Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson

by Robert A. Caro

  The calm would, during succeeding weeks of testimony, be maintained by Richard Russell.

  Never had the respect in which he was held within the Senate been more evident, and more significant for America, than during these weeks, in which other generals followed Marshall to the witness table. Every outburst of rage by the Republican reactionaries, every maneuver they attempted as they saw they were losing, shattered against it. When Senator Wiley, attempting to drag Truman more directly into the controversy, demanded that General Omar Bradley, head of the Joint Chiefs, reveal the contents of his conversations with the President about the Korean War, Bradley refused, and Wiley, Knowland, and the other conservative Republicans exploded. “I am asking the chairman to rule that my question… should be answered,” Wiley said angrily. But the chairman ruled, calmly, that a “private conversation between the President and the Chief of Staff as to detail can be protected by the witness if he desires.” Wiley’s rage boiled over; accusing the Democrats of a “frantic desire to cover-up and whitewash,” he was to charge that Russell’s support of executive privilege had drawn an “iron curtain” over the investigation. Wiley said he would demand a vote by the committee. But his demand was not supported by Lodge, or Saltonstall, or by another Republican, H. Alexander Smith of New Jersey, who said that he wanted to “compliment the chairman on conducting the hearing on the highest possible plane of fairness.” The vote upheld Russell, 18 to 8.

  The leaking that would normally have accompanied closed hearings had been drastically reduced by the committee’s new method of releasing the testimony, but in the early days, some sensitive information did find its way to the press. “Every half hour or so,” Rovere noted, Senator McCarthy “pops out of Room 318 … to brief his favorite correspondents.”

  Russell reduced it further. When some of Marshall’s censored testimony found its way into newspapers, Russell said he wanted to say a few words to his colleagues. All the testimony except that which would endanger American men fighting in Korea was already being released through those edited transcripts, he said. He was sure, he said, that no committee member—that no senator of the United States—would deliberately give a reporter, and thus the enemy, information that would endanger American soldiers, but of course there was always the chance of “a careless word, a slip of the tongue.” And if American soldiers were endangered by such carelessness, he said, neither “God nor our fellow citizens will ever forgive us.” He paused for a moment, and the full power of Richard Russell’s personality was there in the Senate Caucus Room. “Nor would we deserve forgiveness,” he said.

  Russell led Bradley, a World War II general almost as respected by the American public as MacArthur, slowly and carefully through an explanation of the flaws in MacArthur’s proposals, and, thanks to the transcript-release method, Bradley’s testimony was carried in newspapers across the country. On the sixth day of that testimony, Bourke Hickenlooper said he had a proposal: the hearings were consuming so much time, he said, why not skip the other three Joint Chiefs? “In doing so,” as Time reported, “Hickenlooper conceded … that the Republicans had just about abandoned their hope that the hearings would find the Joint Chiefs siding with MacArthur against the President.”

  The proposal might well have carried the day had another senator been chairman of the joint committee: its conservative members had a political interest in cutting the testimony short; as for the others, they had already been hearing testimony for almost three weeks, and it was becoming apparent that more long weeks of testimony, weeks during which their presence would be required, lay ahead. But, as Time reported, “Russell put it up to the committee, and the committee, by a 14–11 vote, decided nothing doing; it would keep going down the line of witnesses in turn.”

  The Chiefs of Staff who followed Bradley—Hoyt Vandenberg of the Air Force, Forrest Sherman of the Navy, and J. Lawton Collins of the Army—made clear that MacArthur’s claim of their support was, by the most charitable interpretation, a misunderstanding on his part. “One by one,” William Manchester writes, “officers who admired MacArthur seated themselves before the senators and sadly rejected his program for victory.” Day by day, as Time put it, “The glamour, excitement and anger of the first weeks of General MacArthur’s return subsided; the public, or at least a large part of it, admitted that things were more complicated than they had seemed.”

