Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson

by Robert A. Caro

  LATER, he took the little subway beneath the Senate to the office he hadn’t wanted. And though Suite SOB 231 may have had only three rooms instead of four, they were senatorial rooms—high-ceilinged, spacious. On one wall of his private office, adjacent to his private bathroom, was a delicate marble fireplace, the hearth flanked by two slender marble columns. Above the fireplace was a tall gilt-framed mirror. And behind his desk was a high, wide, arched window, recessed and framed in mahogany. It looked out over the green parks of the Capitol Plaza, and beyond the plaza was the long Mall, and the great pillar of the Washington Monument. Margaret Mayer of the Austin American-Statesman, who had known him for many years in Texas and who had covered the 1948 campaign, went to interview him there. Referring to the hard campaign—and perhaps, since Ms. Mayer was a perceptive reporter, to his hard life—she asked him if it had all been worth it to be seated at last in that office. Lyndon Johnson winked at her, and nodded—and grinned.

  HIS PATH IN THE SENATE was also made smoother by other gifts that he possessed—talents that he had been demonstrating all his life, and that he now demonstrated again, vividly, during his first year in the Senate.

  One was an ability to transform his outward personality, his demeanor and mannerisms—not to change his nature, but to conceal it—an ability that had always been one of Lyndon Johnson’s most striking characteristics, as had a strength of will that enabled him to make a transformation remarkably thorough.

  The most recent of these changes had occurred during the very election that had won him this Senate seat. The campaign’s first months, when he had been confident of success, had been filled with the familiar explosions at his subordinates: vicious tirades, laced with obscenities and with insults designed to find his target’s most vulnerable point, that made both women and men weep. He had refused to control himself—had seemingly found it impossible, so sudden and violent were the rages, to control himself—even in public, even in places where the tirades would be witnessed by the voters he was trying to court. Arriving at one Rotary Club meeting where he had expected to give only brief remarks, he was told that a longer talk would be desirable; wheeling on his hapless advance man, he screamed, as the club members gaped, “I thought it was just gonna be coffee, doughnuts and bullshit!” Armored against critical newspaper articles by his friendships, crucially important in Texas journalism, with publishers, he refused to control himself even in front of reporters, not only shocking them with his treatment of secretaries (unable to bear watching him shout “unbelievable” obscenities at the sweet-faced, soft-voiced Mary Rather, who was standing head bowed and crying in front of him, Felix Mc-Knight of the Dallas News suddenly found himself jumping in front of her, yelling “You can’t talk to her like that! Apologize to her!”), but giving them a taste of the treatment themselves (“C’mon,” he shouted to stubby Dave Cheavens of the Associated Press, who was sensitive about his weight, “Won’t those fat little legs of yours carry you any faster than that?”).

  His treatment of people not connected with the campaign who were similarly unable to defend themselves—waiters and bellhops, desk clerks and cooks—was the same. Storming into a hotel kitchen, a towering figure holding a large steak in one hand and waving it in a cook’s face, he raged: “Who ever told you you were a cook? Didn’t you ever hear of cutting the fat off? I’ve never seen so much fat on a steak in my life.” And he seemed to feel he didn’t have to control himself; “Lyndon just seemed to think he was entitled to talk to people that way,” one reporter says.

  But in the latter stages of the campaign—when he had suddenly realized, with only a month to go, that he was almost hopelessly behind and could not afford to antagonize voters—the tantrums ended, instantly and completely. Busby, who had been assigned to accompany him on the next trip, was dreading the experience (“I had learned one thing—when he got angry, hide!”). Now he watched in astonishment as Johnson greeted the first desk clerk he encountered with a gracious smile, and gracious words, saying, “You have a very fine hotel here. I stayed in it before and I’m looking forward to this visit.” He told the bellhop who carried his baggage to his room, “I’d like to shake hands with you if your hands weren’t so busy.” After the bellhop had put down the bags and had had the handshake, Busby started to give him a tip. “Son, he’s a cheap tipper; I don’t want him tipping you,” Johnson told the bellhop, giving him a five-dollar bill. And the next morning, Busby awoke to find Lyndon Johnson sitting beside his bed. He wasn’t there to give Buzz orders. He was holding something in his hands. “Here, Buzz,” he said, “I went down and got a coffee and doughnut for you.” And he didn’t simply hand the two items to Busby. He would hand the sleepy-eyed young man the coffee, wait until he had taken a sip, and take the coffee back—and only then would hand him the doughnut. After Buzz had taken a bite, Johnson would take the doughnut back, and then hand him the coffee again—sitting beside the bed holding one of the two items himself, so that his assistant wouldn’t have to hold two things at once. During that entire month, that “all or nothing” month, no matter how high the tension rose, Lyndon Johnson was, in Busby’s phrase, “a changed man.” He never lost control of himself—not once.

