Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson

by Robert A. Caro

  With the loneliness becoming unbearable to him, Johnson began to invite visitors to the ranch—senators and journalists, and others important to him; the first visitors would be Adlai Stevenson, still the leading candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, who was going to speak at the University of Texas on September 29, and Sam Rayburn, who would introduce him—the two men had agreed to drive out to the Johnson Ranch after the speech and spend the night. So many people were invited that the five upstairs bedrooms, several of which were already occupied by staff members, would not be sufficient; while the pool was still being built, another construction project was begun: a four-room guest house.

  Johnson had, furthermore, resumed, as avidly as ever, his quest for money. He did it with his customary circumspection. When E. L. Kurth gave him a prize Brahma bull, named “Johnson’s Manso,” the papers were sent not to him but to A. W. Moursund, and Moursund was at the ranch almost every day. And he did it with his customary energy. During this period, while he was publicly proclaiming—over and over—his devotion to rest and relaxation, he was working at a headlong pace to add new advertising revenues for his radio and television stations, calling Edwin Weisl Sr., Hearst Newspapers counsel, in New York to bring pressure on some advertisers, using Jenkins to bring pressure on others (“I don’t want to leave the impression that we muscled people to come [as advertisers], but we did try to call it to their attention that we had the space available or the time available and could use the programming,” Jenkins would say). And he was adding new stations. “That summer he had a little time on his hands, of course, and we decided that we wanted to go and buy another station or perhaps two stations,” Jenkins recalls. The station Johnson decided to buy was KANG in Waco, and he conducted the negotiations for that property with the old Johnson touch, bargaining with the owners for a favorable price while gently obtaining from compliant FCC Chairman Bartley advance knowledge of upcoming FCC decisions that would make KANG much more profitable for him than it would ever have been for them, and keeping that knowledge secret so that they would sell to him at a lower price. “Lyndon made a lot of money that summer,” Arthur Stehling says. And he was entering new fields as well, buying up stock in the Johnson City Bank and other little Hill Country banks. He took his naps religiously, but woke up from them running—as fast as before. His pace, in fact, seemed to be even faster now. Asked years later, “Did the heart attack slow down Johnson?” George Reedy replied: “It speeded him up if anything.”

  THEN, IN SEPTEMBER, the political landscape changed—dramatically. Dwight Eisenhower was at the very peak of his enormous popularity. In July, at a top-level conference in Geneva with British Prime Minister Anthony Eden, French Premier Edgar Faure, and the two Russian leaders, Nikita Khrushchev and Nikolai Bulganin (Winston Churchill had coined a word for such a meeting; he called it a “summit”), Ike’s broad, open grin and his apparent candor and earnest desire for peace had won the hearts of Europeans, and his proposal for an “Open Skies” aerial inspection treaty to reduce the threat of nuclear war had captured the world’s imagination. As he was flying home in triumph aboard the Columbine, Gallup pollsters were finding that no less than four out of five Americans approved of his performance as President. And then, on September 24, he suffered a heart attack while on a golfing vacation in Denver.

  Ike’s attack, a coronary thrombosis, was more serious than Johnson’s, and Eisenhower, just three weeks short of his sixty-fifth birthday, was almost eighteen years older. The Democratic National Convention was less than a year away, and the general assumption in Washington, an assumption that endured for months, was that the President would not run for another term. Lyndon Johnson, who during the next three days would telephone Eisenhower’s press secretary, Jim Hagerty, two or three times a day to express concern and ask how the President was doing (thereafter, he would be given daily reports by Jerry Persons), was almost instantly running for the prize he had always sought.

  The strategy he evolved—in talks with no one, lying deep in thought on the recliner or walking deep in thought along the path next to the Pedernales—was the strategy Richard Russell had used in 1952, but with a crucial difference. With Russell having removed himself from the picture, Johnson believed he would be the candidate of a solid South, with its 262 votes in the 1,200-vote convention. And he believed that because of the firm ties he had forged with western and border-state senators, he could do what Russell had not been able to do—collect enough votes from these states to give him a substantial bloc at the convention.

  At the moment, Stevenson had most of the southern votes, as the least of three evils, the others being Kefauver and the New York liberal Harriman. If none of these three men could get a majority of the convention, it would be stalemated, and the nomination could well go to a fourth, “compromise,” candidate, if this candidate had a substantial, solid bloc of votes behind him.

  The first requirement was that southern support be stripped away from Stevenson. That would be accomplished by Johnson’s entry into the race. The second was that both Stevenson and Kefauver be stopped—preferably that they kill each other off. The third was that Johnson position himself to be a candidate. And there was an additional, urgent, requirement: that Johnson do so without becoming a candidate openly. An announcement that he was running would rouse northeastern Democrats and liberals across the country, distrustful of him because of his past pro-southern positions, to organize a “Stop Johnson” movement and effectively destroy his candidacy before the convention so that he would not be able to become a compromise choice there. His effectiveness as the Democratic Senate Leader would be undermined as well; as Tommy Corcoran was to explain, “If his colleagues thought he was pushing all those programs to get a track record for a presidential race, they’d scatter every time he called a caucus.” He should go to the convention, he decided, as Texas’ favorite-son candidate. That way, his name would be placed before the convention—but in such a fashion that he could claim he was not a serious candidate but was only trying to hold his state’s vote until its delegation determined which of the other candidates to support. And to make sure he held the delegation’s vote, he decided, he should also be its chairman.

