structural:scholar_edition, structural:expansion, information:extraction
Senate Majority Leader

In 1954, Johnson was re-elected to the Senate and, with Democrats winning the majority in the Senate, he became majority leader. President Dwight D. Eisenhower found Johnson more cooperative than the Senate Republican leader, William F. Knowland of California. Particularly on foreign policy, Johnson offered bipartisan support to the president.

Historians Caro and Dallek consider Johnson the most effective Senate majority leader ever. He was unusually proficient at gathering information. One biographer suggests he was "the greatest intelligence gatherer Washington has ever known", discovering exactly where every senator stood on issues, his philosophy and prejudices, his strengths and weaknesses, and what it took to get his vote. Bobby Baker claimed that Johnson would occasionally send senators on NATO trips so they were absent and unable to cast dissenting votes. Central to Johnson's control was "The Treatment", described by two journalists:

The Treatment could last ten minutes or four hours. It came, enveloping its target, at the Johnson Ranch swimming pool, in one of Johnson's offices, in the Senate cloakroom, on the floor of the Senate itself – wherever Johnson might find a fellow Senator within his reach.Its tone could be supplication, accusation, cajolery, exuberance, scorn, tears, complaint, and the hint of threat. It was all of these together. It ran the gamut of human emotions. Its velocity was breathtaking and it was all in one direction. Interjections from the target were rare. Johnson anticipated them before they could be spoken. He moved in close, his face a scant millimeter from his target, his eyes widening and narrowing, his eyebrows rising and falling. From his pockets poured clippings, memos, statistics. Mimicry, humor, and the genius of analogy made The Treatment an almost hypnotic experience and rendered the target stunned and helpless.

In 1956, during the Suez Crisis, Johnson tried to prevent the U.S. government from criticizing Israel for its invasion of the Sinai Peninsula. Along with much of the rest of the nation, Johnson was appalled by the threat of possible Soviet domination of space exploration implied by the launch of Sputnik 1, the first artificial Earth satellite, and used his influence to ensure passage of the National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958, which established NASA. Johnson helped establish the Senate Aeronautical and Space Committee, and made himself its first chairman.

During his tenure as Majority Leader, Johnson did not sign the 1956 Southern Manifesto, and shepherded the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960 to passage — the first civil rights bills to pass Congress since the Enforcement Acts and the Civil Rights Act of 1875 during Reconstruction. Johnson negotiated a middle course between Northern liberal senators and the Southern bloc of senators who had opposed such legislation by removing key enforcement provisions, such as Title III, which authorized the attorney general to initiate civil action for preventive relief in a wide range of civil rights matters. Being a Southerner was seen as an impossible barrier for a presidential candidate and towards the end of his Senate career as well as not signing the Southern Manifesto, he distanced himself further from the Southern Caucus in 1959 by joining the Democrat's Western regional conference.