Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson

by Robert A. Caro

  This concatenation of one of the greatest upheavals in Senate history with one of the most bitter feuds in Senate history had placed Russell at one of the narrows of senatorial power, one of the strategic passages through which bills, great and small, had to pass before they could emerge into the broader waters of the full Appropriations Committee, and from there onto the Senate floor. In 1933, one-third of the nation’s families still lived on farms, and agricultural appropriations were vital to almost every senator not only because of the big programs—the New Deal’s AAA, soil conservation, crop rotation, parity, and the like—which affected farmers en masse, but because of the small programs, minor items tucked away in the vast Agriculture Department budget, that were not minor at all to a senator’s constituents, and therefore to a senator’s future: laboratories for research into local crop or animal diseases; soil conservation or wildlife experimental stations; an emergency grant for funds to inoculate sheep or cattle against a fatal disease that had suddenly struck a rangeland; the creation of a salary line for a federal agricultural agent for a county that needed one. Approval of a senator’s pet project by the Department of Agriculture meant only that the project was approved, not that it was funded; funding—an appropriation—had to be approved by the Appropriations Committee, and the committee almost invariably approved only appropriations previously approved by its subcommittees. At a stroke, the youngest senator had become a powerful senator.

  Russell fully understood that power had come to him so quickly only by a very unusual coincidence. “I got to be [subcommittee] chairman, in my first year, which was a great rarity, because of a feud,” he was to say. Having been given the power, however, he made the most of it, displaying in Washington as in Atlanta an impressive intellect—along with an equally impressive willingness to use that intellect, to devote his life to his work—that quickly gave him an unusual grasp of the workings of the national government. Most of the invitations that flooded in on a new senator—particularly a charming young bachelor—were declined; he wrote his mother that he was keeping his acceptances “to a minimum as I have to work late nearly every day.” His small hotel room was big enough for a desk, and at it, as at the Governor’s desk in Georgia, Richard Russell would spend evenings alone, bent over a book.

  There were then twenty-two formal Senate rules; Russell memorized them—word for word. Quickly realizing that the Senate was governed more by the precedents which over the years had modified the rules than by the rules themselves, he borrowed the book of precedents from a Senate Parliamentarian, and studied it—all 1,326 pages of it—“until he knew it backward and forward.” After Charlie Watkins was appointed Parliamentarian, Russell would sit in Watkins’ office for hours, discussing the precedents, learning their origins and the reasoning behind them—and the ways they could be used or circumvented. Soon, senators conferring in a committee room began to realize that if they were wondering what the parliamentary procedures might be on some legislation in which they were interested, they no longer had to send for Watkins: there was someone right in the room who knew the answer. And Richard Russell, they began to realize, didn’t know only the procedures; he knew the legislation—their legislation. He had studied the bills they introduced: he knew what they were trying to accomplish with them—and, not infrequently, he knew a better way to accomplish it, a way to make a subtle modification in the language, to add an amendment, to delete a clause that might cause a conflict with some other bill passed years before.

  And Russell was studying more than procedures. Newspapers from all over the United States were kept in the Marble Room, so that senators could read their home-state papers. Russell would sit in the Marble Room for hours, reading newspapers from other states. Senators came to realize that he understood not only their bills but the reasons they had introduced them; he possessed a remarkably detailed knowledge of political and economic conditions in their states. And sometimes Russell would comment on some bill that had been discussed before a committee of which he was not a member; senators would realize that he was familiar with the hearings, that he must have read the transcript. A legend began to arise that Richard Russell read the entire Congressional Record every day.

