1967: Lyndon B. Johnson -Man of the Year - Time
(FL, Found a couple of things that might be of interest to you---the more things change, the more they stay the same...)
1967: Lyndon B. Johnson
FROM THE TIME ARCHIVE
Jan. 5, 1968
time.com
Even if the television tube and a ubiquitous Texan had yet to be conceived, the President of the U.S. in the latter third of the 20th century would almost certainly be the world's most exhaustively scrutinized, analyzed and criticized figure. As it is, the power of his office and the jovial Executive's visage and voice are available for instant dissection from Baghdad to Bangkok, from factory cafeteria to family living room. Depending on the man and the moment, he may come across as heavy or hero, leader or pleader, preacher or teacher. Whatever his role, in the age of instant communications he inevitably seems so close that the viewer can almost reach out, pluck his sleeve and complain: "Say, Mr. President, what about prices? Napalm? The draft?"
For Lyndon Johnson's 200 million countrymen, the year produced an unprecedented crop of complaints, based largely on the two great crises that came into confluence. Abroad, there was the war in Viet Nam, possibly the most unpopular conflict in the nation's history and the largest ever waged without specific congressional consent. At home, the Negro, more aware than ever of the distance he has yet to travel toward full citizenship, vented his impatience in riots that rent 70 cities in a summer of bloodshed and pillage. The U.S. was vexed as well by violence in the streets, rising costs, youthful rebelliousness, pollution of air and water and the myriad other maladies of a post-industrial society that is growing ever more bewilderingly urbanized, ungovernable and impersonal.
Sense of Impotence. It was, for many Americans, an end of innocence. The U.S. was still the world's pre-eminent power, still reveled in the accouterments of prosperity, still enjoyed a standard of living far more abundant than that of any other civilization. But then 1967 awakened many of its citizens to the fact that conscienceless affluence can not only despoil the environment and drive a deprived underclass to the brink of rebellion; it can also pervade society with a sense of impotence and bring on a loss of unifying purpose.
With so many problems flowing together, the nation was battered by a flood tide of frustration and anxiety. A doubt that in the past had rarely been articulated or even felt crept into the American consciousness: Is the U.S., after all, as fallible in its aims and unsure of its answers as any other great power? Can--and should--the Viet Nam war be won? Can the nation simultaneously allay poverty, widen opportunity, eradicate racism, make its cities habitable and its laws uniformly just? Or will it have to jettison urgent social objectives at home for stern and insistent commitments abroad?
It was increasingly clear that the attainment of all these elusive goals would require, above all, a quality that Americans have always found difficult to cultivate: patience. Yet, as the National Committee for an Effective Congress declared last week, with no exaggeration intended, "America has experienced two great internal crises in her history: the Civil War and the economic Depression of the 1930s. The country may now be on the brink of a third trauma, a depression of the national spirit."
More than ever before in an era of material well-being, the nation's discontent was focused upon its President. The man in the White House is at once the chief repository of the nation's aspirations and the supreme scapegoat for its frustrations. As such, Lyndon Johnson was the topic of TV talk shows, and cocktail-party conversations, the obsession of pundits and politicians at home and abroad, of businessmen and scholars, cartoonists and ordinary citizens throughout 1967. Inescapably, he was the Man of the Year.
Often, the 36th President called to mind the Duke of Kent's lament for King Lear: "A good man's fortunes may grow out at the heels." Whether Johnson was a good man to begin with is disputed by many of his critics, but his tribulations were sufficient to deter any man of lesser fortitude--or obstinacy. Week by week, his popularity (as judged by polls that invite a disproportionate number of negative answers: e.g., "Do you approve of how the President is doing his job?") plummeted, reaching a low of 38% in October, where once he had basked in the approval of 80% of the nation (at year's end, however, Gallup showed him up to 46%). Congress, only recently scorned as a "rubber stamp," turned around and began stomping on him.
Caesar & Caligula. Rarely had the voices of dissent been raised so loud or carried so far, or trained on so many issues. The young formed the sword's point of protest--students on a thousand campuses, Negroes in a hundred ghettos, hippies in their psychedelic enclaves. But there was hardly a segment of society that seemed immune to the disaffection. Housewives were alarmed by growing grocery bills, farmers by tumbling prices for their produce, parents by their alienated children, city dweller by the senseless violence around them.
It was sometimes hard to tell whether the rancor aroused by Johnson stemmed from his policies or his personality. An immensely complex, contradictory and occasionally downright unpleasant man, he has never managed to attract the insulating layer of loyalty that a Roosevelt or a Truman, however beleaguered, could fall back on. Consequently, when things began to go wrong, he had few defenders and all too many critics.
Whenever he left his desk and sallied forth among the people who only three years ago gave him the greatest outpouring of votes in history, he attracted angry pickets. Hardly a day passed without a contumelious attack. Wherever he went, from a speaking engagement in Los Angeles to a cardinal's funeral in Manhattan he was dogged by shouts of "Murderer!" and "War Criminal!" or chants of "Hey, hey, L.B.J., how many kids did you kill today?" He was likened to Caesar, Caligula and Mussolini.
Notable Dropout. The very men who most fervently endorsed his domestic programs were largely those who most passionately deplored his commitment in Viet Nam. They felt that, as Yale Economist James Tobin, a former presidential advisor, put it, "the butter to be sacrificed because of the war always turns out to be the margarine of the poor." The President appeared to have broken finally with such Democratic stalwarts as Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman J. William Fulbright, New York's Senator Robert Kennedy and Minnesota's Senator Eugene McCarthy. Much of the anger directed at Johnson spilled over onto Vice President Hubert Humphrey as well, largely because of his unwavering support of the Viet Nam war and of the feeling among his erstwhile friends in the Americans for Democratic Action that he has "deserted" them. The result has been to diminish drastically Humphrey's hopes of ever succeeding Johnson on his own.
