Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson

by Robert A. Caro

  WHEN A TELEGRAM ANNOUNCING the committee vote was read to a meeting of the International Petroleum Association of America in Fort Worth, the eight hundred oil and natural gas producers in attendance broke into cheers and rebel yells.

  The reaction was different in Washington—in those precincts of Washington in which Lyndon Johnson had for so long held himself forth as a liberal, as the protégé of Franklin Roosevelt, as a crusader against the forces of conservatism in Texas.

  The first reaction was shock—for so thoroughly had the preparations been concealed that it was only as the subcommittee and committee took their votes that the liberal community woke up fully to what had been done. “What a subcommittee!” The New Republic exclaimed. “It’s been packed. They even brought in Bricker and Capehart. If we were a defendant in Russia and saw such a mackerel-eyed bunch as that looking down at us from the bench we’d start writing confessions quick.”

  Then there was outrage over the way in which it had been done: over the method used to reject Olds—the Communist smear. As The New Republic put it: “Olds, shouts the Senate committee shaking the yellowed pages of newspapers 20 years old, is the glib salesman of a foreign ideology. Who, then, are the Americans? Olds is the product of New England’s Protestant conscience, of social work in Boston slums and of Pennsylvania steel strikes, of Frank Walsh and Franklin Roosevelt….” The views Olds had held in the 1920s were views so many liberals had held, liberals pointed out. “I know of few men worth their intellectual salt who didn’t have some of the doubts Olds had at the time,” Max Lerner said. In an editorial in the Washington Post, Alan Barth wrote that “Like many a young man, he [Olds] was in a great hurry to reform the world [and] said some extravagant things in his column 25 years ago. Taken out of context and looked at in the light of today’s relationship between left and right, they may be made to seem extremely radical. But the social conditions of 25 years ago invited radicalism. A man could denounce open-shop capitalism in those days without being called a Communist or being considered disloyal to the United States. The elder La Follette did so.”

  And Olds’ views were not the true reason for the campaign against him, which was, The Nation said, actually a “vendetta … a flagrant attempt by vested interests to exclude from office a man who proved too ‘consumer-minded’ to suit their purposes.” The real issue was the immense profits to be made from natural gas, I. F. Stone explained. “This is the reason for the fight on Olds. If he had been willing to knuckle under on the issue, he would have been forgiven the authorship of Das Kapital itself.” But, these liberal writers knew, the campaign had been successful, frighteningly successful. As Lerner put it: “Once the issue of Olds-as-onetime-devil was raised, no one dared line up on his side. The hunting of dangerous thought has overridden every other quest. None of the Senators dared to take a chance that someday an opponent would accuse him of having voted for a man who had once criticized our master-institution of corporate power.” And these writers understood the larger implications of that success. “No one in the government service is safe unless he played an intellectual Caspar Milquetoast from the moment he left his teens,” Lerner declared. The Olds case was teaching Washington that “all a lobbyist has to do is dig up something vaguely pink or crimson in a recalcitrant official’s past to ruin him,” I. F. Stone said. As the Christian Science Monitor reported: “It is hardly surprising that the case of Leland Olds has embittered Washington as few such cases have in recent years.”

  And, as awareness grew of Lyndon Johnson’s role in the campaign, increasingly the liberals’ bitterness began to be directed against him—for many of them were now coming to believe that Lyndon Johnson had betrayed them. The awareness had grown slowly. His friends had not previously focused on the fact that he was the chairman of the subcommittee against which they were raging, but now, criticizing the subcommittee for being “so hostile to Olds that it resembles the House Un-American Activities Committee under J. Parnell Thomas,” The New Republic rectified the omission—with a vengeance. In an editorial entitled “The Enemies of Leland Olds,” the magazine said that “Against Olds is a onetime liberal Senator, Lyndon Johnson, born into the family of a poor farmer, brought forward by the New Deal, and carried into office by liberal and labor support. Johnson, who saw his first backer, Aubrey Williams, hounded out of government on charges of Communism, now is hounding Olds out on the same charges—Johnson, who boasted that ‘Roosevelt was a Daddy to me.’ How Roosevelt would have scorned such backsliding!” Increasingly, in newspaper articles and editorials, the subcommittee was identified as “Johnson’s subcommittee.”

