Newspapers: The Promised Land

After hearing President Johnson’s State of the Union address, the Louisville Courier-Journal had a noble vision. ANOTHER MOSES STARTS TOWARD A PROMISED LAND, went the headline above the Courier’s editorial assessment of the President’s message: “One is constrained to believe that the land in deed is promised, and the leader is worthy.” In Chicago the Tribune was moved too—but in an opposite direction. “The secular savior is to take us over,” said the Tribune, “and give us the bum’s rush up the road to his conception of the Great Society.” Between these two extremes, the editorialists found ample room for disagreement. But whether they cheered Johnson’s sweeping blueprint or worried about the blue-sky aspects of his plan, on one point the U.S. press seemed in complete agreement. The Scripps-Howard newspapers put that question succinctly: “Where is the money coming from?”

Revolution-by-Consent. Columnist Max Lerner, whose most recent book was called The Age of Overkill, used the occasion to go far beyond the immediate and practical problem of price. “The State of the Union address,” said Lerner in the New York Post, “won our assent because we were wholly ripe for it—and Johnson had helped make us ripe. But it was full of worn and weary phrases. Its key concept of the Great Society has never been thought through, either by Johnson or—as far as we know—by anyone around him. Nothing in the speech, in word or idea, left a scar.”

Today in Washington, Lerner said, there is a new kind of Congress, a new kind of President and an extraordinary Supreme Court. “Put the three old branches of the Federal Government together in their new forms and you get something that ought to be the most impressive revolution-by-consent in American history.”

But can Johnson lead that revolution? Lerner was filled with doubt. “A revolution is a mood and a climate,” he said. “It is against power abused and injustice encrusted . . . it is a sense of resistance overcome and triumph achieved; it is a heady madness of winning through. One feels that Johnson by his innermost nature is incapable of generating such a revolutionary climate and leading such a mood.

“Somehow (how in the world did it happen?) Johnson has been cast—perhaps has cast himself—in the role of the Great Prestidigitator, the Miracle Worker. Step up and watch him, Ladies and Gentlemen. See how nimble, see how quick. Watch the incredible performance of this master . . . And because it is a performance we watch, with fascination, with admiration, in the end perhaps with acceptance tinged with boredom. Such a man can carry votes with him; he cannot lift our hearts nor stir, our brain.”

Need for a Nexus. “Certain things come—or look—easy for Johnson. These are the things he does well: the medicare bill, the program for new health centers, the formula for an education compromise. But there are other things that look—and are—hard for him. They are the things he is not yet good at. Usually they involve situations in global policy (and the Viet Nam case is only one, although the chief one), where getting a wide assent is not enough, and where the expanding wealth of our nation will not resolve the problem.

“Johnson’s whole genius lies in accentuating the positive, eliminating the negative, latching on to the affirmative. But the power of positive thinking, while it seems to work on a welfare package for the nation, won’t work in confronting the determined negative mass of Chinese power and the Grand Design of the Chinese leaders. At some crucial point Johnson will have to say Yes or No to a design of our own for world policy. To say, as he did, that every foreign policy problem carries its separate answer, is the sheerest and wrongest fragmenting of the overarching question of our time.”

The trouble is, Lerner concluded, neither welfare programs nor specific State or Defense Department schemes add up to a Great Society. “Before you can get a society, great or small, you need more than a consensus. You need a nexus: something to tie the parts into a whole, something to cement the individual wills, something to stir the nation’s pulse, not continually feel it.”