The Passage of Power

by Robert A. Caro

  And no challenge from outside the committee could threaten him, either.

  Three Presidents had tried a challenge, each apparently believing that since Byrd’s philosophy was so out of touch with that of the country at large, he was vulnerable, and that a President could exploit that vulnerability.

  After Byrd had broken with him before the 1934 election, Roosevelt began funneling federal patronage through Byrd’s political foes in Virginia. Byrd won reelection by forty thousand votes. And when Roosevelt tried another tactic, nominating a federal judge unacceptable to Byrd and to Virginia’s other senator, Carter Glass, the vote against the nomination in the Senate was 72 to 9, the most one-sided vote in Senate history against a presidential nominee. Truman’s attacks on him in 1952, Byrd said, had “actually helped me get reelected.” Kennedy had tried a different route, trying to go around Byrd by creating an alliance with Robert Kerr, then the Finance Committee’s ranking Democratic member, and a Senate power himself, as part of which Kerr would have taken de facto control of the committee. While some members of the Washington press corps thought that the threat to Byrd’s power was real, it never came even close to a showdown—Kerr, as Dillon noted, “always recognized the position of the chairman and worked with his approval and never against him”—before Kerr’s death in January, 1963. Out of step with majority opinion in America though Byrd’s philosophy may have been, it was what the residents of his state—or at least those residents who managed to vote—wanted. Every presidential attempt to challenge his power in Virginia had only strengthened that power. Harry Byrd’s Finance Committee was a feudal barony within the governmental system of the United States. He was one of the mighty chairmen who ran their committees as independent fiefdoms—and who were, in effect, although it was never written about in those terms, in alliance against the President, an alliance, now a quarter of a century old, that no President had been able to break.

  Two days before Kennedy had left for Texas, the Washington Post’s longtime Capitol Hill correspondent, Chalmers Roberts, had written that “probably” Byrd “has never been more powerful than he is today.… Right now he is all-powerful.” “Go around Harry Byrd,” as the Kennedy legislative aides kept so blithely suggesting? Smathers wasn’t the only senator who understood the impracticality of that suggestion. Johnson men, of course, had learned the lesson from Johnson. “You couldn’t go around Harry Byrd,” Horace Busby says.

  DURING HIS YEARS in the Senate, Lyndon Johnson had spent a lot of time reading Harry Byrd.

  At first, the book had been closed to him. During the first three of his Senate years, Byrd’s attitude toward him had been so reserved that it sometimes seemed to border on dislike. Johnson had, nonetheless, never stopped trying to open the book, hadn’t stopped “doing everything” to open it. Early in 1952, as was related in the last volume, Byrd’s beloved thirty-five-year-old daughter, Westwood, died after a fall from her horse during a fox hunt. Rosemont was a two-hour drive from Washington, and heavy rain was falling on the day of the funeral. No other senators were planning to attend the services, but Johnson did, managing at the last minute to persuade another young senator, Warren Magnuson, to accompany him so he wouldn’t be alone. And, Johnson told Busby later that day, as he and Magnuson stood in the rain across the grave from the Byrd family, holding their hats in their hands, the only senators present, Byrd suddenly looked up and saw them. “He looked at us, and then he looked back at me,” Johnson told Busby. “I don’t know what that look meant, but I’ll bet … that was a very important look.”

  It was. Byrd’s administrative aide John (Jake) Carlton told Johnson that he was welcome to drop around to Byrd’s office when he had a problem he wanted to discuss. And Johnson used the privilege he had been given to make the impression he wanted to make on the courtly Virginian. He would always telephone ahead to Carlton for an appointment, but when he arrived at the office, even if Carlton said the senator was free and was expecting him and he could go right in, he wouldn’t do so, “wouldn’t walk right in even if I motioned to him that he could.” Instead, to emphasize that he wouldn’t even think of barging in, “he would wait until I got up and opened the door—so the Senator [Byrd] would know that he was going in only after I had opened the door.” And once Johnson had the text open in his hands, he grasped and made use of the meanings he found within it. While Byrd’s patrician aloofness made him unwilling to stoop to asking other senators how they were planning to vote, for example, he was nonetheless anxious to know what the vote would be on one of the tax or budget proposals about which he cared so deeply. After Johnson realized this, Byrd began getting this information without having to ask; Johnson, it was observed, “counted for him,” having Bobby Baker do the asking and then relaying Baker’s findings to Byrd—always offhandedly, casually, as if he didn’t know how anxious Byrd was.

