RUSSELL’S USE of his immense power to punish senators instead of to help them was very seldom referred to—perhaps because it was exercised with the same diffidence; Richard Russell rarely if ever used the direct threat. But, as Meg Greenfield of the Washington Post was later to write, “It has not escaped the notice of other senators who are interested in projects for their districts or in good committee assignments for themselves that Russell, like the Lord, has the power both to give and to take away.”
And the power was used to punish. Senators knew that—and acted accordingly. The number of individual votes that were, over the years, changed by the unspoken threat of its use, no one can know—but combined with Russell’s knowledge of and use of the Senate’s rules and precedents, and the indefinable, but monumental, power of his personality, the number was enough. Russell may have been afraid that he was going to be “licked,” but he wasn’t. With Russell as the “General” of the southern forces fighting civil rights legislation against long odds, the South had won in 1942 and 1944; in 1946, even with a President of Russell’s own party determined to put through legislation, the South won again.
The South did suffer one defeat during the balance of Harry Truman’s first term, but it was not on a piece of legislation. With Truman determined to integrate the armed forces, Russell countered with an amendment to the Selective Service Act that would allow draftees the option of serving in units made up only, as he put it, of “men of their own race and kind.” (It was then that Russell raised the spectre of venereal disease: was not the Senate aware of its prevalence among Negroes?; “I could not bear, Mr. President, to confront some young man who would carry through life the marks of some disease contracted by him, through no fault of his own.”) Russell couldn’t get that amendment through the Senate, but he could keep the Administration from getting its amendment through; the President was finally forced to achieve integration through an executive order.
Of all Truman’s other proposals—on desegregation of public facilities, on the FEPC, on the poll tax—not one got through the Senate in 1946, 1947, or 1948. With Russell basing his arguments on constitutional grounds (“We are not defending the poll tax as such. We are defending the rights of the States to govern their own elections and to keep Federal police and the Federal government away from the voting places…. The passage of these laws will strip the once-proud States of their last remaining rights …”), most proposals did not even make it to the floor; outmaneuvering the liberals with a parliamentary tactic they did not understand until it was too late, Russell ended the fight on the poll tax without it even coming to a vote.
As for the anti-lynching bill, what would be the sense of passing it in the House, asked the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, since “it would be impossible to put [it] through in the Senate?” The anti-lynching bill died, and as southern prosecutors declined to indict and southern juries declined to convict, the policemen who gouged out the eyes went unpunished, as did the mob that shot the wives as well as the husbands, and the mobs that did not kill but only whipped and kicked. Under the leadership of Richard Brevard Russell Jr. the Senate was indeed the place where the South did not lose the Civil War. The great gifts for parliamentary rhetoric and maneuver, for personal leadership, of the “knightly” Richard Russell—his courtliness and gracious-ness, his moderation, his reasonable, genteel words—their cost had to be reckoned in tears and pain and blood. His charm was more effective than chains in keeping black Americans shackled to their terrible past.
OFTEN, DURING THE 1940S (as would also be the case during the 1950s and 1960s), Washington journalists would liken Richard Russell to the great general of the Lost Cause, the general who had been the young Dick Russell’s hero, the general after whom a barefoot boy in Winder had named his fort. “A thin gray line is once again deployed against superior forces to resist what the Old South regards as an unwarranted assault on its way of life,” as the New York Times put it during one senatorial civil rights battle. “The field general is a man whose dignity, integrity and high principle are recognized even by his opponents.” Like “the Confederate commander of a century ago, Robert E. Lee, Richard Brevard Russell of Georgia is also a master of tactics and strategy and a much respected, even beloved adversary.”
Russell accepted the comparison. His speeches were filled with what one reporter called “the words of war”: “surrender,” “treason,” “appeasement,” “retreat.” “If we are overwhelmed,” he said once, “you will find me in the last ditch.” To Sam Ervin, he wrote, “Our position is desperate, for we are hopelessly outnumbered. But we are not going to yield an inch.” And the comparison was apt—in more ways than some of the writers apparently realized. Lee was indeed the best of generals, military generals—but he was fighting in the worst of causes. Russell was the best of parliamentary generals.
