The Passage of Power

by Robert A. Caro

  And they did touch. Byrd’s reaction to the State of the Union speech—“I congratulate the President on his estimated reduction in federal expenditures and deficits. His references to cutting waste and extravagance have been impressive”—was all Johnson could have hoped.

  The White House press office had been alerted to look for it. As soon as it clattered over the wire service ticker, a press office secretary tore it off, showed it to Pierre Salinger, ran with it into the Oval Office, and the President telephoned the senator and said, “I appreciate [it] very much.”

  In that call, the chord of pride he had newly struck in Byrd was struck along with the old one, Byrd’s affection for him. “I’ve got to represent the whole country and do my best,” the President said. “We’re going to have some differences as we always do.… But I’ll tell you this.… One thing I’m going to try to do—I’m going to try to stop and arrest the spending and try to be as frugal as I can make them be.… You’re my inspiration for doing it. And I want to work with you. And I want you to advise me.… I want you to be proud that you supported me in 1960.”

  Byrd’s response showed how strongly the chords resonated in him. Johnson said he wanted him to be proud of him—and the older man assured him that he already was. “That was an eloquent speech you made,” he said. “You’ve made a good start,” he said. And, as almost immediately became apparent, he was going to help him. The very day after their telephone conversation, the Finance Committee, in what the New York Times called a “speed-up,” held an unusually long session, in which it defeated, often by a 9–8 vote, a number of amendments. By the next week, many journalists had noted that, as the Washington Post put it, “Byrd has been moving in high gear” in “what appeared to be a footrace with the Calendar.”

  “Harry started to regard the budget, well, almost as his budget—he had gotten it down,” Neil MacNeil says. “And because the tax reduction [bill] was so tied in with it [the budget], and he had done so much work on that bill—well, it was almost as if the tax bill had suddenly become his bill, too.”

  All Byrd’s help, and all his power, would be needed to get it passed. Developments that Johnson had not foreseen—a new line of attack orchestrated by Richard Russell and a series of last-minute amendments introduced in the Finance Committee by Republican Leader Everett Dirksen and other GOP committee members, as well as by some Democratic members, to exempt the products of industries in their states from the excise taxes in the tax bill—threatened to upset Johnson’s timetable: with Finance suddenly faced with more work than had been anticipated, and House Rules moving faster than had been anticipated, there was suddenly, thanks to Russell’s maneuvers, the danger that Rules might complete its work before Finance, and send the civil rights bill to the Senate floor before the tax bill arrived there; there was suddenly, again, the possibility that the tax bill might get behind civil rights, that it would be “good night, Grace.” But all that January the chords were played, in telephone calls in which Johnson used the tone he had used years before, as a young senator, when he had sat at Harry Byrd’s knee, and pride and affection overcame even the fear of what might happen if black children and white children rode in school buses together. Harry Byrd no longer wanted the tax bill—his tax bill, now, in his mind—behind civil rights; he wanted his bill passed. He became, in Evans and Novak’s phrase, “Johnson’s secret ally”—and a very effective one. On Thursday morning, January 23, as the committee was about to complete its work, there was almost a derailment. Without warning, Dirksen suddenly introduced yet another new amendment, to repeal excise taxes on luxury goods such as jewelry and expensive handbags and luggage, and it was approved, 12 to 5. A “stunned” Treasury Department estimated that the amendment would cost the government $450 million—almost half a billion dollars—in tax revenue each year.

  That vote broke the dam. Three Democratic committee members—Clinton Anderson of New Mexico, Vance Hartke of Indiana and Abraham Ribicoff of Connecticut—who had, in the interest of getting a bill passed, agreed to withdraw excise tax amendments that would benefit industries in their states immediately decided to resubmit them. Each amendment would have to be debated individually within the committee, and the debates, as senators fought for constituencies in their states important to them, might be long ones. And there remained the other amendments that had not been taken up by the committee: their sponsors might now want them debated individually as well.

  JOHNSON LEARNED of these developments at thirty-four minutes past noon on the 23rd, in a panicky phone call from George Smathers, who told him that the previous agreement to get the tax bill out fast had fallen apart. “The goddamned thing came unglued,” he said, and he didn’t think there was anything that could be done about it in the committee. “I don’t think there’s anything we can do except … just take it [accept Dirksen’s amendment] as it is.”

  Taking it as it was, however, would mean that all the careful balancing of the budget would be undone, and the careful scheduling to ensure the tax bill arrival on the Senate floor before civil rights might be undone, too. But Smathers was talking to the master of the Senate. Long before he was finished explaining that the problem was unsolvable, Johnson had thought of a way—possibly the only way—to solve it.

