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                                                                              ╚January 5, 1968

Man of the Year:Lyndon Baines Johnson

The Paradox of Power



    Even if the television tube and a ubiquitous Texan had yet
to be conceived, the President of the U.S. in the latter third
of the 20th century would almost certainly be the world's most
exhaustively scrutinized, analyzed and criticized figure. As it
is, the power of his office and the jovial Executive's visage
and voice are available for instant dissection from Baghdad to
Bangkok, from factory cafeteria to family living room. Depending
on the man and the moment, he may come across as heavy or hero,
leader or pleader, preacher or teacher. Whatever his role, in
the age of instant communications he inevitably seems so close
that the viewer can almost reach out, pluck his sleeve and
complain: "Say, Mr. President, what about prices? Napalm? The
draft?"

    For Lyndon Johnson's 200 million countrymen, the year
produced an unprecedented crop of complaints, based largely on
the two great crises that came into confluence. Abroad, there
was the war in Viet Nam, possibly the most unpopular conflict
in the nation's history and the largest ever waged without
specific congressional consent. At home, the Negro, more aware
than ever of the distance he has yet to travel toward full
citizenship, vented his impatience in riots that rent 70 cities
in a summer of bloodshed and pillage. The U.S. was vexed as well
by violence in the streets, rising costs, youthful
rebelliousness, pollution of air and water and the myriad other
maladies of a post-industrial society that is growing ever more
bewilderingly urbanized, ungovernable and impersonal.

    Sense of Impotence. It was, for many Americans, an end of
innocence. The U.S. was still the world's pre-eminent power,
still reveled in the accouterments of prosperity, still enjoyed
a standard of living far more abundant than that of any other
civilization. But then 1967 awakened many of its citizens to the
fact that conscienceless affluence can not only despoil the
environment and drive a deprived underclass to the brink of
rebellion; it can also pervade society with a sense of impotence
and bring on a loss of unifying purpose.

    With so many problems flowing together, the nation was
battered by a flood tide of frustration and anxiety. A doubt
that in the past had rarely been articulated or even felt crept
into the American consciousness: Is the U.S., after all, as
fallible in its aims and unsure of its answers as any other
great power? Can -- and should -- the Viet Nam war be won? Can
the nation simultaneously allay poverty, widen opportunity,
eradicate racism, make its cities habitable and its laws
uniformly just? Or will it have to jettison urgent social
objectives at home for stern and insistent commitments abroad?

    It was increasingly clear that the attainment of all these
elusive goals would require, above all, a quality that Americans
have always found difficult to cultivate: patience. Yet, as the
National Committee for an Effective Congress declared last week,
with no exaggeration intended, "America has experienced two
great internal crises in her history: the Civil War and the
economic Depression of the 1930s. The country may now be on the
brink of a third trauma, a depression of the national spirit."

    More than ever before in an era of material well-being, the
nation's discontent was focused upon its President. The man in
the White House is at once the chief repository of the nation's
aspirations and the supreme scapegoat for its frustrations. As
such, Lyndon Johnson was the topic of TV talk shows, and
cocktail-party conversations, the obsession of pundits and
politicians at home and abroad, of businessmen and scholars,
cartoonists and ordinary citizens throughout 1967. Inescapably,
he was the Man of the Year.

    Often, the 36th President called to mind the Duke of Kent's
lament for King Lear: "A good man's fortunes may grow out at the
heels." Whether Johnson was a good man to begin with is disputed
by many of his critics, but his tribulations were sufficient to
deter any man of lesser fortitude -- or obstinacy. Week by week,
his popularity (as judged by polls that invite a
disproportionate number of negative answers: e.g., "Do you
approve of how the President is doing his job?") plummeted,
reaching a low of 38% in October, where once he had basked in
the approval of 80% of the nation (at year's end, however,
Gallup showed him up to 46%). Congress, only recently scorned
as a "rubber stamp," turned around and began stomping on him.

