Washington
If there ever was a moment for Lyndon B. Johnson to break out of his self-constructed Washington cocoon and go to the nation in his old role of consensus-builder, wrapped in the mystic authority of the presidency, it was that nightmarish midsummer Monday when Detroit was in flames, Negro rioting was spreading in chain reaction across the country, and a kind of civil war threatened. Seldom had the American people, even that 50 percent whom the polls showed as not approving of President Johnson’s performance, so yearned for firm, reassuring, calming words from their leader. Instead, the President stalled all day, and at midnight, suddenly slipped onto television screens. With his audience restricted at that hour, he delivered a defensive and legalistic apologia for sending troops to Detroit, reiterating again and again that Governor George Romney had been unable to restore order with his National Guard and had appealed to the President for federal troops. The performance earned the President low marks for conduct under fire, but that will probably all be forgotten long before the 1968 election. What makes Johnson’s stunningly inept performance that Monday night worth close examination today are the confidential reasons given by presidential intimates in an effort to explain his ineptitude.
While Detroit burned . . .
The collective mind of the White House staff simply could not be fixed on the subject of riots. It was wholly absorbed in the business of the President’s tax message, which then pervaded every corner of the Administration. When should it be sent to Capitol Hill? How much of a tax increase should be requested? Should the surtax on corporate income be greater than the surtax on personal income? Should it be dressed up as a war tax, keyed to a call for additional troops in Vietnam? Just at the point when the bloody summer rioting built to the most fearsome internal crisis since Fort Sumter, these questions of fiscal detail preoccupied the White House.
A multibillion-dollar tax increase, of course, is a matter of considerable importance deserving no little presidential attention. Despite this massive attention, however, the political touch was unsure. Democratic congressmen rumbled afterward that calling for a “10 percent surcharge” — that is, a 10 percent increase in the amount of tax paid, not a 10 percent increase in rates — made the public think the tax hike larger than it actually was. Nor, according to these complaints, had Johnson sufficiently prepared the country for higher taxes. Still, the worst fumble committed by the President back in July was failing to set aside for the moment all thoughts of the tax bill once urban rioting reached its climax.
The casual newspaper reader and television viewer, surfeited with years of admiring descriptions of Lyndon Johnson as the superpolitician of his day, may be surprised at this obvious distortion of political values. In truth, however, Johnson never has been skilled as a national politician and even less so as a Texas politician. Johnson is and always was a Washington politician, as peculiar to this city as a Senate filibuster. For all his celebrated longings to linger, homespun, on the banks of the Pedernales, Lyndon Johnson is really a product of Washington, where thirty years of hard experience in a special world of intrigue, ambition, and power have taught him how to live in political splendor. But the Majority Leader who knew every subtle pressure point in the Senate, and when and how to control it as no other man could, was still a neophyte in the strange world beyond the Potomac, so out of touch that he did not know who controlled what delegation at the 1960 Democratic National Convention. Similarly, the President, who has penetrated the inner recesses and solved the baffling secrets of the federal bureaucracy as no President before him has, is often inferior to Franklin D. Roosevelt, to John F. Kennedy, and even to Dwight D. Eisenhower in perceiving the trends and currents of national politics.
The Moyers gap
It is no small failing. Almost surely it would have denied him the White House had it not been for fate. Now it may overshadow his awesome technical competence in the office, For as adversity has deepened, Johnson has become even more a Washington politician as contrasted to a national politician. He has ended all efforts to ingratiate himself with the communications media, which met him mainly with scorn and invidious comparisons with the Kennedy “style.” The tragedy of the Vietnamese War has ruthlessly confined Johnson to his bureaucratic base, the harshness of the antiVietnam critics further inhibiting his timid attempts to make it as a truly national politician. Indeed, it is doubtful whether the President has even been urged along in that direction since the departure last year of Bill D. Moyers from the White House to become publisher of Newsday on Long Island.
