LYNDON B. JOHNSON: BETWEEN TWO WORLDS

...Kennedy's conflict with steel...

...Kennedy had reluctantly lost faith in Rusk was apparently an ad hominem reaction to the source of the revelation, and produced the extraordinary assertion that Mr...

...Even though less than a decade separates their dates of birth, Kennedy and Johnson seem to belong to two totally different political epochs...

...It is true that Mr...

...During much of 1965 he often asserted privately that he has challenged Walter Lippmann (and other critics of his Vietnam strategy) to offer him alternative measures...

...Kennedy had a somber Lin-colnesque sense of the tragic limitations of any man's role...

...his admirers—and they include some of the most sophisticated students of the Washington scene—view this as his rare gift, bordering upon a form of political genius...

...What troubles serious men (as distinct from unreconstructed Maoists and congenital oppositionists) is the knowledge that any modern American President must live in two worlds...

...Yet, when the aluminum trust hurled the challenge of a profiteering price rise, Mr...

...Kennedy liked to engage in what James MacGregor Burns has called a "dialogue of equals...

...but that millions of Americans were deeply dismayed by the disclosure of the Administration's rejection of the chance to explore U Thant's peace initiatives in 1964 is far more consequential—as I suspect Senator Hubert Humphrey would have been among the first to discern and assert...

...And in a sense they do...

...Johnson (after some mixed signals on his team) fought back without flinching...

...but it was no less decisively resolved...

...The Peace Corps marches on under Lyndon Johnson...

...if at times the rhetoric is laden with unduly saccharine sentimentality, surely that is preferable to the cool complacency of those who tell us all battles have been won, and that those still doomed to second-class lives are the victims of their own sloth...

...yet the evidence is now clear that the option of exploratory talks with Hanoi was open in 1964—and that, without any apparent consultation with William Fulbright, the thoughtful chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, (or with Lippmann) he rejected the bid...

...he has performed both the political and legislative duties of deputy with characteristic diligence, and, in such instances as New York's mayoralty campaign, excruciating exuberance...

...It is under his driving, optimistic leadership that so many stalemates have been broken, and that domestic politics has once again seemed to be the art of the possible...

...He valorously endured the suspense to which he was subjected during Mr...

...Yet, writing in this beginning of the third Johnson year, one is obliged to remind oneself of the quick, capricious fluctuations of events that so often render momentary judgments fragile or false...

...Surely it is not that Mrs...

...his detractors see it as a blend of ruthlessness and cynicism, essentially based on the proposition that "every man has his price" and that few are willing to risk their lives for principle...

...Johnson relentlessly proclaims his manhood and exhibits the opinion polls to confirm his mastery...

...The President has often been chided, by myself and others, for what has seemed to be a frenetic preoccupation with the theory of "consensus...

...Johnson was unable to fulfill his commitment to organized labor to achieve the repeal of section 14-B of the Taft-Hartley law, the result may be traced in part to the inadequacy and stodginess of labor's own campaign against the clause...

...Yet somehow he may fight—or muddle—his way though the morass...

...The departure of young Richard Goodwin was a real loss...

...Obviously the real risk in such a state of affairs is that he will increasingly be surrounded by craven yes-men and deprived of the presence of creative, critical spirits...

...All one can say with certitude now is that, as of the first two years, Mr...

...McNamara is plainly a man of impressive talent and strength who has, on numerous occasions, resolutely reasserted civilian supremacy in his dealings with the brass-hats...

...In designating Arthur Goldberg as Adlai Stevenson's successor at the United Nations, Mr...

...But I am not among those currently obsessed with the conventions of 1972...

...Johnson's tastes may diverge from those of Jacqueline Kennedy's, for the First Lady has been a spirited figure whose diverse concerns and endeavors are at times reminiscent of Eleanor Roosevelt's...

...While the surface wounds were less bloody, there can be no doubt that it cost him at least a few percentage points in his rating in the business community...

...we shall never know...

...a figure viewed with political suspicion by a President who has no rational reason for insecurity about his own dominance of his party's structure through the next seven years...

...Surely a quiet retreat with George Kennan or Benjamin V. Cohen might have been more fruitful, if less inspirational...

...Humphrey's cautious abstinence from any hint of private discontent has subjected him to sharp, even derisive assault from liberals who have long constituted his major political base...

...The gap is accentuated by matters of public and private style...

...my concern is whether Humphrey is being heard and heeded in the top councils where world policy is formulated, or whether he has been led to conclude that any forthrightness would constitute unsolicited interference in the internal affairs of the Johnson Administration...

...Johnson has long taken pride in his capacity to manipulate men...

...Unworthy considerations of vanity and resentment have continued to mar the President's relations with Senator Robert F. Kennedy, who might also be rendering valuable aid in the foreign-policy realm...

...the war on poverty is treated as a major matter on the national agenda...

