Lying Low

When Lyndon Johnson returned to Washington last week, it was with none of the accustomed fanfare. After 17 days on the L.B.J. ranch, the President flew back to the capital at an hour guaranteed to assure him minimal exposure--just before midnight at the end of the New Year's weekend. During the week, he made only one public appearance and almost no announcements. He did not even attend the funeral of former Secretary of State Christian Herter, an old friend, though it was held in St. John's Episcopal Church, just across Lafayette Square from the White House.

The ceiling on presidential visibility was deliberately kept low. Johnson is disturbed by his precipitous plunge in popularity (43% in the latest Lou Harris Poll). Though he himself ascribes this to the normal vicissitudes of U.S. politics, he and his advisers have agreed that his wisest course of action may be to continue to lie low for the time being; in 1966, he spent some 90 days in relative seclusion along the Pedernales River.

Machine-Gun Bursts. The President's principal preoccupation was the impending State of the Union address and the budget message. So determined was he to shroud the drafting of the State of the Union speech in secrecy that he waited until week's end to announce when he would deliver it--right after Congress convenes this week, in a night-time appearance designed to draw a large television audience.

To ensure against leaks, outgoing Press Secretary Bill Moyers alone was assigned to draft the speech, which is normally a team effort. Through the week, Cabinet officers and presidential aides slipped into the White House through a side door to deliver the latest budgetary figures and policy recommendations. Moyers, working at his small electric Smith-Corona, in machine-gun bursts of 100 words per minute, translated the reports into Johnsonian prose, sending off completed portions to wherever the President happened to be at the moment. Johnson worked endlessly on the crisp, newly typed pages with his favorite soft-lead pencils.

Blueprint of Restraint. As for the contents of his message, Johnson remains convinced that a nation whose G.N.P. is approaching $800 billion can simultaneously fight a war in Viet Nam and advance his Great Society at home. "We are going to have a better America," he recently told some associates. "We've made mistakes, of course, but we are determined to correct them. We're proud of our programs, and we're going to keep improving them. If any of you think I'm going to make the kids in the Head Start program, the poor, the undereducated, sit at the second table, you're crazy."

Nevertheless, the word from the White House was that the President's State of the Union speech will be a blueprint of restraint compared with last year's ringing promises of guns and butter. He is expected to place more emphasis on the need for some belt tightening to fight the Viet Nam war. He will probably request a 10% to 15% increase in social security benefits and new programs in the health, welfare and urban-rehabilitation fields; he is particularly interested, for example, in a program to build nursing homes that would be "the kind of place I would have liked to see my mother in." But he is also expected to caution that the Great Society will have to proceed at a somewhat tempered pace.

Raising the Ceiling. The reason is obvious. His congressional critics, buttressed by 47 newly elected Republicans, stand ready to poleax any overambitious new measures. Moreover, they will have two opportunities to express their displeasure with his economic policies at the very outset of the session. One will present itself when the President asks for a supplementary appropriation for Viet Nam estimated at $15 billion --rather than the $9 billion or $10 billion that he predicted only last month. Another will arise when he asks Congress to raise the $330 billion ceiling on the national debt. Because Johnson was reluctant to do so just before the November election, Government debt was estimated to be a bare $100 million short of the legal maximum as of last week. Congress will certainly raise the limit--if it does not, its members will not be paid--but it will also seize the chance to take some sharp swipes at the President.

In the State of the Union speech, Johnson may announce two major decisions: 1) whether or not to develop a costly anti-missile system, which the Joint Chiefs of Staff want and Defense Secretary McNamara hotly opposes, and 2) whether or not to raise taxes. At week's end White House sources gave no indication that either decision had been made, despite rumors in Washington and New York that the President had finally ruled out a tax increase.

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