A Test of Time

Outside the door to White House Press Secretary George Christian's office a secretary taped a sign: "No enemy would dare bomb this place and end this confusion." She had a point. Seven months before the presidential elections, an air of disorganization has enveloped President Johnson's staff.

The latest soundings show that the President can still count on a majority of the 2,622 Democratic delegates at the August convention, but every day brings word of new defections. Of the nation's 24 Democratic Governors, no fewer than ten have failed to commit themselves to the President. Even the loyalists are finding themselves with shrinking armies to command. In Utah, pro-Johnson Governor Calvin Rampton declared after learning that six of his eight top nonsalaried advisers prefer New York Senator Robert Kennedy: "I may have a tough time holding the delegation for Johnson." In Iowa, where Democratic precinct caucuses last week showed that Senator McCarthy might pick up as many as 21 of the state's 46 convention votes, Governor Harold Hughes was palpably wavering. Sighed California's ex-Governor Pat Brown, a Johnson man: "Right now, we're dead in the water out here."

Selective Charisma. The President's campaign organization back in Washington also seemed to be in irons. Aside from Johnson himself, the key operative so far has been White House Appointment Secretary W. Marvin Watson, a dour, former Texas steel executive whom the President lauds as "the most efficient man I've ever known" but who is less than an expert in national politics.

Some old Johnson hands have be gun reappearing. Former White House Aide Jack Valenti, now the $125,000-a-year president of the Motion Picture Association of America, contributed a Washington Post article deploring the "holy regard" among Americans for a President's "charisma." Wrote Valenti: "The only two modern figures who could be truly said to possess magic charisma, whose voice and person cast a spell over their countrymen and whom people followed blindly and exultingly were the two largest tyrants of our age, Hitler and Mussolini." Somehow, he overlooked such charismatic non-tyrants as Churchill and Gandhi, Roosevelt and De Gaulle--and for that matter, John Kennedy.

Collective Couch. The President himself, having devoted his speechmaking largely to Viet Nam two weeks ago, last week shifted gears. In ten speeches delivered during a cyclonic week, he hymned his domestic accomplishments as the best ever achieved "by any Administration at any time in all the history of America." His arms windmilling and his voice rising, he told labor leaders: "I sometimes won der why we Americans enjoy punishing ourselves so much with our own criticism. This is a pretty good land. I am not saying you never had it so good. But that is a fact, isn't it?" Lady Bird made a similar point, telling a B'nai B'rith luncheon: "We don't have to spend our time on a collective psychiatrist's couch."

Some of the President's advisers are urging him to get out and campaign across the country. But others feel that things are bound to pick up for the President after the novelty of the Kennedy-McCarthy challenge begins to fade--or if the fortunes of war should happen to change. As California's Democratic Committeeman Eugene Wyman put it, "The President will wear well with time."

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