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                                                                              ╚January 1, 1965

Man of the Year:Lyndon Baines Johnson

The Prudent Progressive



    There is a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the
flood in 1964, led on to fame for Lyndon Baines Johnson.

    From that November afternoon when he made it clear that the
torch of continuity was safe in his hands to that November night
nearly a year later when he won the biggest election triumph in
history, it was his year -- his to act in, his to mold, his to
dominate.

    And dominate it he did. By worlds and gestures, by pleas
and orders. By speeches noble and plainly blunt. By exasperated
outbursts and munificent tributes. By intuitive insights and
the blueprints of planners.

    But most of all by work. He worked in the White House and
he worked at the ranch. On the Hill and astride the stump. In
his limousine (with four separate communication setups) and
aboard the jet (with $2,000,000 in electronic gear). By letter,
wire, scrambler and hot line. In the bath and in the bedroom,
at every meal and over every drink.

     He astonished his partisans with his cyclonic energy ("The
Whirlwind President"), and confounded the skeptics by surpassing
almost all of his predecessors in first-year accomplishments.

    In that brief span he:
 --  Brought to the office of the presidency a concept not
favored by his immediate predecessors who, except for Dwight
Eisenhower, felt that a "strong" President had to fight with
Congress. Always mindful of the presidency's great power,
Johnson put into effect a new relationship with the other "co-
equal" branches of Government, this achieving the truest
partnership with Congress -- in the checks-and-balances sense
envisaged by the Constitution -- in well over a century. His
remarkable legislative record was crowned by the historic Civil
Rights Act.

 --  Worked constantly to win business confidence for his
Democratic Administration without losing labor's. The result was
an unprecedented extension of the national prosperity, sustained
by his personal intervention in bringing about a rail settlement
that seems likely to set a pattern for years to come, and
spurred by his success in getting an $11.5 billion tax cut
through Congress.

 --  Pursued the elusive goal of world peace while keeping U.S.
prestige high and U.S. power strong. He provided no panaceas for
chronic ailments, but he met his major flare-up crisis -- that
of the Gulf of Tonkin -- with just about the proper mixture of
force and caution.

 --  Strove tirelessly to achieve a national consensus, adding
two phrases -- "Let us reason together" and "I want to be
President of all the people" -- to the American political
lexicon. The consensus, of course, became his on Nov. 3 with the
greatest electoral victory since 1936 and the largest percent
(61%) of the popular vote ever.

    Goldfish Bowl. All this was done while his country and the
world watchd in a "show me" spirit. Jack Kennedy had drained the
world's capacity for unrestrained fascination with the U.S.
presidency, and Lyndon Johnson was sure to harvest some initial
resentments. But in that enormous goldfish bowl, he went
relentlessly to work determined to put his own stamp on the
presidency, rarely trying to be anything but himself.

    "Being himself" meant an enormous change in style, habits,
thought and operation in the White House. It wasn't always
comfortable for those in close proximity, and it wasn't always
neat and nice when the stories leaked out. At 56, and despite
a 1955 heart attack that was, by Johnson's own account "as bad
as a man can have and still live," his energies are enormous.
Through the year, he was a geyser at perpetual boil. There were
imprecations and outbursts at foes and friends as he
occasionally wandered over what Kennedy called "the edge of
irritability." In some, he seemed perilously impetuous. But
never, so far as anyone knows, when the national interest was
really at stake.

    That is probably why, though he suffered stalemates and
setbacks, he was yet to meet a reverse beyond redemption. "He
will be impulsive in little things," said Texas' Governor John
Connally, a close friend and political ally for 30 years, "but
no one should make the mistake that this will carry over into
serious foreign or domestic matters."

    Slice of Bread. In this, as in many other ways, the 36th
President of the U.S., is an anthology of antonyms. In him, the
conservatism of the self-made Texas businessman and the
liberalism of the poverty-haunted New Deal politician pulse like
an alternating current. He is overbearing to his aides, then
suddenly overwhelmingly considerate; cynical about men's
motives, yet sentimental enough to weep when a group of Texas
Congressmen presented him with a laudatory plaque; incredibly
thin-skinned, yet able to brush off some criticism with the
comment, "My daddy told me that if you don't want to get shot
at, stay off the firing line." He prides himself on being a
shrewd judge of men's strengths and failings; yet he was, at the
very least, unperceptive enough not to detect grave flaws in
two of his very close aides, Bobby Baker and Walter Jenkins.

