Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson

by Robert A. Caro

  THE SESSION’S OPENING DAYS did nothing to modify that impression. Johnson’s actions during those days furnished new evidence that while he may have been cut a little slack by the South, he hadn’t been cut much—that he was still going to be operating at the end of a very tight rope. During those days he moved effectively not for a civil rights bill, but against it.

  At a January 2 meeting in Paul Douglas’ office on the ground floor of the Senate Office Building, the liberals had decided that Clinton Anderson would offer the same motion he had introduced in 1953, and would have reintroduced in 1955 had not Johnson tricked the liberals out of doing so: that deceptively simple motion to have the Senate adopt rules for the current session. And this year the liberals had a new ally, a very shrewd one. So high had the stakes become in the civil rights game that Richard Milhous Nixon had decided to take a hand himself—at the game’s big table, the Senate: to sit in on the game literally, by taking the presiding officer’s chair on the Senate dais at crucial moments, including the game’s opening hand. Aware of the Republican aim—of Nixon’s aim—of winning the African-American vote, Senate liberals had privately sounded out the Vice President, and he had privately let them know he would be on their side. It had therefore been agreed that as soon as Anderson made his motion, Douglas and other liberal senators would ask Nixon to rule on whether it was in order—on whether, in other words, the adoption of new Senate rules was permissible. And Douglas would also ask Nixon, “Under what rules is the Senate presently proceeding?” Nixon would then rule that the motion was in order, because it would be in order under normal parliamentary rules—and he would rule further that the Senate was at that moment proceeding under standard parliamentary rules because it was not a continuing body but a new Senate which had not yet adopted any rules of its own.

  Anderson’s motion—coupled with Nixon’s ruling—would carry in it the seeds of death for the filibuster. Under standard parliamentary rules, all votes are decided by a simple majority. If Nixon held that the Senate was operating under those rules, not only could Anderson’s motion be passed by a simple majority, but if the South tried to filibuster against it, a liberal cloture motion to cut off that filibuster could also be passed by a simple majority. And then, approval having thereby been given to adopt new rules, a motion to adopt a new Rule 22—stating that cloture could be imposed by a simple majority—could be introduced. And if a filibuster against that motion was begun, a simple majority would suffice to defeat it.

  Russell, well aware of the threat, was aware also that the GOP, all too willing to pander to the NAACP, might well make the vote on Anderson’s motion a party issue for its forty-seven senators—and that even Republican senators unenthusiastic about civil rights, and even less enthusiastic about making cloture easier, might support their Vice President on an issue that might make them the majority party and give them the chairmen’s gavels. Under Nixon’s ruling, not sixty-four but only forty-nine votes would be needed for passage of Anderson’s motion—and there might well be forty-nine votes to pass it.

  Russell reacted by convening the Southern Caucus. Behind the closed doors of his office (on the second floor of the SOB, almost directly over Douglas’ office), resentment over “Judge Nixon’s” tactics spilled over, but Russell, emerging to meet a hallful of reporters, was urbane and confident, giving, one reporter wrote, “a classic performance of a southern politician uttering hard words in a soft manner.” His only hint of criticism was directed at Nixon. “Vice Presidents have always been trying to change the rules of the Senate, over which they have no control,” he said. Otherwise, stated another reporter, Russell was “calm and easy-going.” He managed nonetheless to make it clear that if Anderson’s motion for new rules carried, there would be a filibuster—a king-size one. If the Senate decided it could change rules, he said, then Rule 22 would not be the only rule changed. “We would then have to start with Rule 1, and write a completely new set of rules of the Senate. We would start from scratch.” Changes in every one of the Senate’s other thirty-nine rules would be introduced. And, as the New York Times reported, “Senator Russell suggested” that in this process “legislative business of the Senate might be halted.” “Extended debate” would be held on every proposed change, he said, forcing a separate cloture proceeding on every one. Even if votes could be obtained for the passage of thirty-nine cloture motions, the process would tie up the Senate completely for months. In fact, Russell said, if this “Pandora’s box” was opened, “there would be no way as I see it to bring the debate to a close.” He didn’t employ the word “ever,” but the word was implicit.

