Sense & Sensitivity

(See Cover)

Lyndon Johnson's mental alarm clock went off just before 7 o'clock. He swept his long black hair out of his eyes, smoothed it over the thinning area on top of his head. Then he pushed the bedside buzzer for Cook Zephyr Wright to bring up his tomato juice, pink Texas grapefruit, venison sausage (made from a deer Johnson shot last fall) and half a cup of Sanka. He devoured his breakfast, along with the latest Congressional Record, its ink still wet enough to stain his fingers. By 7:30 he was in the bathroom, working on his leathery brown face with an electric razor. "Bird," cried he through the doorway to "Lady Bird," his wife. "I like to count my blessings."

Translated from family talk, that meant that Lyndon Baines Johnson, 49, tall (6 ft. 3 in. and, by the bathroom scales, 185 1/2 Ibs.), dark and almost handsome, wanted to talk about what he was doing as majority leader of the U.S. Senate. And what Lyndon Johnson was doing last week was, in a broad sense, exactly what he had been doing since he assumed the Democratic Senate leadership five years before: devoting all his energy to building a record for the Democratic Party in a Republican Administration and, what he considers synonymous, the record of a master legislative craftsman, Lyndon Baines Johnson.

Record Writer. The trick is to take any given national problem and make it look as though the Democrats are doing everything, the Republicans nothing. When President Eisenhower was riding high during his first Administration, Johnson's line was that the Democrats were saving Ike from the Republicans. When Ike faltered during the great budget flap a year ago, ex-New Dealer Johnson patented economy as a Democratic invention--and his Democrats even cut seriously into the defense budget. When the Administration presented a tough civil rights bill, it was Johnson who maneuvered both Democrats and Republicans into a compromise--for which Democrats took credit in both North and South.

This year Johnson's showy record-writing has been abetted considerably by the ineptness of Senate Republican leaders and the slow motion at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. After the uproar over the success of Sputnik, it was Johnson, as chairman of the Senate Preparedness Subcommittee, who grabbed the initiative (and the headlines), set up hearings, heard expert testimony from about 200 of the top men in the Defense Department, the armed services, science and industry. So successful was he in capturing the attention of press and colleagues that he produced his own "State of the Union" message two days before the President's own (TIME, Jan. 20). Later, he got unanimous subcommittee endorsement for a constructive report that made 17 recommendations for strengthening the U.S. military establishment. Again, when the U.S. Explorer streaked into outer space, it was Senate Leader Johnson who set up a special blue-ribbon Senate committee, with himself as chairman, to decide on the crucial question of whether space should come under civilian or military control.

Cabinet Boss. Last week his issue was recession, and Lyndon Johnson, well prepared as usual, was in his finest hour. For weeks Senate Democrats had been drafting half a dozen pump-priming bills. By last week a $1.8 billion housing bill and a $500 million public-works bill were scorching along the Senate tracks, with Engineer Johnson holding throttle full-out. Johnson himself arose on the Senate floor to introduce two resolutions considering it "the sense of Congress" that the Administration should speed public-works spending. (Two days later it did.)

During the course of his speech, Johnson hoisted himself to political heights without precedent by referring to himself, in effect, as President of the U.S. (south Pennsylvania Avenue division). "As majority leader of the Senate," said he, "I am aided by a cabinet made up of committee chairmen. I have conferred with them. I think they will expedite action." (Columnist Doris Fleeson, who loves Democrats but has built up an immunity to Johnson's charm, asked if he had worked out a disability agreement with his second-in-command, Montana's Mike Mansfield.) Next day Johnson's estimate of his own importance almost seemed true, for it was he, not the Administration, who announced that the Defense Department would begin pouring some $450 million into military construction projects in surplus labor areas.

Johnson's unique ability to sense the paramount--or sometimes merely the hourly--issue, and then move fast to get control of it, has made him without rival the dominant figure of the Democratic 85th Congress. As such, his is the Face of Democratic performance, and he does indeed stand second in power only to the President of the U.S.

