All during 1958, 1959, and 1960, the liberal attacks on Johnson continued; in January, 1960, the liberals embodied in a formal resolution demands for more frequent caucuses, for selection of the Policy Committee membership by a vote of all Democratic senators instead of by the Leader alone, and for the drawing up by the Policy Committee of a Democratic legislative agenda. And these attacks were treated by the Washington press corps as significant revolts against Johnson’s leadership, with headlines and cutting cartoons; one, by Herblock, showed “King Johnson” on a throne with a spear knocking off his crown as he said, “Methinks, milord, that the peasantry is getting restless.”
Johnson’s grip on the reins of senatorial power, however, was far too firm for the attacks to have any real significance. He was stung by Proxmire’s attacks into answering him on the floor, saying the Wisconsin freshman needed a “fairy godmother” or a “wet nurse.” “This one-man rule is a myth,” he said. “I do not know how anyone can force a senator to do anything. I have never tried to do so. I have read in the newspapers that I have been unusually persuasive with senators. I have never thought these were accurate reports. Usually when a senator wants something done and does not get his way, he puts the blame on the leadership. It does not take much courage, I must say, to make the leadership a punching bag.” As for Clark, Johnson didn’t deign to reply to him himself; he delegated that task to Majority Whip Mike Mansfield, who said that instead of restructuring the Senate, the Democratic senators should rely on “the leadership and parliamentary skill of Lyndon Johnson.”
Johnson refused to meet any of the liberal demands. They had asked for more frequent caucuses. That first Democratic Caucus of 1958—the one at which, in Proxmire’s phrase, “not a single matter of party business” was discussed—was the only caucus held in 1958. In 1959, there was also only one caucus. Then, during the first days of January, 1960, the Senate liberals “determined to speak out” and to make an all-out attempt at reform. At the Democrats’ January 7 caucus, Clark introduced a resolution stating that if at least fifteen senators requested a meeting of the Democratic Party Caucus, one would be held every two weeks. A debate ensued, “the more senior members generally speaking in opposition,” as Clark recalls, until Johnson ended it by saying he would be happy to call a caucus anytime at the request of even a single senator. Johnson was as good as his word—but he added some other words. During that January, he scheduled no fewer than four additional caucuses—but also let it be known that he would not be displeased if senators found they had better things to do. Attendance steadily declined. Sixty of the sixty-four Democratic senators had come to that first, January 7, caucus. By the January 20 caucus, attendance was down to twenty-four.* And, Clark was to say, “that was the end.” The liberals did not even request another caucus “largely because those of us who wanted regular meetings became convinced that without leadership support, which was not forthcoming, we could not turn out enough members to make the conferences worthwhile.” The liberals had proposed another resolution: that the Policy Committee be selected not by the Leader but by an election. The vote on that resolution was 51 to 12—against it. Proxmire had to concede that despite two years of attacks, he had failed to make “any real dent” in Johnson’s power. The Star’s “Washington Window” column summed up the denouement of Proxmire’s revolt against Lyndon Johnson: it had been a “David and Goliath drama,” but with a non-traditional ending: “Instead of Goliath being slain, it was David who was slain.” Talking with Proxmire, Richard Russell told him that his “position reminded him of a bull who had charged a locomotive train…. That was the bravest bull I ever saw, but I can’t say a lot for his judgment.”
THROUGHOUT LYNDON JOHNSON’S LIFE, in every institution of which he had been a part, a similar pattern had emerged: as he rose to power within the institution, and then, as he consolidated that power, he was humble—deferential, obsequious, in fact. And then, when the power was consolidated, solid, when he was in power and confident of staying there, he became, with dramatic speed and contrast, autocratic, overbearing, domineering.
