Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson

by Robert A. Caro

  They had succeeded.

  DURING THE GILDED AGE—the era of its greatest power—the Senate sunk from the heights of public esteem to the depths. Its inertia was a subject of public ridicule—“The Senate does about as much in a week as a set of men in business would do in half an hour,” one newspaper correspondent wrote—as was the corruption that infected it. And it was the subject of public anger.

  Once, Senate and senators had been immortalized in paintings, in a classical, heroic style that became famous—George Healy’s glowing Webster Replying to Hayne; Peter Rothermel’s majestic The United States Senate, A.D. 1850; Henry F. Darby’s Henry Clay; Rembrandt Peale’s John C. Calhoun; Francis Alexander’s “Black Dan” portrait of Webster. Now, it was not classicism but caricature with which the Senate was depicted. It was chronicled in cartoons—cartoons so savage and telling that they became famous. One of a hundred brilliant depictions of the Senate that appeared in the pictorial weekly Puck, founded in 1877, was Joseph Keppler’s “The Bosses of the Senate.” The cartoon shows the desks of the Senate, and the senators sitting at them, men drawn small. Behind the desks, looming menacingly over the little senators, stands a row of huge, pot-bellied, top-hatted, arrogant “bosses” labeled “Copper Trust,” “Standard Oil Trust,” “Sugar Trust,” “Tin Trust.” Behind these figures is a sign: “This Is A Senate of the Monopolists, By the Monopolists, and For the Monopolists.” Above, in the gallery, is a “People’s Entrance,” barred with a padlock and marked “Closed.” Once foreign observers had marveled at the Senate as “the most remarkable of all the inventions of modern politics.” Now their tone had changed. Writing in 1902, the Russian-born, French-educated political scientist Moisei Ostrogorski would say,

  The Senate of the United States no longer has any resemblance to that August assembly which provoked the admiration of the Tocquevilles. It would be no use looking for the foremost men of the nation there; neither statesmen nor orators are to be found in it. [The body is filled] with men of mediocre or no political intelligence, some of whom, extremely wealthy, multi-millionaires, look on the senatorial dignity as a title for ennobling their well or ill gotten riches, [and with] crack wirepullers [and] state bosses [who] find the Senate a convenient base of operations for their intrigues and their designs on the public interest….

  DURING THE GILDED AGE, the Senate’s power reached its peak not only in domestic affairs but in foreign. One-third plus one of the Senate had of course been given power to reject treaties by the Constitution, and in 1868 the Senate was given additional power by itself: it revised its standing rules so that treaties could be amended—their text changed—by a simple majority. And throughout three decades, as Schlesinger notes, “the Senate exercised its power in this realm with relish, freely rewriting, amending and rejecting treaties negotiated by the executive.” Rejecting was the operative term: between 1871 and 1898 the Senate did not ratify a single significant treaty. Writing in 1885, Professor Woodrow Wilson said that since a President was forced to deal with the Senate on treaties “as a servant conferring with a master,” its power was unbalancing the whole system of checks and balances. During this era, senators made policy in another way as well: as had in fact been the case during the entire nineteenth century, most secretaries of state were former senators.

  Nor did the Senate confine its foreign policy role to treaties. Together with the House (and the yellow press), it pushed a cautious President (“I have been through one war,” McKinley told a friend. “I have seen the dead piled up, and I do not want to see another”) into war with Spain. Only with reluctance was the President finally induced to send the Maine to Havana. After it blew up, McKinley still resisted intervention, but a delegation of senators went to Cuba to make their own investigation, and when, upon their return, they told on the Senate floor of Spanish brutality and mass starvation in the reconcentrado camps, the journalistic clamor was suddenly clothed with authority. The Allison-Aldrich clique came down for war; three days later, McKinley issued an ultimatum to Spain; on April 25, 1898, it was war—war on both sides of the world as the young nation’s cruisers steamed aline into Manila Bay to destroy the fleet of the old.

  And when the war ended, after just four months, and the country suddenly had to confront a great decision, it was among the desks of the Senate that that decision was made. As once, three quarters of a century before, the Senate had debated the wisdom of building a fort on the shore of the far-off Pacific, now the Senate debated the question of whether America’s expansion should stop at that shore—or go beyond it; of whether a young nation which had so quickly become a giant power would confine its power to its own continent—or extend it throughout the world; of whether it would still be merely a nation—or an empire. In December, 1898, under a peace treaty hammered out in Paris, Spain relinquished Cuba, and ceded to the United States Puerto Rico, Guam, and, for a token $20 million, the Philippines, an island archipelago seven thousand miles west of the United States.

  Subject, of course, to the advice and consent of the American Senate.