The Sad Fellow. Lyndon Johnson has never ridden higher, and he should be a happy man. But he is not, and he may never be. He sits at his command-post desk in Office G14, Senate wing, U.S. Capitol, restless with energy, tumbling with talk. He flashes gold cuff links, fiddles with the gold band of a gold wristwatch, toys with a tiny gold pillbox, tinkers with a gold desk ornament. And he glances often at the green wall, where hangs Edmund Burke's framed warning about the vexations of leadership:

"Those who would carry on great public schemes must be proof against the worst fatiguing delays, the most mortifying disappointments, the most shocking insults, and, worst of all, the presumptuous judgment of the ignorant upon their designs."

Says Johnson: "People don't understand one thing about me, that is, that the one thing I want to do is my job. Some are always writing that I'm a back-room operator. They say I'm sensitive. How would you like your little daughter to read that you are a 'backroom operator,' a 'wirepuller' or a 'clever man'?" Again and again comes the complaint: "People don't understand ..." But his wife Lady Bird* does. Says she: "He is the most complicated, yet the simplest of men, and sometimes a really sad fellow."

What makes Lyndon Johnson complicated, simple and sometimes very sad is an explosive mixture of common sense and uncommon sensitivity.

The Guide & the Goad. To Lyndon Johnson, common sense has a special meaning. Says he: "One of the wisest things my daddy ever told me was that 'so-and-so is a damned smart man, but the fool's got no sense.' " By sense, Johnson means the art of knowing what is possible and how to accomplish it. He does not waste time on lost causes. He realizes that hot issues are rarely settled by victory for the extremists on either side. Always willing to give a little in return for a lot, Johnson is the Senate's acknowledged master at charting the paths of accommodation and compromise. He is contemptuous of the crusaders and windmill tilters among his colleagues. "All they do is fight, fight, fight," he says, "and get 15 Senate votes." As for himself: "I would rather win a convert than an argument."

But if Johnson's sense is his guide, his sensitivity is his goad. It spurs him to vanity: his LBJ brand appears everywhere, on his shirts, his handkerchiefs, his personal jewelry, in his wife's initials, his daughters' initials (Lynda Bird Johnson, 13, and Lucy Baines Johnson, 10), even in the initials of his beagle pet (Little Beagle Johnson). Lyndon Johnson would rather be caught dead than in a suit costing less than $200. Indeed, when he suffered his far-from-mild 1955 heart attack, the question arose about whether to cancel orders he had put in with his San Antonio tailor for a blue suit and a brown one. Muttered Lyndon, who knew that doctors gave him only a fifty-fifty chance to live: "Let him go ahead with the blue one; we can use that no matter what happens."

"My Daddy Told Me." Small imperfections can upset Johnson terribly. His Sanka is always hot--but never quite hot enough. His staff, the hardest-working and most efficient on Capitol Hill, may reply to letters from 600 Texas constituents in a single day, leaving only 45 unanswered. Cries Johnson: "There's 45 people who didn't get the service they deserve today." When host at his LBJ Ranch near Johnson City, Texas, he often serves hamburgers cut to the shape of Texas. But an unavoidable symmetrical flaw seems to bother him. "Eat the Panhandle first," he urges his guests.

"My daddy told me," says Lyndon Johnson, "that if I didn't want to get shot at, I should stay off the firing lines. This is politics." But Johnson hates to get shot at. He spends hours each day devouring everything written about himself in Texas weeklies, in all the major U.S. newspapers and magazines, in the Manchester Guardian and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung ("These men writing for foreign papers seem to understand me better than the men writing at home").

Pressing the Flesh. Yet Lyndon Johnson, who worries constantly about being misunderstood, understands others. He is a student of people from the moment of introduction, when he goes through a process he calls "pressing the flesh and looking them in the eye." Says he: "When you extend a handshake to a fellow, you can sort of feel his pulse and evaluate him by the way his hand feels. If it's warm and if it has a firm clasp, then you know that he is affectionate and that he is direct. And if he looks you in the eye, you usually know that he is dependable."

