Texas Watchdog

In the week that President Truman announced his program for mobilizing the U.S. economy, the Senate's new watchdog committee on U.S. preparedness uttered its first warning growl. After just a month's sniffing through the U.S. mobilization effort, Texas' sharp-nosed Chairman Lyndon Johnson had caught the strong scent of "business as usual" in some corners of the Defense Department's planning.

Government-owned reserve defense plants, Johnson reported, had been allowed to deteriorate. Such onetime "surplus" items as a synthetic rubber plant, airplane engines and radio equipment had been put up for sale while the U.S. was frantically remobilizing for Korea. Rubber stockpiling had slacked off while the need loomed greater than ever. "If we find in the other fields," said Johnson, "the same siesta psychology that we found in surplus disposal and rubber, our work is certainly cut out for us."

Trained Freshman. The work that 42-year-old Lyndon Johnson had cut out for himself was just the kind that had lifted Missouri's Senator Harry S. Truman out of obscurity in World War II. Freshman Johnson was not unprepared for the job. During the war he had run an efficient House investigating committee which worked much like the celebrated Truman Committee without drawing its headlines. Johnson believed that a congressional watchdog should be something of a seeing-eye guide for blind bureaucracy: his committee marshaled its facts in private, presented them to the appropriate Government officials, and usually received thanks for its suggestions.

Lyndon Johnson began learning his way around Washington in 1932, as secretary to Rancher-Congressman Dick Kleberg. Five years later he was back in Texas, campaigning for a seat of his own. Franklin Roosevelt chanced to be fishing from a destroyer off the Texas coast at the time, read and liked Johnson's hard-hitting New Dealing speeches. F.D.R. saw to it that the freshman Congressman got a seat on the important House Naval Affairs Committee.

Campaign by Helicopter. In 1941, Johnson tried the leap to the Senate, lost out to Governor "Pappy" O'Daniel by 1,311 votes out of more than half a million cast. Six months later, within four days of Pearl Harbor, he became the first House member to go on active duty (as a Navy lieutenant commander). When the President ruled in mid-1942 that Congressmen might not serve in the armed forces, Johnson came back to Washington.

By 1948, he had decided to give up his House seat to run again for the Senate. He whirred across Texas by helicopter in a series of 18-hour campaigning days that won him a hairbreadth 87-vote margin over popular ex-Governor Coke Stevenson. Since then, he has been a loyal, but not unquestioning, supporter of the Fair Deal; when it came to voting on labor and civil-rights bills, he lined up with the coalition of Republicans and Southern Democrats to help defeat the Administration program.

For his newest task Johnson had set himself a commendable set of rules: don't spend time looking for headlines, try to avoid politics, avoid second-guessing war strategy, be constructive and impartial. As a starter, the seven-man Johnson subcommittee planned to survey Alaskan defenses, examine weapons and manpower needs and investigate foreign monopolies of strategic U.S. defense materials.

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