The Passage of Power

by Robert A. Caro

  And all day the President hammered home, over and over again, the theme he wanted emphasized, the phrase that would make it politically untenable for Republicans to keep opposing the petition. “We’ve just got to [get] the party of Lincoln on that goddamned spot and keep them there, and carry it right on through the election,” he told O’Brien. “If they’re anti-civil rights, let’s find out about it right now.… We’ll play it for keeps.”

  By the end of Wednesday, in fact, it was over. Despite the headlines, it wasn’t Wednesday morning’s Republican conference with its defiant anti-petition stance that was decisive but a quiet meeting Wednesday evening, mostly unreported at the time, between Clarence Brown of Ohio, the pro–civil rights Republican who was the GOP’s ranking member on the Rules Committee, and the committee’s chairman.

  Brown told Judge Smith, as a later account puts it, that “the heat was getting so great” that Republicans—by neither signing the petition nor voting against Smith in committee, thereby in effect supporting him—were being put in an embarrassing and politically untenable position. “Appealing to their friendship, Brown said he did not want to have to push him, but something had to be done.” Whether or not Brown made a specific threat, he didn’t have to, so clear was the situation. Two Republican votes could overrule Smith within his own committee and have the committee release the bill to the floor. Or enough Republican signatures could be added to the discharge petition so that it would have the necessary 218. Either course would be a public repudiation of Smith’s authority. Smith agreed to issue a statement, which he did early Thursday morning.

  This statement was somewhat different from earlier ones by the judge. Smith did not repeat that he had “no plans” for setting a date for hearings on the civil rights bill, and no estimate as to how long the hearings might last. Now the judge said he did have plans: to begin the hearings “reasonably soon” in January “after Congress reconvenes.” The statement was allowed to be vague—to permit Smith to save as much face as possible—but the details of Smith’s surrender were clarified by Brown, in a statement reinforced by Halleck. By “reasonably soon,” Brown explained, the chairman had meant that he would begin the hearings in “early January”—it would soon become known that a firm date, January 9, had in fact been set—and that in fact they would run only from seven to ten days, in no event more than twelve. That meant the hearings would be over not in March, but in January. And Halleck said that at their conclusion, the five Republicans on Smith’s committee would all promptly vote to send the bill to the floor—where it would be passed by the full House “by the end of January at the latest.”

  The press viewed the statements as merely a compromise. One of the few reporters who understood was the Times’ Lewis, who noted that “it was a compromise that gave the President all he could reasonably have hoped for.… Johnson ‘compromises’ often have that character.” While Johnson wouldn’t have House passage of the bill in 1963, he would have it early enough in 1964 so that the scenario he had feared—the scenario that had in fact been unfolding until he stepped in (“they’ll have hearings in the Rules Committee until about the middle of March,” and by the time there was a House vote after that, and the bill finally reached the Senate, “Dick Russell … will screw them to death”)—that scenario had been avoided. The “real problem” was still going to be in the Senate, but now there was going to be additional time, perhaps two months’ additional time, to solve it. House observers who knew the judge knew why he had accepted the compromise—because by accepting it he had “spared himself the possible indignity of being relieved of responsibility for the bill,” as the Times reported—and knew that he had been forced to accept it by the sudden new pressure behind the discharge petition from the White House. The civil rights bill was still going to face monumental difficulties when it reached the Senate in 1964, commented Newsweek, one of the few periodicals to grasp the situation, “but by then Mr. Johnson will have [given it] quite a head start.”

  JOHNSON’S STRATEGY WOULD WORK, of course, only if Smith didn’t renege—start to delay again—when January arrived. The best way to ensure against that was to have the discharge petition still active—still on the floor, with a substantial number of signatures attached to it so that if delays began again, enough could quickly be added to pass it.

