Washington

A STORY is being told in Washington which has the ring of truth. One day the President asked Bill D. Moyers, his press secretary, who is an ordained Baptist minister, to give thanks before dinner. Moyers began his prayer only to be interrupted by the President, who said: “Speak up, I can’t hear you.” Moyers quickly replied: “I wasn’t speaking to you.” The story may be apocryphal, but it is too good not to be true. It sounds like the President, and like independent-minded Bill Moyers.

The appointment of Moyers as press secretary, one in a series of brilliant presidential appointments this year, has vastly improved the President’s public relations. Substantively, neither dissident Democrats nor Republicans have yet been able to find a serious weakness in the Johnson armor. Nearly all criticism of him has been directed at the man and his idiosyncrasies.

Vermont’s wise Senator George D. Aiken, the Republican dean of the Senate, said in an interview on his seventy-third birthday in August that Johnson was the ablest politician he had ever encountered. Aiken explained that Johnson knew more about gaining and using power than anyone else he had known in either party. Few in Washington would disagree. Yet there are many who worry about the concentration of power in this man’s hands, because they have a gnawing uncertainty about the Johnson personality.

On Aiken’s birthday, the President rode to Capitol Hill to attend a luncheon which Senator Margaret Chase Smith of Maine gave in Aiken’s honor. The President was in his most expansive, folksy, and scene-snatching mood. He upstaged every other actor there. Finally, he showered Aiken not only with compliments but with gifts: an LBJ picture, an LBJ pen, a set of LBJ cuff links, two LBJ books, and two sets of White House playing cards. These, at least, still bear the presidential seal rather than the LBJ brand.

On the day before the Aiken luncheon, the President invited himself to the State Department for a luncheon with Secretary of State Dean Rusk and his principal advisers. When Johnson returned to the White House, he summoned reporters to his office to tell them what he had said. He had solemnly warned the undersecretaries and assistant secretaries, he said, that he expected to have “unified support” from them at all times. He told them not to let any divisions “creep in after policies are enunciated.” If an officer is in doubt about policy, he went on, “he ought to find out what it is before he starts talking.”

Dissent gently

The President has been heard to complain that there are a hundred assistant secretaries in the government and that he cannot check on every speech before it is delivered. Many have gotten the message and are not making any speeches, or are not saying anything when they do. It is, of course, not too much for a President to demand loyal support. But in the context of his other attempts to dampen dissent and questioning both within and outside his Administration, the brusque words he used at the State Department were disturbing. More than one minor official has had his telephone ring late at night and heard an angry President demand to know why he had made a speech or discussed an issue with a newsman.

Johnson has never liked dissent, and some persons are afraid to speak frankly to him. These people underrate him, for although his temper will flare, he respects a person who speaks out. Once he asked a private citizen to give him a report on a sensitive public matter. The man wrote the requested memorandum and sent it to the White House, A few hours later one of the President’s assistants telephoned to say that he would not give the memo to the President because it would only anger him. The author of the memo resorted to some purple language and demanded that the requested advice be handed to the President. It was, and a few hours later the President himself telephoned to express appreciation for its candor.

The President formally recognizes the need to encourage debate on major social issues. One day, in a speech to a group of professional public speakers, he said: “We must never be afraid to discuss or to challenge or to innovate or to stimulate new ideas and new approaches.” No doubt he believed those words, which his speech writer had prepared for him, but he is so impatient with those who cross him that his very manner tends to stifle innovation and discourage debate. Yet the Administration is crying out for new ideas. Much of the old program has been achieved. The Great Society must now be provided with the intellectual ferment necessary to carry it into its second phase.

Richard N. Goodwin, one of the President’s closest advisers, focused on this need recently in a speech. “Nothing is more disheartening than the failure of the American intellectual community to evolve answers to the crisis of American public life,” he said. “We know there are new problems. But the intellectual resources of the nation — the historic reservoir of social progress — do not readily provide the answers.”

Debate in private?

The paradox is that President Johnson has discouraged the intellectual ferment he needs. Last year he named a number of task forces to advise him on Great Society programs. When the reports were written, his staff culled from them the ideas they thought could be enacted into law, and they became the basis of proposals to Congress. But the reports were never published. More than one Cabinet officer begged the President to make them public to contribute to public understanding. If they had been published, they would have stimulated discussion and new ideas. But the President does not want debate in public.

Government information officers talk more cautiously than ever. They also make fewer formal announcements, for the insatiable man in the White House wants to give out the bits of news and information that in the past flowed out of the Commerce, Agriculture, Interior, or other departments as routine press releases. The Department public affairs men are still allowed to field the unpleasant news, however.

What is your answer?

