The secrecy which surrounded the reports gave Johnson another great advantage in dealing with the press. It infused the reports with an aura of importance, as if information so tightly guarded must be significant. A journalist lucky enough to be given advance information about a report’s contents could tell, and convince, his editors that the findings were significant because he believed they were significant. And, of course, it made the reporter look good to his editors: he was the one who had gotten the scoop; he was the one who had, his bosses back in New York now knew, that valuable Washington commodity, access. It made journalists eager to obtain advance information about the reports; grateful if they got the information, and less disposed to evaluate it with a critical eye, particularly since they would want to be given an advance look at the next report.
And advance information was available, for one of the most important of the lower arts of politics is the leak. Lyndon Johnson’s mastery of this art had been displayed so early—and long before he had substantial ammunition to work with—that his gift for it was obviously natural, instinctive, innate. At the age of twenty-five, still only an assistant to a junior congressman, he had used it to defeat a quiet attempt by the Vice President of the United States, as tough and canny a politician as Texas had ever produced, Cactus Jack Garner, to grab federal patronage from the twenty-one Texas congressmen. Awed by the Vice President’s power and legendary ruthlessness, the congressmen were resigned to the loss of the patronage—until Johnson, through his congressman, Richard Kleberg, told them they didn’t have to lose, that he had a strategy. And a key to the strategy was a leak—his secret disclosure of Garner’s maneuver—not to a Texas newspaper whose publisher, friendly to Garner, might not have printed it but to the Associated Press (through a young reporter from Texas, William S. White, with whom he was acquainted), and the resultant nationwide publicity had forced Garner into a hasty retreat. So impressed had the Vice President been that, as White was to recount, he repeatedly asked, “Who in hell is this boy Lyndon Johnson; where the hell did Kleberg get a boy with savvy like that?”*
Now, in 1950, Lyndon Johnson had ammunition to work with—real ammunition. He used it with a flair, infusing it with drama, emphasizing to favored reporters the risks he was taking in letting them see one of the still-secret reports. Handing an advance copy of one to Frances Levison of Time’s Washington bureau on a Friday afternoon, he made her understand that he was able to give it to her only because no one would be looking into the subcommittee’s safe over the weekend—and that Levison must get the copy back to him before the safe was opened again, so that the leak couldn’t be traced. “PACKETING ADVANCE COPY OF SENATOR JOHNSON’S SUBCOMMITTEE PROGRESS REPORT ON RUBBER, FOR TUESDAY RELEASE,” Levison cabled her editors in new York, “THIS PARTICULAR COPY MUST BE RETURNED AFTER WEEKEND, BECAUSE IT IS SPECIALLY SIGNED FOR COMMITTEE FILES.”
The excitement and feelings of complicity—of alliance—that journalists felt at being involved in such intrigues comes through in their memos. “NOT FOR USE, WE HAVE READ THE PRELIMINARY DRAFTS OF LYNDON JOHNSON’S COMMITTEE REPORTS ON MILITARY PROCUREMENT, WHICH WILL START ISSUING IN ANOTHER TWO WEEKS, POSSIBLY TEN DAYS. THEY SHOW UP GLARING DELAYS IN PROCURING 3.5 BAZOOKAS,” Frank McNaughton of Time’s Washington bureau cabled New York. And evident also is the extent to which this leaking influenced journalists who might otherwise have been skeptical to accept the evaluation Johnson put on the leaked information. Giving a journalist a look at a report in private provided Johnson with an opportunity to “explain” its significance, and the fact that the report would remain secret until the journalist printed it meant that an evaluation of the explanation could not be obtained from anybody else. The “glaringness” of the delays the preliminary draft “showed up” was, it would later turn out, a matter of debate, but the debate would not take place until the report had already been published in a prominent position in Time. And by the time doubts as to the true significance of a subcommittee report surfaced, the subcommittee would be on the verge of issuing a new report—and no one was better than Johnson at making a reporter believe that the report to come would be BIG! Even when a promised Johnson “bombshell” fell far short of expectations (as was the case with the procurement report), he was adept at explaining away the shortfall—and in a way that redounded still more to his credit. He had been privately promising James L. McConaughy major revelations about lagging defense deliveries; when the revelations proved less than major, he told McConaughy, as McConaughy reported in his weekly memo to his editors: “Trouble is, the committee can’t figure out a way to tell the public just how bad the situation is without revealing information damaging to security.”