Now, during his final three years in the Senate, this pattern was repeated. “The success of his leadership affected the Lyndon Johnson lifestyle visibly,” George Reedy was to say. “During his early years as leader, he put on a humble-pie act that would have done credit to Ella Cinders. This faded overnight and a major task of his staff was to keep the hubris from showing—too much.” This task was difficult. He already had an unprecedented amount of office space. Now he took over more—a lot more—not in the Senate Office Building but in the Capitol itself. He already occupied most of the western end of the Capitol’s Gallery Floor in the Senate wing, with his two-room Majority Leader’s suite in G-14 and his three-room Policy Committee suite in G-17, 18, and 19. But between these two suites was a third, the only space on that end of the floor that he didn’t occupy—a two-room suite, G-15 and G-16, filled with the staff of the Commerce Committee. Now he commandeered that as well, so that, as one reporter wrote, “He will have a seven-room spread of offices replete with crystal chandeliers and rich furniture, occupying the entire northwest Senate wing on the third floor of the Capitol.” Sometimes, for a new visitor, he would sweep aside the heavy drapery behind his desk there, and suddenly the window would be filled, as one reporter wrote, with the “marbled city below with its great avenues running toward the White House.” Grand as this suite was, it was still too far from the Chamber floor for his liking, but on the same level as the Chamber floor, and conveniently near it, was a suite of two huge rooms that had been the staff and meeting rooms of the Senate’s District of Columbia Committee. He commandeered that, too. On its high ceilings, above its big crystal chandelier, were frescoes (as soon as he chose the office, painters began touching them up) of boys carrying baskets of flowers and young maidens reclining on couches: a Roman emperor’s banquet. Reporters began referring to it as “the Emperor’s Room” before coining another name, which stuck: “the Taj Mahal.” Lady Bird imported an interior decorator from New York to redo the suite in green and gold. “On entering the office,” Sam Shaffer wrote, “one was immediately confronted” by an extremely well-lit, fully life-size portrait of its occupant, hung above its marble fireplace. The artist had portrayed Johnson leaning against a bookcase, but he had captured at least some of the piercing quality in Johnson’s eyes; “That huge picture of Lyndon looking squarely in the visitor’s eye first thing on entering Lyndon’s office is a sure irritant,” John Steele reported in a memo to his editors at Time. And it was not only Lyndon Johnson’s portrait that was well lit. High above the desk, concealed in the chandelier, two spotlights had been placed, focused so that as the man himself sat at the desk, they cast on him what one reporter called “an impressive nimbus of golden light.” In a corner of the immense room he had ordered high walls of polished mahogany built, and behind them was a bathroom—a Johnsonian bathroom (a “monument of a toilet,” James Reston called it) used as Johnson used bathrooms: soon secretaries, assistants, and senators were having to take dictation from him or discuss issues with him as he sat before them on the toilet.
Johnson made other changes, too, in that Capitol wing that was his world. When he came to the deserted Capitol on a Sunday, he sometimes had to wait a minute or two for an elevator since only one elevator operator was on duty. Now the waiting time was eliminated: three operators were on duty all Sunday. And the operators of the subway between the Capitol and the Senate Office Building no longer stopped working at six o’clock; they remained on duty until Johnson had left the Capitol.
The pattern was discernible not only in the office but in the way visitors to it were treated—not the committee chairmen, of course, but almost all his other colleagues. Often, they were kept waiting; sometimes there would be three or four senators of the United States cooling their heels in the Majority Leader’s antechamber. Even the placid Mansfield once lost his temper over the length of time he was kept waiting for an audience and left, sa
ying to Ashton Gonella, “Well, I’m not going to wait this long for anybody.” (Mansfield’s attitude displeased Ms. Gonella; in recounting this incident, she told the author, “I did not like people who did not respect Mr. Johnson.”) While the time senators spent in the suite’s outer office was sometimes uncomfortably long, the time they spent in the inner office was sometimes uncomfortably short; a request might be made of the Leader, and it might be denied, quickly and curtly, after which, it was clear, the applicant was expected to get up and leave.
Lyndon Johnson’s attitude toward his colleagues was increasingly proprietary and paternalistic. “They were his children; it was his Senate,” Ms. Gonella explains. Some of them were wayward children; that was all right, that was why he was there—the firm, fair father, to see that they didn’t get into trouble. In November, 1958, he would tell John Steele, in an off-the-record interview, “You know, I feel sort of like a father to these boys. A father loves his sons, though one son may drink a little too much, another may neck with the girls a little too much. A good father uses a gentle but firm rein, checks his sons, guides them, and above all understands them.” He knew what each of them needed. In 1958, he selected his new favorite, Frank Church, for the honor of reading George Washington’s Farewell Address in the Senate on Washington’s Birthday; telling a reporter why he had selected Church, he explained that he “needed a bit of bringing forward—just like my daughter does at school.” More and more, he was unguarded in his estimates of his colleagues’ abilities, and in his description of their relationship with him—after all, why should he watch his words; what could they do about it if they didn’t like them? “Now, Alan,” he said about Bible—said to a journalist—“Alan is a good, mediocre senator. He’ll do what I tell him.”
