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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 Committe