The Imponderables

Nothing, it had seemed, could conceivably stand in the way of Democrat Lyndon Johnson's inexorable march back to the White House.

But last week, during a few tumultuous days, a spectacular series of international and national events tumbled forth in bewildering array and threw a whole set of imponderables into a presidential campaign that had previously seemed all too ponderable.

Good Old Rules? To start it off, the Soviet Union orbited the earth's first three-passenger spaceship, indicating that the Russians maintain at least a two-year lead over the U.S. The overthrow of Nikita Khrushchev raised anew the question of what kind of Communist enemy the U.S. faces. The election of a new Labor government in Britain posed for the U.S. the problem of establishing a new set of relationships with one of its oldest, staunchest allies. And the news that Communist China had exploded a nuclear device revived vivid fears in the hearts of many peoples, indicating as it did that the wherewithal to produce an atomic arsenal will, within the foreseeable future, be in the hands of the most irresponsible government among the world's major powers. By all the good old rules of political reaction, these events should have strengthened President Johnson in his 1964 election run. In times of crisis, U.S. voters ordinarily flock to the cause of the man in office.

Johnson, who is perfectly familiar with these rules, behaved accordingly. He called off some politicking engagements, scheduled a weekend television speech to underline the seriousness with which he viewed the world situation.

Responsibility & Accountability. Yet, lest anyone think that that situation had deteriorated under his Administration, he also gave assurances. He talked for 45 minutes with Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, posed for pictures smiling and shaking hands, received vows that the new Soviet government would continue to seek peaceful coexistence. The President also let it be known that he had told Dobrynin that the U.S. would maintain its strength, even while trying to be considerate of the views of others. He reminded the Russian ambassador that it is "one thing to tell a man to go to hell, and another thing to make him do it."

Similarly, in his reaction to the Chinese nuclear explosion, the President promised that "if and when the Chinese Communists develop nuclear-weapons systems, the free-world nuclear strength will continue, of course, to be enormously greater."

All week Johnson's watchword was "responsibility"--a watchword that has proved tried and true in many another U.S. election year. But "responsibility" has many aspects, and one of them is accountability. And many a U.S. voter might feel that the President should be held accountable for a domestic event that burst onto the nation's front pages even amid the cannonade of foreign news: the resignation of Johnson's senior aide, Walter W. Jenkins, after disclosure of the fact that he had been arrested as a sexual deviate.

First reactions to the news about Jenkins were shock and sympathy, particularly for Jenkins' family. This was followed by a nationwide wave of ribald jokes--and no one realizes better than Lyndon Johnson how much it can hurt a politician to be laughed at.

Yet the events in the Soviet Union, Britain and Communist China, following news of the Jenkins affair in rapid succession, seemed to overshadow it and to highlight the sorts of crises that would ordinarily figure to favor an incumbent President during an election year.

Thus, even after last week, Johnson remains likely to win. But the dimensions of his victory may be diminished to a degree that will help many state Republican candidates who might have been buried in a Johnson landslide.

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