When Johnson entered the White House, the majority of Washington observers believed that he would be weakest in his appointments. They thought that he was a provincial who was comfortable only with fellow Texans. The President did surround himself in the White House with Texans, and he likes to vacation only at his Texas ranch. But he has not unduly favored Texans in making his appointments. He naturally has preferred men he has known well a long time, such as Abe Fortas, whom he named to the Supreme Court, or Leonard H. Marks, the new director of the United States Information Agency. Both have been associated in legal capacities with the Johnson family, and both are outstanding lawyers.

The President did not know intimately either John T. Connor, whom he appointed Secretary of Commerce, or John W. Gardner, whom he appointed Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare. He picked John W. Chancellor to direct the Voice of America after knowing him only a few months. As NBC’s White House correspondent, Chancellor made an impression on the President because of his sound judgment, quick mind, and independence. One day Chancellor was summoned to the President’s office and asked to direct the Voice. He replied that he was happy at NBC and liked covering the White House.

But the President never gives in easily. He called Chancellor’s chief and asked his help. At the same time, the President began the lengthy strategy conferences at the White House on Vietnam. After they had been going on for several days, Chancellor asked Moyers: “Are we likely to go through next week as we went through this week? Are we half through, finished, or what?” An hour later, as Chancellor was about to go on the air, he received a call from the President, who had read the transcript of Moyers’ briefing. “That is the question I want to ask you,” the President said. “What is your answer?” After a moment’s hesitation, as he glanced at his watch to see how much time he had before his broadcast, Chancellor replied: “I’m going to give you an affirmative answer.”

It took even less effort on the President’s part to persuade Arthur J. Goldberg to leave the Supreme Court and become ambassador to the United Nations. The suggestion that the Justice and the President plotted to put Goldberg in New York as a potential threat to the Kennedy or Rockefeller forces sounds exactly like Johnson at his calculating best. Yet the theory may be too farfetched. A simpler explanation is that the President recognized that the appointment would be well received, appreciated Goldberg as a man who like himself knew how to get results, and thought that Goldberg might be tested for an even higher post.

In spite of all the schoolboy gossip about the virtues of Dean Rusk as Secretary of State, the President has made clear his respect for him, and Rusk is not likely to leave in the near future. Eventually, of course, he will do so. If Goldberg is a success at the United Nations, he could be the man to succeed Rusk.

More, more, more

Another example of the President’s judgment of people is his appreciation of Eugene R. Black as an independent, roving adviser on a host of economic problems. Black is respected in the business community and abroad, and his presence in the White House is good politics. Yet the President genuinely respects Black’s ability and honesty. He has given him a wide variety of assignments.

Recently he gave Black an office in the Executive Office Building next door to the White House and asked him to be his peripatetic adviser on foreign aid, supersonic transport, Asian development, the balance of payments, and the budget, as well as related and unrelated matters. Despite his slow speech, Johnson’s mind works like lightning; he absorbs all the ideas a man like Black can present to him, and then he asks for more, more, more.

As a banker, Black, the Georgiaborn grandson of the great Southern editor Henry Grady, reached the top in the presidency of the World Bank. When he retired at the beginning of 1963, he thought that he would have some free time at last to follow his many hobbies. Instead he has advised Presidents Kennedy and Johnson as well as foreign heads of state, the Chase Manhattan Bank, and a dozen or more industries. Black is confident that the President’s interest in Asian economic development is worthwhile, and he is helping to establish the Asian Development Bank with a capital of a billion dollars. He is also enthusiastic about the work of the Lower Mekong Committee, with which he met recently in Bangkok. Its initial project is the construction of a dam in Laos, the first major effort to harness one of the world’s great rivers. For nine years Cambodia, Laos, South Vietnam, and Thailand have been studying the river, and they have completed the engineering work required before construction on the dam can begin. Black believes that the Asian Development Bank can be established sometime in 1966.

The Inter-American Bank is made up of Latin-American countries and the United States; the African Development Bank is made up only of African countries. The Asian Bank, on the other hand, is open to all United Nations members as subscribers of capital; its loans, however, will be made only in Asia. Burma, the most neutral of the neutralists, has agreed to join. Nearly every Asian country including Japan has asked that the bank’s headquarters be located in its capital. Japan has subscribed $200 million, the same amount promised by the United States. Western European countries and the Soviet Union also are being asked to subscribe.

Mood of the Capital

When the summer began, Washington watched the approach of the monsoon in Southeast Asia with the gravest apprehension. There were predictions of heavy losses and Communist gains. Before the summer was ended, Washington’s outlook had improved. Whether justified in the long run or not, both the President and former Ambassador Maxwell D. Taylor decided that it was time to emphasize some of the accomplishments. In June, the Viet Cong launched its expected offensive and made some gains under the protection of the weather. But the price it paid was high, and in July many Communist units were withdrawn for regrouping and retraining. By August, there were some significant victories over the Viet Cong, and Washington was vastly relieved.