Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson

by Robert A. Caro

  By about four o’clock, all the scheduled speeches had been delivered, Humphrey had still not appeared, and Capehart and Knowland were insisting on an immediate vote. Afraid to leave the floor lest a vote be called, Johnson prowled restlessly around the Chamber, glancing at his watch, throwing his troops into the breach—Sparkman rose to provide a lengthy overview of the whole history of public housing—embarking on a series of maneuvers: quorum calls accompanied by the palms-down motion to direct clerks to read the names slowly; a reversal of his previous refusal to allow Prescott Bush to introduce a last-minute amendment that would assist a local Connecticut housing authority (since discussing the amendment would take time). But Capehart couldn’t be stalled much longer. Walking back to the cloakroom door, Johnson shouted to a telephone clerk to get National Airport—not some airline clerk at National Airport but an air traffic controller in the airport’s control tower—on the phone. When the telephone clerk had done so, Johnson, saying, “Mr. President, I must leave the Chamber for a few minutes,” rushed into the cloakroom and grabbed the phone. “Damn it, I’ve got a senator up there,” Johnson shouted to the controller. “He’s two hours overdue and I want him down quick. He’s got to vote. You better be awful sure he’s not stacked up there.” The controller said that Humphrey’s plane was indeed stacked up, in a holding pattern over Pittsburgh; a lot of planes were stacked up in the pattern, the controller said. Johnson stopped shouting. His voice grew quiet and threatening. “Well, you better be goddamned sure none of those planes comes in before his comes in,” he said. After checking to make sure that a Capitol police car was waiting at the airport to rush Humphrey to the Chamber, he returned to the floor, where the debate was droning languidly on. At 5:13 p.m., Humphrey appeared on the floor. A quorum call was in progress; Johnson twirled his index finger, and the names came out faster and faster, and after the call was completed, the vote on the Capehart Amendment began.

  Capehart was sitting complacently at a front-row desk, without a clue to what was about to happen, until the clerk reached the name of Senator Price Daniel of Texas, a staunch opponent of public housing whose vote, Capehart was sure, would be in favor of his amendment.

  “Senator Daniel,” the clerk called.

  “No,” Senator Daniel replied.

  “Capehart’s head jerked around so rapidly I was afraid his neck was going to snap,” George Reedy recalls, and what he saw was another shock. The last time Capehart had looked around, most of the Democratic desks had been empty. They weren’t empty now. Sitting at them were the southerners who he had been certain would support his amendment. And the shock was intensified by their votes, as Capehart’s face showed. “For once it was the literal truth to say that a man’s jaw dropped as southerner after southerner voted against him,” Reedy recalls. Not only Daniel but Ellender, Ervin, Fulbright, George, Gore, Johnston, Kefauver, Kerr Scott, Sparkman, and Stennis (and, of course, Lyndon Johnson himself) voted “No.” Russell and Eastland, of whose votes Capehart had also been confident, abstained. (Had Johnson needed their votes to defeat the amendment, they would have voted “No.”) Smathers, Long, and McClellan had already been lost to Capehart through pairs. Capehart had expected to get eighteen or nineteen votes from the Southern Bloc. He got five. His amendment was defeated, 44 votes to 38.

  “As the vote was announced, ponderous Homer Capehart, who had spent the day predicting his own victory by eight votes, was a slumped-down hulk, a pale-faced man in a rumpled suit at his Senate desk,” John Steele was to report. “Bill Knowland, his face a fiery red, stared stunned at the telltale tally sheet in front of him.”

  Then came the vote on the overall housing bill. Many of the southerners voted against that measure, also, but while their votes on the amendment had been decisive, on the bill itself their opposition had no significance, so overwhelmingly was the rest of the Senate in favor of the measure. It passed 60 to 25. “As soon as the vote was announced,” Reedy recalls, “the Southern Democrats … hastened to the Senate recording facilities where they had themselves plugged in to radio stations all over their home states. There they explained to their constituents that they voted against the Capehart Amendment because it still represented socialism—35,000 units [per year] of it.”