  But even as Russell was describing the “Pandora” card, he knew that playing it was not going to be required. He had another, even better, ace up his sleeve, one that he knew would take the opening hand, because he had played it before, in the opening hand of 1953, and it had taken the hand then. It was an ace that could not be played by him, but only by the Majority Leader. In 1953 the then Majority Leader Taft had played it. Now, in 1957, the Majority Leader was Lyndon Johnson—and Johnson played it, too.

  He played it the next day. Anderson introduced his motion. The liberals were expecting to make the next move as well: the moment Anderson finished speaking, Douglas and Humphrey were on their feet, waving their arms, requesting recognition from Nixon so that they could ask for the preplanned ruling. But the two liberals’ desks were in the far bend of the Democratic arc. Even as Douglas and Humphrey jumped up, a commanding figure rose in front of them, in the center of the floor. Lyndon Johnson was on his feet directly in front of the dais, almost eye to eye with the Vice President, demanding the prior recognition that was the Majority Leader’s prerogative. Nixon had no choice but to recognize him first—and when the Vice President did so, Johnson made his own motion: to table Anderson’s motion.

  Russell’s ace took the pot in 1957 as it had in 1953. Since Anderson’s motion was no longer the pending business before the Senate—Johnson’s motion took precedence over it—Humphrey and Douglas could not ask for a ruling on it as they had planned to do, but could make only a “parliamentary inquiry” as to what would happen if it became the pending business, and Nixon could not give a ruling but only an “advisory opinion.” In his opinion, the Vice President came down strongly on the side of civil rights. The Constitution, he said, stated that each House could determine its own rules, “and this constitutional right… may be exercised by a majority of the Senate at any time. When the membership of the Senate changes, as it does upon the election of each Congress, it is the Chair’s opinion that there can be no question that the majority of the new existing membership” can “determine the rules.” Therefore, he said, any “Senate rule adopted in a previous Congress” which denies the right of a majority of a new Senate to adopt rules “is, in the opinion of the Chair, unconstitutional,” and, he added, “in the opinion of the Chair,” specifically Rule 22 is unconstitutional. But Johnson’s motion made Nixon’s opinion irrelevant. Had the Vice President been allowed to rule that Anderson’s motion was in order, a vote on that motion not only would have been a vote with clear-cut, even dramatic, civil rights implications because it struck at the hated filibuster, but would also have been in effect a vote on Nixon’s ruling, and would therefore have attracted heavy Republican support. “He was their Vice President, and he was going to be their candidate [for President in 1960], and a substantial number of Republicans would vote to support him because of that,” Howard Shuman explains. Their votes, added to the votes of liberal Democrats, might have added up to the necessary forty-nine, the necessary majority, and for the first time in decades, there would have been a realistic possibility of obtaining a civil rights bill. “That [a vote on Anderson’s motion] was our big chance,” Shuman says.

  Johnson’s maneuver, however, meant that not Anderson’s motion but his own tabling motion would be voted on first. And that vote would not be on Nixon’s decision—and not directly on civil rights—but only on “tabling,” a procedura
l matter difficult to explain to voters.

  Johnson’s work for the South during those first days of January, 1957, was not confined to parliamentary maneuvers. He threw onto the Senate table not only the ace that Richard Russell had placed in his hand, but some cards of his own—cards on which the face was the naked face of senatorial power. The cards were played against liberal members of his own party, to reduce Democratic support for civil rights to a minimum—and the cards were played with a ruthlessness that was striking in the rawness of its violation of what remained of the Senate’s seniority system.