    In the growing shelf of Johnson literature, the man almost
invariably emerges as a scarcely credible, one-dimensional
character, all sinner or all saint. Probably the best portrayal
of Johnson the man is in a work of fiction, Novelist William
Brammer's The Gay Place. In it, he appears as Governor Arthur
("Goddam") Fenstemaker of Texas, an earthly, explosive
consummately skilled politician whose credo comes across in
three lines of dialogue:

    Fenstemaker: Somethin's better than nothin'.
    Young Newsman: Half a loaf?
    Fenstemaker: Slice of goddam bread, even.

    Brammer was an aide to Johnson in his Senate days, and
while the portrayal of Fenstemaker is affectionate and admiring,
Johnson and Brammer are no longer friends.

    "I Cain't Do It." Most of Johnson's friends despair of
trying to explain him. "He doesn't fit into an established mold
or pattern," says Governor Connally. After their first
encounter, Lady Bird said of him: "I knew I'd met something
remarkable, but I didn't know quite what." And daughter Luci,
17, once declared with a helpless shrug: "I can't ever tell
what he is going to do. He can't either."

    Johnson himself says: "People don't understand one thing
about me, and that is that the one thing I want to do is my
job." More than that, he wants to do it better than anyone
before him, and he will spare no one, least of all himself, in
the effort. With Johnson, everything has to be done yesterday
--  and done right. "I'm always a hour late, a dollar short, and
behind schedule," he likes to say. As a young Congressman,
Johnson handed out diplomas in a mythical "I Cain't Do It Club"
to anyone who had let him down. And, according to Lady Bird,
when things were not done as quickly or as well as Johnson
wanted, "he used to get a rash on his hands."

    If You Try . . . The presidency of the U.S. is enough to
make anyone break out all over. Getting the ponderous machinery
of the Federal Government to move is a task that would try Job,
and Johnson is somewhat less patient. Harry Truman once
described how it would be when Dwight Eisenhower replaced him.
"He'll sit there and he'll say, 'Do this! Do that!'" said
Truman. "And nothing will happen." In a memorable outburst,
Franklin Roosevelt complained that it was tough enough getting
action from the Treasury and State departments, but that "the
Na-a-vy beat the two of them hands down. "To change anything
in the Na-a-vy," grumbled Roosevelt, "is like punching a feather
bed. You punch it with your right and you punch it with your
left until you are finally exhausted, and then you find the damn
bed just as it was before you started punching."

    Johnson, too, has tasted some frustration. Before the
election, he phoned Arkansas Democrat Wilbur Mills, chairman
of the powerful Ways and Means Committee, to request a favor.
"Wilbur," drawled the President, "I've just been looking through
the polls here, and I've only got a few weaknesses, and the
worst of them is that I'm not doin' anything for the old folks.
I need some help. How about Medicare?" In other words, get the
bill at least to the House floor. Mills's answer was an
unvarnished no, and there was nothing Johnson could do about it
-- except keep trying. That he has done, and two weeks ago Mills
announced that he would go along with medicare in the next
Congress, if it is financed by a special payroll tax instead of
by social security.

    Plucked Rooster. Johnson means to be prudent and cautious,
but he also wants to be an activist, "can do" President. Just
since he took office, the population of the U.S. has grown by
2,500,000, and the question he asks most often of his idea men
is: "How are we going to keep up with the times?"

    Almost immediately, he rejects as unsuited to the times the
Whig notion of the President as an errand boy for Congress or
as a chief administrator. During the presidential campaign, when
Barry Goldwater complained that the office was becoming too
powerful, Johnson had a folksy retort to that view. "Most
Americans," he said, "are not ready to trade the American eagle
in for a plucked banty rooster."

    Even so, he also rejects Alexander Hamilton's combative
concept of the U.S. Government as a system of power as the rival
of power. Johnson came to the White House with the most
extensive congressional experience of any U.S. President, and
to him the theory that the branches of the Government should
be coordinate, not one subordinate to another, is a living
reality. Roosevelt, Truman, and Kennedy all scrapped bitterly
with Congress at different times, but that is one thing that
Johnson wants desperately to avoid. "I don't want to come up to
this Congress and scare them to death," he said recently, while
discussing his 1965 program. Rather, he aims to use his
considerable talents of persuasion to get his way, and few U.S.
politicians have ever used that talent to better effect than
Lyndon Johnson.

