Rooms with a View

Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson's refurbished, six-room Capitol suite has a heady view: from its windows the Senator from Texas can peer down Pennsylvania Avenue toward the White House. Last week, in the sharpest language yet, Johnson clamorously sounded the Democratic cry that the big mansion west of his window is, for useful purposes, empty; that initiative belongs on Capitol Hill.

Just before addressing a group of New Mexico Democrats in Albuquerque, Johnson told a press conference that he was "not a candidate, would not be a candidate and would not permit anyone to make me a candidate" for President. Whereupon New Mexico's Senator Clinton Anderson introduced him to the throng as "A man I firmly believe will be the next President of the U.S." Johnson lived up to the billing. Said he, aiming at the Republican line on the budget: "There are two ways to remain fiscally solvent. One is to pull in, shrink back, scrimp and do nothing except sit in a rockin' chair. The other is to stand, produce, work longer and harder." Said he of Dwight Eisenhower: "We are meeting tonight in the lingering twilight of the Great Crusade. And now there's nothing left but a desire for quiet -and government by the threat of veto."

Words were one Democratic weapon of the week; maneuver was another. In the Senate Johnson staked another claim to being the Great Initiator by introducing his own civil rights bill, similar to a measure the Justice Department is preparing. Special Johnson point: the U.S. should set up a federal community-relations service designed to mediate civil rights controversies as the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service tackles strike-threatening labor troubles. (Snapped an Administration legal eagle: "How can you conciliate, cut down, modify or negotiate constitutional rights in voting, schools, or Jim Crow?") Fellow Presidential Hopeful Jack Kennedy offered another version of last session's Kennedy-Ives labor bill before the Administration could get its own to Capitol Hill. Meanwhile, House Democratic leaders, with no fanfare but equal determination, settled down in typical conservative fashion to shape the course of government.

The battle to lead was by no means one-sided. President Eisenhower was in full charge of the budget fracas. And to head off a Democratic school-aid bill that would cost about $11.5 billion over the next four years, the White House was readying its own federal-aid-to-education program, aimed at helping needy school districts mainly by loans and grants.

In sum, the week's words and work showed that the stretch between Johnson's window and Ike's White House is broad, that it has become 1960-5 no man's land, where challenges will be belligerent and combat grim.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.