The Union & the World

The difference between the two occasions was simple but inescapable. The last time Lyndon Johnson stood before a joint session of Congress, the shock and mourning over John Kennedy's assassination had not yet passed. Johnson's State of the Union speech a year ago, for all its high promise, was still a message from an interim President in an uncertain hour. This week Johnson was ready to report on a Union that he himself had guided during 13 remarkable months. He was now President in his own right, with an overwhelming victory at the polls behind him and an overwhelmingly Democratic Congress --68% in the Senate, 68% in the House.

Having accomplished a great deal in the last Congress, Johnson hoped to forge right ahead in the present one--and he was determined to aim straight for the Great Society.

Against Labels. In his State of the Union speech, as drafted during the last days of 1964 at the ranch, he was pushing hard for an increased anti-poverty program, large-scale schemes for conservation of natural resources, aggressive programs in education, and the nurturing of what he likes to call "human resources."

The President had begun preparing for his address as long ago as last July, when, with full confidence of victory over Barry Goldwater, he had instructed his advisers to provide him with ideas. They had come through with a vengeance. At the ranch last week Johnson showed reporters three thick, black looseleaf notebooks crammed, he said, with "thousands of pages from some 50 agencies." But he was also drawing on a document of his own, an article he wrote in 1958 for the Texas Quarterly, which has become his and his advisers' favorite statement of the Lyndon Johnson political philosophy.

In the article Johnson spelled out his brand of idealistic pragmatism and condemned the tendency to label and dogmatize, with too many politicians preferring to be expedient rather than patient: "To grant audiences to 170 million Americans would be exhausting. So we make our divisions, our classifications and our cross-classifications, which permit us to forgo the listening and the searching we ought to do."

Lost Billions. Nobody could accuse Lyndon Johnson of failing to listen or to search as he worked on his State of the Union message and the budget. All week long his Cabinet officers and budget advisers trooped in and out of the Texas spread with dollar signs dancing in their heads. For newsmen, Lyndon pointed out two brown picnic tables in the yard at which he and his advisers had worked on the budget. "That's where you lost billions of dollars this week," he chuckled. "That's where I got the budget down, and a suntan--right there." Whether, as Lyndon has been hoping, the final budget comes out under $100 billion remains to be seen.

Between other chores, Johnson drove to the Fredericksburg cemetery to visit the graves of his maternal grandparents ("Joseph W. Baines . . . A True Man, A Loyal Citizen, A Dedicated Husband and Father, A Faithful Christian") and sent New Year's greetings to the Soviet Union's rulers, asking the Russians to join the U.S. in efforts "to make this a happier and safer world for all peoples."

In Washington, meanwhile, workmen were speedily constructing the presidential box for the Jan. 20 inaugural parade. Mindful of the Kennedy assassination, the Secret Service specified that the President will sit behind a protective setup consisting of a 1/4-in-thick steel shield topped with a 1 1/2-in.-thick slab of bullet-resistant plate glass.

Evidently judging the time appropriate for a reading on his health, the President instructed his physicians to issue a report, which came in the form of a question-and-answer document, prompted, it was explained, by questions that had been put to the White House in recent months. In sum, the report allowed as how the President takes a bourbon and branch water before dinner, swims occasionally, gets seven or eight hours of sound sleep, sometimes works in bed in the morning, and no longer smokes. Among other disclosures:

Q. When the President was plagued by hoarseness during the campaign, did he pop cough drops into his mouth, even as ordinary citizens do?

A. Yes.

Q. What is your judgment as to how the President will withstand the strains and stresses of four more years in the White House?

A. In outstanding fashion.

Foreign Challenge. While the state of Lyndon thus seemed to be as sound as the State of the Union, the same could not be said for the shape of U.S. foreign relations. One of the President's visitors at the ranch was Secretary of State Dean Rusk, who flew down to brief him on the latest turns in the perennial Viet Nam crisis. One prominent White House wit held that the mess in Viet Nam was no worse than the mess inside the Republican Party, but the joke really wasn't very funny. The fact is that, for all his domestic achievements, Johnson has not yet fully applied his talents or his energies to dealing with the rest of the world--particularly when compared with Kennedy's decisiveness and imagination in foreign affairs.

There may be much wisdom in Johnson's present watchful waiting. But his relative inaction, especially concerning Viet Nam--where he insists that the U.S. must neither retreat nor expand the war--has created a kind of vacuum. And this vacuum is encouraging a growing chorus advocating U.S. withdrawal or something close to it (see following story). Therein lies perhaps the greatest challenge to Lyndon Johnson's potentially excellent first full term: he will have to master the Great Society, foreign division.

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