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University Daily Kansan
Monday, Nov. 25, 1963
A Man Is Dead
Today we bury John Fitzgerald Kennedy, aged 46, a statesman.
With his remains we bury a politician, a Congressman, a Senator.
We bury a husband, a father, a war hero, an American.
We do not bury our President.
The President is not a man. He is an office, an institution, a symbol of a free people and their hopes. The President is the very pinnacle of the free world, and he shoulders burdens and responsibilities beyond comprehension.
Because of this, the President cannot be merely a man.
And yet he is.
He is fallible and he is mortal.
He is man born of woman like all men.
But the President is born to and reared in the hopes of his nation, and the ideals for which he stands are the ideals of a free people, and they will last so long as free men live.
He is not more than man, and yet he must be for the President is what we, the people he leads are and will be as long as the United States stands.
Today we bury such a man.
We bury a man whom other world leaders called wise beyond his years.
We bury a man whom a humble woman in the Midwest will remember for the way he played with his children.
We bury a man who carried with him into the Presidency a dream, our dream, the dream of a great and free people. But the dream was already there, a never-changing part of the President.
We grieve today, each of us in his own way for the man we bury.
But we bury the man. We do not bury our dream, the dream for which that man stood, the dream for which our President will always stand.
It is paramount that we know that.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy is dead.
Our President is not.
Our Work Goes On
The following are the closing paragraphs of an address delivered by the Chancellor of the University this afternoon at the convocation in memory of John F. Kennedy.
The flag has been lowered before, has fluttered at half position in other days. Always we have raised it again, to ever-greater heights, and so we will now. Our work goes on, the work that he would have accomplished. Work and service and sacrifice are those things to which he dedicated himself; work and service and sacrifice combined with a deep and abiding faith. In his memory we dedicate ourselves again to them.
The great strength of our nation lies in its continuity. From his hands has passed the responsibility of leadership. Already that responsibility has been accepted by our new President. He and we could do no better than to move forward echoing the final words of John Kennedy's inaugural address:
"With a good conscience our only sure reward, with history the final judge of our deeds, let us go forth to lead the land we love, asking His blessing and his help, but knowing that here on Earth God's work must truly be our own."
— W. Clarke Wescoe
Early in 1953, then-President Dwight D. Eisenhower pointed to the leather chair behind his desk in the White House and said to the man who faced him: "Someday you'll sit in that chair."
Johnson 'Wouldn't Sit There'
"No, Mr. President, that's one chair I'll never sit in," the man replied. "I wouldn't trade desks with you for anything in the world."
But today, Lyndon Bainsoh Johnson, the man in Eisenhower's office, is sitting in that chair, thrust there by an assassin's bullet. He tried to win that chair in a bitter convention fight with John F. Kennedy in 1960, and now he has it, in the most tragic way imaginable.
THE QUESTION, now that Lyndon Johnson is President of the United States, is what kind of President he will be.
Most Washington correspondents, including those who have known Johnson the longest and best, say that he is a Kennedy man, dedicated to the Kennedy program, and the New York Times said yesterday there was widespread belief on Capitol Hill that Johnson would not deviate in any major respects from the legislative priorities laid down by Kennedy. This was thought to be especially true of civil rights and tax reduction, which shared first place on the Kennedy priority list.
President Johnson stressed Saturday that the Kennedy administration's foreign policies will be continued, and U.S. ambassadors around the world have been asked to stay on.
SECRETARY OF STATE Dean Rusk also has been asked to remain, and it is understood that he will.
It would be unusual, most Washington observers have agreed, if any changes at all were made in the immediate official family, at least until after President Johnson has had more time in office.
More important than what Johnson will do in the next several days, when his administration can be at best a caretaker government, is what he will do in the 11 months remaining of Kennedy's term.
That Johnson was better informed as vicepresident than any of his predecessors there is no doubt. Jack Bell, chief of the Associated Press Senate staff, last year said:
"WITH THE ENCOURAGEMENT of President Kennedy, Johnson has branched out from the relative vacuity of his constitutional duty of presiding over the Senate to take a hand in major administrative affairs.
"Kennedy has gone out of his way to give Johnson on-the-job training in the executive department.