    Caesar & Caligula. Rarely had the voices of dissent been
raised so loud or carried so far, or trained on so many issues.
The young formed the sword's point of protest -- students on a
thousand campuses, Negroes in a hundred ghettos, hippies in
their psychedelic enclaves. But there was hardly a segment of
society that seemed immune to the disaffection. Housewives were
alarmed by growing grocery bills, farmers by tumbling prices for
their produce, parents by their alienated children, city dweller
by the senseless violence around them.

    It was sometimes hard to tell whether the rancor aroused
by Johnson stemmed from his policies or his personality. An
immensely complex, contradictory and occasionally downright
unpleasant man, he has never managed to attract the insulating
layer of loyalty that a Roosevelt or a Truman, however
beleaguered, could fall back on. Consequently, when things began
to go wrong, he had few defenders and all too many critics.

    Whenever he left his desk and sallied forth among the
people who only three years ago gave him the greatest outpouring
of votes in history, he attracted angry pickets. Hardly a day
passed without a contumelious attack. Wherever he went, from a
speaking engagement in Los Angeles to a cardinal's funeral in
Manhattan he was dogged by shouts of "Murderer!" and "War
Criminal!" or chants of "Hey, hey, L.B.J., how many kids did you
kill today?" He was likened to Caesar, Caligula and Mussolini.

    Notable Dropout. The very men who most fervently endorsed
his domestic programs were largely those who most passionately
deplored his commitment in Viet Nam. They felt that, as Yale
Economist James Tobin, a former presidential advisor, put it,
"the butter to be sacrificed because of the war always turns out
to be the margarine of the poor." The President appeared to have
broken finally with such Democratic stalwarts as Senate Foreign
Relations Committee Chairman J. William Fulbright, New York's
Senator Robert Kennedy and Minnesota's Senator Eugene McCarthy.
Much of the anger directed at Johnson spilled over onto Vice
President Hubert Humphrey as well, largely because of his
unwavering support of the Viet Nam war and of the feeling among
his erstwhile friends in the Americans for Democratic Action
that he has "deserted" them. The result has been to diminish
drastically Humphrey's hopes of ever succeeding Johnson on his
own.

    Democrats abandoned the President in droves, forming Dump
L.B.J. movements or rallying behind Gene McCarthy as an
alternative for 1968. Said Michigan's former Democratic State
Chairman Zoltan Ferency, who quit over Johnson's war policies:
"The youth, the academicians, the women, the intellectuals --
they are dropping out of politics, they are turned off." A
notable dropout was liberal Pundit Walter Lippmann, long since
disaffected with L.B.J., who went so far as to declare that it
would be in the "national interest" for the Johnson Democratic
Party to "be ousted by a rejuvenated Republican Party." Notes
TIME'S Washington Bureau Chief John L. Steele: "Historical
generalizations are dangerous, but one is tempted to suggest
that not even Lincoln -- who had to fight a civil war to
preserve the Union -- faced such internal questioning, such
intense and wide-ranging dissent as did Lyndon Johnson in 1967."

    Flubdubs & Mollycoddles. Name calling is a time-honored
sport among Americans where their Presidents are concerned.
George Washington was called a crook and the "stepfather of his
country." It was said of John Adams that "the cloven foot is in
plain sight." Jefferson was berated as a mean-spirited
hypocrite, Jackson as a murderer and adulterer, Lincoln as a
baboon. With rare elegance, Teddy Roosevelt called Woodrow
Wilson "a Byzantine logothete (an emperor's bookkeeper) backed
by flubdubs and mollycoddles." When the Depression laid Hubert
Hoover low, newspapers were called "Hoover blankets," and a
"Hoover flag" was an empty pocket turned inside out.

    Johnson has fared worse than most, Black Power Apostle
Stokely Carmichael calls him a "hunky," a "buffoon," and a
"liar." Stokely's successor as head of the ill-named Student
Non-violent Coordinating Committee, H.Rap Brown, suggested that
the President -- and Lady Bird -- ought to be shot. In The
Accidental President, liberal Journalist Robert Sherrill
described the President as "treacherous, dishonest, manic-
aggressive, petty, spoiled." The outrageous play MacBird! called
him: "...this canker...This tyrant whose name alone
blisters our tongues...Villain, traitor, cur."

