Word: mansfield
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Thanks to Lyndon Johnson's precedent-setting decision to give each freshman Senator a choice committee assignment, Mansfield immediately got a coveted spot on the Foreign Relations Committee. To this day, he would rather be considered an authority on foreign policy than a famed floor leader. He made three trips to Indo-China during the years when the French were letting it slip down the drain, concluded that the best solution there was partition, with South Viet Nam under a native, anti-Communist regime headed by Ngo Dinh Diem. Re-examining the situation last month, Mansfield urged that neutralization...
This was not the first time Mansfield embarrassed a U.S. President with his foreign policy pronouncements. In 1961 he gave Jack Kennedy the same sort of headache by advocating that West Berlin be turned into a free, neutralized city. U.S. diplomats in Bonn spent hours trying to persuade hand-wringing West German officials that Mansfield was merely speaking his own mind, not staking out a new Administration position...
...Admiration. In 1957 Lyndon Johnson tapped Mansfield as assistant Senate majority leader. Because Johnson was really his own whip, he needed nothing more than an agreeable errand boy, and Mansfield seemed to fit the bill. Mansfield accepted-but reluctantly, and only out of his personal admiration for Johnson (he supported L.B.J. against Kennedy for the 1960 presidential nomination...
Even after he succeeded Johnson as majority leader, Mansfield had hankerings to be just a plain Senator. He works hard at keeping his seat. He is in his office by 7 most mornings to catch the first mail delivery from Montana, makes a point of seeing as many Montanans visiting Washington as possible. While he paints in broad, if sometimes fuzzy strokes as a foreign affairs expert, his domestic politics are a masterpiece of minutiae-the sort of caring-for-constituents stuff that ensures reelection. "If I forget Montana, they're going to forget me," he says. "I know...
Thanks to such techniques, Mansfield won re-election in 1958 with 72.2% of Montana's total vote, the biggest percentage piled up by any Senator outside the South. He swept all 56 counties, had a plurality of 120,337. He is up for reelection again this year, but the G.O.P.'s most attractive potential candidates are holding off for a crack at Democrat Lee Metcalf's seat in 1966. Mansfield, therefore, has few worries about reelection...