NOW JOHNSON HAD BEEN TOLD that the power in the Senate was Russell, Russell who, like Johnson’s two great Washington patrons, had a lonely personal life—Russell who, like Rayburn, had no one. Schoolchildren in mid-century America learned their so-called “three Rs”—readin’, ’ritin’ and ’rithmetic. Lyndon Johnson, who had already learned two Rs so well, set out now to learn his third.
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A Russell of the Russells of Georgia
WHEN RICHARD BREVARD RUSSELL Jr. was a boy growing up just after the start of the century barefoot and in overalls in a sleepy Georgia farm town, he would often play alone for hours in a big field near his home, carrying a long stick that had been carved to resemble a rifle. Sometimes he would run headlong across the field brandishing the rifle, fall as if wounded, then leap to his feet, pick up the rifle, wave to rally his troops back to the charge, and run forward again. Sometimes he would station himself inside a little circle of wooden planks set atop a low mound of dirt he had piled in the middle of the field, and aim the rifle out as if he was defending a fort.
To friends curious about the long hours Richard spent at the game, Richard’s family explained that the boy loved to play at war, but although there was a war in newspaper headlines at the time—the Russo-Japanese War—that was not the war he was fighting, nor was it war in general but a single war in which he was interested. The charges he was re-enacting were the screaming rush of Longstreet’s brigades at the Second Manassas and Pickett’s last forlorn charge at Gettysburg. The fort he had built he had named Fort Lee. The cause for which he fought was the Lost Cause.
Richard Russell’s boyhood imagination was bound up in that cause—and so was his entire life.
His roots were bound up in it—in the lost dream of the Old South that was crushed at Gettysburg and at Antietam and Vicksburg and Appomattox. His ancestors were part of the upper reaches of the slave-owning patrician aristocracy that dominated the South’s plantation culture and embodied its social graces. The Russells, of English background, had owned plantations in Georgia and South Carolina since Colonial times; Richard’s grandfather established a successful cotton mill near Marietta, Georgia, and married a Brevard, one of the North Carolina Brevards.
But, like so much of that aristocracy, Richard’s family was ruined by the War Between the States: the mill lay in Sherman’s path and was burned down to its brick chimney and floor, while the Russell slaves were freed by Sherman’s troops; Richard’s grandmother fled in a carriage driven by a slave named Monday Russell (for the day of the week on which he was born), who during Reconstruction became a member of the State Legislature; and the family was plunged into poverty. Like so much of that aristocracy, Richard’s family never recovered. It was still an impoverished family when his father, who was descended, as Eminent Georgians noted, “from the oldest and choicest American stock,” was born.
Richard Brevard Russell Sr. yearned to restore the family’s name and fortune, and for a time it seemed he would do so. Tall and handsome, a brilliant student at the University of Georgia, from which he graduated at eighteen with a command of five languages, including Latin and Greek, he graduated from law school at nineteen, almost immediately won a reputation as a young lawyer of “remarkable ability,” and was elected to the Georgia House of Representatives at twenty-one as its youngest member. There he quickly established himself as what one writer called “the champion of Georgia’s institutions of higher learning,” leading legislative efforts to establish the state’s first technological college and first women’s college.
Leaving the Legislature at twenty-seven, he was elected solicitor general, or prosecuting attorney, for a seven-county judicial circuit, and would later be elected judge of a succession of Georgia courts, including its Supreme Court—of which he was Chief Justice for sixteen years. He was highly respected as a judge both for “the brilliance of his mind” and for his diligence (“On more than one occasion,” an admirer wrote, “the Chief Justice was known to have worked and labored all night long”); indeed, some of his judicial opinions were called “gems of legal literature.”
But he was not satisfied to be a judge; “always looking,” as one writer put it, “for larger fields to conquer,” he wanted to be Governor or United States Senator—“the Senate post was the one he wanted most.” Richard Russell Sr. could not be politic, however. As a prosecutor his “fearless” disregard of political considerations had angered local politicians. A booming, eloquent stump speaker, he would never deign to moderate his views, “speaking his mind bluntly no matter whom he angered.” Some of his positions were regarded in Georgia as “radical” or even “socialist,” including his insistence that all qualified students (white students, of course) be able to attend the University of Georgia regardless of ability to pay; “the poorest students” should “have an equal chance with the richest,” he said. His bluntness and independence alienated the three or four powerful factions that dominated Georgia politics, so his dreams of higher office were unrealistic. But he pursued them anyway, with a fervor that, as a biographer says, “got in the way of practical considerations, and even of common sense.” He ran for Governor twice, for Senator once, as well as for Congress twice, and lost each time—usually by humiliatingly large margins.
For these ambitions, it was not he alone who sacrificed. Shortly after he married Ina Dillard, a schoolteacher from Athens, Georgia, who loved the intellectual life of the University of Georgia community, he informed her that they were moving to the tiny farm hamlet of Winder in Barrow County, twenty miles out in the country, because residence there “would be politically advantageous … or so he believed.” Ina, recounts Russell’s biographer Gilbert C. Fite, was “distraught” over the move, but a few years later, the Russells moved even further into the country, into a larger, rambling white frame house about a mile and a half outside the town. The second move was made necessary by the number of Russell children; Ina was to spend much of the first twenty years of her marriage pregnant; she would eventually give birth to fifteen children, thirteen of whom grew to maturity. Attempting to curry political favor with some newly formed county, the Judge would temporarily name his latest child after it.
