But in part the explanation lay in the Senate itself.
“Congressional procedure,” Life magazine was to note in 1945, is largely “the same as it was in 1789.” As for the Senate’s basic committee and staff structure, that had been established in 1890. During the intervening decades, government had grown enormously—in 1946 the national budget was three hundred times the size it had been in 1890—but the staffs of Senate committees had grown hardly at all. To oversee that budget, the Senate Appropriations Committee staff consisted of eight persons, exactly one more than had been on that staff decades earlier. Not only were they ridiculously small, the staffs of Senate committees had little of the technical expertise necessary to understand a government which had become infinitely more complicated and technical. The salaries of congressional staff members were so low that Capitol Hill could not attract men and women of the caliber that were flocking to the executive branch. A study done in 1942 concluded that only four of the seventy-six congressional committees had “expert staffs prepared professionally even to cross-examine experts of the executive branch.” As for senators’ personal staff, as late as 1941, a senator would be entitled to hire only six employees, and only one at a salary—$3,000—which might attract someone with qualifications above those of a clerk. So little importance was attached to staff that many senators didn’t hire even the six to which they were entitled, and an astonishingly high proportion of the approximately 500 employees on senators’ personal staffs and the 144 on the staff of Senate committees were senators’ relatives. The Founding Fathers had envisioned Congress as a check on the executive. Congress couldn’t make even a pretense of analyzing the measures the executive submitted for its approval. During the decades since 1890, when the Senate had authorized a staff of three persons for its Foreign Relations Committee, the United States had become a global power, with interests in a hundred foreign countries. In 1939, the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was still three: one full-time clerk who took dictation, typed, and ran the stenotype machine, and two part-time clerks. As one observer put it, “There could be no adversary relationship between the two branches of government [in foreign relations] because most of the professional work had to be done in the Department of State.” Anyone seeking an explanation of the Senate’s willingness to allow the rise of the executive agreement, which freed it from the details of foreign policy, need look no further: the Senate simply had no staff adequate to handle the details of foreign policy. The adversary relationship—the relationship that had lain at the heart of the Framers’ concept of the American government they thought they were creating—had become impossible in virtually all areas; even Senate Parliamentarian Floyd Riddick had to admit that “with occasional exceptions, Congress did little more than look into, slightly amend or block the bills upon which it was called to act.”
Unable to analyze legislation, Congress was equally unable to create it.
This was perhaps the most significant alteration in the power of the House and the Senate. The Framers of the Constitution had given Congress great power to make laws, vesting in it “all legislative powers,” and during the early, simpler days of the Republic, Congress had jealously guarded that power; as late as 1908, the Senate had erupted in anger when the Secretary of the Interior presumed to send it a bill already drafted in final form. But by the 1930s, with government so much more complicated, bill-drafting had become a science. Knowledge of that science was in extremely short supply on Capitol Hill. There were plenty of legislative technicians with the necessary expertise at the great law firms in New York. There were plenty at the White House, and in the executive departments—the legislative section of the Agriculture Department alone had six hundred employees. In 1939, the Legislative Drafting Service that helped both houses of Congress consisted of eight employees. And of all the scores of major statutes passed during the New Deal, approximately two per year were created by Congress—because, as Tommy Corcoran explained, Congress simply lacked the “technical equipment to draft a big, modern statute.”
To draft one—or even to explain one and defend it in detail, as was often required when major new legislation was being presented to the Senate. The Senate was going through the same rituals it had gone through in the nineteenth century, but frequently now they were rituals without meaning—as was known by those Senate insiders who understood the significance of the fact that often the new Majority Leader, Alben Barkley of Kentucky, rising to speak, would signal a page to place a small portable lectern atop his desk. His intimates knew that Barkley, a gifted extemporaneous orator, needed a lectern only when he was reading a speech written by someone else—and that often the someone else was a White House official. Barkley was not alone. Senatorial floor managers of major legislation were relying more and more often on explanatory speeches written by White House aides. The legislative power was in effect being exercised increasingly by the executive. The Framers had vested in the Congress the power to make laws, but Congress itself had made it all but impossible for it to exercise that power. And the explanation for the lack of adequate Senate staff was as significant as the lack itself. For the fundamental explanation was that the Senate didn’t want the staff it needed. Repeated proposals to add an expert permanent staff to committees—House and Senate—were applauded in principle, and died away without action being taken.
