Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson

by Robert A. Caro

  Noting such developments from his seat on the dais, Riddick saw their significance. “Now, for the first time, you had a Leader who’s going to keep it [a bill] intact…. They [the chairmen] went along [with letting Johnson manage their bills] because by letting him take over the management of the bills, they knew they would get what they wanted,” Riddick says. “Out of loose consideration of legislation was emerging leadership control [of legislation]—control by Lyndon Johnson. Johnson just gradually pulled the management [of bills] out of the hands of the chairmen. They were surrendering their powers—not intentionally, but it was a growth process. There was gradually growing an attitude, ‘Let Lyndon do it.’ You don’t realize you’re losing power, you don’t realize that things are changing. You think the Leader is only helping you. But the first thing you know, he’s integrating everything. He knows everything about every bill, he can change one thing for another with different senators. Things were changing.”

  HE WAS ALSO USING other powers he had acquired, or created, as Minority Leader, and he was using them with less restraint.

  Majority Leader or not, he still needed the support of the old Democratic Bulls—of Russell, George, Hayden, Byrd, Ellender, Eastland, McClellan, three or four others; while Walter George, elected President pro tempore at the Senate’s 1955 opening session, was laboriously ascending the dais to accept the gavel, a reporter in the Press Gallery above muttered, “Save your Confederate money, boys. The South is rising again.” With southerners as chairmen of six of the nine most powerful Senate committees (and its ally Hayden ascending, thanks to McKellar’s death, to the chairmanship of a seventh, Appropriations), “its hold seems even stronger than previously,” Thomas Stokes wrote. Were the Big Bulls to turn against Johnson, they could wreck his leadership as easily as they had wrecked McFarland’s and Lucas’ before him—and to the Big Bulls Johnson was as deferential as ever. He praised them publicly at every opportunity, telling one reporter, “We have the master craftsmen in the legislative field in the Democratic Party,” noting to another that these chairmen “have been twenty-five years in Congress, on the average. Hell, every one of ’em’s an old pro.” In private, he was as obsequious, as fawning, as ever. “He didn’t rant and rave at the Harry Byrds of the world,” Senator George Smathers of Florida would say. “Oh no, he was passive, and so submissive, and so condescending, you couldn’t believe it! I’ve seen him kiss Harry Byrd’s ass until it was disgusting: ‘Senator, how about so-and-so? wouldn’t you like to do this? can’t we do this for you?’”

  But with the Big Bulls solidly behind him, the addition of his new powers made the support of the rest of the Democrats less important to him; they needed him much more than he needed any one of them. For the first time since college and the NYA, Lyndon Johnson had direct power over other men. And as soon as he got it, he showed how he was going to use it. Power, Lord Acton said, corrupts. Not always. What power always does is reveal. And now there began to be revealed a Lyndon Johnson who would have been familiar to those who had known him in college.

  It began quickly—in his first action as Majority Leader: the making of committee assignments. In the appointment calendar on Johnson’s desk the pages headed January 6, January 7, and January 8 were blank except for a numeral he had scrawled large across each one: “231.” His office in the Capitol was too accessible: once again, in the first days of a new Congress, Lyndon Johnson was operating from behind a closed door in his old suite in the SOB; once again, the left-hand button on Walter Jenkins’ telephone console glowed yellow-white; once again, by the date of the Democratic Steering Committee’s first meeting—this year on Monday, January 10—the Standing Committee checkerboard was already filled, and Steering Committee ratification had been arranged. There was, however, a difference between the telephone calls Lyndon Johnson was making now and the calls he had made two years earlier. Throughout his two years as Minority Leader, despite the power over committee assignments that had been ceded to him by the Steering Committee, he had, in making and explaining controversial assignments, hidden behind that committee, telling disappointed or angry colleagues that it was the committee that decided, that he was only one of its members. Though that veil had become increasingly transparent, he had nonetheless kept it in place, and to some extent it had softened the harsh reality of his wielding of power. Now the veil was allowed to fall.