The lives of the thirteen Russell children—seven boys and six girls—were filled with their father’s dreams and defeats. “I was brought up hearing about his political campaigns, or observing them,” Richard Jr. was to recall. It was a boyhood decorated with the trappings of privilege; the Russell children were taught by a governess in their own “private school”; the Legislature incorporated the area around the new house as the town of Russell; the Seaboard Railroad established a tiny station there, not far from the house—on mornings on which the Judge had to travel to court in Atlanta, one of the children would station himself at a curve about half a mile away to wave his handkerchief to flag the train down. Catching a glimpse of the train, he would shout, “Round the curve! Round the curve!” The word would be relayed by another child to the house, where Judge Russell sat regally at his table, refusing to be rushed through his breakfast, and then, at the very last moment, the Judge, a lordly figure—still tall and erect, with a flowing mustache and a full head of black hair—would stride out to the station, still holding his coffee cup. Often he would not get there quite in time, and the train would be passing the station, but he would wave at the engineer, who would put on his brakes and then back the train up so that the Judge could board, taking a last sip as he stepped aboard and handed the cup down to one of his children.
But the trappings were threadbare. The Russells lived in near poverty. In an attempt to augment his meagre judicial salary, the Judge purchased land, and moved in six black sharecroppers, and operated a tiny “commissary” to sell them goods. The firmest of believers in the Old South, his attitude toward these black families is perhaps summed up in the remark made—admiringly—by one of his daughters that “he might have been a typical plantation owner if he had been born a generation or two earlier.” But he seemed neve
r to finish the year with a profit. Intermittently, mired in debts, he had to resign from the bench to pay them off; so highly prized were his skills as an attorney that he was always able to do so, but invariably, as soon as he did, he returned to the bench, and to his unsuccessful attempts to win some other, higher, office. The Russells had few servants, and with Judge Russell usually away in Atlanta, the burden of raising thirteen children fell on their mother. Unable to afford clothing for them, she made most of it herself, sewing late into the night by the light of an oil lamp; recalling his mother’s endless drudgery, Richard Jr. was to say that he was ten years old before he saw his mother asleep; previously, he had “thought that mothers never had to sleep.” “My mother,” he was to say, “was the greatest woman I’ve ever known.”
The relationship between father and mother was warm and loving. Ina believed that her husband’s abilities justified his ambition, and that surely he would become Governor or Senator and have a chance to prove his greatness. And she shared as well his determination to restore the family to its rightful place in Georgia. Richard Russell adored his wife. After they had been married for almost forty years, he sent her a note saying, “With a sense of love and gratitude that is overpowering, I can only say God bless you, idol of my heart.”
The family as a whole was unusually close. The big white frame house seemed always to be filled with the children’s friends and numerous cousins. And the children idolized their gruff father for his independence and adherence to principle; they remembered with pride the night a gang of men, angered by one of his political positions and unaware that he was away in Atlanta, drove around in circles in front of the house shouting threats and singing “Hang Dick Russell from a sour apple tree” while young Dick and his brothers lay on the roof with shotguns ready to defend their house. The Judge was usually in Atlanta all week, but when the train squealed to a stop on Friday evenings, and he stepped off, there would be parties in the front parlor, with the Judge doing clog dances and singing what one daughter remembers as “those funny songs” while his wife played the piano and the children sang along. No child could go to bed without a big kiss good night, “although,” as another daughter recalls, “they squirmed as his huge coffee-and-tobacco-stained mustache scratched them.”
Within this large circle of love and warmth, there was one very special relationship: between the father and his eldest son. The birth—on November 2, 1897—of a male heir was a great event to a father with a strong sense of family. His first three children had been girls, and he had vowed that if necessary he would populate Georgia with girls until he sired a son; when his fourth child was a boy, he thought, “My own R. B. Russell, Jr.—I was crazy with happiness.” He said then what he was to repeat many times: “That is me living all over again.”
He early began taking the boy on trips: to Savannah, to see the Civil War forts and cannon emplacements, and to sites of particular meaning to the Russell family: to “where Grandpa’s slaves are buried,” as the boy put it; to the mill that had been destroyed—and with it the Russells’ patrimony. Quiet and serious, the boy loved reading (“I read all morning,” he wrote at the age of nine in the diary he kept in a school composition notebook), particularly history (“I like to read histories of all countries”) and more particularly still Civil War history; he seemed never to tire of listening to the stories told by the Confederate veterans who stationed themselves every day in front of the Winder general store. His father would sit with him on the broad front porch of the Russell home discussing history and the Lost Cause for hours on end. And, early also, he made the boy aware of his special role—as heir to his name—in his shining dream of restoring the Russells to their rightful place.