But his cause was the same cause.
*Only five senators, all of whom were appointed during the 1930s, received seats on Appropriations immediately after coming to the Senate. In addition to Russell, they were Joseph O’Mahoney and Pat McCarran (both 1934), Theodore Francis Green (1936) and Republican Styles Bridges (1937).
*That same year, the book was made into a movie, with the same title, that became one of the most famous of its time.
8
“We of the South”
THERE WAS ANOTHER motif as pervasive in Richard Russell’s life as power, and it was loneliness.
Within the Senate world, there would for years be speculation about the reason that this man, who possessed “that persuasive charm that no woman can resist” had never married. Some said the explanation was Dick Russell’s never-fading adoration for “the greatest woman I’ve ever known.” At least one remark he made lent plausibility to another theory: that the explanation lay partly in his intense ambition, personal and political, both for himself and for his family, which had made him raise up early and never let drop the fallen banner of the Russells. Asked, when he was old, why he had never married, Russell replied to a reporter friend: “That’s a question I’ve been asked many times, and I’ve asked myself many times. I think it was because I was too ambitious to start with. I wanted to be Governor of Georgia younger than any man had ever been in history … so I didn’t marry until after I was elected, and somehow after that I didn’t get around to it, didn’t have time.”
The denouement of the single episode in which Russell broke his lifelong pattern of “shying away from serious relationships” was viewed as support for this theory. During the 1930s, Russell and Patricia Collins, an Atlanta-born attorney for the Department of Justice in Washington, dated for three years, and were, acquaintances recall, obviously deeply in love. They set a wedding date. And then on the very eve of the wedding, it was canceled; Russell telephoned the editor of the Atlanta Constitution, which had already set the wedding announcement in type to run the next day, to ask him not to print it. Ms. Collins was a Catholic. In the highest circles of Georgia politics there were whispers that, at the very last moment, Richard Russell had finally bowed to the reality that, no matter how popular he might be, in a state with a Baptist-dominated, Catholic-hating Bible Belt, marrying a Catholic might end his political career. Russell and Ms. Collins continued to date frequently in Washington for several more years, and then less frequently, although they were still seeing each other when, in 1947, she told Russell she was going to marry someone else.
Nobody really knows the reason Dick Russell never married—perhaps not even he knew. But he knew the cost. When he was old, that reporter friend asked him whether perhaps it was fortunate that he had never married, and so had been able to concentrate fully on his work, and Russell answered, “Well, no—well, it certainly has permitted me to have more hours to work … but I would not recommend it to anyone. If I had my life to do over again, I would certainly get married.”
In Winder, where his mother kept his room furnished as it had been furnished when he was a boy, and where, during the months he
lived there every year, he often wandered around the house and the yard barefoot, as he had liked to wander barefoot as a boy, he had his family. His father, still Georgia’s Chief Justice, had died in 1938, at the age of seventy-six—of a heart attack following a long day studying cases in his judicial office—and on a gentle hill behind the house, in a clearing surrounded by pines and red oak trees, Russell erected a gray granite obelisk, monumental in sleepy, small-town Barrow County, and wrote the inscription himself: “Richard Brevard Russell—Son of the Old South, Defender and Builder of the New.” And he took his father’s place at the head of the family table. At the sprawling Russell family gatherings, to which the other twelve children, each of them without exception a success in his or her chosen field, would bring their own children, “Uncle Dick,” surrounded by scores of nephews and nieces, would preside—patriarch of the Russells, once again one of the first families of Georgia. He remained very close to his brothers and sisters; of his brother Robert E. Lee Russell, manager of his early political campaigns, he was to say, “We were about as close as two brothers could be.” As for his mother, the flow of tender letters that had begun between them during his youth didn’t stop when he was a senator. In 1952, the town of Winder held a parade in Ina Dillard Russell’s honor; it was then, as her son rode beside her in an open car, that the newsreel camera for once caught, as pride and joy conquered reserve, a broad smile on Richard Russell’s face. When she died, in 1953, to be buried with her husband under the same tall tombstone, he would draft her inscription: “There has never been a married relationship more tender than existed between this noble woman and her eminent husband.” Thereafter, on his visits to Winder he lived alone in the big white frame house, tended by the family’s elderly black housekeeper, and frequently walked up the hill in back, through pines and holly bushes, to the graveyard, and puttered around it for hours, plucking out weeds and neatening the plots, or just sitting there and thinking. He could think best there, he told a friend, close to his family. When years later, the Senator lay dying in Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, and his brother Henry visited him, Dick told him of a thought that was comforting him—that perhaps dying meant that “we could run jump up in God’s lap like we used to run jump up in Mother and Dad’s lap when we were little boys.”