  It was Russell’s demeanor, rather than any specific vote or ruling, that made the tone of the hearings thoughtful, judicious—senatorial. It was difficult for even a Wiley or a Hickenlooper to shout for long when the chairman was so quiet and courteous and considerate of every point of view, when he introduced each witness with so glowing a recitation of his accomplishments and qualifications. When, in mid-June, the time for Dean Acheson’s testimony arrived, “Capitol corridors were charged with political tension,” Time reported. “‘Wait until we get Acheson,’ the more partisan-minded Republicans had crowed….” But, as Time reported, “once the committee doors swung shut, Acheson’s questioners, Republican as well as Democratic, settled into the attitude of grave decision that had dominated the investigation from the start. The Republicans, however noisy the blood cries of their colleagues outside, were courteous, dispassionate and earnestly in search of answers…. A calm seemed to settle over the hearing room. Not in years had an investigation in which feelings ran so high been conducted in so temperate and fair-minded a fashion.”

  The torrent of mail that had inundated Capitol Hill became a stream, and then a trickle, decreasing as rapidly as if it had been water turned off by a tap. The onlooking senators in the audience melted away, and then the attendance of members of the joint committee began to decline; by the last week in May, when, Time said, “the dramatic thunder and lightning of the big MacArthur hearing had settled into a steady drizzle of repetitious questions and answers,” and testimony was nearing “the million-word mark, and there were still many witnesses … to come,” the Caucus Room was no longer needed, and the hearings were moved into the Armed Services Committee’s room—where, small though that room was, there were soon vacant seats. As for the tenor of public opinion, a baseball game was again the barometer. In April, before the start of the Senate hearings, President Truman had been booed at one for firing MacArthur. Now, in June, MacArthur attended a game at the Polo Grounds in New York, and left between innings, to the strains of “Old Soldiers Never Die,” striding briskly across the diamond toward the centerfield exit—until one fan yelled in a Bronx accent, “Hey Mac, how’s Harry Truman?” and the crowd burst into laughter and applause. A group of Texas oil barons flew him to Texas for a speech, in a seventy thousand-seat stadium, that was supposed to be the kickoff to a MacArthur presidential boom, but only twenty thousand of the seats were filled.

  There was one more triumph—one more quiet triumph—for Russell. It came over the question of a formal committee report on the hearings. He didn’t want one. He had attempted to keep the hearings as free as possible from political controversy, and to a remarkable extent he had done so. A report was the last minefield; it “can only serve as a textbook for political arguments,” he scrawled on his desk calendar. So what he did, at the conclusion of the hearings, was, essentially, nothing. Pleading his work on the agricultural appropriations bill as an excuse, he did not convene a committee meeting to consider the question of a formal report until August 17, almost two months after the hearings had ended. At this meeting he advised against issuing a report, saying that it would inevitably reflect a division of opinion, and that any division might affect truce negotiations in Korea. Knowland, Wiley, and three other Republicans objected; the vote against them was 18 to 5. On a motion by Saltonstall, the committee then decided to simply “transmit” the hearing transcript to the full Senate without comment. Eight of the committee’s eleven Republicans later issued a statement criticizing the conduct of foreign affairs in the Far East; it received relatively little public notice. No formal report, or any other action, resulted from the long inves
tigation. Yet the investigation had had a profound effect. As William White was to put it, “Without rejecting outright a single MacArthur policy, without defending at a single point a single Truman policy, without accusing the General of anything whatever, the Senate’s investigation had largely ended his influence on policy-making. It had set in motion an intellectual counterforce to the emotional adulation that for a time had run so strongly through the country.” It had done, in short, precisely what the Founding Fathers had wanted the Senate to do, what their Constitution had designed it to do: to defuse—cool off—and educate; to make men think, recall them to their first principles, such as the principle that in a democracy it is not generals but the people’s tribunes who make policy. “It was, in all truth, a demonstration of what the Senate at its best was capable of doing,” White was to say.

