Some of his votes, votes he had counted on, were missing. There was no more “Sure, I understand, I hope he feels better”—“By God, I got to have his vote!” he rasped to Hennings’ assistant Bernard Fensterwald. “Get him IN HERE!” To other senators’ aides there was a single sentence, delivered in a low, threatening snarl: “Get your fucking senator over here.” Once, in the well, he dispatched Baker to the cloakroom to make a call; Bobby, walking away from him, didn’t move fast enough. With one long step, Lyndon Johnson caught up to him, grabbed each of Baker’s narrow shoulders in a huge hand and shoved him violently up the aisle. Once, Humphrey told a reporter, Johnson, after ordering him to do something and to “get going,” was so impatient that he actually kicked him—hard—in the shins to speed him on his way. (The reporter, Robert S. Allen, thought Humphrey must be exaggerating until “he [Humphrey] added, ‘Look,’ and he pulled up his trouser leg and, sure enough, he had some scars there. He had a couple of scars on his shins where Lyndon had kicked him and said, ‘Get going now.’”)
Some of the senators he needed on his side were still planning to vote the other way. On one vote, the recalcitrants included John Pastore. Talking to the little Rhode Islander, Johnson led him into the cloakroom, where they could not be seen from the galleries. Then he took each of Pastore’s lapels in a hand, pulled the hands together, and lifted them up so that Pastore was held motionless on tiptoe while Johnson brought his face down to stare into his eyes and deliver the argument that way.
The Leader was hurrying back and forth across the Chamber, prowling the aisles, charging up the stairs to the cloakroom—and then, suddenly, the moment was at hand, the moment for which he had been waiting: the number of votes on the tally sheet in his hand was—at last—the number he needed. He would win—if nothing changed. If the senator in the chair was not a thoroughly loyal Johnson man, he quickly put someone in the chair who was. And, prompting him across the well, he hurried the new presiding officer through his paces. Standing next to his Leader’s desk, he would mutter along: “No further amendments…. Third reading of the bill…. The clerk will call the roll….” There might be interruptions from the floor from opponents. The muttering would become a growl—sometimes audible in the gallery. “Out of order!” Lyndon Johnson would prompt. “Out of order!” “Out of order,” the senator in the chair would say. “Call the question,” Lyndon Johnson would prompt. “CALL THE QUESTION!” The question would be called. “Yeas and nays have been ordered. The clerk will call the roll.”
And with those last words, the words that signaled the actual vote, the power of Lyndon Johnson as Majority Leader was fully revealed, for during the six years of his leadership, the Senate of the United States presented, during close and crucial votes, a spectacle such as had never been seen before during the century and a half of its existence.
If all his senators were present when the roll call began, and he could see that there were absentees on the other side, he wanted the roll to be called at a fast pace. If he didn’t have all his men there—if some stragglers hadn’t been found yet—then he wanted the roll call to be slow. And during the years when he was Leader, the roll was called at precisely the pace he desired.
Standing at his front-row center desk, facing the presiding officer and clerk calling the roll, Lyndon Johnson would raise his big right hand, and with a pen or pencil, or simply with a long forefinger, would make those “revving-up circles in the air” that meant, as was said in the Introduction, “hurry up—he had the votes and wanted them recorded” before something changed. When, however, “he didn’t have the votes but would get them if only he had a little more time,” he would make the downward pushing motion with his open hands that meant “slow down.” As senators hurried into the Chamber, many walked down to the well to talk with their colleagues. Standing at the edge of the well, towering over men in it, Lyndon Johnson would raise his long arm over them, making those big circles, like “an orchestra conductor,” leading the United States Senate—the Senate that, for so long, had refused to be led.
Sometimes he would indulge in an even more blatant manifestation of his power. Somehow the vote hadn’t worked out as he had thought it would; he was a vote or two short of victory. So a vote or two would be changed—right out in the open. Johnson would walk across the floor to a senator who had been in opposition, and whisper to him, and the senator would rise and signal the clerk that he had been incorrectly recorded. “You would see votes changed right in front of your eyes,” the Senate aide says. Neil MacNeil, who knew the Senate so well, could hardly believe what he was seeing. “He did it in front of God,” MacNeil was to recall. “It didn’t happen much, but it happened. He was absolutely brazen about it. He put the arm on guys right on the floor.”
