THE CONGRESS: One-Man Show

National security, said Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Baines Johnson to his Democratic caucus, is the issue that will "dominate the Congresses of free men for lifetimes to come." And the man who clearly intends to dominate that issue and the Congress itself in Election Year 1958 is none other than Lyndon Johnson. Last week, as he tirelessly loped through one of the most remarkable performances of a remarkable political career, Johnson stole the show from the other members of the U.S. Senate (50 Democrats, 46 Republicans) and House of Representatives (230 Democrats, 200 Republicans, 5 vacancies) who had gathered to open the 85th Congress, Second Session.

Johnson, chairman of the Senate Preparedness Investigating Subcommittee, began by deciding that the Democratic caucus, usually a cut-and-dried organizational affair, this time would be devoted to national defense. He suggested that Republicans do the same; they did, but by the time they got around to it they had little to do but read the headlines Johnson already had made.

Control of Space. Johnson opened his caucus by announcing that "as a courtesy to the President" there would be no Senate speeches until after the President's State of the Union message. At about that point aides started distributing mimeographed copies of Lyndon Johnson's own State of the Union message, carefully prepared, often eloquent, pointing to faults in the U.S. defense system and proposing programs for action.

"Our national potential exceeds our national performance," said he. "Our science and technology has been, for some time, capable of many of the achievements displayed thus far by Soviet science. That the Soviet achievements are tangible and visible, while ours are not, is a result of policy decisions made within the governments of the respective nations. It is not —as yet, at least—the result of any great relative superiority of one nation's science over the other's. At the root this Congress must—before it does much else—decide which approach is correct . . .

"From the evidence accumulated we do know this: the evaluation of the importance of the control of outer space made by us has not been based primarily on the judgment of men most qualified to make such an appraisal. Our decisions, more often than not, have been made within the framework of the Government's annual budget.* This control has, again and again, appeared and reappeared as the prime limitation upon our scientific advancement . . . What should be our goal? If, out in space, there is the ultimate position—from which total control of the earth may be exercised—then our national goal and the goal of all free men must be to win and hold that position."