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Cabinet Boss. Last week his issue was recession, and Lyndon Johnson, well prepared as usual, was in his finest hour. For weeks Senate Democrats had been drafting half a dozen pump-priming bills. By last week a $1.8 billion housing bill and a $500 million public-works bill were scorching along the Senate tracks, with Engineer Johnson holding throttle full-out. Johnson himself arose on the Senate floor to introduce two resolutions considering it "the sense of Congress" that the Administration should speed public-works spending. (Two days later it did.)
During the course of his speech, Johnson hoisted himself to political heights without precedent by referring to himself, in effect, as President of the U.S. (south Pennsylvania Avenue division). "As majority leader of the Senate," said he, "I am aided by a cabinet made up of committee chairmen. I have conferred with them. I think they will expedite action." (Columnist Doris Fleeson, who loves Democrats but has built up an immunity to Johnson's charm, asked if he had worked out a disability agreement with his second-in-command, Montana's Mike Mansfield.) Next day Johnson's estimate of his own importance almost seemed true, for it was he, not the Administration, who announced that the Defense Department would begin pouring some $450 million into military construction projects in surplus labor areas.
Johnson's unique ability to sense the paramount—or sometimes merely the hourly—issue, and then move fast to get control of it, has made him without rival the dominant figure of the Democratic 85th Congress. As such, his is the Face of Democratic performance, and he does indeed stand second in power only to the President of the U.S.
The Sad Fellow. Lyndon Johnson has never ridden higher, and he should be a happy man. But he is not, and he may never be. He sits at his command-post desk in Office G14, Senate wing, U.S. Capitol, restless with energy, tumbling with talk. He flashes gold cuff links, fiddles with the gold band of a gold wristwatch, toys with a tiny gold pillbox, tinkers with a gold desk ornament. And he glances often at the green wall, where hangs Edmund Burke's framed warning about the vexations of leadership:
"Those who would carry on great public schemes must be proof against the worst fatiguing delays, the most mortifying disappointments, the most shocking insults, and, worst of all, the presumptuous judgment of the ignorant upon their designs."
Says Johnson: "People don't understand one thing about me, that is, that the one thing I want to do is my job. Some are always writing that I'm a back-room operator. They say I'm sensitive. How would you like your little daughter to read that you are a 'backroom operator,' a 'wirepuller' or a 'clever man'?" Again and again comes the complaint: "People don't understand ..." But his wife Lady Bird* does. Says she: "He is the most complicated, yet the simplest of men, and sometimes a really sad fellow."
What makes Lyndon Johnson complicated, simple and sometimes very sad is an explosive mixture of common sense and uncommon sensitivity.