Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson

by Robert A. Caro

  For as long as possible, Johnson did nothing to disabuse the liberals of this notion. The nomination certificate from President Truman arrived at the Commerce Committee on June 5, and Olds assumed at first that renomination would be rather simple; “in fact,” he wrote a friend, “I am hoping that confirmation will be possible before June 22, when my present term expires.” A liberal Washington attorney who wrote to ask Olds, “What can I do to help out?” said that Johnson “is a good friend of mine but I would assume” he is “already convinced,” and that was the general assumption of the letters that arrived at Johnson’s office from such New Deal figures as Morris Cooke, the first REA administrator. Much of Washington’s liberal community was present on June 14 at a cocktail party for Americans for Democratic Action, and a steady stream of friends came up to Olds to congratulate him on being renominated; they regarded Senate confirmation as a matter of course.

  Although June 22 passed without Johnson setting a date for the subcommittee hearings, for some time neither Olds nor his friends saw any significance in the delay. It seemed only a repeat of the 1944 renomination scenario, when his nomination had not been confirmed for almost four months after President Roosevelt sent it up, and almost three months after his term had expired—and, with the exception of Moore’s opposition (which proved to have no real significance), the explanation for the delays had been simply the usual Senate foot-dragging. Confirmation of appointees after their terms had expired was not, in fact, unusual in the Senate even for non-controversial candidates. During the summer, however, disturbing rumors began to be heard: that a whispering campaign was being carried on against Olds—and that the whispers were having an effect. In August Olds wrote a friend that there was a “good deal of opposition.” Ben Cohen had lunch with Lyndon Johnson, and then reported on the lunch to Tommy Corcoran—and afterwards Corcoran said he was “afraid of the decision now.”

  Even then, however, the depth of Johnson’s opposition was not understood. Olds still believed, as did most liberals, that the leader of the Senate opposition was Oklahoma’s Kerr. They felt that Johnson’s opposition would be limited to the pro forma statements and vote against the nomination obligatory for a senator from the nation’s largest natural gas producing state. On August 18, Estes Kefauver spoke to Committee Chairman Ed Johnson, who, as Kefauver related to Olds, “rather agreed” that the “White House could probably bring Lyndon around.” A column by Thomas Stokes on August 25 carried a warning of “serious danger” to the confirmation, but did not even mention Lyndon Johnson’s name. It was only very gradually, as Summer turned into Fall, that Olds and his supporters began to suspect that a key figure in the opposition was the senator Olds had thought was his friend—the chairman of the subcommittee before which he would be appearing.

  And then, on September 16, 1949, almost three months after his term had expired, Olds was finally notified of the date the subcommittee hearing would begin—September 27, just eleven days away; the first day would be brief and largely devoted to scheduling the roster of witnesses; the hearing would get under way in earnest on September 28. And in September, too, Johnson apparently let the mask drop away in a conversation with Olds, after which Olds wrote a friend that Johnson has “shown open hostility.” And in that month, also, the door to the trap that Lyndon Johnson had been preparing was revealed. When, earlier, it had first been announced that the hearing would be held, a five-member subcommittee had been named, and its membership seemed innocuous; one of the two Republican members, in fact, was Owen Brewster of Maine, who was well acquainted with Olds’ work, and admired it. Now it was revealed that the membership had been changed. There were to be seven members, not five, and Brewster was not one of them; instead, the three Republican members were three of the Midwest’s most rabid Communist haters: John W. Bricker of Ohio, Homer Capehart of Indiana, and Clyde Reed of Kansas. After sounding out Bricker about Olds’ nomination, White House aide Tom McGrath reported back that the Ohioan was “unalterably opposed.” The White House did not even bother sounding out Capehart and Reed. Several of the Democratic senators on the full Commerce Committee—Francis Myers, Charles Tobey, Brien McMahon, and Lester Hunt—were sympathetic to Olds. Not one was on the subcommittee. Its Democratic members, in addition to Lyndon Johnson, were Ed Johnson, Herbert R. O’Conor of Maryland, and Ernest W. McFarland of Arizona, all of them as rabidly anti-Red as the Republicans. White House emissary Oscar Chapman, returning from an attempt to persuade McFarland to at least keep an open mind, reported that their conversation had been “unsatisfactory,” mentioning “wild goose talk about commissions interfering with private business.” Wanting the subcommittee’s decision to be conclusive in the full, thirteen-member, committee, Johnson had enlarged the subcommittee so that if it was unanimous, the opinion of the rest of the committee wouldn’t matter; by the time the full committee considered the Olds nomination, a majority of its members would already be committed against him. And he had made sure that the subcommittee’s opinion would be unanimous. Not only had the witnesses been selected with care, so had the judges who would be hearing their testimony. The job had been done with Lyndon Johnson’s customary thoroughness. The subcommittee was stacked, completely stacked. Leland Olds would not have a single ally on it.

