The Passage of Power

by Robert A. Caro

  BUT THERE WAS also general agreement that he could still be stopped.

  “Enormously successful” though Kennedy’s campaigning had been, “it was not enough,” an historian was to write. “And he knew it was not enough.” Popular though he may have been with the public at large, he wasn’t the leader in the polls of Democratic delegates and party officials who would cast the actual votes that would determine the nominee. With them Adlai Stevenson was still ahead. Symington, who had also won a landslide reelection campaign in November, and Humphrey appeared to have substantial blocs of delegates plus the possibility of winning more in primaries, and Johnson had his four hundred or so from the South and border states; favorite sons like Governors Robert Meyner of New Jersey and G. Mennen “Soapy” Williams of Michigan were still in the running. There appeared to be every chance that Kennedy would not be able to win 761 delegates, and that, after a number of indecisive ballots, the convention would still be deadlocked, and the battle would move into the back rooms—where Johnson wanted it, where the decision would be made by the old bosses who were still put off by Kennedy’s youth, inexperience and religion. Johnson was sure he would win in these rooms, and he was not alone in that feeling. “If the convention ever went into the back rooms, we’d never get out of the back rooms,” Sorensen was to say.

  Favorite though he might be, Time said, “Jack Kennedy could turn out to be one of the flowers that bloom in the spring,” and might well do so; “the battle for the 1960 nomination” still “shaped up as one of the grandest, free-swinging, rough and tumble in years.”

  3

  Forging Chains

  IN HIS JANUARY, 1959, letter telling Johnson that he had decided to cast his lot with Humphrey, Jim Rowe agreed with Time’s assessment. “I still think you have a chance for the nomination, despite [the] obvious political handicaps both of us know you carry with you, if you would go after it in the way I have urged you should,” Rowe wrote. “You would have had a better chance a year ago than now, but it is still possible, however remote. But, as I said, and as you agreed, you have no chance whatsoever if you ‘wait.’ By ‘waiting’ I mean staying always in Washington and doing only a superb job as Leader.… I did not make the rules that must inevitably be followed to win the Presidential nomination.… But I know, as do you, that they must be followed.”

  Rationally, Johnson knew that Rowe’s argument was correct (“You agreed,” Rowe reminded him), but it wasn’t the rational that was governing Lyndon Johnson now—as 1959 was to demonstrate.

  He was running all right. Since running would create two problems for him in Texas, early in the year he took steps to solve both of them.

  The first was a prohibition in Texas law against anyone being a candidate for two offices in the same election. Johnson wanted to be a candidate for two in 1960. His Senate term expired that year, and if he received the Democratic presidential nomination but lost to Richard Nixon or whomever the Republican candidate might turn out to be, he wanted to retain his Senate seat. While his reelection to the Senate would not be in doubt—he had won in a landslide in 1954, and his position in Texas had only strengthened since then—under that law, he couldn’t be on the ballot for senator if he was on it for another office.

  Solving that problem required no more than a phone call—which he made to Ed Clark. The state’s “Secret Boss” took care of the matter in the Legislature: on April 20, 1959, over the violent objections of a little band of liberals, it passed a special act which preserved the two-office prohibition—except in the case of a candidate who had been nominated for both a statewide office (such as United States senator) and “for the office of president or vice president of the United States.” And when, later, a lawsuit was filed challenging the constitutionality of this “Johnson for President” bill, Johnson simply made another call to Clark, this time asking him to bring to the Johnson Ranch a list of lawyers who could defend the suit. Clark watched Johnson’s big thumb move down the list, as slowly as it moved down Senate tally sheets, pausing as he considered the pros and cons of each name, until he got to “Jaworski”—Leon Jaworski, a respected Houston attorney who had two additional qualifications: first, as Johnson put it to Clark, that “He’s never been mixed up with Brown & Root”; second, that he was a friend of the state’s senior senator, Tom Connally, whose son, United States District Court judge Ben Connally, would probably be presiding over the case. “Will Leon Jaworski take this suit?” Johnson asked Clark. “I said Yes. You don’t even have to call him. I’ll take care of that.” (The suit never reached Ben Connally’s court; it was dismissed at a lower level.)

  The other problem required a lot of phone calls, and delicate ones, since they involved a figure from Johnson’s past whom he had been hoping to keep in the past: George Parr—George Berham Parr of Duval County in the Rio Grande Valley, the legendary “Duke of Duval,” the most powerful of the despotic patrones or jefes, who controlled the Valley and its votes.

  Confident though Johnson might be about a Senate reelection race, the situation in Texas would be very different should he be the presidential candidate. The state had gone Republican in the last two presidential elections—Dwight Eisenhower had carried it by more than 200,000 votes in 1956—and while part of the explanation was Eisenhower’s personal popularity, part was the fact that traditionally Democratic Texas was becoming steadily more conservative. Johnson might need every vote he could get.

