The Passage of Power

by Robert A. Caro

  Nonetheless, hedged about by conditions though it was, a commitment had been made. If the conditions were met, “we can do some business.” And of at least equal importance, there had been a renewal of old ties.

  Cutting the budget to $101.5 or $102 billion hadn’t really been all that difficult. But a lot more cutting was going to be necessary. The big hand grabbed the receiver. “Kermit, get in here, and bring your meat cleaver,” Lyndon Johnson said.

  AT DINNERS NOW, there would be senators and congressmen, Lady Bird Johnson was to write in her diary, and “the talk among the men was about the Tax Bill, the Tax Bill, the Tax Bill.”

  “He had to get that tax cut,” Jack Valenti says. So many of the things Lyndon Johnson wanted to accomplish—so many of the subjects Valenti had listed on his notepad during Johnson’s monologue in The Elms that first night—depended on the increased tax revenues that would be generated by an expanding economy. Without them, “it would be very difficult to do … the things he wanted to do.… It was his general feeling [that] everything [he] wanted to do would be hinged to the tax cut.” After dinner, Lady Bird wrote, “he went back to his office and his telephone.”

  “I worked as hard on that budget as I have ever worked on anything,” Lyndon Johnson was to say in his memoir, The Vantage Point. “The budget determines how many unemployed men and women are going to be trained; how many hungry schoolchildren are going to be fed; how many poor people are going to be housed … how our entire population is going to be protected against a possible enemy attack. Day after day I went over that budget.… I studied every line, nearly every page, until I was dreaming about the budget at night.” Kermit Gordon seemed to be in his office every evening, Valenti says. “Then they would call in the department heads, one at a time, and work on them.”

  In memos to Cabinet members and agency heads, Johnson, in Gordon’s words, made “abundantly clear his decision to tighten management and hold down employment in the federal government,” and said he would personally review every request that would lead to an increase in a department’s budget. In discussing with Gordon the Budget Director’s meetings with Cabinet members, his tone was even tougher. “Is anyone going up on you?” he would demand. For those department heads who, like Fowler, Rusk and most of all McNamara, were cooperative, Johnson had a friendly voice. (“He’s the only guy that’s really trying to help me,” Johnson said of McNamara in one call to Anderson. “And he is trying to help”; on December 7 the Defense secretary announced a series of steps that would lower his department’s budget by an additional billion and a half dollars.) For those who weren’t, there was a different voice, even for those Kennedy Cabinet members whom he had thus far been handling with kid gloves. The gloves had to come off now: the tax cut had to go through, and that meant the budget had to come down. To convince the country, and conservatives in Congress, that he was doing everything possible to economize, Johnson wanted a symbolic achievement: to be able to announce that the total number of federal employees under the new budget would be lower than under the old one. But although a number of departments were reducing their payrolls, some were resisting, including the Department of Agriculture.

  The soft voice Johnson had been using with Walter Heller, and, through Heller, with Secretary of Agriculture Freeman, had evidently misled Freeman, who, despite the fact that Heller had given him Johnson’s message to “quit lobbying” for increased expenditures, had continued doing so, sending Johnson a stream of memos arguing for a substantial increase in the Agriculture Department budget. “Obviously, he knows I’ve been doing a bit of agitating,” Freeman wrote in his diary, “but according to Walter this does not seem to irritate him.”

  The magnitude of that misconception should have become clear to him when, on December 11, he finally had an audience with Johnson in the Oval Office. He had expected, Freeman was to recall, “a philosophical discussion with the new President” about the overall goals of agricultural policy as laid out in his latest memo.

  Johnson told him he hadn’t even bothered to read the memo. Reminding Freeman that he had told him that he wanted him to deal personally with senators who were agitating for larger appropriations for various farm programs “and keep them off my back,” he said that Freeman hadn’t been doing that—and he wanted him to start. He had told Freeman that he had to get along better with Capitol Hill, to spend more time socializing with senators and representatives, and Freeman wasn’t doing that. “You go up there as I told you to do originally and live with these people,” he said. And when Freeman tried to tell him how hard he was working to cut the Agriculture budget, there was, the secretary says, a “minor explosion.” Suddenly the President was standing very close to him, towering over him, and a long forefinger was jabbing his chest. “You’ve got about the biggest increase in personnel of anyone in the entire government,” the President said. “We’ve got to get that budget down.”

  Evidently, however, the misconception still hadn’t been cleared up. Freeman wrote another memo, apologizing for having made perhaps “a little more noise than anyone else” about the budget, but saying that there was no alternative “if Agriculture is going to get its day in court.” His “vigorous management improvement program” had drastically reduced the number of additional new personnel he was asking for, he said, but the number was nonetheless still thirty-five hundred.

  This time he didn’t get even an audience. “Orville Freeman’s got a memo here,” Johnson told Gordon over the phone. “He’s got plenty of time to write memos.” He read Gordon a few lines from the memo: “ ‘Mr. President, your comments about the number of employees and increases in the Department of Agriculture concern me deeply. My concern does not represent personal sensitivity.’