Moyers was policy adviser, public relations counselor, speech writer, protégé, confidant, whipping boy, faithful friend — and in his last days in the White House, one of the President’s few links with the strange world beyond the Potomac. Had Moyers been around, for example, it is inconceivable that that dreadful statement would ever have been read by the President on nationwide television.
But Moyers’ unique role has not been filled, not because Moyers is irreplaceable but because Johnson has not wanted to replace him.
Toward Moyers, Johnson has demonstrated his characteristic lack of generosity for those who have left his service, and the more conservative Texans on the White House staff, who never cared much for Moyers anyway, can be counted on to make the appropriate clucking noises when they talk about their departed colleague. It is gospel at the White House that Moyers, not the President, is somehow responsible for the evil times and reduced popularity ratings that have befallen Mr. Johnson. Contacts with the Kennedys and other inhabitants of the non-Johnson world that Moyers carefully cultivated, if not altogether avoided by present LBJ aides, are certainly not encouraged.
George Christian, who as the newest press secretary wears one of Moyers’ several hats, is a highly competent professional, in some ways preferred to Moyers by the regulars of the White House press corps. But he would never dream of planting a story with the press about inside developments at the White House or of articulating his own ideology, which has more in common with the two conservative Texas governors he served before coming to Washington (Price Daniel and John Connally) than with the Great Society. Quite probably, Christian would be reluctant to tell his chief that something more than legalisms was desperately needed to be said in that time of national disaster last summer. Christian, in short, is a good technician on a White House staff that, with a couple of exceptions, is essentially a staff of technicians. Those exceptions, in broader touch with the world of national politics, have neither the desire nor the proximity to the President to play the risky Moyers game.
Two technicians
The nature of Johnson’s present staff can be understood by examining its two most important and dramatically dissimilar members. One is W. Marvin Watson, Jr., a rightwing Texas Democrat who may well be the most conservative presidential assistant since the days of Calvin Coolidge but who as the President’s appointments secretary keeps his ideology under lock and key. Watson has not broadened his scope a millimeter beyond the mechanical functions of appointments secretary since leaving labor-baiting Lone Star Steel Company of Daingerfield, Texas, in early 1965 to enter the White House staff.
The other key staffer, Joseph A. Califano, Jr., is a bright-eyed, quickthinking young man from Brooklyn and the Harvard Law School who travels in an infinitely broader world than Marvin Watson. Like Moyers, he maintains amiable contacts with the dark and sinister forces on the outer edges of Lyndon Johnson’s world: journalists, academicians, even the Kennedys. But unlike Moyers (many of whose duties he inherited), Califano does not try to bring those outside forces to bear on White House policy. For Califano too is a technician — a supertechnician, to be sure, out of the Robert S. McNamara training camp — who concerns himself with a bewildering assortment of government affairs but consciously limits his activity to the techniques of solving problems.
The fact that the President’s personal staff is dominated by technicians and not politicians like Eisenhower’s Sherman Adams or Kennedy’s Kenneth O’Donnell is both a cause and a result of Johnson’s own inward-looking preoccupation with the Washington scene. Simultaneously, he has hardened his resistance to delegating responsibility, requiring his personal assent on the small decisions — matters usually delegated to subordinates by past Presidents (when one former Cabinet member was told by Johnson, “You haven’t been bothering me lately,” he wasn’t sure whether he was being praised or criticized).
The President, who may not have read a book from cover to cover since boyhood, is in fact a voracious bedtime reader. Every night he stretches out in bed with his “night reading,” a fat loose-leaf notebook crammed with the never-ending flow of government paper: minutes of meetings, agency reports, proposals for action, and a constant stream of memoranda from califano and other WhiTe House aides — but mostly califano.
