JOHNSON'S NEW EXPERIMENTS LEAD HIM INTO SOME STRANGE ALLEYS
Johnson is "experimenting a great deal now with new techniques" in his efforts to counteract the precipitous decline in his popularity on the eve of a presidential election year, James Reston of The New York Times has reported.
The experiments include an attempt to create a new "image." His success at this was so great on the very first try that the president was forthwith awarded the Oscar as the greatest ham actor to yet trod the boards in the White House.
Johnson is also playing around with some political experiments in obvious hope of coming up with something new to break his losing streak. Thus he re-~ cently floated a trial balloon in witchhunting.
Three Republican congressmen, Gerald R. Ford, Leslie C. Arends and Frank T. Bow revealed November 28 that
at a White House briefing on October 24, Johnson had read a document that persuaded them that the massive October 2l antiwar demonstration in Washington had been organized by "Hanoi."
The report was about "meetings between the protest leader, David Dellinger, three or four other antiwar leaders, and Vietnamese Communist officials."
In a dispatch from Washington about this, New York Times correspondent Fred P. Graham reported:
"The Johnson Administration has rejected requests by the House Republicans to release the report or otherwise document the charges, saying that to do so would fuse a 'McCarthyist' witch hunt."
A Justice Department "spokesman" when questioned about the charges of a Hanoi plot, referred to a statement made by a high government official at a Pentagon briefing the day before the demonstration. In the briefing, the official said that while the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, which organized the protest, did contain some Communists, “we have no evidence that the Communist party is in control of or in charge of the rally and march."
"In Copenhagen," continues the Times, "where he is attending the Vietnam International War Crimes Tribunal, Mr. Dellinger readily conceded that he had met with Communist Vietnamese officials. But he branded as ‘absolute nonsense' the charge that the Vietnamese had influenced the course of any protest rallies in the United States.
"He said it had worked the other way around -- that he had urged them and leaders in other countries to stage rallies to coincide with those in the United States. He added that he had been out of the country and had not even participated when the initial plans for the Oct. 21 rally were made at a meeting of antiwar leaders here on May 17.
The most significant items in this episode are (1) the idea of probing for a reaction on a witch-hunt gambit, (2) having Johnson himself undertake this; (3) doing it with full recognition that what was being toyed with was nothing less than a revival of McCarthyisn.
It was exactly like a pyromaniac striking a match and saying, "This could set the house on fire; but we refuse to do that because it would be pyromania."
The most ironic aspect of this little test run staged by Johnson, is that he himself wants to get together in a secret confab with the person whom he considers to be the most powerful figure in the Communist world. Here is the inside dope as reported by Newsweek [Decenper 4 issue]:
"President Johnson wants a meeting next spring with Communist Party boss Leonid Brezhnev, who is now reckoned to be the first among equals in the Soviet hierarchy -- and LBJ has his Kremlin experts looking into the best way to arrange a summit. LBJ was encouraged to seek the meeting after he received a letter ten days ago from Aleksei Kosygin... in which the Soviet Premier expressed alarm over the state of Soviet-American relations. A summit talk, besides clearing the international air, would largely benefit LBJ in an election year. The President's popularity rose markedly after his Glassboro talks with Kosygin last summer. Soviet diplomats in Washington say they're in favor of a Johnson- Brezhnev summit. They hold that no prominent GOP Presidential candidate will be able to do more than LBJ to end the Vietnam war. In fact, most Republicans, the Soviets argue, may well advocate escalation. Therefore, many political analysts maintain, the Soviets would prefer to see LBJ remain in the White House."
One of the reasons Johnson's popularity rose temporarily when he met Kosygin at Glassboro was that ordinary people hoped the two would be able to come up with some formula to end the war in Vietnam. Another reason was that Johnson's success in inveigling Kosygin into a confab seemed to indicate that his policies were impressing the Soviet government -he had them eating out of his hand!
Would a repeat performance prove sufficient, if it were timed correctly, to put Johnson over with the electorate as less of an evil than a Goldwater who might get the U.S. involved in a war in Vietnam?
Johnson is desperate enough, it seems, to give it a whirl -- even if it leaves him open to the charge from some McCarthyite in or around the White House that the very idea of having a little Communist popularity rub off on the president of the United States is nothing less than a plot hatched in Moscow.