  BY COINCIDENCE, the perfect opportunity to implement this strategy was immediately to hand: that already scheduled visit, just five days after Eisenhower’s heart attack, by Adlai Stevenson and Sam Rayburn.

  The visit had originally been thought of—by both Johnson and Stevenson—as little more than a courtesy call. Now, however, there were consequential matters to discuss. Johnson wanted them discussed in secret, but someone in Austin learned that Stevenson and Rayburn would be going out to the Johnson Ranch after the speech, and George Reedy had to telephone Johnson from Austin to inform him that a large contingent of reporters could be expected the following morning.

  Johnson’s reaction was rage: an old-time explosion that “could be felt all the way to Austin,” that was so violent that Reedy “started being afraid that he was going to bring on another heart attack and die,” and that didn’t subside for hours; at midnight, Reedy got another call—from Lady Bird, “just begging me to keep the press from going out to [the ranch].” “She was just crying, just crying. Apparently the people out at the ranch were like a family would be during the Black Death in Europe.” Explaining that while reporters could be barred from the ranch itself—“That’s private property”—nobody could keep them from standing on the public highway right outside the gates “and talking to people going in and out,” he advised her to allow them on the ranch instead of letting them “use their imaginations as to what happened.”

  Rayburn, Grace Tully (along for symbolism), Stevenson, and Stevenson’s aide Newton Minow arrived about eleven o’clock at night, expecting to find a man recuperating from a heart attack already asleep. Instead he was waiting for them in front of his house. And the discussion among the three leading figures in the Democratic Party, held on the porch, under a huge Hill Country moon and
a sky filled with stars, lasted until well past midnight.

  Among the subjects of discussion was how to handle the press the next day. The reporters, Johnson said with his usual hyperbole, “think that you, Adlai, and you, Mr. Sam, and I are here plotting to take over the government while Ike is dying. We’re not going to let them do that.” And the next morning was, to Reedy, who had spent a very worried night, another “Lyndon Johnson paradox,” with his boss the most gracious of hosts. Coming out onto the front porch at 6:30 a.m., while his guests were still asleep, Johnson found a crowd of newsreel, newspaper and radio reporters on his front lawn. “Are you going to throw me off, Senator?” Dave Cheavens asked. “Of course not,” Lyndon Johnson said, with a laugh and a broad smile. Walking over to his station wagon and saying, “Hop in,” he took a half dozen reporters, with the others following in their own cars, on a forty-minute tour of the ranch. When they returned, Stevenson was outside, and Johnson beckoned him to come over to the barn, then walked ahead of him, noticeably faster than usual with his long strides so that Stevenson was forced to trot to keep up. He loaded Stevenson into an electric golf cart, in which the two men zoomed along the concrete walk past the herd of white-faced Herefords near the river, and when Rayburn emerged from the house, the three men had a Texas ranch breakfast: orange juice, Pecos cantaloupe, scrambled eggs, bacon, venison sausage, hominy grits, popovers, and coffee. “Please,” said Stevenson after the meal. “Let’s skip lunch.” Then they sat down on three chairs on the lawn, the journalists crowded around, and a press conference was held.

  Rayburn didn’t do much talking, sitting with no expression at all on his face, declining to smile for the cameras, and Stevenson wasn’t required to do much, either. When, asked if he thought Texas would return to the Democratic column in 1956, he started to reply, Johnson cut him off. “I think Mr. Rayburn and myself are in a better position to answer that question,” he said. “Texas will be in the Democratic column.” “Who am I to contradict?” Adlai said with a smile. When, at the end of the conference, a reporter asked Stevenson if he was planning to return to Texas, he said, “I’d like to come back to Texas and either talk or listen—whatever they’ll permit me to do.” All three men said that they had agreed not to take advantage of President Eisenhower’s illness. Johnson and Stevenson said the visit had been just a purely social call. Stevenson had the grace to make the statement with a slight smile, which seemed to suggest that everyone there knew he was saying what had to be said, and when pressed on whether any politics had been discussed, he said, “I am in the presence of politicians, and it is possible the talk may have reverted to politics.” Johnson, however, insisted that his statement be believed. “It was purely a social visit with an old friend,” he said firmly, and his elaboration on this point was summed up by Time: “No politics had been discussed, said Johnson, and as far as he was concerned none were going to be. The visit had absolutely no relationship to any political situation arising from Eisenhower’s illness.”

