At Issue; 8; The TFX

This is Austin, the capital of Texas, the home state of the president. Lyndon Baines Johnson, becoming the president, is a kind of cultural shock to the nation's politics. Boston is the same country, but another life. The new frontiersmen from Harvard are not very much like the professors around here at the University of Texas. Their ways and their contexts are vastly different. This week, Aunt Issue looks at the president from Texas. Commentator is Ronnie Dugger, editor of the Texas Observer. This is a rocky, scrubby part of our state, covered with brush and cedar trees. The rivers, the color of milky green, course over limestone ledges, and around and under the boulders, the water's car. The land rolls erratically, as the weather has left the rocks and soil to stay.

We call it the Texas Hill Country. Lyndon Johnson is therefore the president from the Rocky Hills where Texas begins to be western. The Johnsons are country people. The late president Kennedy liked to spend an afternoon on a yacht, and he never wanted for things he didn't have. President Johnson's biographies say that he worked his way out of the scrubby hills through Southwest Texas State Teachers College. He shines shoes, herded goats, worked on a weekly paper, labored on highway jobs, ran an elevator, washed cars, hopped to around a cafe, cleaned up around school. He was secretary to the college president and sold hosiery door to door. He debated in college. It must have been an arrival for him. What would it mean for the United States that this Texan has become president? Reporter Bill Maul of KLRN reports from Johnson City and the LBJ ranch. Johnson City is the small central Texas town where the 36th president of the United States

spent most of his early life, took his first jobs, graduated from high school. It is here that President Johnson occasionally finds time to relax and meet old friends to get back to the soil, which is his home. This land has nurtured many influential politicians, including his grandfather, Sam Johnson, who first settled near here more than a hundred years ago. The townspeople, while struck by the tragedy, seemed to be occupied more with the future than the past. They were proud and confident that the new president would turn out to be a great president. What is your name, sir? J.B. Gore. Do you know the president? Yes, I know. How did you get to know him? I've known him since he was a child. He, in fact, he lived at our home in what school one year? That is in grade school. What kind of a boy was he? He was all American boy, all right. What were some of the things he liked to do? He liked all kinds of sports, baseball, and marbles.

In fact, he played marbles right here on this street. And he had placed along in the evening and he'd come from school down here to town and play, and then about time to get dark right after our home, down to the house. Did you ever think that he'd grow up to your president? Well, I never dreamed of saying that time. A.W. Morrison is a close personal friend of Johnson's and spends a great deal of time visiting, hunting, just driving around with the president when he comes back home to Texas. What kind of a president do you think Mr. Johnson will make? I believe he will make an excellent president. I believe he will make a strong president. I believe he has all the training, government, to know the problems of this country, the problems of foreign countries. I believe that as long as he's praised that, that nobody will push him around, or push his country around, that if a country wants to deal with this country on a fair and

just basis, I'll be fine, but he will not allow any advantage to be taken. I have great confidence in his ability as President. This is a hardy land, a rugged country. Can you see this land reflected in the president, the hardiness of it, the ruggedness of it, the character of it? Well, I don't know how exactly how to express it, but it seems like when the president comes home and stays a few days that he, by being here and driving around over the land and visiting the folk city, he gets some strength out of it. He leaves here, I believe he feels better and he's ready to go back to work.

The LBJ ranch is 15 miles to the north of Johnson City. It's a place where the Johnsons can get away from the harried pace of Washington, or entertain guests from all over the world. Earlier this year, the Johnsons brought 28 United Nations delegates to the ranch, where he told them something of his boyhood. I, I standard of living, and I put cap of the income when I was a boy I was not greatly different from the standard living to put cap of the income in a good many of your countries now. When I grew up and rode a donkey four miles to school, we didn't have these electric lines. We hadn't damned these rivers. We didn't have the irrigation pipe to water our fields. We didn't even have the beautiful, the third-bred cattle. We pumped our water out of the well, or drew it out with a chain, and that's how far

