The Passage of Power

by Robert A. Caro

  The creation of the laws most needed if America were to fulfill the ideals on which it had been founded had proven to be very difficult for Presidents—for a very long time.

  The stalemate between the White House and Capitol Hill had begun not a few years but a quarter of a century before, under not JFK but FDR, because it was Franklin Roosevelt who, in 1937, exuberant over his landslide reelection and with unprecedented Democratic majorities in Congress (seventy-six of the ninety-six senators, a fifty-six-seat plurality in the House), had attempted to pack the Supreme Court, and, in a titanic struggle with the Senate, had been defeated.

  The defeat had repercussions beyond the Court. For almost a century before Roosevelt, the Senate, with its unbreakable filibuster and its six-year terms—staggered, moreover, so that public opinion could never touch more than one-third of the body at any one election—had stood like a mighty dam, towering and impregnable, against social-reform legislation, no matter how strong the tide of public opinion the legislation might have behind it. During the first term of his presidency, not just during its first hundred days but during the almost four years thereafter, Roosevelt had broken through the dam, stripping Congress of its power. The Court-packing proposal had brought together in opposition Republicans and conservative Democratic senators, particularly from southern and border states—and Roosevelt had thereby inadvertently handed the Senate back its power. For four years, uneasy though those senators had been over the New Deal’s agenda of social reform, they had been awed by Roosevelt’s seemingly unchallengeable popularity into going along with it. Their victory over the President on Court-packing reminded Republicans and conservative Democrats of their strength if they stayed together, and made them realize also the similarity in their philosophies, uniting them against the New Deal, as an historian has written, “in a way they would have been completely incapable of achieving on their own.”

  Powerful in both houses of Congress, the new coalition was virtually invulnerable in the Senate, as Johnson had reminded his troika; Roosevelt’s 1938 “purge” campaign against southern Democratic senators had resulted in nothing but defeats for the President. Year by year thereafter, for a quarter of a century, the power of the southern Democrats grew. Congress gave Roosevelt a free hand in running the Second World War; in domestic affairs, on the other hand, he never got a single major social reform bill through Congress during the eight years of his presidency remaining after the Court fight.1

  The Fair Deal fared little better. Harry Truman’s program was a far-reaching attempt to alleviate social and economic injustices in a nation which, rich though it was, had left most of its citizens unprotected against the ravages of old age and unemployment; a nation in which an inexcusably high percentage of the population—not Roosevelt’s one-third of a nation, perhaps, but not much less—was still ill fed, ill clothed, and ill housed; a nation which denied to millions of its citizens, those whose skin was black, the most fundamental rights of citizens. After Capitol Hill gave Truman almost nothing of what he asked during the three and a half years in which he was filling out Roosevelt’s term, and he made the “Do-Nothing Congress” the issue in the 1948 election campaign, and won a stunning victory in his own right, the new Democratic majority in Congress and a rising public outcry against Jim Crow gave liberals confidence that the long-awaited day of social justice was at last at hand. It wasn’t. The election had changed nothing in the South; every southern senator who was up for reelection had won; in both House and Senate, key committee chairmanships, with their immense, all-but-unchallengeable authority, would still be held by southerners. The southern Democrat-Republican coalition was actually stronger than ever; the frustrated liberal senator Paul Douglas was to write of how it flaunted its power, “as when Harry F. Byrd and [Republican Leader] Robert A. Taft sat together on the floor checking the list of senators and sending out for the absent” or laying down the law to “the few recalcitrants.” When Truman left office four years later, his only victories in civil rights had been the limited ones—most notably desegregation of the armed forces—that he had obtained by executive orders which did not require Capitol Hill’s assent. As for the rest of his program, Congress had given him only a patch on the nation’s needs. His proposals for national health insurance, for expanded unemployment insurance, for reduced taxes for the poor, for the expansion of federal aid to education—every one of those proposals died on Capitol Hill. And even those few victories which Congress allowed him—a meagre increase in the minimum wage, a small expansion of Social Security—would, thanks to Congress, prove even less meaningful than they had first appeared. Housing was an example. In 1949, more than ten million American families were still living in houses and apartments that didn’t meet even the lowest standards for decent housing. Congress grudgingly enacted legislation authorizing construction of eight hundred thousand housing units, far fewer than Truman had asked for. But it didn’t appropriate funds for the eight hundred thousand units in 1949—or during the rest of his term. The appropriation bills Congress passed were, in fact, so small that by 1955, six years later, only three hundred thousand units had been built, not even enough to keep up with the increase in population. The number of Americans living in substandard housing was still over ten million. As for the minimum wage, one increase, Congress had apparently decided, was plenty. In 1955, it still stood at a pathetically inadequate seventy-five cents an hour. During two years of Truman’s term, the Senate was controlled by Republicans, but the identity of the party in power didn’t matter. It was the southern-conservative coalition that mattered—and the southern-conservative coalition held firm. Bills that passed the House dashed themselves against the Senate dam—and died.