  And the Senate, as Samuel Shaffer said, had been at its best largely because of Richard Russell. It was his “power and prestige … employed at a moment of great crisis in America” that had calmed a country that was “as close to a state of national hysteria as it had ever been in its history.” He had displayed, Life magazine said, “firmness, fairness and dignity almost unmatched in recent Congressional history.”

  LYNDON JOHNSON PLAYED a minor role in the MacArthur episode, a role that had no relationship to his new post as Assistant Leader. He had assigned his two Preparedness attorneys, Donald Cook and Gerald Siegel, to analyze each evening that day’s testimony and prepare a list of questions for Russell to ask the next day. Before the hearings, Russell had not understood about “staff” in the modern sense. But for weeks now, when he arrived at his office in the morning, there on his desk had been the analysis and the list, tools prepared not by old-style Senate staffers, not by tired old military officers put to pasture on Capitol Hill, but by keen legal minds. Before the hearings, Russell had not understood about public relations in the modern sense. But Johnson had suggested that George Reedy each evening write a statement that Russell could deliver at the opening of the next day’s hearings. For weeks now, Reedy’s opening statements had been there on his desk.

  Russell now understood, moreover, that staff could mean more than questions and press releases. Richard Russell had never had an assistant like George Reedy. Sometimes they would be alone together in Russell’s office in the evenings, and Russell found himself discussing the strategy for the hearings—not specific questions or press releases, not matters of tactics, but the overall strategy—and he found that Reedy was worth discussing strategy with, that it helped to bounce ideas off him, to get other sides of the issue. Reedy, the flaming Wisconsin liberal who had always despised Russell because of the Georgian’s views on civil rights, had come to realize that Russell was not only “the preeminent senatorial tactician” but that he possessed “a grasp of history that was equaled by very few politicians in my memory.” And Russell realized that Reedy, too, possessed quite a grasp of history. He came, almost despite himself, this senator who had never relied on staff, to rely on Cook and Siegel and Reedy. One day, noticing that Russell never delivered the opening statements he was preparing, Reedy didn’t bother to write one. “George, please do it,” Russell said. “You don’t realize something. I may change it. I may not use it at all, but it gives me a sense of reassurance to know that when I come down that that statement is going to be there.” Reedy did so, of course, and he began to see that while Russell might not deliver the statement as written, he managed, in making his own statement, to incorporate most of Reedy’s points—just as, in asking questions of MacArthur and Marshall and Bradley and Acheson and the Joint Chiefs, he either used or incorporated the questions prepared by Cook and Siegel. By the conclusion of the MacArthur hearings, Russell understood the importance—the necessity—of staff, of the way in which it could enable a senator, could enable the Senate, to deal with new complexities, the complexities that had been overwhelming senators and Senate. He understood the importance of this tool in modern politics.

  He understood because of Lyndon Johnson—and he had seen that Johnson was a master in the use of this new tool, as he was a master in so many other new tools. He saw that Johnson was capable of adapting the Senate to the new age.

  And, of course, during those weeks in which Russell had been using the questions and statements provided by Lyndon Johnson’s staff members, it had only been natural for him to discuss them with Johnson. The two men had worked over them together at breakfast in the Senate Dining Room, and, often, in the evenings, so that they often had not only breakfast but dinner together. Their relationship, already close, had become even closer. “By the end of 1951,” George Reedy says, “the Russell-Johnson relationship was a very, very close relationship.” And it was about this time that Richard Russell paid Lyndon Johnson quite a compliment. In an undated memorandum that appears to have been written in November or December, 1951, a Time reporter informed his editors in New York that “Russell has soberly predicted that Lyndon Johnson could be President and would make a good one.”

