for thousands of college students (see EDUCATION), and right there under the hoods and tassels were Lyndon Baines Johnson (Southwest Texas State Teachers College, '30) and his Lady Bird (University of Texas, '33).

The President, whose mortarcade had already toured commencements at Michigan, Texas, the Coast Guard Academy and the Lyndon B. Johnson High School, stood under rain-dripping poplars on the campus of Swarthmore College near Philadelphia to assail the "phantom fears" that a strong Federal Government is a threat to individual liberty.

Government Liberates. Said Johnson: "We are told that this is the age of the oversize organization, of big business, big unions and big government. Does the Government undermine our freedom by bringing electricity to the farm, by controlling floods, or by ending bank failures? Is freedom betrayed when in 1964 we redeem in full the pledge made a century ago by the Emancipation Proclamation? The truth is—far from crushing the individual—government at its best liberates him from the enslaving forces of his environment."

Two days later Johnson drew some 175,000 people to the streets of Worcester, Mass., en route to another commencement address at Holy Cross College. There, he expressed again his lofty hopes for "the Great Society." Even if the cold war should end, Johnson warned, the world would find itself "on a new battleground as filled with danger and fraught with difficulty as any ever faced by man." The fight then, he said, would be "to build a great world society—a place where every man can find a life free from hunger and disease—a life offering the chance to seek spiritual fulfillment unhampered by the degradation of bodily misery."

Johnson also had the unusual experience of making a speech that his audience did not hear. At a centennial banquet at Gallaudet College in Washington, the only U.S. college for the deaf, Johnson spoke slowly, had his words translated into sign language by the college's dean of women, Elizabeth Benson.

No Dreams of G.M. Lady Bird, meanwhile, wrapped herself in the black and white robe given her two weeks before with an honorary degree at Texas, turned up at Harvard Memorial Church to give the baccalaureate address to 252 graduates of Radcliffe. She urged the girls to remain feminine. An educated woman, she said, "does not want to be a long-striding feminist in low heels, engaged in a conscious war with men." Nor should she hold "glamorous images of herself as ambassadress or dreams of glory as she takes over the presidency of General Motors." Instead, advised Mrs. Johnson, a woman should be "preeminently a woman, a wife, a mother, a thinking citizen. If you can achieve the precious balance between woman's domestic and civic life, you can do more for zest and sanity in our society than by any other achievement."

Even the White House bulged with graduating seniors. The Johnsons entertained 121 high school graduates designated as "Presidential Scholars," let them wander through the public rooms and over the lawns for nearly five hours. Lynda Bird presided over a hamburger picnic while the Kingston Trio supplied an upbeat and Lyndon and Lady Bird stretched out on the cool grass to watch.