Even if the television tube and a ubiquitous Texan
had yet to be conceived, the President of the U.S. in the latter third
of the 20th century would almost certainly be the world’s most
exhaustively scrutinized, analyzed and criticized figure. As it is,
the power of his office and the Jovian electronic eye ensure that the
Chief Executive’s visage and voice are available for instant
dissection from Baghdad to Bangkok, from factory cafeteria to family
living room. Depending on the man and the moment, he may come across
as heavy or hero, leader or pleader, preacher or teacher. Whatever his
role, in the age of instant communication he inevitably seems so close
that the viewer can almost reach out, pluck his sleeve and complain:
“Say, Mr. President, what about prices? Napalm? The draft?” For Lyndon Johnson’s 200 million countrymen, the year produced an
unprecedented crop of complaints, based largely on the two great crises
that came into confluence. Abroad, there was the war in Viet Nam,
possibly the most unpopular conflict in the nation’s history and the
largest ever waged without specific congressional consent. At home, the
Negro, more aware than ever of the distance he has yet to travel toward
full citizenship, vented his impatience in riots that rent 70
cities in a summer of bloodshed and pillage. The U.S. was vexed as well
by violence in the streets, rising costs, youthful rebelliousness,
pollution of air and water and the myriad other maladies of a
post-industrial society that is growing ever more bewilderingly
urbanized, ungovernable and impersonal. Sense of Impotence. It was, for many Americans, an end of innocence. The
U.S. was still the world’s pre-eminent power, still reveled in the
accouterments of prosperity, still enjoyed a standard of living far
more abundant than that of any other civilization. But 1967 awakened
many of its citizens to the fact that conscienceless affluence can not
only despoil the environment and drive a deprived underclass to the
brink of rebellion; it can also pervade society with a sense of
impotence and bring on the loss of unifying purpose. With so many problems flowing together, the nation was battered by a
flood tide of frustration and anxiety. A doubt that in the past had
rarely been articulated or even felt crept into the American
consciousness: Is the U.S., after all, as fallible in its aims and unsure
of its answers as any other great power? Can-and should-the Viet
Nam war be won? Can the nation simultaneously allay poverty, widen opportunity,
eradicate racism, make its cities habitable and its laws
uniformly just? Or will it have to jettison urgent social objectives
at home for stern and insistent commitments abroad? It was increasingly
clear that the attainment of all these elusive goals would require,
above all, a quality that Americans have always found difficult to
cultivate: patience. Yet, as the National Committee for an Effective
Congress declared last week, with no exaggeration intended, “America
has experienced two great internal crises in her history: the Civil War
and the economic Depression of the 1930s. The country may now be on the
brink of a third trauma, a depression of the national spirit.”
