The Passage of Power

by Robert A. Caro

  And it wasn’t moving.

  MAKING OTHER CALLS that weekend, Johnson checked up on the most recent attempts to accelerate the tax bill’s progress through the Finance Committee.

  They hadn’t succeeded. “If we don’t have [Harry] Byrd” there was little hope of their succeeding, as Smathers told him on Saturday, November 30—“We’d need Harry Byrd.” They didn’t have Harry Byrd. The South was using the strategy that had worked for years. And it was working again. “To get the tax bill marked up it would be a miracle,” Smathers said. Smathers was talking about a markup before Christmas, but an equally unequivocal statement about the Finance Committee situation made some years later by the committee’s ranking majority member, second in power to Byrd, Russell Long of Louisiana, dealt with a longer time frame. “I couldn’t move the bill out of committee,” Long said. “He [Byrd] wasn’t going to permit the bill to pass.”

  “Go around Harry Byrd?” Nobody was going to go around Harry Byrd. Even some of Kennedy’s people had finally gotten the idea. “It was stalled.… The tax cut was stalled when Lyndon Johnson became President,” Kennedy Budget director Kermit Gordon was to say. “Stalled completely,” says Russell Long, the committee member with whom Kennedy’s aides were working closely. The “two Virginians”—Byrd and Judge Smith—backed by the power of the Southern Caucus and directed by a master legislative strategist “had been thwarting Presidents almost, it seems, since time began,” Richard Rovere wrote that November. It seemed clear that they would be able to do it again.

  ONE SENATOR DID NOT share those feelings. “Smarter than they are” though Richard Russell may have been—smarter than his opponents in the Senate—it was not other senators who were Russell’s real opponent now, but the new President, and Russell felt that fact would change everything. The Kennedy bills would be passed now, Russell told a friend. “He’ll pass them, whereas Kennedy could never have passed them.”

  Lyndon Johnson, Russell felt, would even pass the bill against which Russell had been fighting, and winning, for thirty years. Discussing agricultural appropriations with Orville Freeman a few days after the assassination, Russell changed the subject and began talking about Lyndon Johnson. “He said that Lyndon Johnson was the most amazingly resourceful fellow, that he was a man who really understood power and how to use it,” Freeman recalls. And then, Freeman recalls, Russell said, “That man will twist your arm off at the shoulder and beat your head in with it.”

  “You know,” Russell said, “we could have beaten John Kennedy on civil rights, but not Lyndon Johnson.” There was a pause. A man was perhaps contemplating the end of a way of life he cherished. He was perhaps contemplating the fact that he had played a large role—perhaps the largest role—in raising to power the man who was going to end that way of life. But when, a moment later, Richard Russell spoke again, it was only to repeat the remark. “We could have beaten Kennedy on civil rights, but we can’t Lyndon.”

  *

  1 This discussion of presidential-congressional relations is adapted, sometimes with direct quotes, from Master of the Senate.

  2 The brilliant legislative maneuvers by which Johnson won the minimum-wage increase are described in Master of the Senate, pages 609–12.

  3 For a more detailed discussion of Russell’s 1949 victory over civil rights, see Master of the Senate, pp. 215–18, from which this summary is adapted.

  19

  “Old Harry”

  SHORT AND SLIGHT, seventy-six-year-old Harry Flood Byrd walked softly (in recent years, as he grew older, in scuffed crepe-soled shoes and often with a cane), with a pigeon-toed, mincing gait, and talked softly, in a voice so whispery that his speeches could barely be heard in the high-ceilinged Senate Chamber in which he had sat for three decades. His manner, unvaryingly formal, with a graciousness that a friend described as “almost archaically elaborate,” was mild and diffident, almost meek. His face, round, remarkably boyish, and very ruddy—since he owned the world’s largest privately held apple orchards, generations of journalists had been unable to resist describing him as an “apple-cheeked apple-grower”—almost always bore a small but pleasant and friendly smile, and above the red cheeks shone a pair of blue eyes so bright they were continually being described as “twinkling.” It might have been the face of a benevolent if aging cherub—if behind those twinkling eyes there had not been hatreds, hatreds so intense that sometimes they broke through the courtly façade; once, unable to restrain his rage when he saw NAACP President Roy Wilkins and lobbyist Clarence Mitchell, both black men, sitting in the gallery, he shook his fist at them, and in a voice quite loud enough to be heard throughout the Chamber, insulted them by likening them to Goldy and Dusty, the fictitious black twins whose ignorance and laziness enlivened a weekly radio comedy, shouting, “There they are—the Gold Dust twins!” His other hatred, an abhorrence of deficits, of big government and big government spending, was scarcely less intense; a biographer wrote of “his extreme obsessive hatred of debt, his dogged fixation on economy.” Looking over the dollar numbers attached to some proposed new government program, he would jab his fingers into the offending figures; his voice would generally remain soft and courtly at such moments, but the red face would grow redder still. It might have been the face of an aging cherub had it not been for the way Harry Byrd—the man his Senate colleagues fondly called “Old Harry” or “Old Man Harry”—wielded power in the two domains over which he ruled: his state and the Senate Finance Committee.

