The Best and the Brightest (Modern Library)

by David Halberstam

  Hugh Sidey of Life, who had written of Kennedy’s reading habits, decided to do a similar article on Johnson’s. He started with George Reedy, who told him that yes, Johnson was an avid reader. What books? Sidey asked. All Reedy could think of was Barbara Ward’s The Rich Nations and the Poor Nations, a book on how the rich should help the poor which Johnson had liked because it was similar to his own ideas. From there Sidey went to see Moyers. Yes, said Moyers, he was an avid reader. What books? Well, there was Barbara Ward’s book The Rich Nations and the Poor Nations. And from there to Valenti, who said Johnson read more books than almost anyone he knew. What books? Valenti hesitated and thought for a moment, then his face lit up. Barbara Ward’s The Rich Nations and the Poor Nations . . . Even the book he read was of course a can-do book, a book which was about how to make things work; he had little time for light activities. Both his successor and predecessor were sports fans, but Johnson had little interest in football or baseball. Once Lana Turner was promoting a movie in Washington; aides had arranged for her photo to be taken with a group of senators, including Johnson. The schedule for the day was duly shown him, including the appointment with Miss Turner. He looked at it for a moment and then asked, “Who the hell is Lana Turner?”

  He was the totally political man, living and breathing for the political act. Yet he was curiously a man of Washington more than of the nation, a man who for most of his career harbored national ambitions, and yet who knew amazingly little about national politics as opposed to Senate politics, perhaps because he was afraid that if he ventured forth, people would treat him as a Texas ruffian. So the Senate had remained his theater, and he had mastered it and orchestrated it, the big things and the little things. Unsure of himself outside, he had remained where he was safe and secure. Because of this he had tended to see the country and its politics through the particular prism of the Senate. He believed in 1960 that since Senator Tom Dodd of Connecticut was for him, this meant that he was doing well in New England, and he did not realize what had happened to him until he reached Los Angeles. The problem there was of course not just that he read the country through the Senate, but he had so terrified his own people that they did not dare tell him bad news. Larry King, now a magazine writer and in those days a legislative assistant to a West Texas congressman, was one of Johnson’s area representatives in 1960, assigned the Rocky Mountain area. He went out to work his section, found it very weak and was eventually summoned back to Washington for a meeting of area representatives, all the rest of whom were Texas congressmen. Johnson presided at the meeting, and one after another they made their reports. It was all marvelous: New England was very strong for Johnson, despite the seeming Kennedy strength. New York looked good. The great industrial states were hard and fast. Finally it was King’s turn. “Well, I guess I’m working the one part of the country where we’ve got problems, but things don’t look very good at all,” he began. “Now, in Wyoming you say Gale McGee is for you, but I’m not so sure. He’s staying out of it and telling his people to be neutral but I think they’re leaning to Kennedy. And in Colorado . . .” Johnson gave him a very hard look and cut him off. “Next report,” he said.

  At Los Angeles he found out what the Kennedys, with their surer sense of national politics, had done to him. Washington and the Senate were his mirrors; he was big in the Senate and Kennedy was small there, usually absent. If he knew this, then others would know it too and know who the real man was. If conservatives and hawks were more powerful in the Senate (which they were, more often than not controlling the key committees, Russell, Stennis, etc.), it was a sign that the conservatives were more powerful in the country. If the liberals were prone to make speeches and never got things done in the Senate (the more they talked, the more of a guarantee it would be that they would be outside the real corridors of power), then it was a sign that they were regarded the same way in the country.

  He looked at the East and its politics long after he came to terms with the big-money people of the Southwest with an enduring rural Texas sense of alienation. He did not, for instance, like the big-city bosses as politicians, not liking the culture of the cities they represented, the trailing Catholic priests, the lurking labor leaders who probably didn’t like Southern accents; but he was impressed by them as men, with their capacity to control their environment, their sense of presence, their ability to tell him how many votes a given district would produce. In contrast, Kennedy was not impressed by them as men, he knew them all too well; he was spawned by that tradition and wanted not so much to move up in their world as to move out of it, but he was impressed by them as politicians, liking not them but their methods.

