The last days of LBJ

AMERICA

JOHN GRAHAM

Washington—The Romans had a word for it. They called it auctoritas. But they did not mean by that what we usually mean by authority. They did not mean any technical ability a man might have, or any legal or constitutional power; they meant instead what is in the last resort the greatest power an individual can pos- sess: the power to get other people to do what you want them to do.

It is not a measurable thing, this 'authority,' and it goes by many names. It is called presence, prestige, influence, personality, charisma, and many other things. It derives partly from tangible strength (such as the control of an army), partly from intangible but outward forces (such as the holding of an office like the presidency), and partly from inner forces, such as the ability to persuade and to command respect. It is the miracle ingredient that every President of the United States must have.

Lyndon Johnson had it, and he had it in a very big way indeed after the election of 1964, when he won the presidency in his own right by the second biggest landslide in America's history. Since then, his fortunes have gone into the most extraordinary reverse and be has now lost virtually every shred of it.

Consider the effects of this fall. It was always clear that President Johnson would have a diffi- cult time with the nineteenth congress. But the battering he has received in the past two years, and the evisceration of his programmes, have been almost unbelievable, when you remember that he was considered a congressional wizard par excellence. For instance it took a year and a half, and an international crisis of major dimensions, to persuade Congress to raise taxes, and even then the White House had to pay a heavy price.

The list of failures in the last six months alone is truly extraordinary. Despite the terrible murders of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, President Johnson has been unable to get an effective gun control law passed. Many lesser pieces of legislation—but pieces which the White House was particularly keen on—were either totally ignored or cut to ribbons. The Congress made a mockery of the foreign aid Bill; it put aside completely the International Development Authority replenishment; it re- duced all President Johnson's favourite Great Society programmes, setting back the war on poverty and delaying the real start to the job of rebuilding the cities; it refused to ratify the non-proliferation treaty. Finally it baulked at one of the traditional perks of the presidency, the right to appoint judges to the Supreme Court. Probably few items on the presidential agenda were dearer to Mr Johnson's heart than getting Mr Abe Fortas appointed as Chief Justice, and the course of that fiasco is pretty well known. The last redoubt of hope was stormed by one of the President's oldest friends, Senator Dirksen. The President wanted an old Texan friend, Mr Homer Thornberry, to be on the Supreme Court; the Senate would not have it. He wanted another old Texan friend, Mr Barefoot Sanders, to become a Federal Judge; the Senate refused even to consider the nomina- tion. The presidential embrace had become the kiss of death.

What of the mood of the country? It would

be grossly unfair to blame any man, especially President Johnson, for the riot and destruction in the slums; on the other hand, the President must lead the people. He must inspire them with hope and dissipate despair, he must unite and construct. It may be a simplistic notion, and it may be a lot to ask of one man. But the presi- dency does ask a lot of one man.

President Johnson no longer had it to give. The worst outbreaks could be prevented by massive shows of force, and they were thus pre- vented, and rightly. The President could go on television with an appeal for reason, but his own enormous unpopularity and the greater daring of the violent elements in society made it impossible for him even to appear in public. His authority had vanished.

All this time there was the war in Vietnam, which became more and more unpopular at home and abroad, and more and more destruc- tive at home and abroad. Political, and mili- tary reputations were shattered, and President Johnson was suddenly almost alone. The best men in the Cabinet, Robert McNamara and John Gardner, left because of the war; Arthur Goldberg left the United 'Nations. Politicians all over started to find that opposition to the war was a political asset and not a liability.

There.is no need now to chronicle the grow- ing impatience with the war or the reasons for the collapse of Johnson's 'consensus,' but there is a need to find out exactly what President Johnson did on 31 March. 'On that day he announced that he was not a candidate for re• election, and that he would devote all. his re- maining energies to the quest for peace. The first half of this was certainly true, but was the second half? The answer to this question is the key to the history of 1968.

Johnson's position was that he was taking the noble, statesmanlike approach. The most urgent job facing the President of the USA was to end the war, and the only way to convince the enemy that he was in earnest was to take himself out of politics. President Johnson has always, in addition, been deeply concerned with history, and with his place in history, and the only way to recover the lost ground was to end the war as a magnificent climax to his presidency, against which some of the other mistakes would be forgotten or forgiven. This is what we were supposed to believe. But I, for one, am not convinced. There are two or

three things wrong with this explanation.

