The Administration: The New Line-Up

The President looked glum all week, and Lyndonologists attributed his mood to the loss of two top men: Speechwriter Richard Goodwin and Cabinet Secretary Horace Busby Jr.

Goodwin, 33, a Kennedy Administration holdover, is a versatile intellectual and idea man who made the transition from Kennedy-style rhetoric to the homelier L.B.J. brand with no apparent strain. It was Goodwin who devised the essential idea for Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress, and it was he who first dropped the phrase Great Society into an L.B.J. speech—and into the American vernacular. He accepted a $15,000 fellowship at Wesleyan University’s Center for Advanced Studies, where he plans to write under his own name after years of ghosting for two Presidents.

Texas-born “Buzz” Busby, 41, ranked lower than Goodwin in the White House hierarchy, but was personally closer to the boss, whom he had served since 1948. In addition to his job as Cabinet Secretary, he wrote some press releases and shorter presidential statements, served as deputy to McGeorge Bundy and acted as a liaison man with the intellectual world. With Walter Jenkins and George Reedy gone, Busby was the last of Johnson’s old personal guard. Buzz plans to return to his management-consulting business to take care of his three growing children.

Fresh Recruits. No one on the present White House staff—or possibly in Washington—can match Dick Goodwin’s swift facility for custom prose. Some of the presidential speechwriting chores will now be handled by Harry McPherson, 36, a University of Texas law graduate who had worked for the Senate Democratic Policy Committee, the State Department and the Pentagon before joining the White House staff last month. Helping out with speeches if necessary will be Press Secretary Bill Moyers, General Aide Jack Valenti and Special Assistant Douglass Cater, an old journalistic hand.

There is no new Cabinet Secretary yet. Busby’s other duties will be divided mainly between McPherson and another new White House aide, Joseph Califano Jr., 34. Brooklyn-born and a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard Law School, Califano is moving up fast in the L.B.J. entourage only two months after being lured over from Defense Secretary Robert McNamara’s staff.

Rank on Rank. With Goodwin and Busby out and Larry O’Brien switching to the Post Office Department, the top rank of aides is reduced—in order of importance—to Moyers, who also acts as a general adviser, Bundy, Johnson’s expert in diplomacy and national security, and Valenti, a Man Friday who, among other responsibilities, supervises the presidential schedule and probably spends more time with Lyndon than any other aide in the new lineup.

Clustered in the next echelon are Marvin Watson, who helps Valenti in scheduling the presidential day, Jake Jacobsen, a troubleshooter and sometime legislative liaison man who aspires to succeed O’Brien as chief White House representative on Capitol Hill, and Lee White, a legal adviser, who may also depart soon.