1967
Lyndon B. Johnson
FROM THE TIME ARCHIVE
Jan. 5, 1968
Even if the television tube and a ubiquitous Texan had yet to be
conceived, the President of the U.S. in the latter third of the 20th century
would almost certainly be the world's most exhaustively scrutinized, analyzed
and criticized figure. As it is, the power of his office and the jovial
Executive's visage and voice are available for instant dissection from Baghdad
to Bangkok, from factory cafeteria to family living room. Depending on the man
and the moment, he may come across as heavy or hero, leader or pleader,
preacher or teacher. Whatever his role, in the age of instant communications he
inevitably seems so close that the viewer can almost reach out, pluck his
sleeve and complain: "Say, Mr. President, what about prices? Napalm? The
draft?"
For Lyndon Johnson's 200 million countrymen, the year produced an
unprecedented crop of complaints, based largely on the two great crises that
came into confluence. Abroad, there was the war in Viet Nam, possibly the most
unpopular conflict in the nation's history and the largest ever waged without
specific congressional consent. At home, the Negro, more aware than ever of the
distance he has yet to travel toward full citizenship, vented his impatience in
riots that rent 70 cities in a summer of bloodshed and pillage. The U.S. was
vexed as well by violence in the streets, rising costs, youthful
rebelliousness, pollution of air and water and the myriad other maladies of a
post-industrial society that is growing ever more bewilderingly urbanized,
ungovernable and impersonal.
Sense of Impotence. It was, for many Americans, an end of innocence. The
U.S. was still the world's pre-eminent power, still reveled in the
accouterments of prosperity, still enjoyed a standard of living far more
abundant than that of any other civilization. But then 1967 awakened many of
its citizens to the fact that conscienceless affluence can not only despoil the
environment and drive a deprived underclass to the brink of rebellion; it can
also pervade society with a sense of impotence and bring on a loss of unifying
purpose.
With so many problems flowing together, the nation was battered by a flood
tide of frustration and anxiety. A doubt that in the past had rarely been
articulated or even felt crept into the American consciousness: Is the U.S.,
after all, as fallible in its aims and unsure of its answers as any other great
power? Can—and should—the Viet Nam war be won? Can the nation simultaneously
allay poverty, widen opportunity, eradicate racism, make its cities habitable
and its laws uniformly just? Or will it have to jettison urgent social
objectives at home for stern and insistent commitments abroad?
It was increasingly clear that the attainment of all these elusive goals
would require, above all, a quality that Americans have always found difficult
to cultivate: patience. Yet, as the National Committee for an Effective
Congress declared last week, with no exaggeration intended, "America has
experienced two great internal crises in her history: the Civil War and the
economic Depression of the 1930s. The country may now be on the brink of a
third trauma, a depression of the national spirit."
More than ever before in an era of material well-being, the nation's
discontent was focused upon its President. The man in the White House is at
once the chief repository of the nation's aspirations and the supreme scapegoat
for its frustrations. As such, Lyndon Johnson was the topic of TV talk shows,
and cocktail-party conversations, the obsession of pundits and politicians at
home and abroad, of businessmen and scholars, cartoonists and ordinary citizens
throughout 1967. Inescapably, he was the Man of the Year.
Often, the 36th President called to mind the Duke of Kent's lament for
King Lear: "A good man's fortunes may grow out at the heels." Whether Johnson
was a good man to begin with is disputed by many of his critics, but his
tribulations were sufficient to deter any man of lesser fortitude—or
obstinacy. Week by week, his popularity (as judged by polls that invite a
disproportionate number of negative answers: e.g., "Do you approve of how the
President is doing his job?") plummeted, reaching a low of 38% in October,
where once he had basked in the approval of 80% of the nation (at year's end,
however, Gallup showed him up to 46%). Congress, only recently scorned as a
"rubber stamp," turned around and began stomping on him.
