Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson

by Robert A. Caro

  These places suited him. In a way, Lyndon Johnson had never before been at home anywhere in his life—certainly not in the Hill Country, the trap he had longed to escape; not in the NYA, from which he had wanted to escape back to Washington; not in the House of Representatives, where he had been just one of a crowd. He was at home now. The Senate was his home. He had fit into it. His tone, his mannerisms, had been transformed utterly—transformed into the Senate tone, the Senate mannerisms. He had become the true Senate man.

  Now that he had the leadership, there were, also with remarkable speed, hints of new mannerisms. Hubert Humphrey had noticed a new tone: “take-charge, no-nonsense, stern.” Late in the afternoon of the day of the Democratic caucus, Drew Pearson encountered Johnson in a corridor. “He had just been made Democratic floor leader by the Southern reactionaries, and he felt supremely in the saddle,” Pearson wrote in his diary. As Johnson brusquely dismissed a Pearson request, the columnist wrote, he could not help remembering “the days when Lyndon used to call me from Texas saying he had a tight primary fight and asking me” for help. The next day, the Senate convened before the usual packed galleries of opening day, and reporters in the Press Gallery, looking down at the new Democratic Leader at the front-row center-aisle desk, saw a new Lyndon Johnson. He wasn’t so much sitting in his chair as sprawling in it, sprawling, as Evans and Novak were to write, “almost full length … legs crossed, laughing and joking … the picture of self-satisfaction.”

  *The Leader the Republicans elected on the day that Johnson was elected, Robert Taft, was sixty-three. Before Johnson, the youngest Leader of either party had been fifty-three-year-old Joe Robinson.

  21

  The Whole Stack

  NOW THAT LYNDON JOHNSON had become the Leader of the Democratic senators, his personal ambitions were bound up with that divided and disorganized band. The bond was unbreakable: for him to use the leadership as a stepping-stone to his real goal, he would have to be an effective Leader—and he could be an effective Leader only to the extent that his Senate Democrats were an effective party.

  Johnson’s personal fortunes had been interwoven with institutions before, when he had been leader of the White Stars, or of the Little Congress, or of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Each of these entities had also in its own way been so disorganized and ineffective that in order for him to use them as vehicles for his personal, political advancement, it had been necessary for him not merely to make them more efficient but to change them completely, to transform them into institutions capable of accomplishing a political purpose. Each time, so creative was his political genius that he had transformed them. Now, however, the institution to which he was linked was not a college or staff members’ social club or a political fund-raising committee but the Democratic Party in the Senate of the United States; now Lyndon Johnson’s personal fortunes were bound up inextricably with the fortunes of something far larger than anything he had ever led before. This link carried with it, moreover, a threat, one that was terrible to a man who feared humiliation as much as Lyndon Johnson feared it, for every recent Democratic Leader had been humiliated, made a figure of public ridicule. And this institution had been insulated against change. Not only did a Senate Leader have little power—“nothing to promise them, nothing to threaten them with”—to cajole or force his party’s senators into line behind him, the Senate’s rules and customs had been designed to prevent him from acquiring any.

  The link carried with it another threat to Lyndon Johnson’s greater ambitions. Difficult though the acquisition of power would be for any Senate Leader, it would be especially difficult for him—because of the place from which he had come, and the place to which he wanted to go, because his true objective lay not in the Senate but beyond it. Power in the Senate was held by the southern senators who were his allies, and who had made him Leader. The natural human reluctance to surrender power would be reinforced in the southerners’ case by their devotion to the institution and the region that were both sacred to them. Since their power was derived from the Senate’s rules and precedents and constitutional prerogatives, bound up in the body’s very fabric, any reduction in their power would entail drastic change in an institution they were determined to keep unchanged. And reinforcing that determination also was the fact that it was their power that made the Senate the South’s stronghold, so that any reduction would also weaken the South. They would never give up their power voluntarily. Nor could they be forced to give it up—it was fortified far too strongly for any Leader to take it away. Lyndon Johnson’s only hope of obtaining the power that the southerners now held was to persuade them to give it to him, and he would be able to do that only if they didn’t realize that they were giving it to him—if he was able to conceal from them the implications of what he was doing.