  “Ha, ha, ha!” Johnson said, in a voice that had no humor in it at all. He told Gordon to draft a reply for his signature—“To take this [memo] and not be unjust. But be just as close to being unjust as you can.… Say, ‘Yes, you’ve given me seven reasons why you can’t keep this thing down, but nevertheless we’re going to keep it down.’ ” He didn’t want any more discussions with Freeman, he said, and he didn’t want any more memos. He told Gordon to draft a reply “that will get him away from writing memos, which take up my time … and cost us extra money, and see if he can’t do some saving.

  “Let’s cut down on some of these employees,” Johnson said. “I know the difference between adding 3,500 and subtracting 3,500.” Tell him to “go back and work a little harder.”

  By December 17, despite a substantial reduction that Freeman, having evidently worked harder, had made in Agriculture, and reductions in other departments, the number of federal employees projected under the new budget was still seven thousand greater than under the old, and five thousand of the seven were in the Post Office Department. Citing a sharp increase in the volume of mail the Post Office was handling, and opposition from the powerful postal unions to any cuts in the department’s budget that would reduce the number of projected jobs, Postmaster General John Gronouski had resisted any cuts at all in his proposed budget. When, on December 23, Johnson asked Kermit Gordon if Gronouski had agreed on a budget compromise, Gordon said, “We haven’t agreed on anything—not yet.”

  “General,” Lyndon Johnson said to Gronouski when he had him on the phone, he needed a compromise, “and they [the Budget Bureau] just said that if you’d give us a Christmas present and work day and night, you could squeeze that down.… Now don’t you think you can?”

  The inflection of the question was pleasant, but when Gronouski’s answer was not an assent, the inflection hardened. “You’ve got five thousand of the seven thousand,” Johnson told him. “We’re trying to say we’ve got less employees next year than we had this year.” Defense has cut its number, he said. State has cut its number. Interior has cut it. Agriculture has cut it. “I’ve just got to have some real pruning and some real cooperation.… You think about it.”

  There were ways in which the number could be increased la
ter—after the budget had passed—Johnson said. “I wouldn’t mind going up in December, after we get the election behind us, and giving you a little supplemental appropriation,” he said. That possibility had to be kept secret for now, he said. “You’ve got to understand there’s some bookkeeping here, and accounting, and we can’t say that. But if you could just squeeze it out … and say you’re going to get by on less than you had last year … even though the volume’s way up … it would just help us, because you’ve got five thousand of those seven thousand jobs.”

  Gronouski continued to mention the strength of the postal unions, and the necessity, if cuts were made, of cutting back postal services. Johnson mentioned opposing arguments. “People are wondering about these extra employees,” the President said. They might start wondering about the department’s efficiency, he hinted. The postal service was a monopoly, he said, and “anybody that can’t operate a monopoly at a profit, by God, we’ve got some serious problems.… If you give me a monopoly, I’ll operate it at a profit: I’ll guarantee you that.” He had a list of the various departments before him—“every department,” Lyndon Johnson repeated. “And of the 7,000 increase, 5,000 of them are in postal.”

  Gronouski tried to make a joke of it. “I’ve got them all, huh,” he said with a little laugh.

  “No,” Lyndon Johnson said without a laugh. “You’ve got 5,000 of them, though.”

  The possibility that the press and Congress might get hold of those figures had sunk in. “Five thousand out of seven, right?” Gronouski said.

  “And I don’t think you want to be explaining that,” Johnson said.

  Ten days later, Gronouski announced that the Post Office Department had found it would be able to operate for another year at the current personnel level, so the five thousand extra jobs would no longer be needed. The budget was coming down.

  ALTHOUGH HARRY BYRD had set tough conditions, he had said that if they were met, business could be done: the tax cut bill could come out of committee. And, it was turning out, Lyndon Johnson had again done with him what no one else could do. While Byrd still wasn’t agreeing to end the committee’s hearings on the original bill so that hearings could begin on the proposed amendments, now, when he gave a date by which those hearings on the bill might end—December 10—he appeared to mean it, and indeed they did end on that date. The atmosphere in the Finance Committee offices had changed. After a conversation with Finance Committee chief clerk Elizabeth B. Springer, Mike Manatos told Larry O’Brien, “If I am any judge of Mrs. Springer’s feelings … she reflects a much more positive attitude about Senator Byrd’s desire to cooperate. Obviously, the President’s discussion with Senator Byrd has been most helpful.”

  Then came the committee members’ thirty amendments. Byrd didn’t want them all disposed of, because if, when he saw the budget, it wasn’t below $100 billion, he wanted to be able to continue to hold the bill in the Finance Committee and not release it to the Senate floor, and an easy way of accomplishing that was simply to say that the committee was still dealing with amendments.