  Equally impressive was his ability with people. After he had been in the Senate for a quarter of a century, Time magazine was to report that “Russell does not have a single personal enemy” in it. The head was tilted back, but the blue eyes looking down from it could be warm and friendly, as was his gentle, musical southern drawl. If he accepted you, he had a way of making you feel you belonged. Margaret Chase Smith, the lone woman senator, knew she belonged the first time Dick Russell gave her the nickname by which he would always refer to her thereafter: “Sis.” He generally ate lunch at the big round community table in the senators’ private dining room, and often other senators would delay their lunch until they saw Russell heading for the dining room, so that they could sit with him. The faces of senators already seated at the table would light up when they saw Dick coming to join them. That soft southern drawl could produce gleams of quiet humor, sometimes about his hairline, which by his mid-thirties had receded completely off his forehead and was inexorably making its way up his head; when a younger senator, concerned about his growing baldness, was having his photograph taken with Russell, and asked if they could change positions so that the camera would catch “my better side,” Russell remarked, “You’re lucky to still have a better side.” He never volunteered an opinion as to what a senator should do about a problem that was troubling him, but if a senator solicited his opinion, not infrequently Russell had it already prepared—a startlingly well-informed opinion. “Well, if I were representing your state,” he would say, “I guess I might think about…” And when Russell was unfamiliar with the problem, he would tell his colleague he would think about it—and when the senator saw Russell next, the senator could usually tell he had thought about it, seriously, deeply and empathetically. “In addition to being great” in many fields of legislation, recalls Sam Ervin of North Carolina, who served in the Senate with him for twenty years, “Dick Russell was great in his personal relationships…. He was a congenial companion, he was a man that had what I call an understanding heart, he understood the problems of other senators and other people….”

  If there was affection for Dick Russell, there was also respect—respect that would become exceptional, perhaps unique, within the Senate in its universality and depth.

  This respect was a tribute not only to Russell’s knowledge and expertise—of the Senate, of the individual states, of parliamentary procedure, of tradition and precedent—but also to the integrity with which the knowledge was employed. When a senator, wavering on a bill in which Russell was interested, asked Russell about it, he knew he would be told all about it. Quietly, dispassionately, Russell would make sure the senator understood not only the reasons why he should take the same position on the bill that Russell was taking, but the reasons why he should take an opposing position. Both sides of the issue would be given equal weight. Asked years later “[To] what would you attribute his ability to sway votes and opinions in the Senate?” Ervin would say: “I would attribute it to the fact that he told the truth…. People had so much respect in his intellectual integrity they knew that he was telling the truth when he described what the contents of a bill were or what the effects of that bill would be.”

  Russell’s name was almost never mentioned by the press during the long, bitter fight in 1935 over Roosevelt’s huge four-billion-dollar relief proposal, which had been stalled in the Senate over the demand of pro-labor senators that the government be required to pay relief workers the prevailing wage scale for private projects. But when the bill finally passed the Senate, Arthur Krock of the New York Times asked Roosevelt’s floor leaders to give him the inside story of the fight. And after they did so, Krock reported that the real “hero of the drama” was the “very unobtrusive young man from Georgia…. The winning compromise in each instance was Mr. Russell’
s own idea.”

  As if displeased with even this meagre amount of publicity, Russell took further pains to cloak his Senate work in anonymity, often, after he had devised a compromise amendment, asking another senator to introduce it so that the other senator would be given the credit. So successful was he in keeping his name out of newspapers that he was frequently not even mentioned in connection with bills passed only after he had worked out the compromises which made passage possible. Within the world of the Senate, however, his ability to untangle legislative knots was widely recognized. As legislators from rural Georgia counties had come to him to air their problems, hear them analyzed, and be presented with solutions, now United States senators came to him. And, as his biographer notes, “When he spoke to them … they listened.”

  DURING HIS YEARS AS A SENATOR these abilities were placed at the service of great causes.

