Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson

by Robert A. Caro

  The national bonfire thus ignited by Republican Joseph R. McCarthy—a bonfire that was to consume or sear, leaving scars that sometimes never healed, the reputations of thousands of innocent Americans—was to blaze for four years and ten months, and during virtually all that time, a period longer than America’s participation in the Second World War, not only liberals and concerned journalists but more than a few Democratic senators argued that the Senate should take a stand against him. It was in the Senate that a stand should be taken, they said, for McCarthy was using the Senate floor as his platform (it was the fact that many of his charges were made in the Senate that gave them a veneer of respectability), and his Senate chairmanships—of the Government Operations Committee and its Permanent Investigations Subcommittee (Roy Cohn, chief counsel)—as his base of operations. And in his abusive language about targets and colleagues on the Senate floor, and his misuse of senatorial powers of investigation and privilege, it was not merely basic human tenets of fairness and justice that were being violated, again and again, by the man who was, in Robert Sherrill’s words, “the most influential demagogue the United States has ever produced,” but specific Senate rules of decorum and civility. It was therefore under Senate rules that he could most fittingly be brought to book, and the tarring, month by month, of innocent Americans halted. From the time of that first speech in February, 1950, there were attempts to move in the Senate against this consummate liar (among his inventions was a war record for himself: he claimed to have been known in the Pacific as “Tail-Gunner Joe,” and in 1951 asked for, and received, a Distinguished Flying Cross for flying twenty-five combat missions, although he had never been a tail-gunner but rather an intelligence officer whose primary duty was to sit at a desk and debrief pilots upon their returns from missions). When, several weeks after his Wheeling speech, he repeated on the Senate floor his charge that “there are presently in the State Department a very sizable group of active Communists” (although not, apparently, as sizable as had been the case before: the number was reduced from 205 to 57; it would thereafter fluctuate from speech to speech), the Senate established a special subcommittee, headed by Millard Tydings, to investigate his allegations, and after extensive hearings concluded that they were “a fraud and a hoax” not only on the American people but on the Senate itself. And, as Robert Byrd has written in his history of the Senate, “from the day he gave his address in 1950 … McCarthy was constantly under fire” from liberal senators—from liberals on both sides of the aisle. When, on June 1, 1950, Margaret Chase Smith delivered on the Senate floor her “Declaration of Conscience” (“Recently [the Senate’s] deliberative character has too often been debased to the level of a forum of hate and character assassination, sheltered by the shield of congressional immunity”), six fellow Republicans supported her. And repeatedly Johnson, as whip first and then as leader of the party opposed to McCarthy’s, was asked by liberals both in and out of the Senate to take steps to at least put the party on record against not only McCarthy but McCarthyism, the technique of guilt by association and innuendo that was poisoning the nation’s political dialogue. “Something, somebody, has got to stop this man McCarthy,” Bill White said to him in 1951. “You simply must put the Democratic party on the attack against him.” But no help from Lyndon Johnson was forthcoming.

  Considerations against going on the attack were understandable. Not a few senators agreed with McCarthy. His fears of Communist infiltration of the government were no more paranoid than those of Republican reactionaries like William Jenner or Homer Capehart, or of Molly Malone, who walked into a Washington cocktail party one evening, and loudly announced: “I’m for the son of a bitch and I’m for his methods. And I don’t want to talk about him any more tonight.” In addition, as long as the Wisconsin demagogue confined his attacks to Democratic targets, his party regarded him as a considerable asset in congressional elections in the Midwest. It was for a combination of these reasons that in 1950 Robert Taft told reporters that McCarthy should “keep talking and if one case doesn’t work out, he should proceed with another one.” And among the senators who agreed were more than a few of the conservative, ardently anti-Communist southerners who were the base of Johnson’s support.