And in Winder he had friends. So at ease was he in his hometown that, clad in a sweatshirt and stained dungarees, he would sit on a curb with old friends and chat with them for hours. “He just likes to talk,” the editor of the Winder News explained. “If he has an enemy in Barrow County, I’ve never heard of it.”
But Richard Russell seemed at home and at ease nowhere except in that little town. “He had warm feelings for individuals, but, outside of his family, he did not express them,” says his biographer, Gilbert Fite. “He was not a man” who could talk about “his personal feelings.” In Georgia—where he had been Speaker and Governor, and now, as senator, was known as “the Georgia Giant,” where he was so respected that no politician dared to run against him—“he had a host of acquaintances and casual friends, and friends who would do almost anything for him,” but “very few close or intimate friends.”
And in Georgia, Dick Russell had been young. In Washington, he was growing older, and traits sometimes deepen, harden, as a man grows older, no matter how much he may wish them not to. “He became,” as his biographer says, “somewhat more aloof.”
“I had always been taught that if decent people asked you to come to their house you had to go,” he was to recall, and for a few years after arriving in Washington in 1933, he accepted at least some of the invitations to parties and dinners that poured in on a bachelor senator. And, his hostesses said, when he wanted to be, there was no one who could be more urbane and charming. But gradually he accepted fewer and fewer invitations, and by the early 1940s he had all but stopped going to parties except for ones given by or for Georgians. Once, during the 1950s, a Washington reporter asked him exactly how often he did go to a party—cocktail or dinner. Leafing through his desk calendar, Russell discovered that he hadn’t been to one for six months.
He stopped attending other social occasions, too. He had enjoyed hunting, for turkey, quail or deer—bird hunting was his favorite sport, and he owned five or six shotguns—and had regularly gone on hunting parties with old friends from Georgia. And he had enjoyed golf. But gradually he began finding excuses to decline invitations to hunting trips. “Frankly, I have no desire to kill more deer as I have killed more than twenty in my time,” he said in response to one invitation. Gradually, he stopped playing golf. It took too much time, he said. As a young man, he had been a ladies’ man; now he was an older bachelor. He still had dates, but less and less frequently.
With members of his staff, the reserve of this man so conscious of the dignity of a senator of the United States was especially marked. During his early years in the Senate, he had made attempts at camaraderie with his assistants and secretaries, but they were forced and didn’t work out very well, and, year by year, they became fewer and fewer. Finally, he almost never joked with them, or even came out of his private office to wander around their work area; he was very formal in dealing with them. Women employees, his biographer says, “were ‘Miss Margaret’ or ‘Miss Rachel’ in the best traditional southern manner.” Some of the members of his staff idolized him; they didn’t want to leave him alone in the empty office, and although he never asked them to, when he stayed until six-thirty or seven, as he did most weekday nights, at least one of them would stay in case “the Senator wanted something.” But when he would finish for the day, and take a bottle of Jack Daniel’s out of his drawer and pour himself a drink, he almost never invited one of them in to have a drink with him. Occasionally, one of them would muster the courage to invite the Senator home for dinner; the acceptances were rare and the invitations grew rare, too.