  Then, as the years passed, the text grew easier to read—and it became easier for Johnson to make use of what he read, because Byrd, after all, was already sixty-seven years old when Johnson became Majority Leader.

  After her conversations with Johnson, Doris Kearns Goodwin was to write that he recognized “that the older men in the Senate were often troubled by a half-conscious sense that their performance was deteriorating with age.” “Now they feared humiliation,” Johnson told her. “They craved attention. And when they found it, it was like a spring in the desert,” and among its benefits was “dependence on me.” Byrd’s reluctance to spend money on hiring professional staff members made him particularly vulnerable as he grew older and was less able to do the work himself. More and more research that should have been done, reports that should have been written, were not being done or written—and he knew it. And sometimes, in the most delicate way, Johnson began asking whether perhaps George Reedy or another of his Senate aides, Gerry Siegel, might prepare a draft—just some suggestions, really—for the senator’s approval. In addition, as I have written, “old men want to feel that the experience which has come with their years is valuable, that their advice is valuable, that they possess a sagacity that could be obtained only through experience—a sagacity that could be of use to young men if only young men would ask.” Finding a word that evoked such feelings, Johnson used it with Byrd. He had a problem he didn’t know how to solve, he would say. “Can I have a little bit of your wisdom?” He did a lot of thanking, using that same word. “Thanks for that wisdom,” he would tell Byrd. “I needed that wisdom.” And older men like deference, and with powerful older men Johnson took deference to extremes, and Harry Byrd was a very powerful man; were men astonished when they saw Johnson bend over and kiss Sam Rayburn’s bald head?—with Byrd it was not the head but the hand over which he bent: expressing gratitude for some favor Byrd had done for him, or sometimes merely to show affection, he would take one of the old senator’s hands in both of his, raise it to his lips, and kiss it. In the opinion of some of Lyndon Johnson’s Senate colleagues, of course, Byrd’s hand was not the only part of his body on which Johnson bestowed affection. With “the Harry Byrds of the world … he was … so submissive, and so condescending, you couldn’t believe it! I’ve seen him kiss Harry Byrd’s ass until it was disgusting: ‘Senator, how about so-and-so?’ … ‘Can’t we do this for you?’ ”

  After Johnson became the Democratic Leader, he was not just Byrd’s young friend but his reliable ally. No appointment was ever made to a vacancy on the Finance Committee without Byrd’s approval; any bill, major or private, in which Byrd was interested was moved quickly to the head of the Senate Calendar; as Byrd passed the age of seventy, and moved well beyond it, and his stamina (although none of his mental acuity) began to fade, Johnson would, in the most tactful, considerate way, arrange with Byrd to have Louisiana’s Long—an effective floor tactician and a senator Byrd trusted—manage some Finance bills on the Senate floor, constantly checking in with the chairman, of course.

  Whatever the reasons for Harry Byrd’s affection for Lyndon Johnson (one may have been his ill-conce
aled disappointment in his own son Harry Flood Byrd Jr.), the affection was deep. Ordinarily not a man to tolerate being kept waiting, sometimes, visiting Johnson in the hospital after Johnson’s heart attack, he would find two visitors, the limit the doctors allowed at a time, already in his room, and others waiting on a bench in the corridor. Joining them on the bench, he would sit uncomplainingly, his dented Panama hat on his knee, waiting for his turn to be admitted. “Give Lyndon my best—Tell him the Senate is not the same without him,” he wrote Lady Bird. When Johnson was trying to decide whether to run for President in 1956, Byrd pleaded with him to declare his candidacy; all he had to do was say yes, the Virginian had told him, and he would never have to think about Virginia again; its delegates would be solid for him until the end.

