The Presidency: Lyndon’s Ways

THE PRESIDENCY

Deep in thought, a former Kennedy aide strode through the White House to ward the President’s office, then stopped short. On a rack just outside of the oval office hung a big Stetson hat. Sec retaries, pretty but unfamiliar, bustled around through the anterooms. The doors to the President’s office, nearly always open when John F. Kennedy was there, were closed tight. Inside that office, as the aide well knew, was Lyndon Baines Johnson, probably at that very moment speaking softly into a green telephone.

Inevitably, a new order was being established. So far, Johnson has not tried to strike out in new directions, but to give new momentum to a course set by his predecessor. Yet, in tackling the policies and problems bequeathed to him, Johnson is also making it clear that he has his own way of doing things, and that his way is as different from Kennedy’s as a Texas twang is from a broad “a.”

Cyclonic Vigor. There are, of course, similarities. Like Kennedy, Johnson has plunged into the presidency with cyclonic vigor. “He feels that he has to make the public aware of the man who’s in the office now and to show them a man who looks like he can do the job,” explained an aide. “Beyond that, he feels that his own Administration cannot afford to be anything less than energetic and productive.”

Every morning last week the President left his French-style chateau, The Elms, at 8 o’clock, usually did not return until nearly midnight. Saturday morning he even took a brisk, 10-min-ute walk through his northwest Washington neighborhood before setting out for work, had a caravan of curious reporters and wary Secret Service men quickstepping with him.

Also on Saturday, with Jacqueline Kennedy and her children settling into a Georgetown house, Johnson and his family moved into the White House. “I feel like I have already been here a year,” he told 30 newsmen over coffee in his office. Then he gave the newsmen word of a couple of important trips that are in the works. This week, he said, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara will visit South Viet Nam for the second time in three months, to review the war against the Viet Cong guerrillas. Next week Johnson will go to Manhattan to address the United Na tions and “establish acquaintance” with the delegates there.

For the time being, though, Washington itself was keeping him busy enough. All week long, the President had more engagements than a Texas sky has stars, and he was concentrating especially on three major areas:

∙CIVIL RIGHTS. Day after day, prominent Negro leaders such as James Farmer of CORE, and Whitney Young, executive director of the National Urban League, went to the White House to discuss the stalled civil rights bill and job discrimination. When Dr. Martin Luther King called, American Nazi Party members shuffled along Pennsylvania Avenue in storm-trooper outfits, carrying placards inscribed AH WANTS TO SEE DEE PRESIDENT TOO.

∙SPENDING & TAXES. Through the week, Budget Bureau officials trooped into Johnson’s office and left, as one of them described himself, looking “grim and tight-lipped.” To make Congress more amenable to a tax cut, Johnson was striving to cut expenditures for fiscal 1965, but he finally conceded that the budget would probably run in the neighborhood of $102 billion, thus would be the first to pass $100 billion.

∙UNEMPLOYMENT. With America’s jobless totaling 4,000,000, Johnson said he hoped to increase employment from the present level of 70 million to 75 million, urged labor and business leaders to “roll up your sleeves, stick out your chins and let it be known you are in this fight.”

In each of these areas, Johnson’s job is chiefly one of salesmanship, and the customer is Congress. It was natural, therefore, that he spent much of his time and energy at the very same task that occupied him when he was Senate majority leader—wheedling, cajoling, pleading and threatening Congress in order to get action (see following story).

“Charity & Courage.” During the week, Johnson presided over two ceremonies that were Kennedy legacies. In the Cabinet Room of the White House, he presented the Atomic Energy Commission’s $50,000 Enrico Fermi Award to Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer for his work in building the atomic bomb as wartime head of the Los Alamos Lab oratory. The presentation came exactly ten years after Dwight Eisenhower ordered that a “blank wall” be erected between Oppenheimer and secret documents pending a security check. The AEC subsequently ruled Oppenheimer a security risk, and it is obvious that the case still generates heat. All eight G.O.P. members of the Joint Con gressional Atomic Energy Committee boycotted the ceremony, and Iowa’s Senator Bourke Hickenlooper, the ranking Republican, wrote, “I fail to see how anyone who has any respect for the security system of the United States could support this award.” Said Oppenheimer to Johnson: “I think it just possible, Mr. President, that it has taken some charity and some courage for you to make this award today.”