  A number of younger senators had accumulated sufficient seniority to expect seats on major committees, seats for which they were well qualified—in some cases, extremely well qualified. But their committee assignments were not going to be made on the basis of seniority or of qualifications. Their assignments were going to be made on the basis of their personal allegiance to Lyndon Johnson. And Johnson let them know it.

  Estes Kefauver, for example, had been trying for four years to get on the Foreign Relations Committee or the Policy Committee (making, in regard to the Policy Committee, the argument, strong in traditional Senate terms, that Tennessee had historically had, in McKellar, a Policy seat), and Johnson had always told him in the past that these selections were determined by the Steering Committee. On Tuesday, January 11, 1955, Kefauver learned that he had again been passed over for Foreign Relations. The makeup of the Policy Committee had not yet been announced, and he telephoned Lyndon Johnson and, with Walter Jenkins listening, mouthpiece unscrewed, taking notes, said, “Lyndon, I want to be a member of the Policy Committee.”

  “Well, Estes,” Lyndon Johnson replied, “I appreciate your wanting to be there.” But, Johnson said, you’re not going to be there. And in explaining why, Johnson didn’t bother to cite the Steering Committee. The pronoun he used was the first person singular. “The man I selected hasn’t been you,” he said.

  When Kefauver began to argue—“Lyndon, you remember I started trying to be a candidate for [the Policy Committee] when Tom Hennings got it…”—Johnson reverted to traditional terms, mentioning the need for geographical diversity on the committee, and the requirements of seniority, and Kefauver attempted to swallow his chagrin. “Of course, if it is already settled …” he said. “I was of course kind of disappointed about Foreign Affairs…. How about keeping me in mind?” And when Johnson replied this time, he made things clearer. There were no more traditional terms; instead the new reality was spelled out—in the “new tone” that Hubert Humphrey had heard. “I will sure keep you in mind,” Lyndon Johnson said. But, he said, “I have never had the particular feeling that when I called up my first team and the chips were down that Kefauver felt he … ought to be on that team.” The price of his favor was stated. “If you feel you ought to be and want to be [on my team], it is the best news I have ever had,” Lyndon Johnson said. “I will meet you more than fifty percent of the way. I will push you into every position of influence and power that you can have…. If you and I can ever get on that basis …”

  Kefauver began to plead a little. “As far as I am concerned, I have always wanted to be on that basis,” he said. “I will let my hair down on this point, Lyndon: honestly, you have never given me a break since you have been the Leader.” But Johnson was having none of that. “Maybe I just felt like I wasn’t positive you wanted me to be the captain—that’s letting your hair down,” he said. Proof, clear proof, of Kefauver’s willingness to be on the Johnson team—and to let Johnson be the captain—would be required, Johnson made clear. “You have got to have a lot more than desire on these committee appointments,” he said. Kefauver had not provided such proof in the past, he said. “You just look through your documents and see when you have said to Johnson that you were on my team…. There’s no use in our kidding each other.”

  Johnson apparently felt there was at least a chance that Kefauver could be brought to heel. With liberals like Lehman and Douglas, uncompromising in their principles, there was no such chance, and Johnson knew it. So with them he was more brutal. Long determined to end the injustice and prejudice codified in existing immigration laws, Lehman badly wanted a seat on Judicia
ry, the committee with jurisdiction over those laws. His seniority for that seat was sufficient, his expertise unique: not only did he represent the state which, as Drew Pearson put it, “was more concerned with immigration than any other,” possessing as it did, New York City, lodestar of immigrants, he had been that state’s governor for ten years. But he didn’t get the seat, and when he asked Johnson why, Johnson gave as his reason, as he later told reporters, that Lehman was not a lawyer, an excuse so transparent (no Senate rule made a law degree a requirement for membership on the committee; degreeless Earle Clements had only recently been serving on it) that he obviously did not care whether or not it was believed.