you can come and how far we have come in 50 years by all of us putting shoulder to the urine, giving our best. He also told them about the famous Pakistani camel driver who visited the ranch and met some of the Johnsons' friends. It made the camel driver's visit so enjoyable and so understanding, and Dr. Dobie about sundown said that, Mr. Vice President said, I'm getting up in years, a little bit, and I don't like to drive at night, and you just tell the camel driver, I'm going to have to head down to the Boston. So I told the camel driver, and the camel driver said, well, Mr. Vice President, you tell Dr. Dobie that it's all right for him to go, we're missing, but then early wish he could stay, he's been quite stimulating all evening, but tell him I don't agree with him that he is getting old, because every gray hair in his head represents wisdom. And the interpreter said, well, well, well, well, he went on for about two minutes, and

Dr. Dobie said, well, that's the way he feels about it, I just have another drink and stay. I didn't want to present to him in any way Dr. J. Frank Bowen has lived with us. J. Frank Dobie, the writer who chronicles stories of the southwest, has his own ideas about Lyndon B. Johnson. One time I was at a dinner in Dallas. It seems to me to have been in honor of Mr. Robert Anderson, whom I knew, who was Secretary of Treasury under General Eisenhower. I had acquired the reputation of being too far left, especially with the Dallas News for which it once wrote and which fired me, because that idea is, but I was sitting at the head

table and Lyndon B. Johnson came in and still weren't in a program, but everybody was there. And he came up behind me and put his arms around my shoulders. Well, he didn't have to do that, but he was just telling whoever's there that no matter how far left I was, he knew I wasn't any communist and he was forming. I say he's human. Lyndon Johnson has the reputation of getting things done. Mr. Dobie has paid attention to his growth as an individual and as a politician. Well, he acquired a deserve reputation as majority leader of the United States Senate, under President Eisenhower, to get things accomplished.

It wasn't his thing. Sometimes it was President Eisenhower's things, but it was generally the Democratic policy that he was getting accomplished. He even moved Senator Bird to vote the right way, perhaps even Senator Eastland, but the man that haven't lately voted or have exercised all their power to keep anybody else from voting, he got them to act. And then as he progressed to vice president through his public statements and movements, I've seen him progress from a politician representing Texas to a position of a statesman representing the United States.

He no longer seems provincial minded. President Johnson practices politics by the axiom that it's the art of the possible. Mr. Dobie speaks now on Johnson's position on civil rights in 1964. He's not going to advocate something that he knows impossible. What his dreams are, I don't know. I don't know if the French, I don't know if the Negro has come to guard him as their great friend as they have come to guard President Kennedy as their great friend. Maybe the greatest they've had since the Civil Sense, since Abraham Lincoln, emancipated them.

Naturally, President Johnson will be compared with President Kennedy, not only in politics, but also in personality. Nobody would claim, and President Johnson would be the last to claim, that he is a learned man in the way of President Kennedy, or Harvard, historian. He's not an elusive well-readed senator, Ralph Yabra, who's perhaps as well-read a man that's ever gone from Texas to Washington. He doesn't know history, as Mr. Churchill knows it, or as President De Gaulle, France knows it. But he can talk to President De Gaulle just as easily as he could talk to that camel driver.

He's at ease with humanity and with himself, and he has an extraordinary ability to absorb from people who know. He recognizes people who know and people who don't know. Johnson's voting record in Congress now becomes part of the national history and prospect. As his constituency expanded from this province to the United States, his political positions have become less provincial and more national. He flatly opposed all civil rights legislation for the first 17 of his 23 years in Congress. He voted against an anti-lynching bill and for the poll tax, and he has always defended the Senate's filibuster rules. But as majority leader, he was credited with passing the first civil rights bill since

reconstruction. He was a leader in the Senate's censure of Senator McCarthy. Johnson steadily supported welfare spending, public power, and other public works projects. He has upheld the TVA whenever it has been challenged. He has defended the interests of the major oil companies, which are very influential in Texas politics and are supported by all Texas congressmen. Johnson supported a few of the tax reforms proposed by liberals, but opposed most of them. In the House, he has a record that many labor leaders regarded as unfriendly. He voted for Taft Hartley and resisted the minimum wage. In the Senate, he often supported pro-labor legislation, including the minimum wage. He has always voted as an internationalist, even in his Taft 1948 Sanitorial campaign, which he won by just 87 votes.

