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Lyndon Johnson's mental alarm clock went off just before 7 o'clock. He swept his long black hair out of his eyes, smoothed it over the thinning area on top of his head. Then he pushed the bedside buzzer for Cook Zephyr Wright to bring up his tomato juice, pink Texas grapefruit, venison sausage (made from a deer Johnson shot last fall) and half a cup of Sanka. He devoured his breakfast, along with the latest Congressional Record, its ink still wet enough to stain his fingers. By 7:30 he was in the bathroom, working on his leathery brown face with an electric razor. "Bird," cried he through the doorway to "Lady Bird," his wife. "I like to count my blessings."
Translated from family talk, that meant that Lyndon Baines Johnson, 49, tall (6 ft. 3 in. and, by the bathroom scales, 185½ Ibs.), dark and almost handsome, wanted to talk about what he was doing as majority leader of the U.S. Senate. And what Lyndon Johnson was doing last week was, in a broad sense, exactly what he had been doing since he assumed the Democratic Senate leadership five years before: devoting all his energy to building a record for the Democratic Party in a Republican Administration and, what he considers synonymous, the record of a master legislative craftsman, Lyndon Baines Johnson.
Record Writer. The trick is to take any given national problem and make it look as though the Democrats are doing everything, the Republicans nothing. When President Eisenhower was riding high during his first Administration, Johnson's line was that the Democrats were saving Ike from the Republicans. When Ike faltered during the great budget flap a year ago, ex-New Dealer Johnson patented economy as a Democratic invention—and his Democrats even cut seriously into the defense budget. When the Administration presented a tough civil rights bill, it was Johnson who maneuvered both Democrats and Republicans into a compromise—for which Democrats took credit in both North and South.
This year Johnson's showy record-writing has been abetted considerably by the ineptness of Senate Republican leaders and the slow motion at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. After the uproar over the success of Sputnik, it was Johnson, as chairman of the Senate Preparedness Subcommittee, who grabbed the initiative (and the headlines), set up hearings, heard expert testimony from about 200 of the top men in the Defense Department, the armed services, science and industry. So successful was he in capturing the attention of press and colleagues that he produced his own "State of the Union" message two days before the President's own (TIME, Jan. 20). Later, he got unanimous subcommittee endorsement for a constructive report that made 17 recommendations for strengthening the U.S. military establishment. Again, when the U.S. Explorer streaked into outer space, it was Senate Leader Johnson who set up a special blue-ribbon Senate committee, with himself as chairman, to decide on the crucial question of whether space should come under civilian or military control.