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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. Tm 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 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 set-backs 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.