Leadership

by Doris Kearns Goodwin

  At the core of Johnson’s success in the Senate, however, was his celebrated ability to read character, to gauge the desires, needs, hopes, and ambitions of every individual with whom he interacted. If Theodore Roosevelt’s speed of learning in the state legislature had astonished witnesses, those who watched Lyndon Johnson in his early years in the Senate were positively boggled. In short order, Johnson was able to memorize the entire institution, its people, its rules, its traditions. “When you’re dealing with all those senators,” he explained, “the good ones and the crazies, the hard workers and the lazies, the smart ones and the mediocres—you’ve got to know two things right away. You’ve got to understand the beliefs and values common to all of them as politicians, the desire for fame and the thirst for honor, and then you’ve got to understand the emotion most controlling that particular senator.”

  And whatever Johnson learned of his cohorts, he never forgot. Over time, he was able to create a composite mental portrait of every Democratic senator: his strengths and vulnerabilities; his aspirations in the Senate and perhaps beyond; how far he could be pressured and by what means; how he liked his liquor; how he felt about his wife and family, and, most importantly, how he felt about himself—what kind of senator he wanted to be. As Johnson’s mental profiles of his colleagues became more intimate and expansive, his political instincts became nearly unerring. Knowledge of the minutiae of the needs and desires of his colleagues on both sides of the aisle enabled him to assign places in senatorial delegations, gratify one senator’s wish for a trip to Paris and another’s desire to shore up his foreign policy credentials by attending the NATO Parliamentary Conference. Senators incurred debts large and small to Johnson, debts that would be owed for future collection.

  At every step of his drive for power within the Senate, Johnson was aided by what one reporter called “the biggest, the most efficient, the most ruthlessly overworked and the most loyal personal staff in the history of the Senate.” Working with Johnson was never easy, George Reedy recalled. He could be “a magnificent, inspiring leader” at one moment, “an insufferable bastard” the next. “He was cruel, even to people who had virtually walked the last mile for him. Occasionally he would demonstrate his gratitude for extraordinary services by a lavish gift—an expensive suit of clothes, an automobile, jewelry for the women on his staff,” but such gifts were often prelude to an additional outpouring of invective. And, as always, the staff members “were required to drop everything to wait upon him and were expected to forget their private lives in his interests.” At regular intervals, Reedy would contemplate resigning, but then Johnson would do something so “superb” that he “forgot his grievances.”

  * * *

  When Democrats, by a single vote, gained a majority in the upper chamber in 1955, the forty-six-year-old Lyndon Johnson was elected the youngest majority leader in the history of the Senate.

  With a quiverful of arrows—unflagging energy, guile, single-minded determination, a politician’s ability to link names, people, and events, executive drive, entrepreneurial flare, beguiling storytelling gifts—he had reached the summit of congressional legislative posts. Newspaper reporters painted a picture of a surpassing political mechanic, capable of starting what was stalled, keeping the whole legislative machine humming without rancor and without overheating.

  If at last Lyndon Johnson was “sitting on the top of the world,” the road to get there had taken a drastic toll. During a press conference summing up the Senate’s work in the first half of the year, he “blew his stack completely.” He screamed, “Goddamn you,” at a reporter who had asked a question he resented. “You can get the hell out of here.” The press conference was shattered; members of the press corps left stunned. Though members of his team had witnessed Johnson’s fabled irascibility behind closed doors, he had generally been able to tamp down his temper in public venues.

  Plagued with an odd lethargy, indigestion, and accelerating stress, Johnson finally decided to take a rare hiatus from work to spend the 4th of July weekend at the Middleburg, Virginia, country estate of his good friend and benefactor, George Brown. On the two-hour ride to Middleburg, “my chest really began to hurt,” Johnson recalled, “as though I had jacked up a truck and the jack had slipped and the truck had crushed my chest in.” Fortunately, another guest, who himself had suffered a heart attack, recognized the symptoms: “My God, man, you’re having a heart attack.” An ambulance transported Johnson to Bethesda Naval Hospital in Washington, the nearest major cardiac unit. A long-term friend of Johnson’s, Posh Oltorf, rode with him in the ambulance. “It was a very hectic ride, it hurt him desperately,” Oltorf recalled. “I think he definitely felt there was a possibility that he’d die before we got there,” but throughout the ordeal, Johnson remained “extremely courageous and brave,” adding, “if he had a toe ache, he’d complain” and “expect a great deal of sympathy. He was just the opposite with this serious thing.”