  Over the weekend during which Olds was sorting frantically through ancient clippings, trying to assemble his defense, anew issue of Fortune magazine appeared on Washington newsstands with an article whose timing was, from Johnson’s point of view, unfortunate. Among the photographs accompanying the article—on the “Big Rich” of the Texas and Louisiana Gold Coasts—was a picture of the two Brown brothers, Herman and George, and the article reminded the capital that “a tremendous item in which they [the Browns] have big holdings is Texas Eastern Transmission Co., owner and operator of the Big Inch and Little Inch pipelines…. Although they are pretty sure that there is no such thing as good publicity, they are well known in select circles. These include potent people in Washington. They once put up $100,000 to back Lyndon Johnson for Congress….” (“This,” Lowell Mellett commented in the Washington Star, “may explain the strange tangent taken by the subcommittee under Senator Johnson’s chairmanship.”)

  The sense of betrayal was sharpest among those who had thought they knew Lyndon Johnson best: the small circle of liberal friends who for years, at their dinner tables, had heard him talk so eloquently about cheap electricity (“Public power was a passion with him”) and about the rapaciousness of the private utilities. This circle, in fact, included some of the lawyers who had helped him circumvent the law to keep the Senate seat he had won in such questionable circumstances, because they had believed that by helping him win, they were helping to bring a strong new liberal voice to the Senate.

  Decades later, Jim Rowe, who had long been tied psychologically as well as politically to Johnson’s career, and who in many interviews with the author had defended unpleasant episodes in that career, at first tried to do the same with the Olds episode. In his thoughtful, understated manner, he said that he understood the reason for Johnson’s determination to block Olds’ renomination: “Because he wanted to solidify himself with the oil crowd in Texas. You could not be a senator from Texas without making your peace with them. I don’t think he liked [doing] it, but he was a pragmatic fellow….” After talking in this vein for several minutes, however, Rowe paused and stared down at the desk in his paneled law office—and the pause lasted for some time. When he resumed talking, he did so in a different vein. While he could have accepted Johnson’s blocking of Olds, he said, he had always found it difficult to accept Johnson’s tactics. Speaking very slowly, with long halts between words, Rowe said, “He grabbed onto the goddamned Commie thing and just ran with it and ran with it.” There was another pause. “Just ran with it,” Rowe said. “Ran it into the ground for no reason we could see.”

  Rowe’s partner, Tommy Corcoran, Johnson’s chief fund-raiser in liberal circles but a man tied psychologically to no cause but his own, was to say: “I told him [Johnson] to his face one day … that I thought it was the rottenest thing he’d ever done, and that he could take it or leave it…. The [Commerce] Committee did as dirty a job of trying to crucify this guy à la McCarthy as I have ever heard.” Corcoran’s sidekick, Ben Cohen, was always less loquacious than Tommy the Cork, but he could, in his quiet way, be equally eloquent. When asked about Johnson’s tactics in the Olds fight, Cohen replied in a single word: “Shameful.”

  For some other leading Washington liberals, less under Johnson’s spell than Rowe or Corcoran, the shock was less severe, for his “We of the South” speech in March had forewarned them that all
was not as they had believed. Joe Rauh, who in 1948 had worked all night—along with Rowe and Corcoran—on the legal briefs that persuaded Justice Hugo Black to issue the last-minute ruling that saved Johnson’s election, says he had been “disgusted” by the speech, so that when Johnson’s maneuvers against Olds were revealed, “I wasn’t surprised. I already knew. The tide had turned with Lyndon Johnson.”

