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

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yesterday and done right. "I'm always an hour late, a dollar short, and behind schedule," he likes to say. As a young Congressman, Johnson handed out diplomas in a mythical "I Cain't Do It Club" to anyone who had let him down. And, according to Lady Bird, when things were not done as quickly or as well as Johnson wanted, "he used to get a rash on his hands."

If You Try . . . The presidency of the U.S. is enough to make anyone break out all over. Getting the ponderous machinery of the Federal Government to move is a task that would try Job, and Johnson is somewhat less patient. Harry Truman once described how it would be when Dwight Eisenhower replaced him. "He'll sit there and he'll say, 'Do this! Do that!' " said Truman. "And nothing will happen." In a memorable outburst, Franklin Roosevelt complained that it was tough enough getting action from the Treasury and State departments, but that "the Na-a-vy" beat the two of them hands down. "To change anything in the Na-a-vy," grumbled Roosevelt, "is like punching a feather bed. You punch it with your right and you punch it with your left until you are finally exhausted, and then you find the damn bed just as it was before you started punching."

Johnson, too, has tasted some frustration. Before the election, he phoned Arkansas Democrat Wilbur Mills, chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, to request a favor. "Wilbur," drawled the President, "I've just been looking through the polls here, and I've only got a few weaknesses, and the worst of them is that I'm not doin' anything for the old folks. I need some help. How about medicare?" In other words, get the bill at least to the House floor. Mills's answer was an un varnished no, and there was nothing Johnson could do about it-except keep trying. That he has done, and two weeks ago Mills announced that he would go along with medicare in the next Congress, if it is financed by a special payroll tax instead of by social security.

Plucked Rooster. Johnson means to be prudent and cautious, but he also wants to be an activist, "can do" President. Just since he took office, the population of the U.S. has grown by 2,500,000, and the question he asks most often of his idea men is: "How are we going to keep up with the times?"

Almost intuitively, he rejects as unsuited to the times the Whig notion of the President as an errand boy for Congress or as a chief administrator. During the presidential campaign, when Barry Goldwater complained that the office was becoming too powerful, Johnson had a folksy retort to that view. "Most Americans," he said, "are not ready to trade the American eagle in for a plucked banty rooster."

Even so, he also rejects Alexander Hamilton's combative concept of the U.S. Government as a system of power as the rival of power. Johnson came to the White House with the most extensive congressional experience of any U.S. President, and to him the theory that the branches of the Government should be coordinate, not one subordinate to another, is a living reality. Roosevelt, Truman and Kennedy all scrapped bitterly with Congress at different times, but that is one thing that Johnson wants desperately to avoid. "I don't want to come up