New York, April 7—The withdrawal of Mr. Johnson is among other things technically interesting. The adage that an incumbent President can effect his own renomination appears to be mortally wounded. The objection will be raised that Lyndon Johnson didn’t after all fail to effect his renomination, that he simply didn’t try. But it is likely that he didn’t try because he was uncertain that he would succeed. Those who lived through the year 1948 thought it a pretty boisterous year, what with the Wallace movement, the civil rights walkout, and the staggering upset by Harry Truman. But even though Harry Truman was despised by his own people, the Democratic Party was never in any serious sense refractory. When Harry Truman went to Philadelphia, he was in command of the Convention and no one doubted it. Lyndon Johnson did doubt whether, in the age of television, in this moment of high emotional volatility, he could command the movement of the delegates.
That is an important datum in American history. Some will hail it as evidence that The People are in better command of their own affairs. Others, conservatives for the most part, will wonder whether it is all a cause for rejoicing. The conservative fears plebiscitary government, for the very same reasons given by Burke and Adams. Instant guidance by the people of the government means instability, and instability is subversive of freedom. If Lyndon Johnson has to step down because 45 per cent of the Democrats in New Hampshire, half of them unable to reply accurately to the question whether Senator McCarthy was for or against the Vietnam war, voted for McCarthy, and because tens of thousands of college students moo over Bobby Kennedy who has delusions of being Ringo Starr, there is something somehow unsettling about it all.
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