The General Manager

(See Cover)

I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat.

--Will Rogers

This week any Democrat in the U.S. could borrow Will Rogers' words and describe his own status with as much accuracy as humor. Seven months after the great defeat, the Democratic Party is disorganized, in debt and leaderless. Its condition is one that John Fischer, general book editor of Harper & Bros, and a worker in Adlai Stevenson's camp last year, has diagnosed as "intellectual anemia" and "almost total collapse of the . . . organization."

The big-city machines, which once whirred Democrats to victory, have become backfiring rattletraps. There is no indication that anyone with any effective tools in hand is looking under the hood. In New York, the toothless old Tammany tiger still lies dazed and listless, and Democrats are wondering where their next candidates for governor and U.S. Senator are coming from. In Illinois, National Committeeman Jack Arvey has virtually retired from the day-to-day problems of party management, and the once-great Cook County organization is dozing under the hand of an apathetic municipal court clerk named Joe Gill. In California, only one Democrat (Attorney General Edmund G. Brown) holds any position of importance in the state, and some of the party's wealthiest angels are snapping shut their checkbooks. California's left-wingers, who control the party machinery, have seriously contemplated abdication to see whether that might help the party win an election.

Nationally, the titular head of the party is Adlai Stevenson. But for more than three months. Stevenson has been jaunting around the world, keeping in touch with national headquarters only through hastily squiggled notes on postcards, e.g., a card showing a Malayan sitting on an elephant's head, with the notation that this man "rides the elephant much better than Ike does." Harry Truman, on the eve of a nostalgic visit to Washington, is lodged in a quiet limbo between politician and elder statesman, exerting no party leadership. His latest newsworthy act was to let traveling members of the Oklahoma Junior Chamber of Commerce make him an honorary Indian chief in Kansas City, Mo. Stephen Mitchell, chairman of the national committee, is hiking along at his job, but hardheaded old pols regard him as something of a political Boy Scout, who may, if he's lucky, help a few old tottering candidates safely across the street.

Rope Dealer. Into this leadership vacuum has blown a tornado from the Southwest, a Texas-size (6 ft. 3 in., 204 Ibs.) hunk of perpetual motion named Lyndon Baines Johnson. To rank & file Democrats outside his own state of Texas, he is little more than a familiar name. But as minority leader of the U.S. Senate, moving around the Senate floor and into the Capitol Hill conference rooms, he has become the key U.S. Democrat as of June 1953.

Johnson is important because the Democratic Party must make its record in Congress, mostly in the Senate. Primarily on this record will the Democrats face 1954 House and Senate elections. As the party's Senate leader, Lyndon Johnson believes that he and his party should be rope dealers: just deal out enough rope to the Republicans, and let them hang themselves before November 1954. But rope dealing can be a very tricky business, and not the least of Lyndon Johnson's talents has been his ability to keep Democratic feet from getting tangled up in the rope while he deals.

At this critical juncture in Democratic history, Lyndon Johnson fills a precise bill. He is no political boss, and this is a virtue because a boss would be useless without a machine. He is no disciplinarian, and this helps because a disciplinarian would be powerless in a party which is looking for an excuse to fly to pieces. Nor is he a statesman; this, too, is a virtue because the party, at the moment, stands to profit most by keeping quiet. Lyndon Johnson is a political operator. He senses political situations, understands individual motivations and moves swiftly to organize party positions by reasoning with individuals on an individual basis. As a result of long and careful study, he knows exactly how his fellow Senators will react and how they will vote. Recently, when one Democratic Senator spent an hour speaking against an appropriations cut, Johnson snorted: "What's he wanta waste all that time for? I told him they just haven't got the votes, so why don't we get the show on the road?"

Johnson rightly thinks of himself as a "general manager"--he is, not in the corporate sense, but like the manager of a baseball team. He has to know who should pitch on what day, and when to walk the batter when the game is on.

Combination Man. Johnson's first problem is to keep the three parts of his party together. An ex-New Dealer with Texas overtones, he stands in the middle wing of his party, and understands both the left and the right wings. To get them together in the Senate, he was careful to see that each side got a fair break on committee assignments. To keep them together, he uses such devices as getting Georgia's conservative Richard Russell, the party's recognized farm expert, to go over a farm bill to be introduced by Minnesota's left-wing Hubert Humphrey.

Johnson's success is illustrated by the fact that Humphrey thinks the current party unity is "a near miracle," and Georgia's conservative Walter George is now saying of Humphrey: "Hubert is doing much better these days." Dick Russell sums up some of Johnson's talents neatly: "He doesn't have the best mind on the Democratic side of the Senate; he isn't the best orator; he isn't the best parliamentarian. But he's the best combination of all those qualities."