  Liberal senators remained on the Senate floor, because they had something they wanted to say there. Hubert Humphrey thanked “both sides of the aisle” for “making it possible for me to vote in favor of a progressive and decent housing bill,” but said that “most particularly I desire to express profound thanks to the distinguished Majority Leader, my friend, the senior Senator from Texas.”

  “The Senator from Texas,” Humphrey said, “is a genius in the art of the legislative process.” And, Humphrey said, his genius was being used “in behalf of an effective Democratic Party liberal program.” “I know,” he said, “that the purpose of the Senator from Texas is to direct Congress so that its legislative behavior is a humanitarian one, consistent with the basic tenets of the New Deal and the Fair Deal.”

  Fulsome praise of Johnson from Humphrey had become routine in the Senate, so that the words of the next speaker were more meaningful. For the next speaker was Paul Douglas, Douglas who so distrusted Johnson, Douglas who believed that Johnson’s motives were not at all liberal, Douglas who had been denied his rightful committee assignments by Johnson. “I am frank to say I did not think it would be possible to defeat the Capehart Amendment,” Paul Douglas said. “I do not know the precise methods by which the Capehart Amendment was defeated, but it was due to the extraordinary political virtuosity of the leader of the Democratic party in the Senate, and I wish to thank and congratulate him.”

  And more meaningful still was the scene in G-14 an hour or so later, where Johnson was holding court. Among those present were the regulars at such celebrations: Humphrey, Bobby Baker, several members of the Southern Bloc, two or three chosen journalists. But also present was a senator who had not been invited to G-14 since Johnson had evicted him from it.

  Paul Douglas had not wanted to accept Johnson’s invitation, but he felt he had to accept it. He had been fighting for so long for decent apartments to help “the low-income people, the inarticulate people”—to help them “swim against the tide”—fighting without success. Now at one stroke more than half a million apartments had been provided, and, being Paul Douglas, he had to give to the man responsible what he knew the man wanted.

  While Johnson was holding forth, with Baker and Humphrey and the others laughing, loudly, at his jokes, Paul Douglas kept his distance, standing just inside the door. But when Johnson, gloating over the details of his triumph, looked over at Douglas and said, “Well, Paul, you got what you wanted, didn’t you?” Douglas walked over to Johnson’s desk so that he was standing directly in front of him, “grave and dignified,” as Evans and Novak wrote, and said, “I didn’t think you could do it, and I will never know how you did it, but you did it, and I’m grateful.”

  THE NEXT DAY, Wednesday, June 8, the issue was the minimum wage, which hadn’t been increased in six years—it was still the same seventy-five cents per hour it had been in 1949—and neither had the coverage, which liberals had been trying to extend to low-paid employees in the retail and service industries.

  The Eisenhower Administration had proposed a 20 percent increase to ninety cents per hour, but had declined to broaden coverage. Conservative senators like Spessard Holland opposed even that modest increase. Since the Labor Committee subcommittee handling the matter was chaired by Paul Douglas, it was expected that the bill that would be reported out would both broaden coverage and raise the minimum to $1.25. If it did, the bill would therefore contain two provisions that conservatives would not accept, and the bill would therefore not pass and there would be no improvement in the financial situation of low-paid Americans.

  Lyndon Johnson didn’t wait until the bill reached the floor, or even until it reached the full Labor Committee. He began working instead on the subcommittee, where he had only seven se
nators to persuade, and he convinced them to report out a moderate bill calling for a one-dollar minimum wage and no broadening of coverage.

  With liberals determined to hold out for $1.25 and broader coverage and many conservatives opposed even to the one-dollar figure (one conservative, Republican H. Alexander Smith of New Jersey, was preparing an amendment that would raise it only to the ninety cents the Administration wanted) there were enough liberals and conservatives opposed to the bill so that it appeared that the 1955 minimum wage scenario would follow the scenario of previous years, and that at the end of the day, no bill would be passed.

  The scenario was to be rewritten in 1955, however, thanks to those eyes that “missed nothing” on the floor.