  Many senators feared McCarthy—with reason. Instead of retreating in the face of the Tydings’ subcommittee report, he attacked, going into Maryland to campaign against the patrician Senator, using a fake photograph that “showed” Tydings listening intently to Communist Party leader Earl Browder. In 1938, Tydings had turned back Franklin Roosevelt’s attempt to purge him; he couldn’t turn back McCarthy’s. In November, 1950, he lost to the obscure John Marshall Butler by a startling forty thousand votes. The lesson, underlined by the unexpected victories that November of two Republican candidates for whom McCarthy had campaigned, Herman Welker of Idaho and Wallace F. Bennett of Utah, was not lost on the Senate. After observing the early days of its 1951 session, William White wrote: “There was a time, only a few months ago,” when many Republican senators “snubbed” McCarthy—when they “quietly arranged matters in their daily routine so as never to pass close to the desk of their colleague, Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin. With a seeming casualness they avoided any public friendliness…. The desk of Senator McCarthy of Wisconsin is not, these days, avoided very often by his Republican associates. Senator McCarthy is, by any standards, the most politically powerful first-term senator in this Congress.” Nor, White reported, was the fear confined to the Republican side of the aisle. At the first Democratic conference that January, 1951, “there ran through the caucus” a “general expression of fear that what had happened to Mr. Tydings could happen to any other man in the Senate. ‘For whom does the bell toll?’ one Democrat asked. ‘It tolls for thee.’” The extent to which McCarthy had intimidated the Senate was definitively demonstrated during a speech in which he was presenting his “evidence” of Communist infiltration of the State Department, standing behind a lectern piled high with documents on the various “cases” that proved his point, and saying that any senator who wanted to examine the evidence was free to do so. One senator tried to take him up on the offer. With his funny waddling walk and his heart full of courage, Herbert Lehman came over to McCarthy’s desk and stood in front of it, his hand held out for the documents. Then, as Stewart Alsop wrote,

  the two men stared at each other, and McCarthy giggled his strange, rather terrifying little giggle. Lehman looked around the crowded Senate, obviously appealing for support. Not a man rose. “Go back to your seat, old man,” McCarthy growled at Lehman. The words do not appear in the Congressional Record, but they were clearly audible in the press gallery. Once more, Lehman looked all around the chamber, appealing for support. He was met with silence and lowered eyes. Slowly, he turned and walked [back to his seat]. The silence of the Senate that evening was a measure of the fear which McCarthy inspired in almost all politicians…. Old Senator Lehman’s back, waddling off in retreat, seemed to symbolize the final defeat of decency….

  To traditionalist senators of both parties, moreover, the idea of taking action against a colleague because of his political views was anathema. “At that time, there was a feeling that if the people of a state wanted to send an SOB to the Senate, that was their business,” George Reedy was to write. “It is difficult, in this place so devoted to debate, for the Senate to think of disciplining a member for what he says.” William White said.

  Other considerations may also have been holding Johnson back, some of them strategic. If the issue became a partisan one—if the attack on McCarthy was almost entirely a Democratic attack—Republicans, as Evans and Novak were to write, “would be forced as an instinctive partisan reaction to come to McCarthy’s defense. Beyond that, Johnson had a deeper fear that if the entire Democratic establishment in Congress, led by himself, turned against McCarthy now when he still had a dangerous and powerful hold on millions of Americans, it might appear that the Democrats were moved by self-interest in trying to cover up some unspeakable
wickedness in the Truman Administration.”

  There may have been personal considerations as well. Lyndon Johnson was, after all, unusually well qualified to appreciate the strength not only of the issue McCarthy was using but of some of the specific tactics McCarthy employed; who knew better than Lyndon Johnson the efficacy of linking an opponent to Earl Browder—even if he himself had used not a photograph but photostats of an old newspaper article? It had been a bare six months before the Wheeling speech that Johnson himself had employed the issue, and the link, himself—had employed them so effectively that in August, 1949, the Senate, at his instance, had refused to consent to the reappointment of Leland Olds; if McCarthy had not hit on a single epithet as damaging as “Commissar”—well, McCarthy was not as gifted a phrasemaker as Lyndon Johnson. The issue was not one on which it was wise to be on the wrong side. If Johnson tried to fight McCarthy in the Senate, it was a fight he well might not win.

