Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson

by Robert A. Caro

  The facade dropped away in the cloakroom, too. Johnson would be standing in the middle of it, talking, laughing with a group of senators. A Lehman or a Douglas or a Kefauver or another senator not on the team would walk in. Johnson would turn away so that he wouldn’t be facing them, so that they couldn’t become part of the group. And some of the other senators, men attuned to nuances of power, would take their cue from the Majority Leader. Edelstein was to recall what it was like to be walking with Herbert Lehman after it became clear that he was in the Leader’s disfavor. “You’d walk into the cloakroom. People would fall silent. You’d walk down the hall, and there would be an averting of eyes so that they wouldn’t have to say hello.” The facade dropped away on the Senate floor as well. “Lehman would begin making a speech, and if Johnson was on the floor he would walk out to the cloakroom, just ostentatiously enough so you knew it was deliberate. And other people would drift—leave—the floor.” Or they would not come out onto the floor, as they otherwise might have done. While Lehman or Douglas or Kefauver was speaking, a senator would wander into the cloakroom, intending to go out on the floor. Bobby Baker would be standing by the swinging doors leading from the cloakroom to the floor. He would say to the senator, “Why don’t you stay in the cloakroom for a while?”

  There were methods of humiliating a senator on the floor as well. Johnson would go over to Douglas’ desk, while the Illinois senator was sitting with one of his assistants. He would lean over and chat with the assistant, ignoring Douglas.

  And there were methods less public than these, but, with certain senators, equally effective. “Skeeter would routinely have the boys back to his office at five or six o’clock,” Douglas’ administrative assistant, Howard Shuman, recalls. The invited senators would walk through the tall, dark door into those cheery rooms beyond, their arms around each other’s shoulders, chuckling or laughing. Other senators would see them going in. It was hard not to see; Skeeter’s office was just outside the cloakroom. “Paul was almost never invited,” Shuman says. “In fact, once, when he was, he told me about it.” In the telling, Douglas tried to make a joke of the situation, “but,” Shuman says, “it didn’t come off too well.”

  “Oh, they did a lot of things to diminish Paul, Paul and the others,” Shuman says. “They went out of their way to diminish them. William S. White wrote that the way to get into the [Senate] Club was to be courteous and courtly. Well, that’s nonsense. Lehman was the most courtly man in the world, and he wasn’t part of the club. It didn’t have anything to do with courtly. It had to do with how you voted—with whether or not you voted as Lyndon Johnson wanted you to vote.” Says Neil MacNeil, a longtime congressional correspondent for Time magazine: “The Senate was run by courtesy, all right—like the longshoremen’s union.”

  Assistants to non-team members were constantly being reminded of their bosses’ lack of status. “He [Johnson] was cutting [to me],” Edelstein recalls. “With other staff people he was very verbose. But when I said hello, he’d be very curt and turn his back on me.” Sometimes Johnson would be chatting, outwardly relaxed, in the cloakroom when he would notice, standing nearby, an assistant to one of the senators who was not on the team. “What the fuck do you want?” Lyndon Johnson would say. “Nothing, Senator,” the aide would answer. “Then get your fucking ass out of here,” Johnson would say. Or he would give these aides instructions for their senator in a tone that left no doubt as to where the senator stood in his estimation. Says Harry Schnibbe, administrative assistant to John A. Carroll of Colorado, elected to the Senate in 1956 and never a member of Johnson’s team: “Most of the time he ignored you. But he might say, ‘I want you to tell Carroll to get over here. Get on the phone and tell him! I need senators over here on this debate! You’re over here listening to this. Where the hell is he?’” Or he might simply tell Schnibbe, in a low, threatening tone: “Get your fucking senator over here right away!”

  “I’d say, ‘Yes, sir!’ like I was a page,” Schnibbe recalls. “I’d almost salute. He terrified me. To tell you the truth, if I went in the cloakroom and Johnson was in the cloakroom, I left. I’d say, ‘Oh, shit, I’m not staying here.’ We all operated in total terror of Johnson.”