  That Wednesday, trying to avoid a floor fight that would not only split the Democrats but dramatize the split to the world, Lyndon Johnson had been working for a compromise—passage of Smith’s proposed ninety-cent amendment and of the rest of the Labor Committee bill, with its status quo coverage—and had been trying to get enough votes for this strategy by playing on the worst fears of both sides, telling liberals that he had counted votes and if they didn’t settle for ninety cents, there would be no increase at all, telling conservatives that he had counted votes and if they didn’t settle for ninety cents, they might find the minimum wage increased to $1.25. “The cloakroom was just jammed…. We knew what he was telling both sides, but there was just enough credibility in it—he was a master,” says one Senate aide. And he had apparently succeeded. The Smith Amendment, and the rest of the Labor Committee bill, was going to pass.

  And then, all at once, Lyndon Johnson, standing next to his desk as he managed the bill under the unanimous consent agreement he had negotiated, noticed something. Under that agreement, two hours had been allocated to discussion of the Smith Amendment. The Republican arguments in favor of it had been completed, but the Democratic hour was just beginning. Not expecting a vote for an hour, senators had begun wandering on and off the floor. All at once, although there were still a substantial number of senators on the floor, that number did not include most of the liberals who opposed the Labor subcommittee bill—or most of the conservatives who opposed the bill. By coincidence, at that moment the bill’s strongest opponents all happened to be gone at the same time, leaving on the floor mostly moderates who were willing to settle for an unamended bill—no broadening of coverage but an increase to one dollar in the wage—in the form the Labor Committee had reported.

  “I think we’ll pass that minimum wage bill now,” he told Hubert Humphrey, with whom he had been talking.

  It happened very quickly.

  “Mr. President,” Johnson said. The presiding officer recognized him. “I yield myself such time as I may require,” Johnson said, speaking fast. “The committee considered this question long and thoroughly. I am hopeful that we shall not start amending the bill. I yield back the remainder of my time, and ask for a vote.”

  “All time on the amendment has been used or yielded back,” the presiding officer said, and called for a vote. It was a voice vote, and the amendment was defeated. Suddenly, the pending matter was the unamended bill itself. “The bill having been read the third time, the question is, Shall it pass?” the presiding officer said. No Republicans were waiting to speak, and Knowland yielded back his remaining time. “Mr. President,” Johnson said, “I yield back the remainder of my time.” A voice vote was taken, and the chair announced that the bill was passed.

  “Zip, zip,” Humphrey was to recall. “He called it up, and it passed just like that—voice vote—zip.” Lister Hill, the Labor Committee Chairman, was in the cloakroom at the time, and did not even know what was happening. Herbert Lehman happened to wander onto the floor as the clerk was announcing that the bill had passed. “What’s the vote on?” he asked. Told that it had been on the minimum wage bill, Lehman was “speechless.” Spessard Holland wasn’t. “Boy, oh, boy, Spessard Holland came charging out of the Senate dining room, and he wanted to know what had happened here,” Humphrey would recall. “Oh, he was just jumping, screaming, hollering and pounding the desk. Johnson said, ‘Well, Spessard, I had a little vote. If you fellows aren’t on the job around here, I’ve got legislation to pass.’ He just slipped it right on through there. Zip! Oh boy, they were furious with him.”

  While both sides were furious, however, the fury of the liberal side was tempered by the realization that not only had an increase in the minimum wage finally been achieved, the increase to a dollar was higher than the ninety-cent increase that the Administration had proposed. As Reedy was to say, “Obviously we were proceeding on the ‘half a loaf’ theory. But it seems to me that the scoffers must be men and women who have never been hungry.”

  Among those who agreed was old Matthew Neely, whose state of West Virginia was home to tens of thousands of coal miners who had just had their wages increased by a third. Rising stiffly at his desk, Neely said, “This has been a senatorial red-letter day for labor. With a minimum of debate, a maximum of efficiency and a majestic measure of humanity, we have [increased] the minimum wage from 75 cents to a dollar an hour. This action will cause rejoicing in thousands of American homes.”

