The Passage of Power

by Robert A. Caro

  The gift worked on Capitol Hill as well as on College Hill. There, the organization was the “Little Congress,” an almost moribund debating society of congressional aides that had degenerated into little more than a poorly attended social club, and the office he acquired was its Speaker. After Johnson won that office, in an election, in 1933, that also would not bear close scrutiny, the organization was transformed, an invitation to address it now prized in Washington, and the Speaker became one congressional aide who had access to powerful congressmen and senators, and prestige as well: seeing Johnson striding self-importantly down a Capitol corridor, a newly arrived congressional aide asked who he was, and was told, “That’s the Boss of the Little Congress.”

  The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, with two employees and little cash, was, in 1940, another almost moribund organization that no one took seriously—except Lyndon Johnson. The junior congressman saw two things that no one else saw. The first was a possible connection between two groups that had previously had no link: conservative Texas oilmen and contractors—most notably his financial backer, Herman Brown, of Brown & Root—who needed federal contracts and tax breaks and were willing to spend money, a lot of money, to get them; and the scores of northern, liberal congressmen, running for reelection, who needed money for their campaigns. The second was that he could become that link. Although the only position he could obtain with the committee was a vague, informal one, without any title at all, with it he forged the link: made himself the conduit through which the Texas contributions passed, the congressman to whom, junior or not, other congressmen had to appeal for campaign financing. By the end of the 1940 campaign, the committee had become a key funding source, and at the age of thirty-two he had his first toehold on national power.

  Hardly had he arrived in the Senate in 1949, after the most notorious of his elections, when he began seeking the post of his party’s Assistant Leader, or “whip.” Two years later, he got it—got it easily: no one else wanted it; it was, everyone agreed, a “nothing job.” But Johnson made it a significant job, and then became Leader, a position historically so powerless—“I have nothing to threaten them with, nothing to promise them,” one of his immediate predecessors as Leader had said—that no one really wanted that job, either; the most influential and respected senators routinely refused to take it; previous Leaders’ inability to actually lead the Senate, or even to control it, had for years made Leaders figures of ridicule. Johnson took it—sought it, maneuvered for it—and so transformed it that a journalist, watching him run the Senate, said he seemed to be “running the world!” and journalists in general bestowed on him the title “The second most powerful man in the country.” All his life Lyndon Johnson had been taking “nothing jobs” and making them into something—something big.

  And now, no sooner had he been elected to the vice presidency than he tried to do the same thing with that office.

  THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES says that the Vice President shall preside over the Senate, “but shall have no vote, unless they be equally divided.” It says that in case of the President’s “death, resignation or inability to discharge the powers and duties of said office, the same shall devolve on the vice-president.” And, in regard to the powers of a Vice President, that is all it says.1 With the exception of his ability to cast a vote to break a tie in the Senate, the document that created the office attached to it, not a single specific power. Provisions in the Constitution, moreover, stand in the way of a Vice President’s acquiring power. Its very first lines—Article I, Section 1—state that “All legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States,” that the Congress “shall consist of a Senate and a House of Representatives” and that the Senate “shall be composed of two senators from each state.” Of senators only—no mention of a Vice President. The Founding Fathers were concerned that the mere fact of the Vice President presiding over the Senate might blur the overarching principle of separation of powers, that the office, as Hugh Williamson of North Carolina put it during the Constitutional Convention of 1787, would then “mix too much of the Legislative and Executive, which … ought to be kept as separate as possible.” “In particular,” as one study of the office put it, the Founders “seem to fear that the President would somehow gain ascendance over the Senate through the Vice President.” They needn’t have worried. No body could have been a more staunch guardian of the separation principle, more fiercely jealous of its independence from the executive branch. The Senate, the Constitution says, makes its own rules, and its rules (together with its precedents) grant only to senators (and, upon appropriate notice, former Presidents) the right to address the body or to participate in debate. It doesn’t give that right to a Vice President. He could sit in the presiding officer’s chair in the Senate; he couldn’t be a part of it, couldn’t even speak on the floor except with its consent. As for the authority given him by his right of presiding over it, the Senate had, after some decades in the early nineteenth century in which Vice Presidents had indeed intruded, taken care that its rules and precedents would in future keep such intrusion by the executive branch to a minimum, had done so with such thoroughness that in fact by 1960 a Vice President possessed no significant power that couldn’t be exercised just as well by the newest freshman senator, if he was presiding in the Vice President’s place (and in fact, with Vice Presidents having little taste for the almost purely ceremonial role, it was often freshmen senators who were assigned to sit in the presiding officer’s chair).