    In the Bunker. With so many harpoons filling the air,
Johnson prudently stuck to his bunker for much of the year. In
1966, he held 40 formal press conferences; in 1967, only 21. He
spent two months at the L.B.J. Ranch last year, and even in
Washington made himself scarce for long periods.

    Occasionally, Johnson would erupt, recalling the "whirlwind
President" of 1964. His popularity rating spurted when he met
with Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin at the Glassboro summit --
and impressed him as a man to be reckoned with. Johnson ended
one of the long silent spells with his now-famous "new look"
press conference, during which he prowled a makeshift stage in
the East Room of the White House like a restless tiger, exuding
confidence and control. Before an A.F.L.-C.I.O. convention in
December, he hit into the Republican "wooden soldiers of the
status quo" who were poleaxing his programs in Congress.

    Two weeks ago, he gave a dramatic demonstration of the
resources available to an American President -- and his
readiness to put them to use. On less than 24 hours notice, he
assembled an entourage of four jet planes and 300 people and
spent the next five days in a dizzying, 26,959-mile circuit of
the globe. The original reason for his cyclonic odyssey was to
attend services for Australia's Prime Minister Harold Holt.
Characteristically, Johnson transformed it into a microcosm of
his coming campaign.

    In Canberra, he buttonholed nine allied leaders for talks,
turning the somber occasion into an impromptu summit conference
on the war. In Viet Nam and Thailand, he showed one part of his
celebrated "two-fisted" approach, urging U.S. servicemen to
"give it to" the enemy. Karachi was a jet hop, skip and jump
away, so he stopped in to press the flesh with President Ayub
Khan, a difficult ally of late. Whisking in to Rome, he
unlimbered the other fist, the one that holds the olive branch,
assuring Pope Paul VI that "we will agree to any proposal that
would substitute the word and the vote for the knife and the
grenade in bringing an honorable peace to Viet Nam."

    When High Hopes Turn Sour. Johnson is acutely aware of how
much is expected of him as President -- and of the fact that,
in the eyes of many, he has fallen short. As Health, Education
and Welfare Secretary John Gardner indicated in a year-end
appraisal of "the alarming character of our domestic crisis,"
the President fell victim to "the bitterness and anger toward
our institutions that wells up when high hopes turn sour."
Johnson himself conceded early in the year: "In all candor, I
cannot recall a period that is in any way comparable to the one
we are living through today. It is a period that finds
exhilaration and frustration going hand in hand -- when great
accomplishments are often overshadowed by rapidly rising
expectations."

    As the months unfolded, frustration waxed relentlessly
and exhilaration waned. It was a time when the war was
escalating just as the problems of peace were intensifying, and
Johnson was badly buffeted by the conjunction of those two
powerful trends.

    In Viet Nam, the President increased the U.S. troop level
until it had passed the high-water mark of the Korean War
(472,800 men) and soared on toward 525,000, where it will
presumably level off this year. The big-unit war continued
decisively in favor of the allies, though the enemy shifted
to a strategy of mass assaults on exposed frontier positions
such as Dak To and Con Thien in hopes of bloodying a big U.S.
force and further eroding Stateside support of the war. American
casualties since the beginning of the war climbed well over the
100,000 mark, including 13,000 dead, while the monetary cost of
the war last year alone totaled $25 billion -- part of a $70
billion Defense budget that, in terms of the gross national
product, was 50% smaller than the Pentagon's expenditures in the
last year of the Korean War.

    There were encouraging improvements -- most notably in the
allies' military progress and in the legitimization of the South
Vietnamese government through elections -- but many Americans
doubted that they were worth the enormous expense. Even so,
Johnson at year's end still enjoyed the support of a fair-sized
majority of the U.S. for his middle course "between surrender
and annihilation."

    Hope & Anger. In the area of civil rights, Johnson fell
victim to his earlier successes. It was a classic case of
anticipation outpacing achievement. The bills that he got
through Congress in 1964 and 1965 all but completed the task of
bringing the Negro to legal parity with America's whites. But
progress, inevitably, was slower in the subtler and vastly more
difficult task of improving the Negro's lot in terms of income,
jobs, housing and education. For the nation's 21.5 million
Negroes, the result was a mercurial mood of "hope mixed with
anger" as FORTUNE reported this month.