He let reporters know how cleverly he manipulated them.
His attitude was also apparent in the terms in which he described his own activities. In January, 1958, two days before the President’s State of the Union address to Congress, Johnson delivered a speech to the Senate Democratic Caucus, instructing George Reedy to tell reporters it was Johnson’s “State of the Union address.” Did a President have a Cabinet? During the course of his speech, Johnson, as Time put it in a March, 1958, cover story on him, “hoisted himself to political heights without precedent by referring to himself, in effect, as President of the U.S. (South Pennsylvania Avenue Division). ‘As majority leader of the Senate,’ said he, ‘I am aided by a cabinet made up of committee chairmen.’” Doris Fleeson might poke fun at his pronouncements, asking if he had worked out a disability agreement with his second-in-command, Mansfield, but most of the Washington press corps, which had overplayed each attack on Johnson’s leadership (and then, after each one had failed, had conceded that his power was greater than ever), agreed with Time’s assessment that Johnson is “without rival the dominant face of the Democratic 85th Congress…. As such … he does indeed stand second in power only to the President of the U.S.” Asking, “Who is the most powerful man in the United States today?” Stewart Alsop, in January, 1959, answered his own question: “The President.” But, he added, “Sen. Lyndon Baines Johnson … certainly runs the President a close second, especially now that voters have given him a huge majority to lead. There are those who argue that Johnson is, in fact, if not in theory, the country’s most powerful man, because he loves … to exercise power, and President Eisenhower does not.”
BUT ALTHOUGH DURING THE FINAL THREE YEARS of his Senate career, Lyndon Johnson’s power over the Senate was as great as ever, the legislative achievements of this last stage of his Senate career were in many ways no more than a reprise of his early years in the Senate.
This late period opened with a repeat of the theme—“preparedness”—that had been so prominent during the early period, more full-throated but in most aspects remarkably similar to its earlier form. On October 4, 1957, during the Senate recess before the opening of the Senate’s 1958 session, Russia launched Sputnik (“traveling companion”), the first man-made satellite to orbit the earth. Americans were shocked, having been confident of their nation’s technological and scientific superiority over the Soviet Union. A new age—the Space Age—had been launched, and it wasn’t America that had launched it but America’s most feared enemy. Despite the Eisenhower Administration’s attempts to minimize the Soviet Union’s achievement (Sherman Adams said that America was not about to play the Russians in “an outer-space basketball game”), in the first excitement its implications seemed ominous. The Russians had beaten America in the race to develop a missile capable of placing a satellite in orbit; might they not also win in the race to develop a missile capable of delivering nuclear warheads? Lyndon Johnson was down on his ranch when the news came over the television late that afternoon. He was to recall that when, after dinner, he, Lady Bird, and their guests, Dale and Scooter Miller, took the evening walk on the dirt road next to the Pedernales, they peered up at the dark Hill Country sky, unsuccessfully “straining to catch a glimpse of that alien object” among the skyful of stars. He felt, he was to recall, “uneasy and apprehensive”—as did much of America that night and in the weeks to come. The country’s first reaction was an alarm that approached panic; in the excitement it seemed that the Administration had squandered America’s lead in missilery, and that the nation had been caught unprepared, as unprepared as it had been seven years earlier, when Communist troops in Korea had attacked without warning across the 38th parallel.
