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A year ago, noted Journalist Raymond Cartier saw Johnson as a "professional politician" completely lacking in "the serene authority of Eisenhower, the charm and romanticism of Kennedy." Cartier found something almost sinister in the fact that Lady Bird, upon reading "Quiche Lorraine" on a White House menu, scratched it out and wrote in: "Cheese Custard Pie." Cartier has since come around to an appreciation of Johnson that might satisfy even Johnson. "Because of him, I see America in the process of launching into a second revolution," says Cartier, "a peaceful revolution brought about with increasing worker ownership of capital, the triumph of free enterprise. Look at America today. She decreases foreign aid and intensifies the offensive in Viet Nam. She is burned at the stake in the United Nations. She hardly asks the advice of anyone any more. Yet her prestige has perhaps never been greater."
Polls among his own countrymen indicate that Johnson averages a slightly broader base of approval than Kennedy —by Gallup's reckoning, 72% v. 70%. But the do-you-approve sort of query falls immeasurably short of assessing emotional intensity. Kennedy's legend is The Legend, and he is its hero; Johnson, at best, is the champion of the consensus. The Great Society, which exists largely on paper, is widely approved, but it has not kindled wide enthusiasm or idealistic fire—and those will be needed, just as much as political skill, if the paper is to become reality.
This week Pollster Sam Lubell reports that about one-third of the people interviewed by Lubell consider Johnson to be a "better President" than Kennedy. The corollary: two-thirds still think that Kennedy was the better President —and if practical accomplishment alone is to be the criterion, that is an odd judgment. The fact is that people want and need legends as well as accomplishments; the ability to lift, to inspire—to become legendary—is in itself an accomplishment no less concrete because it is intangible.
The Kennedy legend and the Johnson performance need not be adversary. The difference between the two men, says Harvard's Henry Kissinger, is the difference "between a dream and an achievement." Kissinger sees Johnson as being "in the position of Gary Cooper in High Noon. He has a lot of difficult and lonely decisions which even his critics recognize are necessary but hard to face. If he can bring off what he is trying to do, his image will take care of itself." It is probably just as well that Johnson does not have Kennedy's charismatic qualities in addition to his own talent for power and practical achievement. The combination might be too much for American democracy to bear.