The Campaign: The Old Nonpoliticker

THE CAMPAIGN

Sacramento’s shrieking, surging mob of some 100,000 sent Lyndon Johnson into transports of delight. After reluctantly escaping from his admirers, Johnson winked at aides, chortled and asked: “Now how was that for a crowd?” “Oh,” replied a staffer, “pretty good.” For a moment, Lyndon looked as though he had been smacked in the face with a wet mop. Then he realized that he was being joshed, and grinned more broadly than ever.

The Sacramento ovation was a highlight of a Johnson week that was billed as “nonpolitical.” But if Lyndon gets any more nonpolitical than he was last week, heaven help the Republicans.

Nonexistent Speechwriter. Johnson did, of course, make a few bows to political nonpartisanship. On a flight to Miami Beach to deliver a speech to the International Association of Machinists, he took a look at the text that had been prepared for him, crossed out 19 paragraphs that he considered too controversial. Deleted, for example, was a section pointing out that the Communist takeover of Cuba occurred in 1959 (during a Republican Administration) and that the island has since become a “showcase of failure.”

Trouble was, reporters had already been given advance texts of the speech, and were starting to write their stories when White House Press Aide Malcolm Kilduff, traveling on the newsmen’s plane, ordered that no mention of the deleted paragraphs should be made. Intimating that the objectionable sections had been put in by White House speech-writers unbeknownst to Lyndon, Kilduff ordered: “No reference—repeat, no reference—will be made to that part which has been deleted.”

As it happened, every newsman present knew that L.B.J. likes to give the impression that he is the original author of all of his speeches. A reporter coyly asked how a speechwriter (nonexistent) could possibly put anything into a speech that the President himself had written. Kilduff, painted into a corner by L.B.J.’s little fiction, could only smile ruefully and say to the reporter: “You son of a bitch.”

Peep Through the Periscope. And so, on to Miami Beach, where Lyndon delivered a sterilized, above-the-battle, President-of-all-the-people speech to the Machinists, then whisked on up to Cape Kennedy for an unscheduled inspection tour. There he donned a surgical-looking white nylon cap and gown, went through a pre-satellite-shoot “clean room,” peered through a periscope at a Saturn rocket being groomed for flight, gave missile workers a few little keeper-of-the-peace pep talks.

But all this was prelude to his biggest nonpolitical trip of the week—a two-day sortie to the Far West to meet Canada’s Prime Minister Lester Pearson and sign a Columbia River treaty between the two nations. Maybe the presidential jet just kept running out of gas—but in any event there were five stops before and after, from which Tammany’s old bosses could take lessons in the fine old art of nonpoliticking.

The President flew first to Malmstrom Air Force Base in Great Falls, Mont., plunged into a crowd of 7,000 for some handshaking, accepted a pair of beaded moccasins (size 10—but he’s size 12) from a group of Indians, was so caught up in it all that he nearly missed the arrival of Canada’s Pearson.

Pearson steered Lyndon aboard his Canadian government JetStar, and the two settled down for a two-hour flying inspection of three dam sites designed to harness the waters of the Columbia River system for huge hydroelectric and irrigation projects.

When Johnson stepped off the JetStar in Vancouver, British Columbia, he was outside the U.S. for the first time since he became President. He and Pearson drove to Blaine, Wash., to sign the treaty at the base of the 67-ft. Peace Arch, astride the westernmost point of the U.S.-Canadian border. It was pouring rain, so Pearson cut his scheduled speech to a few perfunctory words. But not Lyndon: with 10,000 people, many of them U.S. voters, clustered around the arch, Lyndon talked for ten minutes.

Curving Radar. Airborne again in his own plane, Lyndon headed for Seattle, nonpoliticked his way through a rush-hour crowd of more than 30,000 before delivering his address on nuclear-arms control. Though Lyndon’s original itinerary ended with Seattle, he flew on to Portland, Ore., then to the wild reception in Sacramento.

There, he uncorked a couple of genies from the bottle of U.S. military science. “We have now developed and tested two systems with the ability to intercept and destroy armed satellites circling the earth in space,” Lyndon told the crowd. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara later said that both systems have intercepted orbiting satellites “hundreds of miles” in space during test shots. Neither system is as much a breakthrough as a solid advance in technology. One is derived from the Army’s Nike-Zeus anti-missile missile, the other from the Air Force’s Thor—both of which were initiated during the Eisenhower Administration.

Lyndon’s other genie was an “over-the-horizon” radar system that “will literally look around the curve of the earth, alerting us to aircraft, and especially missiles, within seconds after they are launched.” The system, which works by bouncing signals off the ionosphere to detect missiles and aircraft far beyond the horizon, could give the U.S. almost twice as much warning time against surprise attack as the 15-minute period now provided by

U.S. ground and airborne radar stations. As long as he was in the neighborhood, Lyndon decided to drop in at Salt Lake City after his Sacramento speech for a motorcade through the central district and a half-hour visit with the ailing head of the Mormons, 91-year-old David O. McKay. Only then was President Johnson, his hands swollen and bruised from all that hand shaking, ready to call it quits. “We’re going back to Washington,” he said, “and go to work.”