  Article I of the Constitution deals with legislative powers. Article II deals with executive powers. “The executive power shall be vested in a president of the United States of America,” states the Article’s first lines. In the President—not in any manner in the Vice President. Succeeding sections of that Article enumerate the presidential powers—to act as commander in chief of the armed forces, for example, or to veto legislation passed by Congress, or to grant pardons. No provision in the Constitution authorizes a President to delegate any of these powers—any of “the executive power”—to a Vice President. Even should Congress wish to, it can’t get around that barrier. “Any formal allocation of power to the Vice President would conflict with the clause in the Constitution vesting the undivided ‘executive power’ in the President,” stated one study of the situation. There was, moreover, a further barrier. The various great departments of government—not only the Department of Agriculture, the Department of the Interior, all the departments whose heads sat as the President’s Cabinet—but other major if non-Cabinet-level federal agencies as well had been established by law: by statutes enacted by Congress. In establishing these departments, Congress had laid out boundaries, statutory boundaries, of their authority. Powers delegated to a Vice President by a President might infringe on those statutory powers. This conflict—and the weakness of the Vice President’s role in it—had become clear during a President’s attempt to give his Vice President what was accurately called “the only big job ever handed a Vice President” during the almost two centuries the United States had been in existence: the executive order that Franklin Roosevelt issued in July, 1941, after, with war looming, he had declared a state of national emergency. “By virtue of the existence of the emergency,” he created an Economic Defense Board to coordinate planning for the looming war with broad powers over areas such as imports, exports and the stockpiling of strategic materials, and made Vice President Henry A. Wallace its chairman, in a position that gave Wallace broad authority in such areas. No sooner had the board been created, however, than the inherent conflict between the Vice President’s role and the powers of other Cabinet members had erupted in open hostility. In their conflict with Wallace, the Cabinet members had Congress behind them. No President since then had made any similar attempt.

  As for the possibility of a President making a more informal delegation of powers to a Vice President, that possibility was hazy. Nothing specific stood in the way of his being given
major responsibilities within the executive branch—should the President wish to do so. But there was a practical consideration that might make him reluctant to do so. Under the Constitution, the Vice President is not a subordinate of the President; the document mentions only one method of removing a vice president from office—through impeachment by Congress; it confers on a President no power to remove him (as he could remove a Cabinet officer, for example) should he use the delegated powers to initiate policies that conflicted with a President’s wishes, or to defy a President. For a President to confer power on someone whom he can fire is one thing; conferring power on someone he can’t fire is a risk, and a big one. At the beginning of 1961, the Vice President had only one position to which he was entitled by law—membership in the National Security Council, a body that had been created not to make decisions but to advise a President. Kennedy had proposed that another law be passed that would make Lyndon Johnson not merely a member but chairman of the National Aeronautics and Space Council, but this, too, was an advisory, not a decision-making, body. Kennedy also told Johnson that he wanted him to succeed his predecessor Vice President, Nixon, in another virtually powerless role: the chairmanship of a committee monitoring racial discrimination in government contracts. When Johnson analyzed the three positions he would be holding, “he discovered something very quickly,” George Reedy says—that they carried with them only “a derivative power of the President.… He discovered that none of the power was his … that any power that a vice president has is just power which has been given him by a president and can be taken back.” When, shortly after his inauguration, Johnson asked Deputy Attorney General Nicholas de Belleville Katzenbach for a study of other possible duties in the executive branch, he would be told that “the nature and number of” those duties “are, as a practical matter, within the discretion of the President.” In later decades, the role of the Vice President would be gradually and substantially enlarged—at the discretion of the President—but at the time of the 1960 election, that was where the office stood. No legislative powers, no executive powers, and obstacles, hitherto insurmountable obstacles, to obtaining any—except what the President might choose to give him.

  But “power is where power goes.” Hardly had he been elected to the vice presidency than Lyndon Johnson launched a campaign, unprecedented in American history on several levels, that, had it succeeded, would not only have dramatically transformed the nature of the office—but would also, in the process, have undermined the concept of the separation of executive and legislative powers embedded in the Constitution.

  THE LYNDON JOHNSON WHO was maneuvering for power now, however, wasn’t the Lyndon Johnson who throughout most of his career had calculated so thoughtfully, made his moves so subtly, demonstrated always so deft a hand, when he was seeking power. He was the Lyndon Johnson of the last year or two, when, with the great prize so close at last, the fear of failure so great, he had made, over and over again, the stops and starts, the frantic flurries of desperation—when he would listen to nothing he didn’t want to hear, when “you couldn’t reason with him.”

  The campaign had two fronts, a mile and a half apart on Pennsylvania Avenue.

  One was on Capitol Hill. The formal conference, or “caucus,” of the Senate’s Democratic members had traditionally been presided over by the senator who had been elected their Leader: Johnson, of course, had been the conference chairman for the past eight years. Now Johnson asked the senator who was to succeed him as Majority Leader—his Assistant Leader, Mike Mansfield—to allow him to continue as conference chairman. He assured Mansfield that the chairmanship would be merely a symbolic honor in recognition of his past services, a pro forma position, as Mansfield was to put it; Johnson may have said—he was to use this argument later—that since the Constitution already gave the Vice President the duty of presiding over the Senate as a whole, presiding over a party caucus was only another, similar function.