    "The secret is, Lyndon gives and takes," a fellow Senate
Democrat once explained. "If you go along with him, he gives
you a little here and there -- a dam, or support for a bill,"
While he was Senate majority leader, Johnson's "treatment"
became famous. In cloakroom and corridor, in his baronial office
or right out on the floor of the chamber, he would go to work
on a colleague -- squeezing his elbow, draping a huge paw over
his shoulder, poking him in the chest, leaning so close as to
be practically rubbing noses. On the phone (and he was seldom
off it) he was equally effective. Huburt Humphrey once
complained that the only way he could resist Johnson's hypnotic
persuasiveness was by not answering the phone.

    Touching the Nerve. Of curse, there is as much legend as
fact in this image of Johnson, just as there is in his image as
an overpowering arm twister. Johnson has a "treatment" all
right, but its effectiveness is due neither to brute force nor
to Svengalian hypnosis. Johnson simply is better than anybody
else at finding and touching the most sensitive nerve a
Congressman has -- his own self-interest.

    So successfully has Johnson restored communication between
both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue that 1964's congressional
session was the most fruitful in a decade. He got a 57.6% of his
217 specific requests, the best batting average since Ike got
64.7% of his 232 requests in 1954. Almost as important, he got
it without alienating any sizable factions.

    Johnson's method, says veteran Democrat Jim Farley, who
managed two of F.D.R.'s campaigns but disapproved of the way his
boss handled Congress. "has produced both the harmony and the
result that already identify it as the soundest approach in a
century and a half," Explains Farley: "He has already bestowed
on the Congress the respect and consideration it has not
received since Jefferson -- and the Congress has fully responded
in terms of the great respect it holds for the presidency. We
shall have no paralyzing crises such as we experienced in the
court fight of 1937 or the purge of uncooperative Congressmen
in 1938." Or, he might have added, in Kennedy's last year.

    New Pilot. In Lyndon Johnson's eventful presidency, the
gravest crisis of all was the first. No Vice President before
him ever witnessed the assassination of a President; none ever
had the presidency thrust upon him in such brutal circumstances.
Johnson was shocked and staggered. But even as he sat in an
anteroom of Parkland Memorial Hospital in Texas, he took full
command of himself and of the office for which he had been
honing his talents all his life.

   He advised Assistant White House Press Secretary Malcolm
Kilduff to withhold news of Kennedy's death until it could be
determined whether a "Communist conspiracy" -- those were
Johnson's words -- was involved. With an eye already fixed
firmly on the history books, he urged Lady Bird to take notes
of everything that happened, had Kilduff scare up a Dictaphone
for the swearing in, made sure that newsmen and a photographer
were aboard the presidential jet to record the event. Only hours
after the assassination, the idea of the Warren Commission
occurred to him.

    On the flight back to Washington, Johnson pondered the
problems that history had bequeathed to him. "I saw in the
plane," he recently recalled, "and pictured it more or less as if
something had happened to the pilot who was flying us back. We
were very much in the same shape as if he fell at the controls
and one of our boys had to walk up there and bring the plane in,
flying at 700 m.p.h., with no plans showing how long the runways
were, with no maps, no notes.

    "I had grave fears about our future, I wasn't sure how
successful I would be pulling the divergent factions of the
nation together and trying to unite everybody in order to get
the confidence of the people and secure the respect of the
world."

    Toward a Consensus. He really need not have worried, for
one of his best and most often misconstrued, talent is in
smoothing off the rough edges of controversy, bringing
antagonists together and achieving a consensus.

    Repeatedly, he has been attacked as a mere wheeler-dealer
for negotiating one compromise or another, but the fact is that
the alternative to such controversial compromises as the 1957
and 1960 civil rights bills, which, as majority leader he
forcefully shepherded along, might have been neither half a loaf
nor a slice of bread, but nothing at all.

    "It is one of the great tasks of political leadership." he
said last spring at the University of Texas, "to make our people
aware that they share a fundamental unity of interest, purpose
and belief. I intend to try and achieve broad national consensus
which can end obstruction and paralysis and liberate the
energies of the nation for the world of the future."

