Back to the valley
AMERICA MURRAY KEMPTON
His little defects, as always, look larger than his substantial virtues. His response to the urban disorders was temperate and farseeing, and he could hardly be blamed if it did not look like immediately making them fly away. But he could be blamed for having seized so greedily on the one chance for partisan advantage they suggested to him. Arnagansett, L 1—The President appears to have entered one of his valleys, which seem each time a little longer and a little lower as his peaks are ever less steep.
He had sent Federal troops to relieve Detroit with considerable reluctance; his old friend, J. Edgar Hoover, now restored to much of his former authority, had argued strongly that, if the President supersedes the local police power anywhere, he will soon find himself at the unfruitful and seldom glorious business of pur- suing criminals everywhere. Having done what he most wanted to avoid doing, Mr Johnson could not avoid blaming a Republican for the necessity; in the five minutes of the announce- ment of his unhappy decision, he said four times that he had acted only because Governor Rom- ney of Michigan had confessed himself unable to restore order and had begged his help.
And so the aftermath of the troubles, which the President had hoped would be given over to prayer and preparation to avoid their future recurrence, was instead clouded over by a most unattractive quarrel between Governor Romney, speaking for himself, and the President, speaking through his subordinates, over whose fault it all was. Mr Johnson fell back on that melan- choly and disagreeable assertion of official dig- nity which is so often his resource in troubles occasioned by a lapse in personal dignity. 'I don't think anything is to be gained trying to justify or explain,' he told his press confer- ence in the course of a half-hour largely given over to long questions citing doubts about his judgment raised by a range of critics running from U Thant to fifty-one former delegates to recent conventions of the Democratic party, and short Presidential answers arguing that it is profitless to quarrel in times like these.
Still, be will quarrel when the fever is upon him, and with insufficient discrimination; it is such little defects that cripple him. He cannot often enough rise above the training in petty shifts, partisan vigilance and the snatch for small advantages that he needed to stay alive in Texas politics. He consoles himself in gloomy hours like these with the recollection of how President Truman, in far worse apparent cir- cumstances, overcame his enemies in the 1948 election. But Mr Truman knew the difference in occasion, being sometimes small in small matters but almost always large in great Ones. Mr Johnson seems endowed with no Such sense of proportion, and, without it, he damaged himself last week far more than he deserted, both as the politician he has to be and as the statesman he so genuinely yearns to be. We are, after all, in a situation rather unique in the history of developed and prosperous nations, one which may be insoluble even if all sensible Ameri,:ans are united and which could very well be hopeless if they break into partisan quarrel.
America may be the first country to reach that stage of advancement where its homeland is an empire whose colonial problems are interior ones. The negro troops in Vietnam, more and more-soldiers for life, perform more and more like American Gurkhas while the negroes in the cities act more and more like American Algerians. The weight of opinion, as in enlightened colonial countries, is still in favour of responding by concession; all the same, we are now dealing with the situation when the colonial power, each time it concedes something, reveals more clearly that it cannot grant everything.
Moreover this is not a situation that can be fobbed off with self-determination—it is thus a problem quite beyond human experience, or any capacity we have shown so far to engage it. The only thing that is truly hopeful is our attitude up to now; the urge to harsh repression is not so far a dangerous distraction; the most general response has been to notice the failure of our promise. This may, to be sure, be only that piety which is the most decent clothing for indifference. Still, it does suggest that the Presi- dent has a large, if uneasy, political centre that he can put to work for some good.
That centre, however, could diminish dan- gerously unless he can suspend all hostilities with the moderate Republicans, of whom Governor Romney is a generally worthy rep- resentative. When the Republicans in Congress sought to blame the President for the disorders, there were gratifying demands for a halt to partisanship from moderates like Governor Rockefeller and Senator Morton of Kentucky.
'So far 6 per cent want you to resign, 43 per cent want you to _stay on, and 51 per cent want me to resign!'
Unfortunately the President, while too sensible to seek to achieve consensus by calling us to war upon the blacks, is not always sensible enough to approach it by striving to be the moderate of all the people. The posture of quarrelling with our public evils.rather than the other party's public men is the one to which he cannot rise without dreadful effort or with sufficient consistency. Most of the time he acts well, but too much of the time he conducts himself badly.
It is our misfortune, as much as his, that during a period when we are so terribly afflicted by our inability to order the Vietcong abroad or the negro at home, we seem driven more often to think about the results of these mis- fortunes on our politics rather than about the wounds they inflict upon our society. Mr John- son is judged to have been damaged by the latest events simply by having failed to measure up to the posture they required. More and more, the loss of confidence seems to be in his person rather than his policies. The other day, for the first time, the Gallup Poll showed a majority of Americans dissatisfied with the way he manages the Vietnam war. The loss of confidence would seem to be in the man; if that is so, this unfor- tunate time in our history can only be made worse by the public decision that all efforts to put it right may as well be suspended for the eighteen months we will have to wait before another director can take his place.
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