  Now, after the campaign, safely in the Senate, he changed back—but only in some areas of his life.

  He was the old Lyndon Johnson driving to work in the morning from his home, a two-story, white-painted brick colonial at 4921 Thirtieth Place in a quiet residential area in northwest Washington—driving down Connecticut Avenue with one hand on the wheel, the other frenziedly twisting the dial on the car’s radio back and forth from one station to another searching for news broadcasts, shouting obscenities at broadcasters who said something with which he didn’t agree. He was constantly sounding his horn to get other drivers out of his way—if they didn’t move aside quickly enough, he would lean out the window and curse them; passing them on their right, he would bang his big left hand down on the outside of his car door to startle them.

  His arrival on Capitol Hill was still as ostentatiously attention-getting as possible. His long affair with Alice Glass, the tall, spectacularly beautiful small-town girl from Marlin who had become the elegant hostess of a manor house in the Virginia hunt country, had faded out during the war. That affair, the most serious of Lyndon Johnson’s life, had been kept very secret, in part because Alice was the mistress—she would later be the wife—of a man very important to Johnson, Charles Marsh, publisher of the Austin American-Statesman; in part perhaps because of Johnson’s feelings for her, which men and women privy to the affair believed were so intense that they felt Johnson might divorce Lady Bird and marry her. During his last years in the House, after that relationship ended, Johnson began arriving on Capitol Hill in the morning in the company of another tall, beautiful woman—one who was famous as well. And now that he was in the Senate, he sometimes still got out of his car with her, and they walked to his office openly holding hands.

  When Helen Gahagan Douglas was named one of “the twelve most beautiful women in America,” the critic Heywood Broun begged to disagree. “Helen Gahagan Douglas is ten of the twelve most beautiful women in America,” he wrote. At the age of twenty-two, the tall, blond Barnard College student with a long, athletic stride became an overnight sensation in the Broadway hit Dreams for Sale, and she was to star in a succession of hit shows, marrying one of her leading men, Melvyn Douglas. Deciding to study voice, she made her debut in the title role of To sea in Prague, and toured Europe in operas and concerts for two years, before returning to more Broadway starring roles and radio appearances. On screen, she played the cruel, sensual Empress of Kor in the film version of H. Rider Haggard’s novel She. By 1936, the New York Herald Tribune noted that “Helen Gahagan Douglas has made her name in four branches of the arts—theatre, opera, motion pictures, and radio.”

  Driving across country with Douglas after their marriage, Helen had been touched by the plight of Okies trekking west, and plunged into a new field—politics—wi
th her usual success. She became Democratic national committee-woman from California, and in 1944, at the age of forty-three, ran for Congress from a Los Angeles district, and won, becoming one of nine women members of the House of Representatives. Washington, one journalist wrote, “had prepared for her tall, stately and gracious beauty, but they weren’t prepared for her brilliance, in short, her brains.” A friend of Eleanor Roosevelt’s (whose husband, Helen said, was “the greatest man in the world”), she was a frequent guest at the White House, while Melvyn remained back in Hollywood making movies. On the House floor she was a striking figure, generally “surrounded,” as one account noted, “by attentive male colleagues,” and she was a riveting, charismatic speaker in her advocacy of liberal causes, particularly civil rights. Declaring that “she stood by the Negro people when they needed a sentinel on the wall,” Mary McLeod Bethune called her “the voice of American democracy.” She won re-election in 1946, and again in 1948, and was one of the most sought-after speakers for liberal rallies across the country. And in an era in which age supposedly dimmed a woman’s charms, hers seemed as bright as ever. A profile in the New York Post in 1949 commented that during her years in Congress “her waistline has grown even slimmer, her face leaner.” In her speech at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia the previous year, the Post said, “she boosted her stock still higher by turning out to be gorgeous on television.” The New York Daily News called her the “Number One glamour girl of the Democratic Party.” It was widely expected that she would run for the Senate from California in 1950, and would win.