  Johnson viewed an area of the country not so much in ethnic and social terms but as an area which had sent certain men to Congress. He was best and most effective not as an open politician who seeks the Presidency (Kennedy had absolutely destroyed him there) but as an insider’s man, working privately in the great closed corridors, always cloaked in secrecy until the good deed was done. There was a reason for this. He could be an excellent campaigner, and knew his own regions well, but what he had dedicated his career and his working hours to was the accumulation of power as a parliamentarian. Once he had established himself in what was virtually a rotten borough or safe seat (and come to terms with the upper tier of the new Texas power establishment) he proceeded to build up his connections and his possibilities as a Senate parliamentarian, trading his chance of appealing to wide national blocs of voters for the opportunity to work quietly on the inside to influence other legislators in private. He sought due bills on the inside, not due bills to the various great national lobbying groups, except as his and their interests occasionally coincided. He dealt similarly with the press; he held, charmed and commanded reporters who were intrigued by the inner workings of the institution of the Senate itself (notably his close friend Bill White who had written a biography of Robert Taft and a book on the Senate entitled The Citadel, and finally a book on Johnson himself, entitled, not surprisingly, The Professional) rather than reporters who were committed more to issues and to ideology, and who, like elements of the public at large, regarded him, because of his great parliamentarian sleight of hand, as something of a wheeler-dealer. Nor did he help himself with reporters by telling them that if they played the game the way he wanted, wrote the stories the way he told them to, he would make them all big men. His view of the press, they soon found, was that in his eyes they were either for him or against him. There was no middle ground. They were either good boys, in which case he felt he owned them, or they were enemies.

  Given that safe seat back in Texas, he could concentrate the full force of his attention on his role within the Senate; given regional prejudices against Southerners, he could probably not aspire to a serious race for the Presidency; given the split between the South and the North within the Democratic party, the chance for an ambitious Texan to serve as something of a bridge between the conflicting forces also encouraged him as a man of the inside. The men from the North, for instance, rarely held such safe seats—their constituencies were often too narrowly divided—and had to devote more of their time to coming to terms with their own regions. If they mastered these regions they thought in terms of national ambitions and continued to channel their efforts outside the Senate. He was thus a man of the Senate because it fit his abilities and his possibilities.

  In addition, it fit his personality. He did not particularly want to be out in front alone on a policy; he was not by any instinct a loner, and in the Senate, if he did his work well, the responsibility (and potential blame) could be broadly shared. He liked as many other fingerprints on the door as possible (in fact, when Johnson wrote his book on his presidential years, he spent a great deal of time and effort not discussing the wisdom of his policy, but emphasizing the consensus quality of it, how many others had been on board and wished him well).

  He liked to think of himself as something of an Abe Lincoln, the country boy learning by oil lamps, and
later, as President, loved to feed his own legend and richly embellished it, taking visitors around the old homestead, describing how simple it had been, a tiny little shack, until finally his mother interrupted him in front of several visitors, and said, “Why, Lyndon, you know that’s not true, you know you were born and brought up in a perfectly nice house much closer to town.” (In the same way he claimed that an uncle of his stood at the Alamo, which under most conditions would be all right, except that the whole point of the Alamo was how few men stood there, which made it tough on them against the Mexicans but somewhat easy for later historians to check whether a Johnson forebear had been there, and to find that one had not.) He was, in reality, despite the poverty that was around him in those Depression days, a member of a part of the American aristocracy, albeit Texas Hill Country aristocracy. An ancestor was president of Baylor University, and his family gave Johnson City its name. His father had served as a member of the Texas Legislature at a time when membership was limited to those who could afford to live in Austin during the biennial session, and Sam Johnson’s seat had been held previously by his father-in-law, Joseph Baines. Thus there was a sense of tradition in the family, and if from time to time during the Depression there was not a lot of money, the Johnsons had land, influence and connections. They were landed aristocrats, though the land was often harsh.

