THE JOHNSON YEARS

NOTHING was beyond his desire.

He wanted to be unifier and savior, uplifter of the poor at home and father of democracy in Asia. He yearned to be a latter-day Lincoln to the blacks, to outshine F.D.R.'s memory among reformers, to surpass Truman's humane but hardheaded foreign-policy record, to evoke the affection accorded Eisenhower. Above all, Lyndon Johnson ached for the trust of today's voters and the respect of tomorrow's scholars.

Now, with so many of his glittering hopes broken, Johnson makes his farewells, grinds through the last budget, the final State of the Union message. He gleans what satisfaction he can by recalling victories in Congress, his associations spanning three decades, his joy over the last moon shot. String music, champagne and nostalgia warm the waning days. "I love Washington," he said last week. "I love this capital."

Without doubt, he would have loved another four years in power. A second full term would have given him a total of nine years in office, more than any other President except Franklin Roosevelt. "More" was his byword. And more time in office would have given him the opportunity to get the nation out of Viet Nam.

Scarred Belly. The war consumed the nation's resources and its leaders' attention. Midway through Johnson's Administration, it aroused a horde of critics from among those who favored his other policies, if not the man himself: the young, the black, the intellectuals and those whom Historian Eric Goldman calls metro-Americans--the educated, affluent, growing middle class to whom the Alamo psychology is as alien as a President who thrusts his operation-scarred belly at the public.

But it was not just the war or his occasional crudities that soured the promising Johnson years. Horace Busby, Johnson's friend and a perceptive former aide, pointed out recently that social changes now come so rapidly that they outstrip the ability to comprehend them, let alone cope with them. Occasionally, Johnson's shrewd mind did grasp the moment and the need. When, after Selma, he went before Congress to vow "We shall overcome," he was genuinely moving. And some of the innovative programs he began, such as Headstart, testified to his willingness to seek new solutions. Yet all too often he answered the call of the '60s with the responses of the '30s. He too readily fell back on "Molly and the babies," on the you-never-had-it-so-good rubric. To be sure, most Americans had never had it so good. But now they wanted it better and different.

The nation needed to be engaged. It needed a personality that it could warm to and trust. Instead, it got a preacher and teacher who measured accomplishment in statistics that were irrelevant to the haves and incomprehensible to the havenots. And as opposition became increasingly strident, Johnson reverted more and more to the defensive, secretive, untrusting and, in return, untrusted.

Thus the man who sought to govern by consensus could not even hold together his own party. The politician who attempted--with much success--to complete the unfinished business of the New Deal ended by presiding over a nation beset by class and racial tension. The President elected in 1964 by the largest popular majority in history had to admit that the interests of peace and national unity would best be served by his renunciation of power.

Uneven Efficacy. Yet by one traditional gauge--the enactment of major legislation--the Johnson Administration was conspicuously successful. Medicare and federal aid to education broke through longstanding barriers. Three far-reaching civil rights acts went beyond anything since Reconstruction. A series of laws aimed at slum renovation and consumer protection were progressive and long overdue. The various anti-poverty programs, while uneven in efficacy and wisdom, were the beginning of a necessary break with the dole approach. In the foreign field, the continuing torment of Viet Nam overshadowed significant accomplishments. Most notable were agreements with the Russians and the beginning of the process that could lead to realistic arms control. The Glassboro summit with Aleksei Kosygin helped start this movement.

But the record, both domestic and foreign, is curiously unsatisfying and even misleading, despite the piles of bills and billions for good causes. Indeed, Johnson enjoyed two periods of Congressional bliss within 14 months--immediately after John Kennedy's assassination and then after L.B.J.'s 1964 victory over Barry Goldwater. In the 1960s, however, the measurement of success in box scores was not enough. If the New Politics has any validity, it is that the politician needs continuing mass support, in election year and out. Johnson had earned his reputation and learned his trade in closet politics, in the one-party Texas of another era and the cloister of Capitol Hill. He had scant preparation for the larger, less orderly world of national politics.

Early in his tenure, this lack mattered little. After Kennedy's murder, the country needed a figure to rally round. Then it needed a responsible alternative to Goldwater. Johnson mistook happenstance for deep, wide support and even for the affection he craved. "I'm sure glad," he would say in those days, "we got rid of that image that nobody likes Lyndon."