    In Congress, Johnson was hobbled by the "stop, look and
listen" approach advocated by Senate Majority Leader Mike
Mansfield. Engorged with costly programs enacted by the 89th
Congress, the 90th cast a jaundiced eye on Johnson's new
requests. According to Congressional Quarterly, from the time
Johnson took office until the end of 1966, he got 655 of his
1,057 proposals enacted into law -- a sensational 62% average,
(By C.Q.'s reckoning, Dwight Eisenhower batted 46%, John F.
Kennedy only 39%.) But in 1967, Johnson was defeated on his tax-
surcharge, civil rights, anti-crime, East-West trade and
legislative-reorganization bills. Foreign aid was cut by a
record $1 billion, poverty funds by $300 million, model cities
by $350 million. The rent-supplements program was practically
shrunk out of existence -- from $40 million to $10 million.
Despite Congress's fractious mood, however, Johnson did get a
number of other bills past Capitol Hill's axmen, most notably:
expanded air-pollution control, a consular treaty with Moscow,
an outer-space treaty, the first meat-inspection program since
Upton Sinclair's exposes inspired a similar bill in 1906, and
a major increase in social security benefits.

    The economy was also a worry, even though the gross
national product neared the $800 billion mark and the nation's
uninterrupted expansion percolated into its 84th month, three
months longer than the old record. There were inflationary
signs, a big balance-of-payments deficit, pressure in the
dollar after Britain's devaluation of the pound. Economists
and politicians began talking about "profitless prosperity."
When Johnson asked belatedly for a 10% surcharge on income taxes
to damp down the supercharged economy, Arkansas Democrat Wilbur
Mills, Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, insisted
on an equivalent cut in federal spending that the President was
unwilling to make.

    Nuclear Imperative. Though often thwarted, Johnson was
hardly rendered ineffectual. Such are the powers of his office
at home and abroad that even at the nadir of his presidency, he
stirred complaints that he was becoming "King Lyndon."
Historians and Congressmen alike began wondering whether the
presidency had not grown too strong. Next month a group of
historians led by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. will meet in Manhattan
to consider that very subject. In the Senate, North Carolina
democrat Sam Ervin began an inquiry into the division of federal
powers, while Fulbright looked into the "overextension of
executive powers." (Power is a word uppermost in many a mind.
Fulbright published The Arrogance of Power, McCarthy The Limits
of Power and Journalist Theodore Draper The Abuse of Power
during 1967. Other studies included David Bazelon's Power in
America, Nicholas Demerath's Power, Presidents and Professors,
and Stokely Carmichael's Black Power.)

    What chiefly disquieted Capitol Hill as the fighting
dragged on was the fact that the U.S. has never formally
declared war on Viet Nam, and that Johnson never sought
congressional approval of the conflict beyond the Gulf of Tonkin
Resolution of 1964.

    Actually, the limits on the Chief Executive's power in
foreign affairs have always been ill-defined. When it comes to
warmaking, there are few formal checks and balances on a
President beyond his own judgement and character. On at least
125 occasions, U.S. Presidents have intervened abroad without
a congressional by-your-leave. Jefferson sought neither advice
nor consent when he dispatched a naval force to fight the
Barbary pirates in 1801. Neither did Polk when he skirmished
with the Mexicans in Texas, or Franklin Roosevelt when he sent
troops to Iceland in 1941, or Truman when he sent U.S. forces
into Korea in 1950, or Eisenhower in the Lebanon crisis, or
Kennedy at the Bay of Pigs. In modern times, the possibility of
nuclear conflict has made swift decision-making by the President
an imperative. Says Stanford's Historian Emeritus Edgar E.
Robinson: "The growth of the powers of the President in foreign
relations appears to be the most important phenomenon in modern
history, inasmuch as the exercise of those powers by four
Presidents in the past 20 years has determined developments
throughout the world."

