(12 of 12)
Falling Sparrows. Unlike Ike, who set up military lines of command and delegated considerable 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, with 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 nation's 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 earthshakers 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 seem 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 in 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 stovepipe 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 pickets 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 is 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 going to cope with a host of social maladies that were but 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 a chance to stand among them.
-*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? An emperor's bookkeeper.
*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.