He declared the United Nations is our greatest hope for peace. Johnson's record in Congress is complex and subtle. He was thoroughly liberal on public works and welfare and on international questions. He evolved from southern to moderate on civil rights and from the standoffish to amenable on the legislative programs of unions. On business issues, his record is too complex to summarize. Just before he was inaugurated as vice president, Johnson stated the priorities of his loyalties. In my own conduct, his majority leader, I have always followed the rule that I am a free man first, an American second, a United States Senator third, and a Democrat fourth in that order. I'm sure that this will be our philosophy when we approach the leadership of the 1960s. He also spoke about his conception of the presidency.

The toughest, most demanding, single job ever devised in the history of the world is the American president. The freedom and the peace of the world depends in large measure, I think, on the strength of that office and on the man who occupies it and the cabinet that surrounds him. Three of us have been sitting in this room in Austin discussing the momentous events of the last few days and the tasks and problems confronting President Johnson. I should like to introduce two men here who have known the President together combined for 50 years. Donald Scott Thomas at my left, an attorney at law in Austin, a native Texan, who since 1944 has represented President Johnson in legal affairs and in business matters. And Dr. Bob Montgomery, known to us who went to the University of Texas here as Dr.

Ball, Professor of Economics at the University of Texas, who has known Lyndon Johnson since he was a college student in San Marcos, and in whose house the President lived two years during the Depression period. We should like to begin this morning by inquiring of these two gentlemen, what we may expect from President Johnson in international affairs. Mr. Thomas? Well, of course I cannot accurately predict the foreign policy that will be pursued by a President, the basis for prediction could only be my understanding of the man as an individual. I know him to be a man of great heart, of great interest in the problems of mankind, of a great desire to fulfill the needs of man everywhere. And I cannot conceive of a man of this nature, not pursuing vigorously the programs for the development of the world that I am sure he recognizes is necessary for peace in our

time. Well, what will he do on foreign aid? Of course it would be impossible for anyone man to say what he will do in specific terms. One thing I know that you can look for, he is thinking of people. He has all of his life been vitally interested in human beings and in their problems. And so far as success in that field of getting along with the people we are trying to help, I think he has had finer training probably than any other man of our generation. President Kennedy has used him as everybody knows, all of the earth. And note that in his trips, just every month, that it is individual human beings who talk to him, who love him, a camel driver from Afghanistan who comes to visit him at his range. Because the president now saw him, liked him, talked to him as a human being, talking

to another. I think that that will be the determining factor in what he does in aid, assistance, in advice, counsel in trying to help the people of the world. I think you both are saying that his interest in the human being will be international. Now let me ask you gentlemen, what your opinion is about what he will do in the civil rights area. Mr. Thomas? I think that the president has very liberal views personally. I think he has great respect for the sincere views of others. I think that he will go forward with the achievement of the goal, complete civil rights to all, perhaps with greater vigor than the people would expect that he would do. I think that he is interested in this field, the achievement of that, which is possible

in the early possible time. Dr. Baum, do any episodes come into your mind that reveal the president's attitude? Oh yes. Oh yes. I was in Washington some three years ago, possibly, when a group of Negro leaders of this country came to visit him when he was the majority leader of the Senate before he was vice president. And they'd had a half a day with him. I met two of those men five minutes after they had left his office. Dr. Kirk, Dr. took his PhD with me at the University of Texas and the man who appointed Mr. Johnson as National Youth Administrator in Texas in 1934. They were walking in the clouds. Aubrey Williams said, look, here's a man who understands the human involvements in this problem.