  Parr could produce a lot of votes for him; he had, in fact, done so in 1948, when, late on election night, with Johnson still far behind Coke Stevenson, the two counties the Duke controlled personally—Duval and Starr—and other Valley counties controlled by the Duke’s satraps suddenly produced 20,000 new votes for Johnson; the vote in Duval was 4,195 for Johnson, 38 for Stevenson: a margin of more than a hundred to one. And, six days later, with all the late returns supposedly counted and Johnson still behind by a few votes, a Parr-controlled precinct in adjoining Jim Wells County suddenly announced that its returns had somehow not been counted, and the two hundred new votes for Johnson from this precinct—votes cast by people who had all written their names in the same ink, in the same handwriting, and who had voted in alphabetical order—gave Johnson the lead in an election he won by eighty-seven votes. With Parr still in power, still able to produce what was needed if he wanted to, Johnson had to make sure he wanted to.

  That required taking a hand in another legal case: Parr’s 1957 conviction for mail fraud. Johnson had assisted the Duval patrón on the legal front before: helping Parr obtain, in 1946, a presidential pardon for a conviction for income tax evasion for which he had served time in a federal prison. Now, in 1959, Parr wanted help again. Having lost his appeals of the mail fraud conviction, he had only one remaining hope—a very slim hope: that the United States Supreme Court would take the case. He needed a lawyer with very good Washington credentials, and, with federal prosecutors having seized his assets, he had run out of funds with which to hire one. Johnson had another incentive to help: his fear, as Ed Clark’s law partner Donald Thomas explains, that Parr might decide to talk publicly about 1948. He asked Abe Fortas, whose legal brilliance had rescued his ’48 victory from a federal investigation, not only to take the mail-fraud case but to take it without a fee; as Fortas’ biographer Bruce Murphy writes, “In return for Parr’s silence, Johnson asked Fortas if he would take the case pro bono.” Fortas agreed, later assuring Johnson that he “had not asked for any money” from Parr, and the case was soon on the Supreme Court’s docket, which “is the best break we have had in the case thus far,” Fortas’ partner Paul Porter told Jenkins. “If they had refused to review it … Parr was just on his way to the clink.” (In 1960, Parr’s conviction would be reversed: “We got him off on a technicality,” another of Fortas’ partners, Charles Reich, explains.) Anxious that his role in helping Parr not become public, Johnson wanted nothing in writing. He told Fortas and Porter to keep Jenkins informed of the appeal’s progress through telephone calls, and told Je
nkins to “burn your memo up on [those] phone calls.” All through 1959, he monitored the case closely, however, and those involved knew why. “He was looking ahead to 1960,” Ed Clark says.

  BUT IF IN TEXAS—and in Washington, too, where at the opening of the 1959 Senate session he easily quashed a revolt by liberal senators against his iron rule—he was moving with a sure hand, in the rest of the country it was a very different story.

  Part of his strategy for obtaining the nomination was based on invalid assumptions—assumptions explained by the fact that he had lived so much of his life in Washington, where the Senate was a focus of intense interest, senators figures of power, and he, as the Senate’s Majority Leader, a cynosure of attention, his remarkably successful maneuvers through the arcane thickets of Senate rules and precedents chronicled in detail in the Washington Post and the Washington Star, marveled at during Georgetown dinner parties. He assumed that senators could deliver their state delegations to him, and that his announcement that Senate business required him to forgo campaigning would be understood, indeed hailed, by the country as proof of his indispensable devotion to the national welfare.

  Another part of his strategy—his plan to keep anyone else (and anyone else was starting to mean John F. Kennedy) from winning the nomination—might have been valid, as sound a strategy, perhaps, as could be devised for a southerner who could not hope to win the votes of 761 of the 1,521 delegates. If he could indeed get enough delegates—add enough, mostly from the western states, to his southern votes—he would have enough, in combination with those of other candidates, not to win the nomination, but to deny it to Kennedy, to throw the choice, after a number of inconclusive ballots were taken, into the back rooms (the “smoke-filled rooms” of political legend) that were the domain of the big-state bosses.

  It was in these rooms, from these men, that Lyndon Johnson indeed had his best chance of obtaining the nomination. He would be negotiating with them—and he was of course a great negotiator—meeting alone with one or another of them: the greatest salesman, selling himself. Lyndon Johnson’s confidence that he would get what he wanted from any man if he was only able to spend time alone with him had not, in the major episodes of his life, often proved to be overconfidence. He would be negotiating, furthermore, with men who talked the idiom of hard, tough, pragmatic politics, the language not of the Senate floor but of the Senate cloakroom—Lyndon Johnson language. “It is the politician’s task to pass legislation, not to sit around saying principled things,” he often declared. In the conversation of these men, “principled things” were not a prominent motif; what they talked about was winning.

  For this strategy of the back rooms to succeed, however, there was a sine qua non. To these men who wanted to win, he had to prove that he could do so, had to demonstrate to the northern bosses that he could carry states outside the South in November. He had to enter some non-southern primaries—Indiana and West Virginia, for example—and do well in them. If he didn’t show these men that he was a winner, no sales talk would help.

