The ugly American
AMERICA FERDINAND MOUNT
New York—During a recent coast-to-coast odyssey, I idly ventured the proposition that Lyndon Johnson is the most unpopular Presi- dent of modern times. Whether on radio and television, on campus or the golf course, round the cocktail cabinet or in the coffee shop, never a voice was raised in dissent. Not merely did nobody reveal any personal enthusiasm for the President, nobody followed the usual practice of denouncing his admirers as communists, fascists, homosexuals, etc. With Johnson there are apparently no admirers to belabour. This is extraordinary, for normally there is no public figure so fatuous or so wicked that some people will not say that he's not such a fool as he looks or that he is kind to beagles. But Mr Johnson has effected a transition from consensus to non- sensus in a bare two years which is remarkable, even granted the traditional fickleness of the citizenry.
The President does not help his cause by the hefty dose of old-fashioned fibbing that he throws into the cauldron. The appointment of a new ambassador to Japan or of a new White House aide, the building of a fence along the demilitarised zone in Vietnam, the-bombing of new targets in North Vietnam—all have been strenuously denied by official or unofficial White House sources. All have come to pass. When Lyndon scratches his ear, he's telling the truth, when he raises his eyebrow he's telling the truth, when he moves his lips, he's lying, goes the current Washington wisecrack.
All governments have lied thus since the dawn of double-talk. Richard Rovere says that while it is possible, even likely, that the Johnson administration resorts to deception more fre- quently than any of its American predecessors, 'the chances are that the present administration would come in first by no more than a nose, or by a length or two at most.' Yet there remains one serious deception of the public for which the President is directly responsible, and which, as so often, has rebounded. Johnson has fre- quently revealed in private his belief that 'we are going to be there (South-East Asia) a very long time'—that this is a ten or fifteen year job. His advisers echo that judgment. Yet pub- lic statements about the progress of the war have rarely reflected such caution and fore- sight. By implanting in the American people the idea that this was an easier war to win than in fact it is, he has intensified the collective frustration inevitable in a war which has already lasted longer than the American in- volvement in the Second World War.
Yet some Presidents could turn even these frustrations to good account by retailing their moral and physical struggles—that tally of sleepless nights, of tears shed for the fallen, of eighteen-hour working days. Lyndon Johnson spares us none of this schmaltz. But even his self-proclaimed sortie with Luci to a Catholic church in search of spiritual refresh- ment fails to stir the imagination. Nobody really cares where he goes.. .. In his colloquies with his beagles, our first thoughts are for the welfare of the dogs.
Commentators usually explain all this in terms of style. They contrast Johnson's Texas twang with Kennedy's Bostonian, though to a supercili- ous British ear both sound awful, and to the vast majority of Americans probably equally strange. Then it is said that under Johnson presidential prose has sunk to a new low. Untrue. Many of Johnson's speeches are decently written (speech to Congress, 15 March, 1965, speech in San Antonio, Texas, 29 September, 1967) and cer- tainly bear comparison with Kennedy's ask-not- what-your-country stuff. Johnson makes sense at his press conferences, his grammar being a great improvement on Eisenhower's. Johnson's preference for Fred Waring over Pablo Casals is surely sympathetic. To stage a selection from American musicals with the audience joining in is more truly representative of American culture than to make frozen-faced aides sit on little gilt chairs and listen to Mozart, which is done better in Salzburg. Harry Truman certainly got away with the display of such unaffected tastes.
Let us be frank. 'Style' is a cissy circumlocu- tion for what Johnson has not got. The all too plain fact is that LBJ is ugly, certainly the ugliest president since Hoover, perhaps the ugliest of the century. Dick Van Dyke is reported to be playing JFK in a new movie. For LBJ you would need a combination of Karl Malden and Boris Karloff. That sinister arma- dillo smile is worlds away from Ike's epidemic- ally contagious grin. Johnson's brow achieves height without nobility, like the Prudential building in Chicago. And his beady eyes seem to be scurrying to hide behind his squashed vulture's nose. When Johnson was having his portrait painted last year, he complained that one of his ears had been drawn too large. The artist said huffily—as artists will—that he was only mirroring reality. The Freud-Bullitt study of Woodrow Wilson records an exactly similar story about a Wilson portrait. Freud-Bullitt of course used the anecdote to prove that Wilson was crazy. Johnson critics have used the story to argue LBJ'S megalomaniac vanity. The critics are wrong and the President is right.
Physical attractiveness has always played a great role in democratic choice, never more so than today. The story of the Kennedy-Nixon TV debates is now a communications cliché. But perhaps the puritan heritage has hampered a full flowering of the thesis. We discuss the glamour of the Kennedy family, the asset of a pretty wife. We are not yet quite emancipated enough to dis- cuss the sexual attraction of the candidate him- self as more than a side-issue. For we like to think that such things as strength of character, intelligence, knowledge of the issues, play a greater part in the voter's mind than in fact they do. The voters like to think so too. But it is hard to think of any striking personal triumph in recent elections against or in advance of the national trend which has not owed much to good looks (Reagan, Percy, Lindsay, Robert Kennedy et al). Lyndon Johnson himself is the exception whose special circumstances prove the rule.
It should be noted that 1964 was also a big exception to the pattern of Johnson's own career which has been built on deals within wheels, on the delivery of bloc votes and allegedly on rigged ballots. For all the pressing of the flesh and the talk of 'the folks you was raised with,' the folks never flooded him with their affection, witness his eighty-seven-vote squeak in to the Senate in 1948 and the attendant sobriquet of Landslide Lyndon. He has in fact never been a great vote-getter, still less beloved by the popu- lace. The assassination of Kennedy momentarily gave Johnson a stature which, if not heroic, was something that many people could look up to— like Nestor counselling the Greeks after the death of Achilles. Now that great drama has faded. We return to normal service and the screen shows an unlovely President meshed in an unlovely messy war where there is no simple purpose like the destruction of Nazism, no great event like D-Day or Iwo Jima. At home, the romantic pageant of the civil rights movement has degenerated into senseless burning, looting and rioting. The once acquiescent Great Society Congress is fractious and bitter. No wonder there is a nonsensus.
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