No Hostile Hand

With his sunburned face the shade of a beet, Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson arrived home last week from his nearly 30,000-mile "fact-seeking" mission through Asia. The White House, emphasizing the importance of the trip, gave him a hero's welcome: John Kennedy dispatched a brace of helicopters to Andrews Air Force Base for L.B.J. and his Lady Bird, ordered out the Cabinet and the diplomatic corps for a greeting ceremony in the White House Rose Garden. That done, Johnson withdrew with the President and Secretary of State Dean Rusk to Kennedy's study for a 45-minute briefing on what he had learned.

Later, Lyndon summed up his voyage for reporters. His major conclusions:

P:"Communism is not riding a tide of inevitable triumph in Asia."

P: The free Asian nations need U.S. financial help and technological guidance more than troops in order to win the battle for liberty.

P: U.S. aid must be matched, as Asian leaders agree, with "efforts and sacrifices of the recipient people"--including long overdue social reforms.

The Vice President pointedly urged U.S. diplomats to get out of their "air-conditioned comfort" and meet the people. Throughout his homecoming week, in private conversations with senatorial friends, Johnson zealously talked up his serious new concern for Asian problems, had high praise for Nationalist China's Chiang Kaishek, Thailand's tough Premier Sarit Thanarat.

Even as Lyndon was spreading his gospel, reporters who had accompanied him overseas were regaling the Washington press corps with stories of one of the most exuberant voyages since Auntie Mame went round the world. Southeast Asia, the reporters agreed, will probably never be the same.

"The Fox Is Loose." Time after time, Johnson ignored the niceties of diplomatic language to tax his translators' skill with a homier sort of rhetoric. "There is an evil force loose in the world," he cried in Saigon while offering a toast to South Viet Nam's President Ngo Dinh Diem. "Its purpose is to get what we've got if it can. Another way to put it, as we would in my native hill country, is, 'The fox is loose, Mr. President. He's after the chickens and you live in the chicken house.' " Johnson grandly compared Diem to F.D.R., Jackson and Wilson, suggested that John Kennedy might have included him in Profiles in Courage.

To street crowds in Saigon and startled villagers in Pakistan, Johnson applied the same folksy approach. Despite State Department fears for his security, he darted in wherever he could to pump hands with surprised onlookers, spiel out his message of U.S.-Asian friendship. "As they say back in my state of Texas, you can look into a man's eyes and see what's in his heart. I'm going back to tell my President that I looked into your eyes and I saw friendship for the United States."

Wai Off Base. Warned that Thailanders were unused to handshaking, Lyndon learned the traditional wai (a gesture of greeting): a crisp nod of the head, hands joined as if in prayer. Looking much like a nervous diver going off a 10-meter board, he tested his style on a few busloads of passersby, got no response, finally gave up and went back to handshaking. In lands where ancestor worship is religious duty, the Vice President, with accidental appropriateness, larded his yarns with references to "my daddy."

But for all his folksiness (some called it lack of dignity), it was generally agreed that Lyndon Johnson has performed a service to his nation in his strong affirmations of U.S. intent to keep Asia free. His crowds, although somewhat mystified by the tall visitor, had obviously swallowed their bafflement, responded to the undeniably open and warm feeling beneath the sunburn and the mannerisms. And Lyndon Johnson had learned a few valuable lessons himself--among them one that could stand in answer to the occupational hand-wringers about Asian attitudes toward the U.S. Said Johnson in reporting to the President: "We never heard a hostile voice, never shook a hostile hand."

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