AS MIKE MANSFIELD WAS SAYING -

...Yet by the third night after the President's withdrawal, one could hear a common citizen say in an all-night coffee shop, "If he ends the war he could get re-elected...

...This was the convention at which President Roosevelt was "drafted" for a third term...

...Of course, he went on to say, Roosevelt had his third term in view, but it was the same for Johnson, too, since he would have served part of one man's term and one of his own...

...Max Frankel of The New York Times, who has good sources in the White House, reported at length on the President's consideration of the possibility of not running...

...Surely the President would not playact in a scenario—much less all the members of the U.S...

...In other words: a fake withdrawal, a bold gamble that neither Kennedy nor McCarthy could get a majority of the delegates as Mr...

...His articles have appeared in many publications, including Harper's, The New Republic, and The Progressive...

...I believe every word he said, and I think the members of the Senate, unanimously, do as well...

...I cannot recall a truly comparable act by any other individual in the history of this or any other nation...

...Johnson by his scouts in that state...

...Asked what role he might play in the campaign, Mr...

...Asked why, he replied, "It's not necessary...

...Johnson had been seriously discussing declining nomination for a year or more, it was more likely that he meant it—that it was "irrevocable...

...The distracting thing about the doubts of the cynical scenarists is that Washington is so lovely in the spring...

...They crowded around his desk...

...Senator Eugene J. McCarthy had scored impressively in New Hampshire, and the prospect that the Senator would achieve an even more sweeping victory in Wisconsin was well understood by the President on that historic Sunday as the result of doleful reports conveyed to Mr...

...Johnson's sensational announcements of March 31...

...The analogy would seem to break down even more in a comparison of the war in Europe in 1940 with the war in Vietnam in 1968...

...This is Morrow's account to me of what Gamer told him: The preceding spring, James Farley had told Mr...

...Representative Johnson regularly voted for the "two-ocean navy" and such military measures as the fortification of Guam...

...Senate...

...Scenario is the latest vogue-word, something like "charisma" in the Kennedy era and "image" in the earlier Johnson period...

...No one but President Johnson knows what or how much of what he meant by the 1940 analogy he broached to newsmen on Air Force One March 18...

...The case for taking President Johnson's withdrawal at face value was persuasive...

...Johnson and his lieutenants and the retrospective de-fensibility of President Roosevelt's tactics or deceit to get us into World War II could be stretched to apply to present times if the pending peace talks fail to reach a settlement...

...My own guess is that the truth is a compound of the appearances and Johnson's deeper hopes—that by withdrawing, he expressed his desire to avoid the political humiliations otherwise ahead of him this year and his willingness to go on back to Texas if that's the way it has to be, but that he also enjoyed flummoxing and embarrassing the forces arrayed against him and hopes he can manage events so that he will be drafted to carry on his policies, just as President Roosevelt was in 1940...

...Only events can answer...

...Its possible importance is not in itself, but in the fact that Mr...

...Rowan made it clear that he was relying on his own knowledge of the President...

...Anyone who knows how deeply Mr...

...He is the author of the forthcoming book, Johnson: From Poverty to Power, to be published by W. W. Norton...

...In the closing years of the 1930's, as President Roosevelt's evident conviction strengthened that the United States would have to fight Hitler, Congress and great portions of the voters bridled and sometimes thwarted his efforts to tool up a military machine...

...A dramatic act of statesmanship," said Senator Gale W. McGee of Wyoming...

...President Johnson has contended, however, that aggression is everywhere the same...

...Johnson was up to began to emerge...

...Beginning about a year ago, Frankel wrote, Mr...

...He is a very personable man, but he doesn't tell the truth if it doesn't suit him...

...Thirteen days later, he said he was not...

...Roosevelt was accused, then and later, of deceiving the people about what he was up to...

...Johnson did not withdraw to open the White House gates to Bobby...

...there were signs that Connally might like to be on a ticket with Humphrey...

...As Senator Mansfield said, "To the best of my knowledge, the President at no time has ever knowingly misstated the truth to the American people...

...If Johnson's peace overtures to Hanoi succeed," Rowan wrote, "Kennedy and McCarthy will have been robbed of the issue that supposedly impelled them to seek the nomination...

...Frankel of The Times reported that, for a year or so, Mr...

...Robert F. Kennedy is no mere John Nance Garner...

...Roosevelt remained aloof from the Presidential campaign...

...Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara...

...If Mr...

...The two dozen or so members of the "writing press" who rode in Air Force One were invited after breakfast to chat with the President...

...This," said Senator Frank Church of Idaho, "is Lyndon Johnson's finest hour...

...Lyndon Johnson is not Franklin D. Roosevelt...

...Johnson has given up his Presidency for it...

...As Rowan reasoned, the country had been seeing Kennedy as a peace-lover and idealist and Mr...

...He considered withdrawing with a statement at the end of the State of the Union address in January of this year...

