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and absolute monarch. Whether he had ever had experience with absolute monarchy or not, I don't know. I can't believe he did. He had just been in the Army. He was an Oklahoma boy who got an appointment to West Point and that's all he ever had experienced. He had, however, read a great deal of history and he was a man of very vigorous imagination, which was part of his ability, and he threw up in his own mind this picture of the President and he endowed him in his own mind with the powers and authority and prestige of an absolute monarch who could say, “There shall be,” and it would be.

Whether Johnson actually thought that, or whether he utilized it in a half daze, as a technique of publicity, I don't know to this day. I suspect it was mixed and that he knew the President couldn't actually do anything, although he would say over and over again, “There is nothing that the President can't do if he wishes to! The President's powers are unlimited. The President can do anything!”

Then you would say, “How can he, Hugh?”

“Well, the state of this country and the world is such that there is nothing the President would ask that the people would not respond to.”

I said, “Well, I suppose the general population responds to it, but suppose the man who owns the factory