  SHE HAD FIRST MET LYNDON JOHNSON in 1945 when, shortly after she arrived in Congress, he dropped around to her office, “draped his long frame in one of my easy chairs,” and asked how things were going. When she said that she was having trouble organizing her office, he said, “Well, come up and see how my office is run.” She found his office “very impressive. It worked. If he wanted something, it came within a half second.” There were “other industrious offices,” she was to recall, “but the efficiency of this office and the extent that they went to reach … the lives of his constituents in an intimate way was something that utterly fascinated me.” She was impressed as well by qualities which she discerned, with a very penetrating eye, in his character: by his instinct for power (“He never got very far away from Rayburn”); by his ambition (he was “in a hurry—in a great, great hurry” and “He was willing to make the compromises necessary, I believe, to stay in Congress”); and by the method by which he concealed views that might stand in the way of the realization of that ambition—a method that, she felt, required great strength. Lyndon Johnson talked so much, she saw, but he never said anything that could be “quoted back against him later.” “Was it just caution?” she was to say. “Just that he didn’t want to have a lot of his words come back at him? … He was witty, he would tell stories, he was humorous. But he was always aware that what he said might be repeated or remembered—even years later. And he didn’t want someone to come back years later, and say, ‘I remember when you said …’” She began to realize, she says, that Lyndon Johnson was very “strong.” In Washington, she was to say, “everyone tried to find out where you stood. But he had great inner control. He could talk so much—and no one ever knew exactly where he stood.” This tall, lanky, charming man was actually “one of the most close-mouthed men I ever knew.” When, years later, “John Kennedy was killed,” and she realized that Lyndon Johnson would be President, “I remember thinking that one thing was sure, we had heard the last frank response to a question from the press.” And, she felt, she knew where Johnson really stood: she was sure he was a New Dealer like her. “He cared about people; was never callous, never indifferent to suffering…. There was a warmth about the man.” That was why, she says, that “despite some of his votes, the liberals whom he always scoffed at … nevertheless forgave him when they wouldn’t forgive someone else.” While his attempt to portray himself as an insider offended some of his House colleagues, it didn’t offend her. “He knew what was going to happen…. The friendship of Sam Rayburn … had much to do with it, but there was also Lyndon’s own presence, which exuded the unmistakable air of the keeper of the keys.” They shared the same feelings for Roosevelt, she was to say, and “on the day of his funeral” in April, 1945, “we were both very depressed.” Lyndon invited her to come to his fifth-floor hideaway, and “we sat very quietly during the time of the funeral, reminiscing about our President. In this way we became friends. Mutual admiration of Franklin Roosevelt.”

  Soon Johnson was coming to the House floor more often than formerly, to sit beside her when she was there—although he didn’t stay long. On the floor, “he looked the picture of boredom, slumped in his chair with his eyes half-closed,” she recalls. “Then, suddenly, he’d jump up to his feet nervous … restless, as if he couldn’t bear it another minute.” And he would leave, “loping off the floor with that great stride of his as though he was on some Texas plain.”

  On one occasion on the floor, however, he came to her rescue—or to be more precise brought Rayburn to her rescue.

  John Rankin of Mississippi was speaking when he suddenly pointed to a group of liberal representatives who were sitting together and referred to them as “these communists.” The other liberals sat silent, afraid to challenge the Mississippi demagogue—all except Helen Douglas. Standing to make a point of order, she said, “I demand to know if the gentleman from Mississippi is addressing me!”

