PRESIDENT JOHNSON'S farewell State of the Union address was very much the kind of performance that we've come to expect from him. The address was full of the old familiar LBJisms--his assurances that peace is closer than ever, his juggled financial statistics, his flagwaving reference to our troops in Asia, his understandable concern over his own place in history.

But the last speech was not as boastful or self-centered as most of the hundreds which preceded it, a fact grate fully noted by all the people who wanted to say something nice about the outgoing President. Wednesday's papers labelled the performance "sentimental" and occasionally even "moving," and the incomparable Jack Valenti said that the speech was an embodiment of the four characteristics of the Johnson Administration -- "breakthrough, beginnings, performance, passion." Everett Dirksen called it a "fine speech," and Tip O'Neill, who came out against the war and then supported McCarthy last year, complained afterwards that the Republicans hadn't cheered enough.

Not everyone was quite so generous. Former LBJ aide Eric Goldman felt the speech underscored Johnson's fundamental failure, which was to understand the modern city and the people--"the corporation executives from Scarsdale"--who live in it. Arthur Schlesinger didn't like the speech because it included no "analysis" of how the war had been bad for the Great Society programs, and more generally because the President did not convey enough of a sense of the mess that he was leaving the country in.

And Jacob Javits, looking fat and enormously confident, pointed out sourly that the speech was a strongly partisan one, an effort to rally the Democratic troops behind the Johnson programs and even behind Johnson himself. Apparently annoyed by LBJ's attempt to steal Nixon's already-feeble thunder, Javits went on to explain that the Johnson programs were really outdated anyhow, just warmed-over New Deal policies, and so on. There aren't very many poor people in the country any more, fewer than ever before, said Javits, and so he expected to see the incoming Administration striking out in "new directions."

BUT ON Tuesday night, the grumblers were outnumbered by the cheerers, and the President left the House chamber amidst a generous gush of applause. On television, the scene seemed strangely meaningless. The programs for which the President had been pleading were largely doomed, and so it could not have been for these that the Congressmen and Senators were cheering. They weren't cheering the President himself, either; Johnson is not a very likeable man, and he is not going to be missed, not even by those who have managed to shuffle and scrape their way into favor during the chaotic, bloody years of his reign.

Rather, Congress was cheering itself. The struggles of the world enter Congress muted, dimmed; agreement and consensus are pervasive there, while differences are always marginal. To its members, Congress itself is what is most important, and they struggle to preserve it and its internal balances and traditions with far more passion than they struggle to change the world outside the Capitol. Congress is a motherly institution, a deep, dark, beloved place which provides for the needs of its members, which offers them security, prestige, and some kind of purpose for their lives.

That is why Congress defends itself with such passion. Its members battle constantly with the President, and they attack the Supreme Court. As a few hundred poor people converged on Washington last May, the legislators decreed drastic penalties for demonstrations in the Capitol; a month before, machine guns had guarded the Hill against the black majority in the city below. To its members, Congress is sacred and inviolate, and must be protected at all costs.

What happened on Tuesday night was that for the first time that anyone could remmeber, a President returned to Congress to reaffirm the special system by which those few hundred men live their lives. As President, Johnson had been forced to struggle against the prerogatives of that system, and during the last two years Congress had won out. Its victory, of course, was purely destructive: it blocked Johnson's appointments and demolished his programs. But the important thing is that Congress won, and on Tuesday night Johnson returned, humbled, to seek the comfort of that closed society.

That is why the loudest applause came when he said that his reason for coming to Congress that night was "purely sentimental." The applause, which went on and on until there were tears in the President's eyes, just didn't make any sense to the millions of people watching on television. They were watching a private ritual in which the nation had no part.

AND SO THE applause for Johnson had little to do with the things that most people think to be important. The Johnson stewardship has been a disaster. At home there is more bitterness, more violence, more disintegration than anyone has ever known. Johnson's endless war has cost 30,000 American lives, but the American Empire is less secure today than when Johnson became its ruler. Even the Congressmen who still support the war are aware that something has gone drastically wrong, that America, for one reason or another, is in terrible trouble. While Johnson spoke, the USS Enterprise, the largest ship ever built, not far from home in a friendly sea, was blowing itself up with its own bombs.

And yet Congress was glad that the President had come back, for its first concern is with itself. Its impact on the world outside is scattered, usually punitive, petty. It looks after its own, and its own interests bear no particular relation to those of the nation. It is moribund, inward-looking, private. Its heroes are its defenders--men like Sam Rayburn, Carl Hayden, and Lyndon Johnson. On Tuesday night one of its heroes came back, back where he belonged