Time and again, the correspondents, some of whom had heard him denying for months what he was now affirming, pressed the issue, and with each answer Johnson made his stand stronger; when he was asked if he would drop out of the race after one or two ballots, he said, “That is very unlikely,” and, as one reporter wrote, “that reply erased Johnson from the status of a mere favorite son candidate from Texas, planning only to get a token vote before throwing his state’s fifty-six votes to someone else.” Asked whether he considered Stevenson or Harriman the best-qualified candidate, he said: “The best qualified now is Lyndon B. Johnson.” He was the Democrat behind whom Democrats from all over the nation could unite, he said, and if he received the nomination, he would run “an effective campaign and a winning campaign” against President Eisenhower. There was no more talk about his heart still hurting. “I have been putting in 15- and 16-hour days every day, including Saturday, during the last weeks of Congress,” he said. But he had not sought any delegates outside his own state, one reporter pointed out. “In your experience in politics, do you recall any serious contender for a nomination who did not seek delegates from outside his own state?” Johnson answered firmly, “You don’t always have to seek something in order to get it.”
Soon after he left his press conference, with word “rolling out across Chicago” that Johnson was running in earnest, he received a call from Harry Truman’s suite in the Blackstone across the street. The former President told him what he already knew. He was going down to his own press conference in a minute, Truman said; “I’m opening this thing up so anybody can get it—including you.”
Truman told reporters that the “mounting crises” in foreign affairs required the nomination of a man with experience in foreign affairs—Averell Harriman. Johnson, in his suite, was watching the press conference on television. As soon as it ended, he emerged with John Connally, turned left and strode down the corridor, past the closed doors of Adlai Stevenson’s suite, to Sam Rayburn’s at the end of the hall. “It’s wide open now,” Connally shouted to a reporter. On Johnson’s face was a broad smile. Recalls Tommy Corcoran: “He thought he had a chance. He really believed it.”
HE BELIEVED IT in part because there were reasons to believe it. His hope that Stevenson would not win on the first ballot was bolstered by precedent: no contested Democratic presidential nomination in history had been decided on the first ballot. In addition, there existed, as at every Democratic convention, the possibility that civil rights—specifically, the wording of the platform plank dealing with the issue—would ignite an explosion, as it had after Hubert Humphrey’s speech in 1948, and upset all calculations. Indeed, Stevenson, after months of tiptoeing around the issue, had already—a few days before the convention—made a slip. When a television reporter unexpectedly caught him on a street, Stevenson said, in what his biographer Martin calls “an ill-considered moment,” that the platform “should express unequivocal approval of the Court’s decision, although it seems odd that you should have to express your approval of the Constitution and its institutions.” At once, “big blocks of southern delegates shifted to the doubtful column,” the New York Times reported. Only a quick public reversal—Stevenson assured an Alabama supporter, in a telegram released to the press, that he would not use force to uphold the Court’s decision—combined with similar private assurances by his aides, enabled Adlai to mend his southern fences. There was always the possibility of another misstep.
But Johnson also believed it for reasons that had no basis in reality—for reasons that were to astonish those who had come to regard him as a consummately practical politician.
He told aides and allies that he had a chance because influential figures in the Democratic Party were on his side, but when he named these figures, almost all of them were senators, or former senators.
His belief in these men—Bob Kerr in Oklahoma, Carl Hayden and Bob McFarland in Arizona, McClellan and Fulbright in Arkansas, Ed Johnson in Colorado, Mike Mansfield in Montana—was in a way understandable. To a man whose life in Washington was spent in the closed, insulated world of the Senate, a world in which these men had immense authority, it was perhaps only natural to assume that they had authority in their own states. But the belief revealed that Lyndon Johnson, knowledgeable though he was about power in Washington, had a woefully inadequate comprehension of power outside the capital. Anyone who held that belief, as Richard Rovere was to explain in The New Yorker, “forgot the wisdom of history, which is that members of the United States Senate almost invariably come to grief when they try to win Presidential nominations for themselves or to manipulate national conventions for any purpose whatsoever. For many reasons—patronage is one, and control of delegations is another—the big men at conventions are governors and municipal leaders.” And among these “big men”—the Democratic Party’s powerful traditional “bosses” since the onset of the age of Roosevelt: Mayor Daley and Jacob M. Arvey of Chicago, Mayor David L. Lawrence of Pittsburgh, Governors like George Leader of Pennsylvania and Robert B. Meyner of New Jersey, and leaders of the party’s major constituencies such as labor’s George Meany and Walter Reuther—Lyndon Johnson had very little support.