He sensed the need to inspire, the opportunity for grand works, and he tried. "Somehow we must ignite a fire in the breast of this land, a flaming spirit of adventure that really demands greatness," he said after a few months in office. Yet his matches often flickered out. He went to Ann Arbor that first spring as President to proclaim the Great Society, to challenge the nation to use its "wealth to enrich and elevate our national life, and to advance the quality of our American civilization." A few years later, the Great Society was gone from the presidential vocabulary and Richard Goodwin, who had written the speech, was gone from the White House.

Many of the other keen, questing intellects also left. Johnson was always a man who took public issues personally; dissent of any kind became increasingly intolerable to him. With many intellectuals in loud and often unreasonable opposition, his old feelings of insecurity and inferiority about his rural background and mediocre education became more pronounced.

In the narrow sense, Lyndon Johnson could function superlatively under stress. He could rap out hard decisions, maneuver in delicate foreign squabbles, intervene effectively in complex labor disputes. But in the less tangible sphere of sustaining the nation's confidence, understanding the drift of opinion, coping with articulate critics, Johnson was all too vulnerable.

The President has a far more effective podium than any band of writers and academics, but Johnson rarely used it to good effect when the Viet Nam debate became virulent, or when the nation became confused and distressed over racial unrest. He might have survived the assault if he had earlier amassed a reservoir of popular confidence. This he had never really done. He tried to come across as the protean President, large in heart and body and energy, but that aura was not consonant with all-too-accurate stories of his pettiness, his bullying of aides, his unnecessary deceptions. His lack of candor about Viet Nam and about less substantial issues became chronic.

Nor were his hyperbolic promises persuasive for very long. In his first State of the Union address, he promised "all-out war on poverty," plus "more homes and more schools and more libraries and more hospitals." The clincher: "All this and more can be done without any increase in spending. It can be done by this summer." Last week Agriculture Secretary Orville Freeman told Congress that another $1 billion was needed to feed the millions of people still so poor that they are literally going hungry.

Even in 1966, Johnson was still promising to fight vigorously on both the war and home fronts. Perhaps it could have been done. By then, however, Johnson was running out of political credit. Crime and violence were becoming national issues. The antipoverty program, already suffering grave administrative problems, was held down. Appropriations for other domestic activities also had to be checked. Congress became increasingly intransigent. The Republican gains in the 1966 congressional election ended any possibility that Johnson could fulfill his earlier goals.

After ghetto rioting and Negro militance began to turn popular opinion against the black cause, Johnson's response was uncertain. He continued to fight for civil rights legislation, and his successes will be a durable monument to the will of a Southerner who had earlier been less than zealous on the Negro's behalf. Still, in 1967, when Hubert Humphrey urged a "Marshall plan" for impoverished areas following the Detroit riots, Johnson quashed that kind of talk. And when the Kerner Commission last year made ambitious recommendations for helping the Negro--findings that could easily have been mistaken for earlier Johnsonian rhetoric --the President pouted in silence, apparently construing his own commission's work as a reproach to himself.

Whisky and Progress. Lately Johnson has taken to saying privately that progress is like whisky: "It is good, but if you drink too much it comes up on you." He obviously believes that he gave the nation as much as it could hold for now. He is anguished that there has been no breakthrough in the Paris negotiations, but thinks he did all any President could to bring peace while defending U.S. interests.

Debate will go on about him even in the unlikely event that he never writes or speaks another sentence. For the short term, the verdict is likely to be harsh. Over a longer period, his prospects are better. It may be several years before the final results of the Viet Nam war are clear. Some of his domestic programs may set patterns for the future. His personality flaws, like those of some of his predecessors, will seem less significant a decade hence. Johnson, at least, is confident of history's favorable verdict, and will spend his remaining years buttressing his record. He talks of the personal papers that are flowing to Texas by the truckload. "I've got 31 million pages of material," he says, "more than any President in history." To the last, Johnson deals in superlatives. "People will look back on these five years as some of the most important in the nation's history," he insists. Of that, at least, there can be little doubt.

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