  IN OTHER WAYS, too, the humility of Lyndon Johnson’s first term fell away, to be replaced by characteristics that would have been familiar to students at San Marcos—to students, that is, who hadn’t been on his team there.

  G-14 had been refurnished—almost instantly, it seemed, thanks to the efficiency of the Senate Cabinet Shop—in the traditional Senate mode: turn-of-the-century desks and a visitors’ bench, refinished and polished until it glowed, from the Old Supreme Court Chamber; a nineteenth-century painting of “Rebecka, daughter of the mighty Powhattan, Emperor of Attaboughkomouck.” Johnson had admired portraits of John Nance Garner and a former Texas senator, Morris Sheppard, that had been hanging in Skeeter’s back office; now they were hanging in Johnson’s office. At the end of the day, Johnson would, after (or, increasingly, instead of) a session in Skeeter’s office, invite a few chosen senators or journalists to G-14 for a drink and a chat. Unbuttoning his double-breasted suit, he would put his feet, clad in either gleaming black shoes or gleaming, elaborately hand-tooled “LBJ” cowboy boots, up on the desk, and buzz a secretary to bring drinks. A You ain’t learning nothin’ when you’re talking plaque had been installed on the mantelpiece, but now, in sharp contrast to his first six years in the Senate, Lyndon Johnson paid markedly little attention to his father’s advice—as little attention as he had paid before those six years.

  The most notable characteristic of these gatherings was the extent to which the conversation at them was dominated by one man. The talk was fascinating, but its dominant theme was the smartness, or, to be more precise, the shrewdness, of the host. Once, for example, on January 13, 1955, the day the committee assignments were announced, he was in the middle of a monologue when he abruptly interrupted himself. “My God,” he said, “I forgot to call Senator Stennis and congratulate him.” Snatching the phone out of its cradle, he tucked it between his shoulder and his chin, and dialed Stennis’ home. And when Mrs. Stennis, answering, said that her husband was not home, Johnson said, “Well, I must tell you, ma’am, how proud I am of your husband and how proud the Senate is, and you tell him that when he gets home. The Senate paid him a great honor today. The Senate elected your husband to the Appropriations Committee. That’s one of the most powerful committees in the whole Senate and a great honor for your husband. I’m so proud of John. He’s a great American. And I know you’re proud of him, too. He’s one of my finest senators….”

  A number of aspects of the monologue Johnson was conducting with Mrs. Stennis—a monologue that went on for quite some time—were worth noting. The first was the attention to detail—to doing everything. Giving Stennis the Appropriations seat had put the Senator in his debt; a telephone call like this would add a little to the debt—so, late though it was, long though Johnson’s day had been, the call was made, and the call was not cursory; Johnson’s conversation was not hurried, but slow and as drawlingly gracious as any Mississippian could have desired. Another was the use of the “I” and the “my”—as Rowland Evans, one of the reporters listening, was to put it, “implicitly he was belaboring the obvious—that it wasn’t the Steering Committee or the full Senate that was really responsible. It was LBJ.” But the most significant aspect of all was that as Johnson talked to Mrs. Stennis, buttering her up, he would, as he poured it on, wink and nod to his listeners, grinning at them over what he was doing. Although his words seemed sincere, he seemed to want his listeners to understand that they really weren’t. It seemed to be important to him that they know that.

  THE VERY RUTHLESSNESS with which Lyndon Johnson used his power helped him to amass more of it. The story of how Bernard Baruch’s contribution had never reached Paul Douglas had gotten around, and everyone knew how Douglas’ office had been taken away from him without warning or excuse. The ostracism of Herbe
rt Lehman had been noted. And aides gossiped. It was an open secret now that some senators couldn’t even get their phone calls returned. The United States Senate contained men adept at reading power and they had no difficulty in drawing from these ongoing actions a unifying lesson.

  And new lessons were constantly being provided for their edification.

  A single attempt at independence could end an alliance with Lyndon Johnson forever—even if the alliance had been as long in duration, and as intimate, as that between Johnson and Stuart Symington.