  The chairman’s handling, on December 11, of the first amendment (one that had been introduced by Russell Long on behalf of his state’s oil oligarchy) was a case study in Senate procedure: that is, Senate delay. First, there was the question of whether, since the hearing was an executive session, a stenotypist should be present to record the proceedings: a simple question, but Byrd let discussion about it drag on for an hour and a half. Then one of the committee members asked a question about some unexplored aspect of the effect the amendment would have on the net amount collected through income tax, a technical question that had to be answered by the Treasury Department; Treasury officials had thought they had prepared for every question, but this one caught them by surprise; it could most easily be explained by graphs, they said, and it was decided that graphs should be prepared; the graphs couldn’t be ready until the next day, so Byrd adjourned the hearings for this day. Some of Johnson’s Cabinet members sometimes seemed to be working against him. The amendment wouldn’t have received such serious consideration had it not been for a letter from Treasury supporting it. “I thought you had an agreement that you’d be against every amendment,” Johnson reminded Treasury’s Dillon on December 12. “Well, we’re against practically every one,” Dillon said; Long had insisted that Treasury support his—“that was the price” for his working with the Kennedy Administration to get the bill passed. If this amendment was passed, other senators would be encouraged to press for adoption of their own amendments, Johnson explained. “You’ll have thirty more of them, if you start amending it.” The following week would be the week before the Christmas recess; senators would begin leaving for home; “I’m afraid you won’t have a quorum next week,” Johnson said. When the Senate reconvened in January, 1964, there would still be many amendments left to dispose of. And even if Byrd was agreeable to disposing of them, that job wasn’t going to be easy; it was going to be “a 9–8 thing every time” in the seventeen-member committee.

  Johnson explained Byrd’s tactics to Dillon. When Byrd had received Dillon’s letter, he knew it would “delay things,” but “the committee [Byrd] said, ‘Hell, we don’t care about delay. That’s what we’re in business for is to delay things.’ ”

  And sometime in 1964, the civil rights bill was going to emerge from the House and go directly to the Senate floor. If that happened and “you don’t have your tax bill,” you will have to wait until after the civil rights fight—until after the civil rights filibuster—he reminded the Treasury secretary.

  Dillon had to make more of an effort, Johnson told him. Every one of the committee’s nine Democratic members had to show up for every meeting, so that there would be a quorum, and they had to vote against every amendment, to prevent any further delays. “You’ve got to get them all in there, and get them organized, and say, ‘God almighty, fellows. We can’t stand this. We can’t have this follow civil rights. You’re going to ruin us on our fiscal program.’ ” Exactly what he had feared would happen was happening. “I’m terribly distressed,” he told Dillon. “I’m just distressed that it’s going to get behind civil rights. If it does, it’s Good night, Grace.”1

  The next day—December 13—there was another conversation between Johnson and Byrd. President though Johnson may have been now, he pleaded with Byrd, pleaded as if Byrd was not a foe but an ally. He was working to give Harry what he wanted on the budget, he told him. “I’m working in [sic] my budget every night. I was up till one o’clock last night. And I’m going to get you a budget I think you’ll be proud of.… I’m going to help you with the budget.” Pleaded as if Byrd was an old ally—and an old friend—who, like him, might see all their hard work go down the drain.

  He found a line that worked. If the tax reduction bill was passed as part of the arrangement with the budget, he told the old senator, “You can tell your grandchildren you were the senator who finally got a President to cut his budget.” And, having found the perfect line, he used it. Unless the bill had Harry Byrd’s help, he told him, the bill might not pass.

  “What we want to do, Senator, is to try to get those amendments voted on before we go home, or at least as many of them as we can,” he said. “What I’m afraid of is” if the civil rights bill arrived on the Senate floor first, “if your [note the pronoun] tax bill got behind it, why all of our work would have been done in vain. So I’m just so anxious to run it [the hearings] morning, afternoon and night, and try to get these amendments voted on.” They had both been working so hard, he said. “You help me … get that bill out. I know you’re against it, but you’re a good chairman, and you help them vote. You’re tired of this talking yourself.”

  And he began to make him an ally—finally, during that December 13 call, began to “get him,” as Bob Anderson had predicted he would get him, persuading Byrd to subordinate at least to a degree his desire to stall the tax cut bill, to subordinate it to this opportunity to realize the grand aim of his public
life: to slow down government’s headlong rush along the path of fiscal profligacy on which a budget over the magic figure would have been yet another step; to pass a budget that might signal a beginning at last of a turn toward governmental prudence and economy.

  Russell Long watched it happen. He had been unable “to move the [tax cut] bill,” he was to recall. “I couldn’t move the bill out of committee.” Then, he says, “Johnson worked with Byrd—promised to cut spending, and Harry changed [his] attitude. Up until then he wasn’t going to permit the bill to pass.” But now, when Lyndon Johnson told Harry Byrd that he knew Byrd was “tired of this talking” and wanted his committee to send the tax bill to the floor, Byrd replied with a single word: “Right.” From Harry Byrd a single word was enough. The amendments started to move faster.