...The analogy with 1940 will not bear even slightly rigorous inspection...

...When the moment approached, Horace Busby, a speech-writer and business consultant to Mr...

...At first President Johnson's announcement, "I shall not seek and I will not accept the nomination," was taken at face value in the nation's capital...

...Carrying it to any serious conclusion would be absurd...

...The bombing pause and withdrawal as a candidate may have been "a brilliant strategic ploy" designed to win the nomination again...

...Roosevelt once explained that although he could not persuade the Congress to expand the Army, mothers did not seem to mind their boys becoming sailors...

...At the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in July, 1940, Lyndon Johnson presided at a Texas caucus at which speaker Sam Rayburn was endorsed for Vice President...

...He is also the author of Dark Star, a study of the Claude Eatherly case, and the editor of Three Men in Texas, published by the University of Texas Press...

...This process began, Frankel reported, "almost" from the day of the 1965 inauguration...

...The correlative of a war in Europe would be a war in Asia...

...Johnson—either in reward for a real or ostensible settlement of the war, or after Hanoi is blamed, as always, for the failure of peace attempts—were drafted for "a third term...

...Rowan thought Mr...

...The cherry blossoms are out...

...Johnson in fifteen states...

...On March 18, Mr...

...How, Rowan asked, can either Kennedy or McCarthy argue he wants peace more than Johnson when Mr...

...The basis for doubt was best laid, the first few days after the announcement, by syndicated columnist Carl Rowan, who knows the President pretty well...

...President Roosevelt installed his young protege, Lyndon Johnson, in a money-raising role for House Democrats standing for re-election...

...He will run, he'll be nominated, he'll be re-elected...

...I am quite certain that he searched his own soul before he made that historic declaration...

...If we're attacked it's no longer a foreign war...

...In the bedlam, these doubts were advanced cautiously...

...But uneasiness grew in the White House as Wendell Willkie, the Republican candidate, gained on him by calling him a warmonger...

...However, suppose Mr...

...Johnson consulted his friend John Connally, the Texas governor...

...Johnson which was widely quoted and reprinted...

...Disregarding the Senator's words, the delegates stormed and stomped for Roosevelt in what Morrow regards— still, after all these years, with bitterness —as a put-up job...

...Johnson as a crass politician and a hawk bent on a military solution in Vietnam...

...At first Mr...

...Once the doubters get into the house, they take over the kitchen and the living room...

...Neither Mao nor Ho is Hitler...

...by this theory, the Munich analogy invoked so frequently in the past by Mr...

...the Navy could be expanded...

...I am quite certain," said Senator Mike Mansfield that spring day, "that the President was honest, candid, and forthright, and that he meant what he said...

...he ran the Government's international information agency for Mr...

...Columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak quoted "high Administration officials" as saying that he did not decide until shortly before airtime that Sunday night to use the statement of withdrawal...

...That night in Boston he said, "I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars...

...Morrow agreed to nominate Garner, whereupon the Vice President told him, according to Morrow: "You're not going to get many votes, because the man in the White House is a very attractive liar...

...consultations with North Vietnam lead to peace negotiations, abort, or drag out, the import of a statement by Johnson's brother may become clear...

...The sobering fact today is that Franklin D. Roosevelt was playing out a scenario in 1940...

...The Editors Washington, D.C...

...Some of the reporters present had the impression he meant he was running...

...Johnson was privately discussing the nature of the campaign he would wage...

...The possibilities in the 1940 analogy need to be named before they can be weighed...

...Garner, 61...

...A reporter who asked, after the withdrawal, about the possibility that he might accept a draft, was given the crush-it-with-contempt treatment...

...I give up power in love of country...

...The President said he was tired of "these high school discussions" about a draft...

...Now he will be able to say what he thinks and they can't accuse him of doing it for some political motive...

...Late the sunny Monday afternoon following Mr...

...Four years ago he wrote an article for The Progressive entitled "Before We Shall Cheer," a critical evaluation of Mr...

...George Christian, his press secretary...

...A peace feeler from Hanoi, Governor Reagan said, may have preceded Mr...

...Moreover, if he wanted the nomination, why did he run the great risk of releasing everyone to Kennedy's and McCarthy's appeals at the moment of his apparently maximum vulnerability...

...If the reporters wanted a feeling of how the President felt about the 1968 campaign, they were led to believe the 1940 campaign was the best parallel...

...The Gallup Poll showed that public approval of his performance in the Presidency was down to thirty-six per cent—the lowest ever...

...The President could very well have considered not running, formed a disposition to run by March 18, but then reached his decision not to run by March 31...

...The most important implication of Frankel's account was nowhere stated explicitly within it...

...Up on Capitol Hill, the politicians were discovering in President Johnson another George Washington, an ornament for the classroom walls of posterity, and, in the meanwhile, a timely addition to the nation's family farmers...

...By withdrawing, the President said in effect, "I am a bigger patriot, more of an idealist," than Kennedy or McCarthy...

