L.B.J. I

What manner of men govern us? Voters choose only promises and premonitions, biographers provide conscientious rationales on the basis of what is vouchsafed them by the reticent subject or the partially informed intimate. But Lyndon Baines Johnson, in his TV interlocution with Walter Cronkite, gave as full a rendition as immediate history is apt to hear.

Like all self-accounting, it is suspect. Johnson was always a man whose oratory could bring tears to his own eyes. But in the revealing program he afforded glimpses of truth--and terror--beneath the vanity and the bathos. There were the flecks of the midnight fear of a man who picks up the world with the telephone receiver:

"The real horror was to be sleeping soundly about three-thirty or four or five o'clock in the morning and have the telephone ring and the operator say, 'Sorry to wake you, Mr. President,' and there's just a second until she could get Mr. Rostow in the Situation Room, or Mr. Bundy . . . Had we hit a Russian ship? Had an accident occurred? We have another Pueblo? Someone made a mistake--were we at war?" Few men, listening, could be so sure of themselves, or so hungry for power, that they would not feel a sickening sense of uncertainty that accompanies the finality of decision at the presidential level.

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