"Kennedy has sent Johnson as his representative to 22 foreign countries and tabbed him to preside over an international manpower conference.
OFTEN CRITICIZED as a Southern politician, Johnson does in fact consider himself a national politician, and has worked hard to break the image of himself as a conservative Southerner.
"In other days, it used to be something of a news story when the vice-president was called to the White House to confer with his chief. Johnson is in and out of the place almost daily."
This knowledge, plus the tremendous knowledge of national government Johnson acquired as virtual king of the Senate for eight years, and his long acquaintance with politics—he broke into politics in 1936 as state director in Texas for the National Youth Administration—probably led Sen. Richard Russell, D-Ga., to comment yesterday that he "had never seen a man come to the Presidency better informed."
He did vote with the oil interests on the tide lands dispute, but no Texas politician in his right mind would do otherwise, and Johnson is now freed from strictly state concerns.
In the 1960 campaign, Johnson told a Nashville. Tenn..audience:
"I will never speak as a Southerner to Southerners, or as a Protestant to Protestants, or as a white to whites. I will speak only as an American to Americans."
Specifically. Johnson's record looks like this:
Specifically, Johnson's record looks like this: SPACE—As a senator, Johnson was head of the Senate Committee on Aeronautical and Space Sciences and helped write the basic legislation in that field. As vice-president, he was chairman of the Space Advisory Council and has shown a strong interest in U.S. advances in space. He will probably continue to do so.
CIVIL RIGHTS—In the Senate, Johnson adhered to the "moderate" line. He was instrumental in pushing through the civil rights bills in 1957 and 1960, but opposed extending the bills past the field of voting rights. As vice-president,
however, he was chairman of the Committee for
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Equal Employment, and most observers agree that Johnson has become a strong advocate of equal rights. He also made, while vice-president, several speeches stoutly defending the Kennedy administration's policies on civil rights.
FOREIGN AFFAIRS—Johnson has shown a steady internationalism, and was a strong advocate of reciprocal trade agreements while in the Senate. His critics in 1960 called his approach to foreign affairs naive, and he had indeed had little experience in that field. As vice-president, however, he was in on most policy decisions, advocated the Kennedy position on Cuba, and made several trips abroad to confer with foreign diplomats. Since Dean Rusk will remain, Kennedy policies probably will remain unchanged.
DOMESTIC ECONOMY—Johnson has been unwilling to go as far as some liberal senators in strengthening Federal unemployment compensation programs, expanding housing and urban renewal aid, employing tax cuts as an anti-recession device or imposing federal controls on tidelands, natural gas producers or roadside billboards.
President Lyndon B. Johnson
However, he voted for larger programs to help depressed areas, to curb stream pollution and to aid community facilities. And in 1954, he voted for tax cuts for low income families over increased tax incentives for investors. He will probably push for Kennedy's tax bill.
DEFENSE—He has voted the straight Democrate line of more and better and was the sponsor of the universal military training act which passed the Senate in 1951.
LABOR, FARM, WELFARE—He voted for a moderate labor reform bill in 1959, but his record is suspect in many laborites' eyes because he supported the Case anti-strike bill in 1946 and the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947. He has consistently upheld high rigid price supports for farm commodities and opposed Ezra Taft Benson's program of flexible supports, but has not offered a farm bill of his own. He has supported federal aid to education for a dozen years or more.
In an article, "What I Believe and Why," in 1959, Johnson defied anyone to categorize his policital position.
"I am," he declared, "a free man, an American, a United States Senator and a Democrat—in that order. I am also a liberal, a conservative, a Texan, a taxpayer, a rancher, a businessman, a consumer, a parent, and voter, and as young as I used to be nor as old as I expect to be—and I am all these things in no fixed order."
THE TRUTH OF the matter seems to be that Johnson is an immensely practical man much too involved with practical matters to spend much time in philosophical debate—with himself or anyone else.
He is definitely non-partisan, was when he was a senator, and probably will be even more so now that he is President.
Whatever his place in the political spectrum, the nation can be sure that Lyndon B. Johnson, the man who cut his working day to 16 hours "whenever possible" after a serious heart attack in 1955, will be working as hard as he possibly can, and it is a good deal more than possible that he adequate if not good job.