Word: johnsons
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...everyone was quite so generous. Former LBJ aide Eric Goldman felt the speech underscored Johnson's fundamental failure, which was to understand the modern city and the people--"the corporation executives from Scarsdale"--who live in it. Arthur Schlesinger didn't like the speech because it included no "analysis" of how the war had been bad for the Great Society programs, and more generally because the President did not convey enough of a sense of the mess that he was leaving the country...
...Jacob Javits, looking fat and enormously confident, pointed out sourly that the speech was a strongly partisan one, an effort to rally the Democratic troops behind the Johnson programs and even behind Johnson himself. Apparently annoyed by LBJ's attempt to steal Nixon's already-feeble thunder, Javits went on to explain that the Johnson programs were really outdated anyhow, just warmed-over New Deal policies, and so on. There aren't very many poor people in the country any more, fewer than ever before, said Javits, and so he expected to see the incoming Administration striking...
...amidst a generous gush of applause. On television, the scene seemed strangely meaningless. The programs for which the President had been pleading were largely doomed, and so it could not have been for these that the Congressmen and Senators were cheering. They weren't cheering the President himself, either; Johnson is not a very likeable man, and he is not going to be missed, not even by those who have managed to shuffle and scrape their way into favor during the chaotic, bloody years of his reign...
What happened on Tuesday night was that for the first time that anyone could remmeber, a President returned to Congress to reaffirm the special system by which those few hundred men live their lives. As President, Johnson had been forced to struggle against the prerogatives of that system, and during the last two years Congress had won out. Its victory, of course, was purely destructive: it blocked Johnson's appointments and demolished his programs. But the important thing is that Congress won, and on Tuesday night Johnson returned, humbled, to seek the comfort of that closed society...
...applause for Johnson had little to do with the things that most people think to be important. The Johnson stewardship has been a disaster. At home there is more bitterness, more violence, more disintegration than anyone has ever known. Johnson's endless war has cost 30,000 American lives, but the American Empire is less secure today than when Johnson became its ruler. Even the Congressmen who still support the war are aware that something has gone drastically wrong, that America, for one reason or another, is in terrible trouble. While Johnson spoke, the USS Enterprise, the largest ship ever...