The Passage of Power

by Robert A. Caro

  Although passage of the 1957 Civil Rights Act did not eliminate the distrust with which liberals viewed him—far from it; his previous record on civil rights was too long, and too southern, for that, the bill he had forced through too weak—his Washington allies felt that the sharpest edges of that distrust had been blunted. As for the southern senators, a key reason they had allowed the measure to pass was their hope that enactment of a bill with which Johnson was identified might, by lessening northern distrust of him, enable the South to get its first President in a century; they were confident that as President, Johnson would keep civil rights reform to a minimum. He had, in years of private conversations, convinced the southerners that in his heart he was on their side. “We can never make him President unless the Senate first disposes of civil rights,” Russell had explained to Reedy. So if he ran for the 1960 nomination, expectations were that the eleven southern states would be solidly behind him—a bloc of 352 votes out of the 761 needed for nomination in the Democratic convention. And he had a real chance, political observers said, to go into the convention with a large bloc of votes from the West as well. Now, at last, was the moment Lyndon Johnson had been waiting for all his life. While Adlai Stevenson was still the idol of many Democratic liberals, his two losses in presidential campaigns disqualified him in the eyes of party professionals, and anyway he had said quite definitively that he would not be a candidate. The party’s perennial hopeful, Estes Kefauver of Tennessee (Adlai’s running mate in 1956), was distrusted by these same professionals because of his stubborn independence. And Kefauver, like the other potential candidates, John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts, Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota and Stuart Symington of Missouri, was a senator, and he, Lyndon Johnson, was the Senate’s Leader, their leader, the man they had to come to—and had been coming to, for years—for every large and small favor in the Senate pantry. As Lyndon Johnson surveyed the field in early 1958, none of these men seemed a particularly formidable opponent.

  If he won the nomination, furthermore, he would not have to face Eisenhower, since the beloved President would have served the two terms the Constitution allowed. Neither of the two potential Republican nominees—William Knowland of California and Eisenhower’s Vice President, Richard M. Nixon—would be nearly as formidable. Lyndon Johnson had positioned himself as well as was possible for a southern candidate. Now was the moment to strike.

  BUT HE DIDN’T.

  Sometime in 1958—no one involved knows the exact date—he summoned to his LBJ Ranch six or seven men who were veterans of previous campaigns, greeted them on the front lawn that sloped down from the house to the little Pedernales River, asked them to pull the lawn chairs into a semicircle around him, and told them he had called them together to discuss his upcoming campaign for the presidency. “He was convinced that he was the best man to be President,” recalls one of the group, Texas State Senator Charles Herring, and “he was convinced that he could be nominated and win if we’d work hard enough.” “I’m going to be President,” he told them. That was his destiny. “I was meant to be President.”

  Having worked for Johnson in earlier campaigns—Herring, for example, had been a part of the first Lyndon Johnson campaign, two decades before, when he ran for Congress in 1937, and of every campaign since (the other five congressional races, and three races for the Senate: the losing campaign in 1941, the legendary eighty-seven-vote victory of 1948 and the walkaway of 1954); Joe Kilgore, now a congressman, had worked the Rio Grande Valley for Johnson in ’41 and carried it with him in ’48 and ’54—the men in that group had heard similar speeches at the start of campaigns, of so many campaigns, in fact, that among themselves they had given the speech a name: “The sales pitch.” No matter what office he had been running for, he “would make that pitch: that he was going to be President one day,” Kilgore recalls.