  The meeting of Johnson’s rubber-stamp Democratic Steering Committee, which made committee assignments, had been abruptly postponed until January 7, so that it would come after the vote on the tabling motion. And in more than one instance assignments were made on the basis not of seniority but of a senator’s vote on that motion. In the case of senators whose vote had been in doubt, a vote for Johnson’s motion—in effect a vote against civil rights—earned a reward, as was shown by the fate of Tennessee’s two senators. One of them, Albert Gore, whose sympathy for civil rights had been worrisome to the South, voted for Johnson’s motion (and against civil rights), and was rewarded with the Finance Committee seat he had been seeking. Tennessee’s other senator, Estes Kefauver, voted against Johnson’s motion—and was punished. Having asked repeatedly for a seat on Foreign Relations since the day he arrived in the Senate, Kefauver was confident that he would inherit the seat made vacant by Walter George’s retirement, since, with eight years’ seniority, he had more than any other applicant. The press, and everyone else familiar with the situation, was treating his appointment as a fait accompli. But when the Steering Committee’s press release on Democratic committee assignments was dropped on the table in the Capitol pressroom, reporters were startled to see that the new name on Foreign Relations was not “Estes Kefauver” but “John F. Kennedy,” who had only four years’ seniority but who was a northerner and whose vote against tabling had therefore been anticipated and was excusable. Kefauver’s reaction was restrained. “I am disappointed,” he said. “Of course, I do not blame Senator Kennedy for trying to better his position, but I am interested to learn that seniority is a rule that may or may not be applied by the Senate leadership in deciding the rights of senators.”

  Other assignments made by the Steering Committee met the same criteria. Johnson had been seriously considering following Jim Rowe’s advice to appoint John Carroll to Judiciary, but Carroll, loyal to civil rights, had voted against his motion. He got neither Judiciary nor his second choice, Finance, for which he was considered well qualified because he had been an active member of the House’s counterpart committee, Ways and Means. Instead, he was appointed to Interior, “which he resented,” according to his administrative assistant, Harry Schnibbe.

  And the loss of a committee assignment was, in some cases, only part of the punishment that Johnson inflicted for the wrong vote—as one of the newly elected senators, thirty-two-year-old Frank Church of Idaho, was to find out.

  Having just taken his oath in the well of the Senate on January 3, Church was starting to walk back up the center aisle when, as he was passing the first desk, “I encountered this long arm of Lyndon Johnson reaching out and grabbing me.” Pulling him close, Johnson said: “Now Frank, you are the youngest member of this Senate, and you have a great future. There’s lots going for you. But the first thing you ought to learn is that in Congress you get along by going along.

  “We’ve got a motion here that Clint Anderson is going to offer and it relates to a matter that is not important to your state,” Johnson said. “The people of your state don’t care how you vote on this one way or the other, but the leadership cares. It means a lot to me. So I just point this out to you. Your first vote is coming up, and I hope you’ll keep it in mind, because I like you, and I see big things in your future, and I want for you to get off on the right foot in the Senate.”

  Church recalls giving only a noncommittal answer, saying something like, “I would study it further”—but, he says, “Apparently I left Senator Johnson with the impression that I would vote with him, and he never came back to me for a second time before the vote.” Since the new senator didn’t understand the importance of the vote—or the significance of Johnson’s combined threat and promise—his “studying” consisted only of a casual inquiry to one or two fellow senators as to how they were voting, and when they said they were voting against tabling, Church decided to do the same. When, on Friday, his name was called, he shouted “No.”

  That was when Frank Church knew he had made a big mistake. From his desk in the back row, he could see Lyndon Johnson sitting below him at his front-row center desk, keeping tabs on the vote on a tally sheet. “When … I didn’t vote with him, he threw his pen down on the desk, and I didn’t see him pick it up again. I knew then that I was in deep trouble.”

  Just how deep the youthful freshman was soon to find out. “For the next six months,” he was to recall, Lyndon Johnson “never spoke to me. He said nothing to me that was insulting, he just simply ignored me. When I was present with other senators, he talked to the other senators.”

  And one thing Johnson did not talk to him about mattered a great deal to Frank Church. Young as he was to have begun a senatorial career—he was six years younger than any other senator—he had already known for a long time the senatorial footsteps he wanted to walk in: the footsteps of his legendary predecessor, the Lion of Idaho.