  Symington had no jealousy of the Texan with whom he had spent so much time and exchanged so many favors. “I thought he was a man of destiny,” he was to recall years later. And he had thought they were friends. “I was awfully fond of Lyndon B. Johnson,” he was to say. But after Johnson put Symington on the Armed Services Committee, the experience and expertise—true expertise—in military matters of the tall, handsome Missourian became apparent at Armed Services Committee hearings, and Johnson’s aides became aware that he resented it. Johnson began to say, when Symington’s name came up during private conversations, “He’s not a team player.” For a while Johnson remained amiable when talking to Symington in person, but Symington, detecting a subtle change in Johnson’s attitude, decided it was simply that “I was getting too much prominence.” He decided to play a less prominent role in future hearings, he was to recall; he didn’t want anything to break up the friendship. But 1954 was the year of the Army-McCarthy hearings, and of Symington’s courageous challenge to McCarthy, after Johnson had told him not to challenge McCarthy, “and,” Symington says, “Johnson didn’t like that at all. I’ve never quite known why. But it [standing up to McCarthy] was something that just had to be done, and I did it.” And then, Symington recalls, “I found out that if you crossed him—well, the one word that was foremost in his mind was power, and if anyone stood in his way—well, no one stood in Lyndon Johnson’s way.” Then Symington realized something about Johnson that he had not understood before: that “there was a sort of cruelty there.”

  He found out the hard way—in public. Because of the role he had played in building up Texas defense contractors, it had become a tradition for Symington to be invited to luncheons given by Texas’ congressional delegation for prominent visitors from the state. Walking into a luncheon shortly after his confrontation with McCarthy, Symington strode over to his friend Lyndon as he always did, and Lyndon turned his back on him. “I did not realize he was breaking with me before that,” Symington recalls. “My goodness, only a few years before he had introduced me [at a Texas delegation luncheon] as ‘the Greatest Texan of Them AIL’ And he did it so that everyone saw it. Cruelty.”

  Then Johnson did it so that everyone in the Democratic cloakroom saw it. In the past, whenever Bobby Baker circulated through the Democratic cloakroom at the end of the day inviting senators to drop by the Leader’s office, Symington would be one of the senators invited. Now, one day, he was standing with two senators when Baker approached. Taking the arms of the other two senators, Baker said to them, “The Leader wants you in his office.” He walked away. Symington realized he hadn’t been invited. And for some years after that, he never was invited. “He [Johnson] was deliberately leaving me out—and he was doing it in such a way that everyone would know. No one crossed Lyndon Johnson.”

  “Senators mutually recognize the primary natural law of political survival,” Neil MacNeil, a very perceptive observer, was to write. When a senator was asked for a vote, an excuse invariably accepted by most Leaders was that it would be politically harmful in his home state. “Hell, I know what it takes to get elected,” one of Johnson’s predecessors as Leader would explain. Even very pragmatic men recognized this law, and accepted it. That was why, Scoop Jackson would later say, that if, despite President Kennedy’s persuasiveness with a senator he had invited to the Oval Office, “the senator said his people [constituents] wouldn’t go along, Kennedy would finally say he was sorry they couldn’t agree but he understood.”

  Johnson wouldn’t understand. He would refuse to understand. Considerations important to the Senator—even the consideration of political survival—did not divert him from his purpose. “He could charm you or knock your block off, or bribe you, or threaten you, anything to get your vote,” Jackson would explain. “And he’d get it. That was the difference.”

  THE LESSON KEEN-EYED SENATORS drew from what happened to Kefauver and Douglas and Lehman was spelled out by one of the keenest, Russell Long. Lyndon Johnson, Long said, “could not bear to have anyone operating outside his camp. When he saw this developing, he would either reconcile or isolate them.” And this made senators all the more anxious to be in his camp, anxious to be on his team. Men learned from watching what happened to Symington what Symington had learned the hard way. “As for Senate loners,” Russell Long said, “he could make their lives miserable.” Seeing what had happened to Symington, men made sure they didn’t make Symington’s mistake and cross Lyndon Johnson. As Frank Van der Linden of the Richmond Times-Dispatch put it, “When somebody is ruthless like that, and has the power, and is willing to use it, weaker men get out of his way.”