Johnson's evaluation of people is paramount to his Senate leadership. The Senate presently has 49 Democrats (ranging from Harry Byrd conservatives to Hubert Humphrey liberals) and 47 Republicans (ranging from Bill Jenner reactionaries to Jack Javits liberals). A straight party-line vote is almost unheard-of, and it is up to Lyndon Johnson, in pursuit of his Democratic line, to piece together a winning combination from the Senate's vastly disparate elements. He does it by knowing each Senator as well as that Senator knows himself. "Sam Rayburn once told me that an effective leader must sense the mood of the Congress," says Johnson. "He doesn't see it, smell it, hear it--he senses it." Because Lyndon Johnson understands its members, he can sense the mood of the Senate as have few men before him. One time Republican Leader Bill Knowland announced to newsmen that a bill, which he supported and Johnson opposed, was going to win by nine votes. Later, Johnson leaned across the aisle to whisper to Knowland: "Bill, we don't need to have a roll call on this. I've got you beat by three votes." He did, too. Says Lyndon Johnson: "I usually know what's going to happen within the first 15 or 20 minutes of the day." Johnson is proud of that fact, as he is proud of his Senate skills. He is, in fact, a proud man who was born in pride.

Light in the East. That birth was described in a family history written four years ago by Johnson's mother, Rebekah Baines Johnson, now 76:

"It was daybreak, Thursday, August 27, 1908, on the Sam Johnson farm on the Pedernales River near Stonewall, Gillespie County. In the rambling old farmhouse of the young Sam Johnsons, lamps had burned all night. Now the light came in from the east, bringing a deep stillness, a stillness so profound and so pervasive that it seemed as if the earth itself were listening. And then there came a sharp, compelling cry--the most awesome, happiest sound known to human ears--the cry of a newborn baby. The first child of Sam

Ealy and Rebekah Johnson was 'discovering America.'"

Lyndon Johnson's ancestry reaches six generations back into Texas history. One great-grandfather was the second president of Baylor University. Another was a preacher who persuaded Sam Houston to get rid of his Indian mistress and stop drinking. Another was a member of the Texas legislature. Perhaps most important to Lyndon's future, his father was a member of the state legislature--and served there with Sam Rayburn.

Great & Good Friends. House Speaker Rayburn was naturally interested in the son of his old colleague, and his influence on Johnson's career is immeasurable. In 1931, when Lyndon Johnson came to Washington as an aide to Texas Representative Richard Kleberg, part owner of the famed King Ranch, he worked himself into a case of galloping pneumonia and collapsed. When he came to in a hospital, he found Sam Rayburn at his bedside. "Now, Lyndon," said Mister Sam, "you just take it easy and don't you worry. You need some money or anything, you just call on me." Johnson did not need the money, but recalls that "the most comforting moment in my life was to see that man sitting there dribbling cigarette ashes down his vest." (To Johnson's children, Rayburn is still "Uncle Sam, the Speaker.") And in 1935, Rayburn got Johnson a job as Texas director of the National Youth Administration.

In NYA, Johnson put some 20,000 young men to work at such jobs as building and beautifying the state's roadside parks--and he built up a respectable political following which he used as a springboard in 1937 to run for the House of Representatives. Johnson won over nine opponents, and, even before going to Washington, made another great and good friend: Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Fishing in Galveston Bay, F.D.R. heard of the young man who had just been elected on the odd--in conservative Texas --platform of support for Roosevelt's plan to pack the Supreme Court. He called Lyndon Johnson aboard his yacht, liked the cut of his jib. When Johnson arrived in Washington, F.D.R. saw to it that he was placed on the powerful House Naval Affairs Committee. Says Johnson of Franklin Roosevelt: "He was like a daddy to me."

