One Team, One Theme

With the economy in high gear, a sweeping civil rights bill in the bag, and an incumbent in the White House, Democrats should have been able to assemble their 1964 platform for this week's convention with a paste pot. As it emerged, the platform was a bit sticky, glued together with boasts about Democratic accomplishments and pleasing promises of more pleasantries to come. But before the promises were put to paper, the Johnson Administration, with sledgehammer subtlety, pounded away at platform hearings with predictably partisan testimony from all the big tools in the Government.

Performing as a well-rehearsed team, the witnesses seemed not the least bit embarrassed by the repetitiveness of the refrain so romantically propounded by their leader. Said Economic Adviser Walter Heller: "Before us, then, lies no less a challenge than to devote our Great Prosperity to the building of the Great Society." Said Health, Education and Welfare Secretary Anthony Celebrezze: "I am confident that we now, as in the past, will pledge our efforts to make that Great Society a reality." Declared Housing Administrator Robert Weaver: "The Great Society can be and will be ours." "The Right Track." Some officials tried to place the issues above partisanship. Secretary of State Dean Rusk said that he was testifying on "the foreign policy of the American people"; yet he conceded that he was a "lifelong Democrat" who had served under "four great Democratic Presidents," and that "under President Lyndon B. Johnson we are on the right track." Defense Secretary Robert McNamara seemed intent on demonstrating that Barry Goldwater's status as a major general in the Air Force Reserve does not qualify him as a final authority on military matters. McNamara reported that he had inherited a chaotic situation at the Pentagon in 1961. "Each military service made its own independent plans," he said. The Army relied "on airlift, which the Air Force was unable to provide," stockpiled for a two-year war while the Air Force was set for only a few days of combat. "Funds were allocated not on the basis of military requirements, but according to the dictates of an arbitrary fiscal policy." But in "our years in office," boasted McNamara, the U.S. has developed "the greatest military power in human history--with a capability to respond to every level of aggression across the entire spectrum of conflict." Tax Cuts. Treasury Secretary Douglas Dillon provided the tastiest vote-getting testimony of all: a hint of tax cuts to come, provided, of course, you-know-who is returned to office. The U.S., said Dillon, was enjoying "the best period of peacetime prosperity in our entire modern history," and he suggested that cuts in excise taxes should be possible by next year. It turned out that the Administration was now convinced that more tax reductions, and the consequent continuation of budget deficits, would constitute the Johnson Administration's policy in the future.

Most partisan of all was Interior Secretary Stewart Udall, who charged that Barry Goldwater "is indifferent to conservation legislation, for the reason that he exalts private rights above public needs, and gives no thought at all to the needs of present and future generations of Americans." And Commerce Secretary Luther Hodges contended that Democrats took office in "the third Republican recession in eight years," and now "this Democratic Administration is the first peacetime administration in a century without a recession or depression." It was all, in short, a fine performance by Lyndon Johnson's associates, in praise of Lyndon Johnson's Administration and Lyndon Johnson's platform.

It could not have suited Lyndon Johnson better. But then he wrote the script.

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