  Even as a boy, Frank Church had idolized William Borah; in the eighth grade, he had written a letter to a newspaper applauding Borah’s warning to avoid foreign “entanglements”; one of his most vivid memories was of Borah’s funeral in Boise in 1940, when the fifteen-year-old youth had walked past the open casket; he wanted to be a senator, Church would say, “because he was a senator.” There was a point of resemblance between Church and Borah, the former Shakespearean actor whose Senate Chamber funeral was held without a eulogy because no one could match his eloquence. Church was also a spellbinding orator who, as a high school junior, had won first prize in a national oratorical contest. Church wanted not only to walk in Borah’s footprints but to step beyond them: “He arrived here [in the Senate] very determined to run for President,” recalls his legislative aide, Ward Hower. He knew the Senate post that would best help him achieve both goals: the chairmanship of the Foreign Relations Committee that Borah had held for nine years. “He was aiming not just at a seat but at the chairmanship, because that gives a senator from a small state a chance to make a name for himself,” Hower says. And Church was aware that if a senator wanted to eventually become chairman of a committee, it was important that he go on that committee early. Talking to Church a day or two before the Senate convened, Johnson had made it clear that he understood that ambition, and might well be willing to help it along, not immediately, of course, but at some early opportunity. Now suddenly any chance of going on Foreign Relations seemed extremely remote. When Church attempted to make a peace overture through Bobby Baker, Baker was not encouraging. “The Leader’s got a long memory,” he said.

  Johnson’s tactics and methods were effective. His tabling motion had cut the ground out from under the liberal attempt to enlist Republican senators on the side of civil rights. When his motion had been voted on—on January 4—only seventeen Republicans had voted against it and for civil rights. Twenty-eight had voted against civil rights. (Two Republicans had been absent.) And his use of raw power on his own side of the aisle had given the southern senators additional proof of his loyalty—that he would, in fact, move on their behalf with all the determination they could desire. Only twenty-one Democrats had defied the Leader’s power by voting for civil rights. Twenty-seven Democrats had voted against civil rights. There had therefore been a total of only thirty-eight votes for civil rights, fifty-five against. He had done precisely what the Southern Caucus—and in particular, its general—wanted.

  Despite the effectiveness of his tacti
cs and methods, in the light of his longer-term goal, the overall weakness of his position had become very clear during that first week in January—because during that fight Richard Russell’s position had become very clear. However much affection Russell might feel for Lyndon Johnson, the overriding reason that Russell wanted him to become President was to protect the interests of the South; when Johnson’s interests collided with those interests, it was the South’s, not Johnson’s, that would be protected. In fact, in the final analysis, it would be only the South’s interests that mattered. Aware though Russell might be that Johnson could never become President “unless the Senate first disposes of civil rights,” if “disposing” of civil rights entailed Senate actions that hurt the South, and the rigid racial segregation that Russell felt was vital to the South, then the disposing would be dispensed with. Use of the filibuster would put an end to Lyndon Johnson’s dreams, but the filibuster was the South’s ultimate defense, and Russell’s firm determination to fight Clint Anderson’s motion to the death had demonstrated that he would never agree to any weakening of that defense, no matter how damaging the consequences of such a fight for Johnson’s presidential ambitions. Johnson had stood solidly with the South in that fight, but if he hadn’t, and if the South had been losing, what would have been the result? “Extended debate” on forty separate rules—the most massive filibuster of them all. To advance along his path, Lyndon Johnson had to persuade the southerners to allow him to distance himself from them on civil rights, and from the filibuster that defended civil rights, and in the first test of 1957, the southerners had shown not the slightest inclination to allow him any real distance at all.

  WITH THE SUCCESS of Lyndon Johnson’s tabling motion, voices across the entire spectrum of liberal opinion were raised against him. “Once again, democracy has taken a beating in the halls of the United States Senate,” the New York Post editorialized. “It was a bad day for the cause of freedom. The unholy alliance [of southern Democrats and midwestern Republicans] still holds sway.” And, the Post said, it holds sway largely because of the Majority Leader. “How can the Democrats explain the continued eminence of Lyndon Johnson, who is justly taking bows for the grand maneuvers of the filibuster legion?” The Post’s was always one of the shrillest voices in the liberal chorus, but that January there was, in liberal discussions of Lyndon Johnson, a harsh note even in voices that were generally calm and reasonable. In a long, thoughtful analysis of the Senate, Richard Rovere wrote in The New Yorker that one of the institution’s most striking aspects is its esprit de corps, which “unites senators of differing political views … against the world outside the Senate.” And proof of this, Rovere said, is “the support that [Senate] Democrats of left, right and center have given” to Johnson, while outside the Senate, “among liberal northern Democrats as a group, it has become an article of faith that Senator Johnson plays a generally destructive role, and that no good can come of his continuing as spokesman for the party.”