  He was a young boy that teachers would pay extra attention to. There was no doubt ever in his family that he would go to college, and when he did, messages about his arrival preceded him and connected him with a job in the office of the president of the school, and almost as soon as he graduated, there was a job in the local congressman’s office. Lyndon was a man with some influence and connections, and most of all, respectability. Most of that respectability and much of the drive within him came from his mother, Rebekah Baines Johnson. (In 1968 when Harold Lasswell, pioneering expert on psychology and the political personality, gave an interview on Johnson’s personality, he said, “One thing of outstanding interest is the extent to which Johnson had to struggle to achieve independence from his mother. She was an ambitious, domineering woman who thought she had married beneath her. She was determined that this lad would be a great success and she pushed him very hard . . . It puts the son in a conflict. On the one side there is a tendency to accept domination and on the other hand a rebellious tendency to reassert one’s independence and masculinity and sense of adequacy . . . It is a reasonable inference that Johnson was very much concerned about remaining independent of outside influence. His subsequent political career—with his demand to make his own decisions, and his demand to control a situation [italics Lasswell’s]—has these very deep roots.” This evaluation might have been debatable, except for the fact that when the interview reached the White House, it was immediately Xeroxed and gleefully passed around among some of the President’s closest and oldest friends and was much admired for its insights.) For Rebekah Johnson was a person of great force, a great sense of herself, and of her son’s destiny; in his own mind she would become a mythological figure. (In “A Family Album,” a brief volume on the Johnson and Baines families which she had written and which was published after her death, with a foreword by the then President, in 1965, there are some signs of her special hold on Lyndon. She told of Lyndon in elementary school reading, as befitted a class leader, a poem of his own choosing, entitled, curiously enough, “I’d Rather Be Mamma’s Boy.” She also reprinted an essay Lyndon published when he was twenty-two in the college newspaper, entitled “To Our Mothers.” “. . . There is no love on earth comparable to that of a mother. Our best description of it is that of all types of earthly love, it most nearly approaches the divine . . .”) Later when he was grown he would talk of his mother to friends: she was the finest, the most intelligent woman he had ever met, and therefore anyone who reminded him of her would have a brighter career ahead of her. Rebekah Johnson had, of course, always believed in Lyndon; all her hopes, which had not been realized in her own life, would be attained through him. When he was elected to Congress, she wrote him:

  My darling boy:

  Beyond “Congratulations Congressman” what can I say to my dear son in this hour of triumphant success? In this as in all the many letters I have written you there is the same theme: I love you; I believe in you; I expect great things of you. Your election compensates for the heartache and disappointment I experienced as a child when my dear father lost the race you have just won. How happy it would have made my precious noble father to know that the first born of his first born would achieve the position he desired.

  The Johnsons were part of the power structure of the Hill Country, the men who had power and who got together with the other men who had power, the Hill Country establishment, so to speak, and they conspired to bring about what was needed. A bridge. A highway. A hospital. Get rid of a bad teacher at the school. Decide who ought to be the candidate for which office. You had your own network of people, your own people arranged and you didn’t go public with it until the time was right. (Years later McGeorge Bundy would tell friends that there was one thing you could not do with Lyndon Johnson and that was to go public with it, and by going public, Johnson meant talking to anyone else.) You never talked, not in the open. To do good, to get things done, to help the folks, to be powerful, you stayed private; you didn’t go to the people, you helped the people. There was a considerable distinction here; if you were a serious man and wanted to get things done, you had to do them for people. Manipulate, but manipulate for their own good. He grew up in that environment and it never left him. In that particular art form there was no one quite like him, the art of doing good for people in spite of themselves. Even when he went to Washington, he mastered the inner corridors of power, getting things done. (Russell Baker, then a young reporter for the New York Times, was sent to cover the Senate in the early Johnson years and would recall one of his first meetings with Johnson. “How are you liking the Senate?” Johnson asked. “Well, I like it, but it’s not what I thought,” Baker answered. “I thought there would be more speeches, more debates, more arguments on the floor.” Johnson leaned over, grabbed Baker, looked him in the eye: “You want a speech, you go see Lehman and Pat McNamara. They’ll make you a speech. They’re good at making speeches.” An edge of contempt passes. Johnson now closer to Baker. “You want to find out how things are done, and you want to see things done? You come to me. I’ll tell you all that.”)

