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The dismaying prospect for any rational conduct of politics is that increasingly militant demonstrators plan to turn out in force wherever Johnson and his Cabinet members go in coming months. When Secretary of State Dean Rusk addressed the Foreign Policy Association in Manhattan last week, he had to slip into the garage entrance of the New York Hilton an hour ahead of time to avoid some 3,000 pickets. Most were moderates, but some, spearheaded by the Students for a Democratic Society and a handful of radicals from the Trotskyite-Maoist Progressive Labor Party, came equipped with plastic bags of cow's blood and aerosol cans with orange paint. They were looking for trouble, and more than 1,000 New York policemen, though generally restrained, finally gave it to them. Thirty-four demonstrators were arrested, a dozen injured.
The Real War. For his part —as he has been increasingly wont to do lately—Johnson compared his situation to that of other wartime Presidents. Exchanging toasts with Japan's Prime Minister Eisaku Sato during a dinner at the White House, he declared: "Let us, Mr. Prime Minister, take courage from Lincoln's words, when he said to his Cabinet in that other tragic period: 'I am here, I must do the best I can, and bear the responsibility of taking the course which I feel I ought to take.' "
Striking back at his critics, Johnson set out to convince a skeptical public that his Viet Nam policy was beginning to show dramatic progress. His top echelon in Saigon, Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker, General William Westmoreland and Pacification Chief Robert Komer, flew into Washington for a minisummit. All three brimmed with confidence—or, as Georgia's Democratic Senator Richard Russell put it after Westmoreland had addressed Russell's Armed Services Committee behind closed doors, "cautious optimism" (see following story). Said one aide, mindful that the latest Louis Harris Poll* shows Johnson's rating on his handling of the war at an all-time low of 23%:
"We're winning that war out there. The real war is back here."
Put Up or Shut Up. For his own major skirmish in that war, in the East Room of the White House, Johnson broke completely with his usual press-conference choreography. Thanks to a lavalier microphone, he was able to leave the lectern and prowl back and forth on a makeshift stage—all the while chopping the air, clutching his breast, slapping, clenching and conjoining his big hands to pound home his points, toying with his glasses and abandoning his previous deadpan, Sunday-sermon visage for a range of grins and grimaces, smiles and scowls worthy of a Method actor. All the while, an Army Signal Corpsman crouched unseen behind the lectern, reeling out microphone cord when Johnson wandered to the edge of the stage and making sure that he did not trip himself up.
The President, well aware that he comes across poorly on television, has lately been asking those around him how he could communicate better. The advice was for him to try to talk to the nation the way he talks to small groups in the privacy of his office. Judging from the congratulatory telegrams that flowed to the White House—including one that said, "Good for you, Mr. President. Give 'em H."—it worked.