Operational Withdrawal

The day after he returned from Asia, Lyndon Johnson summoned news photographers to the Cabinet Room of the White House for a picture-taking session. What was the occasion? "I'll give you the caption later," the President told the puzzled cameramen. Minutes afterward--when the stock exchanges had closed for the day on Wall Street--Johnson sent for reporters. They assumed that he was going to brief them on his last-minute campaign swing. Instead, he began reading a prepared statement.

"I wanted you to know that my doctors have recommended that I undergo surgery to repair a defect at the site of the incision made during the gall bladder operation a year ago," said Johnson. His physicians suggested that the operation, along with another to remove a 3-mm. polyp from his throat (see MEDICINE), should take place in 15 to 18 days. In the meantime, he was ordered to begin "a reduced schedule of activity" at once, and to take off some weight (currently about 215 Ibs.). For that reason, he said, he was leaving the following day for Texas.

"Introspection." Though the news did not ruffle Wall Street (the Dow-Jones average actually rose 0.72 points the next day), it did disrupt Democrats' hopes of a whiz-bang windup to the 1966 campaign. For more than a week beforehand, White House officials had been filtering out information about an electioneering itinerary that would have allowed the President barely enough time in Washington to change his socks before bounding off on a "Boston-to-Austin" barnstorming blitz through more than a dozen states.

Precise arrangements had been made with painstaking care. In Boston, a huge wooden stand was being built for the occasion. In Chicago, local Democrats assembled 118 bands and floats for a parade and 9,000 tickets were issued for an L.B.J. spectacular at the Conrad Hilton. The parade, featuring WELCOME L.B.J. placards, took place anyway. From Massachusetts to Oregon, White House secret service men had feverishly planned security precautions.

Despite such conspicuous harbingers, the President once again yielded to the mysterious Johnsonian compulsion to deny a matter of wide public knowledge.

When a reporter referred to the "cancellation" of his campaign plans, the President snapped: "When you don't have plans, you don't cancel plans." He did a little more to widen the credibility chasm by insisting that "I didn't get weary" during his Asia trip, even though hundreds of newsmen who accompanied him noted that he looked puffy-eyed and haggard. "Most of this weariness," said the President, in one of several barbed cracks at the press, "was some of you engaging in introspection."

Stitch in Time? The President took considerable pains to deny that his timing had been influenced by political considerations. A small protrusion at the site of his gall-bladder incision had grown as big as a golf ball. The polyp, caused by what one doctor called "excessive voice usage," was discovered last August, and has been causing him frequent hoarseness.

Nonetheless, suspicions lingered that the President may have had other, non-medical motives. One line of speculation was that while he did indeed need "a little stitchin'," as he put it, what persuaded him to begin resting up for the surgery immediately was the realization that if he undertook his campaign trip, he might be staking his prestige on several hopeless causes.

In California and Illinois, Governor Pat Brown and Senator Paul Douglas were running badly behind their Republican challengers. In New York, Idaho, Massachusetts, Michigan, Montana and Wyoming, six other states on his tentative itinerary, the major battles were rated as tossups. In Oregon, where Democrat Robert Duncan campaigned for a Senate seat largely on his support for the Administration's Viet Nam policy, the President might have risked an apparent repudiation of that policy at the polls.

The news that the President would not campaign came as a stitch in time to some candidates, such as Tennessee's Governor Frank Clement, who faced a close senatorial race with Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen's son-in-law, Republican Howard Baker. But most were disappointed. Whatever the degree of Johnson's popularity, a presidential visit usually helps swell the vote --and Democrats, who outnumber Republicans among the nation's 116 million eligible voters by a 2-to-1 margin, figured they would be hurt by a small turnout.

Biennial Faultfinder. Only hours before he flew off to the Pedernales, probably not to return until some time in December, the President did manage to get in one final round of politicking. In one of the most heatedly partisan press conferences of his presidency, he dismissed Barry Goldwater's prediction that Republican Ronald Reagan would win a landslide victory in California. "I would just express the hope," rasped Johnson, "that there has been no improvement in Senator Goldwater's judgment since 1964."

The President was especially scathing when a newsman mentioned that Richard Nixon had criticized his Asian trip for having brought the U.S. "no nearer" to peace in Viet Nam; that the war "could last five years and cost more casualties than Korea." Speaking with quiet scorn, the President called Nixon "a chronic campaigner" whose "problem is to find fault with his country and with his Government every two years." He declared that Nixon "doesn't serve his country well" by broadcasting such criticism "in the hope that he can pick up a precinct or two or a ward or two." In the most caustic gibe of all, he said of Nixon: "He never did really recognize and realize what was going on when he had an official position in the Government. You remember what President Eisenhower said: that if you would give him a week or so, he'd figure out what Nixon was doing."

Nixon, campaigning in New England, kept his cool. He remarked that the President had been guilty of a "shocking display of temper" and that his attack had "broken the bipartisan line on Viet Nam policy." Bipartisanship, he went on, meant joint participation and responsibility, "not abject approval of whatever policy the President may announce."

Rx: Geritol. Whatever the reasons, Johnson's operational withdrawal eliminated any last-minute presidential pyrotechnics in a campaign that was remarkably short of fireworks. Nixon, who stumped for nearly 100 Republicans in 32 states, drummed away at the President's Viet Nam policy and his "rubber stamp" Congress, but neither pitch particularly roused his audiences. Vice President Hubert Humphrey encountered such apathy everywhere he went that he finally blurted to a listless Manhattan audience: "Get with it, will you? I'm going to get you some Geritol." At a traditional "bean feed" rally in St. Paul's 12,000-seat auditorium, Hubert managed to draw only 2,000--and faced the embarrassing prospect of a Republican gubernatorial victory in his own state. Though enthusiastic crowds flocked to see New York's Senator Robert Kennedy in the 18 states he visited, Bobby's audiences seemed far more fascinated by the non-candidate than by the office seekers he was plugging.

Formless and confusing as the campaign was, neither party underestimated the importance of the outcome. If they were to have much hope for 1968, the Republicans had to regain most of the 38 House seats they lost in 1964, pick up a couple of governorships and perform well in the contests for some 6,800 state legislative seats. Otherwise, as House Minority Leader Jerry Ford put it, "there won't be anybody who will want" the Republican presidential nomination. Lyndon Johnson insisted bravely that a loss of 40 or 50 House seats would not "adversely affect the Government program." He was probably right about foreign policy, but his whole domestic program would be in trouble if the G.O.P. picked up even 30 seats in the House, now Democratic by 294 to 139.

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