A Chance to Blossom. As a Congressman, Lyndon Johnson went pretty much down the line for the New Deal. He ran for the Senate in 1941 against W. Lee ("Pappy") O'Daniel--and got counted out by a highly suspicious 1,311 votes. He ran again in 1948, this time against former Governor Coke Stevenson--and got counted in by an equally suspicious 87 votes. During his first Senate days he was invited to a Southern caucus by the man who today stands as his most powerful backer: Georgia's Senator Richard B. Russell. There was an argument over Southern strategy in fighting a proposed change in the Senate's cloture rule, and Johnson sided with Russell, who was both pleased and impressed. A few days later Russell tipped off Texas reporters that Johnson was about to make a Senate speech that would be worth a story. From that beginning came a close friendship.

It was Dick Russell who swung all his great Senate weight to make Lyndon Baines Johnson the Democratic leader of the U.S. Senate in 1953. Yet it was against Russell's warning that Johnson made his first major move as leader: Johnson wanted to leapfrog promising freshman Senators ahead of their seniors onto the most sought-after committees, e.g., Montana's Mike Mansfield to Foreign Relations and Missouri's Stuart Symington to Armed Services. Cautioned Dick Russell: "You are dealing with the most sensitive thing in the Senate--seniority." But Russell was not quite right: the most sensitive thing in the Senate was Lyndon Johnson, and his instinct told him to go ahead. Says he: "I pushed in my stack." Not only did Johnson somehow make senior Democrats feel like statesmen in giving up their preferment, but he won the lasting gratitude of the younger Senators.* Says Mike Mansfield, now the assistant Democratic leader: "He gave us a chance to blossom."

At All Levels. Johnson solidified his control by almost every means except by trying to control anybody. The powerful senior Southerners trusted him because he seemed to be one of them. In spite of this, and despite his support for such Texas specialties as the oil-depletion allowance, the natural gas bill and the tidelands oil bill, he won the support of Northerners by astute trades. Example: although Oregon's left-leaning Richard Neuberger had crossed him in a key vote, Johnson got to work the next day to round up votes for Neuberger's special pride, the Hells Canyon Dam, got it passed. Today Neuberger is a Johnson man.

Johnson exercises Senate control at all levels; he is the party leader, runs the policy committee, the party caucus, everything. He even took over the Senate Democratic Campaign Committee, which helps elect liberals and conservatives alike, by wangling its directorship for Kentucky's ex-Senator Earle Clements.

"I Won't Forget." But the Senate balance is much too close and much too flexible for Lyndon Johnson to get anywhere just by confining his attentions to Democrats. "Cactus Jack" Garner of Texas once told him: "No leader is worth his salt unless he has friends on both sides of the aisle." Lyndon Johnson has.

He has had his differences with Republican Leader Bill Knowland (as minority leader in 1953, Johnson adjourned the Senate right out from under Knowland's nose, the worst insult that can befall a majority leader), but the two have come to work together in cooperation and mutual respect. One night during the recent debate on postal-rate increases, Frank Carlson, in charge of the bill for the Republican Administration, had an important appointment in home-state Kansas. He asked Johnson if the Senate could meet early and leave early so that he could catch his plane. Johnson agreed. "Thanks," said Frank Carlson. "I won't forget that." He won't, either.

The Big Payoff. Lyndon Johnson's first four years as Democratic leader coincided with Dwight Eisenhower's first term as President. Johnson correctly judged that the Democrats could only lose by placing themselves in blind opposition to one of history's most popular Presidents. Harassed by the Adlai Stevenson wing, always faced with the threat that his own divided party would blow up in his face over civil rights, Johnson led Senate Democrats time and again in support of Administration programs, e.g., foreign aid, foreign trade, the Formosa and Middle East resolutions. The remarkable payoff came in 1956, when President Eisenhower was re-elected in a near-record landslide--along with a Democratic Congress.