Moreover, as now became apparent, this most pragmatic of men—capable, in Washington, of looking into others and seeing the fundamental realities behind their behavior—was, in Chicago, incapable of seeing a crucial reality: the true depth of the antipathy toward him of northern liberals.
This, too, was understandable. Lyndon Johnson’s world, in Washington, was a world in which deals could always be made, bargains could always be arranged, in which men were reasonable in compromising their principles, except for a few crazies like Lehman and Douglas, who had so little power that they could safely be ignored. It was perhaps only natural that he believed that at least some northern liberals—enough, combined with southern and southwestern votes, to give him the nomination—could be brought under his standard if the right inducements were found, particularly since, in his view, he had already done so much for them by giving Meany and Reuther the Social Security and housing bills they wanted. But this belief demonstrated only that Lyndon Johnson simply had not grasped that there was another world, a world in which Douglas and Lehman were not crazies but heroes, in which principles mattered far more than they did in the Senate. In addition, Lyndon Johnson had not fully appreciated that it didn’t matter what he did for the liberals in Social Security and housing so long as he was not on their side on the “great issue.”
He should have appreciated this. When the ADA had issued that report accusing Johnson of “bringing the Democratic Party to its lowest point in twenty-five years,” it had been civil rights that the report emphasized. It was not two months since United Auto Workers President Walter Reuther had said that the party had “no right to preach morality to the world unless we are fighting equally hard against injustices at home”; even here in Chicago there had already been reminders: labor leaders were supporting the NAACP’s demand for a civil rights plank not only endorsing the Brown decision but advocating the use of force to uphold it if necessary. Johnson had exchanged friendly letters with George Meany after the passage of the Social Security bill, but when Meany appeared before the Platform Committee, it was not Social Security he emphasized, saying grimly, staring down the southerners facing him, “The Democratic Party must declare that it is not in favor of thwarting a decision by the Supreme Court.” In Washington, the conservative coalition that ran the Senate could ignore Walter Reuther with impunity, but more than a hundred delegates to the Democratic convention were members of Reuther’s UAW, and fifty of them were members of the Michigan delegation, which had been supporting favorite-son Governor G. Mermen (Soapy) Williams, but which Johnson was confidently asserting would swing over to him. And there were other labor leaders with substantial numbers of delegates: Emil Rieve of the Textile Workers, Joseph A. Bierne of the Communications Workers, Alex Rose of the Hat, Cap and Millinery Workers, Dave Dubinsky of the Garment
Workers, James B. Carey of the Electrical Workers. Their views may not have mattered much on the floor of the Senate; they mattered a great deal in Chicago. “I was knocked for a loop,” Tommy Corcoran recalls. “He [Johnson] really thought these guys were going to come around [to support him]. Hell, as long as he wasn’t with them on civil rights, they were never going to support him!”