  “The name Byrd has been written across all the pages of Virginia’s history” since William Byrd I sailed up the James River in 1674 to found what became, with the help of generations of slaves, a vast tobacco plantation, one chronicler wrote; among the other Byrds in the fourteen generations that followed were a captain in George Washington’s army, a colonel in Robert E. Lee’s, and a speaker of the Virginia General Assembly; as Richard Russell was a Russell of the Russells of Georgia, Harry Byrd was a Byrd of the Byrds of Virginia. And since becoming governor in 1926, he had written his own pages in that history, with a statewide political machine known simply as “the Organization.” “The Byrd Machine is genteel,” the liberal Reporter magazine had to admit. “There are no gallus-snapping or banjo-playing characters in Virginia politics.” Its hallmark was courtliness, not the demagoguery prevalent in other southern states. “Virginia breeds no Huey Longs or Talmadges,” John Gunther wrote in Inside U.S.A. “The Byrd Machine is the most urbane and genteel dictatorship in America.” But a dictatorship it was. Candidates for office—almost any office, from state legislator down to local school board trustee—would, if the senator approved of them, receive an endorsement known as the “nod.” Without the Byrd nod, it was all but impossible to win an election in Virginia. The state’s last nine governors had all received the nod. As had, of course, Howard Smith of the House Rules Committee. And candidates who tried to win without it encountered tactics that had earned the Organization a different nickname: “the Steamroller.” The Organization (or Steamroller) “runs the commonwealth as effectively as Prendergast ever ran Kansas City … though with much less noise,” Gunther observed. “Because of its control over practically every office, no matter how minor, it is quite possibly the single most powerful machine surviving in the whole United States.” Gunther had written that in 1947. Times might change—had changed, in some respects, since 1947. Virginia’s demographic makeup had become dramatically more urban and African-American as the District of Columbia’s suburbs spread into the state. But in 1963, the Organization, unchanged, was as powerful as ever. Voting by the newcomers hadn’t altered the pattern of politics in the state, because, in general, the newcomers couldn’t vote. Virginia’s efficiency—Byrd’s efficiency—in the use of the poll tax to restrict voting by the black people he hated was a model for the tactic. In the state’s last gubernatorial election, in 1961, only 17 percent of Virginia’s voting-age population had cast ballots. A very wealthy man, Harry Byrd lived in a colonnaded mansion, Rosemont, that, a
s one writer admiringly put it, “surmounts the nearby town of Berryville like a manor house over an English village,” like “the seat of an all-powerful country squire.” And that was still, well into his fourth decade of power, the way Harry Byrd—courtly, gracious, mild mannered—towered over Virginia politics. “The apparent invincibility of the organization makes it seem useless for the dissatisfied to oppose it,” the Reporter said.

  In his committee—“Senate Finance,” as it was known on Capitol Hill—the same was true. No chairman could have been more considerate, more polite, to the committee members. Members were given all the time they required to be heard in committee sessions; these were senators, Old Harry would say; they shouldn’t be cut off. The sincerity of his beliefs combined with the courtesy with which he fought for them won him the respect, and indeed affection, of opponents, even of Paul Douglas, not only a fervent liberal—the most liberal member of Byrd’s committee—but an economist by training, the author of influential books espousing liberal economic policy. “He hated public debt with a holy passion,” Douglas was to write of Byrd. “With little or no sympathy for poor people, and instinctively on the side of the rich and powerful, of whom he was one, he nevertheless had a certain rugged personal honesty and a genial air of courtesy toward his opponents, except when severely pressed.… I developed a real respect for him.”