Perhaps the best example of Johnson's ability to quiet latent differences was his astounding success in handling the tidelands oil issue last April. While the liberal Democrats were screaming about the great "giveaway" of offshore oil land, their own minority leader, Lyndon himself, was supporting the bill. Never one to make long speeches on the floor ("I proceed on the rule that you don't have to explain something you don't say"), Johnson confined himself to one 20-minute speech, just enough for consumption back in Texas. Then he sat back while the liberals tagged the Republicans as the "giveaway" boys.

Freshman's Friend. The youngest (44) Senate floor leader on record, Johnson has had the good sense to encourage the party's youngsters in the dry season. Against the counsel of the old heads, he flouted the Senate's sacred seniority when he made committee assignments at the beginning of the session. He wanted to, and did, put his able freshmen where they would do the party the most good, e.g., Missouri's Stuart Symington, former Secretary of the Air Force, got a seat on the Armed Services Committee. When the old hands protested, Johnson called (as he often does) on a Texas-flavored story. A boy he knew, he said, complained that his brother had been "twowheres and I ain't been nowheres." There was no sense, said Johnson, in seating senior Senators twowheres or threewheres on important committees while good freshmen went nowhere.

After Oregon's Wayne Morse bolted the Republican Party, the Democratic liberals besought Johnson to throw Democratic weight behind Morse's demand for seats on important committees. Johnson decided that the Oregon maverick was a Republican problem and the Democrats should not take him over. When one Midwestern Democrat reported a Morse threat to campaign against him if the Democrats didn't come through, Johnson snapped: "You aren't trying to argue that we should give in to political blackmail, are you?"

Even relatively minor details catch Johnson's party eye. When Senate Republicans tried to give Cabinet members the right to fire civil servants who had not taken competitive examinations, Johnson visualized tens of thousands of Democratic spoils appointees being wiped off the payroll. No other Democrat had paid much attention, but Johnson began buttonholing, conferring, cajoling. To put over their plan, the Republicans had to get a two-thirds vote to suspend the rules. When voting time came, Johnson leaned across the center aisle to the G.O.P. floor leader, California's Bill Knowland, and said: "You're licked, Bill." He was right. The vote: 35-36.

Wrist Watch Alarm. To Lyndon Johnson, politics is everything. Although he is a walking health problem (he has a chronic bronchial ailment picked up in the Pacific during World War II, has been repeatedly troubled by kidney stones and pneumonia), he works harder than any politician on Capitol Hill. His day begins at 7 a.m. to the jingling of his wristwatch alarm, the most-loved of his collection of gadgets. Before he gets out of bed, he eats breakfast, turns through the Congressional Record and the Washington morning papers, and shaves himself with an electric razor. By 8 a.m., he is on the telephone talking to his early-arriving staff members. Then may come a round of calls to some of the oldest and brightest heads in the party, e.g., his longstanding revered counselor, Fellow Texan Sam Rayburn, and Dick Russell.

On the way to Capitol Hill in his chauffeur-driven Cadillac (a perquisite of the minority leader's job), Johnson goes through the New York Times and impatiently gives driving instructions to the driver. At the Capitol, he plunges into conferences, committee meetings and dictation, working three stenographers simultaneously. He has six telephones in his office (and one on a tree in the backyard of his home in Austin for picnic calls), and he handles at least 100 calls a day himself. His office staff, one of the best and most overworked on Capitol Hill, sometimes turns out as many as 4,000 letters a day on electric typewriters. He is a nervous boss with a hot temper, but his young staff takes it and seems to like it. Said one of them: "You feel like you are going somewhere." He is so absorbed in politics that he knows little else. Once, when a friend was urging him to go to a movie, he asked: "Who the hell is Lana Turner?"

Like most politicians, Johnson is gregarious, sentimental and intensely loyal to his friends on both sides of the aisle. While he and Majority Leader Robert Taft were partisan foes in the Senate, they had a genuine mutual regard and friendship. On occasions when Johnson forgot his thick-lensed glasses, he would lean across the aisle and have Taft read to him. Last week, when Taft announced that he was giving up the active majority leadership (see The Congress), it was Johnson who spoke up first in the Senate. Said he, with touching sincerity: "No more honorable man has ever sat as a Sen/-ate leader for any party."

Supreme Court Tie. Lyndon Johnson's private life is just a part of the political life. Johnson, his wife Lady Bird,/- their two daughters (Lynda Bird, 9, and Lucy Baines, almost 6), a cook, a nurse and a beagle pup live in a comfortable, white brick house in the fashionable northwest section of Washington. They spend $37,000 to $38,000 a year to live, a substantial part of their income coming from property Mrs. Johnson owns, e.g., a radio and television station in Austin. They entertain the right people for political purposes, but Lyndon works too hard to allow the Johnsons to be caught in the Washington social whirl. (Says Lady Bird: "Lyndon acts like there was never going to be a tomorrow.")