He believed it, as well, because of the euphoria to which he was prone when he thought he was winning, a euphoria fed by the trappings of a convention: the excitement in the air in the hotel corridors through which he pushed, the cheers of the Texas caucus, all those “Love That Lyndon” buttons in his suite. Truman’s announcement was the break he had hoped for; he thought the nomination was within his grasp, the nomination that would make him the odds-on favorite to get the party’s nod again in 1960, when Eisenhower would not be running. And, of course, Eisenhower was old, and had already had two major illnesses; what if there was another before Election Day? As that week’s Newsweek story on the convention put it, “Another new factor … is the issue of Mr. Eisenhower’s health. No man can be certain what that will be three months hence. This dominant political question is, alone and unaided, wiping out the prospect of a cut-and-dried election this year.” In hindsight, it is clear that, barring some new major illness, there was never any possibility that the President might be defeated; that was not the way it seemed in Chicago in August, 1956. Most of all, Lyndon Johnson believed it because of the intensity of his desire that it be true. Sometimes, talking to men like Tommy Corcoran and Jim Rowe, he was the old, realistic Lyndon Johnson of Washington. Once, during the convention, Rowe says, “he just made a flat statement”—which Rowe had heard him make many times before—“that he better recognize that for Texans, and also the South, their base for power was in the Senate, that was all they were going to have.” But, Rowe and Corcoran say, Johnson’s feelings veered wildly between realism and optimism—unrealistic optimism. “He was ambivalent,” Rowe says. “On one side, I think, deep down, he understood the realities. But he wanted to be President so much….” “On most things, you could talk sense to Lyndon,” Tommy Corcoran says. “But there was no talking to him about this.” On the morning after Truman’s dramatic announcement, the Sunday newspapers delivered to the delegates’ rooms were filled with speculation about imminent breaks in the Stevenson ranks from New Jersey, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. But by noon that Sunday, the party’s insiders already knew the truth. Counting delegates the evening before, they had found that if Adlai didn’t have the necessary 687/2, he was close to that number—and needed only another state or two to win, and by noon there was a growing awareness in the press that Truman’s coup had failed. But Lyndon Johnson wasn’t counting, he was hoping; this man who prided himself on never deluding himself, on always looking unblinkingly at the hard facts, was deluding himself now because he wanted, needed, the prize so badly that, plain though the truth was, he couldn’t see it. “He wanted to be President so much”—and after Truman’s announcement he had persuaded himself that he really might be.
MOST OF ALL, perhaps, Lyndon Johnson believed he had a chance because of Rayburn and Russell.
Although both men had publicly announced that they were supporting him, neither was working actively for his candidacy, since they knew it was hopeless. Russell had not even come to Chicago; Rayburn, the convention’s chairman, told delegates privately as well as publicly that he was supporting Johnson, but he had not demanded their support for Johnson, had not thrown his immense power behind him because he knew “no one can stop Stevenson.” On the day after Truman’s announcement, however, Johnson had been presented, as it happened, with an opportunity to work on his Rs. The crisis in the Mideast that had been precipitated two weeks earlier by Egypt’s nationalization of the Suez Canal was worsening. British and French warships were steaming toward Egypt, and Britain was dispatching troops to the Mediterranean in preparation for an attack to regain control of the waterway. John Foster Dulles was about to leave for London to try to resolve the crisis without armed conflict, and Eisenhower had summoned congressional leaders to the White House for a briefing by Dulles before he left, sending an Air Force plane to Chicago to pick up Democratic leaders, and another one to Winder to pick up Russell. As soon as the plane lifted off from Chicago at 7:45 Sunday morning, Johnson’s delusions—and desperation—spilled out. Taking the seat beside Rayburn, he began talking the moment the plane took off, and didn’t stop until it landed at Washington’s National Airport. Truman had halted the Stevenson bandwagon, he said. The convention was deadlocked now, and in a deadlocked convention, who was in a better position to get the nomination than him? Nobody! he said. And he would get the nomination, he told Rayburn, if only you would take the lead, really get in there and fight for me. Some of the other congressional leaders who overheard the conversation had never before seen Lyndon Johnson “working” Mr. Sam, and they were astonished at his pleading and whining. Rayburn, grumpy anyway because he hated flying, didn’t say much in reply, aside from an occasional, noncommittal grunt; he sat silent, his broad bald head lowered between his shoulders, puffing on a cigarette. When Rayburn didn’t agree to do what Johnson wanted, Johnson escalated his pleas. “Johnson gave him a real sales job,” says House Democratic Whip Carl Albert of Oklahoma, who sat across the aisle from the two Texans. “He told Mr. Rayburn, ‘I have supported you all these years, and I need your help. I have a chance here….’” Rayburn sat silent, a block of granite in his seat. “It was an embarrassing ride for everyone on the plane,” listening to Johnson’s acting “like a spoiled child,” one of Rayburn’s biographers was to write. “But there was silent applause for Rayburn,” who during the two-hour flight said hardly a word.
