Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson

by Robert A. Caro

  Difficult though the text may have been, however, Johnson read it—and made use of what he read.

  It is possible to know why Lyndon Johnson befriended Hubert Humphrey, for in later years Johnson would boast about the use he had made of him, and because of a memorandum “written” during those Senate years by George Reedy but virtually dictated by Johnson, that spelled out, in considerable detail, Humphrey’s usefulness to him.

  Humphrey could, Johnson saw, be the bridge to the northern liberals which he needed. They acknowledged the Minnesotan, as much as they acknowledged any man, as their leader; they viewed Johnson as a typical southern conservative, but if Humphrey came to like him and trust him, he would, should Johnson become Democratic Leader, be a link between Johnson and the liberals; there would be at least a beginning of unity among Senate Democrats. He might, indeed, be the only bridge possible; as the “Reedy” memo put it: “Senator Humphrey is about the only force that is able to control the [liberal] extremists.”

  Johnson wanted, in fact, to use Humphrey as an emissary between the two senatorial camps, as an instrument of compromise, someone through whom could be worked out the compromises necessary for unity, necessary to at least soften the antagonisms in the party, the compromises necessary for a Leader to have a chance of success. Such an emissary, to be effective, would have to believe, first, that compromise was desirable, and second, that it was possible. He would have to believe that at bottom there existed some common ground between Lyndon Johnson and the liberals, that their aims were not, after all, totally dissimilar. And, moreover, Johnson wanted Humphrey to be a friendly, sympathetic instrument, so that in negotiating for compromise, he, Lyndon Johnson, would be negotiating through someone who liked and trusted him. Reedy wrote that there was a reason that Humphrey, seemingly so uncompromising, might be such an instrument—because he believed deeply and sincerely in what he was fighting for, and therefore victory in the fight was very important to him. “There are compulsions upon Senator Humphrey—both of conscience and of constituency—which force him to lead a civil rights fight. But he is not going to win a civil rights fight by splitting the Democratic Party. The only way he can win the fight is to drum up enough votes on his side and soften the opposition on the other side.”

  Johnson wanted Humphrey not only to bring southern and northern Senate blocs closer together, but to bring him, Lyndon Johnson, closer to the northern senators. For him to become President, he needed the North. Viewing him as a typical southern conservative, however, northern liberals, even those of them who were beginning to like him personally, still deeply distrusted his philosophy and aims. He needed the liberal senators to trust him, or at least to feel they could work with him; he needed them to be convinced that at bottom they shared some of the same goals. The best way of convincing them would be to have someone within their own camp who would argue for him. And who better to do that than Humphrey? If the Minnesotan liked and trusted him, he would be the best possible means to the personal rapprochement required for the realization of Lyndon Johnson’s great ambition.

  And, lastly, and perhaps most importantly, what Lyndon Johnson wanted in his dealings with Hubert Humphrey was to modulate that great voice. Of all the liberals who could rise on the Senate floor and embarrass—humiliate, in the Johnsonian lexicon—a Democratic Leader by demanding that he pass liberal legislation which he was in fact not able to pass, no one could do so nearly as eloquently and effectively as Humphrey. No senator could enunciate liberal aims more persuasively, could arouse liberal emotions more dramatically, could mobilize national liberal opinion against a Senate Leader more effectively than that mighty orator from the plains, and Johnson knew it, as “Reedy’s” memorandum makes clear: “The most compelling reason” for making Humphrey a link between the two sides, the memorandum states, “is that a running battle between Senator Humphrey and the leadership will place the leadership in the public mind as a ‘sectional southern’ leadership continually battling the northern liberals.” Humphrey, the memo said, is “a national figure around whom” liberals can rally; if he continues fighting the southern senators, “it would split the party. He has sufficient prestige and sufficient standing that he may do precisely that.” He had to be brought to Johnson’s side.