From the time he was sent away to boarding school at the age of thirteen, Richard Brevard Russell Jr. was reminded of his responsibility in a steady stream of letters. “You are my oldest son and you carry my full name,” the Judge wrote once. “You can have—and you must have—a future of usefulness and distinction in Georgia or it will break my heart…. My son—my namesake—never let this thought leave your mind and may it influence your every act.” On Richard Jr.’s fifteenth birthday, his father wrote: “Son I swear you to carry on my work and fulfill what I leave undone.” You “can make the name of R. B. Russell live long after I die and thus you will help to keep me alive.” The theme was echoed by the youth’s mother, who wrote him, “I’m always expecting my R. B. Russell, Jr., never to fail in anything.” (“She wrote letters that would make you feel ashamed,” Richard would recall when he was an old man. “‘You’re Richard Russell, and you can do anything. If you don’t do it, it’s just your own fault.’ She had so much confidence in me, and predicted such great things for me that in a way it was a challenge to me”), and the theme was echoed by his brothers and sisters, who urged their sibling not to do anything at school that might sully the family name. One sister wrote that she hoped he was behaving himself “becomingly”; she herself, she said, could never do anything “unbecoming” if she just paused “long enough to think whose child I am.”
As defeat followed defeat for the father—after one, Ina wrote to Richard Jr., “Oh, how it hurt”—he shifted more and more of the burden of the family’s dreams to his namesake. “You bear my name,” he wrote his son after one gubernatorial defeat, “and I want you to carry it higher than I have ever done or can do in my few remaining days.”
The quiet youth admired—revered—the imposing, elegant figure whom he had, on visits to Atlanta, watched dispensing justice from the bench. When Richard Jr. was old, having sat in the United States Senate for thirty-eight years listening to great Senate orators, he would say that “the finest speech I ever heard” was an extemporaneous talk his father had once given to the Georgia Bar Association. And he accepted, without reservation, his responsibility in the father’s dream. Among the diary entries of his ninth year, the year in which his father lost his first race for Governor, is: “I expect to be Governor some day.” When he was fourteen, and his father wrote him in despair after his second gubernatorial defeat, the youth wrote him back to tell him to be of good cheer: “It is too bad we got beat but we will try again.” “He seemed,” says Gilbert Fite, “to take it for granted that he would achieve the greatness that his father hoped for him.” After graduating from the University of Georgia, and its law school, he rejected invitations to join the big Atlanta law firms and entered law practice with his father—“Russell & Russell” was painted on a second-floor window in the People’s Bank Building in Winder—moving back into the big white Russell house (“almost as if he had never been gone”). At the first opportunity, in 1921, when he was twenty-three, “young Dick,” as he now was called, ran for state representative, and won. And as soon as he reached the Legislature, he revealed that he possessed not only the willingness to pick up his father’s banner, but the ability as well.
HIS RISE TO LEADERSHIP in the Legislature was remarkably rapid—in part, perhaps, because, much as he loved and admired his father, he had absorbed lessons from his father’s failed career.
Richard Russell Jr. was just over six feet tall, slender, but with broad shoulders, and, like his father, he held himself very straight. His face was the face of a young aristocrat: long, and appearing even longer because his hairline was already receding, with a large, hawked nose of the type known as “Roman,” and a mouth that always smiled pleasantly, if seldom broadly or enthusiastically. And the aristocratic aura was intensified by his habit of tilting his head slightly back, as if he was looking down that large nose. When he spoke in the Legislature, he stood even more stiffly erect than usual, with the extended fingers of one hand resting firmly on the top of the desk before him. And he spoke in a resonant, ringing voice.
He could be as memorable an orator as his father, particularly when he was speaking on that topic that had captured his imagination; describing one of his speeches, a newspaper said, “His tribute to noble women of the Lost Cause was great, while he did not forget
the private soldier who on the bloody fields of the South so nobly illustrated the courage and chivalry of these great people.” While he possessed his father’s eloquence, however, he was much more sparing in its use. His speeches were rare. And also in contrast to the mustachioed old campaigner, whose blunt and controversial stands had aroused so much antagonism, Russell, as Fite puts it, “was careful not to jump out in front” on issues, since “the point man always … made enemies.” It was not on the floor of the Legislature but in the Atlanta hotel rooms in which the legislators sat around and chatted in the evenings that he began to make a mark.
In those hotel rooms, his voice was a soft, friendly, musical southern drawl. Yet the friendliness did not often—if ever—lead to familiarity. Already, at twenty-three, there was a dignity and reserve about Dick Russell that set him off from other men. When arguments arose, he would listen to both sides with grave, thoughtful attention. He never volunteered an opinion; if asked for one, he would give it with a quiet objectivity striking to those who knew his fiery, impulsive father. Although he was one of the youngest of forty so-called Young Turks—many of them World War I veterans, most of them college-educated and embarrassed by Georgia’s “redneck” image—who had arrived in the Legislature in 1921, they began coming to him to settle disputes. The judiciousness and fairness with which he analyzed both sides and calmly delivered an opinion won him his peers’ respect, and he was soon their acknowledged leader.
Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson Page 29