  Lehman’s qualifications for Judiciary were equaled by those of Douglas for Finance, and since Johnson had proclaimed expertise a criterion for committee appointments, it was assumed that he would not dare to continue keeping the Senate’s most respected expert on taxation off its tax-writing committee, particularly since it had not one but two vacancies to be filled (and since, as Evans and Novak were to write, although Douglas was opposed to the oil-depletion allowance, “the Finance Committee was already so stacked in favor of the oil and gas industry” that one vote on it could not affect its decisions). “It had been assumed that he [Douglas] would get it up to the time the lists were made public,” Thomas Stokes was to write.

  But Johnson had another plan for the economist, one with a particular sting in it. There was a committee with the word “Economic” in the title: the Joint Economic Committee. But whereas Finance had vast power, this committee had no power at all; it was authorized only to issue reports. “I’m gonna name him chairman of the Joint Economic Committee,” Johnson told Bobby Baker. “It can’t do a damn thing. It’s as useless as tits on a bull. But it’ll give Professor Douglas some paper to shuffle.” And for Douglas’ exclusion, Johnson vouchsafed no explanation at all.

  In 1955 as in 1953, every newly elected senator received an assignment to a major committee, and columnists were once again full of praise for the “Johnson Rule.” “Johnson at his best again,” Doris Fleeson wrote. “Senator Johnson has once again quietly worked a revolution in the ancient system.” All but unremarked by journalists, however, was the fact that the nature of the revolution had changed. No longer was it only the assigning of freshmen, or the use of expertise as a criterion. Added to the Johnson Rule now was another factor—one which did indeed prove that Johnson ruled.

  HE WAS ACQUIRING NEW POWERS, too—and using them with little restraint.

  The Democrats’ recapture of majority status gave the party more patronage slots to distribute, and that meant more work for its Patronage Committee. And the committee’s chairman, the seventy-seven-year-old Hay den, was also becoming chairman of Appropriations. He was, in the words of one aide, “just not as interested in patronage as he had been.” And he had become very fond of Lyndon Johnson. He was increasingly willing to listen to Johnson—the party’s Leader, after all—on party matters; patronage, the aide says, “just sort of wandered into the hands of the leadership.” Realization of that development came quickly, too—as was shown by a letter from Burnet Maybank to Skeeter Johnston a few days after the November, 1954, election: “I know you feel better about Tuesday’s results—I certainly do. Hope you get the opportunity to talk to Lyndon Johnson about the patronage situation in the Capitol. It appears to me with us having a majority we are certainly entitled to more positions. Of course as you know, my appointees were laid off…. Do let me know what Lyndon thinks about the patronage.”

  What Lyndon thought was that Maybank’s appointees should be restored to their former places, and they were. And that was not the case—at least in several instances—with appointees of senators who were not on his “team.” Neither Kefauver nor Albert Gore was on its roster. Now both Tennessee senators sought to intervene on behalf of an elderly Tennesseean, Walker Toddy, who had been dismissed after twenty-nine years on Skeeter Johnston’s staff. “Mr. Toddy has given 29 years of loyal and faithful service to the Democratic Party and to the Senate of the United States,” Kefauver wrote Johnson. Toddy was not well off financially, and Kefauver noted that one more year would make him eligible for a higher pension. “I am very hopeful that Walker can secure some worthwhile place in the new senatorial setup”—even if only in a position as lowly as that of Bill Clerk. “I know that a lot of senators feel as I do,” Kefauver wrote, but one of those senators was not Lyndon Johnson, and Toddy was not given any place. Watching which senators received patronage slots—and which senators didn’t—Democrats were again reminded that it was better to be on Lyndon’s team.

  For a senator who was not on the team, the cost of such independence might have to be reckoned not only in seats and slots, but in space—for Hayden’s move to Appropriations had left the chairmanship of the Rules Committee, allocator of office suites, in the hands of the “ailing” Theodore Francis Green, and Johnson assured Green that he would remove this “burden” from his shoulders.

