Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson

by Robert A. Caro

  And all during that fall and winter of 1955, the jangle of telephones and the clatter of typewriters were not the only additions to that still, quiet Pedernales landscape; there were plumes of dust in the air, fast-moving plumes from cars carrying visitors from the Austin and Fredericksburg airports to the LBJ Ranch along unpaved Hill Country roads. The flow of visitors increased: Russell, Clements, Symington, Fulbright, Price Daniel, George Smathers, John Connally, Bobby Baker—so many that Reedy could tell Johnson that his ranch had become his party’s “political capital.” Polls were telling Johnson one story, Gallup’s reporting that Stevenson was the favorite of 39 percent of Democratic voters, Kefauver of 33 percent, Harriman of 6 percent, and Johnson of only 3 percent, several other polls listing him only among the “other candidates” favored by less than 1 percent of the respondents. A survey of Democratic county chairmen showed him far behind Stevenson and Kefauver even among the 573 chairmen in the South. In the rest of the country he was the favorite of hardly any county chairmen at all: of only four out of 567 in the Midwest, of only six out of 214 in the West. And of the 142 chairmen in the East, not one preferred Lyndon Johnson for President. But he was telling himself another story. “The backing and filling around the candidacy of Adlai Stevenson … is by this time not merely obvious but blatant,” Doris Fleeson wrote. “Its basic cause, of course, is that Democrats now think they can win,” but not with Stevenson as the candidate. If the South’s county chairmen were not solidly behind Johnson, the South’s senators were, and other elements of a southern-border-state-western coalition seemed to be falling into place. Asked during a visit to the LBJ Ranch if Oklahoma might join Texas in making Johnson a favorite son, Senator Bob Kerr replied that “Outside of football, there is no state Oklahoma would rather go along with than Texas and no subject on which it would be easier to reach agreement.” Montana’s Mansfield said it was a “reasonable assumption” that Johnson “might become a figure around whom Southern and Western Democrats could rally.” “Here [on the Johnson Ranch] is where the southern bloc is being organized,” Richard Strout wrote in The New Republic. “Before the Roosevelt Revolution, the South had a two-thirds convention rule that gave Dixie something of a veto power over the candidate. Now the effort is being made to organize the same device, in effect, through the offices of Senator Johnson.” White wrote in the Times that “Some of the Democratic professionals are maneuvering to gain for the South and conservatives generally an extraordinary and conceivably even a decisive influence on the Democratic national convention next year. The unofficial and unlabelled headquarters for this effort is the LBJ Ranch on the Pedernales River.”

  THE REACTION OF DEMOCRATIC LIBERALS—“growing resentment,” in a Times phrase—to these reports reinforced Johnson’s conviction that they would organize against him if he became an open candidate, and his denials were piously emphatic. Attacking “unjustified presumptions” in the press, he declared that his ranch “has not been a meeting place for discussions or evaluations or planning the strategy of any Democratic nominee,” and added that “It would be unfair and improper for a trustee of the party to set himself up as a kingmaker.”

  Corcoran had come to the ranch bearing the offer of a substantial gift—from a man who had the power to make one: Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. In a meeting in New York, the Ambassador instructed Corcoran to tell Johnson that if he would publicly enter the race for the nomination, and would privately promise that if he won, he would select Jack Kennedy as his running mate, Joe Kennedy would arrange the financing for the ticket. If Johnson was not running, the Ambassador said, he would support Stevenson.

  This offer revealed at least two drastic underestimations on the Ambassador’s part: first, about the extent of Johnson’s own financing, and, second, about Johnson’s political acumen. No sooner were the words of the offer out of his mouth, Corcoran saw, than Johnson understood the reasoning behind it: old Joe Kennedy was betting that Eisenhower would run again (in which case he would, of course, win again). The Democratic vice presidential nomination would give young, relatively unknown Jack Kennedy the national recognition he needed to give him a running start at the 1960 presidential nomination. And it would be more desirable for that candidacy to be on a Johnson rather than on a Stevenson ticket; Adlai, old Joe felt, would lose in a landslide, and an overwhelming defeat would be attributed partly to the Catholicism of his running mate, a belief which would damage Kennedy’s chances in 1960. Johnson, the Ambassador believed, would lose, but in a much closer race.