And if the quid pro quo was unstated, it was nonetheless implicit. If Johnson liked a publication’s treatment of his subcommittee, and of him, there would be other tidbits—juicier tidbits. For a publication as influential as Time, in fact, it was not only copies of reports that were available; so were the transcripts of the subcommittee’s tightly closed executive sessions. And no conversation, not even one in the Oval Office, was off limits, as was made clear by a telex from John Beal, a member of Time’s Washington bureau, to his editors in New York.
Had a long bull session with Lyndon Johnson this afternoon in which he told of some recent off record conversations with Truman. Johnson was pleased with Time story this week and wanted us to know about Friday’s committee sessions. He supplied me with a transcript which I have sent by packet to NA [Time’s National Affairs section].
Please return the transcript to Washington Bureau for return to Johnson.
NOTHING WAS TOO GOOD FOR THE PRESS. Lyndon Johnson rationed out his news, soothed reporters who had not been the beneficiary of his latest leak by telling them he had no idea how the information had gotten out, someone else on the subcommittee must have done it, and promising that he would try to make it up to them. “He worked at keeping the press on his side,” comments Marshall McNeil of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. “He made a point of seeing all newspapermen, and everyone left thinking that he was Lyndon’s best friend.”
And he kept it on his side. Time, preparing an article on the first subcommittee report, sent John Beal to get the story of the chairman’s life for a brief biography, and Johnson spent hours telling a story, and while much of it wasn’t true, all of it was charming. “I think that everything considered he deserves a good sendoff in this introduction to Time readers,” Beal cabled his editors. The editors, several of whom had themselves been charmed by Johnson at dinner parties, agreed. The magazine sent him off with a nickname, embodied in the headline “TEXAS WATCHDOG”; with a paragraph of Timespeak (“The Senate’s new watchdog committee on U.S. preparedness uttered its first warning growl. After just a month’s sniffing through the U.S. mobilization effort, Texas’ sharp-nosed Lyndon Johnson had caught the strong scent of ‘business as usual’”); and with the observation that “The work that [he] had cut out for himself was just the kind that lifted Missouri’s Senator Harry S Truman out of obscurity.” (Time also said he “had set himself a commendable set of rules: don’t spend time looking for headlines.”) The other object of his special attentions, the New York Times, had him on its front page three times before the end of 1950, and all across the country newspapers and magazines followed the Times’ lead. “Mild-mannered but determined” Lyndon Johnson “is beginning to get considerable national publicity,” The Nation said. By the end of the 1950 session, Collier’s was reporting that Johnson’s “prominence is the undisguised envy of many a member who was his senior in service. Numerous senators are pounding their temples in fury because they did not think of reviving the committee first.”
THEN HE GOT A BREAK.
His temporary lease on the subcommittee chairmanship was running out, and, as Horace Busby recalls, “It was expected that when Tydings won reelection, he would take back the subcommittee.” Even if Johnson’s triumphs made it too embarrassing for the arrogant Marylander to supplant him directly, his c
hairmanship of the subcommittee’s parent committee, his unchallengeable authority over the subcommittee’s funding and staff, his right (which was, in a way, only logical, given the centrality of the subject to the committee’s work) to make preparedness the business of the full committee and not just of a subcommittee would have assured that Johnson would no longer have the preparedness spotlight to himself.
