Leadership

by Doris Kearns Goodwin

  All the while Johnson remained in the cloakroom or on the floor, moving from one group of senators to another, correcting, mollifying, blunting extreme statements, preventing the conflict from being cast in irreconcilable terms, ensuring that bargains made were bargains kept. No sooner had the bill for the Hells Canyon Dam passed than the Mountain State senators, to the surprise of their northern colleagues, took center stage in the civil rights debate. Senator Clinton Anderson of Wyoming stood on the floor to offer an amendment that limited the bill to voting rights and excised the president’s power to send federal troops to enforce the bill’s provisions. “I want to see a civil rights bill passed by the Senate,” Senator Anderson said. “This may be the last clear chance the Senate will have in a long time.”

  The moment Anderson offered his amendment, the ever-vigilant majority leader knew he had attained the necessary coalition. Immediately, he called for the vote and the amendment passed. A few days later, Wyoming’s junior senator, Joseph O’Mahoney, and Idaho’s Frank Church took to the floor to introduce an amendment providing defendants accused of violating voting rights the right to a jury trial. With the passage of that additional amendment, Johnson had the only bill that had a chance of soldering the three regions of the country together.

  There still remained Act Three—the challenge of persuading northern senators that an admittedly diluted bill was preferable to no bill at all. To be sure, the New York Times editorialized, “by the standards of all those who had hoped for conclusive Federal action to enforce the whole range of civil rights,” it was “a weak” bill. Nonetheless, it was “the beginning of a curative process in an old national wound.” No one understood more clearly than Johnson that the bill was only a preliminary step, but by dealing, however moderately, with the right to vote, it was a necessary and vital step. Speaking on the floor of the Senate, he said: “A man with a vote has his destiny in his own hands.” Although people spoke of how toothless the bill was, Johnson knew that the fact of the passage was more important than its content. “We’ve shown we can do it,” he said. “We’ll do it again in a couple of years.”

  On September 9, 1957, the Civil Rights Act of 1957, in almost precisely the form Johnson had envisioned seven months earlier, became the law of the land. The brand burned into that bill was LBJ’s. It was LBJ, newspapers noted, who had stitched together an improbable coalition of westerners, easterners, liberal Democrats, and conservative Republicans. It was LBJ who had brought the Senate to pass the bill “without the Democratic bloodletting that had been expected,” shaping a compromise that persuaded five moderate southern senators “to leave the Confederacy voluntarily” to vote with their northern and western colleagues. It was LBJ who had opened the door of the legislature to black Americans for the first time since the Civil War era.

  Newspapers across the country considered the passage of the bill “the most dramatic moment” in Lyndon Johnson’s career, testimony to the widespread agreement that he had become the most powerful majority leader in the history of the Senate. “The Democratic Party owed Johnson the [presidential] nomination,” Massachusetts senator John F. Kennedy declared the following year. “He’s earned it. He wants the same things for the country that I do. But it’s too close to Appomattox.” Former presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson agreed on both counts, judging Johnson “the best qualified Democrat for the presidency from the standpoint of performance and ability, but plagued with a great weakness: he was a Southerner.”

  Twenty years earlier, when Franklin Roosevelt first laid eyes on Lyndon Johnson, he foresaw in the wiry and loquacious congressman the stuff of a future president. But with his political prescience, Roosevelt also understood that first “the balance of power” would have to “shift south and west.” That requisite shift had not sufficiently happened when Democrats convened in mid-July 1960. They chose John F. Kennedy as their nominee for president.

  * * *

  As a shrewd act of political calculation, Kennedy offered the second spot on the ticket to Lyndon Johnson. To the bafflement of many, Johnson accepted. Why, they wondered, would Johnson relinquish his inordinately commanding position as majority leader to accept a historically insignificant position, a snare of talent and ambition, and agree to work as a subordinate to a man who, he claimed, had “never said a word of importance in the Senate”? The answer lay in the multiple occasions during his career when Johnson had been able to mine riches unseen by others in overlooked, unpromising positions.

  That he was unable to transform the vice presidency into a significant position of power was not for lack of trying. Immediately after Kennedy’s victory (made possible by the Democratic win in Texas), Johnson devised a radical proposal to enlarge the breadth of the vice presidency itself. When the Senate Democrats convened in caucus in January, the new majority leader, Mike Mansfield, introduced a motion to elect the new vice president chairman of the Democratic Conference, which would make him the presiding officer at all formal meetings of the Senate Democrats. While a substantial majority of forty-six senators voted yay, seventeen voted nay, arguing that the move strained the constitutional division of powers. Interpreting the vote as a severe personal rejection, Johnson told Mansfield to let the motion die, abandoning any hope of leading the Congress from the chair of the vice presidency. Indeed, so wounded was Johnson that from that day forward he withdrew from the Hill and abstained from active participation in legislative strategy, the arena in which the president most needed his help.

