Lyndon Johnson develops pneumonia in 1938, his second year in Washington, and he’s really quite ill. Rayburn comes to the hospital and sits all night in a straight-backed chair next to Johnson’s bed.
When Johnson wakes up in the morning, he sees that Rayburn was so afraid that he would move and disturb him when he was sleeping that his vest is covered with cigarette ashes from the cigarettes he had smoked during the night, because he didn’t want to get up to brush it off. Johnson wakes up and Rayburn, who’s never shown any emotion for him at all, leans over him and says, as Johnson recalls, “Lyndon, never worry about anything. If you need anything, call on me.” That was the start of Lyndon Johnson’s rise in the House.
DR: They’re both from Texas. I can see some maybe simpatico feelings. Why would FDR have been close to Lyndon Johnson?
RC: James H. Rowe—a name which I’m afraid is getting forgotten in Washington—was a very close advisor to both Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson. I asked him the very question you asked me.
He said, “You know, Franklin Roosevelt was a political genius. Most people didn’t understand what he was talking about when he started to talk to them about government and politics. But he saw that Lyndon Johnson understood it all from the beginning.” These were two political geniuses.
DR: When World War II breaks out, Lyndon Johnson says he wants to go in. [A lieutenant commander in the U.S. Naval Reserve, LBJ signed up for active duty immediately after Pearl Harbor and was stationed in Australia and New Zealand until July 1942.] How did he manage to stay in the House of Representatives while he was in the military?
RC: Well, at that time, congressmen could stay in the House and serve in the military. That’s the easiest answer.
Lyndon B. Johnson (right), shown shaking hands with President Franklin D. Roosevelt, circa 1936–37, shared the older man’s political acumen.
When he’s out in Australia, the senior senator from Texas dies—a man named Morris Sheppard. It’s 1942. Johnson has to decide whether to run again for the House of Representatives or whether to run for the Senate. And President Roosevelt has told him that he can call the White House if he needs any help with anything.
We know what Johnson decides. He decides to stay in the House.
DR: He finally decides to run for the Senate in 1948. Why is he called Landslide Lyndon after the ’48 election?
RC: Six days after the election, he’s still behind the governor of Texas, Coke Stevenson. And suddenly another ballot box is found, a ballot box for Precinct 13. They open it and, if I remember this correctly, two hundred ballots were cast for Johnson. They were all cast by someone using the same handwriting and the same pen, and these people actually voted in alphabetical order.
DR: Technically, he won by how many votes?
RC: Eighty-seven votes.
DR: Eighty-seven votes. So he comes to Washington and he becomes a senator. How does he get so close to Richard Russell? [Richard Russell Jr. was a conservative Democratic senator from Georgia who served from 1933 to 1971.]
RC: He gets close to Russell in sort of the same way he got close to Rayburn. Russell and Rayburn shared a number of characteristics. They were both bachelors. They were both lonely men.
When Johnson is elected to the Senate, the first interview he has is with the secretary of the Senate then, Bobby Baker. Baker said, “All the young senators came to me and they would ask, ‘What’s the best committee to be on? What’s the best place to have an office?’ Lyndon Johnson didn’t ask me any of those questions. He only asked one question. He said, ‘Who has the power in the Senate?’ I said, ‘There’s only one power in the Senate—Richard Russell.’ ”
Johnson was to recall that he realized the only way he could be close to Russell was to be on his committee, which was Armed Services. That was not one of the major committees. Foreign Relations, Appropriations, etc., were the major committees then.
But Johnson asks for Russell’s committee, and he starts to work late. Russell worked late every night because he had no one to go home to.
Often Russell would go to a hamburger place near the Capitol to get a hamburger, and Johnson would happen to be going to the same place to get a hamburger at the same time. And they start to sit next to each other at the counter.
Johnson is just wonderful with older men. And he says to Russell, as he said to Rayburn, “Come by the house for dinner tonight.” Russell also was a man who didn’t go out to dinner very much. Johnson would say to him, “You know, you have to eat somewhere. You might as well come and eat.”