  Johnson didn’t believe that Jack Kennedy would have a serious chance in 1960. “He never said a word of importance in the Senate and he never did a thing,” he was to recall later. And the young senator was also, in Johnson’s words, obviously seriously ill, “malaria-ridden and yellah, sickly, sickly.” But there was no point in improving Kennedy’s chances—and it was important that his own candidacy in 1956 not be made public. “Lyndon told me he wasn’t running, and I told Joe,” Corcoran recalls. Joe then telephoned Lyndon himself, making the same offer, and was turned down; Johnson was to recall telling the Ambassador that “I did not wish to be a candidate.”

  “Young Bobby [Robert F. Kennedy] was infuriated,” Corcoran was to recall. “He believed it was unforgivably discourteous to turn down his father’s generous offer.” Jack, Corcoran was to recall, was more circumspect. He called me down to his office…. ‘Listen, Tommy,’ Jack said, ‘we made an honest offer to Lyndon Johnson through you. He turned us down. Can you tell us this: Is Lyndon Johnson running without us? … Is he running?’” “‘Of course he is,’” Corcoran replied. “‘He may not think he is. And certainly he’s saying he isn’t. But I know goddamned well he is. I’m sorry that he doesn’t know it.’”

  He did know it, of course. He was running harder than ever—so hard, in fact, that his doctors, worried, tried to slow him down. When Dr. Cain did not hear from Johnson for “three or four weeks,” he understood why—“I am sure his reluctance to write is related to the fact that he knows I might fuss at him for doing too much…. He is doing too much and thinking too much”—and, finally, on November 19, he wrote him. “Lyndon, you have come along very well following this heart attack and, as I have said all along, I have every hope that you are going to be completely all right.” But, he said, “I just want to offer a word of warning and a suggestion that you slow down some.”

  But they couldn’t slow him down. One of Reedy’s memos had spoken of a need for Johnson to demonstrate that he was “back in the saddle again.” The phrase caught Johnson’s fancy, and he provided the demonstration by returning to the national stage with a speech, his first since his heart attack, in the little Texas town of Whitney (as he appeared on stage, a band struck up the song “Back in the Saddle Again”). The speech announced his program—he called it “A Program with a Heart” (get it?)—for the upcoming congressional session, a list of thirteen proposals which he said would be submitted to the Democratic Policy Committee “in the hope that they can be brought before the Senate, considered and acted upon by the Senate.” Twelve of the proposals were acceptable to liberals—broadening of Social Security coverage, increased federal funding of medical research, school construction, highways and housing, for example—including the one civil rights proposal that southerners would tolerate: a constitutional amendment to eliminate the poll tax. The thirteenth, listed as Number 7 because Johnson believed that if it was buried smack in the middle of the list it had its best chance to escape notice, was the price he was paying for the Texas conservatives’ support: “A natural gas bill that will preserve free enterprise.” (Johnson said that “of course” the bill would also provide protection to consumers.) A number of editorials noted that, as the Baltimore Sun pointed out, “on a good many of the issues the Republicans have already been there,” and somehow liberals managed to find, and understand, even Number 7: “Senator Johnson’s ‘of course’ will not be accepted by many of his colleagues in the Senate who feel that the 1955 Johnson natural gas bil
l… was just a gimmick to make Texas gas millionaires richer at the expense of northern consumers,” the Washington Star commented. On the whole, however, his return from death’s door was greeted so enthusiastically that Dorothy Nichols, mailing a packet of press clippings to the ranch, wrote, “It looks like in the eyes of the press and the nation you have reached a spot where you can do no wrong. How fine!”

