Lyndon Johnson -1967- Interesting Reflections...Part 2
There were encouraging improvements--most notably in the allies' military progress and in the legitimization of the South Vietnamese government through elections--but many Americans doubted that they were worth the enormous expense. Even so, Johnson at year's end still enjoyed the support of a fair-sized majority of the U.S. for his middle course "between surrender and annihilation."
Hope & Anger. In the area of civil rights, Johnson fell victim to his earlier successes. It was a classic case of anticipation outpacing achievement. The bills that he got through Congress in 1964 and 1965 all but completed the task of bringing the Negro to legal parity with America's whites. But progress, inevitably, was slower in the subtler and vastly more difficult task of improving the Negro's lot in terms of income, jobs, housing and education. For the nation's 21.5 million Negroes, the result was a mercurial mood of "hope mixed with anger" as FORTUNE reported this month.
In Congress, Johnson was hobbled by the "stop, look and listen" approach advocated by Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield. Engorged with costly programs enacted by the 89th Congress, the 90th cast a jaundiced eye on Johnson's new requests. According to Congressional Quarterly, from the time Johnson took office until the end of 1966, he got 655 of his 1,057 proposals enacted into law--a sensational 62% average, (By C.Q.'s reckoning, Dwight Eisenhower batted 46%, John F. Kennedy only 39%.) But in 1967, Johnson was defeated on his tax- surcharge, civil rights, anti-crime, East-West trade and legislative-reorganization bills. Foreign aid was cut by a record $1 billion, poverty funds by $300 million, model cities by $350 million. The rent-supplements program was practically shrunk out of existence--from $40 million to $10 million. Despite Congress's fractious mood, however, Johnson did get a number of other bills past Capitol Hill's axmen, most notably: expanded air-pollution control, a consular treaty with Moscow, an outer-space treaty, the first meat-inspection program since Upton Sinclair's exposes inspired a similar bill in 1906, and a major increase in social security benefits.
The economy was also a worry, even though the gross national product neared the $800 billion mark and the nation's uninterrupted expansion percolated into its 84th month, three months longer than the old record. There were inflationary signs, a big balance-of-payments deficit, pressure in the dollar after Britain's devaluation of the pound. Economists and politicians began talking about "profitless prosperity." When Johnson asked belatedly for a 10% surcharge on income taxes to damp down the supercharged economy, Arkansas Democrat Wilbur Mills, Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, insisted on an equivalent cut in federal spending that the President was unwilling to make.
Nuclear Imperative. Though often thwarted, Johnson was hardly rendered ineffectual. Such are the powers of his office at home and abroad that even at the nadir of his presidency, he stirred complaints that he was becoming "King Lyndon." Historians and Congressmen alike began wondering whether the presidency had not grown too strong. Next month a group of historians led by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. will meet in Manhattan to consider that very subject. In the Senate, North Carolina democrat Sam Ervin began an inquiry into the division of federal powers, while Fulbright looked into the "overextension of executive powers." (Power is a word uppermost in many a mind. Fulbright published The Arrogance of Power, McCarthy The Limits of Power and Journalist Theodore Draper The Abuse of Power during 1967. Other studies included David Bazelon's Power in America, Nicholas Demerath's Power, Presidents and Professors, and Stokely Carmichael's Black Power.)
What chiefly disquieted Capitol Hill as the fighting dragged on was the fact that the U.S. has never formally declared war on Viet Nam, and that Johnson never sought congressional approval of the conflict beyond the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution of 1964.
Actually, the limits on the Chief Executive's power in foreign affairs have always been ill-defined. When it comes to warmaking, there are few formal checks and balances on a President beyond his own judgement and character. On at least 125 occasions, U.S. Presidents have intervened abroad without a congressional by-your-leave. Jefferson sought neither advice nor consent when he dispatched a naval force to fight the Barbary pirates in 1801. Neither did Polk when he skirmished with the Mexicans in Texas, or Franklin Roosevelt when he sent troops to Iceland in 1941, or Truman when he sent U.S. forces into Korea in 1950, or Eisenhower in the Lebanon crisis, or Kennedy at the Bay of Pigs. In modern times, the possibility of nuclear conflict has made swift decision-making by the President an imperative. Says Stanford's Historian Emeritus Edgar E. Robinson: "The growth of the powers of the President in foreign relations appears to be the most important phenomenon in modern history, inasmuch as the exercise of those powers by four Presidents in the past 20 years has determined developments throughout the world."