  The visit had not been purely social, naturally. Stevenson had been “pointedly advised by Senator Johnson,” as William White was later to report, that he must contest Kefauver in at least one or two state primaries in order to prove he was more popular. This course might well lead Stevenson into a trap “in the light of [Kefauver’s] demonstrated skill in that type of campaigning,” White noted; should Stevenson “fail to score heavily in the primaries, he then would be only one of several candidates” and “no longer the odds-on favorite at the convention.” Aware of that danger, Stevenson told Minow on the flight back to Chicago that “I’m not going to do it. If the party wants me, I’ll run again, but I’m not going to run around like I did before to all those shopping centers like I’m running for sheriff. The hell with it.” Johnson’s “advice,” however, had been accompanied by a subtly worded warning about what might happen if it was not followed: in White’s phrase, if Adlai entered the primaries, “no all-out ‘Stop Stevenson’ movement would be likely to arise at the Convention.” And in the event, the advice was followed.

  Texas’ powerful and reactionary governor, Allan Shivers, had expected to be chairman of the state’s delegation, but Johnson had on his side the only man in Texas capable of breaking Shivers’ hold on the state, and Sam Rayburn was willing to do so because, he believed, Shivers had in 1952 committed the sin that was unpardonable to this man to whom “there are no degrees in honorableness—you are or you aren’t”: he had broken his word to him, promising to support Stevenson and then throwing the state to Eisenhower. After Stevenson left the ranch, Johnson apparently told Rayburn—Rayburn was shortly to repeat the conversation to Tommy Corcoran and Jim Rowe when they visited him on his ranch in Bonham—that he knew he couldn’t win the Democratic presidential nomination, but that he wanted to try for it at the convention so that he would be in a stronger position to get the vice presidential nomination—which would put him ahead of the field for the top spot in 1960.

  Feeling that Stevenson had the nomination sewn up, and aware of the depth of liberal antipathy to Johnson, Rayburn was not enthusiastic about Johnson’s candidacy, believing it would split his beloved party after fate—Dwight Eisenhower’s heart attack—had handed it a chance to retake the White House. Although he had little more respect for Stevenson than Johnson did, he wanted a short, harmonious convention. In addition, loving Johnson, he didn’t want him running so soon after his heart attack.

  But, loving Johnson, Sam Rayburn knew what Lyndon really wanted (not for a minute, Corcoran and Rowe understood, did Mr. Sam believe that what Johnson was aiming for was the second spot on the ticket), and he knew how much he wanted it. He agreed to help. Rowe was to write Johnson in a very confidential letter that at Bonham “he spoke of you, as he often does to me, with a certain amount of pride in you and also with some hedging, like an over-fond uncle who thinks his favorite nephew should get a lot more spankings than he does.” Rayburn told the two Washington insiders that he had “regretted agreeing” to Johnson’s proposals “as soon as he left” the LBJ Ranch. “He made it clear that… he wants a quick convention giving the nomination to Stevenson, so that the Democrats don’t get themselves in a first-class row…. He felt that you were making a serious error in forming the Southern coalition because it meant that you would become the prime target of the Northerners.” And Rayburn told the two Washingtonians that if what Johnson wanted was really the second spot, “he, Rayburn, could get it for you by himself and without any trouble.” (Tommy Corcoran asked him how he would do that. Years later, Tommy the Cork would recall Rayburn’s reply. “Sam just looked at me, for a long time, and said, ‘I will go to him [Stevenson] and ask him for it.’ But it wasn’t what he said, but the way he looked when he said it. That was the end of that conversation. I thought, ‘God help Adlai if he tries to take on Mr. Sam.’”) In his contemporaneous letter reporting the conversation with Rayburn, Rowe, who was not given to reporting facial expressions, wrote Johnson that Rayburn had said “he would go to Stevenson and demand it and he knew he would get it.” But he had agreed to Johnson’s proposals, had given his word. Shivers was loudly vowing to fight for the delegation chairmanship; Sam Rayburn simply said to reporters, “Lyndon will be Texas’s ‘favorite son’ for President at this year’s convention and he will also serve as chairman of the Texas delegation to that convention.” And that was the way that, after a brutal fight, it turned out.

  THE REACTION TO Dwight Eisenhower’s heart attack emphasized to Lyndon Johnson the gulf between where he was and where he wanted to be: the fact that while a Senate Leader might be big news in Washington, and to some extent in New York, he was decidedly less big—indeed, not even particularly well known, compared to the President—in the rest of the country. The Dow Jones Industrial Average plummeted, in its most disastrous day since the Crash of 1929; losses were estimated at more than $12 billion. There had not been a tremor in the stock market on the news of his own attack. He had been so proud that the number of letters and telegrams he h
ad received had eventually risen to seven thousand. The White House received tens of thousands of letters and telegrams every day. Bulletins about the President’s condition were on newspaper front pages day after day; his cardiologist, Paul Dudley White, of Boston, became the most famous physician in the country, his every pronouncement analyzed and reanalyzed by columnists for clues as to whether Ike could run again. (Question: “Is your answer yes?” Dr. White: “I would say that it is up to him.” Question: “Did you say he would be physically able to do it?” Dr. White: “Oh yes…. But many things are possible that may not be advisable. If I were in his shoes I wouldn’t want to run again, having seen the strain.”) After an Eisenhower press conference on January 8, 1956, newsmen would conclude by four to one that Ike would not stand for re-election; not until later that month did the President begin to hint that he would run again.