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Show Editorial Rise&Fall When Lyndon Johnson came on the air Sunday night, we yawned and braced ourselves for what we thought would surely be prime time grandstanding. When he went off the air, we were sitting straight up, dead-serious, and gnawed with a yes chilling fear for the Republic. We had the distinct impression that what we had just heard would prove to be perhaps the most significant event of the decade. We have never operated under the delusion that getting rid of LBJ would automatically make things peachy-keen. To no small degree, Lyndon Johnson has been a prisoner of circumstance just as any American President, Democrat or Republican, would have been in the Sixties. The rebellion in the cities was not spawned by Lyndon Johnson it is the child of decades of municipal neglect that allowed the "ghettos" "ghet-tos" to ripen and rot. Even Vietnam stirred primievally at Versailles and Sedan, and Mr. Johnson happened to be the guy who took the rap for a policy even the demi-god JFK set himself to pursue. Our fear for the Republic is four-pronged : First, we see an ominous shift in liberal thinking. The liberals of the Twenties and Thirties were internationalists who saw the link between American well-being and conditions condi-tions abroad. They were the group who wept as the Isolationists Isola-tionists prevented the U.S. from thwarting the power plays of Hitler and Mussolini prior to World War II. They were the group who agonized over the decision of "a little group of willful men" not to join the League of Nations. Contemporary Contem-porary liberals are heading right into the same kind of crippling crip-pling isolationism that the late Senators Borah and Vanden-berg Vanden-berg fiercely espoused. If this trend persists, future Presidents Presi-dents will be unable to act decisively in the interest of national na-tional security short of another Pearl Harbor. We fear that this marks a beginning of a global withdrawal into a North American shell. Second, we doubt that the President's abdication will do much good in Vietnam itself. Having embarked on the pursuit pur-suit of military operations to bring the North to the table, it seems odd to us to expect that Ho Chi Minh would have any desire to cooperate in saving American face by negotiating negotiat-ing at this point. Johnson's abdication is a defacto admission admis-sion that we're on our back. Knowing that the American lion is down, why should not Ho kick it. all the harder? They' will rather exploit the propaganda potential to the hilt. Big Stick diplomacy demands that you use the big stick, and if you can't commit yourself to that you shouldn't fiddle around with it. Third, given the Republican reluctance to provide a better alternative to Nixon, it seems to us that Lyndon has catapulted Robert Kennedy into the Democratic nomina-ion nomina-ion and possibly into the Presidency and that thought scares us too. We frankly don't trust Bobby; he's too much like his dad. Keeping Bobby out of the White House these past years is a gift to the American people for which Lyndon Johnson has never been given sufficient thanks. Finally, Johnson's withdrawal presages what we believe to be the gravest threat to a democratic republic : policy by public opinion. More than anything else, Johnson's failure to mobilize public opinion behind his policies has been responsible re-sponsible for bringing him to the point of Sunday night. Anyone Any-one who has polled must know that public opinion is a nebulous, ne-bulous, shallow thing. It is capricious and unthinking, and very much like a weather vane as it turns in the wind. A President has to formulate public opinion he cannot allow al-low himself to be led by it, or like the blind leading the blind they will both fall into the ditch. LBJ has been likened to FDR as an astute politician; it's unfortunate that Roosevelt's talent as a propagandist didn't rub off on LBJ. As it is, we fear that we have seen the end of the beginning of the decline de-cline of American influence in world affairs. And it came on such a beautiful spring day. |