Ward Politics

Under strict orders to rest and stay quiet after his recent heart attack (TIME. July 11), Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson gazed innocently up from his National Naval Medical Center bed and told doctors of his abiding love for hillbilly music. If he could just have a radio to listen to the comin'-round-the-mountaineers, Johnson hinted, it would help relax him. The doctors considered and agreed. Johnson got his radio, and was soon listening to every news broadcast and political commentator that he could reach on the dial. There are few things that he loathes more than hillbilly music.

A Portable Commode. It should take the big, quietly efficient hospital at Bethesda, Md. quite a while to recover from Texan Johnson's visit there, for the boiling energies that had laid him low would not be stilled. "I'm tired of female talk," Johnson snapped at his nurses. "I want to see my staff." Before long, his aides were not only traipsing in and out of his 16th-floor room, but had usurped the office of the floor physician to carry on round-the-clock political business by telephone.

Johnson also saw Acting Majority Leader Earle Clements four times last week, filled the air with angrily colorful phrases when a nurse asked Clements to depart.

At week's end Johnson's staff was bundling up newspaper clips for shipment to the hospital, while their employer (still, said the doctors, seriously ill), with a contemptuous snort at his in-bed accessories, was getting up to use a portable commode.

But if the hospital was a far livelier place with Johnson there, the U.S. Senate was far less zestful with him gone. His standin, Kentucky's Clements, is a bland, backroom politician whose only spiciness lies in his strong taste for Tabasco sauce, which he pours unstintingly into his soups and salad dressings. In his silent way, Clements has been singularly successful in the business of getting himself elected to public office: he has been a sheriff, county judge, state senator, U.S. Representative, governor and Senator.

A Big Secret. Unlike Johnson, Clements makes a fetish of secrecy. Example: as usual, he recently kept his staff members uninformed about where he would be on a weekend trip out of Washington (Capitol Hill staffers deem it important to know where their bosses can be reached by telephone). But, just before climbing aboard his train, Clements thumbed an aide to his side, looked warily around to make certain there were no eavesdroppers in the vicinity, cupped his hamlike hand to his mouth and whispered conspiratorially: "Keep this to yourself, but in case of a real emergency, I'll be at the Hotel Seelbach in Louisville." For Earle Clements this was a great breach of security.

Partly because of the transition period from Johnson to Clements in the Senate, but mostly because only a few major items remain on the congressional schedule for this session, the week was a slack one on Capitol Hill. Items:

P: The House shouted through bills ranging from authorizing the Secretary of Defense to lend equipment to the Girl Scouts for their senior encampment to creating a commission to promote the centennial celebration in 1958 of Theodore Roosevelt's birth.

P: The Senate, by a 77-to-0 vote, ratified four treaties setting up more humane standards for the treatment of P.W.s and civilian internees. The treaties grew out of the 1949 Geneva Conference, were presented to the Senate in April 1951, but had gathered dust there ever since because of the Korean war.

P: While the political argument about the Dixon-Yates power contract yowled on, with Tennessee's White House-bent Senator Estes Kefauver making the loudest noises, the Senate passed the bill to appropriate $6,500,000 for construction of transmission lines into Memphis from the site of the proposed Dixon-Yates plant. The appropriation will be nullified if, within 90 days, Memphis makes a definite commitment to build its own steam plant. If Memphis does indeed build its own plant, the proposed Dixon-Yates plant will be unnecessary, and the U.S. will cancel its contract with Dixon-Yates.

P: House and Senate passed a bill authorizing rewards of up to $500,000 for information on the illegal importation or manufacture of nuclear material and weapons.

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