Nor is Johnson the sort of President who would be likely to yield a jot or tittle of his authority. "The people of this country did not elect me to this office to preside over its erosion," he once declared. "And I intend to turn over this office with all of its powers intact to the next man who sits in this chair."
Beyond the overriding power wielded by a U.S. President in the nuclear age--that of making war and peace--is a grand galaxy of functions, some defined by the Constitution, some granted by tradition, some arrogated by the man in office. A President is at once head of state and leader of his party, Commander-in-Chief of the armed bureaucracy, leading legislator and top diplomat, educator and economist, symbol and sage, ribbon cutter and fence mender. Because of his role in shaping legislation affecting the cities, in recent years he has also become "the Chief Executive of Metropolis," as Williams Political Scientist James MacGregor Burns puts it.
Teacher-in-Chief. Nor is that all. Cornell Political Scientist Clinton Rossiter once noted that the President must also serve as a national "scoutmaster, Delphic oracle, hero of the silver screen [today, that would read 'TV tube'] and father of the multitudes." In addition, says Historian Sidney Hyman, he must possess "animal energy, a physical capacity for long and sustained attention to detail, the power to endure bores," as well as "a will to decide," and a "sense of tragedy" that results when men seek to do good, but inadvertently achieve evil ends.
What may well be the most important power of a President, in the long run, is one that is neither redefined nor even hinted at in the Constitution. "Presidential power," says Political Scientist Richard Neustadt, Director of the Kennedy Institute for Politics at Harvard, "is the power to persuade." Or, as Stanford Historian Thomas A. Baily writes: "The Commander-in-Chief is also the Teacher-in-Chief. If he is to get the wheels to move and 'make things happen,' in Woodrow Wilson's phrase, he must educate the people."
Stirring Vision. In his application of naked power, Johnson is an acknowledged virtuoso--as his Viet Nam critics ruefully concede. Despite thunderous criticism of his intervention in the Dominican Republic, the President's swift application of military strength followed by an intense diplomatic campaign proved, in the end, a successful maneuver. He has also applied indirect pressure with superb efficacy. Twice he used it to avert a war over Cyprus. His historic hot-line exchange with Kosygin during the Arab-Israeli War contained that conflict on terms acceptable to both the U.S. and Russia. Johnson's artful cajolery ended the rail crisis in 1964, and his masterful manipulation of Congress in the early days of his presidency helped him to clean up a log jam of domestic programs that had been forming since the days of the New Deal. He has also proved himself capable of remarkable restraint, particularly in the face of Charles de Gaulle's persistent provocations.
"It is when Johnson must educate the doubters to the wisdom of his course that he runs into trouble," observes TIME White House Correspondent Hugh Sidey. "Persuasion, education, inspiration--these form an area of power that may be in this age almost more important than the constitutional authority, Johnson is essentially a manager and a manipulator. He knows where all the levers are and he knows how to use them. But when he must, by the sheer force of his intellect and his personality, develop that broad base of support essential to moving the country, he often fail dismally."
Even in this sphere he has succeeded magnificently on occasion, his Great Society speech at Ann Arbor in 1964 offered Americans a stirring vision. The moment in 1965 when he stood before Congress and, in a televised appeal for passage of his voting-rights bill, cast his lot for the Negro's demand for equality by declaring "We shall overcome," was the emotional high point of his presidency to date. His speech at Howard University in June 1965, calling on Americans "to shatter forever not only the barriers of law and public practice, but the walls which bound the condition of many by the color of his skin," was a rousing call to action.
But he has frequently failed where another President with superior powers of persuasion might have succeeded. His inability to convince either Congress or the nation of the need for a tax increase is one example. When the Detroit riots erupted last summer, Johnson had a splendid opportunity to rally the nation. Instead, he took a safe, legalistic and patently political approach delaying the dispatch of federal troops until Michigan's Governor George Remmney, a potential rival in 1968, was ready to admit that he had lost control of the situation. Johnson's follow-up actions were no more impressive. "Here we've had a whole summer of riots," said former White House Aide Richard Goodwin, who served under both Kennedy and Johnson. "and what do we get? A study commission and a day of prayer!"