Sometimes Johnson would not even bother to walk across the floor. Once he yelled across the well to Frear, who was sitting at his desk: “Change your vote, Allen!” The Senator from Delaware did not immediately respond, so Johnson yelled again, in a shout heard, in the words of one writer, by “more than eighty senators and the galleries”: “Change your vote, Allen!” Allen changed his vote. Small wonder that Hugh Sidey, remembering years later the “tall man” with “his mind attuned to every sight and sound and parliamentary nuance,” who “signaled the roll calls faster or slower,” who gave another “signal, and the door would open, and two more guys would run in,” would say, “My God—running the world! Power enveloped him.”
SOME OF THE TOUCHES that Johnson brought to the role of Leader were merely for dramatic effect. “Often these shows were carefully orchestrated and perhaps even a shade melodramatic,” Bobby Baker was to recall. “He [Johnson] was not only a fine actor but a fine director and producer as well. He delighted in striding about the Senate floor, conferring and frowning and giving the impression of great anxiety, while the packed press gallery and the visitors’ galleries buzzed and hummed with tensions, even though he knew—and I was one of the few people who knew—that he had three decisive votes hidden in some Capitol nook and would produce them at the most effective moment. The Republicans would snort at losing another cliff-hanger, the newspapers would trumpet a new Johnson miracle, and Lyndon Johnson would go off to a fresh Cutty Sark and soda to laugh and laugh.” But, Baker was also to say, “I see nothing wrong” in such “trickeries…. Lyndon Johnson knew that the illusion of power was almost as important as real power itself, that, simply, the more powerful you appeared to be, the more powerful you became. It was one of the reasons for his great success.”
Some of the more perceptive journalists realized that some of the drama they were reporting was staged drama. “Lyndon Johnson played Leader,” Sidey says. But he played the part well—played it better, far better, than anyone had ever played it before, played it as if he was made for it, as if he had been born for the role. And however he got the power, he got it. Doris Kearns Goodwin was not the only writer who was to call Lyndon Johnson “the Master of the Senate,” because that was what he was.
26
“Zip, Zip”
AND WITH THIS POWER, Lyndon Johnson made the Senate work. Thanks to his intervention in the Standing Committees, his coordination of their schedules and his prodding of their chairmen, bills were emerging from committees faster than in the past. And since they were emerging with most points of contention already resolved, on the floor they were being passed faster than in the past.
The reciprocal trade bill was one example. For decades—after the Second World War as before it—the bill’s arrival on the floor had caused the Senate to grind to a halt, sometimes for weeks, as free-trade senators fought protectionists and the protectionists fought among themselves, no fewer than twenty states having products they insisted be protected by tariff, and with the rates of each tariff the subject of separate bargaining.
In 1955, the bargaining had—thanks to Johnson—taken place within the Finance Committee, where the logrolling went far more smoothly than it would have done in public. And with the neces
sary compromises agreed, he had been able to secure a unanimous consent agreement to limit debate. There was still another hurdle, a high one for previous reciprocal trade bills: there was traditionally a roll call on the measure, since there always seemed to be some senators who demanded one, and protectionist senators privately in favor of a bill often voted against it to avoid having to explain an affirmative vote to their constituents. The hurdle was removed for the 1955 bill. Putting a supporter of the bill in the chair, Johnson armed him with a surprise parliamentary tactic. Instead of calling for the yeas and nays whenever there was a show of a few hands requesting one, the presiding officer responded to the request by invoking Article I, Section 5 of the United States Constitution, which said that yeas and nays should be ordered only “at the desire of one-fifth of those present.” And Johnson made sure that there were always enough senators present with instructions not to vote for the roll-call request so that the necessary one-fifth was never achieved. The Reciprocal Trade Act of 1955 passed in three days.
