The Presidency: Thanks, Without Enthusiasm

THE PRESIDENCY

“We in America have not always been kind to the artists and the scholars,” said Lyndon Johnson. “Somehow,” he added with a twinkle, “the scientists always seem to get the penthouse, while the arts and the humanities get the basement.” Last week the President took steps to move the artists and scholars upstairs. Under a sparkling autumn sun in the Rose Garden of the White House, he signed a threeyear, $63 million bill creating a National Foundation for the Arts and Humanities that will sponsor new national troupes for the theater, opera and ballet, commission new works of music, finance visits by great artists to U.S. schools, and subsidize community symphonies, repertory companies and art workshops. In effect, the bill establishes the U.S. Government as one of the biggest patrons of the arts any where — and makes Lyndon Johnson, unlikely as it may seem, a kind of modern Medici.

Puzzling Paradox. For the signing ceremonies, Lyndon corralled 100 Congressmen and 300 artists, scholars and entertainers—a gathering illustrious enough to please the pickiest patron.

Among the guests were Painters Willem deKooning and Ben Shahn, Novelist Katherine Anne Porter, Poetess Marianne Moore, Architects Edward Durell Stone and Walter Gropius, Photographer Edward Steichen, Inventor Buckminster Fuller, Actors Alfred Lunt and Fredric March. Also invited but conspicuously absent was Playwright Arthur Miller, who, like Poet Robert Lowell on a similar occasion last June, sent his regrets, and for good measure sent Lyndon Johnson a nasty little note condemning U.S. policy in Viet Nam.

To Broadway Producer David Merrick, who is not himself the most pacific of men, Miller’s headline-making snub was “a slap in the face of the President.” Growled Merrick: “We finally get a subsidy in the theater, and we have an Administration that is in favor of the arts, and then Mr. Miller has to make his statement. All the children who work in the theater and in films should stay out of politics. They are always completely naive about it.”

Esthetic Antipathy. At any rate, the ruckus over Miller’s boycott pointed up a paradox that endlessly puzzles the President. He has persuaded Congress to pass a mind-numbing total of bills promoting causes dear to intellectuals. He has assiduously courted the cerebral community and has shown almost childlike gratitude when it responds to his wooing—as when he gave Merrick a souvenir pen and thanked him for his rebuke to Miller. But for all that, much of the intellectual world still regards him with hostility and even scorn.

“During the time that I have been in the U.S.,” writes British Journalist Henry Fairlie in the October issue of Commentary, “I have found nothing more strange or more unattractive than the way in which American intellectuals take pleasure in reviling President Johnson. It is not simply that they object to his policies in Viet Nam and the Dominican Republic. It is a feeling of strong personal revulsion. ‘He is a slob,’ one of them said to me. Others say much the same.”

Admittedly, some intellectuals who reject Johnson’s foreign policy would also deplore his capitalism. For example, Political Scientist James Mellen of New Jersey’s Drew University admitted at a teach-in last week that he is “a professed Marxist,” and would like to see the Communists win in Viet Nam. Few Lyndonphobes of any political persuasion publicly fault him on such fatuous grounds as Novelist Norman Mailer, who carps: “He has the worst literary style of any political leader I’ve ever read.” An inordinate number, nonetheless, condemn L.B.J. for esthetic reasons: they are put off by his manner. Countless Americans, particularly in the Northeast, wince at Johnson’s folksiness, his cornball cliches, his occasional mawkishness, his graceless reaction to criticism.

Death on Principle. “There is a myth among intellectuals that Johnson believes too much in compromise,” says U.C.L.A. Political Science Chairman Richard Longaker. “Actually, he has compromised less than his predecessor, and achieved much more. He gets results that are broad and purposeful.” Adds a leading California Democrat: “If you look at the intellectuals’ heroes, they are all people who died for principles. They would rather lose on a principle than win on a consensus.”

Some intellectuals doubt that hostility to the President runs as deep as all the commotion created by the petition signers, the teach-ins and the ad hoc committees on Viet Nam would seem to indicate. University of Chicago Historian Richard C. Wade, who estimates that 80% of all U.S. college faculty members support Johnson’s domestic and foreign policies alike, probably comes close to the mark in describing the prevalent intellectual attitude toward Johnson as one of “respect without enthusiasm.” Which, to anyone but L.B.J., would be encomium enough.