Caesar & Caligula. Rarely had the voices of dissent been raised so
loud or carried so far, or trained on so many issues. The young formed the
sword's point of protest—students on a thousand campuses, Negroes in a hundred
ghettos, hippies in their psychedelic enclaves. But there was hardly a segment
of society that seemed immune to the disaffection. Housewives were alarmed by
growing grocery bills, farmers by tumbling prices for their produce, parents by
their alienated children, city dweller by the senseless violence around them.
It was sometimes hard to tell whether the rancor aroused by Johnson
stemmed from his policies or his personality. An immensely complex,
contradictory and occasionally downright unpleasant man, he has never managed
to attract the insulating layer of loyalty that a Roosevelt or a Truman,
however beleaguered, could fall back on. Consequently, when things began to go
wrong, he had few defenders and all too many critics.
Whenever he left his desk and sallied forth among the people who only
three years ago gave him the greatest outpouring of votes in history, he
attracted angry pickets. Hardly a day passed without a contumelious attack.
Wherever he went, from a speaking engagement in Los Angeles to a cardinal's
funeral in Manhattan he was dogged by shouts of "Murderer!" and "War Criminal!"
or chants of "Hey, hey, L.B.J., how many kids did you kill today?" He was
likened to Caesar, Caligula and Mussolini.
Notable Dropout. The very men who most fervently endorsed his domestic
programs were largely those who most passionately deplored his commitment in
Viet Nam. They felt that, as Yale Economist James Tobin, a former presidential
advisor, put it, "the butter to be sacrificed because of the war always turns
out to be the margarine of the poor." The President appeared to have broken
finally with such Democratic stalwarts as Senate Foreign Relations Committee
Chairman J. William Fulbright, New York's Senator Robert Kennedy and
Minnesota's Senator Eugene McCarthy. Much of the anger directed at Johnson
spilled over onto Vice President Hubert Humphrey as well, largely because of
his unwavering support of the Viet Nam war and of the feeling among his
erstwhile friends in the Americans for Democratic Action that he has "deserted"
them. The result has been to diminish drastically Humphrey's hopes of ever
succeeding Johnson on his own.
Democrats abandoned the President in droves, forming Dump L.B.J. movements
or rallying behind Gene McCarthy as an alternative for 1968. Said Michigan's
former Democratic State Chairman Zoltan Ferency, who quit over Johnson's war
policies: "The youth, the academicians, the women, the intellectuals—they are
dropping out of politics, they are turned off." A notable dropout was liberal
Pundit Walter Lippmann, long since disaffected with L.B.J., who went so far as
to declare that it would be in the "national interest" for the Johnson
Democratic Party to "be ousted by a rejuvenated Republican Party." Notes TIME'S
Washington Bureau Chief John L. Steele: "Historical generalizations are
dangerous, but one is tempted to suggest that not even Lincoln—who had to
fight a civil war to preserve the Union—faced such internal questioning, such
intense and wide-ranging dissent as did Lyndon Johnson in 1967."
Flubdubs & Mollycoddles. Name calling is a time-honored sport among
Americans where their Presidents are concerned. George Washington was called a
crook and the "stepfather of his country." It was said of John Adams that "the
cloven foot is in plain sight." Jefferson was berated as a mean-spirited
hypocrite, Jackson as a murderer and adulterer, Lincoln as a baboon. With rare
elegance, Teddy Roosevelt called Woodrow Wilson "a Byzantine logothete (an
emperor's bookkeeper) backed by flubdubs and mollycoddles." When the Depression
laid Hubert Hoover low, newspapers were called "Hoover blankets," and a "Hoover
flag" was an empty pocket turned inside out.
Johnson has fared worse than most, Black Power Apostle Stokely Carmichael
calls him a "hunky," a "buffoon," and a "liar." Stokely's successor as head of
the ill-named Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee, H.Rap Brown,
suggested that the President—and Lady Bird—ought to be shot. In The
Accidental President, liberal Journalist Robert Sherrill described the
President as "treacherous, dishonest, manic- aggressive, petty, spoiled." The
outrageous play MacBird! called him: "...this canker.../This tyrant whose name
alone/ blisters our tongues.../Villain, traitor, cur."