  When during the 1950s the dam’s gates swung briefly open at last, it wasn’t the President, Dwight Eisenhower, who forced them open; the bolts were pulled back from within, by Lyndon Johnson, who as Senate Majority Leader from 1955 through 1960 not only won an increase in the minimum wage2 but extended its coverage to millions of workers who hadn’t been earning even that minimum, broke the housing impasse by raising appropriations to a level that would realize the goal set in the 1949 bill, and even accomplished what seemed impossible to accomplish: passage by the Senate of the first civil rights bill since Reconstruction.

  No sooner had Johnson left the Majority Leader’s desk than the gates swung shut again—more firmly than ever. While the stalemate hadn’t begun under Kennedy, it had grown worse under Kennedy. The sure touch the young President demonstrated on foreign affairs (a sure touch amounting to diplomatic genius in the Cuban Missile Crisis), the programs—the Peace Corps, the Alliance for Progress, the nuclear test ban treaty—which embodied an idealism that was the best of America, the mastery he showed on the podium and in press conferences, the ability he displayed there to inspire a nation and rally it to its better, most humane impulses, did not, during the three years of his presidency that was all he was allowed, carry over to the implementation of those ideals in domestic reforms, did not integrate into American life the ideals he so movingly enunciated.

  In 1961 and again in 1962, he had sent Congress health-care-reform legislation, including, most importantly, a proposal—“Medicare”—for health-care insurance for the elderly. The House Ways and Means Committee had not agreed until November, 1963, even to hold hearings on that proposal. In 1961 and again in 1962, he had sent Congress education legislation, to provide federal aid for college loans for students who otherwise couldn’t afford college, for vocational training, and for urgently needed classroom construction for elementary and secondary schools and colleges. The construction bills had finally passed the House and Senate in November, but in versions so different that it appeared likely that any version which reported out—if in fact any version was reported out—by the conference committee would fail of passage. The other education proposals were stalled completely.

  The few successes he had enjoyed in Congress—manpower-training legislation, a farm bill, increases in
Social Security benefits and the minimum wage—were exceptions, and relatively minor ones. In 1961, Congress had passed his Area Redevelopment Program to provide aid for depressed areas. The program had been hailed as a major achievement. In 1963, Congress was asked to authorize funds that would enable the program to continue. It declined to do so. And his record on other legislation was even bleaker. Bills to create a Youth Conservation Corps and other programs to combat juvenile delinquency, to create a Cabinet-level Department of Urban Affairs, to provide funds for urban mass transit, to preserve natural resources—not one of these had been passed. Civil rights was only one of the logs caught in the jam. The bill that, along with civil rights, he considered most important—the tax cut bill that, saying, “Nothing should stand in its way,” he had sent to Capitol Hill in January—was still lodged in Harry Byrd’s Senate Finance Committee, with endless amendments still to be disposed of, and even a committee quorum apparently difficult to obtain. Of his major domestic legislative proposals—Medicare, federal aid to education, the tax cuts, civil rights—nearly three years into the administration of John F. Kennedy, not one had become law. Nor, in November, 1963, had his request for $4.5 billion in foreign aid been passed: it had already been whittled down to $3.6 billion by the Senate, and the House was just waiting to get its hands on the measure and reduce it further. When Lyndon Johnson became President, the deadlock in Congress that the press called a “logjam” had, except for its breakup during his majority leadership, lasted for twenty-six years.

