Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson

by Robert A. Caro

  Still was the last thing his hands were. When, as President, he addressed the nation, they were often clasped and folded on the desk before him as if to emphasize the calmness and dignity he considered appropriately “presidential.” During his years as a senator, they were moving—always moving—in gestures as expressive as the face: extended, open and palms up, in entreaty, or closed in fists of rage, or—a long forefinger extended—jabbing out to make a point. Or they were making some gesture that brought a story vividly to life; Hubert Humphrey, recalling years later Lyndon Johnson explaining that “If you’re going to kill a snake with a hoe, you have to get it with one blow at the head,” said he would never forget “those hands that were just like a couple of great big shovels coming down.”

  And, not on television but in person, he was, in the force of his personality, overwhelming. In the Senate’s cloakroom or its corridors or on the Senate floor, one thick arm would be around a fellow senator’s shoulders, pulling him close, and the other hand would be grabbing his colleague’s lapel, or straightening his tie, and then the forefinger of that hand would be poking his points forcefully into the senator’s chest. His face would be very close to the senator’s face, looming above it and forcing the other man’s head back, or, in a peculiar cocking gesture, turning sideways, and coming up under his colleague’s face. And all the time he would be talking, arguing, persuading, with emotion, belief, conviction that seemed to well up inside him and pour out of him—even if it poured out with equal conviction on opposite sides of the same issue; if Lyndon Johnson seemed even bigger than he was—“larger than life,” in the phrase so often used about him—it was not only because of the size of his huge body or his huge hands but because of his passions: burning, monumental. His magnetism drew men toward him, drew them along with him, made them follow where he led.

  AND WHEN, on the floor, Lyndon Johnson was running the Senate, he put on a show so riveting that Capitol Hill had never seen anything like it during the previous century and a half of the Republic’s existence—as it has never seen anything like it since.

  Tall and confident, with a gangling, awkward, but long and swinging stride, “the Western movie barging into the room,” in the words of one journalist—he would prowl the big chamber restlessly, moving up and down the aisles, back and forth along the rows of desks. Throwing himself down beside a senator who was sitting on one of the couches in the rear of the Chamber, he would talk to him out of the side of his mouth. Another colleague would enter. Jumping up, Johnson would hug him, joking with him or whispering earnestly in his ear. Moving over to a senator seated at a desk, and then to another, he would sit down beside a man or bend over him, sometimes with both his arms planted firmly on the target’s desk, so that he could not rise and get away. Taking another man by the arm, he would lead him off to one side of the Chamber, drape his arm around his shoulders, and begin whispering urgently. And when Lyndon Johnson was talking to one of his colleagues, his hands seemed never to stop moving, patting a senatorial shoulder, grasping a senatorial lapel, jabbing a senatorial chest—jabbing it harder and harder if the point was still not being taken—and then hugging the senator when it was. Or, if it wasn’t, the reporters in the Press Gallery above would see Johnson bending closer and talking in a very low voice—and they would see the other senator’s face change, as the threat was pounded in, along with Johnson’s determination to carry it out.

  And then, at the climactic moments—the moments when the clerk called for the yeas and nays, and the Senate of the United States made its decision on whether to transform a bill into the law of the land—the power of Lyndon Johnson as Majority Leader was fully revealed, in a manner that veteran Senate watchers, accustomed, some of them over decades, to the body’s traditionally slow-paced, drowsy atmosphere and to the previous courtliness and decorum of its rituals, at first found all but incredible.

  When after days of maneuvering, with votes changing back and forth and back again, Johnson suddenly had enough votes in hand for victory, so long as none of the votes changed again, he wanted the vote taken—immediately. His front-row center desk at the edge of the well below the dais was a step up from the well, and he was so tall that when he stood at his desk, his eyes were almost at a level with those of the presiding senator across the well. “Call the question!” Johnson would say—and if the senator did not respond fast enough, he would snarl at him, in a voice clearly audible in the gallery, “CALL THE QUESTION!”

