Somber & Spare

President Johnson is as ebullient in manner as he is expansive in vision. It was no doubt a difficult exercise for him to stand before Congress and deliver a report card on the nation's past performance and future prospects that was somber in tone and spare in content.

Accurately gauging the nation's mood, Johnson offered no drastic departures in philosophy, no major policy shifts, in his fifth State of the Union speech. Confronted by a Congress that is more in the mood for retrenchment than revolution, he concluded that the most prudent possible strategy would be to avoid asking for any expensive new programs but to maintain the thrust of the old ones. "We've got to keep the momentum," he told aides beforehand.

The message had been gestating since last summer, when White House Aides Joseph Califano and Harry McPherson began tapping experts at more than 100 colleges and culling reports from at least ten task forces. Their research was assembled in a black loose-leaf notebook that grew to 400 pages, divided into 20 categories, by the time Johnson was ready to put on the final touches. Enjoining his writers to keep it concise, Johnson ordered a dozen drafts, rewriting much of the speech in pencil on a yellow legal pad.

"B'ar Grease." Five hours before the scheduled delivery of the speech on a nationwide television hookup, Johnson announced to those in his oval office:

"I'm not going to let anyone put anything else in this. All you want to do is add words, and I'm trying to cut words." The speech thereupon went off to the mimeograph machines and Johnson to White House Barber Steve Martini for a trim. Though many televiewers thought that Martini might have given the President a marcel as well, the difference in his appearance was because Johnson has been letting his hair grow longer, bringing out the silver in it, and has stopped using the hair oil that wags long referred to as "b'ar grease."

Johnson devoted little more than a fourth of his speech to foreign affairs. He said he hoped to send the Senate, before the year is out, a treaty to halt nuclear proliferation; proposed an international program to tap the ocean depths; urged "a major expansion" of both the International Development Association and the Asian Development Bank; called for "a prudent aid program rooted in the principle of self-help"; and offered birth control advice to developing lands.

Five Proposals. On domestic problems, he ticked off a catalogue of unfinished business, from crime and unemployment to lagging farm income and increasing pollution of the environment. "We lived with conditions like these for many, many years," he said. "But much that we once accepted as inevitable we now find absolutely intolerable." He made five major proposals:

P: A $2.1 billion manpower-training program, up $450 million from last year, designed principally to "get to those who are last in line--the hard-core unemployed--the hardest to reach." To do so, Johnson emphasized "a new partnership between Government and private industry," with Washington supplying the funds and business generating the jobs for 250,000 of the hard-core jobless in the first year.

P: A $1 billion authorization for the model cities program, which got only $312 million last year, "to rebuild the centers of American cities."

P: A ten-year campaign to build 6,000,000 new low-and middle-income housing units, twelve times as many as were built during the past decade.

P: A five-year child-health program to give poor families access to services ranging from prenatal care of mothers to free medical service through the first year of a baby's life. "It is a shocking fact," said Johnson, "that in saving the lives of babies, America ranks 15th among the nations of the world." -- A wide range of new consumer-protection programs, including some already approved by the Senate but not the House (truth in lending, gas-pipeline safety) and several approved by neither (among them, a wholesome-fish-and-poultry act). He also proposed appointing a consumer counsel in the Justice Department--a sort of ombudsman of the marketplace.

Tight Budget. Compared with the vast Johnsonian programs of the past, it was pretty tame stuff. At that, even such proposals as model cities and housing are unlikely to get the funds the President wants. He described his budget as a "tight" one, though it calls for an increase in outlays from $175.6 billion to $186 billion.* Most of the $10.4 billion increase will, in fact, go for defense costs and mandatory increases in such programs as social security, aid to farmers and veterans, Medicare.

Where Johnson may run into trouble is in his projected revenues. He estimates them at $178 billion, making for an $8 billion deficit. But that includes $12 billion from a 10% surcharge on personal and corporate income taxes that Congress has not yet passed--and, judging from its mood, is not about to approve. Wilbur Mills, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, where the bill has been bottled up for nearly six months, was not even present for the President's address. Neither were some 250 of the 535 members of the House and Senate.

As he began his speech, with an ovation still ringing in his ears, Johnson recalled what the late House Speaker Sam Rayburn had once told him: "The Congress always extends a very warm welcome to the President--as he comes in." From now on, the welcome is likely to be a good deal cooler.

* Under a new accounting system that includes all federal outlays and receipts, including for the first time those from social security, Medicare, highway funds and other trust funds. Under the old system, by contrast, expenditures under the last budget were listed at $147.5 billion rather than $175.6 billion.

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