  The petition was filed as scheduled on December 9. It was actually filed not by Bolling but by Judiciary Committee chairman Emanuel Celler, because of Bolling’s unpopularity with the leaders, and because it was Celler’s prerogative, as chairman of the committee that had passed the bill, to introduce it. But since Smith had agreed to a date for the hearings, many House members who had previously agreed to sign the petition were now unwilling to do so as long as Smith held to the schedule.

  “Larry? Larry? How’s that petition going?” Johnson asked O’Brien, who was on Capitol Hill monitoring its progress, that afternoon. There were only about one hundred signatures on it, O’Brien replied. “That’s not as good as it should be.” “No, it’s not,” Johnson said.

  He put Jenkins to work applying pressure to wavering members of the Texas delegation, and four in addition to Albert Thomas’ six signed before the day was over, but the total number at the end of the day was only 131. The number was small, however, because only a mere twenty-four Republicans had signed, and Clarence Brown had let Smith know that many more had agreed to sign in January, if the judge tried to delay then, so the number was high enough. “They’ll sign it after the first of the year if he drags,” Albert said. “We can get 218 members if he drags too long.” And Smith knew it. The judge had confessed to Albert that many “members have been … threatening to sign” in January. It was too late for him to renege.

  Thursday, December 5, the day Smith had surrendered, was also the day of Lyndon Johnson’s lunch with Harry Byrd, the lunch at which the mood around the tax bill had started changing, so the lead headlines the next day, December 6, were not only ACTION IN JANUARY PLEDGED ON RIGHTS but also PRESIDENT WINS PLEDGE BY BYRD FOR TAX ACTION—headlines of triumph for Lyndon Johnson. Barely two weeks before, when he had become President, the two most important bills before Congress had been stalled, as they had been stalled for months, with no realistic sign of movement in any foreseeable future. Now, just two weeks into his presidency, both bills were moving.

  They seemed to be moving, furthermore, in the order he wanted—the order this master of parliamentary strategy saw as crucial. If the tax bill wasn’t cleared away—wasn’t passed by the Senate—before the civil rights bill arrived on the floor, it would be used to delay and kill civil rights; the two bills would, in fact, be held hostage to each other, resulting, in all probability, in the death of both. Despite the tough conditions Byrd had set at their lunch, however, the senator had said that if they were met, he would bring his tax bill hearings to an expeditious end, and if he approved the galley proofs of the budget that would be ready for his perusal during the first week in January, he would release the tax bill to the Senate floor, where it could be passed not long thereafter. Since, under the schedule Brown and Halleck had announced, the civil rights bill would still be in hearings before Judge Smith’s Rules Committee until mid-or late January, and then “by the end of January” it would be passed by the full House and sent to the Senate, if Byrd’s schedule was adhered to, the tax bill would be passed—cleared from the Senate floor—before the civil rights bill arrived there from the House. “They’d like to get it behind civil rights,” Johnson knew, and if it gets behind civil rights, “it’s Good night, Grace.” Good night for the tax bill, good night for the civil rights bill. Now, it seemed, he had made sure the tax bill wouldn’t get behind civil rights, that it would be “down in the storm cellar” in time. Other Administration “children”—the appropriations bills, the education bill, the foreign aid bill—were also finally moving on through the line, and would be down in the storm cellar when civil rights arrived. And now, thanks to the discharge petition, civil rights would arr
ive.

  ON ONE OF THE DAYS of that crucial, hectic, tension-filled week—the exact day is uncertain—Life magazine sent a photographer and a reporter to the Oval Office for a cover story that would run in the next week’s edition.

  The article was not the investigative article on Lyndon Johnson’s money or on Bobby Baker and Don Reynolds that, had it not been for the assassination, might have been the magazine’s cover story that week, but rather on the mastery Lyndon Johnson had demonstrated in taking over the presidency. The picture on the cover would be of him standing behind his desk in the Oval Office, leaning over it and resting his weight on his big hands, looking tall and strong in a dark blue suit with the two flags behind him, a picture that fit the headline over the article: TEXAN SITS TALL IN A NEW SADDLE.