  Lady Bird awaited his arrival at the hospital, where he went into shock, hovering between life and death. Each passing day greatly increased his odds for survival, but the doctors told the press that the majority leader’s immediate return was absolutely out of the question, that he could not “undertake any business whatsoever for a period of months.” An Associated Press headline blared: “Heart Attack Drops Johnson from White House Hopefuls.” Political chatter speculated that the heart attack had not only extinguished the prospect of his running for the presidency but that he might not be able to resume the burdensome role of majority leader. The upward trajectory of his career was interrupted, and perhaps brought to an end.

  Johnson fell into a depression so consuming that it appeared he was grieving over his own death. The depth of his despondency was measured by the crushing descent from the eminence he had achieved. Everything he held dear was at hazard—his present attainments, his future ambitions. This was different in degree from the depression one might expect after a heart attack. “He’d just sort of lie there,” Reedy recalled. “You’d feel that he wasn’t there at all, that there was some representation of Johnson alongside of you, something mechanical.”

  “Then one day he got up and he hollered to have somebody come up and give him a shave, and just in a matter of minutes the whole damned hospital started to click. He took over the corridor, installed a couple of typewriters there, he was dictating letters, he was just going full speed.” What had reanimated him from his corpselike state? The crucial tonic, it soon became clear, was not administered by the doctors and the nurses, or even by the round-the-clock ministrations of Lady Bird. What animated him was the spate of more than four thousand letters of concern, condolence, and love. “He’d read them over and over and over again,” Reedy remembered, “oh, he was just basking in those letters.” Finally, it “got to the point where we couldn’t let them all in his room: there wouldn’t have been enough room for him.” The letters, Johnson exulted, showed that “everybody loves Lyndon,” and they kindled in him a fierce need to reciprocate that love. Just as he would answer constituents immediately, so he rose to action now to reply to every single letter. He needed reconnection to these people. Stenographers were installed in the physicians’ station in the hospital corridor, the typewriters were going nonstop, the seventeenth floor became a hive of activity. The letters did not merely occupy his time, entertain, or distract him. They invigorated him as would life-giving transfusions.

  * * *

  “Time is the most valuable thing you have; be sure you spend it well” had been a favorite, oft-repeated adage of Johnson’s. Now, however, it took on a sharper urgency. He had always been a most excessive, immoderate man. Ceaseless striving, a chronically strained metabolism, an appalling diet of whatever he was able to consume in the gaps of his maniacal schedule, could now be fatal. It was necessary that he curb a lifetime of habits. In his six-month period of convalescence at the ranch, a healthy diet replaced breakfasts of four cigarettes and black coffee, dinners of fried steaks and fried p
otatoes. He exercised daily in a newly built swimming pool, drank less bourbon, lost forty pounds, and took regular naps. He endeavored to walk more slowly and somewhat assuage the excitable tempo of his speech. He spent more time with his wife and children and even behaved in a gentler, or at least less demanding, fashion toward his staff.

  To counter the gossip in the press that he might not have the stamina to return to the political cauldron of the majority leadership, he launched a campaign for public consumption, spinning the narrative of a man whose entire mode of living had been altered. This included a thoroughgoing philosophical change most succinctly expressed in a magazine article: “My Heart Attack Taught Me How to Live.” He portrayed himself as a new man, leading a well-rounded and meditative life, reading Plato and American history, listening to classical music, taking pleasure in the natural world of the Pedernales, his ranch and its animals. When reporters and interviewers came to the ranch, they found him “sprawled on a hammock,” holding a book, as “Strauss waltzes floated into the air”—a stage set, complete with soundtrack and arranged props.

