The Look of Leadership

For months his critics had grown ever more vocal--and more violent. His popularity rating had plummeted so steadily that he remarked to an aide:

"I may wind up with 1% before it's over with." Yet, whether from hurt feelings or because of his old hankering for consensus politics, the President remained curiously subdued and remote from the fray.

Last week saw the emergence of "the real Johnson" -- as his friends put it.

Shedding the never-too-convincing guise of folksy preacher and avuncular counselor, he appeared before the TV cameras in the role he knows best--that of the combative, spontaneous, self-assured politician. At the same time Lyndon Johnson came across as an executive ready and willing at last to assert his leadership.

The week had not begun auspiciously. Seeking spiritual solace at Bruton Parish in Colonial Williamsburg, the historic Virginia town restored to Revolutionary-era authenticity by the Rockefeller family, Johnson heard a sermon on Viet Nam instead. "There is rather general consensus that what we are doing in Viet Nam is wrong," lectured Rector Cotesworth Pinckney Lewis as the President sat captive in a front pew that had once been occupied by George Washington. "While pledging our loyalty, we ask humbly, Why?"

Too Much Guff. Johnson, who had spent the previous two days doing his best to explain why in hard-hitting speeches at eight U.S. military bases around the nation, managed to appear unruffled. Leaving the church, Lady Bird chirped a noncommittal "Wonderful choir." Smiling stiffly, the President shook hands with Lewis, mumbled "Thank you" and departed. Titillated by the event, Washington reporters in vented a slew of mock news bulletins and tacked them to a White House bulletin board. "President Johnson," said one, "announced late Sunday he has commissioned Artist Peter Hurd to paint a portrait of the Rev. C. P. Lewis." Hurd, of course, is the painter whose portrait of the President was rejected by L.B.J. as "the ugliest thing I ever saw." Improving on the script, Johnson last week chose as his 33rd wedding anniversary gift to Lady Bird a portrait of a boy titled Arturo by Henriette Wyeth, who is Mrs. Hurd.

The day after the sermon, Johnson failed to appear for a scheduled speech at the 100th anniversary celebration of the 650,000-member National Grange in Syracuse, N.Y., largely because thousands of antiwar pickets threatened to disrupt his visit. Grumbled one farmer: "He takes too much guff from people like these kids and that preacher."

The dismaying prospect for any rational conduct of politics is that increasingly militant demonstrators plan to turn out in force wherever Johnson and his Cabinet members go in coming months. When Secretary of State Dean Rusk addressed the Foreign Policy Association in Manhattan last week, he had to slip into the garage entrance of the New York Hilton an hour ahead of time to avoid some 3,000 pickets. Most were moderates, but some, spearheaded by the Students for a Democratic Society and a handful of radicals from the Trotskyite-Maoist Progressive Labor Party, came equipped with plastic bags of cow's blood and aerosol cans with orange paint. They were looking for trouble, and more than 1,000 New York policemen, though generally restrained, finally gave it to them. Thirty-four demonstrators were arrested, a dozen injured.

The Real War. For his part --as he has been increasingly wont to do lately--Johnson compared his situation to that of other wartime Presidents. Exchanging toasts with Japan's Prime Minister Eisaku Sato during a dinner at the White House, he declared: "Let us, Mr. Prime Minister, take courage from Lincoln's words, when he said to his Cabinet in that other tragic period: 'I am here, I must do the best I can, and bear the responsibility of taking the course which I feel I ought to take.' "

Striking back at his critics, Johnson set out to convince a skeptical public that his Viet Nam policy was beginning to show dramatic progress. His top echelon in Saigon, Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker, General William Westmoreland and Pacification Chief Robert Komer, flew into Washington for a minisummit. All three brimmed with confidence--or, as Georgia's Democratic Senator Richard Russell put it after Westmoreland had addressed Russell's Armed Services Committee behind closed doors, "cautious optimism" (see following story). Said one aide, mindful that the latest Louis Harris Poll* shows Johnson's rating on his handling of the war at an all-time low of 23%:

"We're winning that war out there. The real war is back here."