  DURING 1963, it wasn’t merely major legislation that had become caught in the jam. Appropriations bills, too, weren’t moving normally through the congressional machinery—hadn’t been moving normally for months.

  Each year, twelve appropriations measures had to be passed to pay the operating expenses of the government’s departments and agencies, for under the Constitution no government agency can spend any federal money unless it has been appropriated by Congress. Although these bills were nothing more than routine “housekeeping” measures that simply provided the funds necessary to carry out decisions already made by Congress to appropriate, for example, money for public works projects like dams, reclamation projects that Congress had already authorized, traditional congressional inefficiency had often kept a few appropriations bills for each fiscal year—the government’s fiscal year begins in the middle of the calendar year, on July 1, so the current bills were to pay expenses for the period July 1, 1963, through June 30, 1964—from being passed until late in each congressional session, sometimes at the very last minute before adjournment. Never, however, had so many of them not been passed this late. The twelve bills sent to Capitol Hill by the White House early in the year had been referred to each Chamber’s appropriations committees. Four had been passed by both houses, but in different forms, and, although there seemed to be no major points at issue, were tied up in conference committees. Four had been passed by the House but not by the Senate. As a result, with eight bills not passed, eight departments had been limping along for months under “continuing resolutions,” renewed and then re-renewed every month or so, which allowed them only to proceed with projects and programs already under way, but not to undertake any new ones, and which required them to hold their overall spending to the level of the previous fiscal year, and not spend at the higher levels that would have been authorized under Kennedy’s proposed more liberal 1964 fiscal year appropriations. For almost half of 1963, July 1 through November, therefore, spending had been held to the previous year’s level, and no new projects, not even ones that had been authorized by Congress, had been begun. The delay had already given conservatives a solid, measurable victory, by the measure that counted with them: a reduction in government spending, a lessening of the impact of the government they mistrusted. So long had the appropriations bills been delayed that even were they to be approved now, the eight departments would not have time to spend the money authorized in them: some $2 billion that would have been spent was, in effect, lost forever. “The longer these bills are delayed, the … less of a drain on the Treasury,” explained the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, Clarence Cannon of Missouri.

  What was happening in 1963 had gone beyond the traditional. Never in history had so much of the federal government remained unfunded so late in the year. The general slowdown on Capitol Hill had also reached new levels, observers said. “This Congress has gone further than any other within memory to replace debate and decision by delay and stultification,” Walter Lippmann wrote. Calling Congress “a scandal of drift and inefficiency,” Life pointed out that it has “sat longer than any peacetime Congress in memory” without producing needed legislation; “the least productive Congress in memory,” William Shannon called it. And there was no sign of the deadlock being broken. Education, health insurance, foreign aid, tax cut, civil rights bills—“everything” seemed “stalled, stalled completely” on Capitol Hill.

  ALTHOUGH A FEW LONGTIME congressional observers had, during the very last days of the Kennedy Administration, begun to glimpse a pattern—a strategy—behind the delays in congressional, particularly senatorial, action on a wide variety of legislation, the explanations offered by most Washington commentators, and by senators like Dodd and Clark, still focused on the familiar villains: congressional inefficiency caused by absenteeism, “archaic rules,” a seniority system which left the committee chairmanships in the hands of elderly men, or lack of leadership. If there was a unifying strategy behind the various delays, very few people were aware of it. But Lyndon Johnson, surveying the Capitol Hill battlefield for the first time as President, appears to have seen the pattern, and recognized it at a glance—as was understandable, since it was a strategy that during his very first months in the Senate, fourteen years before, he had helped carry out.

