Washington
On the World Today
I THINK you’ll see a good deal of me this year. I expect to get around the country and talk to the people about our problems,” President Johnson told reporters during a press conference held at his Texas ranch in early July. The President noted that he had visited ten different states within the past few weeks, and added, “At that rate, we could cover all fifty of them between now and the middle of October.”
Such a public appearance tour will come none too soon in the opinion of Lyndon Johnson’s friends and supporters, for it will serve to end an unusually long and puzzling period of isolation.
Nobody in Washington has seen very much of the President for almost a year now. Since his abdominal operation last October, he has isolated himself from the nation, from the Democratic Party, and increasingly from his own Administration. That the White House becomes a prison to its occupants is a fact widely acknowledged by the men who have served there. Johnson’s predecessors all attempted to escape the confinement, however. For the past year he has withdrawn into it.
It was as if he were some brooding Roman general leading an army of siege encamped on a plain. He secluded himself within his tent. His lamp burned late. A small contingent of faithful lieutenants and aides came and went. Camp rumor raged — something obviously was up, an air of urgency prevailed; but so did an air of mystery and uncertainty. He was seldom seen about the camp. Occasionally he went out for one of his short, infrequent walks, but it was obvious that he was distracted and did not wish to be bothered. At night, when the lamp burned late, his shadow could be seen against the tent side as he paced back and forth.
Except for a quick, impromptu trip to Mexico City, which he insisted did not constitute a state visit, he has not been to a foreign capital since he entered the White House, and he remains a stranger in the eyes of the world. All year long there have been rumors that he will go abroad before the end of the year, but he has not given strong indication that he is planning to do so.
Except for one brief afternoon in late June, when he spent forty minutes touring an Iowa farm and a couple of hours shaking hands in Des Moines, his domestic appearances have been perfunctory ones, marked by strident self-justification, as in his Chicago speech on nervous Nellies in May, and in Omaha in June and Indiana in July.
This curious loss of identification with the electorate has not escaped the attention of some of Mr. Johnson’s advisers. One of them suggested recently, in fact, that Doyle, Dane, Bern bach, Incorporated, the New York advertising firm which handled the Democratic advertising campaign in 1964, be rehired now to put a new gloss on the President’s national image. The President himself reportedly gave thought to keeping them on the job after the election, but this time the proposal wasn’t given “serious consideration,” a White House source says.
Except for occasional briefings at the White House, he has remained aloof from Congress this session. In contrast, at the beginning of his Administration it seemed as if the congressional leadership’s real headquarters were at the White House, and there were new stories every week about the personal pressure he was exerting to get his program passed. This year the task of briefing Congress plainly has been a chore to him; there are complaints on Capitol Hill that he did little to push the bills he introduced, and the congressional leaders came and went routinely, halfheartedly mumbling their prepared statements of the legislative prospects as they departed from the weekly White House leadership meetings.
Except for a few friends and favorites, hardly any Washington reporters have had the chance to talk with him privately in months. He used to march them around the White House grounds, leading his pet beagle on a leash and talking on and on about his plans and hopes for his Administration. Now he nods in brief recognition when he steps into the Rose Garden to read the latest proclamation or to preside at a quick public ceremony before the television cameras, and leaves without a word as soon as possible. His press conferences in recent months have been haphazard affairs, called on the spur of the moment and conducted with little prior preparation.
Except for the nominal allegiance he pays to it, he is ignoring the existence of the national Democratic Party and leaving it to its own devices. For fifteen months the national committee held no meetings. The party’s national treasury is virtually empty. A shortage of funds caused the ambitious voter-registration program to be abandoned. A plan to aid first-term Democratic congressmen in their re-election fights was canceled. State party leaders complain that the President has abdicated as their national chief, is indifferent to their problems, and consistently bypasses them.
Except for a few minor offices of inconsequential influence, his administrative appointments in recent months have displayed a similar isolationist tendency. He is appointing more and more career men to high office, and he is showing increased inclination to choose the current second-in-command as the successor to the departing agency chief whenever possible. Both practices tend to make his Administration one more and more composed of officials who are manageable, whose points of view are well known, and whose philosophies are in no way unsettling.
Barrier of nonresponse
The President trusts no one to act as his official spokesman these days. When he has something to say, he either says it himself or lays such exact boundaries for its release through the White House press office that reporters now consider it largely a waste of time to ask Deputy Presidential Press Secretary Robert Fleming — or, to a growing extent, Press Secretary Bill Moyers himself — to comment on anything. After a stubborn fight to break through the barrier of nonresponse, the Washington press corps now appears to have given up on it as a lost cause.
There is little or no meaningful dialogue within the White House between Mr. Johnson and members of his personal staff. His staff aides fulfill a function which is a cross between being an orderly and an aide-de-camp, and are in no sense presidential advisers. He commands, they obey.
When he entered the White House, much was written about the “kitchen cabinet” of knowledgeable, independent men outside the government whom Mr. Johnson reportedly called on frequently for advice. The group was said to include Washington lawyers James Rowe, Tom Corcoran, Ben Cohen, and Abe Fortas (since appointed to the Supreme Court), and former Secretary of State Dean Acheson. This was largely a myth, however. “He’s probably seen Khrushchev more than he’s seen Dean Acheson,” one source admits. And in any event, they are not called on for much advice now.