    Making the Mare Run. With his instinctive political sense,
Johnson began seeking that consensus at once. His prime target
was the nations's businessmen, estranged from the Kennedy
Administration by the battle with Big Steel. Johnson thought
Kennedy had overreacted in that case, just as he thought that
F.D.R. has blundered badly in attacking big-businessmen as
"economic royalists". A quarter-century earlier Johnson catered
to businessmen at White House luncheons, flattered them, assured
them that they were "what makes the mare run."

    Aware that businessmen almost reflexively equate Democrats
with fiscal irresponsibility, Johnson set out to change that
image. He succeeded by keeping his first budget under $100
billion and by halving the deficit. At the same time he
convinced key Congressmen -- notably Senator Harry Byrd and
Representative Mills -- that he really aimed to keep a tight
rein on federal spending. The result: the two men finally moved
the $1.5 billion tax cut out of their committees, and Congress
quickly passed it.

    Though Johnson's techniques of persuasion and manipulation
have inevitably changed somewhat in the transition from
legislative to executive branch, they have lost none of their
potency. After Congress killed a proposed $545 million pay boost
for Government employees, and breathed life back into the
measure with a few phone calls and the earnest talk with
congressional leaders. He pointed out the Economist Walter
Heller has gone $16,000 into debt during three years in
Washington, added: "You can't expect me to maintain this
Government with underpaid men. I'm afraid that a lot of people
will leave because they aren't making enough money." The
bureaucrats got their pay raise.

    "Stop Right There." By preshrinking his foreign aid bill
to a relatively modest $3.5 billion, he wound up with more money
than Congress had given for the previous year's program, though
Kennedy had requested $1 billion more. A $375 million mass-
transit program that had been stalled in a House committee for
two years was passed. A conservation program was enacted along
with a food-stamp bill. Then, of course, there was the poverty
program.

    Johnson admits that his "unconditional war" against
poverty, fueled with an appropriation of $784,200,000, is no
more than a start, but at least it was something. "I have no
illusions," he said, "that $1 billion or $10 billion will wipe
out poverty. I don't expect to see it in my lifetime. But we can
minimize it, moderate it, and in time eliminate it.," Though his
last request was cut by nearly $200 million, he may ask Congress
for $2 billion for 1965.

    To the President, the "most grueling ordeal" of 1964 was
the threatened rail strike. In begging the railway brotherhoods
to extend their strike deadline, he put on a convincing, if not
especially ennobling, performance. "He pleaded beyond reason,"
said a labor man afterward, "for a President of the U.S." But
two weeks later, with the final deadline only hours away, he was
at his best. He sat down with the carriers to talk them into
accepting the settlement, though he had heard that they were
seven to two against it. When one management man began, "I'm
just an  old country boy . . ." Lyndon broke in. "Hold it, stop
right there," said the President. "When I hear that around this
town, I put my hand on my billfold. Don't start that with me."
Everybody roared, and the country boy declared: "By God, all I
was going to say was that I'm ready to sign up." Said Johnson
afterward: "That broke the deadlock. Of course, I'll never know
what he was going to say when I broke in. I wonder."

    But it was civil rights, and not the rail dispute, that
proved Johnson's most exacting domestic test. Less than two
weeks after Dallas, he was discussing his program at "The Elms,"
the house he had occupied as Vice President. Several advisors
told him the odds were 60 to 40 against passage of the Kennedy-
sponsored rights bill, advised him not to risk his still
uncertain prestige by pushing too hard for it. For a long
moment, Johnson was silent, but then he asked: "What's the
presidency for?" Obviously, to command. With his determined
driving, the Senate overrode the hard core of Southern Democrats
with whom Lyndon had often voted in the past, and on July 2 the
President signed into law the most sweeping civil rights bill
since Reconstruction.

    Murkier Waters. Though Johnson likes domestic politics
best, there were time during the year when he found himself
totally immersed in the less familiar and murkier waters of
foreign policy. Less than two months after he took over, he had
to cope with rioting in Panama over U.S. management of the Canal
Zone, and in the weeks that followed, a succession of crises
erupted to plague him -- Cyprus, France's increasing
intransigence, African uprisings, a new coup in Viet Nam.

    Fortunately, none of the crises was of the magnitude of
the Cuban missile confrontation, and Johnson did well enough.
Though he got off to a hesitant start on Panama, he showed
toughness as well as restraint by offering to resume talks
while refusing to yield any principle. "They were killing people
and some thought we should write a new treaty right off," he has
recalled. "But you can't just say, 'I'll give you a blank check'
when there's a pistol at your head. All you can say is that
'we'll do what's right.'" The principle established and the
pistol withdrawn, Johnson agreed two weeks ago to renegotiate
the Panama Canal Treaty, announced that the U.S. would
eventually build a sea-level canal somewhere in Central America
or Colombia.