  Public outcry for civil rights—for an end to Jim Crow—had been rising in 1949, too, in the wake of Truman’s dramatic 1948 campaign, in which he had committed himself to that cause, and the Democratic recapture of Congress, which brought outspoken civil rights advocates like Paul Douglas and Hubert Humphrey to the Senate. Believers in social justice were confident that the Southern Caucus would no longer be able to stand in its way. Expressing a viewpoint found in many liberal journals after the election, the columnist Thomas L. Stokes wrote that “The President can get most of his program, and without so much compromise, if he constantly calls upon the great public support manifest for him in this election.”

  Richard Russell’s public stance was an admission that the odds against the South were long. “It is clear that the only thing we can do now is gird our loins and shout the cry of centuries: ‘The enemy comes: to our tents, O Israel!’ ” he said. Behind the Senate scenes, however, he wasn’t bewailing the odds but shortening them.3 He drew up a list of all federal laws that would expire during 1949 if they were not renewed by Congress to see, he quietly explained to his troops, “if there are any of them … that will build up a logjam … behind … the civil rights bills,” and found one in particular that the Administration could not afford to have delayed. Unless Congress extended federal rent-control laws—the only protection against exorbitant rents for millions of families in northern cities—they would expire on March 31. And then he simply delayed the progress of the bills that would have extended rent-control (and the other expiring laws), by having them held in Senate committees controlled by southerners or delayed at some other point in the Senate process, while on the floor his southern senators conducted a filibuster—not on the civil rights bill itself but on the motion to bring the civil rights bill to the floor. Should the South lose that battle, should cloture be imposed to end the filibuster on the motion, he would still have another line of defense, a filibuster against the bill itself, to fall back on.

  Falling back, however, would not be necessary. As February became March in 1949, editorialists thundered against the filibuster, and public demand for cloture rose, but somehow the votes for cloture were never there, and the foc
us was shifting to the bills that were soon to expire, and the Senate Majority Leader, Scott Lucas, calling the “logjam” in Senate business intolerable, warned that “rent control would go out the window” if civil rights was not withdrawn from the floor.

  Withdrawal would be surrender: the only senators who could withdraw the bill were the liberals who had introduced it. But many of the constituents of these senators lived in northern cities. If they didn’t withdraw civil rights—and rent control therefore expired—their constituents would be the ones who were hurt. The bill was withdrawn. The South had won—again. (The southern senators knew who deserved the credit. “With less than 25 percent of the membership of the Senate, the Southerners have won one of the most notable victories in our history,” Harry Byrd said. “The credit goes mainly, of course, to our great leader, Dick Russell.… I do not think that even Robert E. Lee …”)

  The newly elected Lyndon Johnson had been one of the senators who in 1949 sat around the oval table in Richard Russell’s office as that strategy was laid out, one of the soldiers who carried it out—one of the southern sentries stationed in relays on the Senate floor “to see,” in Russell’s instructions, “that no legislative trickery is employed to secure the passage of any of these bills” (“Relative to my ‘guard duty,’ I will do my best,” Johnson assured him), one of the speakers in the filibuster, the deliverer, on behalf of “We of the South,” of a major, thirty-five-page speech defending the right of unlimited debate that Russell called “one of the ablest I have ever heard on the subject,” and that moved southern senators to line up at Johnson’s desk to congratulate this fresh recruit to their cause.

  RECOGNIZING THE STRATEGY—to defeat a civil rights bill by holding other bills hostage until, to secure their release, the White House or liberal senators agreed to withdraw it—Johnson recognized something else: that if something were not done to counteract it, the strategy would succeed now, as it had succeeded not only in 1949 but at several other times in the past, because it enlisted on the side of Russell’s embattled southern minority in the Senate a reliable ally: time.