Lyndon Johnson was interrupted by applause 53 times during his State of the Union address, but the cheers were mostly perfunctory and markedly partisan. Only once did he draw from his audience of Congressmen and Cabinet members, judges and generals a prolonged, spontaneous ovation. That was when he declared: "The American people have had enough of rising crime and lawlessness in this country."
Increasingly, "crime in the streets"—an omnibus label encompassing all the wellsprings of urban unrest from ghetto riots to muggings in middle-class neighborhoods—looms, with the possible exception of Viet Nam, as the nation's prime preoccupation in Election Year 1968. Predicted Vice President Hubert Humphrey: "Safe streets will be the No. 1 domestic issue, overshadowing taxes, inflation and all the rest." Added a Humphrey aide: "Another summer of riots could really sink us next fall."
In similar vein, the Rev. Dr. Franklin Clark Fry, president of the 3,000,000-member Lutheran Church in America, warned his pastors last week that "unless a massive improvement of the lot of Negro ghettos comes quickly," the outlook is for "more destructive and bloody uprisings that are no longer going to be confined to the ghetto areas, but will be carried into white racial areas." Noting the nihilistic mood among many Negroes, Fry added: "The present situation is comparable to Samson when he destroyed the Temple of Dagon and himself along with it. Like him, many black brothers, blind with rage, have their hands poised on the temple pillars, ready to start pushing."
Troubled Waters. President Johnson can hardly overestimate the depth or complexity of the problem. Once he was able to mobilize a conscience-strick en nation behind civil rights measures designed to right long-standing wrongs. Now, after four summers of holocausts in the nation's largest cities, concern over the Negro's welfare has been largely replaced by consternation at the prospect of anarchy. Nothing more dramatically underscored this shift than the total silence that greeted Johnson's State of the Union plea for several "vital" civil rights laws covering fair jury trials, enforcement of equal-employment opportunity and open housing. By contrast, he was applauded a dozen times when he spoke of curbing crime.
Noting that "Americans are prosperous as men have never been in recorded history," the President added mildly that, nonetheless, "there is in the land a certain restlessness, a questioning." He asked rhetorically: "Why, why, then, this restlessness?" He answered himself with an even greater rhetorical flourish: "Because when a great ship cuts through the sea, the waters are always stirred and troubled. And our ship is moving—and it's moving through troubled and new waters, and it's moving toward new and better shores."
Coming from the bridge, that seemed a peculiarly euphoric position report. Even the modest program of social reform that Johnson outlined faces—as he knows only too well—serious trouble getting safely through a restive, frugally inclined Congress.