End of the Odyssey

THE PRESIDENCY

After the exhilaration of Manila and Cam Ranh Bay, the last leg of what Lyndon Johnson termed his "momen tous journey" to Asia was bound to be anticlimactic. Still, it had its rewards.

After landing in Kuala Lumpur from Bangkok, the President was visibly elated when King Ismail Nasiruddin told him that Malaysia, though it offers no direct support in the Viet Nam war, "fully understands and welcomes the difficult but vital role your great coun try is playing." At a state dinner in Malaysia's Parliament House, Johnson responded by warning Red China's lead ers that "any nuclear capability they can develop can -- and will -- be deterred." He added: "Nations which do not seek nuclear weapons can be sure that they will have our strong support."

Texas Bull. The President got the tonic he really needed in South Korea, where joun son means "good guest." At Seoul, more than 1,000,000 people --more than half of them schoolchildren--lined his 17-mile motorcade route, strewing it with thousands of chrysanthemums and a ton and a half of confetti. A forest of welcoming signs rose above their heads, many bearing bizarre, if well-intended, portraits of a green-faced, Oriental-eyed Lyndon Johnson with an outsized nose like Charles de Gaulle's. The slogans were on the inscrutable side. WELCOME TEXAS GRANDPA, said one. Another somewhat ambiguously proclaimed: TEXAS

BULL-WE LIKE.

At Seoul's City Hall Plaza, the President was revivified by the sight of people massed as far as he could see. "To an American," he declared, "the free soil of Korea is hallowed ground." Lunching with American servicemen just 15 miles south of the Demilitarized Zone the next day, he lauded them in grisly language as "the boys that are willing to go and die and leave their arms and legs and their eyes all over the world. Except for you and your brothers who came here ahead of you, Korea would now be under the master's heel." Caught up in the tide of his own oratory, he recalle'd that his great-greatgrandfather had died at the Alamo, adding a previously unrecorded chapter to the family's martial annals.

"Your parents and your dependents may not see some of you again," the President wound up, "but they will always be mighty proud that you came this way, and so am I." For several U.S. soldiers, his words were soon to prove tragically prophetic. That night, while Johnson slept at the Walker Hill recreation center overlooking Seoul, North Korean infiltrators ambushed a U.S. Army patrol 800 yds. south of the

DMZ, killing six Americans and a South Korean.

From Camp Stanley, the President helicoptered to an agricultural demonstration area south of Seoul. He viewed the painstakingly cultivated land, tried on a flowing blue-and-white Korean farmer's robe and stovepipe hat, then invited Village Elder Si Jong Choe, 65, for a helicopter ride. After 10 minutes aloft, Choe exclaimed: "It's like going to heaven."

Worth the Fare? After an overnight stop and a political breakfast rally in Anchorage, Alaska, the President returned to Washington 17 days and seven nations after he had left. A smallish claque of Government workers was on hand and a huge WELL DONE, MR. PRESIDENT banner rippled in the wind-lashed rain at Dulles International Airport. The President noted wryly: "We had perfect weather until we landed in the U.S. But that shows what happens in an election year."

To be sure, the reaction to his odyssey was not entirely sunny--or partisan, for that matter. Among other critics. Harvard Orientalist Edwin O. Reischauer, who had served ably as Johnson's ambassador to Tokyo, described it as a risky and unnecessary venture that had accomplished little.

Still, the President professed himself pleased. "No new treaties were made; no new commitments were offered," he observed. "But I can tell you now that I return more confident and hopeful than when I left." Though the trip may have had little impact on the Viet Nam war, Johnson had seemingly managed to convince Asian leaders that the U.S. was genuinely willing to expend its treasures to guarantee the security and prosperity of the western Pacific and to help the area develop a new sense of regional cooperation. Whether or not that realization was worth the effort and expense, said the President, "history will decide."

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