    Nor is Johnson the sort of President who would be likely
to yield a jot or tittle of his authority. "The people of this
country did not elect me to this office to preside over its
erosion," he once declared. " And I intend to turn over this
office with all of its powers intact to the next man who sits
in this chair."

    Beyond the overriding power wielded by a U.S. President in
the nuclear age -- that of making war and peace -- is a grand
galaxy of functions, some defined by the Constitution, some
granted by tradition, some arrogated by the man in office. A
President is at once head of state and leader of his party,
Commander-in-Chief of the armed bureaucracy, leading legislator
and top diplomat, educator and economist, symbol and sage,
ribbon cutter and fence mender. Because of his role in shaping
legislation affecting the cities, in recent years he has also
become "the Chief Executive of Metropolis," as Williams
Political Scientist James MacGregor Burns puts it.

    Teacher-in-Chief. Nor is that all. Cornell Political
Scientist Clinton Rossiter once noted that the President must
also serve as a national "scoutmaster, Delphic oracle, hero of
the silver screen [today, that would read 'TV tube'] and father
of the multitudes." In addition, says Historian Sidney Hyman,
he must possess "animal energy, a physical capacity for long and
sustained attention to detail, the power to endure bores," as
well as "a will to decide," and a "sense of tragedy" that
results when men seek to do good, but inadvertently achieve evil
ends.

    What may well be the most important power of a President,
in the long run, is one that is neither redefined nor even
hinted at in the Constitution. "Presidential power," says
Political Scientist Richard Neustadt, Director of the Kennedy
Institute for Politics at Harvard, "is the power to persuade."
Or, as Stanford Historian Thomas A. Baily writes: "The
Commander-in-Chief is also the Teacher-in-Chief. If he is to get
the wheels to move and 'make things happen,' in Woodrow Wilson's
phrase, he must educate the people."

    Stirring Vision. In his application of naked power, Johnson
is an acknowledged virtuoso -- as his Viet Nam critics ruefully
concede. Despite thunderous criticism of his intervention in the
Dominican Republic, the President's swift application of
military strength followed by an intense diplomatic campaign
proved, in the end, a successful maneuver. He has also applied
indirect pressure with superb efficacy. Twice he used it to
avert a war over Cyprus. His historic hot-line exchange with
Kosygin during the Arab-Israeli War contained that conflict on
terms acceptable to both the U.S. and Russia. Johnson's artful
cajolery ended the rail crisis in 1964, and his masterful
manipulation of Congress in the early days of his presidency
helped him to clean up a log jam of domestic programs that had
been forming since the days of the New Deal. He has also proved
himself capable of remarkable restraint, particularly in the
face of Charles de Gaulle's persistent provocations.

    "It is when Johnson must educate the doubters to the wisdom
of his course that he runs into trouble," observes TIME White
House Correspondent Hugh Sidey. "Persuasion, education,
inspiration -- these form an area of power that may be in this
age almost more important than the constitutional authority,
Johnson is essentially a manager and a manipulator. He knows
where all the levers are and he knows how to use them. But when
he must, by the sheer force of his intellect and his
personality, develop that broad base of support essential to
moving the country, he often fail dismally."

    Even in this sphere he has succeeded magnificently on
occasion, his Great Society speech at Ann Arbor in 1964 offered
Americans a stirring vision. The moment in 1965 when he stood
before Congress and, in a televised appeal for passage of his
voting-rights bill, cast his lot for the Negro's demand for
equality by declaring "We shall overcome," was the emotional
high point of his presidency to date. His speech at Howard
University in June 1965, calling on Americans "to shatter
forever not only the barriers of law and public practice, but
the walls which bound the condition of many by the color of his
skin," was a rousing call to action.

    But he has frequently failed where another President with
superior powers of persuasion might have succeeded. His
inability to convince either Congress or the nation of the need
for a tax increase is one example. When the Detroit riots
erupted last summer, Johnson had a splendid opportunity to rally
the nation. Instead, he took a safe, legalistic and patently
political approach delaying the dispatch of federal troops until
Michigan's Governor George Remmney, a potential rival in 1968,
was ready to admit that he had lost control of the situation.
Johnson's follow-up actions were no more impressive. "Here we've
had a whole summer of riots," said former White House Aide
Richard Goodwin, who served under both Kennedy and Johnson.
"and what do we get? A study commission and a day of prayer!"