  Johnson had said repeatedly that he would defer a decision on resuming the majority leadership until after a complete checkup by Dr. Hurst at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta on December 14 and then by a team of doctors at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. But he couldn’t wait. More and more senators—Kerr Scott of North Carolina, Humphrey, Styles Bridges—were coming to the ranch, as were television executives and lobbyists like Scoop Russell of NBC, and when they returned to Washington, they reported, as Robert Albright wrote in the Washington Post on November 27, that Johnson “is talking in terms of the same personally run floor show he successfully conducted last year…. Delegations of authority will be few. To friends who inquire if he is well enough, Johnson retorts that he would ‘rather wear out than rust out.’” And the private meetings grew only more numerous: day after day, pilot Reg Robbins would put down on Wesley West’s landing strip, where no unwanted eye could see, and keep the engines idling. The big white Lincoln Continental would pull up, and the tall, gangling figure of the Majority Leader of the United States Senate would climb out and climb aboard, and the Brown & Root DC-3 would take off, for the quiet conferences in 8-F in Houston or in the messy suite at the Fort Worth Club, or for Fort Clark or St. Joe. And at least once, on November 29, Robbins headed west to California, where Lyndon Johnson gave a speech before the American Hotel Association (“The Democrats will take everything from the courthouse to the White House,” he predicted), then met in the Beverly Hills Hotel with a representative of Howard Hughes, with whom he was on a “hard cash, adult basis,” and who had to be made to understand that five thousand a year wasn’t what was needed now—that “real money” was going to be required in 1956—and on the way back the DC-3 made a stop in Las Vegas, to see Hughes himself.

  The private maneuvering behind the Senate scenes intensified, too. In late November, Estes Kefauver arrived at the ranch, where, on a hunting trip with Johnson, the Tennessean got a ten-point buck “right through the heart” at about three hundred paces with a rifle with a telescopic lens. Outwardly, all was friendliness but, unknown to Kefauver, Johnson was taking steps to deny him the position from which he was hoping to garner publicity during the upcoming Senate session. Judiciary Chairman Harley Kilgore had promised Kefauver the chairmanship of the subcommittee to investigate monopolies, which Kefauver could use to investigate the Dixon-Yates contract. But now, Drew Pearson reported, Johnson “laid down the law to Kilgore”: if Kefauver was given the subcommittee chairmanship, Judiciary’s budget would be cut to the bone.

  So caught up was Johnson in the race he was running now that, once again, as for most of his life, dates meant nothing to him; trying to set up a conference with Adlai Stevenson or his campaign manager, Tom Finnegan, he scribbled a note to Stevenson: “I’d like to see you or Finnegan [on] Dec. 25th.” If there was a reason that the December 25 page in his appointment book had been blank, the reason didn’t seem to cross Lyndon Johnson’s mind.

  THERE WAS ONE ADDITIONAL REMINDER of his youth that autumn. The 1955 Homecoming Day celebration of Southwest Texas State Teachers College at San Marcos had been named “Lyndon Johnson Day” and the college’s “most illustrious graduate” gave the principal address in Cecil E. Evans Auditorium, and afterwards sat on a reviewing stand as floats, decorated by fraternities and sororities, chronicling his triumphant political career passed by. Johnson’s feelings on that day may not have been solely of triumph, however. On the platform with him were the two former deans, Tom Nichols and H. E. Speck, who had with razor blades cut out of every copy of the 1930 college yearbook, The Pedagog, they could find the pages that referred to “Bull” (for Bullshit) Johnson, and that set down in print other aspects of his fellow students’ disdain for him. Also on the platform were several fellow members of the Class of 1930 who had used that nickname freely to Johnson’s face—and whose feelings, in some cases, had not been blunted by time; the member of the class selected to give a talk about Johnson was Vernon Whiteside, who took delight, every time he met Johnson, in reminding him of mean tricks he had played or elections he had stolen during his student days. Also on the platform was the college’s librarian, Ethel Davis. She was the sister of Carol Davis, daughter of the richest man in San Marcos, whom Lyndon Johnson had courted avidly, with a determination to marry for money so unconcealed that The Pedagog had mocked it in print, but whose father had held the Johnson clan in contempt—Carol Davis who had broken with Lyndon because “I knew I couldn’t go against my father’s wishes.”