  The fight was also one for which he had little stomach—for Lyndon Johnson had read not only the polls but the man, and he was very, very wary of the man. “Joe will go that extra mile to destroy you,” he said privately. And he may have been worried that if McCarthy decided to go that mile against him, the Wisconsinite already knew which route to take. On one of Arthur Stehling’s trips to Washington, a lobbyist had taken Johnson’s Fredericksburg attorney and McCarthy to dinner, and at the dinner McCarthy had asked Stehling, as Stehling was to relate, “about how Johnson made his money, how he treated his office help, and whether he trifled on Mrs. Johnson.” And, Stehling was to relate, “he [McCarthy] said enough to make me suspect that he knew at least a little about the money part.” The Senator from Wisconsin seemed particularly conversant with a factor in Johnson’s rise of which Johnson was not anxious that Washington be reminded. After being introduced to Herman Brown at a cocktail party, McCarthy told Johnson the next day: “Well, I met your sugar daddy.” As Evans and Novak were to say: “Johnson, it seems clear enough, wanted to strike at McCarthy—but not until McCarthy could be brought down. He knew how dangerous McCarthy was.” Bobby Baker heard Johnson telling men he could trust, “Joe McCarthy’s just a loudmouthed drunk. Hell, he’s the sorriest senator up here. Can’t tie his goddamn shoes. But he’s riding high now, he’s got people scared to death some Communist will strangle ’em in their sleep, and anybody who takes him on before the fevers cool—well, you don’t get in a pissin’ contest with a polecat.”

  These considerations were especially strong in Texas, where McCarthy’s popularity was high in 1951 and 1952, not only with the public but with some of the most reactionary—and richest—of the state’s oil barons, who felt that their country and their fortunes were threatened by Communism. The largest single contributor to McCarthy’s enterprises was Hugh Roy Cullen, and among his other major supporters were H. L. Hunt and Clint Murchison.

  Johnson had to run for re-election to the Senate in 1954. By 1953, his courting of the Texas establishment, all-powerful in the state’s Democratic politics, had been cemented by the federal contracts he obtained for their companies, and by his defense of the depletion allowance and other tax breaks for the oilmen, and of course by his destruction of Leland Olds and his support of legislation that would free their natural gas enterprises from government regulation. Johnson’s presence in the Senate meant millions of dollars in their pockets, and they knew it, and any possibility of a challenge to him in the Democratic primary was discouraged; the only candidate to enter the field against him would be the extremely wealthy—and extremely eccentric—thirty-year-old Dudley Dougherty, who was regarded, as Ed Clark was to put it, as “a little bit of a nut”; Reedy said that “Dougherty is just a screwball” who “could be equated with no opposition at all”; he would campaign against Johnson from the back of a red fire truck in which he toured the state, would describe Eleanor Roosevelt as “an old witch” and Roosevelt and Truman as mental incompetents, and would tell voters that with the single exception of himself, all Texas politicians were “afraid of sinister, hidden powers.” Dougherty’s candidacy, George Reedy was to say, “is the sort of thing you dream and pray will happen” if you are the incumbent. “Johnson made only a single speech in Texas during that whole campaign,” Reedy would recall. “He never mentioned Dudley Dougherty’s name, did not put out any campaign literature, and he took out only one ad”—and he defeated Dougherty by more than half a million votes—883,000 to 354,000. While Johnson did not have to worry about re-election, however, he had to worry about losing the future support of the oil barons, many of whom were his financial supporters as well as McCarthy’s—and whose financial support he would need for a presidential bid; in moving against McCarthy, he had to walk a very thin line so as not to alienate them.

  When liberals—liberal senators, liberal journalists, liberal Washingtonian insiders like Abe Fortas and Ben Cohen and Tommy Corcoran—asked him to put the Democratic senators “on the attack” against McCarthy, he told them that the time wasn’t right, that McCarthy was still too popular, the issue too potent. When Bill White said that McCarthy was “destroying civil liberties in this country,” Johnson replied: “Bill, that’s a good point, but let me explain something to you. If I commit the Democratic Party to the destruction of McCarthy—‘what he meant was an attempt at something like censure’—first of all, in the present atmosphere of the Senate, we will all lose and he will win. Then he’ll be more powerful than ever. At this juncture I’m not about to commit the Democratic Party to a high school debate on the subject, ‘Resolved, that Communism is good for the United States,’ with my party taking the affirmative.” It was while explaining to Hubert Humphrey that it was necessary to wait until victory was certain, for they might get only one chance at McCarthy, that he warned “that to kill a snake … have to get it with one blow.” Recalls Gerald Siegel: “He kept saying to those people who were impatient, ’Now just wait a minute. The time will come, and when we’ve got enough votes to be sure we’ll win, we’ll move.”

