The Full Treatment

President Johnson last week came up against some of the toughest codgers of the Congress--and if he did not exactly win their wholehearted legislative support, he at least left them feeling friendly.

Trying to hasten action by the Senate Finance Committee on tax-cut legislation, Johnson summoned Republican Floor Leader Everett Dirksen, a key member of the committee, to the White House for a poached egg breakfast. "Why don't you go on back up there and get that Finance Committee moving?" demanded the President. "Let's get a ten-minute limit on speeches and debate put on that committee." Replied Dirksen to the man who first achieved national fame as a skilled Senate lead er: "Lyndon, you know that place well enough to know you can't do that. Not even you ever shut a Senator off on the floor of the Senate, much less in a committee."

On One Condition. Next came Virginia's Democratic Senator Harry Byrd, the Finance Committee chairman. In formed by Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield that the President wanted to talk to him, Byrd telephoned the White House. Said Lyndon: "Harry, I want you to come down here and see me tomorrow. I want to draw on your wisdom." When Byrd hung up, he turned to a visitor, his eyes twinkling. "You know what that means," he said. "He wants to work on me a little bit."

He did indeed, and Byrd got the full treatment--including a lunch of potato soup and salad, and a tour around the President's Oval Office, the Cabinet Room, the White House swimming pool, and even, as Byrd later described it, a "little room where he gets his rub." What Lyndon wanted was a promise from Byrd that the Finance Committee would, early in January, report out a bill for a tax cut retroactive to Jan. 1, 1964. Byrd agreed--but only on condition that Johnson first gave the Finance Committee a look at next year's proposed budget figures. "If you don't mind," Byrd later said to newsmen, "I wish you'd point out that this is what I've been asking for all along."

"Things I Never Saw." In a similar way, President Johnson went to work in an attempt to speed legislative action on the civil rights bill, presently held up by the House Rules Committee under the reactionary chairmanship of Virginia's Democratic Representative Howard Smith. Even as a petition for bypassing the Rules Committee was being prepared, the President one morning drove past the Spring Valley home of House Republican Leader Charlie Halleck, took him to the White House for breakfast. The meal included what Halleck called "thick bacon--the kind he knew a fellow from Indiana would like." Halleck came away glowing about how Johnson had "shown me things I never saw there before." He also began putting the pressure on Smith for civil rights--although not precisely for the reasons that the President wanted. Explained a Halleck colleague of G.O.P. strategy: "It's senseless for us to try to hold back on this thing now when we know we're going to have to go along with whatever it takes to get it out in the end. That's the bill that will tear the Democratic Party apart. I say bring it out and let 'em start fighting over it." In any event, with his sometime Republican allies now pressuring him, Smith finally agreed to start hearings on the civil rights bill "reasonably soon in January."

Also on Capitol Hill last week: > The House Republican Policy Committee ended any notion that President Johnson may enjoy an extended legislative honeymoon by issuing a statement which said: "We are united in our grief at the tragic assassination of our 35th President. This unity of grief, however, is not--nor should it be--the seedbed of a unanimity on all of the legislative proposals put forward by our late President. The denial of discussion would do the greatest disservice to his memory, and to the living nation." >House and Senate conferees agreed on a foreign-aid authorization of $3.6 billion. This was some $900 million less than the Kennedy Administration had requested. The conferees eliminated some restrictions on presidential discretion in allotting aid--restrictions that both President Kennedy and President Johnson had protested. They removed a ban on aid to nations that encroached on U.S. fishing rights and to governments ruled by military juntas that had overthrown democratic systems. They also restored the President's right to grant concessions on trade with Yugoslavia and Poland.

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