  Rauh was not alone. He recalls that even before the Olds hearing “there were discussions. What’s happened? This is not the shining New Deal fellow…. The lustre of winning the [1948] election went off pretty fast.” Nonetheless, the speed, and thoroughness, of the transformation—as made clear in the Olds case—was startling; the election had, after all, been barely a year before. During the court fight over the contested election, Rauh recalls, “Corcoran called to get me on the defense team and said, ‘This wonderful congressman …’ In [Abe] Fortas’ office these people were talking about what a great man we were defending. I just sort of automatically assumed it…. But it soon became clear that Johnson was not the shining knight that I was led to believe, that he was a totally different political figure … than he had been in the Roosevelt days…. I was quickly disabused of the notion that this was a New Deal guy. But it was the meanness of the use of these things [Olds’ 1920s articles] that so attracted my attention.” Leland Olds “was a great American,” Joe Rauh says. What Johnson did to him was “really vicious … one of the dirtiest pieces of work ever done.” Rauh says that “I sort of felt dirty, and double-crossed by Tommy. I goddamned Tommy for getting [me to] help….” Opinion had turned even among the wives of the New Deal set who had been so charmed by the tall young congressman. “My, I wish I could have my campaign contribution back,” Elizabeth Purcell, wife of SEC Chairman Ganson Purcell, said at one Georgetown party.

  LIBERALS ATTEMPTED TO ORGANIZE. The effort had already started in the White House, with Truman’s letter, and now the President ordered Clark Clifford to mobilize support from New Deal “names.” Clifford asked Olds who he thought might help, and on a notepad on his desk, Leland Olds scribbled an address, 29 Washington Square West, New York, N.Y.—the address of the widow who bore the greatest name of all. And Clifford reported Eleanor Roosevelt’s response: “Enthusiastic—will do it at once and discuss it later.”

  Olds was evidently not sure that Mrs. Roosevelt even remembered him. Writing her, at Clifford’s direction, to give her details on the renomination battle (“The main line of attack has been an all-out effort to picture me as a communist…. Unfortunately our old friend Lyndon Johnson is supporting [that] point of view”), he added a reminder of battles long past, as if feeling it necessary to identify himself. “You may recall that we presented the evidence which … enabled Governor Roosevelt to start successful regulation in New York State,” he wrote. And the letter’s final sentences are sentences written by a man who, in dark days, is trying to remind himself of a time when days had been bright.

  I had the never-to-be-forgotten privilege to play a small part in your husband’s great work. I look back with a sense of happiness to the one or two instances when you invited us to join the family luncheon at the Executive Mansion when Frank P. Walsh and I were seeing the Governor on the St. Lawrence project.

  Mrs. Roosevelt’s next “My Day” column showed that she remembered.

  “I knew Mr. Olds when my husband was governor of New York State,” she wrote. “He started his battle then for sound utility and power policy…. Mr. Olds’ work must have been well done because it brought about changes in the state…. A program of effective [national] regulation was later … secured by the Federal Power Commission when Mr. Olds, himself, was chairman of the commission.”

  She had nothing but scorn, Eleanor Roosevelt said, for those who had raised the Communist issue. “The horrible fact has been brought out that he once spoke on the same platform with Earl Browder. I don’t know what that proves…. Can’t our senators and representatives see thru this opposition and recognize honest public servants? Must they swallow such an obvious Red-herring allegation on Communism?”

  Other friends were attempting to mobilize, friends who would have been working for Olds for months had someone contacted them: New York’s Governor Lehman, under whom Olds had served; Morris Cooke of the REA; Angus McDonald of the National Farmer’s Union, Donald Montgomery of the CIO, Walter Munro of the Trainmen—men whose support could have weighed heavily with senators. Many great names from the farmers’ movement and the labor movement and from the New Deal had, as the tenor of the subcommittee hearings became clear, been telephoning the White House, wanting to help. And there were editorials in leading liberal newspapers around the country—some quite eloquent. “Certain senators,” the Louisville Courier-Journal said, “have been able to make patriotism appear to be disloyalty, and to make protest against wrong seem an act of revolution.”