And when Russell starts to go to Johnson’s home, Johnson and Lady Bird and their two daughters make Russell feel like an uncle in the family. That’s part of the reason Johnson became close to Russell.
The other reason is that Lyndon Johnson makes Richard Russell believe that he thinks the same way on segregation and civil rights as Russell did. Russell was the most ardent segregationist. He was the most racist of senators.
He was also a great senator in the area of foreign relations. But in domestic affairs, he really had a very low opinion of people who were not white. Johnson makes Russell, makes all the southern senators believe—there are twenty-two southern senators—that he feels the same way about blacks that they do.
I went to Atlanta to interview Senator Herman Talmadge in his retirement. So you drive down Herman Talmadge Highway and you get off at the Herman Talmadge exit and Herman Talmadge Boulevard, and you drive to Lake Talmadge, and you go to this house with a lot of pillars in front, and a servant in a waistcoat opens the door and says, “The senator is waiting for you in the library.”
I asked the senator, “What was Lyndon Johnson’s belief about the relationship of blacks and whites?” And Talmadge said to me—this is what Lyndon Johnson had made him believe—Talmadge said, “Servant and master.”
So Johnson had convinced the southerners that he was on their side. Russell really anoints him as his successor in the Senate.
DR: Two years after he’s elected to the Senate, he becomes the Senate majority whip. Two years after that, he becomes the minority leader. And two years after that—six years into the Senate—he’s the majority leader. How did he rise up that quickly?
RC: No one wanted to be leader then. Alben Barkley, who had been the Senate leader during the 1940s, had this quote which was famous around Washington. Barkley said, “Nobody can lead the Senate. I have nothing to promise them. I have nothing to threaten them with.”
That was the belief. The Senate was sort of in a mess at that time, had been in a mess for a long time. And nobody wants the leadership jobs. So when Johnson says to Russell, “I’d like to be assistant leader,” Russell just gives him the job.
Of course, Johnson made something out of every job. He becomes majority leader two years later. And he does something which is really worth discussing. No one ever picks this out of my book.
Johnson was a genius at political power. He saw things that nobody else saw. Up until then, seniority had governed everything in the Senate. It was a very rigid rule. It’s not seniority as we think of it today. You got whatever committee assignment your seniority made you eligible for. You got whatever office space your seniority dictated.
The Washington Post, the week before Lyndon Johnson became leader, has the sentence—if I remember it correctly—“The Senate would no more change the seniority system than it would change its name.”
Johnson says he wants to be leader, and he’s going to be leader. Russell has made sure of that.
If we look at Washington in January 1953, Dwight D. Eisenhower has just been elected president. The inauguration stands are being hammered into place. All the bunting is going up. That’s the transfer of power from the Democrats in the White House to a Republican in the White House.
But there’s another transfer of power going on, which nobody writes about, which nobody understands, and it’s going on in Lyndon Johnson’s office, behind the closed door of his private office.
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bsp; He’s in there all alone. But he’s talking on the telephone, and we know that because there are four buttons for his four lines on the desk of his assistant, Walter Jenkins. And one or another of those buttons is always lit hour after hour. Because over that telephone, Lyndon Johnson is trying to change the seniority system. And he does it with a lot of arguments.
The Democrats have controlled Congress for so long, and many of the Democrats have been chairmen of their committees for so long. But Eisenhower brought a Republican majority into the Senate with him, so all of a sudden, these senators are not chairmen anymore.
And Johnson is telling them that if they want to become chairmen again, they have to make a legislative record against Eisenhower strong enough to have a chance to take the Senate back in two years. He says, “We can’t do that by putting our best young senators on the worst committees. We have people like Hubert Humphrey [the Democratic senator from Minnesota] and Paul Douglas [the Democratic senator from Illinois] and Mike Mansfield [a Democratic senator from Montana who previously represented the state in the House]. We have to use them.”
