The Covenant

On the morning of Inauguration Day, a cold, clear, bright morning, Lyndon Johnson was up at 6:40, breakfasted with Lady Bird, and did some last-minute tinkering with his inaugural speech. Then the Johnsons drove to a special service at Washington's National City Christian Church. Clergymen of several denominations took part, among them Evangelist Billy Graham, who said:

"There is a spiritual dimension to leadership, which this Administration has already recognized." Recalling Lyndon Johnson's assumption of the presidency after John Kennedy's assassination, Graham quoted the prayer of King Solomon upon ascension to the throne of Israel after the death of his father.

King David: "Give me now wisdom and knowledge, that I may go out and come in before this people: for who can judge this thy people, that is so great?"

By coincidence, the President had chosen the same quotation from H Chronicles 1: 10 for the conclusion of his inaugural address. That was appropriate enough, because the speech was really a sermon.

The President's delivery was solemn, slow, almost doggedly prayerful and paternal. His main theme was essentially the familiar but enduring notion that the U.S. is not just another country in history, but that its founding was the work of special Providence. The early settlers, "the exile and the stranger, brave but frightened," came to America and "made a covenant with this land. Conceived in justice, written in liberty, bound in union, it was meant one day to inspire the hopes of all mankind." This view of the U.S. as God's country sometimes makes the rest of the world a little uncomfortable. But it is very different from militant nationalism, which substitutes the nation for God, or from messianic imperialism (for instance, the "Holy Russia" of the czarist era, perhaps not entirely dead in the atheistic Marxist present), which sees one nation as universal redeemer. The special American destiny, suggested President Johnson, is both a blessing and a burden. "We have no promise from God that our greatness will endure. We have been allowed by Him to seek greatness with the sweat of our hands and the strength of our spirit. If we fail now, we shall have forgotten in abundance what we learned in hardship: that democracy rests on faith, that freedom asks more than it gives, and that the judgment of God is harshest on those who are most favored.

"If we succeed, it will not be because of what we have, but it will be because of what we are; not because of what we own, but rather because of what we believe. For we are a nation of believers. Underneath the clamor of building and the rush of our day's pursuits, we are believers in justice and liberty and union, and in our own Union. We believe that every man must some day be free. And we believe in ourselves."

A Child's Globe. Johnson did not define the American faith more precisely but, he said, America's enemies always underestimate the power of that faith. Despite this reference to "enemies," and despite a condemnation of isolationism old and new--for, said Johnson, the American covenant requires the expenditure of lives and treasure "in countries we barely know"--it was an inward-looking speech, echoing domestic hopes and concerns. "In a land rich in harvest, children just must not go hungry," said the President. "In a land of healing miracles, neighbors must not suffer and die unattended. In a great land of learning and scholars, young people must be taught to read and write."

Love seemed to be pouring from Johnson as he spoke about the futility of human quarrels on an absurdly tiny earth: "Think of our world as it looks from the rocket that is heading toward Mars. It is like a child's globe, hanging in space, the continents stuck to its side like colored maps. We are all fellow passengers on a dot of earth. And each of us, in the span of time, has really only a moment among our companions. How incredible it is that in this fragile existence we should hate and destroy one another. There is world enough for all to seek their happiness in their own way." Often, with inexplicable timing, Johnson allowed a benign smile to crease his face during passages not requiring a smile--an unsettling podium quirk that he resorts to, apparently, whenever he gets a notion that his audience may feel he looks too stern.

The speech was an admonition rather than a clarion call. Significantly, the President was at his most stirring when he praised slow and painful effort, in a passage that evoked the labor of Sisyphus and seemed to allude not merely to Johnson's own methods, not merely to the U.S., but to the condition of man. The Great Society, said Johnson, "is the excitement of becoming--always becoming, trying, probing, falling, resting and trying again--but always trying and always gaining."

He sounded an almost sad note when he continued: "This is what America is all about. It is the uncrossed desert and the unclimbed ridge. It is the star that is not reached and the harvest sleeping in the unplowed ground. Is our world gone? We say farewell. Is a new world coming? We welcome it--and we will bend it to the hopes of man."

A Subdued Gait. Johnson alluded to his 30 years in public life and paid careful tribute to family and friends "who have followed me down a long, winding road." There was a studied humility in his repetition of a sentence spoken when he assumed office after John Kennedy's assassination: "I will lead, and I will do the best I can." There was humility also in his bowed head and his unusually short steps as he walked to and from the lectern, as if, for this day at least, he wished to replace his jaunty Texas stride with a more subdued gait.

But Johnson, never a humble man, was anything but subdued beneath the words or the steps. He was in fact vibrating at the top of his confidence, utterly conscious of himself and the November victory, and raring for action --at least until he landed in the hospital at week's end. One measure of how much effort it will take to translate the generalities of the inaugural address into realities came in the speech itself, when Johnson set himself a difficult task: "The hour and the day and the time are here to achieve progress without strife, to achieve change without hatred--not without difference of opinion, but without the deep and abiding divisions which scar the Union for generations."

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