    Inspiration Gap. Johnson's "inspiration gap" is to some
extent purely verbal. "The most eminent presidents have
generally been eloquent presidents," wrote Stanford's Bailey in
Presidential Greatness. "They were eloquent with pen, as
Jefferson was; or with tongue as Franklin Roosevelt was; or with
both as Wilson and Lincoln were." Johnson is eloquent with
neither. Harry Truman helped overcome a similar deficiency with
a roof-rasing style on the stump, Dwight Eisenhower with an
avuncular manner that inspired confidence and trust. Johnson's
official verbiage tends to be dull, and though he can be pungent
and forceful in private, his public charisma is just about nil.
He doesn't always look entirely "sincere," and he can't always.
His effectiveness has been blunted by his all-too-familiar
penchant for secrecy, gimmickry and deviousness.

    Hills & Valleys. Part of his problem is the rustic image
he projects in an age when the U.S. has finally acknowledged its
status as a nation of cities. Though Johnson is a man of the
20th century (born in 1908), he nonetheless seems the product
of a more distant past. His politics and philosophy were
annealed in the inhospitable forges of the Dust Bowl and the
Depression. To the generation that spawned acid-rock music, he
often seems as remote as Betelgeuse. Hippies, college students
and Eastern sophisticates are not the only people who look on
him as a parvenu from the prairies. Living in grandiose
isolation at either end of an axis that stretched from the
Pedernales to the Potomac, Johnson is a stranger to the
put-downs and hang-ups (terms he would probably not comprehend)
of a populace that digs op and pop art, Valleys of Dolls in
paperback and micro-skirts in the front office.

    A well-developed will to power is mandatory in a strong
President, but Johnson seems to have been endowed with an
excessive share. He is egotistical enough to turn a sizable
chunk of Texas into a memorial to himself (including a special
plaque at the Hye Post Office immortalizing it as the spot where
four-year-old Lyndon Johnson mailed his first letter). He is a
"hill and valley" man, way up one day, deep down the next. He
can be so overbearing to aides and so intolerant of debate
within his official family that many of his best lieutenants
have left him, often forcing him to surround himself with less-
talented cronies. Increasingly, his staff is becoming a
projection of himself. Of his ten principal aides, six are now
Texans, and few of them are known as "no-men."

    No Leonardo. All too often, Johnson has sought to
substitute promises for challenge. "I'm not sure he knows how
to level with the public any more," says a Southern editor,
"except in the old Texas-New Deal sense. 'I'm gonna build y'all
a dam. I'm gonna put laht bulbs in Aunt Minnie's kitchen.'"
Agrees U.C.L.A.'s Chancellor Franklin Murphy: "I'm not
criticizing Johnson for not having cleaned up the ghettos
overnight or having gotten the war closed up in a year or two.
I don't think Leonardo da Vinci and Thomas Aquinas together
could have accomplished that. What I am saying is that he made
the huge mistake of implying, by way of rhetoric, that this
could be done quickly and easily."

    This has been particularly true in the case of Viet Nam,
In the past his forecasts were hyperbolic, and though they have
since been muted, they backfired as the war dragged on. By
contrast, Churchill knew during World War II that the British
wanted the unvarnished truth, and, as Lord Moran wrote, he
"hurled it at them like great hunks of bleeding meat."

    Politics of Harmony. Paradoxically, the war provides a
supreme illustration both of the powers at Johnson's command and
the limitations of their exercise. Before Viet Nam took center
stage, Cornell's Rossiter predicted that Johnson "would rank up
there with what we call the first-class second-class Presidents,
and perhaps with a big effort, even rise above that." Now he
says: "This war has damaged Lyndon Johnson's place in history.
It has divided the country, and that has cost him his power
base. I bet he wakes up in the morning sometimes and wonders
what happened."