  And Johnson, capable of making every man his tool, knew how to use Humphrey to attain the ends he wanted. Was there, shining out of that text, ambition? Knowing now that Humphrey wanted the same thing that he did, wanted it perhaps almost as badly as he did, Lyndon Johnson used that knowledge—used it so skillfully that the intensity of Humphrey’s ambition would serve only to make him a better tool for realizing Johnson’s ambition. Since a rapprochement with the liberals would strengthen Johnson’s position in his run for the presidency, and Humphrey was of course smart enough to see this, Johnson made Humphrey believe that ultimately it would be to his own benefit for Johnson’s position to be thus strengthened. For Humphrey to believe that, he had to believe that Johnson was no threat to his presidential dreams, and, that in fact, building up Johnson’s support would wind up helping him more than Johnson. And Johnson made him believe that.

  The exact words he employed we do not know, for there is no record of these conversations. But we do know the general nature of the arguments he employed—for Humphrey believed them and later repeated them to others. There was no point in trying to convince a man as intelligent as Hubert Humphrey—and Johnson fully understood the keenness and depth of Hubert Humphrey’s intellect—that Johnson didn’t want the presidency. Instead, Johnson acknowledged to Humphrey that he wanted the presidency but said he knew he would never get it—and he convinced Humphrey that he would never get it, explaining to him, with apparently deep conviction, why no one from the South could be President. And he convinced Humphrey as well that since Johnson couldn’t get the nomination it was to his advantage to build up Johnson as a candidate, make him as strong a candidate as possible, because his strength would eventually go to whomever Johnson wanted—and so long as he and Johnson were allies, it would eventually go to him. Humphrey, believing him, was to explain all this in a strictly off-the-record conversation with Robert Manning, then a reporter for Time magazine, who relayed Humphrey’s words to his editors in a confidential memo: “Nobody can love politics as much as Johnson does, and not want to be President,” Humphrey told Manning. But, Humphrey also said, “for all his political sagacity and influence on party affairs, even if he guns for it, he’s not repeat not going to be nominated.” In fact, Humphrey explained to Manning, Johnson’s ambition would end up helping him, Hubert Humphrey, receive the nomination, since “Johnson votes [the votes from southern states] could very well determine who else gets the nomination,” and those votes “could very well go to Humphrey.” During those chats behind the closed door in 231, Johnson was not the only one of the two young senators who was trying to use the other. If Johnson needed the North if he was ever to become President, and saw Humphrey as a means to obtaining it, so did Humphrey need the South—and see Johnson as a means of obtaining it. And Johnson made sure that Humphrey kept seeing him that way. Carl Solberg, the author of the only thoroughly documented biography of Humphrey, concludes that in his dealings with Lyndon Johnson, Humphrey was thinking that only one of them was going to be President—and that he was going to be the one; that he had a better chance because he wasn’t from Texas; that while Johnson might be under the impression that he was using him, in reality, he was using Johnson.

  Was there, shining out of that text, idealism? Personal admiration—awe, even—could never be a decisive influence with a man who believed as deeply in principles, in moral goals, as did Hubert Humphrey. “Our little group of 25 [sic] or so liberal senators were very suspicious of Johnson, in those early years, very suspicious of him!” Humphrey was to recall. He was very suspicious of Johnson. In order for him to ally himself with Johnson, he would have to be convinced that the alliance would not involve any betrayal of principle—that, in fact, the alliance would impro
ve the chances for realization of those goals.