  Difficult though this would be, however, what would be even harder than getting the power would be what he would have to do with it once he got it. Power in the Senate might be in southern hands, but it was northern hands that held the prize at which he was really aiming. He could reach it only with northern support, and to get that support, he would have to make the Democratic Party in the Senate more responsive to northern wishes, would have to advance liberal causes. He would have to use the power that he took from the South on behalf of causes that the South hated.

  But if senatorial power was the South’s to give, the South also had the power to take it back. Even if he succeeded in enlarging a Leader’s powers, the South not only would still hold its committee chairmanships but would still command a majority in the Democratic caucus. The South had made a Leader; the South would be able to unmake a Leader. If in furthering the causes of the North, he antagonized the South, the South could, in a very few minutes—in the time it took to take a vote in a caucus—make sure that he had no power to further anybody’s causes, including his own. So he couldn’t antagonize the South. Not only would he have to take power from the southern senators without them realizing what he was taking, he would have to use that power without them realizing how he was using it.

  This would be very difficult, for deceiving the southern senators meant deceiving men who were expert parliamentarians, expert legislators, masters of their craft.

  Masters. But not geniuses.

  IN FRONT OF THE CAPITOL, during the first two weeks of 1953, scores of carpenters were hammering into place the stands for the presidential inaugural.Pennsylvania Avenue was draped with red, white, and blue bunting, the full panoply that accompanies the transfer of executive power in America.

  The hammering couldn’t be heard down Delaware Avenue, where, on the second floor of the Senate Office Building, in Suite 231, the door to Lyndon Johnson’s private office stayed closed, hour after hour, during those two weeks, while, on the four-button telephone on Walter Jenkins’ desk, the left-hand button, the one that was lit when Johnson was using his phone, stayed lit hour after hour. Behind that door, Lyndon Johnson was attempting a transfer in legislative power, a transfer without precedent in American history; he was taking a gamble that would, if successful, change the nature of power in the Senate, a gamble in which the odds against him were very long—and in which the stakes were so high that, describing the maneuver later, he was to say, “I shoved in my whole stack.”

  Of all the barriers between a Senate Leader and genuine power the highest was the seniority system. The committee seats so vital to senators’ careers were assigned according to that fixed rule, so a Leader had no discretion over the assigning, no power to use committee seats as instruments of threat or reward. And because the system enabled the southern senators, with their greater seniority, to monopolize seats on the better committees, it exacerbated the resentment of excluded northerners and thus sharpened the hostility between the party’s two wings and made it all but impossible for a Democratic Leader to unite the party behind him. In addition, not only did the seniority system keep the Democratic Leader from being as strong as he might be, it kept the Democrat
ic Party in the Senate from being as strong as it might be: filling vacant seats on the basis of longevity rather than expertise or ability meant that the party didn’t make full use of that expertise or ability. But no Senate custom was more sacred than the seniority system, the system that “the Senate would no more abandon than it would abandon its name.” Behind that door, over that telephone, Lyndon Johnson, in his first act as Leader, was trying to change the seniority system.

  IN A WAY, he was working with a giant chessboard. It had 203 squares, the 203 seats on the Senate’s fifteen Standing Committees.* In theory, ninety-four of them were his to play on, for the Democrats, in the minority in the Eighty-third Congress, would be allowed to fill that many seats. Actually, however, eighty-seven of the squares were already occupied by Democratic senators, so he had only seven to play on, and only four of these were on major committees.