In the Bunker. With so many harpoons filling the air, Johnson prudently
stuck to his bunker for much of the year. In 1966, he held 40 formal press
conferences; in 1967, only 21. He spent two months at the L.B.J. Ranch last
year, and even in Washington made himself scarce for long periods.
Occasionally, Johnson would erupt, recalling the "whirlwind President" of
1964. His popularity rating spurted when he met with Soviet Premier Alexei
Kosygin at the Glassboro summit—and impressed him as a man to be reckoned
with. Johnson ended one of the long silent spells with his now-famous "new
look" press conference, during which he prowled a makeshift stage in the East
Room of the White House like a restless tiger, exuding confidence and control.
Before an A.F.L.-C.I.O. convention in December, he hit into the Republican
"wooden soldiers of the status quo" who were poleaxing his programs in
Congress.
Two weeks ago, he gave a dramatic demonstration of the resources available
to an American President—and his readiness to put them to use. On less than 24
hours notice, he assembled an entourage of four jet planes and 300 people and
spent the next five days in a dizzying, 26,959-mile circuit of the globe. The
original reason for his cyclonic odyssey was to attend services for Australia's
Prime Minister Harold Holt. Characteristically, Johnson transformed it into a
microcosm of his coming campaign.
In Canberra, he buttonholed nine allied leaders for talks, turning the
somber occasion into an impromptu summit conference on the war. In Viet Nam and
Thailand, he showed one part of his celebrated "two-fisted" approach, urging
U.S. servicemen to "give it to" the enemy. Karachi was a jet hop, skip and jump
away, so he stopped in to press the flesh with President Ayub Khan, a difficult
ally of late. Whisking in to Rome, he unlimbered the other fist, the one that
holds the olive branch, assuring Pope Paul VI that "we will agree to any
proposal that would substitute the word and the vote for the knife and the
grenade in bringing an honorable peace to Viet Nam."
When High Hopes Turn Sour. Johnson is acutely aware of how much is
expected of him as President—and of the fact that, in the eyes of many, he has
fallen short. As Health, Education and Welfare Secretary John Gardner indicated
in a year-end appraisal of "the alarming character of our domestic crisis," the
President fell victim to "the bitterness and anger toward our institutions that
wells up when high hopes turn sour." Johnson himself conceded early in the
year: "In all candor, I cannot recall a period that is in any way comparable to
the one we are living through today. It is a period that finds exhilaration and
frustration going hand in hand—when great accomplishments are often
overshadowed by rapidly rising expectations."
As the months unfolded, frustration waxed relentlessly and exhilaration
waned. It was a time when the war was escalating just as the problems of peace
were intensifying, and Johnson was badly buffeted by the conjunction of those
two powerful trends.
In Viet Nam, the President increased the U.S. troop level until it had
passed the high-water mark of the Korean War (472,800 men) and soared on toward
525,000, where it will presumably level off this year. The big-unit war
continued decisively in favor of the allies, though the enemy shifted to a
strategy of mass assaults on exposed frontier positions such as Dak To and Con
Thien in hopes of bloodying a big U.S. force and further eroding Stateside
support of the war. American casualties since the beginning of the war climbed
well over the 100,000 mark, including 13,000 dead, while the monetary cost of
the war last year alone totaled $25 billion—part of a $70 billion Defense
budget that, in terms of the gross national product, was 50% smaller than the
Pentagon's expenditures in the last year of the Korean War.
There were encouraging improvements—most notably in the allies' military
progress and in the legitimization of the South Vietnamese government through
elections—but many Americans doubted that they were worth the enormous
expense. Even so, Johnson at year's end still enjoyed the support of a
fair-sized majority of the U.S. for his middle course "between surrender and
annihilation."
Hope & Anger. In the area of civil rights, Johnson fell victim to his
earlier successes. It was a classic case of anticipation outpacing achievement.