  Yet, beneath this contrived projection, a bona fide metamorphosis was taking place. Death had brushed hard against him, and beneath the calculations of a public relations machine, he was struggling mightily within himself. Johnson’s New Deal friend Jim Rowe had sent him a recently published biography on Lincoln, which detailed the profound change Lincoln had undergone during a waiting time when he was out of politics. This was Johnson’s waiting time, a time of gathering strength and direction.

  When Lincoln had suffered his deep depression he had asked himself: What if I died now? What would I be remembered for? Coming back from “the brink of death,” Johnson asked himself a similar set of questions. He had laid the foundation of a substantial fortune, but what purpose did that serve? He had learned to manipulate the legislative machine of the Senate with a deftness and technical expertise without parallel in American history. But to what end did one accumulate such power? Regardless of one’s impressive title, power without purpose and without vision was not the same thing as leadership.

  * * *

  As the January opening of the new congressional session drew near—the date doctors designated for the convalescent’s earliest return to Washington—Johnson made plans to deliver a major public speech that would display his physical and mental readiness to resume full command of the Senate. The time and site for his formal reemergence in the public eye were chosen—the late November dedication of the Lake Whitney Dam at the National Guard Armory in the lakeside community of Whitney, Texas. Though the town itself was tiny, the armory had a seating capacity of five thousand, which the advance team intended to pack with people from all over the state, making it “a matter of honor for everybody” to show their joy that Lyndon was back.

  All through November, with George Reedy’s help, Johnson nervously worked on the speech. Though fully aware of his disabling inability to deliver an effective formal speech, he was determined to show that he was “back in the saddle again”—indeed that was the song chosen for his introduction. Of even greater importance, he had decided to use the speech as an occasion to rededicate himself to the values that had originally drawn him into public service: the idea that government should be used to help those who needed help—the poor, the undereducated, the ill-housed, the elderly, the sick. “We’ve got to look after these people,” his father had repeatedly told him, “that’s what we’re here for.” He had returned from this crucible of a massive heart attack with a renewed allegiance to his father’s plainspoken counsel, resolved to act upon it while he had the time and if he had the chance.

  Just as Franklin Roosevelt had obsessively rehearsed and trained before the 1924 convention speech that would mark his first public appearance since he had been stricken with polio, so Johnson called Reedy “every three minutes to switch ‘and’ to ‘the’ or ‘the’ to ‘and’ . . . just the most incredible nit-picking stuff. It had to be retyped each time. My poor secretary retyped that goddamned speech so much” that “her fingers were still flying” when she went to bed at night. “He even rewrote it as we drove from the Ranch to Whitney,” Mary Rather recalled, “and I had to type it again at the last minute.”

  In the speech, the man who had renounced his allegiance to the New Deal and soft-pedaled his views on civil rights in order to remain viable in an increasingly conservative Texas, laid down a powerful “call to arms,” a boldly progressive agenda that set a clear direction for the approaching congressional session and would mark the national dimension of his leadership for the first time. He demanded enlarged Social Security coverage, increasing tax exemptions for low-income groups, federal subsidies for education and housing, a constitutional amendment to eliminate the poll tax, liberalization of immigration, public roads and water conservation, and, embedded in the midst of this liberal barrage, a single reactionary thorn—a natural gas bill for moneyed Texas conservatives.

  Billed as a “Program with a Heart,” the speech showed that the resurgent Johnson advocated a social vision beyond anything the likely Democratic presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson was proposing. “I had never before seen him take such complete command of an audience,” George Reedy remembered of that electric moment. On several occasions the audience “leapt to their feet, clapped their hands, stamped their feet, beat on the tables and whistled to show their approval.” The compassion he felt for the marginalized, the badly educated, the badly housed fueled his delivery in such a way that he “sounded like Joshua ordering the trumpets blown at Jericho.” Once he was done with his prepared text, he stepped away from the rostrum and with renewed assurance addressed the audience extemporaneously. “People walked out of that speech dazed,” Reedy said, stunned by “the amount of emotion that he put into it and the fire.”