With the nation possibly in danger, Richard Russell was again not the bigot but the patriot—a patriot who, in love of his country, was pure of heart. On October 4, Russell was back in the big white frame house in Winder, and all that evening, telegrams and telephone calls arrived there from his colleagues, for, apprehensive over the news, they knew, as they had known during the MacArthur crisis, who was the best senator to handle the necessary investigation, the senator who was, moreover, chairman of the Senate committee—Armed Services—into whose jurisdiction the investigation fell. “This is so vital a matter that nothing short of your own guidance will give it the necessary prestige and force,” John Stennis said. Stuart Symington was particularly insistent, urging “complete hearings” before the full committee so that “the American people can learn the truth”; in such hearings, he, as former Secretary of the Air Force and a longtime critic of Eisenhower’s defense policies (and as a Democratic presidential candidate planning to base his campaign on the defense issue), envisioned himself playing a substantial role. But Russell, more and more aware of his loss of “energy,” felt there was someone better suited for the work than himself: the senator who had done such yeoman work during that earlier time of unpreparedness. Having returned from his walk to the Pedernales, Johnson was about to put in a call to Winder when the phone rang in his living room. It was a call from Winder, and Russell told Johnson that the investigation should be carried out not by the full Armed Services Committee but by its Preparedness Subcommittee. Symington, he was to tell Johnson, “has a lot of information and would raise a lot of hell, but it would not be in the national interest.” Soon, in a time of possible peril to the Republic, the telephone calls were again going back and forth between the big frame house in sleepy Winder and the ranch in the isolated Hill Country. Russell’s tone was again avuncular. “You’re so thorough you’ve got to have the answers before you ask the questions,” he told Johnson. “Maybe this time you should ask the questions first.” To Stennis and Symington and any other senator who asked him to conduct the investigation, Russell said, as he was to put it, that he “had more or less turned this whole matter over to Senator Johnson.”
PREPAREDNESS HAD BEEN THE ISSUE THAT HAD, in 1950, catapulted Lyndon Johnson to Senate prominence, of course, and what he did now with that issue—and with that subcommittee (which, George Reedy was to say, “he had kept alive” during the intervening years “through the same instinct that causes people to store obsolete furniture in an attic rather than throw it in the trash”)—duplicated in m
any ways what he had done with the issue and the subcommittee in 1950.
There was the same instant creation of an extremely able staff from outside the Senate world. Johnson’s first choice for general counsel, in fact, was the subcommittee’s earlier general counsel, Donald Cook. But Cook, now president of American Electric Power and determined never to work for Lyndon Johnson again, declined, and Johnson persuaded the man who had engineered Cook’s move to American Electric, the New York attorney Edwin Weisl Sr., to accept the job in his place, and Weisl brought with him the brightest of the young lawyers at his big New York law firm, Cyrus R. Vance (who quickly caught Johnson’s eye, would be boosted by him up through government ranks, and, during Johnson’s presidency, would become Secretary of the Army), as well as Edwin Weisl Jr., a young attorney. Scientific expertise of the same quality came with the recruitment for the subcommittee’s staff of scientists from Harvard and Rice Institute. These lawyers and scientists were added to the nucleus of the subcommittee’s staff, headed by Daniel McGillicuddy, that was already in place, since Johnson had kept that nucleus intact over the years. Reedy was informally seconded to the subcommittee to be, again, its publicity director. There were the same assurances to a President—now not Harry Truman but Dwight Eisenhower—that the subcommittee would not attempt to lay blame on the Administration; after one Johnson visit to the Oval Office, Eisenhower would tell Ann Whitman that Johnson had “said all the right things. I think today he is being honest”—the same eloquent assurances of nonpartisan-ship to Senate Republicans, particularly to Styles Bridges, who was still the subcommittee’s ranking Republican member; there would be “no ‘guilty party’ in this inquiry except Joe Stalin and Nikita Khrushchev,” Johnson said; the material being assembled by the committee’s staff was so “deeply disturbing” that even “the most hardened ward-heeler would forget politics if he knew the facts.” He therefore pledged not to embarrass the “one man who can give the orders that will produce the missiles. That man is the President of the United States.” “We very much appreciate the way you are approaching this,” Secretary of Defense Neil McElroy replied. “… If through your efforts it is kept out of partisan politics, it will be for the good of the public and we want to work with you.” To Republicans, he held up Symington as a spectre, the way he had held up Joe McCarthy to Democrats in 1950. “If he did not initiate it [an inquiry], it would be done by Symington, and that would be much worse,” he told John Foster Dulles. There was the same journalistic praise over the non-partisanship. The investigation “will serve a useful purpose,” Time’s editors were told in a memo from the magazine’s Washington bureau. “… It is not, repeat not, being conceived as a witch hunt. Johnson knows that a good investigation is the only kind that will satisfy anyone, and in the end bring credit to everyone…. Here, as downtown, there is a sense of urgency, of consideration of the national interest.” There was the same understanding that nonpartisan-ship was, in this instance, the best politics, for the facts that would undoubtedly be brought out could hardly reflect other than unfavorably on the Administration. As a memo to Johnson from Reedy put it: “This may be one of those moments in history when good politics and statesmanship are as close to each other as a hand in a glove.”
Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson Page 161