The reason for this rested partly on philosophic considerations, extremely shortsighted ones. Describing the senatorial attitude, Time magazine’s longtime congressional correspondent Neil MacNeil says, “The damned staff cost money,” and conservative senators believed in reducing government spending, not increasing it. Senators who did not spend even the meager allocation for personal staff boasted when, at the end of the year, they turned the money back to the government. For many senators, large, bustling staffs fit in neither with their concept of their beloved institution—“It was a quiet, sleepy place, and they wanted to keep it that way,” MacNeil says, “and besides, they didn’t want the institution to change, and they never had had staff”—nor with their concept of themselves: “They were senators, senators of the United States, not corporation executives supervising staffs.” A senator, MacNeil says, “would go back to his office, and put his feet up on his desk, and think about what was going on in the world, and after a few weeks, he’d make a speech. He’d sit there and think, and come up with ideas and theories. And that didn’t work with a staff.” Most senators seemed to have no concept of what a staff could do. When the Librarian of Congress, Archibald MacLeish, proposed augmenting the tiny Legislative Reference Service so that congressional committees would have “scholarly research and counsel… at least equal to that of” the witnesses from the executive branch and private industry who testified before them, Congress rejected the proposal.
There were more pragmatic considerations as well. The staff of senatorial committees was controlled by the committee chairmen; giving individual senators more staff would therefore dilute the chairmen’s power, and the chairmen were not eager to have it diluted. The press referred to the proposed administrative assistants as “assistant senators,” reinforcing senators’ apprehensions at establishing “a cadre of political assistants who would eventually be in a position to compete for their jobs.” Senior senators, entrenched in power under the old system, had, as one would put it, a “suspicion… that they had little to gain and much to lose from a change in the status quo.” Richard Strout of The New Republic was to say that “Congress has a deep, vested interest in its own inefficiency.” It wasn’t outside forces that kept the Senate inefficient—fifty years out of date. It was the Senate itself, for its own reasons.
The same was true of the other reasons for the Senate’s increasing inability to perform the function for which it had been created: the autocratic, paralyzing power of the committee chairmen, their selection not by ability but by seniority alone—these practices were not changed because the Senate did not want them changed, and in fact had incentives
not to change them. And the Senate did not have to change them. It was increasingly unable to respond to the demands of a changing world, but, because of the armor that the Framers of the Constitution had bolted around it, that world couldn’t touch the Senate. The Framers had sought to insulate the Senate against the executive and the people, against outside forces, and they had done the job too well. No one could take away the Senate’s power to play the role the Framers had envisioned for it; the Senate had, without consequence to itself, given that power away.
AND WHEN, in foreign affairs at least, it attempted to play that role, the attempt resulted in a tragedy that vividly illuminated the full potential for disaster that could be caused by the Senate’s unshakable power—and that illuminated as well the Senate’s utter inability to respond to the modern world.
After the First World War, an America sickened by the war’s horrors, disillusioned by its apparent senselessness, and cynical and distrustful of the political maneuvering of foreign powers turned its back on the world, refusing to accept responsibility for maintaining the peace; insisting rigidly on the repayment of the colossal war debts it was owed by its struggling Allies, while raising tariff walls against them and thereby exacerbating international tensions. While totalitarian regimes in Italy, Germany, and Japan were building huge military machines, America scrapped its navy, reduced its army, tried to lull itself into a belief that trouble could best be avoided by ignoring it, and refused to participate in attempts to create a collective security and an international rule of law. The Twenties and Thirties were decades of a tragic national self-delusion, of shortsighted diplomacy, of a refusal to understand the terrible new forces arising in the world, of a belief that America could simply isolate herself from them. And the Senate was the stronghold of isolationism.
Many of the most influential senators—Wheeler, Norris, both La Follettes, Vandenberg, Taft, Key Pittman, Hiram Johnson—were isolationists, as was Henry Cabot Lodge’s successor as Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, William E. Borah of Idaho.