  EVEN AFTER the subcommittee’s new membership had been announced, Lyndon Johnson maintained his pose when talking with liberal senators. Francis Myers of Pennsylvania visited his office to remonstrate about the “stacked [subcommittee,” but Johnson told him that conservatives had been put on it in the hope that when they heard the testimony, they would come to support Olds. And it was the chairman who ran a subcommittee anyway, he reminded Myers—and he was the chairman. Myers, evidently reassured, reassured Clark Clifford, who reassured Olds—as is shown by the note Olds made after his conversation with the White House counsel. “Lyndon going to do judicial job,” the note said.

  The pose was successful. Olds finally began attempting to round up witnesses, writing a few old allies. “I am in a real fight,” he told Adolf Berle, an old New Deal friend from New York. “They are going to avoid the main issue and try to pin the communist or near-communist label on me…. I am wondering whether you would feel that you could come down to tell the Committee that I am a reputable citizen.” But not only was Olds writing these few letters—writing them at the last minute—after the campaign against him had been going on for months, the letters reveal that he was still unaware of the extent of that campaign, and of what the hearings would be like. While “the subcommittee is rather stacked against confirmation,” he wrote Berle, “the administration is going all out” and “I am confident of winning in the long run.”

  Similar unawareness—and confidence—was still prevalent in Washington’s liberal community, where, despite warnings such as the one in Stokes’ column, the prevailing opinion remained that while there might be a tough fight, it would certainly end in victory. The President was committed; indeed, as Marquis Childs wrote, “seldom has such zeal been shown in behalf of a presidential nominee.” The confidence extended to liberal senators. Paul Douglas didn’t even bother to attend the hearings. “We thought it was going to be routine,” recalls his administrative assistant, Frank McCulloch. “We had no reason to know what was coming.”

  No one, including Leland Olds, had any idea of what was in store for him when, on the morning of September 28, 1949, accompanied only by his wife and a single FPC aide—without an attorney, without having any idea of what evidence was to be presented against him (and, indeed, without having seen most of that evidence for more than twenty years)—he walked into the Senate Office Building, and came to the place of his hearing.

  11

  The Hearing

  ROOM 312, on the third floor of the Senate Office Building, was a high-ceilinged room of white marble and tall windows and gold brocade draperies and sparkling chandeliers, but it was not one of the building’s larger rooms, so that the wings of the raised horseshoe-shaped dais at one end ran hal
fway down the adjoining walls, and the room was dominated by the dais’s dark, heavy oaken facade. It loomed over the small table, set between the wings, at which witnesses would testify.

  Only a few witnesses, spectators, and reporters—uninterested reporters, since the hearings were not expected to generate much news—were sitting in the three or four rows of folding chairs that had been set up in the other half of the room. Coming in with Maud, Leland Olds saw John Lyle sitting among the waiting witnesses. The Congressman was holding a large briefcase on his lap. Olds didn’t know what was in it, or why Lyle would be testifying, but then Lyndon Johnson, sitting at the center of the dais, rapped a gavel to open the proceedings and said, “We have with us Congressman John Lyle of Texas. Congressman Lyle, do you have a prepared statement?” and Lyle, taking the chair at the witness table, opened the briefcase, took out a thick stack of white-on-black photostats of the Federated Press articles, and said that Olds’ reappointment would be “utterly unthinkable.”

