A Different Kind of Johnson

They've been telling some terrible things about me. The most vicious thing they've said is that I'm related to Lyndon Johnson. I want you to know there's not a dang thing to it.

When I look on the national scene, and I see drunk men at the head of the Government, and I see high-placed preachers on the President's staff dancing vulgar dances until 3 o'clock in the morning while our boys are fighting and dying in the jungles of Viet Nam, I cringe, I tell you. If that's the Great Society, I want no part of it.

The greatest service that Lyndon Johnson is performing for the people of this country is the fact that his sitting in the President's chair keeps Hubert Humphrey out of it.

With such impassioned oratory, James Douglas Johnson, 41--neither a consanguineal nor a philosophical relation of the President--last week handily captured the Democratic nomination for Governor of Arkansas. Not too many people in the capital of Little Rock gave Johnson, an out-and-out segregationist ("I don't shake hands with niggers"), very much notice when he entered the campaign last spring. Many even discounted his chances after he ran first in the July 26 primary, expecting most Democrats to rally in the runoff behind J. Frank Holt, 55, an easygoing moderate and the candidate of the Arkansas machine headed by outgoing Governor Orval Faubus.

Evangelical Eloquence. What few of the big-city slickers realized was that Johnson, who resigned from the State Supreme Court to campaign, was having an electric effect on Arkansas' farmers and hill folk. His attraction was not entirely based on his segregationist views. He vowed that his election would end the twelve-year rule of the Faubus machine. He called Lyndon Johnson, who is none too popular in Arkansas, a "socialist" and a "parasite." He also, on occasion, made Washington sound like Sodom and Gomorrah, D.C.

With evangelical eloquence and a country band, Jim Johnson stumped the state, attacking the "no-win" policy in Viet Nam, the evils of federal handouts, race riots in the big cities, and the "foreign-aid giveaway to every Hottentot country in the world." He promised that, if elected, he would cut taxes, give teachers a $500 pay raise and schoolchildren free textbooks, and bring more industry into the state. He also promised to bring prayers back to the schoolroom. "We're going to pray in our schools in this state," he declared, "and I don't believe Lyndon Johnson would have the guts to send troops down here to try to keep us from it." He quoted the Bible, ended his speeches with a sincere "God bless you."

Winthrop in Winthrop. Johnson's opponent in November will be Republican Winthrop Rockefeller, 54, who this week opens his campaign in the tiny town of Winthrop (pop. 203). Rockefeller, who has singlehandedly rejuvenated the state G.O.P., won a surprising 43% of the vote when he ran against Faubus in 1964, and had hoped to do even better this time, especially if he faced the lackluster Holt. Johnson's victory not only robs Rockefeller of much of the anti-Faubus vote that came his way two years ago, but also injects into the battle a lively and colorful campaigner whom he will be hard pressed to match.

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