  This occasion seemed no different. As Lyndon Johnson sat in front of his big white house under a majestic oak tree, facing the men and the long, sloping lawn behind them, wearing a rancher’s khaki pants, open-necked shirt and high boots, the men there remember him, as Kilgore says, “leaning out of his chair like he always was.” He was a big man—just under six feet four inches in height—and everything about him was outsize, dramatic: his arms long even for a tall man, his hands huge, mottled; the powerful shape of his massive head emphasized because his thinning, still mostly black, hair was slicked down flat on it. His face, unblurred by excess flesh because, ever since his 1955 heart attack, he was keeping his weight thirty or forty pounds below its previous level, was a portrait in aggressiveness: between the long ears the sharp, jutting nose; the sharp, jutting jaw; under long, heavy black eyebrows penetrating, intimidating eyes so dark a brown that they seemed black. And as he talked, leaning forward out of his chair, his belief in his destiny poured out of Lyndon Johnson with such passion and intensity that, as had been said about him, “He was big all right, but he got bigger as he talked to you.” And now, on the ranch lawn in 1958, “he was very aggressive,” Herring says. “Anyone who didn’t agree with him was wrong. He knew he was going to win. He knew in his own mind that he was destined to be President of the United States.” He didn’t use the word “destined,” Herring says. “That wasn’t a word in his vocabulary.” But he used other words that conveyed the same meaning. “He told us, ‘I’m going to be President. I was meant to be President. I was intended to be President. And I’m going to be.’ ”

  These men had also heard before some variation of the words Lyndon Johnson spoke next. If we do everything, we’ll win, he told them. It was simply a matter of hard work. In every campaign, as in every aspect of his life, Herring, Kilgore and the other men in the little circle knew, Lyndon Johnson had driven himself, and had driven his men, reciting that mantra, “If we do everything,” and now he told them what “everything” was going to mean in the campaign for the nomination: They would each shortly be assigned a group of states for which they would be responsible, and they would make contact with—and try to win to Johnson’s side—every member of those states’ convention delegations. Between them, and others who would be brought aboard and assigned responsibility for other states, “we were,” Herring recalls, “going to see every Democratic delegate in the United States.” So, having heard similar sales pitches before, they felt they knew what would quickly come next: the list of states to which each of them was assigned and then the barrage of orders telling them what they were to do to win those states’ delegates for Lyndon, orders that would include details of each delegate’s political, personal and financial situation, and then the follow-up calls from Johnson—the calls, often in the middle of the night, in which he did not bother to identify himself but simply began, as soon as the telephone receiver was picked up, to ask questions, demand answers (Had this been done? Had that been done? Why hadn’t more been done?) and to give new assignments.

  But this time, as month after month passed in 1958, nothing came, not even the list of assigned states. “We didn’t hear anything at all,” Kilgore says. And when, puzzled, they called the two men they normally called when they had questions—John Connally, who had left Johnson’s staff to become attorney for the wealthy oilman Sid Richardson but who would, Johnson had told them, be running the campaign, and Walter Jenkins, the member of Johnson’s staff most able to convey Johnson’s thinking—the answers they received were evasive. Oh, he would be running, Connally and Jenkins told them. Of course he would be running. He just wasn’t running yet.

  But, as month followed month, and 1958 drew to a close, and the convention and election year of 1960 drew closer, the assignments were still not forthcoming.

  MEN WERE PUZZLED in Washington, too. When a group of attorneys—a dozen leading legal and political minds of the New and Fair Deals—had, in 1957, been brought together in the conference room at Corcoran & Rowe to devise wording that would facilitate passage of the civil rights bill, the senior partner of that influential Washington law firm had told them, “You know, we’re a
ll pros here, and we can talk to each other. We know we’re here to elect Lyndon Johnson President.” And now, in 1958, with the bill passed, “it was,” Reedy says, “time to move.” Hardly had the year begun when the firm’s other name partner was sitting in Johnson’s office in the Capitol explaining what Johnson had to do.

