Lyndon Johnson does not often get publicly angry at labor, but he was coldly furious last week. Object of his wrath: the striking longshoremen, who had rebuffed two presidential pleas to return to work, were in the fifth week of a senseless strike that halted the nation's waterborne commerce from Maine to Texas. Not only was continuation of the strike "totally unjustified," said the President, but "the injury to the economy has reached staggering proportions."
The senselessness of the strike lay in the fact that most of the locals of the International Longshoremen's Association, beginning with the pace-setting New York...