Inspiration Gap. Johnson's "inspiration gap" is to some extent purely verbal. "The most eminent presidents have generally been eloquent presidents," wrote Stanford's Bailey in Presidential Greatness. "They were eloquent with pen, as Jefferson was; or with tongue as Franklin Roosevelt was; or with both as Wilson and Lincoln were." Johnson is eloquent with neither. Harry Truman helped overcome a similar deficiency with a roof-rasing style on the stump, Dwight Eisenhower with an avuncular manner that inspired confidence and trust. Johnson's official verbiage tends to be dull, and though he can be pungent and forceful in private, his public charisma is just about nil. He doesn't always look entirely "sincere," and he can't always. His effectiveness has been blunted by his all-too-familiar penchant for secrecy, gimmickry and deviousness.
Hills & Valleys. Part of his problem is the rustic image he projects in an age when the U.S. has finally acknowledged its status as a nation of cities. Though Johnson is a man of the 20th century (born in 1908), he nonetheless seems the product of a more distant past. His politics and philosophy were annealed in the inhospitable forges of the Dust Bowl and the Depression. To the generation that spawned acid-rock music, he often seems as remote as Betelgeuse. Hippies, college students and Eastern sophisticates are not the only people who look on him as a parvenu from the prairies. Living in grandiose isolation at either end of an axis that stretched from the Pedernales to the Potomac, Johnson is a stranger to the put-downs and hang-ups (terms he would probably not comprehend) of a populace that digs op and pop art, Valleys of Dolls in paperback and micro-skirts in the front office.
A well-developed will to power is mandatory in a strong President, but Johnson seems to have been endowed with an excessive share. He is egotistical enough to turn a sizable chunk of Texas into a memorial to himself (including a special plaque at the Hye Post Office immortalizing it as the spot where four-year-old Lyndon Johnson mailed his first letter). He is a "hill and valley" man, way up one day, deep down the next. He can be so overbearing to aides and so intolerant of debate within his official family that many of his best lieutenants have left him, often forcing him to surround himself with less- talented cronies. Increasingly, his staff is becoming a projection of himself. Of his ten principal aides, six are now Texans, and few of them are known as "no-men."
No Leonardo. All too often, Johnson has sought to substitute promises for challenge. "I'm not sure he knows how to level with the public any more," says a Southern editor, "except in the old Texas-New Deal sense. `I'm gonna build y'all a dam. I'm gonna put laht bulbs in Aunt Minnie's kitchen.'" Agrees U.C.L.A.'s Chancellor Franklin Murphy: "I'm not criticizing Johnson for not having cleaned up the ghettos overnight or having gotten the war closed up in a year or two. I don't think Leonardo da Vinci and Thomas Aquinas together could have accomplished that. What I am saying is that he made the huge mistake of implying, by way of rhetoric, that this could be done quickly and easily."
This has been particularly true in the case of Viet Nam, In the past his forecasts were hyperbolic, and though they have since been muted, they backfired as the war dragged on. By contrast, Churchill knew during World War II that the British wanted the unvarnished truth, and, as Lord Moran wrote, he "hurled it at them like great hunks of bleeding meat."
Politics of Harmony. Paradoxically, the war provides a supreme illustration both of the powers at Johnson's command and the limitations of their exercise. Before Viet Nam took center stage, Cornell's Rossiter predicted that Johnson "would rank up there with what we call the first-class second-class Presidents, and perhaps with a big effort, even rise above that." Now he says: "This war has damaged Lyndon Johnson's place in history. It has divided the country, and that has cost him his power base. I bet he wakes up in the morning sometimes and wonders what happened."
Still, Viet Nam can hardly be held entirely responsible for the President's setbacks in the ephemeral but transcendently important area of public respect and support. Johnson could cultivate his consensus for only so long. Once he had to start assigning priorities, as every President eventually must, the politics of harmony had to give way to the politics of conflict and controversy.