Put Up or Shut Up. For his own major skirmish in that war, in the East Room of the White House, Johnson broke completely with his usual press-conference choreography. Thanks to a lavalier microphone, he was able to leave the lectern and prowl back and forth on a makeshift stage--all the while chopping the air, clutching his breast, slapping, clenching and conjoining his big hands to pound home his points, toying with his glasses and abandoning his previous deadpan, Sunday-sermon visage for a range of grins and grimaces, smiles and scowls worthy of a Method actor. All the while, an Army Signal Corpsman crouched unseen behind the lectern, reeling out microphone cord when Johnson wandered to the edge of the stage and making sure that he did not trip himself up.

The President, well aware that he comes across poorly on television, has lately been asking those around him how he could communicate better. The advice was for him to try to talk to the nation the way he talks to small groups in the privacy of his office. Judging from the congratulatory telegrams that flowed to the White House--including one that said, "Good for you, Mr. President. Give 'em H."--it worked.

During the conference, the President touched on foreign-aid cuts ("a serious mistake") and on congressional reluctance to enact his proposed 10% surcharge on individual and corporate income taxes. Singling out House Republican Leader Gerald Ford, Wisconsin Republican John Byrnes and Arkansas Democrat Wilbur Mills, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, he declared: "They will live to regret the day when they made that decision [to bottle up the tax bill], because it is a dangerous decision. It is an unwise decision." Raising taxes is an unpopular move, but "we should do it" and eventually "Congress will do it." Will he run again? "I will cross that bridge when I get to it." Hardly anybody in the room doubted that he had long since made the crossing.

Most of the 37-minute conference was devoted to the war and the wide spread dissent that it has spawned. The President emphasized that measurable progress is being made. "We are pleased with the results that we are getting," he said--so much so that no increase was anticipated in the currently authorized troop level of 525,000. He was pessimistic about prospects for a bombing pause, and noted that Hanoi's demands last week for a U.S. pullout as a prelude to peace talks "should answer any person in this country who has ever felt that stopping the bombing alone would bring us to the negotiating table." If North Viet Nam's leaders are operating on the assumption that another President would pull out of Viet Nam and make "an inside deal," they are making "a serious misjudgment."

Johnson insisted that U.S. goals in Viet Nam have been clear from the first. "I thought even all the preachers in the country had heard about it," he cracked. One aim was to preserve U.S. security, another was to honor a commitment. "In 1954 we said we would stand with those people in the face of common danger. The time came when we had to put up or shut up. We put up." A third goal was to resist aggression: "If you saw a little child in this room and some big bully came along and grabbed it by the hair and started stomping it, I think you would do something about it."

Admitting that there were deep divisions within the Democratic Party, Johnson said that all parties had their internal disagreements, though "we have perhaps more than our share sometimes." Clearly, he felt that the Senate Foreign Relations Committee contributed more than its due. With a passing reference to the fact that, historically, the committee's chairmen have "almost invariably found a great deal wrong with the Executive in the field of foreign policy," he took a swipe at the present chairman, J. William Fulbright, who had just pushed through resolutions urging Johnson to take the Viet Nam issue to the United Nations and demanding a greater voice for Congress in committing U.S. troops abroad. "The committee had a big day yesterday," said Johnson archly. "They reported two resolutions in one day."

Criticism is "one of the things that goes with the job," but Johnson added: "I think the time has come when it would be good for all of us to take a new, fresh look at dissent. We welcome responsible dissent. There is a difference between constructive dissent and storm-trooper bullying, howling and taking the law into their own hands."

While on the subject of dissent, as at some other times, Johnson turned his comments into a harangue. Irately, he denied that he had ever branded dissenters as unpatriotic. But he did say that among the critics "there are some hopeful people and there are some naive people in this country and there are some political people. And all of these hopes, dreams and idealistic people going around are misleading and confusing and weakening our position. We have never said they are unpatriotic, although they say some pretty ugly things about us. People who live in glass houses shouldn't be too anxious to throw stones." Yet he was able to joke about his critics. "If I have done a good job of anything since I have been President," he smiled, "it is to insure that there are plenty of dissenters."

There will be more, of course. And now Lyndon Johnson seemed in a mood to meet them headon. As he entered his fifth year as President, it was plain that the time of defensive silence was over, and that he was once more taking the stance of leadership.

* Gibing at polls, Johnson told a Gridiron dinner held by Washington's press corps that before Patrick Henry delivered his "Give me liberty or give me death!" oration in 1775, he--naturally--conducted a poll. The results: 46% were for liberty, 39% for death, and the rest didn't know.

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