Us Senate

As director of the Senate Majority Policy Committee during the 1950s, Reedy (Lyndon B. Johnson, etc.) had an opportunity to see the World's Most Exclusive Club in operation. He shows that it does not accomplish its goals through floor debate nor in committees, but through personal contacts, wheeling, dealing and horse-trading. For senators, he stresses, this involves an understanding of the constituent pressures on other senatorsthe member who does not grasp this is doomed to be a powerless outsider. Thus the Senate is a series of constantly shifting blocs, depending on the issue at hand. How Lyndon Johnson made use of this to line up the Democrats behind President Eisenhower, making Ike's own party look like obstructionists, is the essence of this study. In his concluding chapters, Reedy also demonstrates why the Senate today is, and is likely to remain, impotent. (October 24