Johnson, who likes to wear $190 tailor-made suits and takes pride in his gold, diamond-studded cuff links shaped like the map of Texas, abhors formal dress. Recently, when he was dressing for the Gridiron Club dinner, he found to his horror that neither he nor his wife could get his white tie tied properly. In a typical Johnson solution, he telephoned his old Texas friend, Supreme Court Justice Tom Clark, and rushed two miles to Clark's home to have the Justice tie his bow.

A Senator Is Born. Lyndon Johnson was born and bred to politics. His grandfather, Sam Ealy Johnson, Indian fighter and cattleman, and his father, Sam Ealy Jr., a backslapping rancher and real-estate man, were both members of the Texas legislature. When Lyndon was born, in a little frame house among the pecan and sycamore trees along the banks of the Pedernales River, grandfather Sam rushed out to tell the neighbors: "A United States Senator's been born today."

Johnson began to show his tremendous capacity for work in his early school years. Because he finished his lessons ahead of everyone else and then got into trouble, the teacher loaded him with chores--washing the blackboard, bringing in wood and water. After he finished high school with high marks at 15, he seemed to lose interest in education. He took a wild trip to California with five other rangy young Texans, worked as a hasher and an elevator operator there, then hitchhiked home to take a tractor-driving job. All this distressed his mother. Lyndon Johnson still remembers the late Sunday morning after a full Saturday night when she sat on his bed, softly admonishing him: "To think that my eldest born would ever be satisfied with a life like this ..." Lyndon turned his head to the wall in shame.

He also turned to a new life. He borrowed $75, hitchhiked to San Marcos and enrolled at the Southwest Texas State Teachers College. As many another youth of his age turned to sports, young Johnson turned to debate and campus politics. He became the star debater; he organized a new faction, which he called the "White Stars," to wrest control of campus politics from the entrenched, athlete-dominated "Black Stars."

In 1932, after a stint as a debate coach at Houston's Sam Houston High School, 23-year-old Lyndon Johnson advanced on Washington. He had helped in the congressional campaign of Richard Kleberg, one of the owners of the fabulous King Ranch, and Kleberg took him east as a secretary. Before long, Lyndon reorganized something called "The Little Congress," an organization of congressional employees, got himself elected "speaker," and turned a drab organization into a yeasty forum for New Deal proposals.

Catching a Lady Bird. It was at this stage of his life that the brash young Texan caught Lady Bird (christened Claudia Alta Taylor), the bright, charming daughter of a millionaire Texas rancher. Johnson organized his campaign and surrounded her in typical fashion. The day they met in Austin he asked for and got a date for breakfast the next morning; he courted her for three days until he had to go back to Washington, then kept up a steady fire of letters and telephone calls. They were married ten weeks after they met, and Johnson hustled her back to Washington and into his political plans.

Lyndon's career got firm support from powerful old Sam Rayburn, a great friend of Lyndon's daddy when both were in the Texas legislature. Rayburn got Johnson appointed director of the National Youth Administration for Texas. Johnson went west again, took on the job with a combination of idealism, enthusiasm and his uncanny ability to organize and operate. He soon had between 15,000 and 20,000 young men hard at work on projects such as playgrounds and highway roadside parks. All told, he turned in a good job and built himself a political foundation in his own state.

Then Lyndon turned to the next phase of political life: getting elected. One day, in 1937, while visiting an uncle in Houston, Lyndon was standing at the bathroom door, chatting while his uncle shaved. Spread across the washbasin was a Houston newspaper, with headlines announcing the death of Representative James P. Buchanan of Johnson's district. Said his uncle: "You can succeed Buchanan."

Lyndon and Lady Bird campaigned on their $3,000 savings and $10,000 she borrowed on her property, and he succeeded Buchanan. He did it by the trick of campaigning on an all-out New Deal platform, including Franklin Roosevelt's Supreme Court packing plan. The stratagem got the nine other more conservative candidates to turn all their fire on Lyndon giving him all the publicity. F.D.R., fishing in the Gulf, heard about Johnson's campaign, took him back to Washington on the presidential train. That was the beginning of a long friendship, renewed and broadened over many a Sunday-morning breakfast at the White House.

"Landslide Lyndon." In 1941, Johnson tried for the Senate, but W. Lee ("Pass the Biscuits, Pappy") O'Daniel edged him out by 1,311 votes. Many of Johnson's friends wanted him to contest the election on the ground that the count was rigged. "That's the ball game," said he. "I thought it was a curve ball, but the umpire called it a strike. Let's play again some day."