  Humphrey’s recollections of the conversations in 231 give some hint as to the methods Johnson employed to make him believe that they shared the same principles. One was for Johnson to identify himself with the President who to Humphrey had been the supreme embodiment of these principles. Like the great storyteller he was, Johnson brought alive those two paintings on Humphrey’s office wall, talking endlessly about his private dinners and breakfasts with FDR. Humphrey could never get enough of these stories, and to him they did indeed validate Johnson’s liberalism. “Johnson was a Roosevelt man,” Humphrey says. “That was his greatest joy. To remind people that Roosevelt looked upon him as his protégé. A hundred times I heard him mention that, you know. That was his great moment…. This made him in a sense, in his contacts with many people like myself, a sort of New Dealer.” And Johnson talked also about Ben Cohen and Tommy the Cork and other almost legendary New Dealers with whom he was friends. “David Dubinsky was another one of his heroes, and the ILGWU, and how he and David always worked together.” And Johnson also talked, as only Lyndon Johnson could talk, about the episodes in his life in which he had fought for the things in which liberals believed, about fighting the private utilities to bring electricity to the Hill Country, about the months he had spent in Cotulla. “I knew he was very sympathetic to the Mexican-Americans,” Humphrey says. “Johnson never forgot that he was a schoolteacher down there.”

  Humphrey could see with his own eyes that Richard Russell also regarded Lyndon Johnson as his protégé, that the senators with whom Johnson was on the most intimate terms were the southerners, but Humphrey felt, after those talks with Johnson, that he understood that. “Johnson never was a captive of the southern bloc,” he says. “He was trying to be a captain of them, rather than a captive…. He was, I think, biding his time, so to speak, and building his contacts.” He was not yet fully convinced of Johnson’s liberalism, but he was convinced that there was much more liberalism in his new friend than he had previously believed.

  Was Johnson also reading in Humphrey his loneliness, the loneliness of a gregarious man, shunned in the Senate, who badly needed a friend? Of all the things that Lyndon Johnson made Hubert Humphrey believe, in those years when one was not yet President of the United States and the other was not yet his Vice President, one of the most important in binding Humphrey to him was to convince Humphrey that Lyndon Johnson was his friend.

  Johnson liked him, Humphrey would say, he was sure of it. “We were hitting it off.” Looking back at those Senate years in 1972, from a very different vantage point, he would say, “I really believe that Lyndon Johnson looked upon me—I’ve tried to think about this even after the Vice Presidency and all—I think it’s fair to say he liked me as an individual, as a human being.” He thought he understood why. “Johnson had a sense of humor, and he could kid with me,” he would say. “Johnson didn’t enjoy talking with most liberals. He didn’t think they had a sense of humor.” And there was in Johnson’s attitude an implicit assumption that they were comrades-in-arms, friends fighting for the same cause. He not only showed Humphrey a mountaintop—that both of them would rise (although because he, Johnson, was unlucky enough to be from Texas, Humphrey would rise higher)—but that they would be on the mountain-top together. Once, on the Senate floor the day after one of the huge Democratic Jefferson-Jackson dinners, he told Humphrey in a low, confidential voice that he was tired of “the same old phonograph records of yesterday” that had been played at the dinner. “We’ve many fine governors and members of Congress, fresh faces, who weren’t heard from,” he said. “We need new voices. Someday we’ll give our own party.”

  In letters he wrote to Humphrey from Texas during the long Senate recesses, he used over and over again the word Humphrey wanted to hear. “I have been sorely missing your wise advice and friendly counsel,” he wrote in 1953. “I am looking forward to many more years of service with a good friend,” he wrote in 1954. In a letter at a crucial point in their relationship, in 1956, he wrote assuring him, “You will be on the scene as a national leader long after the others are forgotten.

  “And you are my friend.”

  “You are a wonderful friend, and I will never forget it,” he wrote in 1957, and, also in 1957, “My deep thanks go to you for … being my everlasting friend.”

  And Humphrey responded with the same word. “The privilege of your friendship is a priceless gift,” he wrote. “Thanks so much for your warm words of friendship,” he wrote.