Reciprocal trade was only one example. The Upper Colorado River Reclamation Bill—one of the most vital but controversial measures among westerners—had been brought up in session after session, hotly (and often lengthily) debated, but never passed. In 1955, it, too, passed in three days. The Paris accords, which, as Stewart Alsop wrote, “could have been expected at the very least to have elicited a lot of oratory for the folks at home,” were passed in less than two hours of floor debate. Then there were the dozen departmental appropriation bills, those measures that had been stalling Senate machinery for years—decades, in fact. “Traditionally,” as Alsop wrote, “the agriculture appropriation bill, touching as it does many sensitive farm pocketbooks, is the subject of loud, long and angry argument.” In 1955, “it passed, all but unnoticed, after exactly an hour of debate.”
The other appropriation measures were handled with comparable dispatch—even one, the bill covering the Departments of State and Justice, that was being handled by an Appropriations subcommittee whose chairman, Harley Kilgore, was one of the few chairmen who had refused to coordinate, or even discuss, his subcommittee’s deliberations with Johnson because he viewed such discussions as an infringement on his independence. Despite Kilgore’s secretiveness, Johnson knew exactly what was going on in his subcommittee, and when, near the close of Senate business at the end of one May week, Kilgore suddenly appeared on the floor to announce that his subcommittee had completed its work and had a bill prepared, Johnson was ready. He asked a question to which he already knew the answer: “Was the subcommittee report a unanimous report?” “It was a unanimous report,” Kilgore replied. In that case, Johnson said, the bill would be brought up at the earliest possible moment the next week. He had already discussed that schedule with “the distinguished Minority Leader,” he said; the distinguished Minority Leader had agreed. As for routine business, in a single day, as Newsweek reported, “the Senate passed 90 bills, confirmed an ambassador and a Federal Trade commissioner and then knocked off because it had temporarily run out of business. The elapsed time: four hours and 43 minutes. Washington was jolted to attention.” The first session of the Eighty-fourth Congress, Alsop wrote, “is certainly the most efficiently run session in recent memory.” In less than six months as Majority Leader, the youngest Majority Leader in its history, Lyndon Johnson had tamed the untamable Senate.
ALTHOUGH THE SENATE was running more efficiently, however, it sometimes seemed to be running in opposite directions. But underlying most of its significant actions was a single principle that determined which legislation would be passed—and which wouldn’t. The principle was the ambition of its Leader. As Leader of the majority instead of the minority, Lyndon Johnson’s personal interests affected America’s interests more directly than ever before, and when they conflicted, his interests came first.
Richard Russell had by now made most of the Southern Caucus understand that the way to make the South part of the United States again, “to really put an end to the Civil War,” would be to elect a southerner President, and they understood that their beloved Dick, giving up his own dream, had anointed Lyndon as that southerner. With the unbeatable Eisenhower expected to run again in 1956, victory that year would probably not be possible, but the Democratic nomination might be, and the nominee in 1956 would be a front-runner for the 1960 nomination. And they understood—to those of them slow in grasping the fact, Russell had made them understand—that in order for Johnson to attain the nomination he would first have to be perceived as a strong and successful Senate Leader, and that therefore he would have to have a unified party behind him, and they must bend their views to support him and not simply oppose the Leader’s every attempt to pass even moderately liberal legislation; that they must, in fact, even allow him at times to, in George Reedy’s words, “engage in maneuvers” that would facilitate the passage of legislation with at least a tinge of liberalism, legislation they would never have permitted another Leader to pass.