  And when the vote was taken, it was taken at the precise pace Lyndon Johnson wanted. Sometimes he had all his men there at the moment of the vote, and his opponents didn’t; sometimes he didn’t have all his men there—stragglers were still being rounded up, sometimes they hadn’t been found—so sometimes he wanted the roll call fast, and sometimes he wanted it slow. And he set the tempo accordingly. Standing at his desk, directly in front of the clerk calling the roll, Lyndon Johnson would raise his big right hand, and with the pen in his hand, or simply with a long forefinger, would make circles in the air, “like an airport mechanic signaling a pilot to rev up the motors,” as Time magazine put it. This signal to the clerk meant, as Johnson’s aide George Reedy would say, “hurry up—he had the votes and wanted them recorded” before the situation changed. Or he would make a downward shoving motion with his open hands, meaning “slow down”—“he didn’t have the votes but would get them if only he had a little more time.” Senators would be hurrying into the Chamber, crowding into the well. Lyndon Johnson would stand at the edge of the well—looking, because he was a step above the men in it, even bigger than he was, towering over the men before him—a long arm raised over them, making big circles, “for all the world,” as Time said, like “an orchestra conductor” leading the Senate the way a conductor led an obedient orchestra.

  The journalists above marveled at what they were seeing. “It was a splendid sight,” Hugh Sidey would say. “This tall man with the canvas face, his mind attuned to every sight and sound and parliamentary nuance…. He signaled the roll calls faster or slower. He’d give a signal, and the door would open, and two more guys would run in. My God—running the world!”

  THIS BOOK is also an examination of the particular type of power that Lyndon Johnson wielded in the Senate.

  In an America that has been focused for most of the two centuries of its existence on executive, or presidential, power, legislative power, very different, is very little understood. But the life of Lyndon Johnson is a uniquely effective prism through which to examine that kind of power. When he arrived in the Senate, that institution had for decades been almost a joke—an object of ridicule to cartoonists and comedians, of frustration and despair to historians and political scientists. Hamstrung by archaic rules and customs which it was determined to keep unchanged, it seemed hopelessly unable to adapt to the new needs of a modern, more complex world, and its rigid adherence to a seniority system thoroughly drained it of energy and vitality and initiative while keeping in some of its most influential positions men so elderly that wags called it the “senility system.”

  Among the main causes of senatorial inertia and impotence was the fact that its so-called “Leaders” had had no power over their colleagues: “I have nothing to promise them,” one of Johnson’s immediate predecessors as Majority Leader complained. “I have nothing to threaten them with.” But these Leaders were not Lyndon Johnson. “I do understand power, whatever else may be said about me,” he was to tell an assistant. “I know where to look for it, and how to use it.” That self-assessment was accurate. He looked for power in places where no previous Leader had thought to look for it—and he found it. And he created new powers, employing a startling ingenuity and imagination to transform parliamentary techniques and mechanisms of party control which had existed in rudimentary form, transforming them so completely that they became in effect new techniques and mechanisms. And he used these powers without restraint—as he did powers that had been used by Leaders before him, but that had seemed inconseque
ntial because in their hands they had been used with restraint. Lyndon Johnson used all these powers with a pragmatism and ruthlessness that made them even more effective. Scoop Jackson would say that when Jack Kennedy, as President, urgently needed a senator’s vote, he would summon him to the Oval Office and “would explain precisely why the bill was so important and how much he needed the senator’s support.” If, however, the senator said his constituency would not permit him to give that support, that if he gave Kennedy the vote he needed, the vote might cost him his seat in the Senate, “Kennedy would finally say he was sorry they couldn’t agree, but he understood.” Lyndon Johnson, Jackson would say—and Jackson worked closely with Johnson as Representative and Senator for twenty-five years—Lyndon Johnson wouldn’t understand, would refuse to understand. He would “charm you or knock your block off, or bribe you or threaten you, anything to get your vote,” Jackson would say. He would do anything he had to, to get that vote. “And he’d get it. That was the difference.” Lyndon Johnson once told a friend: “I’m just like a fox. I can see the jugular in any man and go for it, but I always keep myself in rein. I keep myself on a leash, just like you would an animal.” That self-assessment is only half true. Power corrupts—that has been said and written so often that it has become a cliché. But what is never said, but is just as true, is that power reveals. When a man is climbing, trying to persuade others to give him power, he must conceal those traits that might make others reluctant to give it to him, that might even make them refuse to give it to him. Once the man has power, it is no longer necessary for him to hide those traits. In his use of power during his Senate years, Lyndon Johnson sometimes reined himself in—and sometimes he didn’t. He used the powers he found and the powers he created with a raw, elemental brutality. Studying something in its rawest and most elemental form makes its fundamental nature come clear, so an examination of these sources of power that Johnson discovered or created, and of his use of them, should furnish insights into the true nature of legislative power, and into its potentialities.

