Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson

by Robert A. Caro

  And when, the next year, a great opportunity suddenly appeared, and Lyndon Johnson grabbed for it, Russell saw to it that Johnson got it.

  THE FIRST HALF OF 1950 WAS SLOW. The desultory, now-familiar, Senate routine resumed—as did the extra-senatorial routine: the lunches and dinners at Bill White’s and Dave Botter’s to cultivate the press; the lunches and dinners to cultivate Rayburn (most notably a birthday lunch for the Speaker that Johnson, along with Representative Wright Patman, persuaded President Truman to attend as a surprise guest, and a boisterous dinner the Texas delegation threw for the Speaker at the Mayflower); the lunches and dinners to cultivate Rayburn’s nephew, FCC Chairman Robert Bartley: when the Congressional Club had a ladies’ tea, it was Ruth Bartley who was Lady Bird’s guest. (And there was the evening that Lyndon and Lady Bird, just the two of them, spent at the Speaker’s apartment, eating a dinner he had had sent in from Martin’s—a very happy evening for Mr. Sam.) Sunday brunches were still devoted to Russell, but during the first half of 1950 there was little Russell could do for him. Johnson’s main effort in the Senate, apart from routine Armed Services Committee work, ended in frustration when, in April, Truman vetoed a natural gas deregulation bill.

  Making the first half of the year more difficult was the tension at the Georgetown dinner parties of his old circle caused by the Leland Olds hearing, and now aggravated by the stands he continued to take on civil rights issues—his vote, for example, against cloture when Truman tried again to make employment practices more fair. His relationship with the President, never warm, had been further chilled by the Olds fight. The White House, during the reign of Roosevelt so open to him, was now a place he visited only when the Speaker brought him along, which during the first six months of 1950 was exactly once. Otherwise, apart from a few group occasions like the Rayburn lunch, Lyndon Johnson saw Harry Truman mainly up on daises—on Capitol Hill as the President delivered his State of the Union address, at the National Guard Armory at the Jefferson-Jackson Day Dinner. He had come a long way, but he had a long, long way to go—and, it seemed, in that slow, slow Senate, as if it was going to take a very long time to get there; if there was a shortcut, he hadn’t found it. The buzzer summoning aides to his private office was sounding less often; he was starting to brood in there again; when he telephoned Tommy Corcoran or Jim Rowe, his voice was beginning again to be flat, a little listless.

  FOR A FEW MEN IN WASHINGTON, the news came late Saturday night, June 24, in telephone calls like the one Assistant Secretary of State Dean Rusk received during a dinner party in Joseph Alsop’s home in Georgetown. Watching as Rusk listened to the message, Alsop saw “his face turn the color of an old-fashioned white bed sheet,” although all Rusk said, as he asked his host to make his apologies, was that there had been a rather serious “border incident” in South Korea. For the rest of Washington, including freshman Senator Lyndon Johnson, the news came, as the news of Pearl Harbor had come, on a quiet Sunday morning, in headlines and radio bulletins.

  When Johnson telephoned Horace Busby’s house in suburban Chevy Chase that morning, Busby heard the difference in the Chief’s tone immediately. “He called me at ten, and we were still talking at noon,” Buzz would recall. “All of a sudden, he was energized. He came to life. Because he knew the territory. He was a creature of war. His whole life had been shaped in the buildup to World War II. He felt he knew what was necessary. He talked about China—would China come in? Would Russia come in? He knew the territory. He was back in command.”

  Johnson’s involvement was not immediately requested, however. When, on Tuesday, with North Korean tanks rumbling down through South Korea, the President invited some forty congressional leaders to the White House, to inform them that he was dispatching United States air and naval forces to support the South Koreans, Johnson was not among them. He was just one of the crowd of senators and representatives who cheered the President’s statement when it was read on Capitol Hill, and he did not participate in the Senate debate on the “police action,” which took place on Wednesday.

  But if you do everything, you’ll win. Johnson had already done something. The White House was concerned about adverse congressional reaction to Truman’s failure to ask congressional authorization to send in troops. In the event, despite tense moments—Robert Taft declared that the President had “usurped the power of Congress”—substantial reaction did not materialize; several senators were to write letters to the President expressing their support. Johnson did everything he could to make sure his letter would have the strongest possible impact on the President.

  On Tuesday night, Busby recalls, “He called me at home and said I want you to draft a letter from me supporting him.” The tone of the letter had to be perfect, he said. And it had to get there first, before a letter from any other senator. He would get to the office early Wednesday morning, he told Busby, “and I want that letter on my desk when I get in. I want it on Truman’s desk when he gets there in the morning.” And, Busby says, “he called someone in Truman’s office to make sure the President would see it the minute he got in.”

