14 FEBRUARY 1964, Page 9

Mr. Johnson, Alas

From MURRAY KEMPTON

-WASHINGTON

THEODORE SORENSON, whose mind Mr. Ken- nedy seems to have thought the most useful, and Arthur Schlesinger, whose range Mr. Ken- nedy seems to have thought the most enjoyable among his intimate advisers, have departed President Johnson's service. The tone of their farewell notes was eminently correct; but to at least one reader—concededly one over-prone to bring his own feelings to the interpretation of the written words of other men--each seemed strikingly without warmth.

When he began, President Johnson thought that he wanted to keep Mr. Kennedy's domestic establishment side by side in the White House with his own. That, of course,,was an aspiration unrelated to the nature of things. Still, Mr. Johnson indulged it. His rise• in the world has demanded from him such compulsive concen- tration on the proposition that every man has a material need which, once found, can be satis- fied as to leave him insensitive to the fact that every man also has a disposition which must be considered. One wishes for Mr. Johnson— although one doubts if it enters his head to wish it for himself—that he were the sort of employer whose servants miss his person when they leave him.

Partings like Sorenson's and Schlesinger's are inevitable when a command changes, of course; the condition that the old establishment adjusts badly to the new is never entirely the fault of the new. There may even be a case for Goneril, let alone Mr. Johnson. To watch Mr. Johnson close seems, however, to arouse the same sad reflection that watching Mr. Johnson at a dis- tance does: the thing that everyone of us has lost in Mr. Kennedy, we know now too late, is not so much the hope of glory as the means of grace.

Mr. Kennedy, as an instance, made it his prac- tice, from nature more than from policy, to leave the door to his office cracked a little as a. signal that any personal assistant who felt the need to talk to him might walk right in. Presi- dent Johnson, upon his accession, told the sur- vivors that his door would always be open to them. A few weeks ago, one Kennedy relict, having a problem and seeing the executive door cracked as of old, walked in as of old. Mr. John- son looked up from his desk and said, 'How did You get in here?' in a voice where the sense that he had been trespassed upon had quite driven away the consideration that he might only have been misunderstood. His victim fled to his own office, more affronted than frightened. He re- mains in the White House still, faithful to his duty, but hardly at ease with its personal-object. To work for Mr. Johnson, one thinks, must be rather like being a Negro in our Northern States: the Negro begins taking the North at its word; he learns, after a while, that he will never quite know what to expect; he adjusts at last by limiting himself to situations already tested and found safe; from such necessities, respect is pos- sible, but hardly affection.

The stream of personal anecdotes continues, fleshening and, I am afraid, further coarsening the President's image, and one wishes they would stop. Most of them are recounted in tones of awe, some with amusement, almost none with genuine affection. When Mr. Johnson thinks to be kind to an inferior, he seems almost as brutal as when he needs to be harsh. There is the story of the young journalist, whose father is a colleague of infinite authority, and whose paper sent him to Texas. President Johnson thought to do him a service and invited his parents and him to a personal talk; in its middle, he picked up the telephone and called the young man's employer and said that `your man is here with me, and he's a fine boy and I hope you appreciate him and, here he is, why don't you talk to him?' At which he handed the telephone to poor D, while poor D's poor publisher must have wondered just who D was, and they stam- mered back and forth to one another. Anyone who hears that anecdote has to wonder just what service the President's action could do a young man which would be worth that embarrassment.

Let me confess, then, that I respect the Presi- dent of the United States and that his perfor- mance so far gives me every reason to admire him as an instrument, but that I have abandoned the hope of ever really liking Lyndon B. John- son. I hope that is said in sadness rather than in ill-nature; and I hope it is said responsibly and as a confession rather than a judgment; it would be entirely inexcusable to say such a thing in a house of strangers unless it were said in singularly personal terms, both as a warning of bias and as the justification of the hope that, only when this is said, will it be possible to proceed thereafter to give Mr. Johnson the due that is his, even after one has accepted the sense that his due does not include affection.

He has made a full recovery from the humiliation of the three years he was in Mr. Kennedy's shadow and from the first week of shock at the circumstances of his accession. The history of the United States is the safer for that

recovery; it would be irresponsible to regret that the cure has been so entire that Mr. Johnson seems just what he was when he was the great presence of the Senate; in private matters, in- secure without being humble, hearty without being warm, the hand that slaps the back never withheld, the heart that eases the soul seldom tendered, a man more just than kind. All that leaves him still with that compulsion to see himself great, if not greatly good, and his country great, and also greatly good; and, if he were a more attractive man, we might be dealing with a far more unfortunate object, a President grown gentler because those qualities had been broken in him. To watch the House of Representatives begin its part in passing the Civil Rights law was to appreciate again Mr. Johnson's qualities as orchestrator. The Democrats of the North were careful to be pleasant; and the Democrats of the South were resigned to accept. Those who gave the pill and those who knew they had to swallow it were alike Johnsonians.

It is an order imposed, less by agreement of conscience or acceptance of history, than by the calculated use of individual self-interests. But we have endured three months now of the shock of the damage that disorder can do us; whether we like the man who brings it to us is less im- portant than the immense gift he has brought.