  The reporter was John Steele, who, having covered Johnson for many years, understood the significance of a small gesture Johnson made during the interview. On Johnson’s desk was an in-box. Steele had seen that box in Johnson’s vice presidential office, when there had been few documents in it—when, perhaps, it had been empty. Now it was filled, with documents that had to be dealt with, problems that had to be solved, decisions that had to be made. As Johnson was talking to him, Steele was to write, “Almost lovingly, he thumbed slowly through” its “jammed contents.”

  Steele had filed thousands of words on Lyndon Johnson over the years, but he felt the man he was seeing now was a man he had never seen before. “There is in Lyndon Johnson an inner calm, a certainty of purpose,” he wrote. “The small vanities, the occasional petulance, the inordinate preoccupation with what men say or write about him are gone, at least for the present. There is about him now an aura of fulfillment which in all his prior years of public office never marked the man.”

  ON THE SATURDAY of that week—December 7—the Johnsons moved into the White House.

  Lady Bird had insisted that Jackie and her children not be hurried out, but she had begun making plans for the move, on November 26, the day after President Kennedy’s funeral, asking the man in charge of the internal administration of the White House—Chief Usher J. B. West—to come to The Elms. When West told her that Jackie would be taking only the furniture from her own bedroom and her children’s, she said she would bring only the furniture from her own bedroom, and Lucy and Lynda’s. She didn’t want to alter the rooms Jackie had restored, she said. (“I especially love the Yellow Oval Room upstairs.… It’s my husband’s favorite color,” she told West.) He quickly discovered, as he was to say, that “there was nothing tentative about Claudia Alta Taylor Johnson.” Looking at him “intently,” he was to say, she “emphasized, ‘I want you to run the White House.’

  “I’ve been running a house for thirty years, and I want to devote my time to other things,” she said. She was highly organized, he realized, and had very clear ideas. “I like working in a room with one door so I can control my privacy,” she said.

  Jackie had moved out with her children, to a house in Georgetown made available to her by Averell Harriman, on the morning of the 7th, and Lyndon Johnson wanted to move in that afternoon. Feeling that December 7, a date with the aura of infamy about it, was not the best possible day for the move, Lady Bird had tried to persuade her husband of that, and thought for a time that she had done so. “I think we’ll probably wait until after Pearl Harbor Day,” she told West. In the event, however, her wishes had received the consideration they usually received. On the morning of the 7th, moving vans began pulling in to the driveway of The Elms, and at three o’clock, two cars pulled up to the White House, Lucy’s white convertible, from which she emerged with the Johnsons’ two beagles, Him and Her, on a leash, and a black White House limousine. (Lynda Bird had returned to the University of Texas in Austin.) When Mrs. Johnson stepped out of the second car, she was carrying only one possession: the large, framed photograph of the man with the grim face. “I had our favorite picture of the Speaker, Mr. Sam Rayburn, in my hand,” she was to write in her diary. “His is the only photograph of a person that we keep in our living room wherever we are, and I wanted it with us at the White House.”

  West escorted Mrs. Johnson and Lucy up to the private, second-floor family quarters, where Lady Bird found a small vase of flowers from Jackie, and a note: “I wish you a happy arrival in your new house, Lady Bird—Remember—you will be happy here. Love, Jackie.” He showed Lucy her bedroom. A telephone was on the nightstand next to the bed, and she asked him, “Does this telephone go just to my room or does it go anywhere else?” When he explained that it was connected only to the White House switchboard and not to any telephone on the second floor, she said, “Oh, good! In our house all our extensions were connected, and my daddy was always listening in on me.”

  Lucy’s father was not as pleased with his new quarters. Two days after the Johnsons moved in, he told West, “Mr. West, if you can’t get that shower of mine fixed, I’m going to have to move back to The Elms.”

  “He didn’t sound as if he were joking,” West was to say. And after the President explained that the water pressure was inadequate, and that he wanted the same elaborate, multi-nozzle arrangement that he had had at his former home, he repeated his threat to move out. Then, “without a smile, he turned on his heel and walked away.”