The bills that he got through Congress in 1964 and 1965 all but completed the
task of bringing the Negro to legal parity with America's whites. But progress,
inevitably, was slower in the subtler and vastly more difficult task of
improving the Negro's lot in terms of income, jobs, housing and education. For
the nation's 21.5 million Negroes, the result was a mercurial mood of "hope
mixed with anger" as FORTUNE reported this month.
In Congress, Johnson was hobbled by the "stop, look and listen" approach
advocated by Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield. Engorged with costly
programs enacted by the 89th Congress, the 90th cast a jaundiced eye on
Johnson's new requests. According to Congressional Quarterly, from the time
Johnson took office until the end of 1966, he got 655 of his 1,057 proposals
enacted into law—a sensational 62% average, (By C.Q.'s reckoning, Dwight
Eisenhower batted 46%, John F. Kennedy only 39%.) But in 1967, Johnson was
defeated on his tax- surcharge, civil rights, anti-crime, East-West trade and
legislative-reorganization bills. Foreign aid was cut by a record $1 billion,
poverty funds by $300 million, model cities by $350 million. The
rent-supplements program was practically shrunk out of existence—from $40
million to $10 million. Despite Congress's fractious mood, however, Johnson did
get a number of other bills past Capitol Hill's axmen, most notably: expanded
air-pollution control, a consular treaty with Moscow, an outer-space treaty,
the first meat-inspection program since Upton Sinclair's exposes inspired a
similar bill in 1906, and a major increase in social security benefits.
The economy was also a worry, even though the gross national product
neared the $800 billion mark and the nation's uninterrupted expansion
percolated into its 84th month, three months longer than the old record. There
were inflationary signs, a big balance-of-payments deficit, pressure in the
dollar after Britain's devaluation of the pound. Economists and politicians
began talking about "profitless prosperity." When Johnson asked belatedly for a
10% surcharge on income taxes to damp down the supercharged economy, Arkansas
Democrat Wilbur Mills, Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, insisted
on an equivalent cut in federal spending that the President was unwilling to
make.
Nuclear Imperative. Though often thwarted, Johnson was hardly rendered
ineffectual. Such are the powers of his office at home and abroad that even at
the nadir of his presidency, he stirred complaints that he was becoming "King
Lyndon." Historians and Congressmen alike began wondering whether the
presidency had not grown too strong. Next month a group of historians led by
Arthur Schlesinger Jr. will meet in Manhattan to consider that very subject. In
the Senate, North Carolina democrat Sam Ervin began an inquiry into the
division of federal powers, while Fulbright looked into the "overextension of
executive powers." (Power is a word uppermost in many a mind. Fulbright
published The Arrogance of Power, McCarthy The Limits of Power and Journalist
Theodore Draper The Abuse of Power during 1967. Other studies included David
Bazelon's Power in America, Nicholas Demerath's Power, Presidents and
Professors, and Stokely Carmichael's Black Power.)
What chiefly disquieted Capitol Hill as the fighting dragged on was the
fact that the U.S. has never formally declared war on Viet Nam, and that
Johnson never sought congressional approval of the conflict beyond the Gulf of
Tonkin Resolution of 1964.
Actually, the limits on the Chief Executive's power in foreign affairs
have always been ill-defined. When it comes to warmaking, there are few formal
checks and balances on a President beyond his own judgement and character. On
at least 125 occasions, U.S. Presidents have intervened abroad without a
congressional by-your-leave. Jefferson sought neither advice nor consent when
he dispatched a naval force to fight the Barbary pirates in 1801. Neither did
Polk when he skirmished with the Mexicans in Texas, or Franklin Roosevelt when
he sent troops to Iceland in 1941, or Truman when he sent U.S. forces into
Korea in 1950, or Eisenhower in the Lebanon crisis, or Kennedy at the Bay of
Pigs. In modern times, the possibility of nuclear conflict has made swift
decision-making by the President an imperative. Says Stanford's Historian
Emeritus Edgar E. Robinson: "The growth of the powers of the President in
foreign relations appears to be the most important phenomenon in modern
history, inasmuch as the exercise of those powers by four Presidents in the
past 20 years has determined developments throughout the world."
