The Skipper & the Ship

The legislative ship of state was moving right along last week, and who should be manning the oars but the long-reluctant leaders of the 88th Congress. The craft was, of course, skippered by Lyndon Johnson.

In the House the civil rights bill was sailing through virtually unscathed; in the Senate the $11.6 billion tax cut was approved, and moved on toward conference committee.

Both actions followed a gale of White House phone calls to Capitol Hill. As Lyndon Johnson's admirers saw it, the President deserved all the credit for breaking up the legislative ice jam. Others, however, insisted that Lyndon's poking and prodding had little to do with it, that President Kennedy had already laid the groundwork for congressional action. The truth lay somewhere in between.

Before Kennedy's death, the two bills were being bottled up by a pair of Virginians: Judge Howard Smith, who had a hammerlock on civil rights in his House Rules Committee, and Harry Byrd, who had the tax cut cooped up in his Senate Finance Committee. Eventually, both bills almost certainly would have been pried loose from their caretakers. But it was Johnson's masterful dealing with Congress that got both bills moving swiftly and both through without casualty.

There was danger in such tactics; the President's aides, in fact, were warning him that he might be dissipating his considerable influence over Congress with too many phone calls and elbow squeezings. "We don't want him to be one of the boys, just another Senator," said one. "We only want to use these calls where they will have maximum impact." But in the case of civil rights and the tax cut, Lyndon Johnson's efforts had IMPACT.

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