  “Rankin looked at me—oh, what a look—and went right on talking,” she was to recall. Most congressmen had learned not to confront him, and Helen Douglas had herself once been warned by Majority Leader John McCormack, “Remember, Rankin is a killer.” But she didn’t sit down. Instead, in her ringing, melodic voice, she said again, “I demand to know if the gentleman from Mississippi is addressing me!” and went on standing—a tall blond figure on the House floor.

  Since the Speaker had to be in the chair for a point of order, Rayburn entered the Chamber and took the podium, saying, “The gentleman from Mississippi will have to answer the congresswoman,” but Rankin, acting as if he had not heard Rayburn, went on talking; as Ms. Douglas recalls, he “was such a fearsome man, he appeared to believe himself untouchable.” Rayburn, not quite sure what the fuss was about, was letting him do so, when Johnson hurriedly approached the podium, Ms. Douglas says. He “had been in the House coffee shop when someone ran in and told him, ‘Helen is taking on Rankin!’ I was told later that he had bounded up the stairs to the Chamber three at a time.” As always he knew the right words to persuade someone to do something. “Who runs this House, you or Rankin?” he whispered up to the Speaker. “Sam scowled and banged his gavel again,” Helen Douglas recalls. “This time his voice was fierce with warning as he again ordered Rankin to answer me.” Rankin “measured Rayburn,” she was to recall. The Speaker did not say another word, but simply stared at Rankin, his face set in the stern mask that men feared. “With obvious pain,” as Helen Douglas recalls, Rankin said, “I am not addressing the gentlewoman from California.”

  MORE AND MORE FREQUENTLY, Lyndon and Helen began arriving on Capitol Hill in the mornings in the same car—sometimes hers, more often his. They would park on New Jersey Avenue, about a block and a half from the House Office Building, and walk to it together, holding hands: a conspicuous couple, both tall, both with dramatic features, walking with long strides as they came up Capitol Hill. Often, at the end of the day, they would drive, together or in separate cars, to Helen’s home on Thirty-first Street, where they would have dinner together. They went to parties together. (During the first six months Helen was in Washington, Melvyn was in India, and when he returned, his relationship with Helen proved difficult; “over the next several years,” her biographer Ingrid Winther Scobie was to write, “[their] relationship continued to deteriorate.” He returned to California. In May, 1946, their two children went to California for the Summer, and in September were enrolled in a bo
arding school near Los Angeles.)

  Whatever the considerations that had deterred Lyndon Johnson from advertising his relationship with Alice Glass, they evidently didn’t apply to Helen Douglas. He made sure that people believed he was having a physical relationship with her. Not only would they be holding hands when they arrived together in the morning, they sometimes strolled through the Capitol together, with tourists coming up to the former actress to tell her they had enjoyed one of her performances, and they held hands during those strolls. “They were a handsome couple,” one of Helen’s friends, United Nations bureaucrat Charles Hogan, was to recall. “A strikingly handsome couple together. She’s so much better looking than poor Lady Bird.”

  In particular, it seems, he wanted Alice Glass to believe it. When he parked on New Jersey Avenue, he usually parked in front of Number 317, a small building in which Alice’s sister, Mary Louise, who was then working on the staff of a Pennsylvania congressman, had an apartment. “Helen Douglas’ affair with Lyndon started just after she got to Washington,” Mary Louise says. “I know because I used to see them going to work in the mornings holding hands.” And, Mary Louise says, she knew because Johnson wanted her to know. “They would park on the street in front of my house,” even if there were spaces available on New Jersey Avenue closer to the House Office Building, she says, and she felt he parked there so that she would see the hand-holding, and tell Alice about it. If she happened to be coming out of her building while they were parking, Johnson and Helen would walk to work with her; “we’d all go in together.” In fact, she says, Lyndon himself told her sister about his new affair. Before the war, Alice and Charles Marsh had attended the annual Music Festival in Salzburg, Austria, and Helen Gahagan Douglas had sung several concerts there. “Well, I’ve got another girl who spent the summer at Salzburg,” Lyndon told Alice, in a remark that hurt her, and angered Mary Louise. “Just bragging—kissing and telling,” she says.