   Johnson showed similarly sound restraint when Cuba's Fidel
Castro cut off the water at Guantanamo. He avoided an
unnecessary showdown and eliminated a potential source of
future conflict, simply by ordering the U.S. Naval base to
develop its own water supply.

    Prosecuting Attorney. Trouble seasoned him. When North
Vietnamese PT boats twice attacked Seventh Fleet destroyers in
the Gulf of Tonkin last summer, there was nothing impetuous
about Johnson's response. Like a prosecuting attorney, he kept
asking his aides: "Are you sure we were attacked? How come they
were such bad shots?"

    Only when he was completely satisfied that the attacks
were deliberate and unprovoked did he okay the retaliatory
bombing of North Vietnamese torpedo boats and bases. Though some
advisors hesitated about striking one big nest of boats
dangerously close to Red China, Johnson specifically ordered
a strike against that target.

    But if the Gulf of Tonkin was a triumph, it was one of the
few for the U.S. in Viet Nam. Unwilling to withdraw and fearful
of escalating the war, Johnson has maintained a "more of the
same" policy that pleases almost nobody and makes less sense
with the passing of each day. All the while, the Saigon
government has been stumbling from coup to coup, In the latest
unhappy episode, the U.S. and the Vietnamese approached a
parting of the ways. The U.S. was insistent about trying to
sustain a group of civilian politicians against overthrow by
a junta of disgusted young generals, has come close to a parting
of the ways, with Vietnamese Commander in Chief Nguyen Khanh
loudly denouncing U.S. Ambassador Maxwell Taylor, and the U.S.
muttering dire threats about curtailing or withholding aid to
Viet Nam.

    On several other occasions as well, Johnson's diplomatic
report card also was mixed. His decision to go ahead with the
Congo air-rescue operation was diluted by its tardiness and by
the fact that the mission was halted prematurely. To his credit,
he attempted to restore peace to Cyprus, even though the
prospects of success were slight. The effort failed, but only
after Under Secretary of State George Ball gave the island's
Archbishop Makarios a dressing down worthy of Lyndon himself.
"For God's sake, Your Beatitude," Ball scolded the archbishop,
"this killing must stop!"

    Unaccountably, Johnson allowed U.S. officials to press
ahead with plans for NATO long after it had become obvious that
the West Germans were the only ones interested. Johnson, like
his predecessor, remains convinced that nobody has come up with
a better way to halt nuclear proliferation. But at year's end,
he advised U.S. diplomats to quit twisting the allies' arms to
make them accept MLF, pledged that no program would be adopted
until it was first aired with London, Paris, and Bonn.

    At the Heart. Through the year, whether he was hoisting his
beagles by the ears, bellowing through a bullhorn to invite
campaign crowds to "a speakin'," or roaring along a Texas road
holding his five-gallon hat over the speedometer, Johnson made
colorful copy and was copiously covered. Even when fear of
getting too much news exposure induced him to try to get away
from it all -- as when he took a powerboat trip on Granite
Shoals Lake last July -- newsmen pursued him on foot, by boat
and by plane, and photographers zeroed in from afar with
telescopic lenses.

   Yet, for all the verbiage, he remained hard to classify. He
hates labels, and none will stick on him for long before he rids
himself of it. "At the very heart of my own beliefs," he once
wrote, "is a rebellion against this very process of classifying,
labeling, and filing Americans under headings: regional,
economic, occupational, religious, racial, or otherwise." Back
in 1958, he defined himself as "a free man, an American, a
United States Senator, and a Democrat, in that order," and added
" and there, for me, the classifying stops."

    For a partial understanding of Johnson, one has to go back
to the harsh hill country of west-central Texas where he was
born in 1908. Historian Walter Prescott Webb describes it as a
land of "nauseating loneliness," whose inhabitants were "far
from markets, burned by drought, beaten by hail, withered by hot
winds, frozen by blizzards, eaten out by grasshoppers, exploited
by capitalists and cozened by politicians."