  By the later years of Johnson’s time as Leader, it had become known around the Senate that Johnson could occasionally—not often but sometimes—do what no one else could do: move the immovable Harry Byrd. Before one vote—on a measure about which Byrd did not have strong feelings but on which he would ordinarily have voted no—Johnson confided to a Senate aide that he might persuade him to abstain instead. “Harry Byrd is a man of principle,” he said. “I can’t ask Harry to do anything against his principles. But I can ask Harry Byrd—and he might oblige me—to stay away [during the vote].”

  Reading the Byrd text, however, Johnson had found one point very clear: the unshakable, immovable solidity of Byrd’s fiscal conservatism, of his belief in the importance, for America and the world, of the balanced budget and an end to deficit spending. For the Virginian there was a line, firm and hard, at which personal feelings, even paternal fondness, ended, and it was the line at which feelings collided with philosophy and issues based on that philosophy: nothing, not even Lyndon Johnson, could soften in the slightest Byrd’s unyielding opposition to government spending and government debt.

  Johnson knew that Byrd’s references to a $100 billion budget were not offhand, casual remarks; that to the Finance Committee chairman a budget over that figure would symbolize the launching of governmental spending into a new, unprecedented sphere. Under $100 billion, Johnson immediately understood, wasn’t something Byrd was suggesting, it was something on which he was, in his bland, soft-spoken southern way, insisting. Johnson had also realized that Byrd was saying something else as well. When the chairman had told Smathers that he wanted to “see and prove” for himself that the budget was under $100 billion, those words had not been chosen casually, either. He had meant “see and prove.” He wanted to see the budget in writing. He wanted to be able to read it, and have congressional staff experts analyze it to ensure that the budget was truly under $100 billion, that that figure hadn’t been lowered to that amount by some accounting or governmental gimmick. Johnson understood other aspects of the situation as well. For years, Harry Byrd had been trying to insist that government hold down spending, without much success. Now, however, for the first time, he had a bargaining chip, the tax bill, to force it to hold spending down, at least to a level he considered acceptable. And he was using that chip. What he was saying—even if no one in the Kennedy Administration seemed to have understood what he was saying—was that until he got a budget of under $100 billion from the President, got it in writing and had it analyzed, in detail, for himself, he was not going to release the President’s tax bill from his committee. And, Johnson knew, if Byrd didn’t release the tax bill, there wasn’t going to be a tax bill.

  TALKING WITH JOHNSON on the phone about the tax cut and budget, Robert Anderson, who during his years as Treasury secretary had often dealt with both men, told Johnson that the best hope of breaking the impasse might lie in Byrd’s affection for him. “Harry Byrd always voted with the Republicans until you became the leader of the Democrats,” he said. “And you could bring him to us once in a while and … finally, on every crucial vote, you had him. And you can get him again.” Overstated though that analysis might be—only on rare occasions had Johnson won Byrd’s support on a significant fiscal bill—it contained a germ of truth: he had indeed obtained Byrd’s support on several occasions when doing so had seemed impossible. That, however, had always required a personal plea: no intermediary would do; he had always had to go to Byrd in person. He was reluctant to request a meeting with Byrd now, because making the request would weaken his negotiating position. He hoped the senator would make the first call, he told Anderson on November 29. “It would look a lot … a lot better if he was seeking the appointment.” He asked Anderson to suggest to Byrd that he call, and when that didn’t work, on December 3 he asked Mansfield, explaining, “I don’t want to be asking him.” But no call came.

  Johnson had no choice. You couldn’t go around Harry Byrd. Telephoning the senator on December 4, Johnson asked him to come to lunch, saying, “Harry, why don’t you come down here and see me tomorrow. I want to get some of your wisdom.” Hanging up the phone, Byrd turned to Neil MacNeil of Time magazine, who was sitting in his office, and said, “You know what that means. He wants to work on me a little bit.” But, MacNeil recalls, as Byrd said that, his eyes were “twinkling,” and there was a “fond note” in his voice.