    Still, Viet Nam can hardly be held entirely responsible for
the President's setbacks in the ephemeral but transcendently
important area of public respect and support. Johnson could
cultivate his consensus for only so long. Once he had to start
assigning priorities, as every President eventually must, the
politics of harmony had to give way to the politics of conflict
and controversy.

    Executive Energy. Harry Truman said three years ago that
"the presidency is exactly as powerful as it was under George
Washington. The powers are in the constitution, and the
President can't go any further than that." Strictly speaking,
Truman was right. Thanks largely to Hamilton's eloquent plea in
The Federalist papers for "energy in the Executive," the office
was invested with broad authority -- but it was also artfully
hedged. Every strong President has exploited his mandate to the
fullest, always testing the Congress and the judiciary to see
where the parameters of power may lie. Just where they ought to
lie is an argument that has raged for 180 years. More than a
century ago, when Chief Justice John Marshall scolded Andrew
Jackson in Worcester v. Georgia for failing to honor a treaty
guaranteeing the rights of the Cherokee Indians, Jackson is said
to have retorted with impunity: "John Marshall has made his
decision; now let him enforce it." By contrast, when F.D.R.
tried to pack the Supreme Court, he was rebuffed by Congress
and later by the voters, who re-elected all but one of the
recalcitrant, anti-New Deal Congressmen he tried to purge.

    The Latitudinarians. At one end of the presidential
spectrum are the men whom New York University Political
Scientist Louis Koening calls the "literalists": those who, like
Madison and Taft, interpreted their powers narrowly and
subscribed to the Whig theory of the President as an errand boy
for Congress. At the other end are what Yale historian John
Morton Blum calls the "latitudinarians": those who, like Lincoln
and Wilson, gave wide scope to the Constitution's vague charter.

    From the first, the powers have been there for a strong
President to use. When the Swiss examined the U.S. Constitution
as a possible model for their own 1848 charter, they rejected
it on the grounds that the presidency is a "matrix for
dictatorship." Nonetheless, even the most activist Presidents
have run into brick walls. "Lincoln was a sad man," F.D.R. once
said, "because he couldn't get it all at once. And nobody can."
At the end of one of his poorer days, Truman growled over a
bourbon and water: "They talk about the power of the President,
how I can just push a button to get things done. Why, I spend
most of my time kissing somebody's ass." And Johnson roared
recently: "Power? The only power I've got is nuclear -- and I
can't use that."

    Johnson has had less to say about the job than many of his
predecessors. But once, in the early days of his presidency,
when his aides warned him against risking his prestige by
fighting for a civil rights bill because the odds were 3 to 2
against its passage, he asked quietly: "What's the presidency
for?" That brief remark spoke volumes about his desire to use
the office not simply as a springboard for self-aggrandizement
but for the nation's progress.

    Falling Sparrows. Unlike Ike, who set up military lines of
command and delegated responsibility, Johnson wants to be in on
everything. His "night reading," often a five-inch-thick stack
of memos and cables, covers everything from the latest CIA
intelligence roundup to a gossipy report on a feud between two
Senators. "Not a sparrow falls," says a former aide, "that he
doesn't know about." He speaks of "my Government" and "my army"
and "my taxes." The Presidential Seal has been emblazoned on
his twill ranch jackets, his cowboy boots, his cuff links, even
on plastic drinking cups.

    Former Vice President Richard Nixon, among others, thinks
Johnson makes a mistake by getting involved in too many things.
"A President's creative energies must be reserved for the great
decisions, which only he can make, and which mean war or peace,"
he says, adding shrewdly: "If the President assumes too much
power, his mistakes are magnified. If power is diffused, his
mistakes are reduced." In addition, if a President wants credit
for everything that goes right, he must also be prepared to take
the blame for everything that goes wrong.