  But it is not only depths that power reveals. Throughout Lyndon Johnson’s life, there had been hints of what he might do with great power, should he ever succeed in attaining it—bright threads gleaming in a dark tapestry: hints of compassion for the downtrodden, and of a passion to raise them up; hints that he might use power not only to manipulate others but to help others—to help, moreover, those who most needed help. No teacher in the “Mexican school” on the wrong side of the tracks in the desolate South Texas town of Cotulla had ever really cared if the Mexican children learned or not. Twenty-year-old Lyndon Johnson cared—cared, and helped. And the compassion had at least once been combined with a rare capacity to make compassion meaningful, a startling ability to mobilize the forces of government to fulfill what his father, an idealistic Populist legislator, had said was government’s most important function: to help people “caught in the tentacles of circumstance,” to help them fight forces too big for them to fight alone. As a twenty-eight-year-old congressman, Lyndon Johnson had seen what his two hundred thousand constituents, scattered on lonely farms and ranches, needed most: electricity to ease the terrible drudgery that was their lot because, without electricity, they had to do all farm chores by hand. And, against seemingly impossible odds, he had used federal agencies to “bring the lights” to the Texas Hill Country. So long as he was still seeking power, however, that passion had been subordinated to the passion for power—subordinated almost totally. Now, once he had acquired power in the Senate, the compassion, and the ability to make compassion meaningful, would shine forth at last.

  • • •

  THIS BOOK must try to be an examination not only of legislative power, but of legislative genius. This type of political genius is very different—indeed, in some aspects, diametrically opposite to—presidential genius, and is also, in America, little understood. But in his creation of and use of legislative power, Lyndon Johnson proved himself to be possessed of a talent that was beyond talent—a rare, instinctive gift. Part of the nature of genius is to do something new and remarkable, something unique. That is what Lyndon Johnson did. At the time he arrived in the Senate, seniority governed all its workings. New members were not supposed to speak much, or at all, on the floor during their first year or two, and during the remainder of their first six-year term to speak only infrequently, and to participate in other Senate activities in a largely apprentice role. After his first two years in the Senate, Lyndon Johnson was Assistant Leader of his party. In another two years, while he was still in his first term, he became his party’s leader, the Democratic Leader of the Senate. Since the Democrats were in the minority, he was therefore Minority Leader. When, two years later, the Democrats became the majority, he became Majority Leader, the most powerful man in the Senate after just a single term there, the youngest Leader in history—after a rise unprecedented in its rapidity.