With his fellow senators, he was invariably courteous, friendly, even cordial. But, more and more, as year followed year, that friendship also had a limit: the point at which intimacies, personal confidences, might have been exchanged but were not, because of the barrier around Richard Russell which was never lowered. He seemed unable to express affection, unable to talk about personal matters, to bridge the distance between himself and even a colleague he liked. The grave demeanor, the judiciousness and reserve, might bring him the respect of his colleagues; it did not make any of them his intimates.
He loved baseball, had in his head the day-to-day batting averages, not only of the Washington Senators but of an impressive number of players around the American League. A longtime tradition of the Senate was that on the season’s opening day, senators who liked baseball (and a few selected functionaries such as Secretary of the Majority Felton [Skeeter] Johnston) would attend the game as a group. Russell, his aides say, had a wonderful time going to Opening Day with other senators, but, of course, that was a formal occasion, with the invitations made without any participation on his part being necessary. As for the rest of the season, members of his staff could have gone to games with him, just as they could have invited him to their homes, but one social occasion was as rare as the other. Sometimes the Senator went to a baseball game alone. It was embarrassing for such a man to be alone. If he was the renowned Richard Brevard Russell, the most powerful man in the Senate, why didn’t he have anyone to go with? Would some colleague or staff member or acquaintance see him—and feel sorry for him, or tell people that Dick Russell went to baseball games alone? So Russell went to few baseball games.
WHEN THE SENATE was in session, of course, Russell’s life was crowded with committee hearings and discussions about legislation and floor tactics, with professional give-and-take with his colleagues. But the Senate wasn’t generally in session in the evenings, or on weekends.
The respect—almost awe—in which he was held made it difficult for his colleagues to invite him to their homes. He himself lived, during most of his years in Washington, in a small, two-room hotel suite, first
in the Woodner Hotel, then in the Mayflower; finally, in 1962, he moved into a small apartment, furnished as impersonally as a hotel room, in a cooperative apartment house on the Potomac.
In his hotel room or apartment, he would spend long hours reading, often with a cigarette and a glass of Jack Daniel’s at hand, sometimes with the radio on. He still read the Congressional Record every day, and after he became a member of the Armed Services Committee he read not only the transcripts of the endless hours of testimony that the committee had taken, but the exhibits—the analyses and studies and charts—that witnesses had entered into the record to supplement their testimony, as well as classified Army, Navy and Air Force internal reports and memoranda. His apartment was filled with books, including a steady stream of books he requested from the Library of Congress; on many Fridays, a stack delivered from the Library for his weekend reading would be on the corner of his desk in the Senate, ready for him to take home. In the apartment, books, some opened, some with slips of paper sticking out of them to mark passages to which he wanted to refer, would be piled on the desk, on chairs, on the floor—mostly history and biography; during his early years in Washington, he read—again—Gibbon’s complete The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and in his later years, he read it through a third time.
His life fell into a pattern. He would arrive at the Senate early—at eight or eight-thirty in the morning—and eat breakfast alone in the Senate Dining Room. He would stay at the Senate late. After a day filled with Senate business, and punctuated by lunch at the round table in the dining room, the center of respectful attention whenever he spoke, he would return to his office at four or five o’clock to go through his mail, draft or dictate letters, and return telephone calls. By six-thirty or seven, he would be finished, and would take out the Jack Daniel’s and water, and sip a drink or two while listening to the evening news on the radio, or, in later years, watching it on television. When the news was over, he would get up and leave, often through the door from his private office which opened directly onto the corridor, so that he would not have to make conversation with his staff. He generally ate at O’Donnell’s Seafood Grill, on E Street, sitting alone at the counter. Then he would go back to his small apartment—that apartment where books were stacked on chairs on which no one ever sat; that apartment in which, unless he turned on the radio, there was no human voice—to spend the evening alone, reading.
Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson Page 35