  The debate in the Senate over ratification of the treaty ending the Spanish-American War was a national soul-searching. It was among the Senate desks—eighty-four of them now—that the imperatives of imperialism confronted other imperatives, imperatives dramatized because even as the debate raged, Filipino nationalists rose in rebellion against American troops, and the debate was conducted against a backdrop of atrocities committed by both sides in a brutal guerrilla war that would last three years and require the commitment of seventy thousand American troops before the independence movement was crushed. Rising for the first time among those desks, thirty-seven-year-old Albert Beveridge of Indiana proved that a single speech in the Senate could still catapult a newly elected senator to national fame. “The Philippines are ours forever,” Beveridge said,

  And just beyond the Philippines are China’s illimitable markets. We will not retreat from either…. We will not renounce our part in the mission of our race, trustees under God, of the civilization of the world…. God has marked us as his chosen people, henceforth to lead in the regeneration of the world…. He has made us adept in government that we administer government among savages and senile people.

  And it was among those desks that seventy-two-year-old George Hoar of Massachusetts rose to reply—in a voice trembling with anger.

  I have listened, delighted, as have, I suppose, all the members of the Senate, to the eloquence of my honorable friend from Indiana…. Yet, Mr. President, as I heard his eloquent description of wealth and commerce and trade, I listened in vain for those words which the American people have been wont to take upon their lips in every crisis…. The words Right, Justice, Duty, Freedom were absent, my friend must permit me to say, from that eloquent speech.

  Anti-imperialists said governing a foreign country without its consent was a violation of the spirit of the Declaration of Independence; the United States was “trampling on our own great Charter” in the Philippines, Hoar declared. Henry Cabot Lodge responded that that was not the point, since “the Philippines mean a vast future trade and wealth and power.”

  The vote on the treaty was very close. Fifty-six of the eighty-four votes would be necessary for ratification, and the vote, taken in February, 1899, was 57 to 27. That was the vote—a vote in the Senate—that set the stage for the American Century.

  As the nineteenth century drew to a close, the Senate had been the dominant entity in the American government for perhaps three quarters of that century. If its glory was gone, its Golden Age vanished long before, its power seemed as great as ever.

  BUT THEN CAME the twentieth century.

  Suddenly, with that treaty, the United States was no longer merely a nation but an empire—an empire with colonies stretching from the Caribbean to the China Sea. The oceans were no longer broad moats that protected and insulated an infant republic and let it grow strong, but lakes over whose surface sped the Republic’s powerful fleets, lakes on the far sid
e of which were the Republic’s colonies and coaling stations, sources of its raw materials, markets for its industries, lakes dotted with islands—Puerto Rico, Cuba, Hawaii, the Philippines, Guam, Samoa, other, smaller Pacific islands—vital to American interests, in some cases garrisoned by American troops. And with the acquisition of colonies came, all at once, new needs—a navy powerful enough to keep open the sea lanes to the colonies, an Isthmian canal so the navy’s squadrons could be shifted rapidly between ocean and ocean, protection for the canal’s Caribbean approaches. Indeed, the acquisition of colonies created problems beyond the immediately obvious: had not America brought peace and stability to Cuba?—was it not only logical then, “for economic, strategic and humanitarian reasons,” to bring peace and stability to the entire region, to supervise much of the Caribbean and Central America? And, as Americans were to discover in the very first years of the “American Century”—in that “revolt” (or “War for Independence”) in the faraway Philippines—conquering a country was easier than governing it. All at once, with American citizens, property, and commercial interests scattered all over the globe, there were decisions to be made: whether or not to send troops to protect them from imminent menace; decisions on how far to go in countering Russian expansion in Manchuria; on how to deal with Santo Domingo’s default on debts to European nations—a default that led France and Italy to threaten immediate intervention in the Western Hemisphere. And these were decisions that couldn’t wait for Senate deliberations; there were threats and maneuvers that might come when the Senate was not in session, and that had to be met immediately.

  And suddenly there was a President who was confident that he could make these decisions by himself. Senatorial power had been a coefficient of presidential weakness, and for thirty years, Presidents had been either inexperienced like Grant, or indecisive, or simply cowed by the mighty Senate. But with the crack of the assassin’s gunshot that struck down McKinley, and, to the rage of Senator Mark Hanna, put “that damned cowboy” Theodore Roosevelt in the White House, the era of weak Presidents was over.

  The executive agreement—the international covenant devised by the President acting alone—had had its origin almost a century before in certain murky phrases in the Constitution. “Gradually, in a way that neither historians nor legal scholars have made altogether clear”—but largely, it appears, because in the early nineteenth century the Senate accepted the device to spare itself the task of considering a multitude of technical agreements—it obtained the color of usage, but almost entirely for minor matters. But when, in 1901, Roosevelt became President, the executive agreement became almost the order of the day.

  When the Senate moved too slowly for Roosevelt’s taste in ratifying a treaty with Santo Domingo to forestall European intervention, Roosevelt, as he himself described it, “put the agreement into effect, and I continued its execution for two years before the Senate acted; and I would have continued it until the end of my term, if necessary, without any action by Congress.” In another executive agreement—one kept so secret that historians would not discover its existence for two decades—Roosevelt agreed to Japan’s imposition of a military protectorate on Korea.