Executive Energy. Harry Truman said three years ago that "the presidency is exactly as powerful as it was under George Washington. The powers are in the constitution, and the President can't go any further than that." Strictly speaking, Truman was right. Thanks largely to Hamilton's eloquent plea in The Federalist papers for "energy in the Executive," the office was invested with broad authority--but it was also artfully hedged. Every strong President has exploited his mandate to the fullest, always testing the Congress and the judiciary to see where the parameters of power may lie. Just where they ought to lie is an argument that has raged for 180 years. More than a century ago, when Chief Justice John Marshall scolded Andrew Jackson in Worcester v. Georgia for failing to honor a treaty guaranteeing the rights of the Cherokee Indians, Jackson is said to have retorted with impunity: "John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it." By contrast, when F.D.R. tried to pack the Supreme Court, he was rebuffed by Congress and later by the voters, who re-elected all but one of the recalcitrant, anti-New Deal Congressmen he tried to purge.
The Latitudinarians. At one end of the presidential spectrum are the men whom New York University Political Scientist Louis Koening calls the "literalists": those who, like Madison and Taft, interpreted their powers narrowly and subscribed to the Whig theory of the President as an errand boy for Congress. At the other end are what Yale historian John Morton Blum calls the "latitudinarians": those who, like Lincoln and Wilson, gave wide scope to the Constitution's vague charter.
From the first, the powers have been there for a strong President to use. When the Swiss examined the U.S. Constitution as a possible model for their own 1848 charter, they rejected it on the grounds that the presidency is a "matrix for dictatorship." Nonetheless, even the most activist Presidents have run into brick walls. "Lincoln was a sad man," F.D.R. once said, "because he couldn't get it all at once. And nobody can." At the end of one of his poorer days, Truman growled over a bourbon and water: "They talk about the power of the President, how I can just push a button to get things done. Why, I spend most of my time kissing somebody's ass." And Johnson roared recently: "Power? The only power I've got is nuclear--and I can't use that."
Johnson has had less to say about the job than many of his predecessors. But once, in the early days of his presidency, when his aides warned him against risking his prestige by fighting for a civil rights bill because the odds were 3 to 2 against its passage, he asked quietly: "What's the presidency for?" That brief remark spoke volumes about his desire to use the office not simply as a springboard for self-aggrandizement but for the nation's progress.
Falling Sparrows. Unlike Ike, who set up military lines of command and delegated responsibility, Johnson wants to be in on everything. His "night reading," often a five-inch-thick stack of memos and cables, covers everything from the latest CIA intelligence roundup to a gossipy report on a feud between two Senators. "Not a sparrow falls," says a former aide, "that he doesn't know about." He speaks of "my Government" and "my army" and "my taxes." The Presidential Seal has been emblazoned on his twill ranch jackets, his cowboy boots, his cuff links, even on plastic drinking cups.
Former Vice President Richard Nixon, among others, thinks Johnson makes a mistake by getting involved in too many things. "A President's creative energies must be reserved for the great decisions, which only he can make, and which mean war or peace," he says, adding shrewdly: "If the President assumes too much power, his mistakes are magnified. If power is diffused, his mistakes are reduced." In addition, if a President wants credit for everything that goes right, he must also be prepared to take the blame for everything that goes wrong.
The fact is that Lyndon Johnson has made a greater effort than any of his recent predecessors to shift more responsibility to the states and cities. He concedes that much of his domestic legislation has turned into a "programmatic and bureaucratic nightmare that we frankly must face up to." Johnson has diffused certain federal powers to a wider extent than is generally recognized--in the poverty war, with its 1,000-odd community- action programs; in the landmark Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which encourages innovation by individual schools; in the air- and water-pollution-control acts, which their call for state-conceived programs; and in the model-cities bill, which leaves it to the mayors to tie together some 200 different federal urban programs into a coherent attack on blight. Under Johnson, moreover, private enterprise for the first time assumed an active role in the rehabilitation of the nations' cities.
Still, L.B.J. is not a man to yield power freely. He has, for instance, flatly rejected the idea of sharing taxes with the states. In so doing, he kept jealous guard over the prime source of a President's domestic strength--the federal taxing power. |