  Persuading Mansfield was not difficult. The Montanan was a quiet, accommodating, philosophical man who, as one account noted, “owed his prominence in the Senate solely to Johnson’s selection of him as his Assistant Leader,” and who in that job had had, as he himself said, “no work to do: he [Johnson] kept control even when he went to Texas” through “his conduit, Bobby Baker.” Taking Johnson at his word—“In my view,” Mansfield was to say, “this would constitute (only) an honorary position, and I had no objection”—he agreed.

  This, in itself, would have been a revolutionary step. As Evans and Novak were to say, Mansfield was agreeing to do “what no other Senate had ever done: breach the constitutional separation of powers by making the Vice President the presiding officer of all the Senate Democrats whenever they met in formal conference.” But Johnson was not in fact intending the chairmanship to be pro forma at all—as became clearer when he also persuaded Mansfield to let him retain what was to Washington the symbol of his senatorial power: his awesome “Taj Mahal” office. Although this office, convenient to the Senate Chamber, had been the Majority Leader’s office, Mansfield agreed to let Johnson keep using it, saying he himself would be more comfortable operating from a less pretentious suite. Then it was announced that the conduit through which the power flowed would remain in place as well; Bobby Baker would stay on as secretary for the majority. “I think that Mansfield inherited Baker passively,” Larry O’Brien says. “Baker had the job, and he wouldn’t throw him out any more than he would demand the Majority Leader’s office and that the Vice President remove himself from it.”

  But Johnson also had to persuade senators far less malleable than Mansfield—and that proved a very different story.

  Sometime in December, with Mansfield’s agreement secured, Johnson invited four longtime senatorial allies—Robert Kerr, Hubert Humphrey, George Smathers and Richard Russell—to a meeting not in the Capitol but in a private dining room at the Sheraton-Carlton Hotel, “probably hoping,” as Humphrey puts it, “to keep it a secret,” and told them of his plan to retain the caucus chairmanship.

  It was obvious to the four senators that Johnson’s plans for the post included more than merely presiding over the caucus. “He had often controlled, constantly influenced the course of legislation” from that “powerful position” for eight years, Humphrey was to say, and now he was planning to continue doing so, to use the chairmanship, in Humphrey’s words, “to hang on to [the power] he had wielded as Majority Leader” as a “de facto Majority Leader”; Johnson “had the illusions that he could be in a sense, as Vice President, the Majority Leader.”

  His proposal violated what was to these senators one of the Senate’s most sacred precepts—its independence of the executive branch; he was proposing that a member of that branch preside over their meetings. Misgivings were voiced, but, as Humphrey puts it, “Johnson was not an easy man to tell you can’t do something,” and he evidently felt he had persuaded his old allies. Summoned to the Taj Mahal, Baker found “a buoyancy about him that lately had been missing.” “Bobby,” he said, “I’ve been thinking about where I can do Jack Kennedy the most good. And it’s right here on this Hill. All those Bostons and Harvards don’t know any more about Capitol Hill than an old maid does about fucking. I’m gonna keep this office, and help Mike Mansfield and Bob Kerr and Hubert Humphrey pass the Kennedy program. It’s gonna be just the way it was! You can keep on helping me like you’ve always done.… Bobby, I’m working it out.”

  And, in fact, had Johnson’s plan succeeded, in many ways it would indeed have been “just the way it was.” In several conversations during this period, he also mentioned, seemingly casually, that he planned to “sit in” on meetings of the Democratic Policy and Steering Committees. These committees—the first, known for years as “Johnson’s rubber stamp,” exercised considerable control over the fate of legislation Democratic senators wanted passed; the second had absolute control over the committee assignments crucial to senators’ careers—had been keys to his domination of his party’s senators; most of
their members had been his allies, long accustomed to accede to his wishes; that was why they were on the committees. He had always been able to count on them to do his bidding and evidently felt they would continue to do so. Had his plan succeeded, although he would no longer be Majority Leader in name, both of these key instruments through which he had controlled the Senate would still be in his hands, not in those of the “amenable” Mansfield. “He was going to be vice president and Majority Leader,” Ken O’Donnell says. And if he was—if the Vice President was also the leader of the Senate majority—the Vice President would possess a source of power totally outside the executive branch, power separate from, and independent of, the President. Kennedy would not be able to deal with him as if he was merely a subordinate. Johnson had told Baker that he was keeping the caucus leadership to “help Jack Kennedy’s program.” But what if he opposed some aspect of that program, this leader with a firm control of the Senate? His opposition might have behind it an institution that, as he had already demonstrated, could be quite successful in opposing a President.

  However, Johnson’s belief that his plan would be accepted was only another example of how his loss of confidence had eroded his gift. Certain though he was that it would succeed, it never really had much of a chance. When Baker heard it, he was to recall, “I was both astonished and horrified. If anyone knew the United States Senate, its proud members and its proud traditions, it was Lyndon B. Johnson. Surely he knew that the prerogatives of membership were jealously guarded, that no member of the Executive Branch—even a Lyndon Johnson—would be welcomed in.”