Well, this month marks our fourth full year of the presidential rule of Lyndon Baines Johnson, and it is high time to sum up his reign. These four years have been years of enormous frustration and resentment on the part of America’s liberal intellectual community. Here was a man who looked and still looks upon FDR as his political mentor — a man who ran with the support of the ADA [Americans for Democratic Action], of old and new New Dealers, of all authentic liberals — and here is a man who is now universally reviled by those former supporters.

In recent years the nation’s conservatives, bitter and angry at Supreme Court decisions preserving the rights of the individual against the police, have begun to demand a new Constitutional convention which could totally rewrite our present document.

The 1967 elections present many heartening features. The main trend shining through is the confirmation of all recent public opinion polls: the disastrous plummeting of support for the Johnson administration. Never in recent history has a president been so mistrusted, deplored, and reviled by all segments of the population; his popularity has reached an all-time low in the polls.

When the Establishment Press really zeroes in on someone and smites him from pillar to post, day after day, then it is a safe bet that he can’t be all bad. It is also a wise move to dig further and find out the reason for all this uniform wrath. So in the case of Charles de Gaulle, whom the press, liberal and conservative, has been denouncing and vilifying for years.

Turk and Greek are once again threatening war over Cyprus. No patchwork peace settlement will last. In the United States, both the left and the right are confused; since there is manifestly no Communist issue involved, and since Communism dominates everyone’s thinking, neither rightists nor leftists are able to come to grips with the complex of rights and wrongs involved.

A lot of people throughout the country are beginning to realize that getting into the Vietnam war was a disastrous mistake. In fact, hardly anyone makes so bold as to justify America’s entrance into, and generation of, that perpetual war. And so the last line of defense for the war’s proponents is: Well, maybe it was a mistake to get into the war, but now that we’re there, we’re committed, so we have to carry on.

Ever since I was a little tot, General Lewis B. Hershey has been in charge of that selective slavery system known as the draft. The man seems ageless and, as in the case of that other seemingly Indispensable Man, J. Edgar Hoover, General Hershey’s retirement rights were waived for the greater good of us all, and he rolls on, presumably immortal, ever calling out his creed of Draft ’Em All. The latest effusion of our Simon Legree was to urge the local draft boards to draft those youngsters who interfere with the workings of the Selective Service System.

The big argument for an income tax increase now is one taken from Lord Keynes: during a boom the government should raise income taxes in order to “sop up excess purchasing power” and prevent inflation. There are many fallacies in this argument for a tax hike.

On any definition, “slavery” means forced labor.

One of the most heartening developments on the current American scene is the new nation-wide organization, Business Executives Move for a Vietnam Peace. These dedicated businessmen came from all over the country to meet at the Statler-Hilton in Washington on September 27, to form their organization and expressed their determined and cogent opposition to the war in Vietnam.