Today, with his own State of the Union speeches and talk of his own "cabinet," Johnson has plainly thrown off his cloak as an Ike backer, but he remains on warm personal terms with the Republican at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. During a recent Johnson visit to the White House, the President pointed to the leather chair behind his desk. "Some day," he said, "you'll sit in that chair." Replied Johnson: "No, Mr. President, that's one chair I'll never sit in. I wouldn't trade desks with you for anything in the world." "Well, listen," said Dwight Eisenhower with a burst of laughter, "I'll trade with you any time."

"Get Him." Both publicly and privately, Lyndon Johnson insists that he does not want to be President, that he would not even respond to the unlikely event of a draft. He points to the formidable presidential handicap of being a Southerner. He cites his long history of illness (besides the 1932 pneumonia and the 1955 heart attack, he suffers chronic bronchial trouble, has undergone surgery for kidney stones). And he says that the U.S. Senate keeps him too busy to worry about anything else.

He is right about that, as any typical Johnson day will prove. By 8:15 one morning last week he had made a dozen telephone calls, was dictating notes to Lady Bird. At 8:45 he left their fashionable Rock Creek home in Washington (the Johnsons need not worry about money: Lady Bird comes from a wealthy family, owns 2,900 acres of Alabama cotton land, an Austin radio station and Austin's only television station). In his chauffeur-driven, Government-supplied Cadillac, he read the morning papers, dictated some more notes to a secretary.

Johnson's staff had been on the job since before 8 o'clock, but his arrival, as always, spurred the breakneck pace. "Get me Senator Stennis," he ordered. A few minutes passed--and no Stennis. Johnson buzzed a secretary. "Where is Senator Stennis?" he asked. He was told that Mississippi's Senator John Stennis was flying south. "Do you want me to give you a raise or do you want to give me your resignation?" cried Lyndon Johnson. "Get him in ten minutes!" Three minutes later John Stennis, caught between planes, was at the end of a telephone line in the Atlanta airport.

Next came a call to Dick Russell about some business of the Armed Services Committee. Then in came Tennessee's Albert Gore to discuss plans for speeding up antirecession highway spending. New Mexico's Dennis Chavez, chairman of the Public Works Committee, joined Johnson and Gore, agreed to skip hearings on the highway bill and clear it for Senate consideration by this week. Lyndon Johnson left his office at a lope, looked in at a meeting of the Armed Services Committee, trotted back to his office, gulped down a cup of hot bouillon, greeted Minnesota's Hubert Humphrey for a discussion about farm supports.

For Whom the Bells Toll. By noon, Johnson was in the Senate chamber. No sooner had "Amen" sounded to the opening prayer than Johnson claimed the floor for his pretentious speech on recession. "I believe it is essential," he cried, "that responsible leaders prepare now to meet any eventuality. I should think that can be done without any foreboding prophecies of gloom or doom, or any Pollyanna predictions that prosperity is just around some ever-receding corner."

Whatever other leaders might do. Lyndon Johnson was already manning the pumps--the political pumps, that is. "I do not take any obscene delight in playing politics with human misery," he said. "I think that is what people do when they procrastinate or send up smoke screens. I have responsibilities as the majority leader of the Senate of the United States ... I plan not only to live up to my responsibilities, but to discharge them as effectively as I can." Three hours later he was back to offer his resolutions on military construction and public works. "I'd like to ring the bells and notify the Senators that I'm making a statement--it's rather important."

What was really important to Lyndon Johnson--and to the Democratic record --was the fact that Johnson had once again taken possession of a key issue, given it the full force of his energy and legislative skill. Perhaps, happily, the recession would pass swiftly, and the economy would no longer be an issue. In a U.S. of fast political change, only one thing is really predictable: when the next hot issue comes along, Lyndon Johnson will build it bigger and better--hoping that it will do the same for him.

* Named Claudia Alta Taylor, she was called Lady Bird by a Negro nurse, and Lady Bird she has been ever since. -By comparison, the rigid Republican seniority system has buried such able freshmen as Kentucky's John Sherman Cooper and Thruston Morton, and New York's Jack Javits.

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