  A few minutes later, Mrs. Johnson asked West to come by the room she had chosen for her office, a small sitting room with one door. “I guess you’ve been told about the shower,” she said, with a smile, and repeated to West what she said to all Johnson employees. “Anything that … needs to be done, remember this: my husband comes first, the girls second, and I will be satisfied with what’s left.”

  As he became acquainted with the Johnsons, West was to write, “I soon could see that had been her life’s pattern.” Nothing, he came to see, could “faze her.”

  UNEXPECTEDLY, KARL MUNDT’S wheat amendment reared its head again. Despite Johnson’s belief that he had “murdered” the bill, as it turned out, the death certificate bore only the Senate’s signature. On December 16 the amendment was resurrected in the House, which passed it as an amendment to the foreign aid appropriations bill, and then refused to accept a conference committee report in which the Senate conferees tried to delete it. “Congress seemed ready to resume its rebellion against presidential authority,” as Evans and Novak put it. Speaker McCormack again advised Johnson to let the whole foreign aid issue go over until January: for one thing, many House members had already left for the Christmas recess.

  The advice wasn’t accepted. Reminding his staff that the issue was not wheat but power—that the House as well as the Senate had to be shown who was in charge—Johnson worked on members of the conference committee, “demanding of Congress,” Evans and Novak said, “what Congress had made clear it would not give,” and on December 21 the conferees agreed on a foreign aid bill with no Mundt amendment in it. Then he ordered McCormack and the other Democratic leaders to call every Democratic congressman back to Washington for another vote in the House. When the leaders protested that the members wouldn’t come, he wouldn’t listen. Those who returned he invited to a December 23 Christmas party at the White House, at which he climbed up on a small gilt chair, and shouted, “You have labored through the vineyard and plowed through the snow.” And on December 24, in a session held—“perhaps for the first time in history”—at 7 a.m. so that congressmen could get home for Christmas Eve, the House reversed itself, and on a party-line vote (189 to 158, with the 189 including only two Republicans), finally killed the Mundt amendment for good. The earlier victory had had to be revisited—it had been. He had won again—an even more impressive victory than before. He knew exactly what he had won. “At that moment,” he was to write in his memoirs, “the power of the federal government began flowing back to the White House.” His assessment was echoed by congressmen and by observers of Congress, one of whom said that if Johnson “had dodged this one,” he might have been viewed on Capitol Hill as just another weak President, but by instead showing “steel
y nerve” in demanding the members’ return, he had taught them once and for all that “a strong hand was at the wheel.”

  Two hours after the vote was counted, Air Force One was in the air, carrying him back to Texas, where he would spend thirteen days on his ranch over Christmas and New Year’s.

  *

  1 For an example of him rallying, see Master of the Senate, pp. 970–75.

  2 The one-on-one meetings had already begun, in a meeting with Wilkins, the dean of the group, on the Friday—November 29—of Thanksgiving weekend, and, on Monday, the day of his conversation with Bolling, with Whitney Young. Before the week was out, he would also meet with King, Randolph and Farmer.

  21

  Serenity

  FROM BERGSTROM AIR FORCE BASE, outside Austin, three big olive-green Army helicopters lifted off and wheeled west. Down to the right, as Lyndon Johnson sat in the front seat of the first helicopter beside the pilot, was the pink granite dome of the State Capitol, in which as a boy he had stood, as content, perhaps, as he was ever to be, in the rear of the House of Representatives chamber while his father had had a seat there, and in which his father, after a while, no longer had had a seat, and near the capitol was Austin’s other dominant building, the University of Texas Tower, centerpiece of the college he hadn’t been able to attend because he had had to go to the “poor boys’ school.” And then, almost immediately, the helicopters were over hills; the passengers could see over the first ridges, over the ones behind them, could see the hills rolling away to the west as far as the eye could see, and Lyndon Johnson was, the moment the hills began, back in the landscape of his youth.