  “Some of us had hoped the amount would be somewhat larger,” Hubert Humphrey said. “But surely, by this very decisive action in the Senate, we have raised the economic levels of vast numbers of persons.” And among those who agreed was Paul Douglas. Passage of the minimum wage bill had confirmed the feelings about Lyndon Johnson that Douglas had expressed the previous day after the passage of the housing bill. “I was against him for Leader, but I think I was wrong,” he told his administrative assistant, Frank McCulloch. “I think now he’s the best man for the job.”

  The last time a minimum wage bill had been before the Senate, Lyndon Johnson had voted against increasing it. Now he had fought for an increase in the wage—and the wage had been increased. Whatever the reason for his change on that issue, he had changed—and had made the Senate change with him. Whether or not Lyndon Johnson talked about “principled things,” or believed in “principled things”—and in both the public housing and minimum wage fights he had all but ignored the issues and concentrated on maneuvers—he had won principled things, for hundreds of thousands of Americans who needed those things. The slickness of Johnson’s maneuver had senators laughing among themselves as they walked out of the Chamber, but the liberals had much more reason to laugh. Lyndon Johnson had not only made the Senate work, he had, in at least two areas of social welfare legislation, made it work on behalf of that legislation. For so many decades—generations—the Senate had stood against such legislation like a dam. The dam was being breached now.

  “THE TALK OF POLITICAL WASHINGTON today is the way Lyndon Johnson runs the Senate,” Leslie Carpenter wrote in his column on June 12, and the talk, and the print, now ranged all across the political spectrum. Conservative Gould Lincoln’s “The Political Mill” ground for him in the Washington Star. Under the headline “LYNDON MOVES MOUNTAINS,” Lincoln wrote that “The Senate, which so often has been the stumbling block over which legislation has fallen by the wayside, has set a pace rarely equaled—All this hasn’t just happened. There’s a tall Texan in the saddle….” The Wall Street Journal ordered up a long article on “the Texas-sized Texan” who “RUNS THE SMOOTHEST DEMOCRATIC SHOW IN YEARS.” Johnson had been enjoying praise from conservatives all year, but now, following the passage of the housing and minimum wage bills, liberals joined them on the Johnson bandwagon. “On several occasions in the past this newspaper has been critical of Senator Johnson’s leadership,” the Washington Post editorialized. “We are happy to say that in this session of Congress, he has exhibited a remarkable amount of finesse, understanding and restraint [and] has served the national interest.” Declaring that Johnson had “snatched victory from defeat” with “brilliant political technique,” Doris Fleeson added: “Admiring spectators suggested that all that remains is for him to do his next triumphs to music.” Drew Pears
on praised “the deftness of [his] leadership.” A long Newsweek article on June 27 called him “THE TEXAN WHO IS JOLTING WASHINGTON.”

  “The Frantic Gentleman from Texas,” Saturday Evening Post, May 19, 1951

  The Monday Meeting: President Harry Truman poses at the White House with his congressional leaders. Seated: Senate Majority Leader Ernest McFarland, Truman, and House Majority Leader John W. McCormack. Standing: Senate Whip Lyndon Johnson and House Whip Percy Priest, January, 1951.

  The cover Johnson wanted

  Leland Olds, September, 1949

  With the Republican leaders. Above: Robert Taft of Ohio. Below: William Knowland of California

  President Dwight D. Eisenhower with Johnson and Senate and House leaders, on the White House steps, 1955

  In the middle: Johnson with Hubert H. Humphrey and Richard B. Russell

  WORKING THE PHONES

  Bobby Baker

  Theodore Francis Green

  Allen Ellender

  Leverett Saltonstall

  Scott Lucas

  THE JOHNSON TREATMENT

  Sam Ervin (seated, Alan Bible and Herman Talmadge)

  Johnson campaigning in 1954 with George Reedy and Dorothy Nichols

  Democratic National Convention, August, 1956: Estes Kefauver, Truman, Adlai Stevenson, and Johnson

  Strolling the halls after the 1958 State of the Union Address, with William Knowland; ahead of them are Vice President Richard Nixon and Senator Carl Hayden.