sanity

In an e-mail I received, it said,

"Another comment about LBJ: When Dwight Eisenhower left office he complimented Democrat Lyndon Johnson for working in a bipartisan manner to helping Ike get legislation passed that was good for the country. A Republican sincerely praising a Democrat; can you believe it...? Now the world is turned upside down!"
--------------------

Reading that e-mail made me think of the following passage from Robert Dallek's first Lyndon Johnson book, Lone Star Rising.
As I read this
(from Chapter 13, "Bipartisan Politics")
certain words or phrases seemed to stand out, to me:
moderate
reactionary
service
in the service of the nation
wisdom
judgment
tact
sense of humor
statesman
responsibility
loved.
-------------
{excerpt}------ Domestic affairs was a less promising arena for Johnson's bipartisan strategy. As George Reedy observed, "Eisenhower was an economic conservative and, on domestic legislation, his heart belonged to the moderate right wing of the Republican party." With the exception of a Labor Secretary who had been head of the plumbers' union, the President principally appointed conservative businessmen to his Cabinet, including three men tied to the automobile industry. The New Republic described the Cabinet as "Eight millionaires and a plumber," and Adlai Stevenson complained that "the New Dealers have all left Washington to make way for the car dealers."

Yet even on domestic issues, Johnson made it seem that the President and the Senate Democrats were joined in a struggle against reactionary Republicans. Johnson held "Democratic" legislation to a minimum, and turned Eisenhower's bills into "New Deal-ish" laws with amendments spawned by the Democratic Policy Committee. By leaving Eisenhower's stamp on the bill, Johnson accurately calculated that the President wouldn't intervene in the Senate debate or veto the measure. "It also meant," Reedy says, "that the Senate Democrats were pitted solely against Senate Republicans and, as the Democrats were fighting only for amendments, the picture before the public was that of a Republican president and a Democratic Senate cooperating in the service of the nation while a small group of GOP partisans were trying to throw sand in the gears."

The shift in Republican Senate leadership from Taft to Knowland in 1953 partly made this possible. Taft himself was unsympathetic to much of what Eisenhower proposed at the start of his term. When the President told Taft at a White House meeting in April that his first budget would be $5.5 million in the red, the Senator pounded his fist on the Cabinet table and shouted: "With a program like this, we'll never elect a Republican Congress in 1954. You're taking us down the same road Truman traveled. It's a repudiation of everything we promised in the campaign."

Knowland was even more of a problem. Former governor of New Hampshire Sherman Adams, who had become "Assistant to the President," said, "It would have been difficult to find anyone more disposed to do battle with much of the President's program in Congress" than Knowland. In addition to being so conservative, he was also inept. In the view of one Democratic senator, Knowland "possessed little skill or finesse" for the Majority leader's job. "The blustery Knowland was a man of principle, to the point of bullheadedness. So often did he cross paths with his president's program, that Dwight Eisenhower soon found he could work more comfortably with the Senate's Democratic leader than with the Republican Knowland."

In a note to a friend, Eisenhower himself said of Knowland: "It is a pity that his wisdom, his judgment, his tact, and his sense of humor lag so far behind his ambition."

As time passed, Eisenhower became even more critical of him: "In his case," the President confided to his diary, "there seems to be no final answer to the question 'How stupid can you get?'"

Republican senator Styles Bridges of New Hampshire once told Johnson, "Don't think you can pull the wool over my eyes the way you do with Bill Knowland."

In the summer of 1953, after Congress adjourned, Lyndon publicly emphasized that the President's real friends on domestic legislation were the Democrats. He described the session as "a shakedown cruise" and said that its principal bills were extensions of New Deal--Fair Deal measures: the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act -- "the monument to the great Democratic statesman, Cordell Hull" -- was extended for a year; a grant of authority to reorganize executive agencies was "the same authority granted to predecessor Presidents"; and the excess profits tax represented a six-month extension of an existing law.

Yet "a majority of the basic issues" had been put off until the next session with the agreement of the President. Johnson described the outstanding feature of the first session as the responsibility displayed by the minority Members of both Houses. "The great majority of the President's program was put through only because of Democratic support." Most of the opposition came from "the ranks of his own party."

The Democrats had "acted upon the conviction that the future of the Nation was far too important to be jeopardized for the sake of a narrow partisan gain."

And "through a strict adherence to the politics of responsibility, the Democrats achieved almost unprecedented heights of unity during this session." Johnson's Democratic colleagues agreed with him. As Time reporter John L. Steele told his New York office, "Congress ended on the sweet note of unity. Everyone loved everyone else."
----[end excerpt]
[From Lone Star Rising: Lyndon Johnson and his Times, 1908 - 1960.
Robert Dallek. Copyright, 1991. Oxford University
Press. New York.]

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