  HE DIDN’T “MOVE,” HOWEVER—didn’t commit the Democratic Party in the Senate—even when, in the opinion of many liberals, he had enough votes, even when, in their opinion, the time was right at last. He had told Humphrey, back in the early days of the Red Scare, what he was waiting for. Attacks on McCarthy by liberals were useless, Johnson said, both because it was easy for McCarthy to destroy them by calling them “soft” on Communism (“He just eats fellows like you. You’re nourishment to him”), and because they didn’t have enough power in the Senate. Only when the Senate Bulls took the field against him could he be stopped, he said. “The only way we’ll ever get Joe McCarthy is when he starts attacking some conservatives around here, and then we’ll put an end to it.”

  What Johnson said he was waiting for began to occur in April, 1952, in George Reedy’s opinion because McCarthy failed “to realize the fundamental toughness of the senior members of the establishment. It had never occurred to him that politicians who had survived two or more Senate contests must know something about political warfare. They had said nothing about him and he thought they were keeping silent out of fear. That was a serious misunderstanding.” That April, McCarthy, speaking on the floor of the Senate, attacked one of Carl Hayden’s faithful retainers, Darrell St. Claire, chief clerk of Hayden’s Rules Committee, charging that in a former job—as a member of the State Department’s Loyalty Board—St. Claire had voted to give security clearance to an economist who was the subject of “twelve separate FBI reports.” Hayden, in his usual quiet voice, defended his aide, saying that St. Claire’s name “has been dragged into this dispute without any basis of fact at all.” McCarthy, who, George Reedy says, regarded Hayden “as an old, blind, fuddy-duddy,” then almost casually took a swipe at the Senator himself. “God,” Reedy was to say, “that was a stupid thing for him to do…. Carl Hayden was one of the toughest creatures that ever walked the face of the earth.” Speaking to some reporters that night, Johnson said, “Joe has made a lifelong and powerful enemy
in Carl Hayden, and Carl is not a man who forgets easily.”

  Looking back on the McCarthy affair years later, George Reedy, praising Johnson for his “superbly developed sense of timing,” would say that “the Hayden episode really sealed Joe McCarthy’s doom although it did not come until many many months later.” But superb though Johnson’s timing may have been, it was also slow. Although he became Democratic Leader in January, 1953, he neither spoke against McCarthy nor raised the matter in the Policy Committee until July, 1954. The number of months that would elapse between the Hayden episode and the Senate’s censure resolution on McCarthy was, in fact, thirty-two months—more than two and a half years, years during which scores of men and women were destroyed by the Wisconsin demagogue’s charges, and hundreds, possibly thousands, more were destroyed by charges brought by local vigilantes emboldened by the national atmosphere of fear and distrust that McCarthy went on creating. During these years, thousands of government workers would be fired under federal loyalty decrees and hundreds of others lost their jobs—in Hollywood, in schools, in colleges, in unions—and were prevented by blacklists from finding others.

  During this period—beginning, in fact, just a few days after the Hayden episode—more cracks in McCarthy’s aura of invincibility appeared in the very spots that Johnson had told Humphrey would be crucial. In April, 1952, Richard Russell, while reiterating his warnings about the threat of world Communism, also took an obvious slap at McCarthy, warning about “hucksters of hysteria” who, in criticizing those who disagreed with them, undermined “the American system of fair play.” He predicted that these “salesmen of infamy” would fall because of the common sense of the American people. To some liberals Russell’s remark was the signal they had been waiting for: that the conservative southern senators were no longer solidly behind McCarthy, and that Democrats could begin to move against him in the Senate. Then, in July, 1953, the chief investigator of McCarthy’s subcommittee, J. B. Matthews, in an article in the American Mercury entitled “Reds in the Churches,” assailed Protestant clergymen, including Bishop G. Bromley Oxnam, Methodist bishop of the District of Columbia—and a friend of Harry Byrd’s. Minority Leader Johnson was reading wire service stories that had been clipped from the teletype machines in the Senate lobby when he came across the story on Matthews’ attack. “Come on over here,” he shouted to Hubert Humphrey, and, showing him the article, said, “This is the beginning of the end for Joe McCarthy. You can’t attack Harry Byrd’s friends in this Senate, not in this Senate.” McCarthy, he said, had made “a fatal mistake. Harry Byrd is going to take this personally. And that is going to be a fatal blow.”