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In his walnut-paneled White House office, Lawrence Francis O'Brien held a hurried conference with his aides. He had been warned by Vice President Lyndon Johnson that an important Southern Senator was wavering on an Administration bill. "See what you can do with him," O'Brien told a staffer. Then, as the meeting broke up, O'Brien turned to his telephone and called another Senator to thank him for a favorable vote the previous week. "I didn't want you to think we didn't notice and appreciate what you did," said O'Brien in a low Yankee twang. "The President mentioned it at the leadership meeting this morning."
During that same morning, O'Brien heard warnings, gave orders and expressed gratitude in a dozen other telephone calls; he talked to Congressmen, lobbyists, Democratic National Chairman John Bailey and Secretary of State Dean Rusk. Between calls, he raced downstairs three times for quick conferences with President Kennedy. Then he was off to Capitol Hill for a meeting with Lyndon Johnson and Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield in the Vice President's office. After lunching on the run, O'Brien talked to a dozen Congressmen, examined the fever charts of a dozen pending bills. Returning to the White House in midafternoon, he held another staff conference, saw the President again, greeted North Carolina's visiting Democratic Governor Terry Sanford, finally shrugged into his jacket and left for the Mayflower Hotel, where a Democratic National Committee cocktail party for Congressmen was in full swing.
All in all, that day last week was a relatively relaxed one in the life of Larry O'Brien, 44, whose job as President Kennedy's Special Assistant for Congressional Relations makes him one of the most important of all New Frontiersmen—with responsibility for seeing to it that the Kennedy Administration's programs become public law.
A Problem of Climate. To the casual observer, that responsibility might seem simple. After all, Democrat Jack Kennedy took office from Republican Dwight Eisenhower with lopsidedly Democratic majorities in both the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives. But Kennedy won his way to the White House by such a perilous plurality (118,000 votes out of a national total of 68 million) that he could in no sense be considered to have a mandate that might compel Congressmen to go along with him. Indeed, many winning Democratic Representatives and Senators who led Kennedy on the ticket within their own constituencies, could reasonably decide that they knew better than the young President about what was good for the people.
In such a political climate, the job of convincing or, if necessary, pushing the Congress into following the Administration has become one of the toughest and most sensitive in Washington. It requires keen understanding of the equations of politics. The President's man on Capitol Hill must know instinctively which Congressmen will respond to deference or flattery, which ones require threats or pressures from home, which ones will leap at the hint of presidential support in the next campaign. O'Brien possesses such understanding in good measure. And he is an expert in the political uses of power, patronage and persuasion.