  Coupled with the rise of the executive agreement was what Arthur Schlesinger calls a “new presidential exuberance” about the use of armed force “on the pretexts of protecting American citizens and property.” Roosevelt, often without congressional permission, dispatched American regiments to Caribbean countries and installed provisional governments.

  What would have been the result had the Senate resisted TR’s expansion of executive authority in foreign affairs cannot be known—because the Senate did not resist. It refused to assert the powers in foreign affairs that the Framers had given it. Time after time, when a senator proposed an amendment limiting the new executive authority—denying appropriations for military forces sent to foreign countries without congressional consent, for example—the Senate’s GOP rulers saw to it that the amendment was voted down. “I say there is no law, and I do not believe there ever was a law to prevent the Commander-in-Chief of … the United States from … giving [American citizens] the protection required by self-respect,” Senator Elihu Root declared. A President’s authority as Commander-in-Chief therefore allowed him to send troops “unless it be for the purpose of making war, which of course he cannot do.” As the trend toward executive action continued during the Taft Administration, protests in the Senate grew louder. But, as Schlesinger summarizes, “whatever the nuances of arguments, limitations were evaporating. The executive was becoming habituated to the unconstrained deployment of American forces around the world, and Congress chose not to say him nay.” As Roosevelt himself was to say, “The biggest matters, such as the Portsmouth peace, the acquisition of Panama, and sending the fleet around the world, I managed without consultation with anyone….” To a considerable extent, TR was only telling the truth. Furthermore, precedents had now been established. Following bloodshed in Tampico in 1914, Woodrow Wilson asked congressional sanction to send troops to protect American citizens in Mexico. There was doubt among senators over whether the provocation justified Wilson’s reaction, but, trapped by what Hamilton had called the “antecedent state of things,” they approved the move. No President—and perhaps no outside force of any type—could have so drastically weakened the Senate’s power in foreign affairs. The Founding Fathers had given the Senate armor that should have prevented that. But the Senate could weaken itself—and it had done so, stripping away much of its own authority over foreign affairs.

  BUT NOT ALL OF IT—as, in 1919, Woodrow Wilson discovered.

  When the President sailed for Europe to personally represent the United States at the peace conference convening in Paris, warships in New York Harbor fired salutes, a huge throng filled Battery Park to cheer him off on his historic journey, and as his liner passed through the Narrows, his fellow passengers saw, all along the Brooklyn and Staten Island shorelines, children waving flags. When the ship pulled into Brest, posters on the walls of the old slate-roofed stone houses called on all Frenchmen to praise this world hero who had come “to found a new order on the rights of peoples, and to stop forever the return of atrocious war.” The American President’s idealistic aims had captured the imagination of a war-weary world. In isolated villages in Italy, peasants burned candles before his portrait. All over Europe, crowds cheered him as he paraded through the streets, a reception which, as one historian puts it delicately, “tended to increase his sense of mission.” And not only was the peace treaty signed at Versailles in May, 1919, the remarkably moderate treaty that Wilson wanted, but incorporated within the body of the treaty was a Covenant, or Constitution, for a world organization for peace, a “League of Nations,” which he had determined to bring into being, so that the treaty would be “definitely a guarantee of peace.” And the American people were, by a substantial majority, in favor of the proposed League in principle, and newspapers supported it by a margin of four to one.

  But it was not the people of the United States who would determine the fate of the League of Nations but the Senate of the United States—and the Majority Leader of the Senate, who commanded from Daniel Webster’s desk, was Henry Cabot Lodge.

  Dr. Lodge (Ph.D., Harvard), historian and author, had been known as “the Scholar in Politics” before the advent on the political scene of Dr. Woodrow Wilson (Ph.D., Johns Hopkins), historian and author, who promptly was awarded that title as if Lodge had never held it. The Senator loathed the President. “I never expected to hate anyone in politics with the hatred I feel toward Wilson,” he had written a friend some years before; he told other friends that the President was “shifty,” “the most sinister figure that ever crossed the country’s path.” The feeling was reciprocated. The Republican senators, particularly Lodge, were “pygmy-minded—narrow … selfish … poor little minds that never get anywhere but run around in a circle and think they are going somewhere,” Wilson said. So strained were relations between the
two men that at one ceremony Wilson refused to sit on the same platform with the Senator.

  Piled atop the personal considerations were the political. In a wartime truce on politics, Republicans had in many instances supported Wilson’s war program more loyally than Democrats, but just before the 1918 congressional elections, Wilson had suddenly appealed to voters to return Democratic majorities to both houses. Furious Republicans considered the appeal a betrayal, and some of them—none more so than Lodge—saw it as confirmation of what they had long suspected was the President’s unbridled lust for power; Lodge believed that Wilson was planning to run for a third term, in 1920, and, that the President, anxious to be acclaimed as the peacemaker to boost his re-election prospects, was sacrificing the independence of the United States to the League. And when Wilson’s appeal backfired—the Republicans took control of both houses, although by a mere two-vote margin in the Senate—the President’s most bitter enemy was elevated not only to the Senate’s majority leadership but to the chairmanship of its Foreign Relations Committee.