  He had to broaden his support beyond the South, Jim Rowe said, but the big northern states were controlled by a few bosses—Dick Daley of Illinois, Dave Lawrence of Pennsylvania, Mike DiSalle of Ohio, Carmine De Sapio and Mike Prendergast in New York, John Bailey of Connecticut. To win the support of these hard-eyed men, and of party chieftains in smaller northern states, he would have to demonstrate that, although he was a southerner, he could attract support in non-southern states, not in liberal strongholds like Illinois or Pennsylvania or New York, perhaps, but certainly in the border states, and in the western and Rocky Mountain states. That could only be done, Rowe said, if he entered some of the Democratic primaries that would be held in 1960. There would be sixteen of them, and some of them seemed naturals for Johnson: Indiana, for example, a conservative state with strong ties to the South; and West Virginia, whose junior senator, Robert C. Byrd, a Johnson acolyte, was already urging him to run, promising to deliver the state for him—a state so overwhelmingly Protestant that even if a Kennedy candidacy had somehow managed to pick up steam, it would be derailed there. He had to decide which primaries he was going to enter, Rowe said, and he had to decide quickly. While the primaries might be two years away, it was none too early to begin setting up organizations—statewide organizations, county-wide organizations, organizations in each state’s individual congressional districts. He had to start immediately making trips to states that would not hold primaries as well as to those that did, meeting the men who would select and, in some cases, control the delegates who would cast votes at the convention; he had to establish personal relationships with them—personal and other kinds: had to find out what they wanted, what promises (of positions in a new presidential Administration, for themselves or for their allies; of rewards even more pragmatic) would enlist their support; what issues they cared about, cared about deeply enough that a candidate’s position on them would be a decisive factor in whether or not they supported him. And, Rowe said, it was important to start doing that, too, as soon as possible: to lock up delegates before they were locked up by someone else.

  Lyndon Johnson had, George Reedy was to say, “an almost mystical belief in Jim’s powers” because of a memorandum that Rowe had written to President Harry Truman in 1948, at a moment when Truman’s reelection campaign looked hopeless. Johnson knew that Truman had kept the memorandum—thirty-two single-spaced typewritten pages, containing a campaign strategy of great specificity and pragmatism, with every one of its recommendations based not on ideology but on what the memo called “the politically advantageous thing to do”—in the bottom drawer of his desk in the Oval Office all during the campaign, using it as a blueprint for his come-from-behind victory over Thomas Dewey. Having read it himself, Johnson believed that its brilliance had been proven by Truman’s victory. Feeling that Rowe might be able to do the same for him—could give him, too, a blueprint for reaching the goal that flickered always before him—he had often, as in the case of the “Armageddon” memo, given heavy weight to Rowe’s opinions. But this time, when Rowe gave his advice, Lyndon Johnson rejected it—all of it.

  He wasn’t going to enter any primaries, he told Rowe. He wasn’t going to run around the country giving speeches. He was going to make no overt move at all to get the nomination. Instead, he was going to stay in Washington and stick to running the Senate; he was going, he said, to “tend the store.” He had a responsibility to do that, he said; being Majority Leader was a full-time job, and he was going to concentrate on that job, and simply stay in Washington and do it. The country would see that he was doing it, he said; the country knew what he had accomplished as Majority Leader, and would see that he was doing the responsible thing.