...For those of my generation and younger, the abbreviated Kennedy years had a special magnificence, graced with excitement and expectation, adventure (not always well-conceived) and animation...

...Now I have gone this far and the balance sheet may have a tone of nibbling negativism...

...Nor is it the intermittent reminder that the affairs of a man named Bobby Baker were swept under the rug...

...At times he has cruelly burlesqued himself...

...The unhappy truth is the reverse...

...Kennedy had to overcome among many liberal critics to recall how swiftly contemporary verdicts may be altered...

...the exterior Johnson seems too often to confuse himself with superman...

...Johnson named one of the country's most conscientious and dedicated civil libertarians—Abe Fortas—to the Supreme Court, thereby insuring a continuance of the Warren Court's cure of the national illness induced by McCarthyism...

...Goldberg to the United Nations, Mr...

...Johnson took Graham seriously...

...His triumphs, he might justly point out, have almost come to be taken for granted...

...No one doubts the zealousness with which he pursues his goals...

...Johnson has intermittently affirmed his hospitality to disagreement...

...yet, with the exception of certain notable utterances on the perils of nuclear proliferation, he has been largely heard in intemperate defense of the Administration's stand in Vietnam and the Dominican Republic, and in chastisement of the evil spirits allegedly luring innocents into disparagement of our Vietnam position...

...The confrontation had little of the high drama of Mr...

...Among his books are "The Age of Suspicion" and "Reflections of an Angry Middle-aged Editor...

...It is not that the President exposed a surgical scar to photographers, abrasive as that act may have beert to some sensitive souls...

...Johnson has also stubbornly reiterated his confidence in the diplomatic omniscience of Dean Rusk, whose sterile orthodoxies are devastat-ingly documented in Arthur Schlesin-ger's chronicle of John F. Kennedy's Presidency, A Thousand Days, President Johnson's reaction to the historian's disclosure that Mr...

...and that there is a haunting sense that all of the local good he is striving to fashion may be reduced to ashes by a cosmic international blunder...

...Certainly he has not been underworked, and it may well be that he has carried on unpublicized assignments more meaningful in nature than many missions officially recorded...

...What is worthy of exploration at this stage in his career is whether there is valid basis for the estrangement, and whether it may have any crucial bearing on his place in history...

...Yet the impression persists in many places in Washington that his skills have been inadequately utilized in certain crucial areas, and that he has too often been reduced to the status of apologist for deeds already done rather than as partner in the shaping of large achievements...

...Among even his closest associates Humphrey has fastidiously avoided any lamentation about his role...

...But serious men must try to isolate the emotions of the past from relevant appraisal of the present...

...Few men glimpse as keenly as he does both the complexities and possibilities created by the strife within what used to be Russia's Holy Communist empire...

...There have been other moments when, as we seemed to be nearing an irretrievable brink, sanity or luck intervened...

...but there is every reason to believe that the President tried hard to retain him...

...Johnson's legislative score card is an apparent omen of even more historic days...

...But the conventional strategems employed on Capitol Hill offer small guidance to wise conduct in the sophisticated ideological world conflict on which not merely private success but human survival may hinge...

...Johnson long ago established his talent for out-maneuvering the Republican bunglers...

...Johnson's capacities in domestic matters seem far more distinguished than any skills he has shown in world policy...

...Surely many would be exulting in the dramatic change in climate wrought by Johnson's advent—the stirring sight of a government suddenly reinvigorated, of a legislative process reborn, of passion and purpose replacing torpor, of dedication substituted for abdication...

...Bill D. Moyers, whom the President elevated to the role of press secretary and personal spokesman, is one of the most independent and idealistic characters to achieve any eminence in modern Washington...

...One need only recall the skepticism Mr...

...In my own judgment—perhaps attributable to a faulty intelligence system—Humphrey's hand has been most painfully missing in the shaping of great foreign-policy decisions...

...To intimates he has portrayed McNamara as the man he would install as "Assistant President" if he had full freedom of choice...

...That he is sensitive to this condition is well known...

...At a critical moment in American debate over the Vietnam war—the weekend of the most recent peace march on Washington—he attended a Billy Graham pep rally and there welcomed the evangelist's testimonial to the President's conduct of foreign affairs, accompanied by the Reverend Graham's familiar outcry against sin...

...On the first point, the origins of JAMES A. WECHSLER is editor of the editorial page of The New York Post and a regular columnist for that newspaper...

...The point is not whether such talks had any large chance of success at the time...

...he was similarly uncomplaining when he was conspicuously omitted, early in the Johnson regime, from the delegation attending Winston Churchill's funeral...

...I think there is a parallel feeling that he becomes more self-righteous and arrogant in those areas in which he is most self-conscious and insecure, and that his impatience with criticism is more often directed at those who question his infallibility in his most vulnerable fields...

