The Johnson Formula
HERMAN, GEORGE E.
TREATMENT, TRADING AND TAKE-OVERS The Johnson Formula By George E. Herman Washington it is the fashion in Washington these days to talk about President Johnson as the legislative miracle worker...
...Who is the opposition...
...Officials looking for President Johnson recently finally tracked him down in Ellender's office...
...One disturbing memory lingers from Johnson's days as Senate Majority Leader...
...The essence of the Johnson Treatment is the absence of arm-twisting and the presence of back patting...
...And it is there that the secret of his "amazing" successes will be found...
...His treatment, his trading, and his take-overs of ideas and phrases form the three "T"s of the President's technique...
...That is the time for Presidential miracles, and it might be well to suspend judgment until then...
...He had no patience with, and utmost contempt for, Senators who went onto the floor to advocate and fight for a cause they knew they did not have enough votes to win...
...This is the big stick the President holds as he walks softly on civil rights legislation...
...Nevertheless, a great deal of the fast-moving legislation falls into the category increasingly labeled here as "Consensus Legislation"—things everybody is more or less in favor of...
...It is, for example, no coincidence that Senator Harry Byrd and Representative Howard (Judge) Smith of Virginia were in his office to discuss a new Scenic and Historic Highway for Virginia (Federally financed to a large extent) shortly after the House passed Medicare and Aid to Education...
...Medicare is a shoo-in...
...When a big Senate debate on Vietnam appeared imminent, his Baltimore speech took the wind out of the sails of Senatorial critics...
...he would sneer...
...And the office has ways of changing the man who becomes President...
...President Johnson is not an easily predictable man...
...And it is one of the recurrently surprising facts of life in Washington these days that whatever Lyn don asks for, apparently, Lyndon gets...
...The President wants the influential Senator Byrd's silence on certain key items, including these two and foreign aid...
...The President almost never forgets a legislator's birthday or a wife's birthday or anniversary...
...What's the matter with them...
...At times Senate Republican Leader Everett Dirksen seems to be working harder for the President than his own Party...
...He is a man who can bedazzle the caller with an end less torrent of facts, arguments, persuasion and sheer pyrotechnics...
...And a scenic highway which Virginia deserves anyway is a small price...
...To analyze this phenomenon one must examine three separate items: His technique, his opposition, and the direction of his movement...
...The next morning Senate clerks had a busy time scratching out the names of Senators who had asked for time to speak on Vietnam and had hurriedly decided they no longer had anything to say...
...drop by at the White House later for a drink with me and Lady Bird...
...Why are they wasting our time...
...When Johnson says "Come, let us reason together," he intends it not as a mere aphorism from the Bible but as a way of practical politics...
...Lastly, it should be pointed out that a President, especially one like Lyndon B. Johnson, does not have opponents...
...The voting rights bill is abhorrent to the South (and to some Northern constitutional lawyers), but not so abhorrent as the already passed public accommodations laws...
...It is his policies which have opponents, in the usual course of events...
...George E. Herman, of the CBS News Washington bureau, has covered the capital for many years...
...And the Southerners faced by the President from Texas do not seem like the same crew faced by the President from Massachusetts...
...The President knows how to use the majesty of his office for artful flattery, sometimes bravura, sometimes subtle...
...Poverty...
...And not nearly so abhorrent as strict enforcement of the last act's Title Six provision that no Federal funds shall go to any state program where there is segregation...
...But the Republican party in Congress after the recent Gold-water election is not the same party faced by President Kennedy...
...In addition, many of the leading Republicans are longtime members of the inner club which the President found his way into so long ago, and whose bonds of friendship he seeks to maintain...
...They understand him, even when they do not like what he is trying to do...
...He understands them and feels for their problems...
...The Southern bloc, like the GO P bloc, no longer looks so monolithic...
...Medicare and Aid to Education have had the benefit of more than a decade of debate apiece, and the popular pressure for each has been growing over the years...