  While he ran the committee graciously, however, he ran it unyieldingly. “He had a habit of slapping” a fellow senator on the back and laughing, “as if they were both enjoying a good joke,” while he was denying a request, recalls the Republican committee member Norris Cotton of New Hampshire, and he did it when Cotton asked him for a hearing on a bill he had introduced. “He continued to pat me on the shoulder, and to laugh, but he said, ‘Sorry, boy, you can’t have a hearing on it.’ ” Cotton repeated the request several times, saying it would be embarrassing for him to have to tell constituents he couldn’t get “even a hearing,” but Byrd simply repeated the refusal each time. “Then, with a final hearty laugh and slap on the back, he ushered me out.”

  His economic philosophy was a businessman’s philosophy. No one ever called him a reader or a particularly deep thinker, or even a man with more than a surface understanding of the field—the fiscal and tax policy of the United States—in which Senate Finance played so significant a role. He was, he often said, “blind to charts,” on which economists rely so heavily. He couldn’t understand them, he said; as a member of his committee was to recall, “he said … if you wanted to convince him you had to present it so he could understand it, and he could understand a column of figures.” The figure that was important to him was the bottom line: one that showed a profit, or, in the case of government, a surplus, not a deficit. The “deceptively apple-cheeked apple-grower” had a “frank pleasure in the arts of business,” the Saturday Evening Post noted; government, he believed, must be run like one, with debt kept to a minimum and the federal budget as firmly balanced as the ledgers of a successful corporation.

  And if Harry Byrd’s story was a businessman’s story, it was the story of a very tough, and very shrewd, businessman. In 1902, his father, having lost what remained of the Byrd money, all but bankrupt and about to lose the local newspaper that was the last thing he owned, agreed to turn it over to fifteen-year-old Harry, who dropped out of school—he was to have no further formal education. He struggled for ten years to make the newspaper succeed under the load of debt that had been placed on it; since its credit had been cut off, he had to raise six dollars a day in nickels, dimes and quarters to pay, cash on delivery, for the newsprint on which the next day’s paper would be printed. “When you have to hunt for them that way, you get to know how many cents there really are in a dollar,” he was to say.

  With the newspaper at last in the black, he turned to apples, first spraying orchards, then leasing them, saving every penny so he could begin buying them, working endless hours year after year, until his orchards, which produced a million bushels a year, stretched for miles across the Shenandoah Valley. Only then did he go into politics, running for governor.

  Feeling, as a friend wrote, that “debt had robbed him of his youth and education,” the “characteristic that distinguished him above anything else [was]” that “extreme obsessive hatred of debt,” his “fixation” on frugality. The words he used on the subject had an almost religious intensity. “Improvident political promises and programs are sinful,” he said once. “They are perpetrated on innocent citizens by demagogues.” He said that “The American dollar is the only thing today that is holding the world together,” and “Once the American dollar goes down, we will go into an age of international darkness.” The role he could play in defending economy in government, in balancing the budget, was, to him, another friend said, “almost a sacred duty.”

  He “would have no truck with Keynesian theories,” recalls Douglas Dillon, who as secretary of the Treasury dealt with the senator more frequently than any other member of the Kennedy Administration. Franklin Roosevelt had been all right for a while, Byrd was to say; the two governors had become personal friends; he had been an early supporter, the finance chairman, in fact, for FDR’s first presidential campaign; “then this fellow Keynes got ahold of him.” He liked to boast that “I am the only man left in the Senate who voted against the Wagner Act and the TVA.” When President Kennedy, arguing that tax cuts would stimulate the economy and that the concept of a balanced budget was an outdated and “misleading … mythology,” called, in one of his typically eloquent speeches, for “new words, new phrases” in economic theory, Byrd had been moved to make a speech of his own—in the old words and phrases. The “illusions,” he said, were the ideas that budgets did not have to be balanced, that debt was not evil. No one who witnessed his frustration and genuine indignation at government’s indifference to the old verities could doubt their depth. Jabbing his finger at a sheet of statistics on his desk, one day in 1962, he said, “The civilian employment in government went up 35,000 in just the last month.” The red face turned redder with anger. Again and again the finger jabbed the paper. “Just think of that—35,000 in the last month.”

  BELIEVING THAT THE SIZE and cost of government should be reduced, that new government programs might be a menace to the American dollar, Byrd, Russell Long says, “measured his success as a senator not by what he passed, but what he stopped from passing.” And at the moment, when the issue before the Finance Committee was the Kennedy tax bill, he was being quite successful.

