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On the flight back to Washington, Johnson pondered the problems that history had bequeathed to him. "I sat in the plane," he recently recalled, "and pictured it more or less as if something had happened to the pilot who was flying us back. We were very much in the same shape as if he fell at the controls and one of our boys had to walk up there and bring the plane in, flying at 700 m.p.h., with no plans showing how long the runways were, with no maps, no notes.
"I had grave fears about our future. I wasn't sure how successful I would be pulling the divergent factions of the nation together and trying to unite everybody in order to get the confidence of the people and secure the respect of the world."
Toward a Consensus. He really need not have worried, for one of his best, and most often misconstrued, talents is in smoothing off the rough edges of controversy, bringing antagonists together and achieving a consensus.
Repeatedly, he has been attacked as a mere wheeler-dealer for negotiating one compromise or another, but the fact is that the alternative to such controversial compromises as the 1957 and 1960 civil rights bills, which, as majority leader, he forcefully shepherded along, might have been neither half a loaf nor a slice of bread, but nothing at all.
"It is one of the great tasks of political leadership," he said last spring at the University of Texas, "to make our people aware that they share a fundamental unity of interest, purpose and belief. I intend to try and achieve a broad national consensus which can end obstruction and paralysis and liberate the energies of the nation for the work of the future."
Making the Mare Run. With his instinctive political sense, Johnson began seeking that consensus at once. His prime target was the nation's businessmen, estranged from the Kennedy Administration by the battle with Big Steel. Johnson thought Kennedy had overreacted in that case, just as he thought that F.D.R. had blundered badly in attacking big-businessmen as "economic royalists" a quarter-century earlier. Johnson catered to businessmen at White House luncheons, flattered them, assured them that they were "what makes the mare run."
Aware that businessmen almost reflexively equate Democrats with fiscal irresponsibility, Johnson set out to change that image. He succeeded by keeping his first budget under $100 billion and by halving the deficit. At the same time, he convinced key Congressmen-notably Senator Harry Byrd and Representative Millsthat he really aimed to keep a tight rein on federal spending. The result: the two men finally moved the $11.5 billion tax cut out of their committees, and Congress quickly passed it. Though Johnson's techniques of persuasion and manipulation have inevitably changed somewhat in the transition from legislative to executive branch, they have lost none of their potency. After Congress killed a proposed $545 million pay boost for Government employees, he breathed life back into the measure with a few well-placed phone calls and an earnest talk with congressional leaders. He pointed out that Economist Walter Heller had gone $16,000