Thursday, March 26, 1964 University Daily Kansan
Page 7
LBJ Persuasion Sweet or Rough; Talks Sway Recalcitrant ADA
Ey Lyle C. Wilson United Press International
"The Treatment" is the description given by President Johnson's friends and foes to the political therapy by which LBJ persuades citizens to vote for or otherwise to endorse the administration's projects.
"The Treatment" varies from the gentle laying on of hands to muscular arm twisting calculated to wrest that member in its socket. The gentle laying on of hands includes such things as a White House lunch or a birthday telephone call.
Lunch at the White House may be accompanied by a dip in the presidential pool. If no birthday or other fete offers, the treatment may be via telephone call expressing the president's flattering desire for advice, help and counsel.
The arm twisting is reserved mostly for members of Congress whose votes are required. There is, in fact, not much difference between Johnson's bare knuckle handling of a recalcitrant Congressman and the bully boy methods which were employed by the late president John F. Kennedy. A major difference, of course, is that Johnson's methods get results.
For the non-member of Congress the Johnson treatment is likely to be all sweetness and light; no arm twisting whatever or, at least, none that the patient immediately can detect. Thus it is that the politically-minded in Washington are chuckling over the reported effect of the Johnson treatment on Joseph L. Rauh, Jr., the Washington, D.C., spokesman for ADA. ADA is Americans for Democratic Action, a leftwing group denounced by its enemies as a menace to the Republic but conceded by all to be an effective political force with style.
The right-wing National Review noted Rauh's treatment in a recent issue as follows: "The whirlwind courtship of ADA Panjandrum Joseph L. Rauh Jr. by Lyndon Johnson has started to pay big dividends. Johnson offered Rauh a seat on the presidential airplane to New York for Herbert Lehman's funeral just a few days after his inauguration. Since then he has asked Rauh repeatedly to the White House and listened to him and his conferes on civil rights.
Result: The ADA, which four years ago pointedly endorsed only the top half of the Kennedy-Johnson ticket, is now telling the boys, "it's okay to go all the way with LBJ."
That would be a switch. On June 30, 1960, when LBJ was seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, ADA said of him: "He (LBJ) is a conservative, anti-civil rights, gas-
and-oil senator. He has supported all of the major anti-labor legislation enacted during the past two decades and bragged about it."
again that his first loyalty is to the Southern racists."
As late as February, last year, Rauh said: "Vice President Lyndon Johnson has demonstrated once
Whether Rauh has forgiven LBJ and has persuaded ADA to do likewise perhaps remains to be proven, but it is a fact that ADA's anti-Johnson barrage has been silenced.
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VI 3-2091
813 Mass.
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When You're In Doubt, Try It Out—Kansan Classified
SEN. WAYNE MORSE
SUA & ASC present this Oregon Democrat who will discuss "Foreign Policy under President Johnson" APRIL1 8PM HOCH
Reception in South Lounge / Union following the speech