  His use of his powers as chairman—the virtually limitless powers of a chairman of one of the Senate’s fifteen great Standing Committees, powers that, as was explained in the last volume, were almost never overruled—was of course not confrontational. “Senator Byrd was a gentleman of the old school, essentially a country gentleman,” Dillon says. “Always most courteous in his relations with me and others.” When, back in February and March, Kennedy had asked the senator to begin Finance Committee hearings on the tax bill without waiting for the House to pass the measure, all he had done was to explain that doing that would violate Senate procedure. “The old man won’t begin [hearings on] the bill until it’s sent over [from the House],” one senator said. “He’s a stickler on this. Of course, one of the reasons for this is that he’s opposed to doing anything anyway.” When, in October, the hearings finally began, they moved very slowly, of course. Testimony thus far—in the hearings’ sixth week—had all been on general topics; the committee had not yet taken up any of the individual amendments submitted by committee members. There were going to be quite a few individual amendments. The chairman had let it be known that members could submit as many of these “special provisions important to them” as they wished. Thirty had been submitted already—and more were coming all the time. And the chairman had let it be known that he understood how important these special provisions were to their sponsors, and that members would be allowed ample time to discuss them. On some days, there were no hearings. (“He couldn’t
get a quorum, he said.”) To objections that Finance was hearing the same witnesses, and the same testimony, that the House had heard for months on end, Byrd said that senators had to have the opportunity to hear these views for themselves, had to be able to question witnesses themselves, had to have all the time they needed to express their own views on the testimony. He wouldn’t even consider cutting off a United States senator. In dealing with the President’s men, and with the President himself, he was unfailingly courteous, responding to each suggestion for speeding up the committee’s work with some new, technical reason why it couldn’t be speeded up, and unfailingly impossible to pin down. Doodling on a pad during one discussion, Kennedy had written: “Pillow fight in the dark with Harry Byrd.”

  Some of the Kennedy team did not seem to grasp the reality of what was happening. While describing Byrd’s control of his committee as “absolute” (“nothing could be done that he [Byrd] opposed”), Dillon also says that although Byrd did not work actively to pass the Kennedy tax reduction bills, “he did not oppose them”—a statement that indicates the same lack of understanding of Byrd’s tactics as the Treasury secretary had displayed about Byrd’s mild suggestion that he would like to see the budget come in under $100 billion. He “did not oppose them”—that was true; all he was doing was delaying them. A “sweet dear guy—loved him,” says the more realistic Russell Long, but “if he didn’t want something to happen it usually didn’t and vice versa.… Bills didn’t move until he decided they would move.”

  No challenge from within the seventeen-member committee could threaten him. The Democratic Steering Committee, which appointed Democratic senators to committees, was dominated by southerners, and made sure that there was always a comfortable majority among his party’s members of Finance of whose support Byrd could be certain; on the Republican side, the ranking member was Delaware’s Williams, a close personal friend of Byrd and a fellow rock-hard fiscal conservative, and in general all seven Republican committee members were conservatives and behind the chairman; in 1963, in the event of a challenge to his authority, Byrd could count on the seven Republican votes and, on the Democratic side, in addition to his own vote, of five of the nine other Democrats—in all, a comfortable majority indeed. And, of course, behind him also was the interlocking power of the southern chairmen, and of the chairmen who stood with the South; seldom was that power (and its consequence for a senator who opposed a chairman) expressed as bluntly as it was on one occasion to Illinois’ Douglas, who was opposing pork-barrel spending bills in several committees. He was informed that unless he stopped he would find “all public works projects for Illinois removed from” bills before Hayden’s Appropriations Committee. Bluntness was not usually required, however. A senator who opposed Harry Byrd would simply find that a bill he had introduced—perhaps a bill he urgently needed to satisfy constituents without whose support he could not be reelected—that was before Richard Russell’s Armed Services Committee, or A. Willis Robertson’s Banking Committee, or John McClellan’s Government Operations Committee, or James Eastland’s Judiciary Committee, or Allen Ellender’s Agriculture Committee, or Lister Hill’s Labor Committee, was simply not moving ahead within the committee process. He would eventually get the idea. Four Finance Democrats—Douglas, Gore, Hartke and Ribicoff—generally opposed Byrd. But they were four among seventeen.