...So the question arises: How will the President act when he finds himself compelled by the lonely logic of his job to press for the passage of an unpopular law...
...In President Kennedy's time it was the Republicans and the Southern conservative Democrats, working in coalition...
...They are also desperately striving, in the words of Pennsylvania Governor Scranton's campaign last summer, to prove that they are not just the party that says no, no...
...And for a policy like that, leadership would not be an accurate word...
...Who is against fighting poverty...
...And at parties outside the White House he is apt to whisper into a Congressional ear or two as he leaves, saying: "Why don't you and the Mrs...
...But here, for the first time, we see signs of trouble in the honeymoon between President and Congress...
...It's incredible— they give him all he asks for...
...When the voting rights bill was made the pending business of the Senate, not a single Southerner raised a voice in objection...
...What will he do when he comes into collision with the economics of union wage demands and industry's price demands...
...The technique is polished by 27 years of Washington service, and aided by a natural-born membership in the innermost "club" of the two houses of Congress, the finest political memory since James Farley, and the sharpest sense of horse-trading since David Harum...
...He draws his chair closer, juts out his head confidentially, and soon the object of his attention finds himself staring at the pores of Johnson's nose a few inches from his eyes, while the flow of suasion reaches a crescendo...
...How will this man, who gives such evidence that he wants everybody to love him, how will he act when he is not riding on a swell of inherited prosperity...
...He has a genius for making speeches to the nation in which he pre-empts the ground of critics, be they Congressmen or civil rights opponents...
...Among them are his private wars against foreign aid and for agricultural aid, his staunch defense against civil rights legislation, and New Orleans cooking...
...But what of the opposition he must use it on...
...The man who helped Johnson make his way into that club was, of course, his close friend and protector, Richard Russell of Georgia —brilliant tactician of the Southern bloc, now greatly weakened by a chronic lung condition...
...More than that, they are keenly aware that their own power has seldom been so low in the two houses, and that a President's has seldom been so high...
...Here we come to a phenomenon even more unusual than the man in the White House...
...With other members of Congress the "treatment" varies...
...Senator Allen J. Ellender of Louisiana prides himself on a number of things which he does well...
...Can't they count...
...His idea of how to fight for anything was to start rounding up the votes...
...In this school of thought men like Harry S. Truman and John F. Kennedy, who rushed into speech for causes the Congress would not immediately pass, did not understand politics...
...He gave them no credit for starting the process of awakening the national conscience...
...He does not ask that Byrd break with his conservative past and support them...
...He had no patience with a man who felt he had to fight for something simply because it was right...
...The Republican survivors are not only tattered and scarce...
...He holds endless parties, brain sessions, and conferences for members of Congress at the White House...
...And in the reasoning which generally follows he is usually more addicted to the carrot than the stick...
...TREATMENT, TRADING AND TAKE-OVERS The Johnson Formula By George E. Herman Washington it is the fashion in Washington these days to talk about President Johnson as the legislative miracle worker of our century...
...Just refraining from active opposition is good enough...
...How will he make out if the war in Vietnam loses its present confusing character and becomes clearly and obviously bad for all to see...
...Call the entire list of the great Southern leaders and you will find close friends of the President...
...And so one must examine, above all, what kind of thing it is that Lyndon's legislative lightning has been striking...
...A final part of Johnson's technique is pre-empting positions, ideas, or merely phrases...
...He had been on the Hill, had gotten word that Ellender had cooked up one of his famous Jambalayas, and dropped in to invite himself to lunch...
...Just look at him," say the oracles, "he got the education bill through without a murmur from the religious lobbies...
...The upcurve of pressure and the downcurve of Congressional resistence finally reached a point where the brilliant ability of the President at "reasoning together" could effect a solution...
...It remains to be seen whether, as President, Lyndon Johnson will lead America by advocating only courses of action he knows Congress is ready to approve...
...The all-out treatment is famous from Johnson's days as Senate Majority Leader...
Vol. 48 • April 1965 • No. 9
