AMERICA
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partisan advocates off balance, never lost his cool. Though Johnson was,
like Kennedy, born into the twentieth century, it's to be doubted if
Johnson
and his style
would have
chosen
to be born at this time (as
Kennedy in his inaugural claimed). The arm-twist, the buddy-buddy hug,
the aside-whisper, the power press, the threat open, the threat veiled, are
as old as cloakrooms, and not really in and of this time. Kennedy's cool
might have prevented Congress from knowing what he really wanted,
or, more accurately, I think, might have allowed Congress to pretend it
didn't know what he really wanted. Going to a Rusk or a McNamara or
a Freeman or a Vice-President Johnson, a Mansfield or a Humphrey
might have given one a clue, but might conceivably have revealed sig–
nificant shades of difference.
Lyndon Johnson's boys speak with one voice. Not only the un–
necessarily abject and voluntarily self-effacing Hubert Humphrey prates
the OK word. Vietnam has wrought a monolith. The results are bad
enough already: the Right has identified itself with bombing and escala–
tion, the invasion Ky talks about, the nuclear attacks poor sad dreary old
Ike wakes to prattle. Johnson has not backed the latter two policies, yet
it's clear that the analogies the deterrence-minds find in "Chicken" and
"Minsk-Pinsk" must never exclude the possibility of extreme tactics. We
must never
tell
the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese that we won't
invade, or drop the bomb, otherwise we lose an important deterrent; at
the same time we must never let invasion and the bomb be only words
and threats, and must never disallow the possibility of actually
doing
the
thing we can't possibly
conceive of doing,
etc., etc., etc.
On the principle of "those of you who are not with me are against
me" Johnson has rallied the right-wing lunatics to his side, whether he
wants them there or not; on college campuses it is they who throw eggs
and manhandle the "Vietniks," the beards, the "unwashed," the draft–
dodging neophyte Nervous Nellies. I heard an NCAA commercial between
halves of a football game point to collegiate athletics as an excellent
counterforce to protest movements on college campuses! Lyndon Johnson
didn't write the commercial, of course; his destructive partisanship did,
I suggest, encourage its being written.
Kennedy's style could deal with something as nerve-shattering as a
Cold War; time and time again he cautioned against impatience, against
seeking solution in violence which, as every Pentagon man knows, is the
shortest distance between any two points. When he said he would not
have chosen to be born into any other century but this one he meant it
to include the tensions of a cold war, the pressures of an anticolonial
revolution, a Negro revolution, a technological revolution, population
escalations, the whole bit. And his cool could deal with hysterics, inflated
