Up the winding driveway, through grounds bursting with redbud and dogwood, to the great white Shenandoah Valley mansion of Virginia's Senator Harry Byrd, drove some distinguished visitors, among them Treasury Secretary George Humphrey, Democratic Senators Lyndon Johnson and Walter George, and Republican Senator Eugene Millikin. They met in the second-floor room that Byrd uses as his home office. From the meeting came a decision to strive for a compromise that might save President Eisenhower's liberalized foreign-trade bill—still under discussion in Harry Byrd's Senate Finance Committee—from being ruined by crippling amendments.
Next day, Walter George laid it on the line to his...