  He would pick up plenty of non-southern support without running around the country, he said. He would get that support right out of Washington. For one thing, he had Mr. Sam. The Speaker, he said, had an awful lot of representatives who owed him favors and who wanted favors from him. And he himself, he said, had his senators. He could count on them, he said, senators like Carl Hayden, Mike Mansfield, Clint Anderson and Dennis Chavez. Ol’ Carl had promised him Arizona; in Montana, he had Mike; Clint and Denny would take care of New Mexico. Let the other candidates run around the country, he said. Since none of them were particularly strong, they would kill each other off in the primaries. None of them had a chance of coming into the convention with anything near the necessary 761 votes. The convention would therefore be deadlocked, he said—and then the party would turn to him, for in the event of a deadlock, the nomination would be decided by the party’s bosses. They wanted a winner; they weren’t going to go for Adlai, a two-time loser whose indecisiveness had exhausted their patience; they weren’t going to go for Hubert—he was so liberal he could never win. Symington was hardly known outside his own state. Kennedy was campaigning all over the country, but he not only was young—forty-one—but looked much younger, far too young to be a President. Furthermore, he was a Catholic. The veteran big-city bosses were Catholics, all of them: Daley, Lawrence, DiSalle, De Sapio, Prendergast, Bailey. They would never put a Catholic at the head of their party’s ticket. As Newsweek analyzed their feelings, “Thirty years have passed since the defeat of Al Smith, but they still remember vividly the violent anti-Catholic feeling which the 1928 campaign engendered.” Who would take Kennedy seriously anyway? Johnson said. He knew him from the Senate, and he was little more than a joke there: a rich man’s son, a “playboy,” and, he said, “sickly” to boot, always away from Washington because of some illness or other, and never accomplishing anything when he was present. “He never said a word of importance in the Senate, and he never did a thing,” he was to say. And he himself would have, between his southern support and the additional states his senators delivered to him, a substantial bloc of votes of his own with which to bargain. And the old leaders wouldn’t require much persuasion anyway; they knew the importance of experience and responsibility in a candidate. They would go for him. For example, he had already had discussions with De Sapio and Prendergast; he would have plenty of support in the New York delegation.

  The men to whom Johnson explained this reasoning—and soon he was having to explain it not only to Rowe but to Corcoran and other New Deal lawyers like Ben Cohen and Abe Fortas (“I was so anxious for him to announce,” Fortas would recall), and to many other men in Washington—felt that it might have a certain degree of validity. His position as Leader made him vulnerable if he declared his candidacy. “I’m trying to build a legislative record over there,” he told one of Rayburn’s assistants, D. B. Hardeman. “The Senate is already full of presidential candidates. If I really get into this thing, they’ll gang up on me and chop me up as Leader so that I’ll be disqualified for the nomination.” “Speculation [over whether he is a candidate] merely adds to the burden of his leadership,” John Steele of Time magazine explained to his editors on March 4, 1958, in a memo following a conversation with Johnson. But the validity, these men felt, was only to a point. For one thing, Johnson’s belief that senators (and members of Rayburn’s House) would control delegations had long been disproved. Senators spent much of their time in Washington, and that made a difference. W. H. Lawrence was to point out in the New York Times that for decades, “the Congresional [sic] bloc has not been dominant in either party’s national conventions.… In convention delegations, governors—enjoying statewide patronage and constantly on the job at home—usually exercise much more influence than do Senators and Representatives.” In fact, Johnson had seen this for himself. In 1952, another Senate Majority Leader, Robert Taft, had relied on senators to get him the Republican nomination against Eisenhower, with notable lack of success. And while Johnson may hav
e believed that his triumphs in the Senate had given him national recognition, men like Rowe and Corcoran knew that this belief was unfounded. Outside of Washington, people simply weren’t that interested in the Senate, didn’t even know what a Majority Leader did. As a Johnson ally explained to Walter Jenkins, “You can cross the Potomac River and get out in the country and those folks haven’t the slightest idea how legislation is brought up—they don’t even know that Lyndon Johnson has the power to schedule legislation.” Moreover, Johnson’s strategy rested on his belief that the bosses would turn to him if there was a deadlock. But they wouldn’t turn to him unless he had proven that he could win outside the South. That meant entering the primaries, and Johnson was saying he wouldn’t enter any primaries. If he wouldn’t do that, there was a slim chance—very slim, but nonetheless a chance—that he might be able to demonstrate that he could connect with northern delegates by going to their states, meeting them, speaking at their meetings. And, of course, he had to meet, and make allies of, the bosses themselves, some of whom he had met only once or twice—if at all. But Johnson was saying he wouldn’t do even that. “I’m not going to get the nomination by running around with my shirttail hanging out hollering for it,” he said. He refused to do any form of campaigning in northern states. “He said he wasn’t going to do anything,” Jim Rowe recalls.