    The fact is that Lyndon Johnson has made a greater effort
than any of his recent predecessors to shift more responsibility
to the states and cities. He concedes that much of his domestic
legislation has turned into a "programmatic and bureaucratic
nightmare that we frankly must face up to." Johnson has diffused
certain federal powers to a wider extent than is generally
recognized -- in the poverty war, with its 1,000-odd community-
action programs; in the landmark Elementary and Secondary
Education Act, which encourages innovation by individual
schools; in the air- and water-pollution-control acts, which
their call for state-conceived programs; and in the model-cities
bill, which leaves it to the mayors to tie together some 200
different federal urban programs into a coherent attack on
blight. Under Johnson, moreover, private enterprise for the
first time assumed an active role in the rehabilitation of the
nations' cities.

    Still, L.B.J. is not a man to yield power freely. He has,
for instance, flatly rejected the idea of sharing taxes with the
states. In so doing, he kept jealous guard over the prime source
of a President's domestic strength -- the federal taxing power.

    Shakers V. Smoothers. Clinton Rossiter categorizes
Presidents as either "earth-shakers" or "earth smoothers."
Johnson's emphasis on consensus and conciliation, his efforts
to bring businessman and laborer, black and white, city dweller
and dirt farmer into his big tent, all seemed to mark him as a
smoother.

    But in this, as in so many other things involving this
paradoxical man, the appearance belies the truth, Johnson has
been a fighter in a dozen different arenas. No President has
ever laid his prestige so squarely on the line on behalf of the
Negro. None has tried so persistently to persuade the wealthiest
nation on earth of the need to uproot poverty. None has achieved
more for the advancement of education and health. If Johnson
occasionally steps back -- emphasizing a "law and order" bill
rather than a new package of civil rights proposals, for example
-- his retreat is almost certainly tactical, not strategic. He
is aware that Harlem cannot be rebuilt in a decade, much less
a year.

    Thus he counsels patience and perseverance in order to calm
the doubts and anxieties of his fellow citizens, "The country
wants to be comfortable," he told Arthur Schlesinger in 1960,
shortly before announcing his candidacy for the presidency. "It
doesn't want to be stirred up. Have a revolution, all right, but
don't say anything about it until you are entrenched in office.
That's the way Roosevelt did it.

    Away from Consensus. At the moment, Johnson can hardly
consider himself entrenched. The dump-L.B.J. Democrats stand to
his left, Alabama's George Wallace to his right, and a newly
vigorous G.O.P. dead ahead. He has allowed the Democratic
National Committee's once smooth machinery to rust. Indeed,
whereas Lincoln's Cabinet complained that he carried his files
around in the sweatband of his stove-pipe hat, Johnson tries to
carry the whole Democratic Party in his inside coat pocket.
Defense Secretary Robert McNamara will soon be leaving him and
a debilitating exodus of top officials could follow. The far-
out National Conference for New Politics has threatened to
assemble 1,000,000 outside Chicago's International Amphitheater
in August to disrupt the Democratic Convention -- though there
is some question whether 1,000,000 Americans even know what the
N.C.N.P. is, let alone subscribe to its anti-everything
policies.

    Withal, the President's prospects are not all that gloomy.
Most likely, once the Republicans nominate a candidate and Old
Campaigner Johnson can start shelling the foe, the President
will again be the favorite. The excesses of the protest movement
are beginning to produce substantial dissent against dissent.
Pollster Louis Harris reports that 70% of Americans feel that
the demonstrators are hurting their own antiwar cause. As for
Democratic defections, they are not likely to be as widespread
as the breathless publicity surrounding them would indicate.
A survey of delegates to the 1964 convention shows that 87%
still back the President; if past Democratic behavior is any
guide, many of those who have strayed from the fold will be back
in time for the campaign.

    And the campaign should be a spectacle to behold. If there
is one thing that Lyndon Johnson enjoys as much as being
President, it's running for President. On the stump, he enjoys
a signal advantage -- his unparalleled record of domestic
legislation.

    As the campaign approaches, the Man of the Year
increasingly shows signs of a readiness to move away from
consensus and toward leadership. He will have to, if he is
hoping to cope with a host of social maladies that were being
dimly perceived a decade ago. Whatever his shortcomings in
terms of personality and performance, none but his most
relentless critics can fault his desire to cope with those
problems. The greatest Presidents are those who emerged during
periods of severe strain, domestic or foreign. Johnson still has
the chance to stand among them.