  Since the entire national press corps was present for the majority leader’s first public appearance, the speech received widespread coverage. On this single speech he had rolled the dice and his emotional charge had “affected every newspaperman that was there.” Liberal icon Hubert Humphrey declared: “Twelve home runs and one strike out”—“A very fine batting average.” Humphrey especially noted the call for elimination of the poll tax, which would “give some forward action at last” in the civil rights struggle. Johnson had not only demonstrated his physical readiness to lead through the impassioned conviction of his delivery, he had shown a deep resolve to move both his state and the country forward on a more progressive path.

  With clarified purpose, the prodigal son of the New Deal had returned.

  * * *

  Lyndon Johnson had no sooner resumed his role as Senate majority leader in January 1957 than he committed himself to the passage of a civil rights bill. For eighty-two years, since the passage of the 1875 Enforcement Act, though various civil rights measures had survived the House, the southern bloc in the Senate had used the filibuster to keep the door to the passage of any civil rights bill firmly shut.

  A sequence of events had created a new urgency for legislative action. The Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision prohibiting racial segregation in public schools had quickened the civil rights movement, incited a violent reaction in the South, and prompted the Eisenhower administration to send a bill to Congress expanding federal authority to protect black citizens in a wide range of civil rights, including voting rights. Passed by the House the previous year, the bill landed on Johnson’s desk for consideration in early January. Despite the long historical track record of failure, he told friends that before summer’s end, he would carry a civil rights bill safely through the Senate for the first time in more than three-quarters of a century.

  As he studied the initial Republican bill passed by the House, he understood at once that as written (like every other bill sent to the Senate over the past decades), it was dead on arrival. According to witnesses, he “ran his pen twice through one section, and made certain alterations in other sections” before predicting: “This
will be it in the end!”

  The plot line, he understood at once, had to unfold in three acts.

  In Act One, Johnson had to convince Richard Russell, his mentor and the leader of the southern bloc, that a filibuster would gain a Pyrrhic victory for the South. The growing momentum of the civil rights movement suggested that it was only a matter of time until a two-thirds vote could be gathered to secure cloture and then, “there’ll be no way of putting a brake on all sorts of wild legislation.” Moreover, a successful attempt to kill the bill would plunge the Senate into paralysis and prevent action on the South’s most fundamental problem—economic stagnation. If the South accepted the inevitability of small, incremental progress on civil rights, it might well become one of the most prosperous regions in the country. If it refused to move forward, it would remain an economic backwater.

  He promised Russell he would remove any mention of social or economic integration, limiting the bill solely to the protection of voting rights. He pledged to remove the part giving the president power to send federal troops to the South to enforce the bill’s provisions. And he would work to secure a jury trial for any southerner indicted for violating black rights, a gambit that stacked the deck heavily in favor of the accused. For the time being, Russell agreed to hang fire and let the debate proceed, knowing that if Johnson failed to deliver on his promises, the filibuster would commence.

  Act Two featured the Mountain States in the West, where the minuscule black population exerted scant sway. While most of these senators supported civil rights, they had less to lose than their colleagues in the North by working toward a compromise. It was in this region that Johnson hoped to find sponsors for the amendments he needed to reshape the bill. And for this objective he was willing to barter. For nearly a decade, western Democrats had struggled to secure federal support for a dam at Hells Canyon near the Idaho-Oregon border that would supply inexpensive public power for the entire region. The Eisenhower administration and their conservative allies in the South had opposed the bill, asserting that private industry should finance the project and control the rates. In an overtly political deal, Johnson persuaded the southerners to vote for the Hells Canyon Dam if the Mountain State senators worked with him to delete the most objectionable provisions of the pending civil rights bill.