As an example, I’ll take one thing that he does. He sees that Ohio senator Robert Taft, who is not only the Republican majority leader but a great debater and a great speaker, is moving to the Foreign Relations Committee so he can attack the Marshall Plan, our policy on China, all the Roosevelt–Truman initiatives in foreign policy.
We have two young senators. Mike Mansfield was a professor of Far Eastern history before he became a senator, before he became a representative. And Hubert Humphrey is, of course, the great orator.
Johnson says, “We have to put Humphrey and Mansfield on Foreign Relations.” He says, “Hubert can out-talk Taft and Mansfield can out-know him.”
There are two vacancies at the bottom of that committee. But there are senior senators—one is Harry Byrd, the Democratic senator from Virginia—who are entitled by seniority to those places.
Johnson goes to Byrd and makes this argument to him. Byrd wants his chairmanship of the Finance Committee back, so he agrees not to take his seat on Foreign Relations. Johnson does this with another senator, and all of a sudden you have two strong new Democratic voices on Foreign Relations.
He says to Humphrey, “I’ll put you on Foreign Relations”—which Humphrey wants because it’s the most prestigious committee—“I’ll put you on Foreign Relations if you give up both your seats on Agriculture and Labor.” Humphrey agrees to do that, and all of a sudden there is now a vacancy on Agriculture.
Earle Clements, the senator from Kentucky, has always wanted to go on Agriculture. Johnson says to Clements, “I’ll put you on Agriculture if you give up your seats on Public Works and Rules.”
Johnson looked at this as if it was a giant chessboard. There are 203 spaces on it—203 committee slots. And he uses those spaces, moving senators around on them, to create power—power for him. Because all of a sudden, he is making the decisions about who’s going where. It’s no longer seniority, it’s not just saying, “You automatically do this”; it’s who the leader says is going to be on the committee, and he is the leader.
At one stroke, Johnson does a lot to change power in Washington. He changes the nature of legislature power in Washington forever.
DR: One famous thing written about is the “Johnson treatment,” where Johnson basically persuades members to do what he wants. And I always had thought it meant he would curse at people and yell and scream at them. But when you listen to the Johnson tapes from his time in the White House, there are no curse words. What was the Johnson treatment?
RC: Johnson was not foul-mouthed in this respect. He didn’t get what he wanted many times. He often did.
But he would read a person. Lyndon Johnson did not like to read books. But he was a great reader of men, and he had rules for reading men.
When young staffers would come to work for him, one thing he would say to them was, “Read their eyes. Read their hands. What they’re telling you with their hands is more important than what they’re telling you with their lips.”
He would say, “Never let a conversation end. There’s always something that someone doesn’t want to tell you. And the longer the conversation goes on, the more likely you are to find out what that is.”
DR: While Johnson is the majority leader of the Senate, he has a heart attack in 1955. Did that incapacitate him?
RC: Yes, because it was a major heart attack. He was only given a fifty-fifty chance of living, although he was only forty-eight at the time. He went back to Texas for some months to recuperate.
DR: He decides in the latter part of the fifties that he would like to be president of the United States. He’s done the Senate, wants to be president—a not uncommon thing for some people in the Senate.
LBJ and Lady Bird Johnson on their ranch in Stonewall, Texas, January 3, 1958.
But there’s a young senator named John Kennedy. How did Lyndon Johnson view John Kennedy in those days?
RC: With absolute contempt. He used to say, “Kennedy doesn’t even know how to make a motion. He doesn’t know how to address the chair.”
DR: What was Johnson’s strategy to become the Democratic nominee in 1960? How did he think he was going to be nominated?
RC: I should say he also viewed Kennedy with contempt because Kennedy, of course, at this time was still very sick. He had Addison’s disease, and they had just discovered that cortisone might work for it. Kennedy was so thin and scrawny, and Johnson used to say, when Kennedy said he was going to run for president, “Look at his ankles. They’re only this big around. And he’s yellow all the time.” Kennedy had a yellow cast to his complexion then because of his illness.