   For all that,  Lyndon speaks almost lyrically of the land.
"It's dry country," he says, "but it seems there is always sun
here. We don't have dreariness. We  don't have those dull grey
skies when you look up. Here you have birds singing, flowers
growing, girls smiling.

    Rattle Rattle. To Lyndon, who left the land to seek his
fortune elsewhere and came back in style, the hill country now
means mostly the 400-acre LBJ Ranch on the banks of the
Pesernales. It is an oasis of expensive Stetson hats and
tailored twill trousers, herds of sleek Herefords, Angora goats
and blooded horses, a fleet of Lincolns and a landing strip with
a gleaming private plane, meals of venison steaks, homemade
bread and pecan pies, a heated pool and Muzak piping in The
Yellow Rose of Texas. And it is a galaxy removed from the
granite and limestone land that Webb wrote about.

    Just two miles up the road from the LBJ spread, though, is
Emil Klein's 167-acre ranch. There a battered pick-up truck sits
in the driveway, wash hanging on the line and an income of a few
thousand a year is all that one can expect. In the grim days of
the Depression and the Dust Bowl, the face of Texas that Lyndon
knew best bore a close resemblance to Emil Klein's pinched
place, and so he cleared out.

    At 23 he became secretary to Congressman Richard Kleberg,
then co-owner of the King Ranch, and at 26 he was Texas director
of F.D.R.'s National Youth Administration. Even then he drove
his people hard. "We're gonna get this job done," he exhorted
his NYA staff on one occasion, his hands stuffed in his pockets.
"I carry aspirin in this pocket [rattle] and Ex-Lax in this
pocket [rattle], and were gonna get the job done."

    As a Congressman from 1937 to 1948, Johnson learned his
politics from a couple of masters, Roosevelt and fellow Texan
Sam Rayburn. Once, he wanted F.D.R.'s approval for an
electrification project in his Tenth District but found that
every time he got into the oval office, Roosevelt dominated the
conversation and waved him out before he had a chance to make
his pitch. It is a technique that Johnson has emulated with
great success. In any case, Lyndon learned that Roosevelt was
a sucker for photos of dams, brought along a batch of big glossy
prints the next time he saw him. Sure enough, Roosevelt was
entranced, picked up the phone while Johnson was still sitting
there, and got the wheels moving. The resulting Pedernales
Electric Cooperative became for a time the biggest in the
nation, remains one of Johnson's proudest achievements.

    Burning Bush. By the time he reached the Senate in 1948,
after a run-off primary that he won by a bitterly disputed
margin of 87 votes out of 988,295 cast, Johnson had polished his
political talents to a high gloss. He was Democratic whip in
two years, minority leader in four. When the G.O.P lost both
houses in Congress in the 1954 midterm election, he became, at
46, the youngest majority leader ever.

    With his gift for compromise, his powers of persuasion,
and his wizardry at counting noses -- aided, from  1955 on, by
ubiquitous little Senate Majority Secretary Bobby Baker -- it
was not long before Johnson was absolute monarch of the place.
He was most influential Democrat in the nation, stood second in
power only to President Eisenhower. According to one of the gags
current during that time, a Senate page asked a door attendant,
"Have you seen Senator Johnson" The rely: "I haven't seen
anything but a burning bush."

    Johnson, in short, became a sort of a Washington
institution. Part of the institution, of course, was Lady Bird,
whom Lyndon married less than three months after they first met.
"I'm not the easiest man to live with," he admits, but Lady Bird
has more than managed to live for three decades in the eye of
the hurricane (they celebrated their 30th anniversary in
November). Now 52, she is an extraordinarily versatile woman --
wife, mother, business partner, campaigner, hostess -- who can
never utter the classic complaint of the American wife that her
husband never tells her anything. Lyndon confides in her and
admires her judgement enormously.

    Inevitably, there was talk that Lyndon would one day be
President -- but he denied any such ambition. When, in 1960, he
finally decided to go after the job, his Southern background
proved his greatest handicap; no genuine Southerner had been
elected to the White House since Zachary Taylor in 1848.
(Tennessean Andrew Johnson never was elected in his own right;
Virginia-born Woodrow Wilson left the South at 26; Texas-born
Ike, as a career soldier, never really had a home, but gave
Kansas as his address.) It was the geographical barrier that
Jack Kennedy was talking about when he said, some time before
his own nomination: "I know all the other candidates pretty
well, and frankly think I'm as able to handle the presidency
as any of them. or abler -- all except Lyndon, and he hasn't
got a chance."