  PLANNING WENT INTO THAT VISIT. Every courtesy was observed, every gesture extended that would make Harry Byrd of the Byrds of Virginia feel that respect was being paid to his power—and to the power of the Senate that he represented. The White House limousine waiting for him at the steps of the Senate Office Building went without saying, but there was also a tour of the White House conducted by the President himself: of the Cabinet Room, the swimming pool, even what Byrd called “the little room where he gets his rub,” and then the Oval Office—and, beyond it, the small office where they were to have lunch, with a menu selected by Johnson (potato soup, a Byrd favorite, and a salad). Byrd was the first person who had ever dined with him there, the new President said.

  The only other person in the small office was Jack Valenti, and, thanks to his accounts, the lunch has previously been depicted as an unadulterated triumph for Johnson. By its conclusion, Johnson “had gotten a commitment out of Harry Byrd,” Valenti has written in one of his many descriptions of the meeting, reporting that when Byrd said, “I want to get it down to one hundred billion,” Johnson had asked, “Harry, if I do [that], will the tax cut come out of committee,” and Byrd had replied, “In that case maybe we can do some business.”

  In reality, however, Byrd had not budged from his previous position on the budget during that lunch. Not only had he again insisted on the $100 billion limit, this very tough businessman had repeated his other conditions. Although Valenti doesn’t mention this point, he had said that the tax bill might come out of committee, but only after he had been given the budget in writing, had seen it with his own eyes, and had had it analyzed.

  In addition, it was not just he who would have to see it in writing, he told Johnson during that December 5 luncheon; it would also have to be shown to his committee’s ranking Republican, John J. Williams, the same Williams who was investigating Bobby Baker, a senator as adamantly opposed to government deficits as Byrd himself. No negotiating had been possible about those conditions: Byrd had been immovable. Johnson understood the ultimatum; as he was to explain to a caller the next day: “They [the Finance Committee] are going to hold this thing [the tax cut bill] until they get a look at our budget and then decide what they do about our tax bill.” And he understood that he had no choice but to accept the conditions. If he didn’t, there might, at the end of all the months of effort, be no tax bill at all. In some ways, nothing had been changed by the lunch. “They’d like to get it [the tax bill] behind civil rights and not [pass] it … at all,” he said. During that lunch, Byrd had received a commitment that he would get what he wanted, what he had been asking for for months: a budget that would be under his “magic figure” and proof—in writing—that it would indeed be under that figure. “If you don’t mind,” he said mildly to reporters after he got back to his office, “I wish you’d point out that this
is what I’ve been asking for all along.” And to Johnson’s request that he speed up the Finance Committee’s public hearings and vote on all of the committee members’ individual amendments before Congress’s Christmas adjournment so that when in January the budget was ready to be reviewed by him and Williams, the tax cut could come to the floor without further delay, Byrd told the reporters, “I told the President you simply can’t rush through a complex bill that runs more than three hundred pages.” Despite Valenti’s depiction of the lunch as a victory for Johnson, the President emerged from it knowing as a certainty that there was no hope of having the tax cut bill pass before the end of the year and the current session of Congress, that, as George Smathers had told him in that first call about the congressional situation, he was simply “not going to be able to do it.” And he emerged from the lunch knowing something else: the budget had been cut to $101.5 or $102 billion through the use of gimmicks, in particular the promise of future “supplemental” appropriations, and “the committee”—Byrd’s committee—“knows how to spot the gimmicks,” and knew all about supplementals. By the time Byrd saw the budget, it had to be not merely below $100 billion but far enough below $100 billion so that Byrd wouldn’t feel that it had been reduced to that figure only by accounting tricks—wouldn’t feel that the true figure was higher—and so that he would feel that federal spending for the year would still be below the magic figure even after the inevitable supplementals had been added later.