The Congress: When Is a Majority a Majority?

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Probably the first to make the job a genuine power center was crusty old Rhode Island Republican Nelson Aldrich, grandfather of New York's Governor Nelson Rockefeller, who as Senate leader in 1908 and 1909 used his power to appoint committees as a lever for control. Old Nelson's fiercest expletive was "my goodness gracious," but he was so ironhanded in his domination of the Senate that "Aldrichism" became a term of opprobrium. After World War I, another famous grandfather, Henry Cabot Lodge Sr., was not only majority leader but also chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee and the Senate's most important Republican. Triply anointed with power, he led the successful fight against ratification of the Treaty of Versailles. Ohio's Robert Taft had been "Mr. Republican" for nearly a decade before he finally assumed the leader's post in 1953, just before his death. It was Taft's idea that his job was to lead the President, not follow him.

And then there was Lyndon Johnson, undoubtedly the most powerful Senate majority leader ever. Lyndon browbeat Senators, threatened them, coaxed and cajoled them, tugged at their coat lapels and kneaded their elbows. Sometimes he worked them over so roughly that as he put it, "the skin comes off with the fur." From the moment he became majority leader in 1955, Johnson grasped all the ganglia of Senate power, and he never let them go. He floor-managed all major bills, was chief lobbyist, strategist, parliamentarian and whip. He took his own nose counts, relied on people like busy Bobby Baker only as supplements to his own one-man intelligence agency.

New Show. This was the man mild Mike Mansfield succeeded. "It's going to be a new show," chuckled one Senator when Johnson left to assume the vice-presidency. "These fellows are about as similar as Winston Churchill and St. Francis of Assisi." For a while, Vice President Johnson seemed to be trying to run the same old show. He retained his baronial majority leader's suite while Mansfield occupied humbler quarters. He sat in on the Democratic Senate Conference, spoke up often at Policy Committee meetings, attended weekly legislative conferences. But after Mansfield proposed that Lyndon preside over Democratic caucuses as well, a determined cadre of Democrats rebelled. "We are creating a precedent of concrete and steel," protested Oklahoma's Mike Monroney. "The Senate would lose its power by having a representative of the Chief Executive watching our private caucuses."

Mansfield's proposal was passed by a 46-17 vote, but Lyndon quickly understood that he was not very welcome at caucuses. He showed up at fewer sessions, finally resigned himself to the fact that diffident Mike Mansfield, not he, was now the majority leader.