    Also the Edges. Only the cruelest turn of fate gave Lyndon
Johnson his chance, and so far he has made the most of it.

    In the view of Political Scientist Richard Neustadt, whose
Presidential Power was one of Kennedy's basic texts. "Johnson
is trying to be a 'Rooseveltian Eisenhower' -- trying to
establish a rather Eisenhowerlike stance in the interest of
rather Rooseveltian results." Like Ike, Johnson has worked at
projecting himself as a "President of all the people," excluding
no group from his embrace -- except, possibly, Goldwater
Republicans. "Most people want what you would call a 'prudent
progressivism,'" says Johnson. "They want you to march forward,
constantly going ahead, but never getting both feet off the
ground at the same time. I hope I'm progressive enough without
being radical. I want to be prudent without being reactionary."
That is a philosophy that not only straddles the middle but
engulfs the edges as well, and most Americans obviously
subscribe to it.

    Over the Arm. Nevertheless, if he is to achieve
Rooseveltian results, Johnson is aware that he will eventually
have to risk losing some elements of the great consensus he has
forged. "there will be times," he has said, "when I'll have to
make difficult decisions between business and labor. I know
that, you have to do these things."

    Even when that time of decision arrives, Johnson, being
Johnson, has hopes of keeping everybody happy. "When I was
a boy," he says, "one kid would put his arm up between two other
kids and say, 'The one who spits over my arm first is the
bravest.' And one would spit and hit the other one and then
there was a fight. I try to avoid all that, just as I try to
avoid saying ugly things about labor, industry, the farmer, any
group in this country."

    At no time was Johnson's unwillingness to spit over
anybody's arm better demonstrated than in November. He had just
piled up the greatest popular vote ever, blurring party lines
and dissolving traditional regional loyalties as he swept
everything except Arizona and five Deep South states. Partly,
the scope of his victory was due to his opponent's narrow
appeal, but his own strength in drawing 43 million votes was
undeniable. He was proud of, and grateful for, his victory. Said
he: "The people are pretty fair. They said, 'He brought us
through this, he landed the plane, he did a pretty fair job."
He also declared: "I do not consider the election a mandate to
embark on any reckless, dangerous, novel or unique course."

    "Bold New Steps." Johnson does not intent to stand still,
either. The major thrust of his activity is in domestic
programs. And to complaints that he is ignoring foreign affairs
in his intense preoccupations with America, he replies: "I must
prove that I can lead the country before I can lead the world."
Already, he has had 15 or 16 task forces studying what "bold
new steps," in the President's words, can be taken in such
fields as urban renewal, trade, transportation, agriculture.
In his Great Society speech at the University of Michigan last
May, he addressed himself eloquently to the country's problems.

   "For half a century," he said then, "we called upon unbounded
invention and untiring industry to create an order of plenty for
all. The challenge of the next half-century is whether we have
the wisdom to use that wealth to enrich and elevate our national
life, and to advance the quality of our American civilization."
He called upon the graduating class to move "not only toward the
rich society and the powerful society, but upward to the Great
Society." and he listed three places where they could begin to
build -- "in our cities, in our country-side, and in our
classrooms."

    If anything is to have a priority, it is the classrooms.
Johnson's mother was a teacher and he himself taught grade
school for a year in Cotulla, Texas, to help pay his way through
Southwest State Teachers College, later taught public speaking
in high school. He says he would like to be remembered as a
great President who has really furthered the cause of U.S.
education. "The Great Society already is born," he said
recently, "It's not a long way off. But its got to be improved
as we go along. The big job is education."

    Getting Things Done. Above all else, Johnson believes that
the surest way to move forward is one step at a time, achieving
agreement at every step along the way, pausing to consolidate,
then stepping out once more. It sounds dull, but it minimizes
conflict and it gets things dona, and as Dean Acheson once said
of Johson: "He understands that government is not a matter of
posturing but of getting things done. "

    Once, when scolded by an unhappy supporter for not
reshaping the country fast enough, Thomas Jefferson offered a
well-reasoned rejoinder. "When we reflect how difficult it is
to move or to infect the great machine of society, " he wrote,
"we see the wisdom of Solon's remark that no more good must be
attempted than the nation can bear."

    The 36th President of the U.S. has reached much the same
conclusion. "Let's keep our eyes on the stars," he once said,
"and do the possible."