  What he could have done, were he to campaign in the North, was demonstrated when finally, on May 7, 1959, he accepted an invitation to speak there—before six thousand Pennsylvania state employees who, at the behest of Governor David L. (Don’t Call Me “Boss”) Lawrence, had anted up a hundred dollars per ticket to attend a “Democratic Victory Dinner” that overflowed the main auditorium in Harrisburg’s Zembo Mosque as well as two smaller dining rooms and two huge tents that had been set up outside, so that scores of Democrats had to eat their dinner in the mosque’s kitchens.

  The star attraction proved worth the price of admission. “Never had Lyndon looked more vigorous as he raced from tent to tent, dining room to dining room, greeting Pennsylvanians,” John Steele of Time reported in a memorandum to his editors. Tall, slender, smiling broadly, “daisy-fresh in a neat, dark blue single-breasted suit, white shirt, and dark tie … his laugh at the quips of others infectious,” he entered the mosque by bounding up its several flights of steep stairs “like a high hurdler” as if to put to rest once and for all any doubts about his health (meanwhile the aides who had accompanied him were quietly letting reporters know that his health was so good that he’d just qualified for an additional $100,000 of life insurance).

  Calling his 1957 civil rights bill “weasel-worded,” the NAACP’s Pennsylvania Chapter had protested the invitation to Johnson, calling him “one of the foremost enemies of civil rights in the Senate.” Lawrence, however, had somewhat more experience than they with the difficulties in passing legislation, and he dealt with that subject when he introduced Johnson. “For eighty-two years men talked and talked—and did nothing—about civil rights legislation,” the governor said. “But it was a Democratic Congress which in 1957 passed the first civil rights bill since Reconstruction.” It was a Democratic Congress that had in 1956 and 1957 passed disability insurance, minimum wage, public housing, and public works measures. “Lyndon Johnson is … the man who guided through the Congress the programs upon which the Democratic Party rests its case with the people.” And when a beaming Johnson rose to speak, with the crowd, stirred by Lawrence’s introduction, giving him a warm welcome and the band playing “Deep in the Heart of Texas,” he threw up both arms in an “Ike-like” gesture, and, after a few quips—“You discovered oil in Pennsylvania but we get all the blame”—delivered a powerful message: that indeed the Democratic programs would keep America true to its ideals, and, what’s more, would bring the world to America’s side: “Flung down before us now is a Communist challenge to wrestle for the soul of uncommitted lands. The struggle is not to be won by arms—it is to be won by the force of the examples of our two systems—and the century itself is the prize.” Johnson’s “approach varied from … the shouted, flourished” challenge to “the confidential conversational of the great FDR speeches,” Steele told his editors. And the audience interrupted him twenty-three times with applause, and gave him a standing ovation when he finished.

  “For years,” Steele wrote, “Lyndon … had turned down by the bushel basket full [sic] invitations to invade the unfriendly North … which he needs but which for so long he has timidly distrusted.” The warmth of the Pennsylvania reception would change his attitude, Steele believed. Decades later, remembering the scene, Steele said, “You felt that surely, now, he would campaign in the North—and that he was going to make everyone who heard him rethink what he was all about.” Reedy felt the same way. After such a triumph, he felt, Johnson would see the possibilities: he had thought he couldn’t win over a northern audience, but now he had finally appeared before one—and had won it over. Surely he would now agree to more speaking engagements in the North, perhaps even agree to enter primaries there. When, however, a month or so later, Reedy handed his boss an invitation to address another Democratic event in Pennsylvania, the response, after long minutes of poring over the invitation, was, “I don’t want to get into a hostile audience.” His excuse for declining invitations was the press of Senate business, but the Senate adjourned for the year in August; five months were open before the next session. Although he had accepted invitations for events during these months, again and again he pulled back as the day approached, often at the last minute telling his staff that he wouldn’t go, to make some excuse; often he blamed the staff, saying he had never agreed to go, even though of course he had—in a pattern that became so familiar that his aides grew to dread accepting an invitation, since they knew that later, after the invitations had been printed and mailed and all arrangements made, they would probably have to call the event’s organizers and tell them the featured speaker wouldn’t be there. Jim Rowe saw a man being “torn”—“tortured, almost”—between his desire for something, and his desire not to be seen to be desiring it.

  Johnson’s strategy also required winning western votes. Winning the West—in political parlance, “the West” in 1960 didn’t include California (deemed too urban to fit that category) but ten other states: Oregon and Wa
shington in the far Northwest; the seven so-called “Mountain States” (Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and Nevada) that ran southwest down the long line of the Rockies; as well as Arizona—should have been easy for Lyndon Johnson. Not only had he, as Senate Leader, consistently been the West’s ally on mineral rights, irrigation and reclamation projects, and other issues important to the region, he had made himself its champion in 1957 by maneuvering through the Senate the long-stalled authorization for a great federal dam on Hells Canyon on the Snake River that would provide the inexpensive “public power” so vital in the West not only to Oregon and Idaho, the two states separated by the Snake, but to other western states linked to the dam by long transmission lines. What’s more, since the ten states had only small black populations, civil rights was not a major issue; Johnson’s southernness wouldn’t hurt him there. And although, compared with the heavily populated northeastern states, the western states individually had few delegates, together they had 172.