  Beginning “My dear Mr. President, I want to express to you my deep gratitude for and admiration of your courageous response yesterday to the challenge of this grave hour,” the letter spared no adjectives. Your leadership, Johnson told him, had been “inspired”; it would, he said, “be remembered as the finest moment of American maturity.” It “gives a new and noble meaning to freedom…. For the decisions you must face alone, you have my most sincere prayers and my total confidence. Under your leadership, I am sure peace will be restored and justice will assume new meaning for the oppressed and frightened peoples of the world.” And Truman replied in a “Dear Lyndon” letter with a tone more cordial than that in which he had responded to previous Johnson overtures. Some months later, talking with Johnson, the President would say, “I remember: you were the first Senator to support me.” “The first was very important,” Busby says. Although the relationship between Johnson and Truman would never be particularly warm (Margaret Truman says that her father “never quite trusted him”), a moderate thaw, with occasional reverses, can be dated from this exchange.

  But getting closer to the President, important though that was, was not nearly as potentially significant as another opportunity Johnson saw in this moment—and for which he reached just as quickly. Still an obscure senator, he saw within hours, perhaps even more quickly, that America’s entry into the Korean War was a chance for him to assume the same role that had propelled Harry Truman into national prominence when he had been just an obscure senator.

  Of course, Johnson knew the story: how Truman, just beginning his second term, still known only by the derisive title “the Senator from Prendergast,” had in January, 1941, become concerned about waste and mismanagement in America’s defense mobilization program and had persuaded the Senate to create a special committee to investigate the program, and, after Pearl Harbor, the war effort; how the “Truman Committee” had, with remarkable rapidity, become a national byword for its fairness and lack of partisan bias, as well as for the revelations it produced; so that when in 1944 Franklin Roosevelt was looking for a running mate, the chairman of “the most successful congressional investigating effort in American history” had sufficient stature to be chosen for the vice presidency that became the presidency. Everyone in Washington knew the story. Truman of the Truman Committee was the title of an inspiring political Horatio Alger saga. And, in a city in which so many men viewed great events at least partly through the lens of personal opportunity, many men—including many senators—saw very quickly how a new war, or even a “police action,” could provide the backdrop for a repeat version of the same scenario. But no one saw the opportunity as quickly as Lyndon Johnson. And no one moved as quickly—or as deftly—to take advantage of it.

  Speed was necessary, for the odds against him getting the job were very long. For one thing, an investigation might well fall under the jurisdiction of the Senate’s
Committee on Expenditures in Executive Departments, chaired by John McClellan. Had the powerful and prickly McClellan moved to assume jurisdiction, no senator would have opposed him. But McClellan didn’t move. Johnson did: he had an emissary, Truman’s Secretary of the Air Force, Stuart Symington, respectfully point something out to the President: Expenditures’ ranking Republican member, who would play a prominent role if that committee investigated the Administration’s war effort, was Joe McCarthy. With an election coming up and the Democrats by no means certain of retaining control of the Senate, McCarthy might, in fact, soon be the committee’s chairman. That possibility should be eliminated before anyone focused on it. Truman took the point. He was soon on the phone to Majority Leader Scott Lucas, to, in Busby’s words, “get an investigation started, and started quick, and put it in the Armed Services Committee.”

  That move reduced the odds against Johnson only slightly. Grasping the potential in such an investigation, Armed Services Chairman Millard Tydings wanted to head it himself. At that very moment, however, Tydings was getting bad news from the home front—his home front, the state of Maryland, where he would be up for election in November. He had been chairman of the Senate’s Select Committee on McCarthy, which, earlier that year, had brought to light the lack of proof, and of truth, behind McCarthy’s Wheeling speech, and McCarthy, out for revenge, was planning to campaign against him. Tydings had survived a 1938 purge attempt by Franklin Roosevelt, but this threat, his advisers were telling him—more and more urgently each day—was worse; he was in a fight for his political life, and had better concentrate on his re-election campaign. Still, Tydings tried to keep his options open. Although, formally staking Armed Services’ jurisdiction over the investigation, he emerged from a committee meeting on July 17 to announce that, pursuant to a resolution introduced by Senator Lyndon Johnson, the committee had established a seven-member “Preparedness Investigating” subcommittee “similar to the one headed during World War II by President Truman,” the announcement did not name the subcommittee’s membership, much less its chairman; Tydings apparently intended either to take the chairmanship himself after he had been re-elected or to return jurisdiction to the full committee which he chaired. And if Tydings did not take the chairmanship himself, of course, the committee had several senior senators (most notably Russell, the Senate’s leading expert on military readiness) who would be more logical choices than a freshman senator.