Russell had been keeping himself inaccessible at his place “with no telephones,” but his attendance at the White House briefing (at which Johnson told Eisenhower that the proper response was “to tell [the British and French] they have our moral support and go on in; Eisenhower demurred) put him within Johnson’s reach, and Johnson had more success “working” him than he had with Rayburn. Determined not to go to Chicago, Russell tried to explain that he could not help Johnson get the nomination, that it was too late, that even the Georgia delegation, under Governor Marvin Griffin’s direction, was now so firmly committed to Stevenson that its vote could not be changed. As Evans and Novak were to recount: “Johnson persisted. All right, he said, Griffin is hopeless. But please, please, come out with me anyway. Come with me and sit with me in my headquarters and talk to me and eat with me and be with me. The tone was beseeching, pleading.” And Russell finally agreed, leaving for the airport with Johnson without even packing a suitcase. “Robert E. Lee could not have dragged Dick Russell to the Democratic National Convention in … 1956,” Evans and Novak wrote. “But Lyndon Johnson did.”
When the plane arrived back at Chicago’s Midway Airport at four o’clock Sunday afternoon, Rayburn and Johnson began walking toward their waiting limousines, accompanied by Booth Mooney. When newspaper and television reporters and cameramen ran toward them, the Speaker pushed through them, scowling, but Johnson stayed to talk.
“I don’t see why Lyndon lets those buzzards trap him like that,” Rayburn said to Mooney. Looking around to make sure that no reporter could hear him, he muttered, “I hate to see Lyndon get bit so hard by the presidential bug at this stage of the game. Stevenson’s got it sewed up.” When the reporters caught up to him, he “stayed hitched,” repeating that “I haven’t said I was for anybody but Lyndon, dammit.” Asked if Johnson’s candidacy was truly a “serious” one, he said, “It’s a serious one.” He even said that Johnson would get “a good many votes” besides the ones from Texas. But, as Mooney was to say, “he had no illusions.” And as soon as Russell started telephoning the leaders of southern delegations, he lost any he may have had. Rayburn and Russell were realists; both saw there was no hope. Rayburn told Johnson privately that he felt he was making a big mistake in actively pushing a h
opeless candidacy. “I told Lyndon I thought he had lost his head,” he was to tell a friend later. “I told him that it was a mistake to become a sectional candidate. He should be thinking of 1960. Look what happened to Dick Russell.” Johnson was getting the same warning from the only member of his staff besides Connally who dared to give him warnings. When Johnson had awakened Sunday morning, he had found a memo slipped under his door. It was from Jim Rowe, who had written it during the night. In it, Rowe recalls, “I said you must be careful [that] you don’t get yourself where Dick Russell got himself in 1952…. Don’t get yourself in that position, don’t get out front, you can’t make it….” After he returned from Washington, Johnson came into Rowe’s room and said, “I agree with everything you said.” Perhaps he did agree—intellectually. But he didn’t take the advice. He couldn’t. He was beyond listening to warnings, as was demonstrated the next day, when the convention opened.
ON THAT DAY, Monday, August 13, “one man who thought Lyndon Johnson’s chances were excellent was Lyndon Johnson,” Richard Rovere wrote in his New Yorker analysis. “For somewhere between twelve and eighteen hours on Monday, he waged a perfectly serious and purposeful campaign for the nomination, and he … thought it more likely than not that he and Senator Russell, of Georgia, could gain control of the Democratic Party and make it a medium for the expression of their views.”
In the International Amphitheatre, party orators were droning away to a nearly empty auditorium; the real negotiations were going on in the big Loop hotels, not in the lobbies jammed with boisterous badge-wearing, placard-waving delegates, but upstairs in the traditional “smoke-filled rooms” of party leaders, and in the hotel conference rooms where state delegations were caucusing. At the Texas caucus early Monday morning, Johnson sat listening as one speaker after another predicted he would win the nomination; “Let us tell the nation and the world that we have here the next President of the United States,” John Lyle proclaimed in that ringing voice that would have been familiar to anyone who had attended the Leland Olds hearings. Emerging from the caucus, Johnson told reporters that he had no plans to release his delegates; “My name will stay as long as the American people are interested.”
Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson Page 128