Too much secrecy
The day-by-day secrecy surrounding Mr. Johnson’s activity has become more pronounced in recent months, too. His appointments schedule is seldom announced in advance. When he travels, his plans are kept secret until the last possible moment.
His brief Midwest trip in June provides a typical example of this. After privately promising Iowa Governor Harold Hughes that he would attend a Democratic fund-raising dinner in Des Moines, he refused to commit himself publicly. The governor, hard-pressed to sell $100-a-plate tickets in a state where no party dinner ever had cost over $25 before, finally took it upon himself to announce the visit. Even then, the White House refused to confirm it until the day of the dinner.
In the end, the President almost decided not to go. Then, after making a last-minute decision to go, he scheduled an unexpected appearance in Omaha without telling Governor Hughes anything about it, and made a major address on Vietnam there which captured the headlines and made the Des Moines dinner seem like an anticlimax by comparison.
“This is not my show, as you can damn well see,” the governor angrily told reporters. “I feel as useless as a bangle on a horse’s tail. Security measures are so tight around the President that even I don’t know things.”
The new isolation
The President is not about. He has been in his tent. Why? What was he doing in there? Is he now about to emerge again?
Mr. Johnson always has been a politician who likes his privacy and who believes in the value of the dramatic and the unexpected. When he was Vice President, on more than one occasion he swore his staff to keep his whereabouts secret when he left Washington for a needed weekend of rest at his Texas ranch. But this new isolation has little or no connection with his past habits. “Everybody is making a big mistake in assuming he’s always been this way,” says one who both knows him well and loves him. “His mode of operation has changed. . . . It’s not like the past, it’s new.”
The self-imposed isolation began, it is generally agreed, last October. Johnson entered Washington’s Bethesda Naval Hospital, had his gallbladder removed and a kidney stone excised, then went to Texas to recuperate. He was weak from the operation, and he was tired. He had bulled his Great Society program through Congress, and he had been constantly involved with the war in Vietnam situation. He secluded himself at his ranch, and didn’t return to Washington until January. “Things haven’t been the same since” in the opinion of one of his friends. Another is even more blunt: “He just doesn’t seem to care.”
The Texan who for two years had managed to keep his national political consensus herded within a corral built from a set of interlocking political alliances quit his patrol and made few repairs.
Was it Vietnam? In part. Here is a man of political genius frustrated by an essentially political problem which consistently defies political solution, and he is responding to the application of military power only in the slowest, most agonizing way. The image this analysis suggests is that of a wartime President whose involvement in crucial decisions leaves precious little time for anything else.
LBJ’s disenchantment
The analysis is correct, as far as it goes: it explains his preoccupation, but not his new isolation. The fact is that Lyndon Johnson is disenchanted, and his disenchantment is a hulking, Texas-sized sorrow.
He is disenchanted with the press, which he believes has never really given him a fair shake from the day he took John F. Kennedy’s place. He is disenchanted with segments of his own party for not providing a unified Democratic front for a Democratic President. He is disenchanted with the American intellectual community. “Criticism is one thing, diplomacy is another,” he told the professors at Princeton.
He is disenchanted with the American liberal community, which he believes never trusted him and never will and is not giving proper recognition to his domestic social accomplishments. In recent private conversations, when he was asked about the effect of new attacks on the thoroughness of the Warren Commission’s investigation of the Kennedy assassination, his very dismissal of concern implied irritation with the wave of critiques. He said he is personally convinced that the Commission’s findings are accurate: he had been especially careful in choosing the members of the Commission because he realized that “people” would be speculating about the assassination for years to come unless all doubt was completely satisfied. Those present feel sure the “people” he had in mind were the liberals.
Even more telling, however, was the estimate of the liberal intellectuals which he delivered at a speech in San Antonio last April: “Sometimes among our more sophisticated, self-styled intellectuals—I say self-styled advisedly; the real intellectual I am sure would not ever feel this way — some of them are more concerned with appearance than they are with achievement.” He is disenchanted with U.S. allies. “It is difficult to understand the response of nations who a few years ago, with their own security involved, wanted American troops and military support,” he said in July.
Most of all, he appears to be disenchanted with his own fate. He feels he inherited the Vietnam problem and that his solution to it is right, politically and morally. He feels, in any event, that he had no real choice in the matter. “A lot of our friends tell us how troubled they are and how frustrated they are,” he said in Chicago. “And we are troubled and frustrated, and we are seeking a way out.”
He feels cheated by fate, for his was a presidency which began at a time of almost unparalleled opportunity for social and economic advance at home and the pursuit of peace in the world at large; yet now he may have to raise taxes to pay for a war which has made it necessary to cut back on his Great Society programs, and every time a Western European paper runs a cartoon of him it depicts him with a bomb in each hand. “Who could have foreseen it?” the New Republic asked in a July 16 editorial entitled “The War President.” “The Great Society exponent, the practitioner of common sense, compromise and consensus, has become The War President - sworn to prevent at any cost one set of Vietnamese (unfriendly, we have guaranteed that) from overcoming other Vietnamese (who could not hold power without us).”
It is almost certain that the President’s intention to forage through the nation for support was forced on him. His national popularity has been in a slow but steady decline all year long. In Iowa one poll showed that Michigan Governor George Romney would defeat the President but would be defeated soundly by Senator Robert Kennedy, and another poll in California showed that Democrats in that state would rather have Kennedy than Johnson as President by almost two to one. That is enough to send any man hurrying to the boondocks to win back friends and influence people.
DOUGLAS KIKER