...Johnson would have had to shred his own Party...

...Farley, 72 and nine-tenths...

...Did Sam Houston mean that his brother had to quit the race to attain credibility for a peace offensive in the midst of the spring Presidential campaigns...

...Johnson flew from Austin to Minneapolis...

...According to Morrow, "Roosevelt said, 'Exactly right...

...But from a veteran of many scenarios, Ronald Reagan, a bolder guess came ticking into the Washington newsrooms from cross-continent...

...If—and the "if" was slowly slanting toward italics—he was renominated after such a damaging spectacle, even Richard Nixon might easily defeat him...

...Johnson's announcement, girls from the Government offices were strewn across the grass in Farragut Square, the tables of the sidewalk cafes were alive with people sipping drinks, and the newspapers were thumbed page after page with a kind of joyous and unbelieving confusion...

...Most pundits agree that the imminence of disaster in Wisconsin helped trigger the timing of Mr...

...In his announcement there is the stamp of greatness," said Senator Harry Byrd of Virginia...

...Johnson...

...Johnson, drafted a new statement of withdrawal for use Sunday, March 31, if the President decided to go ahead...

...According to Wright Morrow, then a Houston lawyer and oilman and later a conservative Texas Democratic national committeeman, Vice President John Nance Garner of Texas asked him to nominate Garner for President at the Convention, but warned that he would have a hard time doing it...

...This was bland but suggestive...

...And then there was Robert F. Kennedy provoking delirious support with slashing criticism of Mr...

...Roosevelt that Farley and Garner were going to be candidates for the nomination, provided FDR had no idea of running again...

...Johnson said that a person who wanted to understand the Administration's approach would do well to study Franklin D. Roosevelt's 1940 campaign...

...He could not fail to know that the country was deeply divided after his four and a half years of seeking to unite it...

...Johnson intended to hurt Kennedy and help Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey get the nomination...

...Sam Houston Johnson, who is now living at the White House, said the President "had to take himself completely out of the race to work toward peace...

...After a day or two, however, the "scenario" theory of what Mr...

...To a visitor Mr...

...It would be modeled after 1940 and Franklin D. Roosevelt's bid for a third term," Childs wrote...

...The President's sacrifice on behalf of peace was widely praised, and the political sense of his decision, on behalf of national unity, was tacitly accepted...

...He had seen to it that a young Congressman, Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas, was put on the Naval Affairs Committee in 1937...

...The Convention chairman at Chicago that July, the late Senator Alben Bark-ley, told the delegates, "The President has never had, and has not today, any desire or purpose to continue in the office of President, to be a candidate for that office, or to be nominated by the Convention for that office...

...a few sat on a sofa nearby...

...But, perhaps more significantly, columnist Marquis Childs noted that during the ten days or two weeks before the withdrawal, Mr...

...Johnson received the acclaim of the nation for his peace initiatives...

...Mao might not march across Thailand, but Hong Kong might be Dunkirk, or Saigon might be London...

...Morrow did nominate Garner...

...With the almost immediate development of a prospect for peace negotiations, there were four or five shell games going on at once, and the capital was confused...

...Humphrey's candidacy appeared to be shored up as the conservative Governor Connally moved to bind the Texas delegation to himself as a favorite son...

...Johnson "thought of his tenure as four years...

...Dugger is editor-at-large and publisher of The Texas Observer...

...They," went the implication, "lust for power...

...A patriotism and a magnanimity which will live in history," said Senator Albert Gore of Tennessee...

...To win the nomination, Mr...

...The scripts of the scenario theory varied, but their common plot-line was that Mr...

...A deeply emotional man, he surely has wearied of the antipathies he has provoked...

...After his withdrawal on March 31, Washington reporters who were present on Air Force One on March 18 began talking again about what he had said that day...

...Johnson mentioned it as the model for his strategy in 1968 thirteen days before he announced his withdrawal...

...Johnson's withdrawal announcement...

...And anyone who knows, said Rowan, how strongly the President feels about his policy in Vietnam would know he was not giving up all hope of justifying this policy to history...

...The circle of the informed expanded slightly to include a few other White House staffers and Clark Clifford, McNamara's successor...

...and General William C. Westmoreland...

...Johnson did not mean what he said...

...As the U.S...

...Franklin Roosevelt got 946 and thirteen-thirtieths votes...

...Johnson feels about Robert Kennedy would know, Rowan wrote, that Mr...

...According to James MacGregor Burns in his book, Roosevelt: the Lion and the Fox, on board the campaign train on October 30, 1940, President Roosevelt wanted to drop from a speech his usual proviso that American boys would not be sent into foreign wars "except in case of attack...

...I have no idea of a third term, I will not run for a third term, I will not allow my name to go before the Convention.' " Farley told this to Garner, and President Roosevelt later confirmed the statement directly to Garner...

...Johnson considered the idea of withdrawing, but when did he actually make up his mind...