  By tradition, moves on the chessboard would be governed almost entirely by seniority. Into the four major committee seats would move the most senior of the senators desiring them. Their moves would vacate four places. Into them would move the most senior senators wanting them. There would be other moves. Occasionally—not often, for a senator who moved from one committee to another had to start accumulating seniority with that committee from scratch—a senator would move from one committee to another of approximately equal importance. And of course there were always vacancies in the least desirable spaces: seats on the least important committees. They would generally be filled with newly elected senators who had no seniority at all. Seniority had never been the only factor in the filling of committee seats. Liberals, for example, would almost never be appointed to Finance, the committee which wrote tax laws like the oil depletion allowance which meant money in the pockets of oilmen and other business interests who backed conservatives. A disproportionate number of them found themselves relegated to the Post Office and Civil Service Committee or to the equally impotent Labor and Public Welfare. And sometimes, defeat or death would empty an unusual number of seats, and freshmen found themselves on important committees, as had been the case in Richard Russell’s appointment to Appropriations in 1933. But for generation after generation, seniority had almost invariably been the governing factor. If more than one senator wanted to move into a vacant space, the one with the most seniority was the one who was allowed to move.

  PLAYING THAT CHESS GAME in his private office, behind the closed door, sometimes he would be sitting in his big black leather chair behind the desk at the far end of the office, phone in hand, hunched forward in concentration. Sometimes he would be standing behind the desk. One mottled hand—the left hand if things were going well, the right hand if they weren’t—would be wrapped around the black receiver he was holding to his ear, the receiver looking unexpectedly small in that huge fist. The other hand would usually be holding a cigarette. He lit one cigarette from the end of another, often not bothering to stub out the first, and the ashtray on his desk and the standing ashtray next to it were overflowing with butts, some still burning.

  Often, for long minutes, the only words Lyndon Johnson spoke were words to encourage the man on the other end of the wire to keep talking—so that he could better determine what might bend the man to his purpose, what arguments might work. For long minutes, the only movements Lyndon Johnson made were to raise the cigarette to his mouth and take a long, deep drag. The hand gripping the telephone would not move, the lines of the normally mobile face would not move, the eyes next to the phone, narrowed to unblinking slits, gleamed black with concentration through a slender column of smoke while another column or two rose from the ashtrays, their lazy upward spiral accentuating the intensity of the big figure behind them. Lyndon Johnson would stand or sit that way for a long time, motionless, intent, listening—pouring himself into that listening, all his being focused on what the other man was saying, and what the man wasn’t saying; on what he knew about the other man, and on what he didn’t know and was trying to find out.

  And then, when he had decided what arguments might work, Lyndon Johnson would begin to talk, and as he did so, he would begin to circle the desk, prowling restlessly around it in front of the fireplace that was so delicate alongside his tall, burly frame. His voice would be soft, calm, rational, reasonable, warm, intimate, friendly, telling the stories, explaining the strategy, shoving in his whole stack. And whether he was listening or talking, the room was filled with Lyndon Johnson’s determination, with the passion and purpose radiating from him. Then the call would be over. He might immediately make another one, the index finger so big in the dial. Or instead he might drop back down into the big chair and sit for long minutes motionless, slouched down on his spine, the relaxed pose of the body belied by the fierceness of the concentration on the face, the hand holding the cigarette rising again and again to his lips. Or, turning his back on the room, he would stand behind the desk, staring at the window whether the blinds in front of it were open or closed, stand there unmoving except for the hand in his trouser pocket. There would be no sound in that office at all except for the jingling of coins. Sometimes, then, he would take out a white handkerchief from his other pants pocket and mop it hard over his brow. And sometimes, lighting yet another cigarette, he would bend over in his chair, head low as he took his first drag, “really sucking it in,” in Jenkins’ phrase, and sit like that, head bowed, cigarette still in his mouth, for a while, as if to allow the soothing smoke to penetrate as deeply as possible into his body, as if trying desperately to relax for a moment. And then he would reach for the phone again.

  HE SOLD WITH LOGIC—some very unpleasant logic.