Johnson has taken to piling a daily work load on his thirty-sixyear-old aide that would numb the mind and body of older men. In the process, califano has become the President’s indispensable eyes and ears within the federal establishment. On orders from the Oval office, he keeps a steady stream of factual memoranda moving from his desk to the President’s, reports of all his official conversations during the day’s work from Cabinet members to low-level bureaucrats to newspapermen. “Joe is the President’s reporter,” says a Johnson intimate. “He knows more about this government than anyone except the President himself.”
Memos and minutiae
The President’s memo-mania embraces the entire White House staff, guaranteeing him instant access to hidden events. When Secretary of Labor Willard Wirtz had a small spat with Attorney General Ramsey Clark over the railroad strike that threatened last summer, for example, the President read all about it in memo form, though it’s doubtful the principal actors ever learned that Johnson was aware of their disagreement.
Moreover, officials attending routine daytime meetings at the White House are often amazed to see the door swing open and the President walk in and take a seat. And Johnson, a notorious nonlistener over the years, may sit quietly for forty-five minutes of bureaucratic jargon (though this is quite likely to be followed by a forty-five-minute Johnsonian soliloquy while the bureaucrats sit quietly and listen).
With Johnson so involving himself in the day-by-day happenings, of government, it is natural that his desk sometimes becomes a bottleneck, particularly in the case of highlevel appointments. But this seems to be the exception rather than the rule. We have here a Johnsonian tour de force. No other modern President has immersed himself so thoroughly in the minutiae of the government. Rare is the personal feud between some assistant secretary and some deputy agency chief that escapes the President’s attention. No problem in funding or organization is unknown to him. When Johnson gave White House reporters a blackboard lesson on budgetary problems from memory, it was no gimmick but a genuine demonstration of mastery over the details of governmental financing.
Thus, just as Johnson mastered the intricacies of the Senate, he has come to know in intimate detail the vastly more complex mosaic of the federal government itself. But the analogy is far from exact. Whereas Johnson used his encyclopedic knowledge of the Senate to dominate it, he has not been able to dominate the federal bureaucracy much more than Franklin Roosevelt or John Kennedy could. On the contrary, the paradox is that the more Johnson isolates himself as a Washington politician the more he seems to become the prisoner of the bureaucracy. Alienated from the press, the academy, and even his own party, Johnson has turned more and more to the career civil servant as his natural ally.
“Loyalty”
Certainly, there never before has been a day in Washington when so many high-level posts in the government are filled by the careerists, and this is a vivid manifestation of his deepening isolation. As Vietnam has seemed to become less and less soluble and as the Negro revolution reaches toward a climax, the surge of confidence and sense of security that enveloped Johnson after his landslide election in 1964 have faded, and his old suspicion of enemies lurking behind every corner has returned. As early as the spring of 1965, when Johnson delayed for weeks signing the official commission of a man already selected for high office, he explained the delay on grounds that the appointee had once worked for a former liberal Democratic foe of Johnson. “How can I trust the friend of my enemies?” he asked mournfully. He eventually signed the commission, but today such an appointment would quite likely not be made at all. In his isolation, Lyndon Johnson has made a fetish of loyalty.
In its most ludicrous form, this means that middle-echelon career bureaucrats — all new officials who reach the “super-grade” of GS-16 — are summoned to the White House, and knees trembling and heart pounding, required to listen to Marvin Watson tell them about the meaning of “loyalty” and how the President expects “loyalty” from all federal employees. The ritual has been going on now for more than two years, and it is leaving behind scores of civil servants who are both mystified and resentful at having their loyalty questioned. The loyalty fetish is worst in the deadly serious business of transfusing an unquestionably tired Administration with new blood from the outside world. But the loyalty test demanded by the President these days for every new prospective appointment is nearly impossible to meet. A finding that the businessman or professor under consideration never was anti-Johnson is not enough; it must be shown positively that he has been pro-Johnson, difficult indeed for someone new to politics and government.
