LYNDON'S FABLES

Lyndon Johnson is the hardest-working presidential tale spinner since Abraham Lincoln. Some of his yarns are long and tangled and full of Johnson's long-winded Texas syntax. Some are funny, some are pithy, and as often as not they are used to draw an Aesopian moral or to make a contemporary point. Some examples:

The Game is the Same. "Twenty-seven years ago this month, I came here as a newly elected Congressman. Washington has changed very little since then. Not long ago I called in one of the very bright and very busy young men I have working with me, and I said to him, rather brusquely, because I was in a hurry, 'The people want to know what we are going to do about the farm bill. Let's get our recommendations up right away.' He came right back and said, 'Mr. President, I don't think we have to consider that. I don't have a file on it. I will look it up, but I think you ought to go tell them if we owe it, we will pay it.' "

The Drunk and the Courthouse. When Johnson gets excuses about why something cannot be done, he often tells of "a fellow down in Blanco County who wanted to find the courthouse. He asked the town drunk, who lurched up to the car and began to give directions. 'You go down to the creek, take the first right past the bridge, then go left--no, you can't get to the courthouse that way.' He tried again. 'Let's see, you go on up to the top of the hill, turn left at the cedar grove and cross the bridge--no, you can't get to the courthouse that way either.' After a couple of more stabs at it, the drunk gave up, looked at the other fellow and said, 'You just can't get to the courthouse from here.'"

The Case of the Sleepy Parishioner. "The goal of my Administration is to work for a greater society. I have come here today to ask your help in that work. I don't want you to answer me like the man who slept through the preacher's sermon down in my hill country. Every Sunday he would come and get in the front row and sleep all during the sermon. Finally the preacher got a little irritated, and one Sunday he said, 'All you people'--the fellow was snoring in the front row--he said in a low voice, 'All you people who want to go to heaven, please rise.' Everyone stood up except the man that was asleep. When they sat down, the preacher said in a very loud voice that was calculated to arouse him, 'All of you men that want to go to hell, please stand up.' The man jumped up. He looked around in back of him, he looked at his wife, and she was sitting down. He looked at his grandmother and she was sitting down, at his children and they were sitting down. He looked at the preacher somewhat frustrated and he said, 'Preacher, I don't know what it is we are voting on, but you and I seem to be the only two for it.'

Mr. Sam, The Answer Man. "I was confident that the railroad men [negotiating the settlement] know more about the railroad business than I do. Back in the war, I remember when some people came to Mr. Sam Rayburn and asked if he didn't want to go down to Oak Ridge and inspect the place where they were making the atomic bomb. And he said to General George Marshall, 'I am not a physicist. That is not my business, and I would not know any more about how to win a war after I went to Oak Ridge than I did before I came.' And he said, 'If you don't know how to win a war any more than I do, we sure as hell have wasted a lot of money on West Point all these years.' "

The Uneaten Meal. "I was an NRA director back in the early days of the Roosevelt Administration in 1935 when we were taking kids out of boxcars who were riding the rails. We saw them getting their breakfast by culling grapefruit rinds that had been thrown in the garbage can. I knew a lot of social workers during those days, and I still do. One of the finest women that I ever knew, a social worker, told me that she had called on a family at mealtime not long ago. She told me the surroundings were meager. During the mealtime, she noticed one of the many small children was not eating. When she asked the child why, the answer was, It is not my day to eat.' "

The Heckler's Rebuke. "Al Smith was addressing a crowd when a heckler yelled, 'Tell 'em what's on your mind, Al. It won't take long.' Smith grinned, pointed at the man and shouted, 'Stand up, pardner, and I'll tell 'em what's on both our minds. It won't take any longer.' "

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