  17

  The “Nothing Job”

  THE PRESIDENCY, OF COURSE, was never far from Lyndon Johnson’s mind. Just after his election as Assistant Democratic Leader in January, 1951, Leslie Carpenter had written that “To Johnson and his admirers his selection as majority whip was just one more step on the road to the Vice-Presidency—and perhaps one day to the White House itself. The Texan makes no particular secret of his ambitions in that direction.” But the path ahead was still a very long one, and if Johnson had few illusions about the position of Democratic Leader, he had even fewer about the position of Assistant Leader. “The whip’s job is a nothing job,” he told journalist Alfred Steinberg. If he was to advance along that path, however, his progress during the next two years at least was going to have to be through that “nothing” job. So he had set about making, out of nothing, something.

  While, during these two years, 1951 and 1952, the Senate had, in the MacArthur Hearings, a moment of glory, over the rest of those years hung a miasma of gloom. The century-long decline in its power and prestige accelerated. Hardly had the Eighty-second Congress convened in January, 1951, when President Truman announced that he was sending, “without reference to Congress”—and without any emergency to justify the decision—“four more divisions to reinforce the American army in Europe.” This was not sending a few Marines to some Latin American banana republic; this wasn’t a murky question of whether the dispatch of troops was interposition or intervention; “never before,” as Arthur Schlesinger was to write, “had a President claimed constitutional authority to commit so many troops to a theater of potential war against a major foe.”

  Truman didn’t merely claim the authority, moreover; he flaunted it. Even while Senate business was being dominated by a “Great Debate” over whether or not to give him permission to do what he had already done, the President said of Congress, “I don’t ask their permission; I just consult them.” Not, he added, that he was required even to consult “unless I want to. But of course I am polite, and I usually always consult them.”

  Opening the debate, Robert Taft said the “President simply usurped authority, in violation of the law and the Constitution, when he sent troops to Korea,” and “without authority he apparently is now attempting to adopt a similar policy in Europe,” but Tom Connally replied that the President had “authority … as Commander-in-Chief to send the Armed Forces to any place required by the security interests of the United States.” For eighty-six days the debate rolled back and forth, but when Dwight Eisenhower, who had been the Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe during World War II and was considered an unchallengeable authority on military questions, testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee that there was “no acceptable alternative” to the “defense of Western Europe” but to send the four divisions, the debate was effectively over. Attempting to save some face, the Senate resolved that it was its “sense” that Congress should be “consulted” before future presidential decisio
ns to send troops abroad (“What this foggy final paragraph meant no one seemed to know,” one observer commented), but it approved Truman’s decision, and, as Fortune put it, “The effect was to loosen still more Congress’ none-too-firm grip on the sword, thus bringing about a definite relinquishment of some of its constitutional authority.”

  These two years were years of investigation; Johnson’s Preparedness Subcommittee and Estes Kefauver’s Organized Crime Subcommittee were only the most famous of a score of congressional investigating groups actively looking into Truman’s Administration, into atomic spying, into a host of other areas, and hardly had Russell’s hearings, which burnished the Senate’s reputation, concluded when Joe McCarthy removed the luster and lacquered on tarnish by speaking, on the Senate floor, of a “conspiracy so immense”—and thereafter, throughout these two years, McCarthy’s influence on the Senate grew. With the Korean War still dragging on, Congress at least passed some foreign affairs legislation, authorizing increased military expenditures and nonmilitary aid. On the domestic front, as one observer noted, “Mr. Truman’s Fair Deal program scarcely got discussed.” When the national legislature finally ground to a halt in October, 1952, it had, the Washington Star said, “completed less work than the 80th Congress, the Congress called ‘the worst’ by Truman.” The Washington Post reported that “almost as many major bills have been sent back to committee as have been reported to Congress in the first place.” In the House, there was at least some leadership, thanks to the commanding figure of Ray burn; the Senate was in almost total disarray. “Congress is being overcome by its own inertia,” said Fortune; “the legislative machinery, which is the heart of democracy, is breaking down.” The era’s most authoritative work on Capitol Hill, the 689-page The Legislative Process in Congress, was being written even as the Eighty-second session was going forward. Its author, the political scientist George B. Galloway, concluded that “Many people are losing faith in American democracy because of its repeated and prolonged failures to perform its implicit promises.”