1968 - Mark Kurlansky [28]
If the speech was a barometer for the direction the country was turning, the news was not good for liberalism. The Great Society, Johnson’s catchphrase for the extensive list of social programs that were supposed to define his presidency, was mentioned only once. The audience of Congress, cabinet members, and top-ranking military greeted the speech with the appropriate periodic applause that always seasons these events. According to Time magazine, the president was interrupted by applause fifty-three times, although it reported no genuine enthusiasm to most of these outbursts. The one prolonged standing ovation came when Johnson said, “The American people have had enough of rising crime and lawlessness in this country.”
In place of new social programs, Johnson announced the Safe Streets Act, a new narcotics law with more severe penalties for the sale of what had become a campus favorite, LSD. He also called for gun control legislation to stop “mail order murder,” which was the only statement in the fifty-minute speech that received applause from Senator Robert Kennedy.
Johnson responded to Hanoi’s offer of talks—on condition that the United States cease bombing and other hostile acts—by saying, “The bombing would stop immediately if talks would take place promptly and with reasonable hopes that they would be productive.” He then angrily recalled the enemy’s violation of the New Year’s truce, adding, “And the other side must not take advantage of our restraint as they have done in the past.” This was an important point, since there were calls for another cease-fire for the upcoming Vietnamese New Year, Tet.
A Gallup poll released two days after the speech showed more people seeing Johnson as hawkish than saw either Nixon or Reagan that way. In a time when politicians were divided more commonly into doves and hawks, for peace or for war, than into Democrats and Republicans, this was significant. Both Nixon and Reagan had been regarded as unelectable, and one of the reasons had been their hawkishness.
In a New York Times Magazine article titled “Why the Gap Between LBJ and the Nation?” Max Frankel suggested that Johnson’s problem was not so much that he handled the media badly, but that he was just not convincing:
But the measure of Mr. Johnson’s trouble is not only Vietnam—perhaps not even Vietnam. It is his failure to persuade much of the country of his own deep belief that his war policy is right. Were he to succeed, his critics, even in the opposition, might at least respect the genuineness of his purpose. As it is, a great many of them seem to have concluded that he is beyond rational debate, merely afraid to concede a “mistake” or too timid to risk retreat. . . . He rehearses many of his public performances and studies some afterward. He has tried every combination of television lighting known to theatrical science and uttered every genre of political address.
Frankel quoted the president comparing himself to the Boston Red Sox’s spectacular slugger Ted Williams. Despite all his records and considerable accomplishments, when Ted Williams stepped up to the plate fans often booed. “They’ll say about me,” Johnson explained, “I knock the ball over the fence—but they don’t like the way he stands at the plate.” The Times ran a follow-up letter to the editor signed by five members of the history department at Cornell:
On the other hand, there are similarities between the men that the President evidently chose to overlook: (1) Boston fans booed Williams not because of his stance but because he seldom delivered in the clutch; (2) Williams’s problems were often caused by rudeness, immaturity and unsportsmanlike conduct with the public and the press; (3) Williams could never make a hit in left field either; (4) when faced with a new obstacle, like the Boudreau shift,