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There is no rule of politics that says a U.S. President has to get along with the country's intellectual community. Few Presidents have done so, although most of them have tried--notably, Franklin Roosevelt with his Brain Trust, Kennedy with his White House stable of bright young Harvardmen. Even Lyndon Johnson sought to establish a rapport with the academic world. Last week that link was broken with the resignation of Dr. Eric F. Goldman, 51, who since 1964 had served the Administration as a part-time intellectual-in-residence. That raised a question: Would Johnson, whose appreciation of the intelligentsia is somewhat less than passionate, replace the missing link? The answer, typically Johnsonian, was both yes and no.

In announcing the appointment of Dr. John P. Roche, 43, professor of American civilization at Brandeis University, as a "special consultant" to the President, Press Secretary Bill Moyers pointedly observed that Roche was not replacing Goldman. Indeed, said Moyers, the White House had started angling for Roche three or four months ago--long before Goldman's letter of resignation landed on the presidential desk. That seemed to settle the "no" part of the answer. The "yes" part was embodied in the choice of Roche.

Straight A's. Brooklyn-born John Roche is very much an intellectual. But he is also a political activist who does not subscribe to the view, common among intellectuals, that academe and the smoke-filled room are incompatible worlds. Until last year, Roche was national chairman of the Americans for Democratic Action, an energetic organization that straddles both communities, and he is still an A.D.A. vice chairman. He was a speechwriter for Hubert Humphrey in 1964 and has also served Johnson, most recently on a fact-finding mission to Saigon in June.

Roche's mind runs on intellectual lines that are remarkably parallel to Johnson's political thought. On the conduct of the war in Viet Nam, for example, Roche gives Johnson straight A's. "We are fighting a carefully limited war," Roche has written, "in the effort to attain a perfectly reasonable objective: the maintenance of the integrity of the Saigon government from Communist aggression masked as 'civil war.' " Johnson could not have put it better.

Equal Blame. Roche gives the President the same high marks for his achievements in other fields, such as social welfare and civil rights: "Never in American history has an Administration taken such a series of giant steps toward the attainment of liberal objectives as we have seen under the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson." He is well aware that other intellectuals do not feel that way: "Johnson's very success in managing the creaky congressional machinery has generated suspicion. Never in my memory has the intellectual community been so bitterly anti-Administration."

It is this prevalence of suspicion--intellectuals mistrusting the President, the President mistrusting intellectuals --that has short-circuited communications between the two. Eric Goldman resigned largely because he felt that Johnson did not really use him or even listen to him. If his concrete accomplishments seem slender--staging the White House Festival of the Arts, urging reform of the country's archaic draft machinery, counseling Johnson to give a respectful ear to the voices of national dissent--it may well be that Goldman was not permitted to do more.

More objective, perhaps, than Goldman, John Roche allocates blame for the cultural rift equally between the President and the academicians. "From long experience," he says, "I have become convinced that most intellectuals are secret Platonists who feel that some how the messy, human aspects of life and politics should be brought under the control of enlightened men. In their view, politics should be a 'science' and the politician a 'political scientist.' " If the President still cares seriously about resolving the conflicts and getting along with the intellectuals, John Roche may well prove the ideal catalyst.

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