ustxtxb_obs_1964_06_26_50_00012-00000_000.pdf

centers. If the school board says all right, Houston will become the second city in the South to benefit under the program, but the board is very conservative. V John Barron of the Washington Eve ning Star has done as \(leep an inquiry into the Johnson fortune and public questions associated with this subject as has yet appeared. The Star published it June 9; wire service reports of its contents were not adequate to its import. U.S. News & World Report begaii re-evaluating its own bland account of the Johnson fortune on the basis of Barron’s long report. The Observer hears conflicting understandings on the fate of the Life Magazine team’s research on this subject: that it will come out as a book; that it will come out in July. It was first scheduled for May 29. V Here and there: The Houston Post re ported that Gov. Connally conferred privately with spokesmen for sportsmen and oyster and fishing interests in Hous ton in an attempt to take the shell dredg ing issue out of the political arena. Sens. A. R. Schwartz, Galveston, and Criss Cole, Houston, also attended. . . . The Alamo New York City William S. White seems to have dashed off his campaign biography The Professional: Lyndon B. Johnson \(Houghton MiffNovember’s election will be for sainthood. Nothing remotely resembling a simple human failing gets mentioned in this catalog. Instead, there is so ample a supply of miracles that any self-respecting critic must play devil’s advocate. White has thoughtfully failed to discuss all Texas politics since 1952, so the innocent reader has no idea of Johnson’s sin of omission: refusal to shore up Texas liberalism. That it is now in ruins might prove unsettling, though instructive, to voters everywhere. It’s an old, sad story to Texans, but White chooses to state the obvious 12 The Texas Observer 19 Library Subscriptions One day this month the Observer received 19 subscriptions for college libraries in a block from the Dallas Educational Film Committee under our special rate for group subscriptions. Other liberal groups or union locals may want to obtain Observer subscriptions for their own members on a similar basis. Subscriptions to the Observer can be bought by groups at a cost of $4 a year, provided ten or more subscrip tions are entered at one time. If you belong to a group that might be in terested in this, perhaps you will want to take the matter up with the others. Messenger praised Sen. Yarborough for “rare courage” on civil rights. . . . Presumably the U.S. Supreme Court ruling refusing to reverse a lower court decision that reversed the conviction of the Communist Party for failing to register as a subversive organization will bear on the Stanford case now before the court from San Antonio. . . . The Texas Education Agency is considering creating a statewide program to encourage teaching about communism in public schools. . . . Stuart Long got a scoop when ex-Gov. Allan Shivers told him he would back Johnson for President despite Johnson’s doing “a great many things I disagree with.” Shivers’ reasoning: “Our views are colored by Texas attitudes and we here are not charged with national responsibility.” . . . U.S. News & World Report reproduced the UPI story based on the Observer’s story on the Howard Dodgen matter. The Observer read in the American Civil Liberties Union’s national publication that Stanley Marcus of Dallas had joined Dallas ACLU’s advisory committee and reported that he had, but this was incorrect; he has not. and at so great a length it becomes the tediousabout something else, generally The Nature of Politics. I hate to do it but I must give you a sample of his art and thought: “True politicians, with very rare exceptions, are men of sentiment though seldom of sentimentality; their working materials are men and women and human emotions and memories and traditions, quite as much as abstract and impersonal problems. The latter things perforce they tolerate and wrestle with; the former are welcome, in their blood and bones.” The Professional: Lyndon B. Johnson is steeped in this weepy, not to say misty, reverence for Politics and Politicians, and soggy reading it makes. Notice that White is so eager to list “working materials” his use of “latter” and “former” \(to use his Grand Style is essential but is betrayed by faulty sense of order \(whose “blood and *Out z’ Since 1866 The Place in Austin GOOD FOOD GOOD BEER 1607 San Jacinto OR 7-4171 Politics calls for brainy and muscular imthese cancel one another out. White’s excuse for The Johnson Method of Compromise, which has proved so debilitating on home soil, is that it’s a “deep attachment to the art of the possible.” Suggest that, perhaps, something better could have been possible, and he’ll call you all sorts of elegant names \(“ultra-liberal,” return to gaze rapturously at his little circle of logic: What was done Was all that was Possible because it was all that was done. THE BOOK is as weak in body as it is in mind. White is always claiming miraculous achievements but rarely clinching ,them with specifies. In this gaseous atmosphere, even Johnson’s heartening New Deal and civil rights record look dangerously inflated. Between these wild claims of perfection, White inserts nagging homilies about the need for moderation. How well he follows this advice can be guessed by his assertion, quite on his own authority, that the country was “almost hysterical” immediately after Kennedy was assassinated and that a moderate could best “put together the threads of national union that has parted like a broken seam.” It’s the Gospel according to White that Johnson stretched forth his hand and, lo, he brought forth Democratic control of the Senate in the teeth of the then unexampled popularity of Gen. Eisenhower in 1954, the year he also destroyed Senator McCarthy-L. according to White, of course. But this is nothing compared to the treasure laid up in store. White prophesies the possibility of “the most soundly based Latin American relationships yet seen” with Johnson as President. He has ample proof of this: Texans of Mexican descent consider Johnson muy hombre. Catch your breath and we’ll continue. The most glorious revelation of all is his statement that Johnson came close to running the country from 1953-’60, when Ike Was purportedly our leader. I thought no one was in charge then, but White insists that, if anyone was, it was Johnson. He had his hand in foreign policy, too; he was the strongest influence on policy decisions of the Foreign Relations Committee, which probably did influence J. F. Dulles about” as much as anything. Now this worries me. Considering what MARTIN ELFANT Sun Life of Canada 1001 Century Building Houston, Texas CA 4-0686 WHITE WASH