Scheduling a summit of park commissioners six hours before a session pressured wavering legislators.

Evidence

Then Smith and Mrs. Moskowitz conceived a master stroke: they told Moses to call a meeting of the seventy-three regional park commissioners and to hold it in the Executive Chamber at 2 P.M. June 22—just six hours before the opening of the special session—a move that insured that the influential commissioners would be on hand during the session, available to bring further pressure on wavering legislators, and to dramatize to press and public the contrast between the attitude of the Legislature and of men genuinely interested in parks. GOP leaders pleaded with the commissioners not to attend, telling them that they were working against their own party, but the old men were loyal to their parks. They canceled vacation and business trips, and all but nineteen of the seventy-three were present, packed into the visitors’ gallery of the Assembly Chamber along with the largest crowd the Chamber had ever held, as Smith, speaking not from the raised Speaker’s chair but in the well of the Chamber, a spot where he had stood so many times before, stood so close to the senators seated on folding chairs brought in specially for the occasion that he could touch them. And he told them: You created the State Parks Council. I kept politics out of it by appointing to it these men, mostly Republicans. They include some of the greatest men in the state. And it’s their plan, not mine, that you’re killing. … Smith’s speech brought the packed galleries to their feet cheering. Smith had asked the Legislature for permission to have his speech broadcast; it had not dared refuse. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 881

Categorization

• XREF: Smith’s positional staging — the governor standing in the chamber well close enough to physically touch skeptical senators, amid a gallery packed with his own trusted appointees — is strategic theater in the lineage of Lyndon Johnson’s ‘Treatment’; Smith as LBJ’s predecessor.