Firstly, the announcement came just before the Wisconsin primary, in which President Johnson

was beaten by Senator McCarthy. There was

plenty of evidence before the primary that McCarthy might win, and that at best the Presi- dent could expect a narrow victory. Now Mr Johnson is a proud man, and the taste of de- feat, especially defeat at the hands of a man like Senator McCarthy, is bitter. President Johnson must have known that he could get the Democratic nomination if he wanted it—it is almost impossible to deny the nomination to as incumbent President. But he may have cal• culated that he could not beat the Republican candidate for the presidency. It is unthinkable that Mr Johnson would have run a big risk of defeat only four years after his massive victors'' This suggests that a noble desire to end the war may not have been the prime motivation for the 31 March position. I am quite sure that

Mr Johnson wants peace and that he is dis- tressed at not being able to get it. But I find the straightforward profession of purpose diffi-

cult to credit in such a complicated man. It is also difficult to see the peace effort of the last seven months as a total effort. Would it really have been difficult to stop the bombing and see what the other side did? For three weeks now there has been an intensive effort to quicken the peace momentum, and nothing has come of it. It is still perfectly possible that President Johnson really will make some arrangement with Ho Chi Minh, but it is less likely with each day that passes. It may also be sobering to recall that Johnson is the man who said he was not about to be the first President of America to lose a war, and whatever arrangement he makes with Hanoi will hardly go down in the history books as a signal victory..

Besides, there is a logical difficulty here. By taking the noble, above-politics stance, Presi- dent Johnson arguably threw away the only chance he had of making peace. He announced to the world that he was deliberately diminish- ing his power, that it would almost vanish after 5 November, and vanish completely in January. His influence with Hanoi derived in part from the thought that he might be President of the U.S.1 for another four years. Why sit down to play poker after throwing away your ace?

This is especially difficult to believe of a man uho has all his life shown an unusual under- standing of the basis of power. If it does happen to be true, then one is forced to the conclusion that a radical change took place in President Johnson after he got to the White House. a change which could be traced to the 1964 land- slide. That election gave Johnson a huge poli- tical base. He had the Congress in his pocket. and a wide popular following. He enjoyed colossal authority, and he started to exercise it.

The very size of his, support led him into error. He started to take it for granted, and impose crude solutions rather than rely on the subtle manipulation he was so famous for. He started to bomb North Vietnam, and he started to ride roughly over Congress. As Harold i Wilson discovered with Rhodesia, if you bully a little country it won't necessarily fall over and say sorry. Vietnam did not fall over for Presi- dent Johnson, and neither did the Congress. Both started fighting back. Consensus col- lapsed, unravelling with it the fabric of Mr Johnson's authority.

The result, visible now, is a disappointed and frustrated man. For a time he was plain Id-fashioned bad-tempered, and Hubert umphrey bore the brunt of this earlier in the ear. It seemed that Johnson was doing all he ould to prevent Humphrey from winning the residential race. Now everything has changed, nd Johnson has decided to go all out for umphrey and attack Richard Nixon—he de- vered three separate attacks in two days last eekend. He was angry at Nixon for what he onsidered ugly and unfair charges of a security ap, and he cried: let the message go out that e best hope for a better America is Hubert umphrey.' Well, Humphrey may be elected and the resident may get his peace, though the odds are inst both. Even so, President Johnson can- escape the sense of incompletion, the talgia for what was and the regret for what .ght have been, as he packs his bags for exas. The judgment of history will no doubt kinder on him than that of his contem- poraries. The war is bound to end some day, and the anger it induces will be blunted. People will remember the good things about Lyndon B. Johnson's presidency, and there are many of them. He did more to raise America's stan- dards of education and health than any man before him. He did more for the Negro than any other President.

But the judgment of history may not come in time for him to hear it, and much as he

loves his ranch in Texas, for a man who has spent so much of his time in Washington and who has to leave without doing what he wanted to do, the leaving must be sad indeed. I suppose the one most important thing the President has to do is to lead the people, and when it really mattered Lyndon Johnson could not lead the American people. His high-handed style had alienated them. The Greeks had a word for it too. They called it hubris.