Remembering the Johnson Treatment

Publication of Robert Caro's magisterial ''Master of the Senate'' -- it is the third volume in his biography of Lyndon Johnson and covers 1949 to 1960 -- has reignited interest in the singular man who gave us the great Civil Rights Act of 1964 -- and then Vietnam. Mr. Caro concludes from long and deep study that when Johnson's vivid sense of compassion came into conflict with his powerful ambition -- he wanted not just to be president but to surpass his hero, Franklin D. Roosevelt -- ambition won out.

Probably so; and most of us who saw the master of the Senate at work in the 1950's, even as he fought for the 1957 civil rights act, would likely agree. But that conclusion does not quite account for the well-authenticated story about the night Congress finally passed a more sweeping civil rights act, in 1964 -- a bill that, with the Voting Rights Act of 1965, is the true charter of citizenship for many Americans.

Bill Moyers, then a young White House staff assistant, is said to have called President Johnson to congratulate him on this triumph. Silence ensued; then L.B.J. replied: ''Bill, I think we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come.''

Johnson died in 1973. The South was lost to the Democratic Party for longer than perhaps even he expected. I can imagine no president since, and few before, who would have pushed, pulled, cajoled, conned, argued, dealt and rammed any legislation past Congress at such a high political price.

Ambition? Compassion? Does it matter?

On the other hand, not authenticated at all but considered characteristic was a story well known in President Johnson's Washington. He liked to drive himself about his ranch and vicinity and supposedly was stopped for speeding one day by a Texas patrolman. When the cop saw who the driver was, he gasped, ''My God!'' Whereupon, as the story had it, the president replied: ''And don't you forget it!''

Who'd tell such a tale about George W. Bush, a different kind of Texan?

Clashing ambition and compassion was not the only contradiction in Lyndon Johnson's remarkable self. The glowering, near villainous-looking figure who took the nation so deeply into Vietnam could be charming, a funny and eloquent raconteur. His hand-wringing, quaver-voiced mimicry of Adlai Stevenson, for example, was no doubt unfair, but hilarious and memorable.

Johnson was perceptive enough about himself, or vain enough, to refuse after he had succeeded John F. Kennedy to hold a news conference in the same auditorium Kennedy had used. He knew the comparison to J.F.K. would be inevitable and not to his own advantage. So his first news conference was staged at the L.B.J. Ranch, with an upended hay bale for a podium and no comparison possible.

He seemed innocent of some ordinary scruples. I once complained to his press secretary that the president was not holding as many news conferences as promised. The telephone on the secretary's desk rang in the middle of my protest, and I was summarily called into the presence. L.B.J. had been eavesdropping on his own press office and seized on my complaint to regale me with one of his nonstop, no-questions-possible monologues.

As The Times's White House correspondent, I applied for an interview with the new president soon after Kennedy was murdered on Nov. 22, 1963. When the response came late one afternoon, I hurried to the White House and soon was shown into the Oval Office. L.B.J. was having his hair cut. The barber hovered behind him. The usual protective sheet was draped over Johnson's big and inelegant form.

How could the Secret Service, I wondered for a moment, let the neck of the president of the United States be exposed to a barber's shears? But I only blurted something obvious, like ''Thanks for seeing me.'' Johnson didn't reply. He just stared at me from under heavy, lowered brows, across the sheet littered with his hair clippings. I shuffled from one foot to another; still he said nothing, nor did he even move, as the seconds came to seem minutes, then hours.

I had thought I was on easy terms with the senator, then the vice president. But was this the same garrulous man I had known -- this silent, staring president? Whoever it was, I was quickly intimidated, unnerved, reduced to a sort of nothingness by those unblinking eyes, that jowly familiar face turned implacable, that motionless form under the barber sheet, the brooding silence in which I was being regarded, or perhaps measured.

I shuffled and writhed. He still said nothing. Finally I knew I was beaten, and to my shame I mumbled some banality about the nation's good fortune in having such a man to take over. Only then, as if just noticing my presence, he whipped off the barber sheet, stood up and spoke, as if those interminable moments had never happened.

Forty years later, whenever I remember that first interview with a new president, I still feel diminished by my small experience of the Johnson Treatment.

Drawing (Robert Grossman)