  But it was too late. The hearings—and the subcommittee and committee vote—were already faits accomplis. The surprise had been total. Men who would have testified had not done so. Jerry Voorhiis wrote a long statement on behalf of the National Cooperative League, but he wrote it after the hearings were over. Thanks to the thoroughness with which Johnson had selected the subcommittee’s membership, moreover, there was no Senate supporter of Olds familiar with the testimony, and, now, with the hearings over and the vote of the full Senate imminent, there was no senator who was organizing support to make an effective presentation on the Senate floor. During the same conversation in which Clifford told Olds that “many want to do something,” the White House aide also told Olds that his friends had “no place to plug in.” At one point, in a remark that points up vividly the disparity between Lyndon Johnson’s operation and the effort the Olds supporters were attempting to start, Clifford had to remind Olds of the “importance of accurate poll[ing]” of the senators.

  And more time might not have helped. Max Lerner had been correct when he wrote in the New York Post about senators not “daring” to support Olds once the “Communist” issue had been raised. Senator Tobey’s abrupt departure—and failure to return—to the hearing room had been a straw in the wind. On the day after the hearings, reporters polled senators—and found only twenty-nine who said they would vote for the President’s nominee, a shockingly small number in a Senate containing fifty-four members of the President’s party.

  Truman thereupon ordered Democratic National Chairman William M. Boyle Jr. to send telegrams to all members of the Democratic National Committee and to state Democratic chairmen urging them to contact their senators and ask them to support Olds. Predictably, that maneuver backfired, for the Senate viewed Truman’s effort as an attack on its cherished independence—“a brazen effort,” Andrew Schoeppel of Kansas called it. Terming it “a deliberate effort to threaten and coerce the members of the Senate,” Harry Byrd said, “President Truman appears to believe that the United States Senate should be an adjunct to his own office, whereby he can issue orders as he pleases.” So predictable was the Senate’s reaction that more than one observer speculated that, in the words of Time magazine, Truman must have “deliberately courted trouble.” Reporters’ polls showed that after Truman’s attempt the number of senators willing to vote for Olds dropped to twenty-four. Leland Olds’ nomination was dead—a simple voice or roll-call vote would have killed it.

  But Lyndon Johnson didn’t want a simple vote—for while he had won the Olds fight, he had not yet reaped from it the reward he wanted: recognition by the oil and natural gas industry that he was its savior and champion. The necessity to appear impartial in his role as subcommittee chairman had forced him to disguise the fact that he had organized and stage-managed the hearings—and the disguise had been so successful that his role had not been broadly publicized. Newspaper articles on the hearings had quoted Lyle, or Bonner, or Head—or, when they quoted senators, the senators were Reed and Capehart. Johnson himself had not yet given them much to quote. And he needed a better stage—the Senate floor. At his requ
est, a debate on the nomination was scheduled—for an evening, Wednesday, October 12, since the Senate’s evening sessions were particularly dramatic. He himself would deliver a major address during it; he told Leslie Carpenter that it would be the “most important speech of my life.”

  *Olds said that he had not even written one article Lyle had cited, charging that in it Olds had “publicized a school for Communists, urging the comrades to attend.” That article was indeed damaging, Olds said. But, he said—in a statement never thereafter challenged by Lyle, the HUAC investigators, Lyndon Johnson, or anyone else—he had not written that article; he had never seen it before.

  12

  The Debate

  PAUL DOUGLAS, not a member of the Commerce Committee and preoccupied with other issues in which he was taking a leading role, wanted to speak in support of Olds, although, his administrative aide, Frank McCulloch, recalls, “because of past attacks on Douglas himself [as a left-winger], he suspected he might be a target himself” if he did so. He had been waiting to hear from the nomination’s floor manager, until, on the very day of the debate, he realized that there was no floor manager—that little or no planning had gone into Olds’ defense. “In the afternoon, I made a canvass, found there was literally no one to speak for Olds,” he was to recall. Attempting to round up speakers proved difficult; “as the hour for the vote approached, a number of liberals suddenly discovered out-of-town engagements.” Exactly four other senators—Morse of Oregon, Aiken of Vermont, Langer of North Dakota, and Humphrey of Minnesota—were willing to take the floor for the nominee.