Nor is Johnson the sort of President who would be likely to yield a jot or
tittle of his authority. "The people of this country did not elect me to this
office to preside over its erosion," he once declared. "And I intend to turn
over this office with all of its powers intact to the next man who sits in this
chair."
Beyond the overriding power wielded by a U.S. President in the nuclear
age—that of making war and peace—is a grand galaxy of functions, some defined
by the Constitution, some granted by tradition, some arrogated by the man in
office. A President is at once head of state and leader of his party,
Commander-in-Chief of the armed bureaucracy, leading legislator and top
diplomat, educator and economist, symbol and sage, ribbon cutter and fence
mender. Because of his role in shaping legislation affecting the cities, in
recent years he has also become "the Chief Executive of Metropolis," as
Williams Political Scientist James MacGregor Burns puts it.
Teacher-in-Chief. Nor is that all. Cornell Political Scientist Clinton
Rossiter once noted that the President must also serve as a national
"scoutmaster, Delphic oracle, hero of the silver screen [today, that would read
'TV tube'] and father of the multitudes." In addition, says Historian Sidney
Hyman, he must possess "animal energy, a physical capacity for long and
sustained attention to detail, the power to endure bores," as well as "a will
to decide," and a "sense of tragedy" that results when men seek to do good, but
inadvertently achieve evil ends.
What may well be the most important power of a President, in the long run,
is one that is neither redefined nor even hinted at in the Constitution.
"Presidential power," says Political Scientist Richard Neustadt, Director of
the Kennedy Institute for Politics at Harvard, "is the power to persuade." Or,
as Stanford Historian Thomas A. Baily writes: "The Commander-in-Chief is also
the Teacher-in-Chief. If he is to get the wheels to move and 'make things
happen,' in Woodrow Wilson's phrase, he must educate the people."
Stirring Vision. In his application of naked power, Johnson is an
acknowledged virtuoso—as his Viet Nam critics ruefully concede. Despite
thunderous criticism of his intervention in the Dominican Republic, the
President's swift application of military strength followed by an intense
diplomatic campaign proved, in the end, a successful maneuver. He has also
applied indirect pressure with superb efficacy. Twice he used it to avert a war
over Cyprus. His historic hot-line exchange with Kosygin during the
Arab-Israeli War contained that conflict on terms acceptable to both the U.S.
and Russia. Johnson's artful cajolery ended the rail crisis in 1964, and his
masterful manipulation of Congress in the early days of his presidency helped
him to clean up a log jam of domestic programs that had been forming since the
days of the New Deal. He has also proved himself capable of remarkable
restraint, particularly in the face of Charles de Gaulle's persistent
provocations.
"It is when Johnson must educate the doubters to the wisdom of his course
that he runs into trouble," observes TIME White House Correspondent Hugh Sidey.
"Persuasion, education, inspiration—these form an area of power that may be in
this age almost more important than the constitutional authority, Johnson is
essentially a manager and a manipulator. He knows where all the levers are and
he knows how to use them. But when he must, by the sheer force of his intellect
and his personality, develop that broad base of support essential to moving the
country, he often fail dismally."
Even in this sphere he has succeeded magnificently on occasion, his Great
Society speech at Ann Arbor in 1964 offered Americans a stirring vision. The
moment in 1965 when he stood before Congress and, in a televised appeal for
passage of his voting-rights bill, cast his lot for the Negro's demand for
equality by declaring "We shall overcome," was the emotional high point of his
presidency to date. His speech at Howard University in June 1965, calling on
Americans "to shatter forever not only the barriers of law and public practice,
but the walls which bound the condition of many by the color of his skin," was
a rousing call to action.
But he has frequently failed where another President with superior powers
of persuasion might have succeeded. His inability to convince either Congress
or the nation of the need for a tax increase is one example. When the Detroit
riots erupted last summer, Johnson had a splendid opportunity to rally the
nation. Instead, he took a safe, legalistic and patently political approach
delaying the dispatch of federal troops until Michigan's Governor George
Remmney, a potential rival in 1968, was ready to admit that he had lost control
of the situation. Johnson's follow-up actions were no more impressive. "Here
we've had a whole summer of riots," said former White House Aide Richard
Goodwin, who served under both Kennedy and Johnson. "and what do we get? A
study commission and a day of prayer!"