  “I am here to oppose Mr. Olds because he has—through a long and prolific career—attacked the church,” Lyle began. “He has attacked our schools; he has ridiculed symbols of patriotism and loyalty such as the Fourth of July; he has advocated public ownership; he has reserved his applause for Lenin and Lenin’s system….”

  His stem-winder’s voice ringing through the room, Lyle looked up at the senators on the dais. “Yes, unbelievable as it seems, gentlemen, this man Leland Olds, the man who now asks the consent and approval of the Senate to serve on the Federal Power Commission, has not believed in our Constitution, our Government, our Congress, our representative form of government, our churches, our flag, our schools, our system of free enterprise.”

  Olds had never believed in these things, Lyle said. “What manner of man is this Leland Olds?” he asked. He had discovered the answer, he said, in the fifty-four articles stacked before him; “they provide a clear and definite pattern of Leland Olds’ alien economic and political philosophy.” Many of them, Lyle said, had been published in the Daily Worker, “official organ of the Communist Party,” and even those that had been published in other publications, Lyle said, had followed the Communist line. In reading them, he said, “I found he was full in his praise for the Russian system. I found that he advocated radical and alien changes in the things that all of us believe in, live for, and fought for.” In the articles, Lyle said, Olds “commends Lenin”; conforms to the “Marxian doctrine”; “praises the Russian system as the coming world order and as a model for the United States; preaches class war; echoes the Communist doctrines of class struggle, surplus value, exploitation, downfall of capitalism, and international action by workers, as proclaimed by Karl Marx in his Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital.”

  And Olds still didn’t believe in the Constitution or the American flag, Lyle said. He has an “established contempt for the fundamentals of American philosophy,” he said. Olds had merely concealed his true feelings in recent years, he said. “One of Mr. Leland Olds’ particular and peculiar talents is the ability—like a chameleon—to be many things to many men.” And he had concealed his feelings from dark motives. “Leland Olds has seen fit—even in very recent years—to resort to the gymnastics of expediency to remain in a position of power where his advocacy can retain the influence of high position.”

  But now that he himself had read those articles, Lyle said, Olds’ true feelings were all too clear. “Now I can understand Mr. Olds, can understand his manner of doing things, his easy turn-about without reason, his easy advocacy of either side of a question, using the same artful, deceitful and sly tactics so evident from his writings which I have assembled.” These articles, he said, “provide a clear and definite pattern of Leland Olds’ alien economic and political philosophy. They unmistakably show that his objectives are basically hostile to our American way of life.”

  He would prove this, Lyle said, with the photostats he was holding, those photostats of Olds’ own articles—with “words from his own pen,” most of them words published in the Communist Daily Worker.

  One by one, Lyle went through the articles that Leland Olds had written during the 1920s—or, to be more precise, through the fifty-four articles that had been selected. With each one, Lyle first summarized the key point: “Mr. Chairman, I have before me here a photostatic copy of the Daily Worker, July 16, 1925, wherein Leland Olds claims that educational institutions are subservient to the ‘money princes who govern industry.’… I just briefly call your attention to a few lines: ‘Give till it hurts means nothing to the money princes. They simply can’t give till it hurts. They have too much….’” Or: “I have before me, Mr. Chairman and gentlemen, a photostatic copy of the Federated Press Labor News, July 20, 1929, wherein Leland Olds hails the ‘decay of the church….’”