In a Chamber filled with renowned orators, Borah, a former Shakespearean actor, was the orator without peer. Whenever during his thirty-three-year senatorial career word spread through the Capitol that “Borah’s up,” spectators would pour into the galleries, and senators would hurry onto the floor to hear him speak. “The Lion of Idaho” possessed, as well, a gift for attracting the journalistic spotlight. At his daily three o’clock press conferences, journalists crowded into his office, leading a disgruntled President Coolidge to comment that “Senator Borah is always in session.” For decades, a historian says, “it seemed impossible to pick up a newspaper without reading a Borah pronouncement.” And while Borah, a liberal Republican on domestic issues, often employed his eloquence on behalf of the farmer or the factory worker, its impact was greatest on foreign policy.
In rejecting the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, the Senate had undermined the possibility of peace in the world. For more than twenty years thereafter, it carried on that work. In 1923, President Coolidge proposed that the United States become a member of the World Court. Since this tribunal could settle disputes only when every member agreed, its threat to America’s sovereignty was minimal, and not only the President but both political parties, in their platforms of 1924, and the House of Representatives, by an overwhelming vote of 303 to 28, and in polls, a majority of the American people, endorsed the World Court treaty. But treaties require Senate ratification, and the Senate, following Borah’s lead, made ratification contingent on five conditions. The Court’s twenty-one member nations accepted four of them, and expressed a willingness to negotiate on the fifth, but the Senate made clear that its resolution was non-negotiable—and America’s failure to become a member made the Court ineffective. In 1931, the Japanese invaded Chinese Manchuria, and quickly began turning it into a puppet state. Amid warnings that failure to force Japan to disgorge its new territory acquired by naked aggression would encourage not only the Japanese but other potential aggressors, the League of Nations met to consider action, and American representatives sat in on the discussions. But the discussions were shadowed by the old concern: even if the League members agreed on some course of action, what would the American Senate do? And nothing—at least nothing effective—was done. In 1933, President Roosevelt asked for congressional authority to block arms shipments to aggressor countries. The House gave it to him. The Senate didn’t. In fact, it amended the House resolution to force the President to embargo shipments to every country involved in a war—an amendment which, as Arthur Schlesinger puts it, “destroyed the original purpose of the resolution, which was precisely to discriminate against aggressors,” and which would actually have an effect opposite to what Roosevelt had wanted, “by strengthening nations that had arms already” at the expense of those who didn’t.
For almost two years beginning in September, 1934, the high-ceilinged, marble-columned Senate Caucus Room was the chief rallying point for isolationist sentiment in the United States, as a special Senate committee, chaired by the ardent isolationist Gerald P. Nye of North Dakota, held ninety-three hearings, staged with great public fanfare, to “prove” that America had been lured into the Great War to boost arms makers’ profits. In 1935, with Hitler rapidly rearming, the danger of a worldwide conflagration increased as Mussolini massed troops on the borders of the primitive kingdom of Ethiopia. When Roosevelt asked for authority to impose an arms embargo, the Senate’s response was to pass, in twenty-five minutes, the Neutrality Act of 1935, which tied the President’s hands by making it impossible for him to exert effective influence against Italy by forbidding the export of munitions to all belligerents. While noting that the bill penalized not Italy but Ethiopia, Roosevelt, afraid of exacerbating isolationist passions, felt he had no choice but to sign it. That same year, the President urged the Senate—as, twelve years before, President Coolidge had urged the Senate—to allow America to join the World Court. From the Senate floor came the response. “We are being rushed pell-mell to get into this World Court so that Señor Ab Jap or some other something from Japan can pass upon our controversies,” Huey Long shouted. “To hell with Europe and the rest of those nations,” Minnesota’s Thomas Stall cried. Although there were seventy-two Democrats in the Senate, the proposal could garner only fifty-two votes, a majority but short of the two-thirds needed for passage. At the very height of Roosevelt’s popularity, twenty Democratic senators had deserted him. “Thank God!” Borah said. That same year, the Senate passed legislation, drafted by Borah, strictly limiting expenditures for warships or for any other form of national defense. Nineteen thirty-six brought a further escalation in international tensions, so the Senate passed that year’s Neutrality Act, which restricted even more tightly America’s ability to deter aggressors by adding to the earlier restrictions on arms aid to all belligerents restrictions on financial aid as well. By the time Congress convened in 1937, Francisco Franco’s fascists, armed and aided by Hitler, had launched a campaign against Spain’s Republican government. This was a civil war, and the Neutrality Acts of 1935 and 1936 did not apply to civil wars. So Congress passed the Neutrality Act of 1937, which broadened the embargo so that it would apply to civil wars. “While German planes and cannon were turning the tide in Spain, the United States was denying the hard-pressed Spanish loyalists even a case of cartridges,” Garraty observes.
