Simple Man In A High Office

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30413, 11 April 1964, Page 5

Simple Man In A High Office

'J'HE tone was steady, avuncular: the smile self-effacing, the achievements listed with becoming modesty. President Lyndon B. Johnson may have been campaigning, but it hardly showed in his first hour-long television confrontation with millions of Americans. Mr Johnson has now been President for something just over four months and this abitrary period was apparently sufficient justification for him to arrange, with the three major networks, a meeting with their most articulate, best-informed and least-in-hibited news analysts. The talk was studiedly nonpolitical. Mr Johnson spoke mainly in general terms about the problems and rewards of his great office, the gratitude he felt for the privilege of being allowed to hold it, his hopes for the future, and the President’s “awesome responsibilities”—a phrase he used three times. Few Thrusts Only once or twice did he permit himself an oblique political thrust—one clearly aimed at Senator Barry Goldwater’s suggestion that the marines be sent in to Cuba to turn the water on at the Guantanamo naval base. But he did not mention the senator by name. He moved quietly but very confidently round two other controversial areas: First, the current investigation into the tangled and unsavoury affairs of a former Senate employee, Bobby Baker, who has been described as Mr Johnson’s protege during the years when the President was Majority leader in the Senate, and, second, the reports of a feud

between himself and the At-torney-General, Mr Robert Kennedy, over the Vice-Presi-dential aspirations Mr Kennedy’s friends are expressing on his behalf. Altogether Mr Johnson successfully projected the image of a reasonable man unflurried by crises, pragmatic, modest but self-assured a simple, honest man trying as best he knew how to fulfil the high office to which God and the nation had called him. Past Reputation All this would not be so remarkable if it were not that Mr Johnson has not been much known in the past for an even temper and bland utterance: nor for what might be called Presidential “stature.” An acute and most experienced political observer, Theodore H. White, said of him in July. 1961: “When Lyndon B. Johnson is in good form and seen in the proper setting—say, at a small-town Masonic temple, at a dinner for small-town Southern Democrats, where the hot food is being served by the good Ladies of the Eastern Star—one can observe a master performance of native American political art. Yet when the same performance is transferred to a dinner in New York, or is delivered on television, it has no smack of Presidential quality about it. It is, sadly, what is called in the cynical North ‘cornball’.” No “Cornball” But there was nothing remotely “cornball” about this latest performance of Mr Johnson’s He was, perhaps, a little homely (in a massively authoritative way) and used straightforward and simple language, with none of the elegance and sly wit that used to characterise President Kennedy’s impromptu television remarks. But “cornball,” never. There has clearly been a change in Lyndon Johnson

since that terrible Friday in November. And it is impossible not to speculate about the reasons for it. They seem to be at least two, and one less charitable, in a sense, than the r'her. The first, less charitable, one, is that President Johnson is a deeply political animal. (This phrase gives him no offence: it was used about him, without causing any reaction, by one of his television interviewers). Given this, it seems reasonable to assume that he must have realised, both consciously and intuitively, that he could not remotely hope to emulate the style of the man whom he replaced in such tragic circumstances: and that, more important, an immediately frightened and even now still disturbed America would seek in its leadership the qualities of steady, paternal firmness and reasonableness that would reasure both the nation and the world at large that everything was not lost. Inspired Moment Thus it was, in his early speeches, that President Johnson did not seem entirely at ease with the graceful clarity, the delicate play of thesis and anithesis, that President Kennedy’s speechwriter injected into his texts. In his first State of the Union message, for example, President Johnson was most obviously and most effectively himself when he discarded sophistication and m a quiet voice recited the words of “America, the Beautiful” something President Kennedy would never even have attempted. Thus it is even now that the President seems deliberately to be putting aside anything which might smack of contrivance of flamboyance. Asked in the television interview about finding a slogan to express the aims and philosophy of himself or his Administration, he rejected the stirring visions of the “New Deal” or “The New Frontier.” In what appeared to be the

only real flash of inspiration in the whole hour, he said: “I suppose we all want a Better Deal, don’t we?” This seemed somehow to sum up the whole tenor of the discussion. “Things are not really too bad. All things considered, there is no need for radical change. It’s just that everyone the world over should be getting a better deal.”

This may be hardly inspiring, but it is certainly unexceptionable, to labour, to industry, the rich, the poor, the Negro, the free and the enslaved.