THE LAST OF THE BREED NEW-TYPE AMERICAN WILL FOLLOW LYNDON JOHNSON

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31659, 20 April 1968, Page 12

THE LAST OF THE BREED NEW-TYPE AMERICAN WILL FOLLOW LYNDON JOHNSON

[By

Brian Beedham,

Foreign Editor of the "economist"!

It may be that when history comes to write its final judgment on Lyndon. Johnson it will say that he never had a chance. It is not that he is out of touch with the problems of the times: in many ways he has seen very clearly what needs to be done to get the United States through the last third of the twentieth century. His trouble is that he has been unable to explain himself to the majority of his countrymen, because there is an unbridgeable gap between his sort of American and the sort of people that most Americans have now become.

This is what he has admitted by his decision to abandon the Presidency. The man who is elected in his place next November may well continue the substance of many of Lyndon Johnson’s policies, even his policy in Asia. What has made Mr Johnson bow out is the realisation that if these policies are to survive someone else will have to explain them. Johnson has failed to communicate with the American people. Pioneer Qualities The fact is that, in both his virtues and his vices, Lyndon Johnson represents a different America from the place that most of today’s Americans see around them. His virtues are courage, willpower and inarticulate endurance. His vices are the other side of the same coin. He is obstinate, he is as unsubtle as old leather, and he can be brutal. These are the qualities that are bred in a people who have had to open up a country and master the new land. They are the qualities of the frontiersman and the -homesteader: of men who have had to dominate their environment or be broken by it. It is no accident that Lyndon Johnson comes from the place where the old South and the old West meet. This I is the place where the virtues and vices of the frontier have lasted longest because the conditions that created them have lastest longest there too. If there ever was such a thing as a log-cabin President, Lyndon Johnson is the last of them. Industrial Society The qualities that shaped a nation go on influencing it for a generation or more after it has moved into a new stage of its history. The Americans went on admiring the virtues of the frontier period—and to some extent behaving as if they were still living in it —long after the United States had become a predominantly industrial society. They gave a last tip of their bat to the older America when they reelected Harry Truman against all the odds in 1948. Harry Truman was the frontier sort too. But a time comes when the page is turned and the nation changes its own picture of itself. This is what has happened in the United States. The greatest majority of Americans now live in cities and make their living in industry or the service trades. Nearly half of their children are receiving some form of college education. The Americans have become an urban, middle-class people, rather intellectual and rather introspective. They are even farther removed from the men who opened up their country than the average European is. Changed Problems i Their most important probI lem is not the problem of the (pioneers, which was to establish the mastery of humans over the natural environment. The new problem of contemporary America is to master the mechanisms that were created to do this: above all the city and the industrial society. It is these, not the the empty land, that are now challenging man’s sense of identity. Between this new sort of American and a man like Mr Johnson there is something close to total incomprehension. This is why Lyndon Johnson has never been able to make contact with the majority of his countrymen. It will doubtless be said of Mr Johnson, rather as the English said of Charles I after they executed him, that nothing in his Presidency so

became him as the leaving of it. That would be cruel, and inaccurate. Courage And Honour President Johnsoi achieved a number of major domestic reforms at the beginning of his term. He reacted to the challenge in Asia in the way that was to be expected of the man, and he would be looking no better now if he had avoided the challenge: the Indo-Chinese states would already have been in communist hands. If he has failed to

beat General Giap, it would be a bold man who would say that another President would have succeeded.

There is much courage and honour in Lyndon Johnson. It will take the historians to assess him properly, for they may understand him better than many of today's Americans do. The one thing that Is almost certain is that we shall not see his sort in the White House again. There are quite a lot of people, here in Europe too, who recognise that with mixed feelings.