Democrats abandoned the President in droves, forming Dump L.B.J. movements or rallying behind Gene McCarthy as an alternative for 1968. Said Michigan's former Democratic State Chairman Zoltan Ferency, who quit over Johnson's war policies: "The youth, the academicians, the women, the intellectuals--they are dropping out of politics, they are turned off." A notable dropout was liberal Pundit Walter Lippmann, long since disaffected with L.B.J., who went so far as to declare that it would be in the "national interest" for the Johnson Democratic Party to "be ousted by a rejuvenated Republican Party." Notes TIME'S Washington Bureau Chief John L. Steele: "Historical generalizations are dangerous, but one is tempted to suggest that not even Lincoln--who had to fight a civil war to preserve the Union--faced such internal questioning, such intense and wide-ranging dissent as did Lyndon Johnson in 1967."
Flubdubs & Mollycoddles. Name calling is a time-honored sport among Americans where their Presidents are concerned. George Washington was called a crook and the "stepfather of his country." It was said of John Adams that "the cloven foot is in plain sight." Jefferson was berated as a mean-spirited hypocrite, Jackson as a murderer and adulterer, Lincoln as a baboon. With rare elegance, Teddy Roosevelt called Woodrow Wilson "a Byzantine logothete (an emperor's bookkeeper) backed by flubdubs and mollycoddles." When the Depression laid Hubert Hoover low, newspapers were called "Hoover blankets," and a "Hoover flag" was an empty pocket turned inside out.
Johnson has fared worse than most, Black Power Apostle Stokely Carmichael calls him a "hunky," a "buffoon," and a "liar." Stokely's successor as head of the ill-named Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee, H.Rap Brown, suggested that the President--and Lady Bird--ought to be shot. In The Accidental President, liberal Journalist Robert Sherrill described the President as "treacherous, dishonest, manic- aggressive, petty, spoiled." The outrageous play MacBird! called him: "...this canker.../This tyrant whose name alone/ blisters our tongues.../Villain, traitor, cur."
In the Bunker. With so many harpoons filling the air, Johnson prudently stuck to his bunker for much of the year. In 1966, he held 40 formal press conferences; in 1967, only 21. He spent two months at the L.B.J. Ranch last year, and even in Washington made himself scarce for long periods.
Occasionally, Johnson would erupt, recalling the "whirlwind President" of 1964. His popularity rating spurted when he met with Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin at the Glassboro summit--and impressed him as a man to be reckoned with. Johnson ended one of the long silent spells with his now-famous "new look" press conference, during which he prowled a makeshift stage in the East Room of the White House like a restless tiger, exuding confidence and control. Before an A.F.L.-C.I.O. convention in December, he hit into the Republican "wooden soldiers of the status quo" who were poleaxing his programs in Congress.
Two weeks ago, he gave a dramatic demonstration of the resources available to an American President--and his readiness to put them to use. On less than 24 hours notice, he assembled an entourage of four jet planes and 300 people and spent the next five days in a dizzying, 26,959-mile circuit of the globe. The original reason for his cyclonic odyssey was to attend services for Australia's Prime Minister Harold Holt. Characteristically, Johnson transformed it into a microcosm of his coming campaign.
In Canberra, he buttonholed nine allied leaders for talks, turning the somber occasion into an impromptu summit conference on the war. In Viet Nam and Thailand, he showed one part of his celebrated "two-fisted" approach, urging U.S. servicemen to "give it to" the enemy. Karachi was a jet hop, skip and jump away, so he stopped in to press the flesh with President Ayub Khan, a difficult ally of late. Whisking in to Rome, he unlimbered the other fist, the one that holds the olive branch, assuring Pope Paul VI that "we will agree to any proposal that would substitute the word and the vote for the knife and the grenade in bringing an honorable peace to Viet Nam."
When High Hopes Turn Sour. Johnson is acutely aware of how much is expected of him as President--and of the fact that, in the eyes of many, he has fallen short. As Health, Education and Welfare Secretary John Gardner indicated in a year-end appraisal of "the alarming character of our domestic crisis," the President fell victim to "the bitterness and anger toward our institutions that wells up when high hopes turn sour." Johnson himself conceded early in the year: "In all candor, I cannot recall a period that is in any way comparable to the one we are living through today. It is a period that finds exhilaration and frustration going hand in hand--when great accomplishments are often overshadowed by rapidly rising expectations."
As the months unfolded, frustration waxed relentlessly and exhilaration waned. It was a time when the war was escalating just as the problems of peace were intensifying, and Johnson was badly buffeted by the conjunction of those two powerful trends.
In Viet Nam, the President increased the U.S. troop level until it had passed the high-water mark of the Korean War (472,800 men) and soared on toward 525,000, where it will presumably level off this year. The big-unit war continued decisively in favor of the allies, though the enemy shifted to a strategy of mass assaults on exposed frontier positions such as Dak To and Con Thien in hopes of bloodying a big U.S. force and further eroding Stateside support of the war. American casualties since the beginning of the war climbed well over the 100,000 mark, including 13,000 dead, while the monetary cost of the war last year alone totaled $25 billion--part of a $70 billion Defense budget that, in terms of the gross national product, was 50% smaller than the Pentagon's expenditures in the last year of the Korean War. |