  And there was one further key element in the Humphrey text, one element that to Lyndon Johnson, to whom personality was all-important, may have been the most important of all. It was a quality that could have been discerned, at this stage of Hubert Humphrey’s career, only by an unusually gifted reader of men, for at this stage Humphrey was regarded as a very strong man, strong and tough enough to have stood up to the South. But Lyndon Johnson was just such a reader. Hubert Humphrey may have been strong and tough, Johnson saw, but he wasn’t strong enough or tough enough. Most importantly, he wasn’t as strong, as tough, as he himself was.

  At the bottom of Humphrey’s character, as Johnson saw, was a fundamental sweetness, a gentleness, a reluctance to cause pain; a desire, if he fought with someone, to later seek a reconciliation, to let bygones be bygones, to shake hands and be friends again. And to Lyndon Johnson that meant that at the bottom of Humphrey’s character, beneath the strength and the ambition and the energy, there was weakness. Years later, he would define this crucial difference between them with Johnsonian vividness of phrase. At the time, they were both in a dispute with labor leader Walter Reuther, whose right arm had long been permanently crippled by a would-be assassin’s gunshot. Reuther had come to Washington to meet with them individually, and Johnson told an assistant: “You know the difference between Hubert and me? When Hubert sits across from Reuther and Reuther’s got that limp hand stuck in his pocket and starts talking … Hubert will sit there smiling away and thinking all the time, ‘How can I get his hand out of his pocket so I can shake it?’ When Reuther sits across from me,” Lyndon Johnson said, “I’m smiling and thinking all the time, ‘How can I get that hand out of his pocket—so I can cut his balls off!’”

  Hubert Humphrey was trying to use him, just as he was trying to use Hubert Humphrey. Lyndon Johnson knew that. But he knew something else, too. If two men were each trying to use the other, the tougher one would win—and he, Lyndon Johnson, was the tougher.

  LYNDON JOHNSON BEGAN, although he was still only Assistant Leader, to prepare the way for the time when, as Leader, he would be able to make use of what he had learned about Hubert Humphrey. Of all the political science lessons taught in SOB 231, the most important, for the teacher’s purpose, was about the need for compromise.

  To convince Humphrey of the efficacy—indeed, the necessity—of compromise, Johnson played on one of the Minnesotan’s deepest desires: his wish not only to fight for social justice, but to win; to help, instead of merely talking about helping, the poor and underprivileged, the “people! Human beings!” that he saw as the main issue of the twentieth century; on Humphrey’s desire for genuine accomplishment.

  As Humphrey would later relate, Johnson would often telephone him in his office at about seven-thirty in the evening. “Hubert, come over. There’s something I want to talk to you about,” he would say. If Humphrey protested that his family was waiting, Johnson would say, “Damn it, Hubert, you’ve got to make up your mind whether you’re going to be a good father or a good senator.” And when Humphrey arrived, Johnson would, evening after evening, play variations on the same theme: “Your speeches are accomplishing nothing,” he would say. Humphrey should learn to compromise. “Otherwise, you’ll suffer the fate of those crazies, those bomb-thrower types like Paul Douglas, Wayne Morse, Herbert Lehman. You’ll be ignored, and get nothing accomplished you want.” Humphrey, the man who had refused to compromise, not only came to believe this—“Compromise is not a dirty wo
rd,” he would say. “The Constitution itself represents the first great national compromise”—but to believe it with all the fervor of the convert, the convert who is the most enthusiastic of believers. Not only, he was to say, was compromise not a dirty word; those who refuse to compromise are a threat; “the purveyors of perfection,” as he came to call them, “are dangerous when they … move self-righteously to dominate. There are those who live by the strict rule that whatever they think right is necessarily right. They will compromise on nothing…. These rigid minds, which arise on both the left and the right, leave no room for other points of view, for differing human needs…. Pragmatism is the better method.” The fact that some of his fellow liberal senators were to come to look upon him as, in his own words, one of the “unprincipled compromisers” bothered him for a while, he was to say; “it doesn’t bother me any more at all. I felt it was important that we inch along even if we couldn’t gallop along, at least that we trot a little bit.”