Man Of The Year: Lyndon B. Johnson, The Prudent Progressive

(2 of 11)

proximity, and it wasn't always neat and nice when the stories leaked out. At 56, and despite a 1955 heart attack that was, by Johnson's own account, "as bad as a man can have and still live," his energies are enormous. Through the year, he was a geyser at perpetual boil. There were imprecations and outbursts at foes and friends as he occasionally wandered over what Kennedy called "the edge of irritability." In some, he seemed perilously impetuous. But never, so far as anyone knows, when the national interest was really at stake.

That is probably why, though he suffered stalemates and setbacks, he has yet to meet with a reverse beyond redemption. "He will be impulsive in little things," said Texas' Governor John Connally, a close friend and political ally for 30 years, "but no one should make the mistake that this will carry over into serious foreign or domestic matters."

Slice of Bread. In this, as in many other ways, the 36th President of the U.S. is an anthology of antonyms. In him, the conservatism of the self-made Texas businessman and the liberalism of the poverty-haunted New Deal politician pulse like an alternating current. He is overbearing to his aides, then suddenly overwhelmingly considerate; cynical about men's motives, yet sentimental enough to weep when a group of Texas Congressmen presented him with a laudatory plaque; incredibly thin-skinned, yet able to brush off some criticism with the comment, "My daddy told me that if you don't want to get shot at, stay oft the firing line." He prides himself on being a shrewd judge of men's strengths and failings; yet he was, at the very least, unperceptive enough not to detect grave flaws in two of his very closest aides, Bobby Baker and Walter Jenkins.

In the growing shelf of Johnson literature, the man almost invariably emerges as a scarcely credible, one-dimensional character, all sinner or all saint. Probably the best portrayal of Johnson the man is in a work of fiction, Novelist William Brammer's The Gay Place. In it, he appears as Governor Arthur ("Goddam") Fenstemaker of Texas, an earthy, explosive, consummately skilled politician whose credo comes across in three lines of dialogue:

Fenstemaker: Somethin's better than nothin'.

Young Newsman: Half a loaf?

Fenstemaker: Slice of goddam bread, even.

Brammer was an aide to Johnson in his Senate days, and while the portrayal of

Fenstemaker is affectionate and admiring, Johnson and Brammer are no longer friends.

"I Cain't Do It." Most of Johnson's friends despair of trying to explain him. "He doesn't fit into any established mold or pattern," says Governor Connally. After their first encounter, Lady Bird said of him: "I knew I'd met some thing remarkable, but I didn't know quite what." And Daughter Luci, 17, once declared with a helpless shrug: "I can't ever tell what he is going to do. He can't either."

Johnson himself says: "People don't understand one thing about me, and that is that the one thing I want to do is my job." More than that, he wants to do it better than anyone before him, and he will spare no one, least of all himself, in the effort. With Johnson, everything has to be done