  “A vice president is generally like a Texas steer,” Johnson opined. “He has lost his social standing in the society in which he resides.” With insufficient outlet for his energies, deprived of center stage, he plunged into profound depression, finding temporary fulfillment only in his work as chairman of the President’s Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity, created to eliminate racial discrimination in hiring by the federal government and by companies with federal contracts. In meetings on civil rights, Johnson came to life, speaking in an “evangelical” tone, according to historian Arthur Schlesinger, that was “extremely effective”—more so “than the President or the Attorney General.” By contrast, in meetings on other subjects, Johnson was so quiet and reclusive that he “appeared almost a spectral presence.”

  Like Theodore Roosevelt, Johnson found he simply wasn’t “made to be Vice President.” He, too, felt adrift, shrunken, bereft of the kind of meaningful work that provided justification for his existence. The ceremonial aspects of the office—“trips around the world, chauffeurs, men saluting, people clapping”—meant “nothing.” He “detested every minute of it.” If Theodore Roosevelt contemplated law school, anything to alleviate the tedium of the subordinate office, Lyndon Johnson had no other life he could imagine. “He felt,” one friend recalled, “he had come to the end of the political road.”

  One could hardly find two more dynamic men, twin “engines in pants,” to suffer more volubly from the structural constrictions imposed by the vice presidency. Then, for both men, the prison cell of the vice presidency was violently opened. President William McKinley moved toward a receiving line at the World’s Fair, where an anarchist’s revolver hidden under a handkerchief awaited him; and Kennedy’s black limousine rounded the corner past the Texas School Book Depository Building into Dealey Plaza.

  III

  THE LEADER AND THE TIMES: HOW THEY LED

  NINE

  TRANSFORMATIONAL LEADERSHIP

  Abraham Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation

  When Abraham Lincoln entered the presidency on March 4, 1861, the house was not merely divided; the house was on fire. In the four months between his election and inauguration, seven southern states had passed resolutions to secede from the Union. At a meeting in Montgomery, Alabama, representatives from these seven states formed a new government with a new constitution, selecting former Mississippi senator Jefferson Davis as provisional president of the Confederate States of America. Meanwhile, a growing rancor threatened to tear apart
the Republican Party. On one side stood conciliators convinced that with the proper compromises, the remaining slaveholding states could be kept in the Union; on the other, hard-liners who believed compromise would further agitate the recalcitrant South.

  From the start, Lincoln correctly identified the full gravity of the challenge that secession posed to the continued existence of his country’s communal life, its shared experiences, its memories, its role as a beacon of hope to the world at large. “I consider the central idea pervading this struggle is the necessity upon us of proving that popular government is not an absurdity,” he told his secretary John Hay. “We must settle this question now, whether in a free government the minority have the right to break up the government whenever they choose. If we fail it will go far to prove the incapability of the people to govern themselves.”

  To meet the terrible burden he faced, Lincoln pieced together the most unusual cabinet in American history, representing every faction of the new Republican Party—former Whigs, Free Soilers, and antislavery Democrats, a combination of conservatives, moderates, and radicals, of hard-liners and conciliators. “I began at once to feel that I needed support,” he later noted, “others to share with me the burden.” Where President James Buchanan had deliberately chosen like-minded men, adherents who would not question his authority, Lincoln created a team of independent, strong-minded men, all of whom were more experienced in public life, better educated, and more celebrated than he. In the top three positions, at the State Department, the Treasury, and the Justice Department, he placed his three chief rivals—William Seward, Salmon Chase, and Edward Bates—each of whom thought he should be president instead of the prairie lawyer from Illinois.

  When asked why he was doing this, Lincoln’s answer was simple: The country was in peril. These were the strongest and most able men in the country. He needed them by his side. Furthermore, Lincoln had sufficient confidence in his leadership that he would be able to meld this contentious, personally ambitious, gifted, yet potentially dysfunctional group into an administrative family whose loyalty to the Union was unquestionable.

  As the president-elect began his journey from Illinois to the nation’s capital, he bade farewell to friends gathered at the train station. “No one, not in my situation, can appreciate my feeling of sadness at this parting,” he said. “I now leave, not knowing when or whether ever, I may return.” Later, considering the trials and tensions he would endure those first weeks in office, he confessed to a friend: “They were so great that could I have anticipated them, I would not have believed it possible to survive them.”

  The life Lincoln had led, a life marked by perpetual struggle, provided the best preparation for the challenges the country faced. His temperament was stamped with melancholy but devoid of pessimism and brightened by wit. He possessed a deep-rooted integrity and humility combined with an ever-growing confidence in his capacity to lead. Most of all, he brought a mind tempered by failure, a mind able to fashion the appalling suffering ahead into a narrative that would give direction, purpose, and lasting inspiration.

  No episode more clearly reveals the unique chemistry between the particular configuration of leadership within its particular historical context than Abraham Lincoln’s first unveiling and subsequent implementation of the Emancipation Proclamation.