But, suddenly, Tydings wasn’t going to be returning to the Senate. It was in the 1950 elections that the ferocity and efficacy of Joe McCarthy’s tactics were demonstrated for the first time, and nowhere were they demonstrated more vividly than in Maryland, where Tydings’ opponent was a political nonentity. Raising big money (much of it from Texas ultra-conservatives like the men who had walked the beach on “St. Joe” with Lyndon Johnson; Clint Murchison alone gave ten thousand dollars), the Wisconsin senator assailed Tydings in bitterly vindictive speeches, and arranged for the creation of an effective anti-Tydings tabloid that was distributed across the state; it featured a “composite”—in reality, a totally fake—photograph in which Tydings was shown apparently listening attentively to Earl Browder. (It was the second time that Browder had been of use to Johnson.) When the campaign was over, so was Tydings’ career. The new chairman of the Armed Services Committee was Richard Russell, who reappointed Lyndon Johnson chairman of Armed Services’ Preparedness Subcommittee, and increased its annual budget to $190,000. “When Tydings lost,” Horace Busby recalls, “that’s when people began to say that Lyndon had a charmed life, or was a genius—mostly, that he was a genius.”
*When, years later, Cook’s appointment was mentioned to an expert on Senate hiring practice—Donald A. Ritchie, associate historian in the Senate Historical Office—he refused at first to believe it had occurred.
*The proposal was for the establishment of a system of Universal Military Training, a cause for which Russell was the longtime champion on Capitol Hill and for which Russell had introduced legislation (Senate Bill S.I) in 1948, 1949, and 1950. It had been carried forward in those years by the Armed Services Committee because he wasn’t yet chairman, and could therefore adhere to his lifelong practice of avoiding the spotlight on legislation in which he was interested. Not being the “point man” on this legislation was particularly important to Russell because he was simultaneously proposing a bill that would have fostered segregation in the armed forces by allowing draftees to elect to serve in racially segregated units; knowing that this bill would be defeated, he didn’t want UMT entangled with it. After Tydings’ defeat in 1950, however, Russell became Armed Services’ chairman, so he “delegated” the UMT hearings in January, 1951, to its Preparedness Investigating Subcommittee, and extensive hearings were held on S.I. But this delegation was in name only; as Richard T. McCulley, Historian of the National Archives’ Center for Legislative Archives and author of A History of the Senate Committee on Armed Services, writes, “On S. 1 the Preparedness Subcommittee was functioning as an arm of the full Committee … rather than as an [independent] investigative entity.” Russell, McCulley says, was using the subcommittee “to facilitate the work of the full Committee and to meet his own political needs.” In contrast to all its other work, in this lone instance the “Investigating” subcommittee wasn’t even investigating; in what Russell’s aide William Darden calls an “unusual” step, Russell had given “an investigative subcommittee a legislative job”: analyzing the merits of a specific bill. The hearings were in all but name hearings by the full committee, even down to the fact that the key staffers involved were not the ones Johnson had hired but two regular Army officers, General Verne Mudge and Colonel Mark Galusha, whom Johnson had not wanted for Preparedness, and who had been working on UMT for Russell for years. In other aspects, too, the subcommittee was acting less under Johnson’s direction than Russell’s, and its procedures in this instance were in sharp contrast to the rest of its work. Not only the subcommittee’s members but other members of the full committee sat in on the hearings: Russell, Ralph Flanders of Vermont and John Stennis of Mississippi, for instance, sat on the dais, questioned witnesses and made statements. The hearings were not even funded under the Senate resolution providing funding for the subcommittee but rather under the resolution providing funding for the full Armed Services Committee. And when the bill came to the floor, although Johnson was called its floor manager, it was actually Russell who, as his biographer Gilbert Fite says, “skillfully guided the bill through the Senate. He granted interruptions and time to key supporters….” When a conference committee met to reconcile Senate and House versions of the bill, Russell was its chairman. (The bill eventually provided that it would become effective only if Congress approved an implementation procedure to be proposed by a special commission; since Congress never did so, the bill never went into effect.) “The UMT thing—that was a Russell operation, not Johnson’s,” Horace Busby said. A similar situation existed with four “task forces” established by the Armed Services Committee during the Eighty-second Congress. Although they were called “task forces” of Preparedness, “Chairman Johnson chaired no Task Force and attended no Task Force meeting,” McCulley writes. Some of them included senators who were not even members of Preparedness, and not Johnson’s men but Mudge and Galusha handled the bulk of the staff work.
