Recalling a Man Who Stayed the Course : Presidency: L.B.J. was the best champion of the poor and downtrodden; too bad his example is lost to history.

On this day 30 years ago, Lyndon B. Johnson was inaugurated in his own right as the 36th President of the United States. He had been elected President the previous November in a landslide of public favor, with the largest percentage of votes in this century, matched by no other victorious President in the ensuing years. This day plus two is also the 22nd anniversary of his death.

Is it odd or is it merely the lament of one who served him as best I could that his presidency and his passing find only casual regard on this day?

He was the greatest parliamentary commander of his era. He came to the presidency with a fixed compass course about where he wanted to take the nation, and unshakable convictions about what he wanted to do to lift the quality of life. Against opposing forces in and outside his own party, in conflict with those who thought he had no right to be President, contradicting conventional wisdom and political polls, he never hesitated, never flagged, never changed course. He was a professional who knew every nook and cranny of the arena, and when he was in full throttle, he was virtually unstoppable.

He defined swiftly who he was and what he was about. He said that he was going to pass a civil-rights bill and a voting-rights bill because, as he declared, “every citizen ought to have the right to live his own life without fear, and every citizen ought to have the right to vote and when you got the vote, you have political power, and when you have political power, folks listen to you.” He promptly told his longtime Southern congressional friends that though he loved them, they had best get out of his way or he would run them down. He was going to pass those civil-rights bills. And he did.

He made it clear that he was no longer going to tolerate “a little old lady being turned away from a hospital because she had no money to pay the bill. By God, that’s never going to happen again.” He determined to pass what he called “Harry Truman’s medical insurance bill.” And he did. It was called Medicare.

He railed against the absence of education in too many of America’s young. He stood on public rostrums and shouted, “We’re going to make it possible for every boy and girl in America, no matter how poor, no matter their race or religion, no matter what remote corner of the country they live in, to get all the education they can take, by federal loan, scholarship or grant.” And he passed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.

He was in a raging passion to destroy poverty in the land. He waged his own “War on Poverty,” giving birth to Head Start and a legion of other programs to stir the poor, to ignite their hopes and raise their sights. Some of the programs worked. Some didn’t. But he said over and over again, “If you don’t risk, you never rise.”

He often said that no President can lay claim to greatness unless he presides over a robust economy. And so he courted, shamelessly, the business, banking and industrial proconsuls of the nation and made them believe what he said. And the economy prospered.

On the first night of his presidency, he ruminated about the awesome task ahead. But there was on the horizon that night only a thin smudge of a line that was Vietnam. In time, like a relentless cancer curling about the soul of a nation, Vietnam infected his presidency.

If there had not been 16,000 American soldiers in Vietnam when he took office, would he have sent troops there? I don’t believe he would have. But who really knows. What I do know is that he grieved, a deep-down sorrow, that he could not find “an honorable way out” other than “hauling ass out of there.”

I think that grieving cut his life short. Every President will testify that when he has to send young men into battle and the casualties begin to mount, it’s like drinking carbolic acid every morning.

But it was all a long time ago. To many young people not born when L.B.J. died, he is a remote, distant figure coated with the fungus of Vietnam. They view him, if at all, dispiritedly.

But to others, to paraphrase Ralph Ellison, because of Vietnam, L.B.J. will just have to settle for being the greatest American President for the undereducated young, the poor and the old, the sick and the black. But, perhaps that’s not too bad an epitaph on this day so far away from where he lived.