Dr. Kirk said, we love the man because he will not lie to us. When we go to him, he says, not I will do this or I will help you do this. He said, this is the most serious social change since Civil War in the United States and you know it. And all of the things that you need and should have, that you deserve to have, the same standing as any other citizen of this nation. You cannot get all at once, you can do this now and then you can do this and then you can do this. But you've got to learn a little patience with us. That is magnificent statesmanship. This was when he was Senate majority leader in the Senate. What do you gentlemen glean from his economic attitudes and domestic attitudes about legislation? Mr. Thomas? Well, I think that his basic philosophy is to be interested in human problems and the welfare programs.

I think that his record is very good there. I think that he is interested in development of the natural resources of the country. I think you'll be the kind of president that those of us who grew up in the Roosevelt era want. How do you think he will go about Dr. Bob practicing his politics? As he always has. He has trained himself for a lifetime and he was child for politics. I call it statesmanship if you want to govern it as a profession and he is a professional. He will know what he wants to do and then he will do whatever is possible. He knows perfectly well that no man ever gets his own way in everything. He will do what it is possible to do always however since I've known him 30 odd years in a direction that is clear and unmistakable and that is in the direction of democracy

freedom for every man, liberty, a chance, same chance for all of us. May I ask Mr. Thomas what it's like to work with the president? Well working with the president is a long day, getting early and ending at bedtime, intermixed with fun and pleasant surroundings, this man works at all times, writing over the ranch and discussing and making decisions on end of the night. His greatest capacity however I think is to inspire the dedicated work of the staff and that desire of his staff members to achieve a solution to any problem and to present it to him in such form as he can go forward with. These have been good insights.

May I ask you for one illustration of what it's like to work with President Johnson? Well I think that you refer to an incident I told you about a moment ago when after working all day and getting ready to go to bed at night, suddenly three decisions were made, three stenographers were called dictation, given to the stenographers papers were completed in three transactions, carried out between 12 and 1 at night. This is the type of concentration on a problem which is typical of his everyday life. I see. Dr. Baum? What is it like to work with him? You work your heart out, you want him to do something, he's in position to do it, you're sure. He takes that and you don't get exactly what you want. Some people get angry at that situation. I think it's magnificent because I make mistakes too, you see. But a year later, ten years later and I have the opportunity of saying 25 or 30 years

later, I see that in most cases, Lyndon Johnson was right and I was wrong. In my own field. Thank you Dr. Bob and thank you Mr. Looks. It stands to reason that many of the New Englanders, many of the scholarly gentlemen from Harvard will have less to do in Washington now and different sorts of people, Western sorts, Texas sorts and moderate southern sorts will have more to do there. The Ivy Leaguers will still be called on for their ideas and their knowledge. The Texans and the Westerners will be called on for their toughness and their earthiness and their skills in a horse trade. The political question now is whether President Johnson will continue his liberalism as vice president or revert to his more middleish positions of 1960. Everyone in politics will watch everything he does from now on. His first days as president, Johnson had Homer Thornberry at his side.

Thornberry is the earnest, gravel voiced congressman from Austin who has come in line for a federal judgeship. He had his liberal voting record in Congress as any Texan these last few years. It will be a very political administration. In Texas we have a phrase, let's get on with the snake killing. Lyndon Johnson and his people classify a man pretty quickly as a friend or a foe and they leave no doubt what this means. A nation still shocked by the ruthless act of an assassin turns now to President Johnson. If his may not be a new frontier, still there is the fact that he admired and hired a great Western historian, the late Walter Prescott Webb, who wrote a book called The Great Frontier. President Johnson has his own frontier to remember and a great frontier to seek. What we all must be sure of is the trust and the power and the fearful will of being President.

This man from the Texas Hill country now must live every moment of his life, every hour of every day and every night with awful power. He and only he must act in the name of us all. If in the future there comes a new crisis between East and West, he can prevent or he can cause the destruction of mankind. This is his awful burden. And to the fullest extent that each of us in this free and vital country can help him bear it, as ever long as he must bear it, we must bear it with him. This is NET, National Educational Television.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.