“With every surrender the prospects of European war grow darker,” Roosevelt was warned by his ambassador to Spain, but it was not the President but Capitol Hill’s isolationists who were shaping American foreign policy. The Senate vote for the Neutrality Act of 1937 was an overwhelming 63 to 6. In October, 1937, with Japanese troops now pushing into North China, with the fascists winning in Spain, with Germany having reoccupied the Rhineland in violation of the Versailles treaty and with Germany, Italy, and Japan having formed a military alliance, Roosevelt warned that if totalitarianism rolled over one country after another, America’s turn would eventually come.
Predicting that there would be “no escape through mere isolation or neutrality,” he called for a “quarantine” of aggressor nations. Nye and Borah accused the President of trying to police the world and plunge America into another “European war.” In December, 1937, Japanese warplanes sunk the United States gunboat Panay (foreshadowing another surprise attack on a December Sunday morning) as it lay in a Chinese river. Borah reminded the reporters crowded into his office that America had “the Atlantic on one side and the Pacific on the other,” and was therefore safe from invasion. “The United States is getting worked up over the prospect of war. I’m not,” he said.
Forced to abandon his hopes for collective security, Roosevelt began concentrating on America’s own military preparedness, calling for huge defense appropriations. To these Congress agreed, particularly after Nazi tanks rolled into Austria in May, 1938. But when, in September, with Hitler now menacing Czechoslovakia, the President asked also for a modification of the Neutrality Acts that would allow him at last to discriminate, in supplying arms, between aggressors and their victims, the isolationists on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee flatly refused to report out any modifications at all; they, not the President, were the best judges of the international situation, they made clear. When Roosevelt predicted that war in Europe was imminent, Borah replied confidently: “We are not going to have a war. Germany isn’t ready for it…. I have my own sources of information.” In March, 1939, in violation of his promises at Munich, Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia. Borah had a reaction: admiration. “Gad, what a chance Hitler has!” the Senator said. “If he only moderates his religious and racial intolerance, he would take his place beside Charlemagne. He has taken Europe without firing a shot.” The Senator’s sources of information were evidently still operative. “I know it to be a fact as much as I ever will know anything … that Britain is behind Hitler,” he said at this time. Roosevelt again appealed to the Senate to repeal the arms embargo, but on July 11, 1939, in a showdown vote, the Foreign Relations Committee decided, 12 to 11, to defer consideration of the matter until the next session of Congress. In August, Hitler and Stalin signed a non-aggression pact. In desperation, Roosevelt called the committee members to the White House and, urging them to reconsider, came as close as Franklin Roosevelt ever came to begging. The world was on the verge of a catastrophe, he told them, and he needed all the power he could muster to avert it. “I’ve fired my last shot,” he said. “I think I ought to have another round in my belt.” The senators sat there cold-faced. Vice President Garner, their leader in 1939 as he had been in the court-packing fight, showed Roosevelt who was boss. After polling the senators one by one in front of the President, he turned to him, and said: “Well, Captain, we may as well face the facts. You haven’t got the votes, and that’s all there is to it.” (Not until Germany invaded Poland in September, and World War II was actually under way, was the arms embargo finally repealed. And even then—and even after a poll that showed that 84 percent of the American people wanted an Allied victory—it was repealed only after six weeks of acrimonious Senate debate, during which Borah, still adamantly insisting that America need not be involved in war, made his last impassioned radio address to the American people.)
Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson Page 14