  One was the nation’s military strength. Russell was for twenty-six years either Chairman or dominant member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, which oversaw the battle readiness of the nation’s far-flung legions and armadas. As senators of Rome had insisted that, regardless of the cost, the legions must be kept at full complement because the peace and stability of the known world—the Pax Romana—depended on their strength, Russell believed that the peace and stability of his world—the Pax Americana—depended on America’s strength. Before World War II, listening to Senate isolationists, he knew that they simply had not read their Livy or their Gibbon, and as a member for twelve years of Armed Services’ predecessor Naval Affairs Committee, he had insisted that America’s Navy must be strong enough to control not one but both of the world’s great oceans, and had been one of the earliest senatorial advocates of the construction of the most gigantic new machine of war: the aircraft carrier. During the war, he had spent months touring the battlefields around the globe on which American soldiers were engaged; he was not impressed with the performance of America’s allies. Upon his return, he told the Senate—almost every seat in the Chamber was filled during his speech—that the world was becoming smaller and that America must have a presence in all of it; the bases on foreign soil purchased “with the blood of American boys” must be retained after the war was over. To liberal criticism—retaining the bases was inadvisable, The New Republic said, unless America intended to become the “greatest imperialist power of all time”—Russell replied that “call it what you will,” retaining the bases would “prevent another generation of Americans … from being compelled to pay again in blood and treasure in taking those islands back.” As the Romans had believed that the conquered Gauls must be made to feel conquered, Russell believed that the enemies of the United States must be made to feel its full vengeance; standing in the ruins of the German cities after V-E Day, he was satisfied that the Hun had felt it, but Japan must not be allowed merely to surrender, for if it was insufficiently humiliated, its “barbarism” would return; he rose in the Senate to demand that Emperor Hirohito be tried as a war criminal. When, three months later, the first atomic bombs were dropped, he exulted in the havoc they wreaked, and told Truman that if the United States did not possess more atomic bombs, “let us carry on with TNT and fire bombs until we can produce” more, and then use them—until the Japanese “are brought groveling to their knees” and “beg us” to be allowed to surrender. Even Japan’s unconditional surrender did not satisfy him; he again urged the ouster and public trial of the Emperor, and advised Truman to parade a large army through the streets of Tokyo; having Admiral William Halsey ride the Emperor’s white horse in the parade might give the “Japs” the message, he said.

  In the years that followed, “There was,” a fellow senator said admiringly, “no more ardent cold warrior in Congress than Dick Russell.” Convinced that the conflict between Russia and the United States was simply a Manichean battle between evil and good, he opposed almost every suggestion for relaxing tensions or for disarmament or for a reduction in expenditures for military preparedness. Once, Senator Milton Young of North Dakota said to him, “You people in the South are much more militarily minded than in the North.” “Milt,” Russell replied, “you’d be more military minded, too, if Sherman had crossed North Dakota.” Others might see non-military foreign aid as a key to world peace; to Russell, the key was military might, and foreign aid only drained away funds that could better be spent on troops and weapons. Important though he considered governmental economy and a balanced budget, those were not the most important considerations to Russell. America’s security came first. “I want to see the planes first, and then consider the cost in dollars,” he said once. And on Capitol Hill, Russell’s views were the views that counted. “In the field of national defense, Russell is recognized as pretty much the voice of the Senate,” journalist Jack Bell wrote accurately during the 1960s—and he could have written the same words accurately during the 1950s or the 1940s. “He is considered to be the greatest living expert on the military defense and establishment of the United States,” another congressional observer said, and as such, he was “largely responsible for shaping military budgets during the Cold War,” for keeping America militarily strong.