  Early on, there was an interruption. Senator Charles Tobey of New Hampshire had been considered too sympathetic to Olds to be placed on the subcommittee. Assured by Johnson that the hearings would be routine, he had given him his proxy for the vote in the full committee. But he had stopped by to watch the hearings, sitting in one of the empty chairs on the dais, and as the thrust of Lyle’s testimony became apparent, he could not restrain himself. As Lyle was calling Olds a “chameleon,” Tobey interrupted. “A man has a right to change his mind; does he not?” he asked Lyle. “Did you not ever change your mind on issues and men?” When Lyle replied, “Yes, sir,” Tobey said, “Does that not qualify what you are talking about now?” But before that line of questioning could continue, Lyndon Johnson intervened, asking that Lyle be allowed to read his prepared statement without interruption. “The Congressman … will be very glad to have any questions asked of him when he concludes, and I should not be surprised if some members of the Senate change their mind if they are willing to indulge him a courteous hearing…. If the members will bear with us, at least for a few minutes until the Congressman completes his prepared statement, the Chair will appreciate it.”

  The only further interruptions were occasional brief exclamations of approval from subcommittee members for Lyle’s thoroughness, and a ritual began. Picking up a photostat, Lyle would identify it—“Here is a photostatic copy of the Daily Worker, July 5, 1928. There is an article in here entitled ‘Imperialism and the Fourth of July,’ by Leland Olds.” He would read in a voice full of indignation a marked paragraph, sentence, or phrase from the article which he said summed it up. “That, gentlemen, was written by Mr. Leland Olds, who wants your permission to serve in high public office, your consent: ‘The Fourth of July will loom as anything but the birthday of liberty.’” Then, rising, he would extend the incriminating photostat—“with a flourish,” one observer recalls—to a committee clerk. “Without objection, the article appearing on page 5 of the Daily Worker of July 5,1928, entitled ‘Imperialism and the Fourth of July,’ will be incorporated in the record at this point,” Lyndon Johnson would say.

  Occasionally, Lyle would deliver himself of an editorial comment. “Here is an interesting one, gentlemen,” or “Perhaps I am naive, gentlemen, but this is one that shook me”—or

  Here is one you gentlemen will enjoy, I am sure, because it concerns you. I will summarize it here. According to Mr. Olds, the Government of the United States is nothing more than a servant of business. He views it as a popular delusion that a political system created in a much simpler economic era still affords the people effective control through their votes over the complex industrial state, which has come into being. He says “politicians must perpetuate this idea, for their jobs depend upon it, but the true view,” he says, “would reveal the political government handling administrative details for an immensely powerful ruling class.”

  I am quoting him from that statement wherein he relieves you gentlemen of the responsibility of thinking, the responsibility of acting. All you have to do is handle administrative details for the powerful ruling class.

  Occasionally, Lyndon Johnson himself made a brief comment. When Lyle handed up the “administra
tive details” article, the chairman said, “Without objection we will perform one of those details now and insert this in the record.” Usually, however, Johnson simply repeated, over and over, “Without objection it will be made part of the record.” And that thick stack of photostats, of the very words that Leland Olds had written, that Lyle handed up so methodically, lent an air of authenticity to the Congressman’s testimony. So thoroughly had the articles been deconstructed, in fact, that ideas had been found in them that Olds had not even expressed. At one point Lyle cited five articles to show that Olds had been a propagandist for the “surplus value” theory. “Surplus value,” he reminded the subcommittee, is “the fundamental doctrine, you know, of Karl Marx and his Communist followers.” As it happened, not one of the five articles contained the incriminating phrase, but Lyle explained that that point was of no significance. “Expressions” used in the articles showed that Olds “adhered to the surplus value” doctrine, the Congressman said. Recondite points had been noted, and now were called to the committee’s attention. None of the fifty-four articles contained the word “gravediggers,” but that fact was also of no significance. While Olds had not used the word, it had appeared in a headline above one of his articles—in a headline written by some editor in one of the scores of newspapers that printed the article—and Lyle gravely explained the implications to the subcommittee: “The word ‘gravediggers’ is of interest in view of Karl Marx’s statement in the Communist Manifesto, page 42. I am quoting from Karl Marx: ‘Before all, therefore, the bourgeoisie produces its own gravediggers. Its downfall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.’” (“Without objection, it will be made part of the record.”)