Targeting the Treatment: The Strategy behind Lyndon Johnson's Lobbying

• Published date: 01 May 2017
• Date: 01 May 2017
• Author: Neilan S. Chaturvedi,Jennifer Rosa Garcia,Matthew N. Beckmann
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lsq.12150

MATTHEW N. BECKMANN

University of California, Irvine

NEILAN S. CHATURVEDI

California State Polytechnic University, Pomona

JENNIFER ROSA GARCIA

Oberlin College

Targeting the Treatment: The

Strategy behind Lyndon

Johnson’s Lobbying

Lyndon Johnson woke up studying whip counts, went to bed reading the

Congressional Record, and invested countless hours in between translating that political

intelligence into a lobbying offensive. The result, famously christened “The Johnson

Treatment,” remains the archetype practitioners and political scientists cite when

appraising presidential leadership on Capitol Hill. Yet Beltway folklore aside, we know

little about how LBJ helped forge winning legislative coalitions. Stepping back from the

(countless) colorful anecdotes, this study offers a new and systematic look at Lyndon

Johnson’s lobbying. Specifically, after exploring theoretical models of presidential coali-

tion building, we then investigate their operational tenets using original data on all

President Johnson’s contacts, with each member of Congress, in both chambers, for

every day he was president.

The challenges to president-led coalition building in Congress are

clear. They emerge from the Constitution’s “separated” design (Corwin

1957; Jones 1994; Neustadt 1960; Peterson 1990) and then rise and fall

according to sitting lawmakers’ various partisan attachments, policy

preferences, and parochial concerns (Fenno 1978; Kingdon 1974;

Mayhew 1974). Recognizing this basic institutional setup, Richard

Neustadt thus articulated a core precept of presidential power:

“Command has limited utility; persuasion becomes give-and-take”

(Neustadt 1960, 37). President John Kennedy’s outlook aff‌irmed the

point: “The fact is that I think the Congress looks more powerful sitting

here than it did when I was there in the Congress” (Kennedy 1962, 551).

Yet opportunities for presidential leadership in lawmaking do

appear, and each president’s foremost challenge is capitalizing when

they do. As George Edwards explained: “The essential presidential skill

LEGISLATIVE STUDIES QUARTERLY, 42, 2, May 2017 211

DOI: 10.1111/lsq.12150

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C2016 Washington University in St. Louis

in leading Congress is in recognizing and exploiting conditions for

change, not creating them” (1989, 221). Others have judged the presi-

dent’s assignment similarly. Mark Peterson says: “But an essential

measure of leadership ultimately has to be the capacity to prevail against

the odds, and to know how to craft one’s ambitions to f‌it the opportuni-

ties of the day” (1990, 267). Samuel Kernell adds: “The number and

variety of choices place great demands upon [presidents’] strategic

calculation, so much so that pluralist leadership must be understood as

an art ...an ability to sense ‘right choices’” (1997, 36).

Though there is no set metric for scoring a president’s strategic

“choices”—day to day, bill to bill, legislator to legislator—scholars

who differ in many respects nonetheless agree on this: If there was one

president who excelled at forging winning coalitions on Capitol Hill, it

was Lyndon Johnson. Barbara Kellerman declared, “Lyndon Johnson

was the very model of a political president”(1984, 124); Paul Light cit-

ed LBJ as having “no equal in legislative skill” (1999, 21); Jon Bond

and Richard Fleisher characterized him as the “master congressional

tactician” (1990, 198); Mark Petersonaff‌irmed, “[n]o one knew, under-

stood, or employed personal contact as effectively as Lyndon Johnson,

the king of the head count, the telephone exchange, and the nose-to-

nose encounter” (1990, 230); George Edwards ref‌lected, “Lyndon

Johnson was the master legislative strategist and technician, making

Congress his highest priority and leaving no stone unturned in his

effort to exercise his leadership” (2010, 126). Comparable exaltations

abound (see Edwards 1989; Jones 1994; Mayhew 2005).

Recognizing President Johnson was such an extraordinary legisla-

tive operator, researchers have long studied his example to investigate

presidential-congressional relations. Analyzing White House staffers’

contemporaneous “headcount” records, Terry Sullivan found LBJ’s lob-

bying operation united his fellow partisans (1990a), including those who

were initially (often strategically) “hesitant” (1990b), while also helping

identify opponents who could be won over (1988; see also 1991). Cary

Covington’s research offered additional insight. He showed Johnson

(and Kennedy) mobilized congressional supporters to show up for key

votes (1987a), which squared with the fact that White House dinner invi-

tations went to the president’s legislative allies (1988a). Covington also

found LBJ lobbied “cross-pressured” members when their support was

important (1988b) and that he would work quietly behind the scenes

(rather than “go public”) when it facilitated legislative negotiation and

compromise (1987b). James J. Best’s (1988) coding of President

Johnson’s f‌irst two years identif‌ied congressional leaders as among the

few “elites” whom LBJ contacted regularly.

212 Matthew N. Beckmann, Neilan S. Chaturvedi, and Jennifer R. Garcia