  Another of Russell’s great causes was that of America’s farmers. Believing that “Every great civilization has derived its basic strength and wealth from the soil,” and that the primarily agricultural character of the Old South was a principal reason that its culture was so superior to that of the North, with its pounding assembly lines and soot-covered cities, he felt fervently that unless America revived the dignity of farm life, it would decline as Greece and Rome declined. Passing through an almost empty Senate Chamber one day while Hubert Humphrey was giving an ardent speech on the importance of agriculture, Russell suddenly stopped as he was almost out the door to hear what Humphrey was saying. Walking back into the room, he sat down at a desk right in front of the fiery Minnesotan and looked up at him as he talked, and then began to say, in rhythm with Humphrey’s points, “That’s right.” “Yes sir, that’s right.” “He’s absolutely right.” As a reporter wrote, “It was a little like a prayer meeting.” And seeing that the American farmer was being driven from his land by economic forces too big for him to fight alone, for thirty-eight years Richard Russell tried to bring government to the farmer’s side. He was fighting for farm price parity—the parity that he regarded as simple justice for farmers—in 1938, and again in 1948 and 1958. Decade after decade, he played a major role in providing funds for rural electrification, soil conservation, and government-insured mortgages to help farm families buy or keep their land. Year after year, behind the closed doors of conference committees, or of his subcommittee, he quietly inserted funds for agricultural research in appropriations bills. The 1937 legislation creating a Farm Security Administration to make land and equipment loans to impoverished farmers was called the Bankhead-Jones Act, but the key figure in making the FSA viable was Russell—whose name was never publicly associated with the legislation. Without his support, Bankhead was to admit years later, the measure, unpopular in the North, would not have passed in the Senate. Every year thereafter brought attempts to abolish the FSA or slash its appropriations. Year after year, in subcommittee and conference committee, Russell beat back those attempts.

  Of all his battles for the farmer, Russell was proudest of his fight for a national school lunch program which would aid farmers by reducing the country’s huge agricultural surpluses while providing nourishment for needy children. As one reporter noted, “He kept [the program] alive for nine years by stubbornly putting it into the appropriations bill,” until in 1946, it was finally enacted into law. Yet the National School Lunch Act bore no senator’s name although, as Gilbert Fite notes, it “was essentially the Russell bill.” Not one of the agricultural bills for which Russell maneuvered and argued—not one of the bills which he rewrote and amended until he was in effect their author—bears his name. But so many of them bear his imprint that an admiring fellow senator could say that “throughout the late 1
930s and early 1940s, farmers owed their direct parity payments, soil conservation payments, and loans from the FSA more to Russell than to any other single leader in Washington.” And although in 1962 he was to surrender his chairmanship of the agricultural subcommittee to devote the bulk of his time to the Armed Services Committee, he was never to stop fighting for the rural families he regarded as the bulwark of democracy.

  THE CAUSE MOST PRECIOUS to Richard Russell, however, was the cause that was not his country’s but his Southland’s.

  In defending that cause, Russell was outwardly very different—in appearance and in arguments—from racist senatorial demagogues like Cotton Ed Smith and Theodore (the Man) Bilbo, who ranted on the Senate floor about “niggers” and the “Negro menace” and the intellectual and moral supremacy of “the pure and undefiled Caucasian strain,” and who blocked every attempt to pass civil rights legislation with filibusters during which they read telephone books and recipes for pot likker and southern delicacies into the record for hours as if to show their utter contempt for “Northern agitators.”

  A Russell of the Russells of Georgia would not stoop to what Richard Russell called “nigger-baiting”; “he considered it unworthy of people in his class,” his biographer wrote, and seldom used the word, never in public. He maintained firmly that he was not a racist. “There are no members of the Negro race in my state tonight,” he said on the Senate floor in 1938, “who would say that any official or personal act of mine had resulted in any unfairness to the Negroes.” “I was brought up with them. I love them,” he said on another occasion. And, despising a Bilbo, the short, red-faced, pot-bellied, profane son of an impoverished mill-hand, for the pot-likker filibusters that made Russell’s beloved Southland appear backward and foolish, he himself based his defense of the filibuster on the Constitution’s concern with protecting the rights of minorities in this case, the minority being the eleven southern states—and on the Senate’s provision to protect that right: the right of unlimited debate. And while, from his early days in the Senate, he opposed—as the Bilbos and the Smiths opposed—virtually any bill designed to ameliorate the condition of black Americans, in his arguments against these bills Russell took the high ground. He invariably based his arguments on constitutional premises: that the proposed legislation would violate either the constitutionally guaranteed sovereign rights of the individual states, or, as he put it, “the rights of private property and the rights of American citizens to choose their associates,” or of American businessmen to hire and fire whom they wished.