  Seeing his precious opportunity slipping away, Johnson pleaded for a chance to talk to Tydings in person—“Millard, as indicated twice today, I shall be delighted to discuss my position with you at any time … that may be convenient for you”—a chance he was apparently not given. In a letter he wrote Tydings on July 19, there was, before the requisite disclaimer, a note of desperation. “I believed that I would be named chairman of the group authorized by the resolution I introduced. Since this would only be in line with the usual practice of the Senate, I thought I had some right to expect this. I have no political ambitions to further, however, so I have no intention of objecting if you want to name yourself chairman.” In a July 25 memorandum, Johnson sought to reassure Tydings that the subcommittee would pose no threat to his authority as chairman of the full Armed Services Committee, or to his ability to take credit for the subcommittee’s findings. As chairman of the parent committee, Tydings would have full authority over the subcommittee’s expenditures, the memo said; its expenses and the salaries of its staff, which would be limited to a mere $25,000, “shall be paid … upon vouchers approved by THE CHAIRMAN OF THE COMMITTEE.” (The crucial words were capitalized.) Tydings would have full authority over the subcommittee’s staff—not that there would be much staff. “You would designate such members of our [Armed Services Committee] professional staff as you saw fit to be the nucleus around which additional investigators could be employed when, and if, they were needed,” Johnson promised. “You would be expected to designate and approve any additional investigators.” And it would be Tydings, not the subcommittee’s chairman, who, the memo promised, would have full authority over the subcommittee’s reports—and the right to release them: “The subcommittee would submit all reports, recommendations, etc., to the full committee—not to the Senate or to the public. The full committee then would decide what, if any, reports would be presented to the Senate by the chairman of the full committee.” And the memorandum closed with a note of urgency. “In view of the fact that other resolutions are now being introduced calling for similar investigations by other and special committees, I think it is important that announcement of the [membership] of our subcommittee should be made at the earliest possible date.”

  Attempting during the long, frustrating week following the July 17 committee meeting to enlist Truman’s influence on his behalf, Johnson issued a number of statements designed to reassure the President that he need not fear criticism from any subcommittee headed by Lyndon Johnson. Pointedly re-emphasizing in one statement that establishment of the subcommittee would “cut off other indiscriminate investigations of the emergency [defense] effort,” he added, “I personally do not believe we have time for criticism at the present moment.”

  If Truman intervened, his intervention was not sufficient: the President’s influence on Capitol Hill was on the wane. Tydings refused to budge. For a freshman senator to get this prized subcommittee chairmanship, he would need an ally—a patron—more influential within the Senate than the President.

  And this freshman senator had that ally. “He had talked it over beforehand with Senator Russell and asked his help in convincing [Tydings] to give him the subcommittee despite his lack of seniority,” a journalist familiar with the situation was to recall. Although Russell had agreed to help, he had hitherto not thrown his full weight into the scales. Now he did so—and with Russell on his side, Lyndon Johnson didn’t need anyone else. As Symington was to put it, “Russell was for him. There were no other factors that mattered.”

  While Tydings may not have been talking to Johnson, he now began talking with Russell, in the secrecy of the Marble Room. The details of those conversations are not known—because, as always with Russell, they took place in confidence—but their outcome was clear. “As was generally the case in delicate maneuvers involving Russell, there was no rancor, no controversy; but it somehow came to pass that Tydings, faced with the rigors of a difficult campaign, decided that he did not want to take on additional time-consuming duties,” John A. Goldsmith wrote. Saying privately that he would assume the subcommittee chairmanship himself when, with the re-election threat disposed of, the Senate reorganized in January, 1951, Tydings, on July 27, 1950, simply announced that Lyndon Johnson would be chairman.

  The significance of the appointment to Johnson’s career was instantly apparent. “Senator Johnson of Texas today faces opportunities for fame, public service and political advancement almost without equal for a senator serving his first term,” Leslie Carpenter wrote. “Those opportunities are fundamentally the same as those that confronted Senator Truman … in 1941. And no one has to be told what happened to Truman.” And, Carpenter pointed out, Truman had been in his seventh year in the Senate when he was given his great opportunity. “Johnson is only in his second year.” As The Nation reported, “With the outbreak of the Korean War dozens of Congressmen recognized that the impact of a tremendous rearmament program would open up new fields for legislative investigation and that national reputations could be built by skillful employment of the power to probe.” Dozens had recognized it; one had gotten it—thanks largely to his third R.

  AND ONCE LYNDON JOHNSON had the opportunity, he made the most of it—displaying gifts more rare than the ability to court an older man.

  The Senate as a whole—and most senators individually—may not have grasped the importance of staff, of a new kind of staff suited to the new, more complicated postwar world, but Lyndon Johnson had grasped it from the day he arrived in the Senate. And now, assembling a staff for the Preparedness Investigating Subcomm
ittee, he set out to create what he had had in mind.

  He had promised Tydings that the “nucleus” of the subcommittee’s staff would be the staff of the parent Armed Services Committee, but that staff consisted of former career military officers, not at all what Johnson had in mind. So from the moment he got what he wanted from Tydings—the chairmanship—the promises he had given Tydings were moot.

  Assembling part of the subcommittee’s staff was easy, for it was already on his payroll. The “best man with words” whom he knew—Horace Busby—was simply moved out of 231 and down the hall to a little cubicle in the Armed Services suite, and on the cubicle’s door was painted the title “Editor of Subcommittee Reports.” Another man of unusual abilities was on a payroll that Johnson treated as his own: that of Alvin Wirtz’s Austin law firm. John Connally had thought that he had finally found a refuge from Johnson there, but Wirtz now informed Connally that while he would remain on salary with the firm, he would also have assignments from the subcommittee.