Winding Down

At the White House, there was an unaccustomed air of casualness, an unfamiliar atmosphere of tranquillity. President Johnson went through the normal busy week--a state dinner for Norway's King Olav, a jet excursion to Illinois, the appointment of a new ambassador to the U.N. But something was missing, some factor had disappeared from the unique Johnsonian equation. Both the shock and euphoria that followed the President's March 31 abdication speech had disappeared, and the Johnson Administration was slowly, inexorably winding down toward its self-set demise on January 20, 1969.

The signs, to be sure, were scarcely perceptible. Flying to Chicago in midweek, the President was given a dizzying reception by Mayor Richard Daley's faithful machine. Johnson reiterated his constant theme these days--national unity. "However strong, however prosperous, however just its purposes or noble its cause," he told a dinner of Cook County Democrats, "no nation can long endure when citizen is turned against citizen, cause against cause, section against section, generation against generation by the mean and selfish spirit of partisanship."

Back in Washington for a talk to the Burro Club, the gathering of aides to Democratic Congressmen, he was by turns philosophic, nostalgic and proud. He looked forward to the day when he would teach at the University of Texas, looked backward to the happy times when he was a Congressman and Senator, and looked sideways at the historians who will judge the achievements of the Johnson years. "I believe that you know," he said, "and that our children will know, and all history will know, that that is an unparalleled record." The fencing for a site to negotiate with Hanoi, which continued throughout the week, disappeared for a moment from the President's consciousness.

"The pressure is off," says one Cabinet officer. Some high officials are now going home at the unheard-of hour of 6 o'clock, while others are planning their first vacations in years.

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