Inspiration Gap. Johnson's "inspiration gap" is to some extent purely
verbal. "The most eminent presidents have generally been eloquent presidents,"
wrote Stanford's Bailey in Presidential Greatness. "They were eloquent with
pen, as Jefferson was; or with tongue as Franklin Roosevelt was; or with both
as Wilson and Lincoln were." Johnson is eloquent with neither. Harry Truman
helped overcome a similar deficiency with a roof-rasing style on the stump,
Dwight Eisenhower with an avuncular manner that inspired confidence and trust.
Johnson's official verbiage tends to be dull, and though he can be pungent and
forceful in private, his public charisma is just about nil. He doesn't always
look entirely "sincere," and he can't always. His effectiveness has been
blunted by his all-too-familiar penchant for secrecy, gimmickry and
deviousness.
Hills & Valleys. Part of his problem is the rustic image he projects
in an age when the U.S. has finally acknowledged its status as a nation of
cities. Though Johnson is a man of the 20th century (born in 1908), he
nonetheless seems the product of a more distant past. His politics and
philosophy were annealed in the inhospitable forges of the Dust Bowl and the
Depression. To the generation that spawned acid-rock music, he often seems as
remote as Betelgeuse. Hippies, college students and Eastern sophisticates are
not the only people who look on him as a parvenu from the prairies. Living in
grandiose isolation at either end of an axis that stretched from the Pedernales
to the Potomac, Johnson is a stranger to the put-downs and hang-ups (terms he
would probably not comprehend) of a populace that digs op and pop art, Valleys
of Dolls in paperback and micro-skirts in the front office.
A well-developed will to power is mandatory in a strong President, but
Johnson seems to have been endowed with an excessive share. He is egotistical
enough to turn a sizable chunk of Texas into a memorial to himself (including a
special plaque at the Hye Post Office immortalizing it as the spot where
four-year-old Lyndon Johnson mailed his first letter). He is a "hill and
valley" man, way up one day, deep down the next. He can be so overbearing to
aides and so intolerant of debate within his official family that many of his
best lieutenants have left him, often forcing him to surround himself with
less- talented cronies. Increasingly, his staff is becoming a projection of
himself. Of his ten principal aides, six are now Texans, and few of them are
known as "no-men."
No Leonardo. All too often, Johnson has sought to substitute promises for
challenge. "I'm not sure he knows how to level with the public any more," says
a Southern editor, "except in the old Texas-New Deal sense. `I'm gonna build
y'all a dam. I'm gonna put laht bulbs in Aunt Minnie's kitchen.'" Agrees
U.C.L.A.'s Chancellor Franklin Murphy: "I'm not criticizing Johnson for not
having cleaned up the ghettos overnight or having gotten the war closed up in a
year or two. I don't think Leonardo da Vinci and Thomas Aquinas together could
have accomplished that. What I am saying is that he made the huge mistake of
implying, by way of rhetoric, that this could be done quickly and easily."
This has been particularly true in the case of Viet Nam, In the past his
forecasts were hyperbolic, and though they have since been muted, they
backfired as the war dragged on. By contrast, Churchill knew during World War
II that the British wanted the unvarnished truth, and, as Lord Moran wrote, he
"hurled it at them like great hunks of bleeding meat."
Politics of Harmony. Paradoxically, the war provides a supreme
illustration both of the powers at Johnson's command and the limitations of
their exercise. Before Viet Nam took center stage, Cornell's Rossiter predicted
that Johnson "would rank up there with what we call the first-class
second-class Presidents, and perhaps with a big effort, even rise above that."
Now he says: "This war has damaged Lyndon Johnson's place in history. It has
divided the country, and that has cost him his power base. I bet he wakes up in
the morning sometimes and wonders what happened."