...unfortunately he too often conveys the impression to Senatorial and other doubters that he will defend to the death their right to agree with him...

...not since the early times of the New Deal is there any record of breakthroughs comparable to those Mr...

...No doubt the "fixers" are operating in Washington, but there has been no deadly taint of scandal unearthed during the Johnson period...

...So simple-minded a totalitarian portrait is crudely overdrawn...

...Instead there is an increasingly exacting scrutiny of the mood and manners of the Johnson regime, a downgrading of even the high moments, an undiminished sense of loss even amid tangible signs of advances, an undercurrent of apprehension in any applause, no more than two cheers even when three seem fully warranted...

...But whether he possesses any notable insights into the shifting, often inscrutable, tides of the strife-torn Communist world is far from demonstrated...

...It is some measure of the problem that even these tentative characterizations of Humphrey's status are set forth reluctantly, lest some paranoid Johnson loyalists in government or the press accuse the Vice President of inspiring the remarks...

...Johnson to suggest that this morose thought has not occurred to him...

...Yet Kennedy remains a target of White House hatchet-men rather than a respected consultant...

...Nor is it that Norman Mailer and Truman Capote are missing from White House guest lists (or are they...

...all his visions of the Great Society are imperiled by a war he inherited, which is one phase of an infinitely complex world-wide political struggle...

...the most controversial affair involved his zealous effort to minimize the damage to a dedicated aide caught in a homosexual misadventure, and the President's instinctive response might well have been described as a kindness rather than cover-up...

...Perhaps more than any other man, Kennedy acquired important wisdom from the rough experiences of his brother's administration...

...Johnson hardly chose a man with a reputation for meekness or reticence...

...Johnson if the accidents of life had made him successor to Dwight D. Eisenhower rather than to John F. Kennedy...

...Johnson's choice of a Vice Presidential running mate...

...It is in the elusive, enigmatic status of Vice President Hubert Humphrey that the fears of the detractors appear most seriously sustained...

...Like his predecessor, the President has relied heavily in these first two years on the counsel of Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara...

...that Mr...

...there can be no one brash or prescient enough at this juncture to predict what the world will look like even a year from now if the mutual escalation accelerates in Vietnam...

...In matters of contrast, it might also be observed how differently some alienated intellectuals might now view Mr...

...What is relevant is the procedure of Presidential decision, and the lack of candor eventually revealed...

...As someone remarked, one had the awful feeling that Mr...

...indeed, the selection undoubtedly evoked large bureaucratic anxieties in the State Department and other power-conscious domains...

...There has been a combination of affectionate retrospect and maudlin exercise, much of it mingled with a nostalgia that seems to contain implicit criticism of Mr...

...His "antenna" about Latin America is peculiarly sharp, as was manifested anew in his recent journey to that region where—despite State Department misgivings about his journey— he did so much to retrieve recent American ineptitudes by a hopeful restatement of nobler intentions...

...After all, it is Lyndon B. Johnson who has carried through swiftly and superbly so much of the long-unfinished business on the liberal legislative agenda...

...By contrast with Kennedy, the State Department's Thomas Mann—the architect of so much of our current Latin American trouble—is an uninformed adventurer operating in a world of discredited "strong-man" stereotypes...

...the whispered question is whether he is so indifferent to all the rules and so insensitive to individual dignity that he is creating an atmosphere more appropriate to an Orwellian "big brother" society than to a democracy...

...It would be an injustice to Mr...

...It was this tall Texan who embraced the battle cry of the Freedom Movement—"We Shall Overcome"—and who, in his Howard University speech, so thoughtfully and passionately outlined the basic roots of Negro frustration...

...Johnson's rating in the opinion polls remains strikingly strong, it has become fashionable to describe him as an object of approval rather than adulation, as one who is grudgingly saluted rather than loved...

...Rusk was the greatest Secretary of State in our century...

...If Mr...

...On the basis of tangible achievement, Mr...

...While Mr...

...the problem are by now fairly plain...

...he has publicly disputed assertions that his place in the civil rights effort has been curtailed...

...Nor is it irrelevant to note that, when he dispatched Mr...

...Johnson's place in history clearly depends, alas, on history...

...yndon B. Johnson: Between Two Worlds by JAMES A. WECHSLER TVTow, as attempts are made to assess ' the first two years of Lyndon B. Johnson's Presidency, the country has barely completed observance of the anniversary of the Kennedy assassination...

...What has been wrong...

...An authentic yearning to be remembered as the man who brought new hope to the lower depths runs through the bulk of Presidential proclamations...

...Why, then, is this report seemingly permeated with anxiety and half-heartedness...

...He might well be more effective as coordinator of affirmative domestic programs than as a guide in the wilderness of world politics...

...Johnson has wrought in education, in medicine, in civil rights, and in many related areas...

...That such evil spirits exist I have no doubt...