  His solution would require two far-from-routine rulings from the committee chairman, rulings that would in fact fly in the face of the committee’s vote that morning: first, that the Dirksen amendment could be brought back that afternoon and voted on again; and, second, that it be brought back by a motion that lumped in with it all remaining amendments before the committee, even those that had not yet been debated, so that a single vote by the committee—a vote to defeat the Dirksen amendment—would be a vote to defeat all the remaining amendments as well, thereby concluding the committee’s work on the tax cut bill and removing the last obstacle to its release to the Senate floor. And since only five committee members had voted against the amendment before, Johnson’s solution would require also that the three rebellious Democratic senators be persuaded not only to withdraw their amendments, but to reverse their vote on the Dirksen amendment, and this time vote to defeat it. Even their three votes would not provide the nine necessary to defeat it; not only Byrd’s ruling to allow the motion but his vote against the amendment, a fourth vote that would be reversed, would be essential; it was going to be another “9–8 thing.”

  “I think we just got to go right on with the bill,” Smathers said, but Johnson refused to accept that. “Can’t you redo it in the committee?” he demanded. “Can’t you repeal what you did in the committee? Can’t you put those votes together?”

  “I don’t think so,” Smathers said. “I just don’t see how.”

  “That’s what I’d try to do,” Lyndon Johnson said.

  There was little time to do it. He hung up the phone with Smathers at 12:42. The Finance Committee was scheduled to reconvene at two o’clock. He told Colonel Roberts to get the three Democratic senators on the phone.

  Luckily, Anderson and Hartke had been in the Senate while Johnson was Leader. They knew that Lyndon Johnson was a bad man to cross but could be a good man to have on your side. And they—and Ribicoff—knew that a President had a lot of ways to help or hurt a senator. The persuasion went fast. Agreeing to withdraw his amendment, Anderson said Ribicoff would never withdraw his—“He won’t do it! He won’t go with anybody.”

  “If you go with us … I’ll appreciate it and I’ll remember it,” Johnson told Ribicoff. He had put Ribicoff on Finance, he told him. “When you wanted to go on that committee, I just stood up and said, ‘By God, it’s going to be.’ Now I just want one vote [one motion], and I want to get that bill out of there, and I’ve got to have it, Abe.” Ribicoff said that his amendment “is for something in my home state that’s already been announced” and that he had “a problem with saving [face]” with his constituency. “I’ll save your face,” Johnson said. “You save my face this afternoon, and I’ll save your face tomorrow.”
“Okay, Mr. President,” was the reply. When Hartke said he needed to have a separate vote on his amendment because it was vital to a company in Indiana, Johnson said he couldn’t have it. “We want to just have a general vote.… See if you can’t do that for me.” Laughing, Hartke said, “All right.”

  “I’ll do something for you,” Johnson said.

  “I know you will,” Hartke replied.

  Johnson’s calls to the three senators had lasted a total of nine minutes.

  But of course, despite his success with the senators, everything depended on Byrd, on his rulings—and on his vote, too. For all his telephoning Johnson was still one vote short. He telephoned Byrd to ask him to allow the motion for a single vote that very afternoon, and then, on that vote, to vote no. “I hope you can help,” Johnson told the chairman in a call to Byrd’s office at 1:17. “Because that [Dirksen amendment] throws everything out of caboodle if we lose 450 million”—all the careful budget calculations. “If you’ll go with me on that, we can do it.… Just have one general motion that covers them all.” Byrd said he would have a problem doing that because he had already committed himself to vote in favor of several individual excise tax amendments, but Johnson kept pleading. “I’ll do the best I can,” Byrd said finally. “Help me, Harry,” Lyndon Johnson said.

  Late that afternoon, Byrd called the Oval Office, getting the same White House switchboard operator on the line who had connected him to the President that morning. He was so excited that he delivered his news to her, not the President. “Well, I want to tell you—the President called me this morning in regard to votes,” he said. “Yes, sir,” the operator said. “We had a 9–8 vote,” Byrd said. “My vote was the one that carried it his way.”

  “Ohhh, wonderful!” the operator said. The senator and the operator laughed happily together.

  “Tell him, and I won’t bother him, but I … Nine to eight was about cutting out these … reductions of the excise taxes, you know.” The operator said she did know. Byrd told her that he had ruled that all the reductions “could be lumped together in a single bill,” and “they were taken out of the bill by nine to eight.”

  The operator gave another long “ohhh” of admiration.

  “My vote,” the old senator said proudly.

  THE CALL ENDED with the operator saying, “I’ll tell him.” She evidently did, because a few minutes later, her boss called Byrd. “That Harry Byrd,” Lyndon Johnson said. “He can do anything.”

  It was a moment for remembering long-ago days. “You’ve learned to count since I left up there,” Johnson said. “I used to do your counting, but when you can beat them nine to eight, you’re doing all right.”

  THERE WAS STILL A NEED for haste. By that last 9–8 vote, the committee had finally finished its hearings on the tax bill, but it could not go to the Senate floor until the committee’s majority report on the bill was written, printed and filed with the secretary of the Senate, and since a tax bill report was a complex document, the committee’s staff usually took a week or more to write it. And over in the House, Republicans, eager to avoid further reminders about whose party they were the party of, had agreed that the civil rights bill would be reported out of Rules, and passed by the entire House, before members left town on February 8 to begin giving speeches for Lincoln’s Birthday, February 12. “The clock is ticking,” Johnson told reporters.