So Johnson did not regard Kennedy as a serious opponent. Johnson thinks he doesn’t have to campaign. He’s the most powerful Democrat, and he expects to get the nomination.
DR: When it turns out that Kennedy does get the nomination, he calls Johnson and says, “Would you like to be vice president?” How did that come about, since Lyndon Johnson was not close to John Kennedy?
RC: John Kennedy was very good at not telling anybody what he was really thinking, including his brother Bobby Kennedy, who hated Lyndon Johnson. Nobody has any clue that Jack Kennedy is even considering Lyndon Johnson until the morning after he wins the nomination.
Jack Kennedy calls his brother Robert early in the morning—Robert is actually in the bathtub—and says, “Count up the electoral votes of all the northern states plus Texas.” And Robert Kennedy says, “You’re not thinking of nominating Lyndon Johnson, are you?” And Jack Kennedy says, “Yes.”
So he comes down to Johnson’s room. They’re both staying in the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles [the site of the 1960 Democratic Convention]. Kennedy’s on the ninth floor. Johnson’s on the seventh floor. They both have corner suites, and there’s a back staircase between them. At ten o’clock in the morning, Jack Kennedy comes down and offers Johnson the vice presidency.
Johnson calls his closest advisors, Rayburn and John Connally and Bobby Baker. It’s decided he’s going to accept the nomination. And he does accept it. He thinks he’s accepted it.
That afternoon, Robert Kennedy comes down those back stairs three times to Johnson’s suite to ask him to withdraw from the ticket. When people would say he did this without his brother knowing, Robert Kennedy would say, basically, “What are you, crazy? You think my brother took a nap, so I went down to get his vice president to withdraw?”
However, he comes down three times. At one point he comes down and Lady Bird says, “Don’t let the two of them meet, because Lyndon Johnson and Robert Kennedy really hate each other.”
The first time, Rayburn sees Robert Kennedy, and Robert Kennedy comes in and says they want Lyndon Johnson to withdraw from the ticket, and Rayburn, this mighty figure—I wrote in the book he was old and he was blind, but he didn’t seem old or blind when he said to Robert Kennedy, “Are you authorized to speak for your brother?” Robert Kennedy says, “No.”
And Rayburn says, “Come back and see the Speaker of the House of Representatives when you are.”
Robert Kennedy retreats back up the stairs. A little while later he comes down, and Lady Bird is still trying to keep them from meeting. John Connally sees them. And this time Robert Kennedy makes a firm offer. He says that if Johnson withdraws, the Kennedys will make him chairman of the Democratic National Committee. Goes back upstairs, and finally he comes down and the two of them meet alone in the room.
We don’t really know what happened in that room. Robert Kennedy says Lyndon Johnson started to cry. We don’t know if that’s true or not.
But we do know that Johnson was terribly upset until somebody says to him, “Call Jack Kennedy yourself.” He calls Jack Kennedy, who says, “No. I want you to be vice president. I’m announcing it. I’m going out this minute to announce.”
DR: So it happened. They get elected in 1960. Probably Texas helped. When Lyndon Johnson becomes vice president, what does he try to do with the Senate?
RC: Johnson thinks, at the beginning, that he’s going to continue to run the Senate as if he were still majority leader. It’s a total miscalculation because, of course, when he goes to the first caucus, they make clear to him that “you’re not in the Senate anymore and we’re not going to listen to you.”
DR: He wanted to run the Democratic caucus still.
RC: In fact, he tries to take the chairman’s chair at the first caucus.
DR: So that doesn’t work. What jobs did John Kennedy actually give Lyndon Johnson to do as vice president?
RC: Johnson is given nothing to do. He’s never consulted on legislation. This is the greatest legislator in American history, and the Kennedy legislative program has trouble from the very beginning.
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