  AND LYNDON JOHNSON, looking for power over the Senate, had found another instrument with which power could be created. It wasn’t a new instrument. First employed in 1845, it had been formally embodied in the Senate Rules (Rule 12, Paragraph 3) since 1914, and previous Senate Leaders had used it in a number of different ways. Never, however, had it been used as this Leader used it. His use of it was, in fact, perhaps the most striking example of the creativity that Lyndon Johnson brought to the legislative process.

  The instrument was a “unanimous consent agreement,” a procedural device under which the Senate, by unanimous consent, agrees to limit the amount of time that a particular bill can be debated; to divide that time between the bill’s proponents and opponents according to a prearranged formula incorporated in the agreement, and to place the allocation of that time under the control of one or two specific proponents and opponents of the measure; to limit the number of amendments to the bill that can be introduced, and the amount of time each amendment can be debated, and to place that time, too, under the control of specific senators.

  Prior to World War II, most unanimous consent agreements had come near the end of a session, when the bill in question had already been debated for days, if not weeks; the Senate would then agree that after a certain number of additional days of debate, a vote would be taken. The mounting impatience after the war with the Senate’s inefficiency had led to increased use of these agreements, but they still had generally been employed only after substantial debate on a measure had already occurred, and they still generally allowed additional time for debate. The 119 bills that had become the subject of agreements between the end of the war and the end of the 1954 Senate session had been debated for an average of six days before the agreements were instituted—and the agreements had allowed an average of three additional days of debate, so that a total of nine days of discussion had been allowed before the vote.

  Lyndon Johnson wasn’t allowing nine days; sometimes, in fact, he wasn’t allowing even one.

  Traditionally, says assistant parliamentarian Riddick, who had begun drafting more of the agreements as parliamentarian Charlie Watkins grew older, “It was sort of a practice to allow them to consider [debate] the bill a while to see if they anticipated a long debate”; it was only if they saw that one could be expected that they would try to restrict debate. “After Mr. Johnson came to the forefront,” however, the agreements began coming earlier and earlier in the legislative process; “you would get an agreement on some [bills] before you even started debate.” Johnson would decline to call some bills—including some quite major bills—off the Calendar onto the floor until a unanimous consent agreement had been worked out setting a strict time limit; the total debate on a bill might be only six, or four, or, in some cases, two hours. Nor was that the only difference. Until Johnson became Majo
rity Leader, Riddick explains, most agreements were “loose—just general agreements,” many dealing only with time limits. “Often they just set the number of hours, or a set time at which they would vote—that was all many of them contained. You didn’t work out all the details.” Now the agreements became much stricter, and much more detailed. “What Mr. Johnson did was introduce the use of … a detailed agreement as to…how long each amendment would be debated; how long the general debate of the bill would last; whether all amendments had to be germane to the bill, and details of that nature. This was all reduced to unanimous consent agreements, even specifying the hour that you’d proceed to the consideration of said bill; and the hour that you’d vote on it.”

  Among the details now included, moreover, was the identity of the senators who would control the allocation of time to other senators who wanted to speak for or against the bill. In the past, the time given to a bill’s supporters had usually been controlled by the senator who had introduced the measure (the “mover”), or by the senator who was managing it on the floor, or by the chairman of the committee from which it had emerged. Now, in more and more unanimous consent agreements, a new figure was named. Ordered by unanimous consent, that…debate shall be limited to four hours, to be equally divided by and controlled by the mover of the bill and the majority leader, an agreement might say. Ordered that on the question of the final passage of such bill debate shall be limited to six hours, to be equally divided and controlled, respectively, by the majority and minority leaders, said another. Sometimes, in fact, the time allotted to a bill’s supporters was divided and controlled by the Majority Leader alone.