  ON DECEMBER 11, three days before the “definitive” medical checkups, the DC-3 took off from the Wesley West airstrip, but not to either Atlanta or Rochester. Lyndon Johnson, accompanied by his wife, cook, masseur, dietitian, and chauffeur, was flying to Washington. He had dinner at Thirtieth Place with Richard Russell. The next day, Gene Williams drove him down to Capitol Hill, the first time he had returned there since his heart attack, and he held a standing-room-only press conference attended by 125 reporters. The reporters were astonished by the transformation in Johnson’s physical appearance. Tanned, trim (he weighed “about 170 pounds”—about fifty-five pounds less than he had weighed the last time they had seen him) and handsome, he seemed bursting with energy and confidence. Edward J. Milne of the Providence Bulletin, who interviewed him in G-14, described how Johnson sat “with his feet crossed on the desk top as if to prove how relaxed he is, but with a frequent tapping of fingers on chair arm hinting at all the old, restless tension.” Before the press conference, he had met with Senators Murray, Mansfield, Hayden, and Anderson, with lobbyists Clark Clifford, Corcoran, and Rowe, and with columnist Fleeson. After the press conference he met with Justice Douglas, then had dinner with Averell Harriman. Only then did he fly to see his doctors, accompanied by Reedy and Russell and talking presidential strategy all the way. After examining Johnson, the doctors reported that he had fully recovered. “Senator Johnson is now active, and his reactions to activity are normal,” they said. “His blood pressure is normal, his heart size is normal, and his electrocardiogram has returned to normal.” They said that they had advised Johnson that “extraordinary pressures and abnormal tensions should be kept to a minimum,” but that so long as he maintained “carefully regulated hours of work and rest,” the Senator could resume the leadership.

  TWO ASPECTS of Lyndon Johnson’s life changed during the six months he spent recovering from his heart attack.

  One was his relationship with his wife.

  He had asked her never to leave his bedside until he was out of danger, and she hadn’t left. “Every time I lifted my hand, she would be there,” he was to recall. After he left the hospital, Ruth Montgomery was to write, “Lyndon could scarcely bear to have Bird out of his sight.” On the ranch, Mary Rather says, “whatever Lyndon did, Lady Bird did with him. How she managed to run the house, attend to her children, talk to visitors and still take care of her husband, I sometimes wondered.” Chores that took her away from him were done while he was sleeping. Whenever he woke and asked, “Where’s Bird?” she “was always near enough at hand to answer for herself: ‘Here I am, darling.’” Their daughters, Ms. Montgomery was to write, “sensed a subtle change in their parents…. They seemed closer to each other than ever before.” “Of course, what happened, it deprived the girls even more of her presence and her motherhood,” George Reedy was to say. “I think they spent almost all of that time with Willie Day.” (Wherever they spent their time, Ms. Rather says, “They weren’t there at the ranch a great deal.”) An exception was the trip to California, on which the Johnsons took Lynda and Lucy along, and where they spent a day with them at Disn
eyland; the girls “had the time of their lives,” Ms. Rather says.

  And as Lyndon recovered on the ranch, Lady Bird was happy, happier than anyone could remember her being.

  “I never saw a woman more obviously in love with a man and more obviously grateful that he had been rescued,” George Reedy says. “In her face, you could see it. I remember once when we were walking down the path, she just reached over and gave him a quick hug. You could almost feel the joy bubbling in her veins that he was still alive. I think she forgot and forgave all the times that he’d made life miserable for her, which he did very often.” Among the hundreds of letters from strangers to Lady Bird was one from a woman who wrote that “Some of the happiest days of our lives were after my husband’s heart attack.” At the time she first read the letter, Lady Bird was to recall, she was “puzzled” by what the woman had written. But later, she was to recall, “I came to understand.”