Later in the week, the President conferred the Medal of Freedom, highest civilian award, on 31 Americans and foreigners chosen by Kennedy last summer.*In an unexpected gesture, Johnson added two names of his own choice: John F. Kennedy, whose “energy, faith and devotion,” in the words of the citation, “will hereafter ‘light our country and all who serve it,’ ” and Pope John XXIII, who “brought to all citizens of the planet a heightened sense of the dignity of the individual, of the brotherhood of man, and of the common duty to build an environment of peace for all humankind.”

“Something to Do.” Johnson’s kinetic energy encouraged the nation. “We were impressed with the fact that this country could come through such a tragedy and find a man like the President to carry on,” said American Telephone & Telegraph Chairman Frederick R. Kappel, as he emerged from a Business Council meeting with Johnson (see U.S. BUSINESS). Said Steelworkers President David J. McDon ald after labor leaders met with John son, “I think he’s going to be a great President.”

The President seemed to be thriving on his whirlwind days. His doctor announced that he is “in good shape,” thoroughly recovered from his 1955 heart attack. A few friends who stopped at The Elms for a Sunday drink noted that he had rarely looked better. “He’s got something to do now,” said one of them. “That must be it.”

Another fact is fairly obvious: a new Lyndon Johnson is emerging. As Vice President, Johnson served Kennedy loyally, was never known to criticize him, but chafed in a job that had few substantial duties. At first, he hoped to keep an eye on the Senate by presiding over Democratic caucuses, but some Senators complained that his presence would amount to an executive invasion of the legislative branch. He traveled abroad, had a hand in the Peace Corps, the space agency and the job-discrimination field, but that was still not enough. His frustrations mounted, his vanity was easily bruised, and his temper flared often.

No Replacements. But the presidency appears to be working some changes on Johnson. The shiny silk suits and pastel shirts have given way to subdued herringbones and pale blue shirts. For years he had the notion that the left side of his face photographed better than the right. It got so that one photographer cracked, “The right side of his face is going to become as big a mystery as the dark side of the moon.” But cameramen lately have managed to catch the right side on occasion. And where once Johnson used to whip off his eyeglasses every time he saw a photographer zeroing in, he no longer seems to care.

Johnson was never the easiest boss to work for, despite his staffers’ loyalty to him. As Vice President he once complained in the presence of several aides: “Why can’t I get men like Ted Sorensen?” Johnson has perhaps a dozen truly trusted associates in Washington and Texas, some of them connected with him since the days of the New Deal, others relatively young men who were plucked from Texas campuses. But for a President, his staff is painfully thin, and he repeatedly told Kennedy’s aides in asking them to stay with him, “I have nobody to replace you with.”

He has been more gentle with his staffers of late, has even managed to hold down his high dudgeon. “It seemed like he had a clock inside him with an alarm that told him at least once an hour that it was time to chew some body out,” says a longtime friend. “But he hasn’t lost his temper once since 2 p.m. on Nov. 22.”

A Few Doubts. For that, his aides are grateful. But some of the Kennedy men who are staying on during the transition still have reservations. The new President works behind closed doors, does not like his men to drop in unheralded. Naturally enough, Johnson has not yet established rapport with most of the holdovers—Presidential Adviser McGeorge Bundy is one of the exceptions—but some wonder if he ever will. Comparing notes, the Kennedy aides were irritated to learn that Johnson seemed to use a set speech in asking them to stay on, always ending his pitch with the phrase, “I need your help more than President Kennedy needed it.”

So far, because of the circumstances in which he came to office, Johnson has had things pretty much going his way. But Republicans already are complaining about the extent of his public politicking while they are waiting out the month-long political moratorium they imposed on themselves after Kennedy’s assassination. While the veterans of Capitol Hill, recalling his 32 years in their midst, still think of Johnson as one of their own, they are less likely to respond to arm-twisting tactics from President Johnson than they were to those of Senate Majority Leader Johnson. Thus, the President faces certain frustrations—and how he reacts to them may yet turn out to be the real test of his Administration.

-Among them: Contralto Marian Anderson, Cellist Pablo Casals, Educator James B. Conant, Virologist John F. Enders, Justice (retired) Felix Frankfurter, Inventor (Polaroid camera) Edwin H. Land, Bankers Robert A. Lovett and John J. McCloy, Architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Steelman Clarence B. Randall, Pianist Rudolf Serkin, Photographer Edward Steichen, Authors E. B. White, Thornton Wilder and Edmund Wilson, and Painter Andrew Wyeth.