  * * *

  On July 22, 1862, Abraham Lincoln convened a special session of his cabinet to reveal—not to debate—his preliminary draft of the Emancipation Proclamation. He understood that there were “differences in the Cabinet on the slavery question” and welcomed their suggestions after the confidential reading was concluded. At the outset, however, he “wished it to be understood that the question was settled in his own mind” and that “the responsibility of the measure was his.” The time for bold action had arrived.

  What enabled Lincoln to determine that the time was now right for this fundamental transformation in how the war was waged and what the Union was fighting for? And how did he succeed in persuading his fractious cabinet, the Army, and his divided countrymen in the North to go along with him?

  Acknowledge when failed policies demand a change in direction.

  In the last week of June 1862, General George B. McClellan’s Army of the Potomac suffered a crushing defeat in its first major offensive. In a series of brutal battles, General Robert E. Lee’s forces had repulsed McClellan’s advance up the Peninsula to attack the Confederate capital at Richmond, driving the Union Army into retreat, decimating its ranks, and leaving nearly sixteen thousand dead, captured, or wounded. At one point, the capitulation of McClellan’s entire force had seemed possible. Northern morale was at its nadir—lower even than in the aftermath of Bull Run. “We are in the depths now,” New York businessman George Templeton Strong admitted, “permeated with disgust, saturated with gloomy thinking.”

  “Things had gone from bad to worse,” Lincoln recalled of that midsummer, “until I felt that we had reached the end of our rope on the plan of operations we had been pursuing; that we had played our last card and must change our tactics.”

  Gather firsthand information, ask questions.

  No sooner had the crippled Union Army arrived back at Harrison’s Landing on the James River than Lincoln resolved to visit the troops—to comfort the wounded, talk with them in small groups, bolster their morale, and sustain his own spirits. The stimulant of the president’s unexpected visit on the enervated regiments was instantaneous.

  Equally important, Lincoln’s accessibility to his soldiers afforded him the chance to gather information and ask questions—questions and observations that led to a major revision in his thoughts about the role of slavery in the war. From the beginning of the struggle, Lincoln had stressed that the North was fighting solely to preserve the Union, not to interfere with slavery. Though he had long despised slavery, as we have seen, he felt compelled to muzzle his abhorrence in deference to both public sentiment regarding the primacy of restoring the Union and the constraints of the Constitution that protected the institution of slavery in states where it already existed.

  Through firsthand inquiries at the encampment with commanders and soldiers, however, Lincoln came to realize a fortifying link between slavery and the Confederate war effort. Slaves dug trenches and built fortifications for the Confederate Army. Slaves served as teamsters, cooks, waiters, and hospital attendants. On the home front, they tilled fields, raised crops, and picked cotton. Slave labor kept farms and plantations in operation. The toil of slaves liberated Confederate soldiers to fight. “The slaves,” Lincoln understood, “were undeniably an element of strength to those who had their service, and we must decide whether that element should be with us or against us.” If the rebels were divested of their slaves, the beleaguered North would thus gain a desperately needed military advantage.

  Find time and space in which to think.

  As Lincoln began to survey the darkening landscape of the war and consider a new strategy regarding slavery, he needed time to reflect upon both the constitutionality and the ramifications of issuing an emancipation order. Yet, amid the crush of hundreds of visitors and office seekers who poured into the White House as soon as the morning doors were opened, Lincoln scarcely had time to relax much less contemplate the complexities of the issue. Wherever he moved, “he had literally to run the gantlet” through throngs in the hallways and lining the stairs leading up to his second-floor office.

  That pivotal summer, he found refuge at the Soldiers’ Home, a three-hundred-acre complex in the hills three miles north of the city. Within the government-run compound, which included a main building that could accommodate 150 disabled veterans, an infirmary, and a dining hall, were a number of smaller residences, including a two-story brick cottage where Lincoln and his family settled from June until mid-October. Rising before seven in the morning, Lincoln rode his horse to the White House, returning to his country cottage in the evening when the cooling breezes brought relief from the oppressive swelter and tumult of W
ashington.

  The Soldiers’ Home provided sanctuary. There, Lincoln recalled, he was able to dwell thoroughly and “earnestly on the gravity, importance, and delicacy” of the subject of slavery. Since the first shot at Fort Sumter, two issues—the legal/constitutional issue and the moral issue—had been at loggerheads. In the tranquil setting of the Soldiers’ Home, he was able to resolve at last the chasm between the constitutional protection of slavery and the moral abomination of slavery.

  The worsening context of the war, which threatened the survival of the Union and the Constitution itself, provided a suitable resolution to this dilemma. Given the manifold advantages the slaves supplied the Confederacy, an executive order freeing the slaves could be considered “a military necessity absolutely essential for the salvation of the Union.” Emancipating the slaves, “otherwise unconstitutional,” might therefore become a lawful action. The constitutional protection of slavery could be countermanded by the constitutionally warranted war powers of the commander in chief. Thus, Abraham Lincoln was able to come to the decision that would define both his presidency and his place in history.