Still, Viet Nam can hardly be held entirely responsible for the
President's setbacks in the ephemeral but transcendently important area of
public respect and support. Johnson could cultivate his consensus for only so
long. Once he had to start assigning priorities, as every President eventually
must, the politics of harmony had to give way to the politics of conflict and
controversy.
Executive Energy. Harry Truman said three years ago that "the presidency
is exactly as powerful as it was under George Washington. The powers are in the
constitution, and the President can't go any further than that." Strictly
speaking, Truman was right. Thanks largely to Hamilton's eloquent plea in The
Federalist papers for "energy in the Executive," the office was invested with
broad authority—but it was also artfully hedged. Every strong President has
exploited his mandate to the fullest, always testing the Congress and the
judiciary to see where the parameters of power may lie. Just where they ought
to lie is an argument that has raged for 180 years. More than a century ago,
when Chief Justice John Marshall scolded Andrew Jackson in Worcester v. Georgia
for failing to honor a treaty guaranteeing the rights of the Cherokee Indians,
Jackson is said to have retorted with impunity: "John Marshall has made his
decision; now let him enforce it." By contrast, when F.D.R. tried to pack the
Supreme Court, he was rebuffed by Congress and later by the voters, who
re-elected all but one of the recalcitrant, anti-New Deal Congressmen he tried
to purge.
The Latitudinarians. At one end of the presidential spectrum are the men
whom New York University Political Scientist Louis Koening calls the
"literalists": those who, like Madison and Taft, interpreted their powers
narrowly and subscribed to the Whig theory of the President as an errand boy
for Congress. At the other end are what Yale historian John Morton Blum calls
the "latitudinarians": those who, like Lincoln and Wilson, gave wide scope to
the Constitution's vague charter.
From the first, the powers have been there for a strong President to use.
When the Swiss examined the U.S. Constitution as a possible model for their own
1848 charter, they rejected it on the grounds that the presidency is a "matrix
for dictatorship." Nonetheless, even the most activist Presidents have run into
brick walls. "Lincoln was a sad man," F.D.R. once said, "because he couldn't
get it all at once. And nobody can." At the end of one of his poorer days,
Truman growled over a bourbon and water: "They talk about the power of the
President, how I can just push a button to get things done. Why, I spend most
of my time kissing somebody's ass." And Johnson roared recently: "Power? The
only power I've got is nuclear—and I can't use that."
Johnson has had less to say about the job than many of his predecessors.
But once, in the early days of his presidency, when his aides warned him
against risking his prestige by fighting for a civil rights bill because the
odds were 3 to 2 against its passage, he asked quietly: "What's the presidency
for?" That brief remark spoke volumes about his desire to use the office not
simply as a springboard for self-aggrandizement but for the nation's progress.
Falling Sparrows. Unlike Ike, who set up military lines of command and
delegated responsibility, Johnson wants to be in on everything. His "night
reading," often a five-inch-thick stack of memos and cables, covers everything
from the latest CIA intelligence roundup to a gossipy report on a feud between
two Senators. "Not a sparrow falls," says a former aide, "that he doesn't know
about." He speaks of "my Government" and "my army" and "my taxes." The
Presidential Seal has been emblazoned on his twill ranch jackets, his cowboy
boots, his cuff links, even on plastic drinking cups.
Former Vice President Richard Nixon, among others, thinks Johnson makes a
mistake by getting involved in too many things. "A President's creative
energies must be reserved for the great decisions, which only he can make, and
which mean war or peace," he says, adding shrewdly: "If the President assumes
too much power, his mistakes are magnified. If power is diffused, his mistakes
are reduced." In addition, if a President wants credit for everything that goes
right, he must also be prepared to take the blame for everything that goes
wrong.