“Security”
Moreover, Watson’s fear of inadvertently approving someone with a black mark in his past has led to absurdly long delays. This fear stems from the tragic scandal of Walter Jenkins, who was brought down by overwork and fatigue during the 1964 presidential campaign. Right after the fall of the faithful Jenkins, Johnson ordered full “special investigations” of 1200 top government officials, including the whole White House staff, and gave Watson personal authority over all future appointments to assure that any possible security blot would be discovered.
When Professor Richard B. Morris of Columbia University was selected as a member of the American Revolution Bi-Centennial Commission, Watson put the FBI on a full-scale field check. When the FBI reported to Watson that Morris had written a book about the Hiss case (in fact, Fair Trial: Fourteen Who Stood Accused from Anne Hutchinson to Alger Hiss, a book on trial juries), and that one statement in that book might possibly be interpreted as suggesting subversive tendencies on the professor’s part, Watson slipped the Morris file into a dusty drawer. There it remained for weeks. At last, without ever talking to the President, Watson vetoed the appointment. It wasn’t until another member of the White House staff learned of the long and inexplicable delay that a second investigation, this one by the White House itself, was ordered. It revealed that the FBI report had misquoted from Morris’ book. The professor wasn’t a subversive after all. Johnson thereupon immediately appointed Morris to the obscure commission.
But all too often the result of this unreasoning fear of a security taint in the background of a prospective employee, coupled with the unreasoning demand for proof of total loyalty, is that the Johnson Administration follows the course of least resistance in filling a high-level vacancy.
Passing the test
A post may remain unfilled for weeks or months, and eventually go by default to the career bureaucrat on the next rung down the ladder. An example of how this works was the long hand-wringing over the appointment of the first American Ambassador to Communist Hungary, where the level of the U.S. representation is being raised from Legation to Embassy. With the Kadar regime ever so cautiously liberalizing both its domestic and foreign policies, an imaginative freewheeling ambassador was indicated, and a massive search for a hardcharging business executive was launched.
There were numerous candidates, but none quite suited Johnson; that is, none quite passed his loyalty test. The Foreign Service lobby was plugging; hard for the appointment of Martin Hillenbrand, an exceptionally able Foreign Service officer who had performed well as secondin-command in Bonn, but as a careerist, not the ideal man to employ the freedom of maneuver and improvisation needed in Budapest.
After six months of stalling and inability to find a tried-and-true LBJ businessman, the President finally named Hillenbrand. This syndrome is repeated time and again, aggravated by the fact that John Macy, chairman of the Civil Service Commission, doubles as presidential assistant for recruiting highlevel personnel. Although he is supposed to be searching at all times for new blood, Macy happens to be a zealous advocate of career promotion for professional bureaucrats. On top of this, Macy’s hunt for talent has been inhibited by White House insistence on loyalty and security.
The effects of all this are pervasive. A President whose contacts and experience are already restricted to Washington now finds himself heading an Administration which day by day is staffed in its middle and upper echelons by careerists — honorable men, to be sure, but men Potomacoriented and lacking in national grasp. Thus does the Administration and the President become inexorably more inward-looking.
Military primacy
In the case of the war in Vietnam, the impact of this myopia is both acutely serious and poignantly ironic. From his days as young congressman investigating the Navy Department’s conduct of World War II, Lyndon Johnson has always been suspicious of the professional officer corps, often exhibiting outright hostility. Over the last year, Johnson’s resistance has wilted. More and more cut off from outside critical advice, he has become increasingly dependent upon the military bureaucracy. When one civilian official this past summer attempted to argue against any further arms buildup, Johnson cut him off tersely. That, he said, was “a matter of tactics,” and tactics are for the military to determine.
The number of American troops in Southeast Asia, of course, has a great deal more to do with politics, national and international, than with military tactics. That the President either fails or refuses to understand this now is testimony to his old and growing weakness as a national politician, a weakness that could prove fatal in 1968.
— Rowland Evans and Robert Novak