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More than ever before in an era of material wellbeing, 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 fortune may grow out at 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-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 dwellers 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.