  Paul Douglas learned this new fact of Senate life during that same week in January. Johnson wanted more, and better, office space, and now that he was Majority Leader, he set out to get it. One January afternoon, he told Walter Jenkins to go down to the Senate custodian’s office and come back with the master keys that would open every door on the Senate side of the Capitol. That evening, Johnson waited until most senators and their staff had gone home, and then he began to walk through the empty Capitol, opening every door. On the top floor, near the head of a flight of stairs leading up from the gallery, he found what he wanted behind a door marked G-14, “Joint Economic Committee.” Inside, in the outer room of the two-room suite, sat its staff director, Grover Ensley, working late. Suddenly, without a knock or any other warning, the door swung open, and the startled Ensley found himself facing the tall figure of the Majority Leader.

  Without a word, Johnson walked in and began looking around. The two rooms were rather small but elegant; from their high ceilings hung two chandeliers impressive even by senatorial standards; they had hung in the White House in Theodore Roosevelt’s time. In the inner office was a working fireplace, which, in Ensley’s memory, was probably lit that evening; he made a point of lighting it every afternoon. “It was very comfortable and cozy,” he recalls. The inner office was a corner room, and Johnson pulled aside the heavy draperies in front of its windows, and there was a view “right down the Mall to the Lincoln Memorial and across to Arlington Cemetery.” And what made the office perfect was that it was the office of the Joint Economic Committee. “The next day I got a letter from the Rules Committee,” Ensley recalls. It said that G-14 was going to be the new office of the Majority Leader. Having relegated Douglas to a committee whose only amenity was its office, Evans and Novak were to write, Johnson had now taken away the office, and “the Senate took notice. It was a dramatic sign of the consequences of a lack of rapport with the Majority Leader.” For other rapport-lacking senators, the signs were less dramatic, but decipherable nonetheless. Every time a senator had to walk a long way to reach the Capitol subway—and knew that other senators, with more conveniently located offices, had a shorter distance to walk—he was reminded of what Lyndon Johnson could do for him, or to him. “After a while,” as Doris Kearns Goodwin wrote, “insiders could recognize Johnson’s allies by one look at the roster of office suites—the larger suites … were reserved for friends, the smaller … were allotted to ‘the troublesome ones.’”

  THERE HAD BEEN a façade of courtesy in his dealings with other senators, even those senators who were not part of the team. Now that facade dropped away. In the pile of message slips on his desk, there would be notations that “Senator Lehman called—please call him back,” “Senator Douglas called—please call him,” “Senator Kefauver called—would like to speak to you.” When he saw such slips, a thin smile would cross Lyndon Johnson’s face. Crumpling them up, he would throw them in his wastepaper basket. Or Walter Jenkins would be reading off the messages from his yellow legal pad,
writing beside each one Johnson’s instructions for dealing with it. When he got to one from a senator who wasn’t on the team, there would be a silence. Jenkins would read the next message. “He wouldn’t return Lehman’s phone calls for days on end,” recalls Lehman’s administrative assistant, Julius Gaius Caesar Edelstein.

  He might not return them at all. And his men—Clements, Skeeter, Bobby Baker—wouldn’t return them, either. When, in 1955, this first began happening, Lehman, himself the soul of courtesy, a man who, as Governor, would never have dreamt of snubbing even an avowed enemy, could hardly believe it was intentional. But after one incident in 1955, he had no choice but to believe. He first had difficulty reaching Johnson, who was at the ranch, being “told he was out hunting,” as he was to recall. When he finally spoke to him, Johnson promised that he would deal with the matter “immediately” and that either he or Earle Clements would call him back. “I even gave him the number of my [hotel] room and told him that if I should be out, he or Earle should leave word that they had called, and I would call back as promptly as possible,” Lehman was to tell Edelstein. Neither Johnson nor Clements ever called.