This understanding had allowed Johnson, again in Reedy’s words, to obtain “elbow room from the Southern Democrats” in his attempts to establish at least a modicum of rapport with Senate liberals. “The Southern dons of the Senate, the conservative men with seniority and power…regarded him with pride as their boy,” Booth Mooney says. “The southerners did not always agree with their Leader, but they wanted him to do well, and when it was necessary, were usually willing to stretch their own convictions to support him.” As Johnson advanced toward a more liberal position, his rear and his flank had therefore been protected against the southern attacks that would normally have made that advance impossible. There was even a symbol of that protection; the fact that as Lyndon Johnson sat in the Senate, the desks directly to his rear and at his side were manned by Russell and Walter George, the two most important southerners. Some of the less senior southerners had even made sacrifices (short-term sacrifices for which they had been assured they would be recompensed in the long term): to help him do well, to help him achieve the unity with liberals he needed, they had agreed that young liberal senators be appointed to committee seats into which they themselves would otherwise have moved through seniority; they had allowed the entrance of Humphrey into high party councils (some southerners still couldn’t understand how they had been talked into that: Harry Byrd said to Johnson one day, “Lyndon, I’ll never understand how in the world you got me to liking Hubert Humphrey so much”). And there were more subtle means of assistance: Johnson was no longer placed in the embarrassing position of attending, or declining to attend, meetings of the Southern Caucus; he simply was no longer invited.
On a number of issues, however, “Dick Russell and His Dixieland Band” would alter their position not an inch—and on those issues, Lyndon Johnson marched to their tune.
On the issue that mattered above all others, the southerners were, as Strom Thurmond’s aide Harry Dent puts it, “just as sure as ever that in his heart he was on their side”—a confidence that was understandable, since added to his eighteen years of votes on their side and his other actions of support for them in the past were the actions he was taking now, in 1955, as Majority Leader.
Almost the first major policy issue that confronted Johnson upon his assumption of the leadership was the issue that would make possible progress in civil rights: the long-dreamed-of change in Rule 22. The Senate liberals who had fought for the change in the past hoped that the liberal Democrats elected in November, 1954, would provide the reinforcements needed to vote it through at last. “We had [a] chance for a significant step forward,” Paul Douglas was to recall. But Johnson crushed the hope, in part, in the opinion of some observers, by making it clear to the newly elected senators that his offer of choice committee seats was contingent upon their support of “the leadership” in the Rule 22 fight (Walter White of the NAACP was to blame the defeat on “shrewd horse-trading over committee memberships”); in part by using Hubert Humphrey to sabotage the liberal caucus from within. After listening to Hump
hrey argue, with his customary eloquence, that the liberals should “abandon the devil theory of history,” stop thinking of Johnson as the devil and give him, now that he was equipped with the new powers of the majority leadership, “a chance to see what he could do with the South,” and to fight for civil rights not through “a frontal assault” on the rules but through the regular Senate committees,” Douglas went along with Humphrey’s pleas to shelve the rules-change motion. He knew almost at once that “we had made a bad mistake,” Douglas was to say. “There was no change in Johnson’s opposition to civil rights and not the slightest softening in the attitude of the South,” which, in fact—emboldened by Johnson’s success—“sharply stiffened its opposition.” Humphrey’s persuasiveness, Douglas was to say with bitterness, may not have resulted in any gains for blacks but it resulted in gains for Humphrey; his “role in this matter sealed his alliance with Johnson.” (Douglas was not alone in this opinion. John Steele informed his editors that in the Rule 22 fight, “behind Humphrey stood the off-stage figure of Lyndon Johnson.”)
Thwarting a new liberal attempt in 1955 to attain another long-sought objective—statehood for Hawaii—was easy for Johnson, but in May came an assault more threatening to those who believed in separation of the races. The black congressman from New York, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., attached to one of the South’s—to one of Richard Russell’s—most cherished proposals, the military reserve bill, an amendment to ban racial segregation in reserve units, and the House of Representatives passed it. The bill was before Russell’s Armed Services Committee, and there it stayed, for as much as Russell wanted a reserve system adopted, the threat to separation of the races was too grave; the Senate might pass the bill without the amendment, but the bill would then eventually be returned to the House, which might reinstate the amendment. Elated by the success of the maneuver, liberals were planning to attach a similar amendment to the school construction bill; House conservatives had responded by holding that measure in committee.
Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson Page 95