  And it was not merely the velocity of his rise within the institution that was unique. He made the Senate work. It had worked—fulfilled the functions the Founding Fathers had designed it for—during the Republic’s early days, in the decades between its founding and its Civil War, when the “Great Triumvirate”—Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, and John C. Calhoun, none of them a party leader (the institution of Senate “Leaders” had not yet been created) but all three among the most celebrated Americans of their time—had strode the Senate floor together. But that had been a century earlier. Despite a few significant leaders—most notably, perhaps, the Republican Nelson Aldrich at the turn of the century and the Democrat Joseph Robinson in the 1930s (but even their power had been in the last analysis no more than the power of a first among equals)—the Senate hadn’t really worked since, falling more and more out of step with a constantly changing world. Lyndon Johnson transformed the Senate, pulled a nineteenth-century—indeed, in many respects an eighteenth-century—body into the twentieth century. It was not only men he bent to his will but an entire institution, one that had seemed, during its previous century and three-quarters of existence, stubbornly unbendable. Johnson accomplished this transformation not by the pronouncement or fiat or order that is the method of executive initiative, but out of the very nature and fabric of the legislative process itself. He was not only the youngest but the greatest Senate Leader in America’s history. His colleagues called him Leader. “Good morning, Leader,” they would say. “Could I have a minute of your time, Leader?” they would say. “Great job there, Mr. Leader.” “Mr. Leader, I never thought you could pull that one off.” And a Leader he was. He was master of the Senate—master of an institution that had never before had a master, and that at the time, almost half a century later, when this book is being written, has not had one since.

  • • •

  PERHAPS THE CLEAREST illustration of this mastery was the struggle in which this entwining of personality and power was most vividly played out: the collision in 1957 between the seemingly irresistible political force that was Lyndon Baines Johnson and the seemingly immovable political object that was the United States Senate—the struggle in which Johnson used all his cunning, and all the power he had amassed, to accomplish what had seemed impossible to accomplish, the passage by the Senate of a civil rights bill.

  For decade after decade, the Senate had been not only a joke, but a cruel joke. For almost a century, it had not merely embodied but had empowered, with an immense power, the forces of conservatism and reaction in America, had stood as an impregnable stronghold against which, decade after decade, successive waves of demand for social change, for governmental action to promote justice and to ease the burdens of impoverished and disadvantaged Americans, had dashed themselves in vain. At the beginning of 1957, the Senate still stood—as it had stood, with rare exceptions, since the founding of the Republic—as a defiant fortress barring the road to social justice. It stood, more particularly, as the stronghold of the South, of the cause that had been lost in the Civil War—and then, over the intervening decades
since the war, had been won in the Senate. The Senate, William S. White, the body’s most prominent chronicler, wrote in 1956, is “the South’s unending revenge upon the North for Gettysburg.” Not just revenge, unending revenge. When the Senate convened in 1957, the gavels of its great standing committees were still overwhelmingly in the hands of the South, and no end to that revenge seemed in sight. And after the crushing of the 1956 civil rights bill by the largest margin in Senate history—a result in which Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson played a leading role—southern control of the Senate seemed firmer than ever; the 1956 defeat seemed to foreclose any chance of meaningful progress for black Americans for years to come. Never had the hope that blacks like Margaret Frost would be able to vote seemed further from any possibility of realization. In the Summer of 1957, however, Lyndon Johnson, in an abrupt and total reversal of his twenty-year record on civil rights, would push a civil rights bill, primarily a voting rights bill, through the Senate—would create the bill, really, so completely did he transform a confused and contradictory Administration measure that had no realistic chance of passage; would create it and then, in one of the most notable legislative feats in American history, would cajole and plead and threaten and lie, would use all his power and all his guile, all the awe in which his colleagues held him, and all the fear, to ram the bill through the Senate. It was, thanks to him, a bill that the House could also pass, and that the President could sign—the first civil rights legislation to be added to the statute books of the United States since 1870. The Civil Rights Act of 1957 made only a meagre advance toward social justice, and it is all but forgotten today, partly because it was dwarfed by the advances made under President Lyndon Johnson’s Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965. But it paved the way—its passage was necessary—for all that was to come. As its Leader, he made the Senate not only work, but work toward a noble end.