Change in the Scenery

The President's annual State of the Union message is a mixture of stock taking and promise making, a report card to the nation on the year just past and a blueprint for the year to come. As such, it is always awaited with expectation. This week, as Lyndon B. Johnson goes before a nationwide television audience with his third State of the Union address, that expectation has been heightened by the presence of some considerable differences from previous years. For one thing, the President has just returned to the capital after a twelve-week convalescence that he spent mostly in the isolation of his Texas ranch. For an other, the scenery around him has been transformed by the ever growing demands of the Viet Nam war and by the activity triggered by his "peace offensive" aimed at ending that war (see cover story).

Growing Chinks. Despite the lengthening shadows cast by Viet Nam, Johnson's report on the state of the nation should be sanguine indeed. The economy is not only good but sensational--a fact underscored by the stock market's confident thrust toward the 1,000-point mark in the Dow-Jones industrial average and by the gross national product's one-year surge of $34 billion to an estimated level of $675 billion. Unemployment has practically reached such a rock bottom--at 4.1%, it is the lowest in more than eight years. The great American middle class, which constitutes about three-quarters of the nation, has never been more affluent or spent more freely.

To be sure, Utopia has not arrived. The sores of segregation and poverty still fester in many parts of the U.S. despite the real gains brought by such legislation as the Voting Rights Act and the poverty program. The big cities are in need of imaginative renewal if they are to remain livable. There are chinks in the President's all-embracing and long-enduring consensus that could widen into cracks before year's end. Under prodding to hold the line on prices, the business community is growing restless and resentful.

Johnson's overriding problem--and the nation's--is, of course, Viet Nam. The war there has not yet become a divisively unpopular one, as did Korea by 1952, but it is a gnawing, worrisome affair, more so because this is an election year. Already it is consuming not only money and manpower but vast stores of the nation's time and energy. Some time in 1966, the U.S. must decide what it hopes to achieve with this huge expenditure. It must decide where it is headed in Viet Nam and the rest of Asia, and whether it is sufficiently the master of events there to channel them toward its goals.

Consultation & Cerebration. The man who must make the final decisions has been unwontedly somber since he returned to Washington last week. He has held only one press conference since August. He showed none of the old relish for open combat when confronted with the steel industry's price increase or the transit workers' strike in New York City. But the familiar ebullience has not vanished entirely; it has simply been capped for the time being, like a gusher in a Texas oil field. With his three biggest messages of the year coming up in the next few weeks--those on the State of the Union, the Budget and the Economy--Lyndon Johnson has withdrawn for a needed period of consultation and concentration.

The State of the Union address that results from this cerebration will not be only one man's diagnosis of the nation's health. It will be, as it should, a report based on ideas gleaned from countless economists and educators, politicians and poets, official and unofficial advisers. With his wide acquaintanceship, his readiness to pick brains by phone or in person, and his considerable capacity for absorbing viewpoints, the President has as accurate and comprehensive a view of the state of the union as one man can.

That view will be vastly different from the one that Johnson beheld twelve short months ago. Then, riding the tide of an unprecedented victory at the polls, the President looked around and saw a nation ripe for his brand of consensus politics. Then he had something to offer almost everyone--voting rights for the Negro, a tax cut for the wage earner, continued prosperity for business. Since then, the nation's problems have grown more complex and the solutions less easy. Where once compromise and cajolery worked, many hard choices are now required--choices that could alienate some elements of Johnson's great consensus. Cooperative as the 89th Congress has been, for example, its members will require delicate handling after three months in the hustings. Many of them have grown increasingly critical of the size of the budget and the direction of the war in Viet Nam, and not a little of the criticism is coming from members of the President's own party.

Taking the Plunge. If Lyndon Johnson is to contend successfully with the many problems that confront him, his first task is to regain full mastery of the levers of power and the instruments of opinion making that lie at his disposal as President. His long absence from the White House has removed him from the mainstream, and this week's State of the Union address--usually a President's most important in any given year--will indicate how ready he is to plunge back in. When he is fully ready, his first and most important order of business will be to decide just where the U.S. is headed in the Viet Nam war.

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