Field Commander

With the U.S. Senate at razor-edge balance between 49 Democrats and 47 Republicans, the success of the Democratic leadership may well depend on the ability of the assistant majority leader, or whip, to cajole Democratic Senators of all hues and persuasions (including the Southern) into following the party line. Last week, casting about for someone to replace Kentucky's defeated Earle Clements as whip, Senate Democrats thought they had found a topnotch prospect: Montana's shy, sharp-featured Senator Mike Mansfield, 53, the heavy favorite to become field commander in charge of carrying out the strategic planning of Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson.

Michael Joseph Mansfield's promotion to a command post would provide a new twist to a strange career: he quit school in the eighth grade, ran off and joined the Navy (he lied about his age, then 14), served a year during World War I, was discharged, promptly entered the Army for a year, received another honorable discharge, enlisted in the Marine Corps, stayed two years--and came out, not as any sort of commander, but as a private first class.

Into the House. Back in Montana, dogged Mike Mansfield slaved days in the copper mines around Butte, slaved nights studying to make up for his missed education. Passing special entrance examinations, he went to the Montana School of Mines and Montana State University, won his master's degree in history and political science at 31, was appointed professor of Latin American and Far Eastern history at Montana State. He gave up teaching for the U.S. House of Representatives in 1943 (having defeated Republican Jeannette Rankin, who cast the lone congressional vote against a U.S. declaration of war after Pearl Harbor), served five terms and carved out an influential place for himself on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. In 1944 Franklin Roosevelt appointed him presidential representative to study political and economic conditions in China. In 1951 Harry Truman made him a U.S. delegate to the United Nations General Assembly.

In the face of the Eisenhower landslide in 1952, Mansfield unseated Republican Senator Zales Ecton and moved to the other end of the Capitol. On the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Mansfield won bipartisan respect for his carefully thought out, independent views, e.g., foreign aid administered with a high degree of selectivity and a close eye on costs ("I do not agree with those who argue that U.S. leadership requires us to spend billions simply to prove that we are more generous than the Russians"). In 1954 Dwight Eisenhower named him a delegate to the Southeast Asia Conference that resulted in the SEATO pact.

Up in the Senate. If Mike Mansfield becomes the Senate's Democratic whip, his soft, low-pressure approach may work against him; the job sometimes requires a wheeler-dealer with a big stick. But Mansfield has impressive support. Texas' Johnson is strongly behind him. So are many Southern conservatives (Mansfield was a special protege of Georgia's retired Senator Walter George). So are such northerners as Minnesota's Hubert Humphrey, Oregon's Wayne Morse and Illinois' Paul Douglas. If he can persuade the dissident Democrats to work together, onetime Private First Class Mansfield may become a Senate commander of the highest rank.

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