"Some day" came in 1948, when O'Daniel stepped out and Johnson ran against former Governor Coke Stevenson. It was a wild, extra-inning game. To make up time lost by illness, Johnson campaigned by helicopter, with fleets of tank trucks and crews of advance men spread out in his path. He dropped in on ten to 15 towns a day. After running second in the first Democratic primary, he won the runoff (tantamount to election) by a hair-thin 87 votes.

In getting elected, Johnson picked up, as most politicians do at one time or another, some political scars. Cynics, noting Lyndon's narrow margin of victory, pointed to the odd voting procedure in Jim Wells County, in the bailiwick of notorious Political Boss George Parr. Originally, Jim Wells turned in a count of 1,786 for Johnson, 769 for Coke Stevenson. Then, six days later, the county reported a corrected count: Johnson 1,988, Stevenson 770. The correction put Johnson over. Stevenson charged fraud, but the polling list and ballots from Precinct 13 (where Stevenson said the fraud occurred) could not be found. They have not been found yet. Johnson won all the legal battles, and a new nickname: "Landslide Lyndon."-

46 Testimonials. In the Senate, Lyndon Johnson drew his first consistent headlines by organizing and running the Senate's Preparedness subcommittee early in the Korean war. Lyndon knew the field; he had specialized in military affairs in the House, had served for eight months during World War II on leave from the House as a naval officer in the Pacific. His Preparedness subcommittee infuriated the Pentagon, but did what non-Pentagon observers consider a good job. It saved the U.S. taxpayers $500 million by recommending changes in the tin program, saved $1 billion by its discovery that the Government was paying too much for natural rubber while disposing of its own synthetic rubber plants. The most remarkable result of the committee's work was a ringing testimonial to Johnson's ability to get agreement: all 46 of its reports were unanimous.

Johnson's move toward the minority leadership actually began in 1951, when Dick Russell took note of his ability and put him over as whip (assistant floor leader). After the G.O.P. victory last November, Johnson in Texas telephoned Russell in Georgia to propose that Russell be minority leader. No, said Russell, Johnson was the man. After that, Georgia's Russell plugged Texas' Johnson every time a Senator called for advice. By the time Congress convened, Johnson had plenty of votes to turn back a threat by a group of Humphrey-led liberals.

As Democratic general manager, Johnson lays the party line now on the proposition that President Eisenhower is a great and good man, but that only the Democrats can save him from the Old Guard Republicans (TIME, June 8). Thus, the line goes on, the people of the U.S. should give Ike a Democratic Congress in 1954. This policy, based on the realization that Ike is a very popular President, may be dangerous. Now that the President has begun making some Republican-like speeches around the country, and has shown that he has a powerful weapon in television, it may be hard to sell. But Johnson & Co. frankly admit that the "We Like Ike" line is temporary, and can be switched whenever they think the proper time has come.

"I Want to Stay." Capitol Hill Democrats are, in the way of Democrats, optimistic about 1954. Last week any Democratic leader on the Hill would bet that they will win control of the House in 1954 (a net gain of five seats will do it). They do not think they can win control of the Senate, but only because too many doubtful seats now held by Democrats will be on the block. No one is saying just what roles Harry Truman and Adlai Stevenson will play in the 1954 campaigns. Said Truman recently: "If it will help for me to stay at home, I'd just as soon stay at home."

Some Democrats are looking as far ahead as 1956, but the view is blurred. Adlai Stevenson still has a fervid follow ing, notably among the all-important amateurs outside the old Democratic organization ranks. There is already talk about new possibilities, e.g., Missouri's Senator Symington, who has a long record of success in business, Government and politics. Occasionally a Democrat will speculate on whether Lyndon Johnson, the party's key man of 1953, may himself be the party's presidential candidate in 1956.

Johnson's thoughts do not run that way. His chances for re-election to the Senate in 1954 are excellent; his only prospective opponent with real strength, Governor Allan Shivers, has said privately that he won't run against his old friend. When asked about the presidency, Johnson says: "I'm not smart enough to make a President. I come from the wrong part of the country. I like the Senate job; it's the best job I've ever had. I want to stay here."

The future, as ever, is a matter of uncertainty for both man and party. But in the perilous present, there is no doubt that Lyndon Johnson is, for the Democrats, exactly the right man in the right place at the right time.

f A name given her as a baby by her family's cook, who said: "Lawd, she's as purty as a little lady-bird." -The election produced a favorite political story in Texas which tells about a Mexican-American who found his friend Paco sitting on a curbstone, weeping: Friend: What troubles thee, Paco? Paco: My old father was here Saturday, and he did not come to see me.

Friend: But your father has been dead for ten years.

Paco (sobbing bitterly): That is true, but he was here Saturday and he voted for Lyndon Johnson and did not come to see me.

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