  It was based on two new facts of political life that had been revealed by that November 2 election, and that Lyndon Johnson, down on his ranch, had grasped very quickly. One was the previously unappreciated depth of America’s affection for Dwight David Eisenhower. The other, demonstrated in some hard numbers in the election returns, was that, even beyond Eisenhower’s personal victory, the national balance of power might be tipping against the Democrats. The foundation of Eisenhower’s victory had been his overwhelming margins in the suburbs, and it was suburbia, traditionally GOP suburbia, that was the fastest-growing part of America. As for the cities, the longtime Democratic strongholds, the Democrats had, almost incredibly, lost Chicago and almost lost New York—an indication of what analysts called “the total decay of the old Democratic city machines.” The significance of these facts, as well as their all-too-likely implications for the Senate Democrats, was spelled out in a three-page memorandum Johnson had had George Reedy write on November 12. Eisenhower’s victory, the memo said, “was a personal triumph and not a Republican victory,” as was proven by the fact that despite “one of the most astounding votes in history,” he had been able to pull into office with him only slim majorities in Congress. But, as Reedy added, it would not be difficult for Eisenhower to “turn his personal victory into a party victory…. He has a mandate almost unmatched in American history. If he has the ability, he can use that mandate to do anything he wants.” And “should he have a truly successful administration,” he could “bring in large Congressional majorities in 1954…. The balance of power will certainly shift from Democratic to Republican.” The current tenuous Republican edge in the Senate would be made firm—and it would stay firm for a long time.

  Johnson had had the memo written—ostensibly to himself—to lend an air of objectivity and authority to a key argument he wanted to make. After making the argument to a senator over the telephone, he would say that it was Reedy’s memo that had persuaded him of its validity, and that he would have George drop off a copy so that the senator could read it, and then he would phone back to draw the senator’s attention to specific points. Before January 2, he had had to be discreet in explaining the implications for the seniority system because he wasn’t yet Leader, but now he could do so, and he did, not that much explaining was needed with the master politicians who were reading it. The men to whom he was speaking had bee
n committee chairmen for a long time, but now, suddenly, they were no longer chairmen, and a successful Eisenhower Administration would mean that they would not be chairmen again anytime soon. Their best hope of regaining their lost power—their gavels and their patronage—was to create in the Senate a Democratic record strong enough so that Republican gains in the next election would be kept to a minimum—so that perhaps the Democrats might even become the majority in the Senate again.

  And that, Lyndon Johnson said, would require the Senate Democrats to change the system by which they assigned committee seats.

  The Foreign Relations Committee, on which there were two of the seven Democratic vacancies, was a key illustration he used to explain what he meant. Foreign Relations was going to be a focal point of the Republican attack, he said. Anyone could see that: the rumors that Taft himself was moving from Labor to Foreign Relations had just been confirmed, and Taft always went where he was going to attack, as he had moved to Labor in 1947 so that he could push through Taft-Hartley. And Taft was bringing with him Ferguson, Knowland, and Langer, Old Guard haters of the Marshall Plan and the China policy. This move presaged an all-out attack on the Roosevelt-Truman foreign policies that the Old Guard felt had not only drained America’s coffers to provide foreign aid for untrustworthy Europe, that had not only handcuffed the noble MacArthur when he had tried to wage the Korean War the way it should have been waged, but that had also given the world the Yalta Conference; the Old Guard had always felt that even the Yalta agreements that had been announced publicly, those agreements that had allowed the Russians to enslave Poland and the other Eastern European countries, were unconstitutional because they were actually treaties and had never been presented to the Senate for ratification. And the Old Guard believed as an article of faith that other, secret agreements had been made at Yalta. Now Taft would try to use the power of the Foreign Relations Committee to obtain those secret texts at last, and thereby document once and for all the Democratic Party’s “softness” on Communism, an attack that could be devastating both to the party’s future, and to the Roosevelt-Truman hopes for the containment and ultimate collapse of Communism, and for peace. And the Old Guard would want a formal vote in Foreign Relations, and then in the Senate as a whole, to repudiate all the Yalta agreements, secret and public alike, and to amend the Constitution to ensure against any future circumvention of the treaty process. Moreover, the Old Guard had always felt that Truman had acted unconstitutionally in sending those four divisions to Europe to be part of NATO; now was the chance to end that commitment, too.