The fact is that Lyndon Johnson has made a greater effort than any of his
recent predecessors to shift more responsibility to the states and cities. He
concedes that much of his domestic legislation has turned into a "programmatic
and bureaucratic nightmare that we frankly must face up to." Johnson has
diffused certain federal powers to a wider extent than is generally
recognized—in the poverty war, with its 1,000-odd community- action programs;
in the landmark Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which encourages
innovation by individual schools; in the air- and water-pollution-control acts,
which their call for state-conceived programs; and in the model-cities bill,
which leaves it to the mayors to tie together some 200 different federal urban
programs into a coherent attack on blight. Under Johnson, moreover, private
enterprise for the first time assumed an active role in the rehabilitation of
the nations' cities.
Still, L.B.J. is not a man to yield power freely. He has, for instance,
flatly rejected the idea of sharing taxes with the states. In so doing, he kept
jealous guard over the prime source of a President's domestic strength—the
federal taxing power.
Shakers V. Smoothers. Clinton Rossiter categorizes Presidents as either
"earth-shakers" or "earth smoothers." Johnson's emphasis on consensus and
conciliation, his efforts to bring businessman and laborer, black and white,
city dweller and dirt farmer into his big tent, all seemed to mark him as a
smoother.
But in this, as in so many other things involving this paradoxical man,
the appearance belies the truth, Johnson has been a fighter in a dozen
different arenas. No President has ever laid his prestige so squarely on the
line on behalf of the Negro. None has tried so persistently to persuade the
wealthiest nation on earth of the need to uproot poverty. None has achieved
more for the advancement of education and health. If Johnson occasionally steps
back—emphasizing a "law and order" bill rather than a new package of civil
rights proposals, for example—his retreat is almost certainly tactical, not
strategic. He is aware that Harlem cannot be rebuilt in a decade, much less a
year.
Thus he counsels patience and perseverance in order to calm the doubts and
anxieties of his fellow citizens, "The country wants to be comfortable," he
told Arthur Schlesinger in 1960, shortly before announcing his candidacy for
the presidency. "It doesn't want to be stirred up. Have a revolution, all
right, but don't say anything about it until you are entrenched in office.
That's the way Roosevelt did it.
Away from Consensus. At the moment, Johnson can hardly consider himself
entrenched. The dump-L.B.J. Democrats stand to his left, Alabama's George
Wallace to his right, and a newly vigorous G.O.P. dead ahead. He has allowed
the Democratic National Committee's once smooth machinery to rust. Indeed,
whereas Lincoln's Cabinet complained that he carried his files around in the
sweatband of his stove-pipe hat, Johnson tries to carry the whole Democratic
Party in his inside coat pocket. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara will soon be
leaving him and a debilitating exodus of top officials could follow. The far-
out National Conference for New Politics has threatened to assemble 1,000,000
outside Chicago's International Amphitheater in August to disrupt the
Democratic Convention—though there is some question whether 1,000,000
Americans even know what the N.C.N.P. is, let alone subscribe to its
anti-everything policies.
Withal, the President's prospects are not all that gloomy. Most likely,
once the Republicans nominate a candidate and Old Campaigner Johnson can start
shelling the foe, the President will again be the favorite. The excesses of the
protest movement are beginning to produce substantial dissent against dissent.
Pollster Louis Harris reports that 70% of Americans feel that the demonstrators
are hurting their own antiwar cause. As for Democratic defections, they are not
likely to be as widespread as the breathless publicity surrounding them would
indicate. A survey of delegates to the 1964 convention shows that 87% still
back the President; if past Democratic behavior is any guide, many of those who
have strayed from the fold will be back in time for the campaign.
And the campaign should be a spectacle to behold. If there is one thing
that Lyndon Johnson enjoys as much as being President, it's running for
President. On the stump, he enjoys a signal advantage—his unparalleled record
of domestic legislation.
As the campaign approaches, the Man of the Year increasingly shows signs
of a readiness to move away from consensus and toward leadership. He will have
to, if he is hoping to cope with a host of social maladies that were being
dimly perceived a decade ago. Whatever his shortcomings in terms of personality
and performance, none but his most relentless critics can fault his desire to
cope with those problems. The greatest Presidents are those who emerged during
periods of severe strain, domestic or foreign. Johnson still has the chance to
stand among them.
COVERS GALLERY: Click here to see the cover image from 1967
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