Muffle the Dissent

 From Robert Caro's Master of the Senate (508).  Johnson didn't want there to be any dissent among the Senate democratic party.

  His reasons were partly personal -- that deep aversion to issues that had manifested itself throughout his entire political life, and that desire for unanimity which Gerry Siegel had observed on the Preparedness Subcommittee and which he was now to see again. His reasons were party strategic. Raising issues could only divide the party, Johnson felt. How could a Douglas and an Eastland, a Lehman and a Stennis, ever be reconciled? The gap was simply too wide to be bridged. The mere raising of many issues would spotlight the Democratic schism, would foster dissension and the disunity that would undermine a Leader's authority, and ultimately make him an object of derision. He wanted unity, and he made clear to his newly formed Policy Committee staff that it was their job to take the preliminary steps necessary to produce it.

  The lawyerly Siegel would analyze the drafts of legislation that senators were planning to introduce, and he or Reedy would solicit comments from the other senators interested in the same subject. "We'd call individual senators who were objecting to something in a bill, and we'd explore their thinking and determine what would meet their objections." Then Siegel would set to work, to, as he puts it, "make the changes... necessary to adjust to the reality." The staff's job, in other words, was to devise compromises within the party, to see that dissent was muffled before it became open. Then Lyndon Johnson would confer-in person or over the phone-with the senators involved, try to win their agreement to the compromise.

  This procedure, of course, had profound significance for the Senate. The Senate had always been the citadel of individualists, of independents, of ambassadors from sovereign states negotiating with each other-from positions of sovereignty. Although there had always been exceptions, senators had to a considerable extent negotiated, either in person or through their assistants, directly with each other—had negotiated among themselves. Now, gradually-very gradually at first, almost imperceptibly—a change was taking place. Senators were still negotiating with each other, of course, but now they were also negotiating through Lyndon Johnson. He- or his Policy Committee staffers- were representing senators' opinions to other senators. He was telling one senator what an opposing senator was asking for and what he would really settle for. He was telling Gerry Siegel what wording to put in the next draft of a senator's bill. The beginning of this change can be dated precisely: the first mention of the transformed and revitalized Democratic Policy Committee the Lyndon Johnson Policy Commite on February 3, 1953. Its evolution and growth was for some time be unnoticed by those he Democratic senators- whom it was most directly affecting. But it had begun.