*For a fuller account of this incident, see Volume 1, The Path to Power, pp. 266–68.
14
Out of the Crowd
THE JOHNSON SUBCOMMITTEE had far less impact on the defense effort than the Truman Committee had had, and not only because the police action in Korea was not the Second World War but because, unlike Truman’s work, so much of Johnson’s was based not on original research—on-the-spot inspections—but on previously compiled documents simply reworked in the interests of publicity. Dan McGillicuddy, who was to work for Preparedness for thirteen years, eventually as its assistant chief counsel, came to feel that “The whole thing was to get Johnson’s name in the papers.” And, McGillicuddy says, Johnson wasn’t any too particular about how he did it. “He was looking for the sensational,” McGillicuddy says. “Hell! Twenty-six reports in one year! These things weren’t being carefully researched. They’d get a report from somewhere, and Reedy would wrap it up in catchy phrases, and they’d put it out, and hope it caught on. He [Johnson] was fishing for a program of national interest.” The Army colonel who later became the committee’s staff director, Kenneth E. BeLieu, echoed McGillicuddy’s feelings in an interview; then, asked if the subcommittee’s impact during these two and half years had been significant, BeLieu smiled and said, “No, not really.”
Sometimes this search for the sensational led down false alleys, out of which Johnson was able to scramble only by employing considerable ingenuity. After an unexpected rush of enlistments during the Christmas holidays at the end of 1950, senators’ mailbags began to contain complaints from enlistees’ parents about conditions at overcrowded Lackland Air Force Base, near San Antonio, at which sixty-eight thousand men were receiving basic training. In the middle of the coldest winter on the Texas plains in forty years, parents wrote, their sons were sleeping in unheated tents, with inadequate blankets, clothing, and food. There were reports of suicides and deaths from a pneumonia epidemic. Summoned to a closed session of the Armed Services Committee, Air Force officials said that they had heard the rumors, had already begun investigating them, and that rumors were all they were. There was no epidemic of pneumonia, or any other illness, at Lackland, they said; every man on the base had adequate blankets, clothing, and food. The base was indeed overcrowded because of the rush of enlistments, and some men were indeed sleeping in tents, but none of the tents was unheated—and, after all, these officials noted, it would not be the first time in history that soldiers had slept in tents. Construction of twenty-five new, centrally heated barracks, and of a new airfield equipped for basic training—Sampson Air Base in Romulus, New York—was being rushed; Sampson’s completion, due within two months, would end the overcrowding. In the interim, the
officials said, the Air Force had already curtailed enlistments and Lackland’s population was being reduced daily as men were shipped to other camps for their basic training. The senators were urged not to add fuel to the rumors. As Air Force Secretary Thomas K. Finletter was to say in a letter to Johnson:
We are all extremely solicitous of the welfare of our young men but with large numbers of them now in combat we feel that others should not be encouraged to make public complaint because of minor discomforts and inconveniences. During a period of emergency some very minor hardship must be considered normal. False or exaggerated reports can cause unjustified worry or apprehension on the part of parents and others when they become public issues.
On January 27, 1951, however, Johnson emerged from an Armed Services hearing to announce that the Preparedness Subcommittee was rushing a team of four investigators to Lackland, and on January 31, escalating the sense of urgency, he told reporters that the four investigators were, as the New York Times put it, “to make a personal check tonight,” to draw the same “blankets and sleeping gear issued to any recruit,” to “sleep in separate, unheated tents along with the recruits,” to eat with them—and to telephone him personally in Washington in case emergency measures were necessary. And urgency permeated his instructions to the crack team he had selected for the mission—Lyon Tyler, Colonel Mark Galusha, and his two Texas aces, John Connally and Horace Busby. He sent them into battle with an inspirational battle cry: “We’ve got to tell these mothers something!”
Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson Page 54