  In Washington his first great mentor was Sam Rayburn, Mr. Sam, who as Majority Leader held great power, who exercised it wisely, meting it out judiciously, but who was never a public figure, never gave long speeches, never tried to get his name in print. Mr. Sam was the first teacher, and the second was Senator Richard Russell from Georgia, who taught him more about Washington, how to maneuver, how to get people indebted to him. In later years Johnson would tell friends how Dick Russell had operated, Russell the bachelor, always with plenty of time for young bright congressmen when they first arrived, taking them around at night, carefully guiding their careers and their social lives, making profound impressions on them with his generosity and intelligence, moving them ever so slightly into his orbit of influence. However, Johnson did not talk about the other half of his particular relationship with Russell, which was similar to that which he had enjoyed with Rayburn and others back in Texas, which was of the bright eager young man who brilliantly cultivates a lonely, forceful, older man of great power (Russell was a bachelor, and Rayburn, briefly married, might as well have been). That was a Johnson specialty, and helped lift him above the average young congressmen of his time. Johnson seemed to be the perfect pupil for both Rayburn and Russell; they were like fathers, he was almost sycophantic, thought some around them, but later, having gone beyond both of them, he could at times be harsh and contemptuous in talking about them. Yet the lessons were clear, these were men who got things done, who did not hang around the fancy men and indulge in the fancy talk of Georgetown dinner parties. These were men.

&
nbsp; Like Rayburn, Johnson became an immensely successful parliamentarian, a man of the center able to move slightly to the left or the right depending on his needs and his party’s needs, able to accommodate to the Eisenhower years with few problems (leaving Democrats the feeling that the Eisenhower election over Stevenson had upset neither him nor Rayburn; indeed the congressional leadership was so acquiescent to the Republican White House that the liberals created a Democratic Policy Study group as a means of charting a more independent course). Johnson could move slightly to the left on civil rights as national ambitions began to touch him, but he could also serve as a brake within his party if it moved too far to the left. Similarly, one of the reasons why the Democratic party did so little on major tax reform in the decade of the fifties was the relationship Johnson had with the big money in Texas and their proxies in the Senate (he could say of Senator Paul Douglas of Illinois, a constant critic of the oil-depletion allowance, that Douglas would understand it just a bit better if there were a few oil wells in Cook County).

  There were two reasons why he was so successful: his own hold on the Senate, and the fact that, teamed with Rayburn, he controlled both branches of the legislature and could control, through Rayburn, the appropriations aspect of legislation. He could thus, for example, keep the military on a long-enough leash to allow them to plan their new weapons systems, and on a short-enough leash to have them keep coming back for more. His congressional position gave him considerable influence within the party of the fifties, a party caught in the conflict between its Southern-dominated Congress and a Northern-dominated mass. If Richard Russell tried to assert the party leadership through the Congress it would split the party, and someone like Hubert Humphrey, representing the liberal-labor elements of the coalition, did not have the horsepower to stand for the party in the Congress. So Johnson was the go-between; each adversary armed him against the other, their divisions fed his strength, he was the compromise figure. He was acceptable to the Southerners, but not really of them, but the more the Northern wing of the party rebelled, the luckier they felt they were to have Johnson. But if he was regionally acceptable to the South, he was for the same reason probably regionally unacceptable to the rest of the party. But he could, holding power in the Senate, make Humphrey glad to deal with him, giving the liberals just enough to keep them from going into open rebellion and asserting independent, though futile, leadership.