  The staff couldn’t take a week. “You make them write that Majority Report over the weekend, Harry,” Johnson urged Byrd when he spoke to him that Thursday evening. “They’re going to pass this other bill [the civil rights bill] before Lincoln’s Birthday, and I want to get this tax bill out of the way before that civil rights bill gets there.” Byrd made them—and Johnson made them. “Startled officials at the Government Printing Office” picked up their telephones to find that the caller was the President, ordering them not to close for the weekend in case the Finance Committee report was completed, one account said. Then a “flabbergasted” Elizabeth Springer picked up the phone to find the President of the United States on the line to tell her that the Printing Office was waiting for the manuscript. “No other President of the United States,” this account said, “had ever been quite so familiar with the minutiae of the legislative process.”

  Springer’s staff couldn’t finish writing the report over the weekend, as it turned out, but they finished it on Tuesday, January 28—“record time,” the Washington Post reported—and the Government Printing Office printed it the same day, and on that same day it was filed with the Senate, and Mansfield announced that no other matter would be allowed on the floor until the tax bill was passed, which it was on February 7, three days before the civil rights bill passed the House.

  DIFFICULT THOUGH IT HAD BEEN to pass the tax cut bill, the effort would be justified by the results. The reductions instituted by the bill, and the increased spending they inspired, were a key element in what would become one of the longest economic expansions in American history. And the bill was passed because of what Lyndon Johnson had done during those first days after he was thrown, with no warning and no preparation, into the budget and tax cut fights, thrown into them and presented at the same time with deadlines that had to be met, and met very quickly. His grasp in an instant of the reality that underlay the haggling over the budget, that Byrd had to be given what he wanted; his promise to let Byrd see the figures for himself; and most important, his ability to take advantage of the affection and trust of an older man, to “get” the ungettable Harry Byrd—these were the crucial elements in breaking a deadlock that, before November 22, had seemed all but unbreakable.

  23

  In the Books of Law

  THE CIVIL RIGHTS BILL ARRIVED in the Senate as early as it did—on February 10—because of the outcome of the early skirmish on that bill, the skirmish that had begun before Christmas to pry civil rights loose from Judge Smith’s House Rules Committee. That encounter had ended almost on schedule—on the schedule which back in December Smith and House Republican Leader Halleck had agreed to accept.

  Not that that had been an indication of good faith on the part of the judge.

  Hardly had Smith gaveled the Rules Committee into order on January 9 to open its hearings on the bill when his agreement began to demonstrate a certain elasticity. During testimony by the very first witness, House Judiciary Committee chairman Emanuel Celler of New York, “the undercurrent of bitter feelings over the measure began showing,” UPI reported, as Smith accused Celler of “railroading” the bill through his committee. “We don’t railroad bills through,” Celler said. “Do you prefer the word ‘strong-armed’?” Smith asked, and it had immediately become apparent that “railroading” (or “strong-arming”) was not a crime of which the judge himself was going to be guilty. He allowed each witness to testify at such length—asking them innumerable questions himself and allowing another southern stalwart, Representative William M. Colmer of Mississippi, to ask innumerable others, “going over and over the same points” hour after hour, the Times reported—that after seven days of hearings, only eight of the thirty witnesses scheduled to testify had been heard. At that pace, the schedule that had been agreed upon in December—that the hearings would not last longer than twelve days—was rapidly becoming meaningless.

  That schedule was going to be accelerated, however.

  Celler began mentioning to reporters the lever that Johnson had put in place in December with his telephone call to Richard Bolling, the lever behind which the President had thrown “his full weight,” and that would, if pushed far enough, subject Smith to the “indignity” of having his committee discharged from consideration of the bill. Celler said he certainly expected Smith to live up to the agreement, and complete the hearings expeditiously. “But,” UPI reported, “Celler also made clear that efforts to get enough votes for a discharge petition, which could bypass the committee if there were a prolonged stall, would not be abandoned.” Johnson told Larry O’Brien to go back to work rounding up signatures t
o add to the 130 that had been placed on the petition before Christmas.1

  And when that lever appeared to be stuck, Johnson inserted another one. Despite O’Brien’s efforts, on January 18 the petition still bore only 178 signatures, forty short of the required number, and since 153 of them were Democratic signatures, not too many more could be expected from the Democratic side of the House. And while most of the necessary forty would have to come from the Republican side, Republican leaders, from Halleck on down, were still advising GOP congressmen not to circumvent traditional House procedure by signing. Republican members of the Rules Committee who wanted the bill released were getting the same advice, and, the Times reported, were still “reluctant to take it away from the chairman.” But at noon on January 18, Charles Halleck was in the Oval Office. Using logic at first, as Johnson was later to recall, “I said, ‘If I were you, Charlie, I wouldn’t dare … go out and try to make a Lincoln Birthday speech that’ll laugh you out of the goddamned park when Howard Smith’s got his foot on Lincoln’s neck. You’d better get that [the bill] out before then.’ ” And then he used a blunter weapon. Picking up the telephone, with Halleck sitting in front of him, the President called NASA Administrator James Webb about requests the Republican Leader had made of NASA, one of them concerning Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, the largest educational institution in his congressional district.