NOTHING ABOUT THE SENATE would be changed, it seemed. The Senate’s world was made up not only of the Capitol’s north wing but of another building, which pointed at that wing from across broad Constitution Avenue. This building was known simply as the “Senate Office Building” (there was only one Senate office building then; new senators were warned to spell out its name in full when giving a constituent their address; as one senator observed, “If you give him the abbreviation—S.O.B.—he will not know whether you are calling him one, or expect him to call you one”), and it indeed contained only offices and committee rooms, but these were the offices of senators and Senate committee rooms, and the building was the Senate office building; “Never in the history of the world was there such an office building,” the New York Times marveled when it opened in 1909.
In authorizing its construction, the Senate had made clear that it should embody senatorial philosophy—the same philosophy of restraint and dignity that had motivated the body to decree that its Chamber should be unadorned. The man directing the search for an architect said he was looking for one “of mature years … and it would not scare me off to hear his colleagues say that ’He is a little old-fashioned …! That is what we need now: a little of the old-fashioned but correct architecture.” And the architects selected—Carrère & Hastings of New York—had captured that philosophy perfectly.
It was a vast structure—low (only three stories high on the side facing the Capitol, five stories on the far side, so steeply did Capitol Hill fall away) but long, so long that from its majestic entrance pavilion, modeled on the pavilions of the Louvre, stretched away a colonnade of thirty-four thirty-foot-high columns, columns fluted for beauty and paired for strength, a towering colonnade that was in itself longer than a football field and that angled away from the Capitol in a diagonal that seemed to go on endlessly—except that there was, far down Constitution Avenue, an end: another, matching, if slightly smaller, entrance pavilion. In this building, the Times said, “a thousand men would feel lonesome”; it covered “what in New York would be a space of several city blocks.” The building’s exterior was a white Vermont marble selected for its unusual purity and hardness. The trees in front of that colonnade were still small enough in 1949 so that their leaves did not yet blur the facade or soften it, and from the Capitol’s Senate wing the long line of tall columns and the majestic pavilions that flanked them gleamed at you across the Capitol’s lawns, brilliant and dazzling in the late-afternoon sun, or loomed majestically through rain on a gray day.
But like the House Office Building on the other side of Capitol Hill, also by Carrère & Hastings, the Senate Building was designed so that it would not compete with but complement the Capitol, toward which both buildings were canted in such a way that they were in effect pointing at it.* The building’s roof would be ornamented only by a simple balustrade, the architects said, not by prominent decorative elements which might “detract from the effect of the Capitol building.” And while the Capitol’s exterior was lavishly ornamented, it was decided that that would not be the case with the facade of the Senate and House Office Buildings.
The ground level of the Senate Building, the base of the long row of columns, was of the simplest design: Concord granite rusticated but otherwise unadorned so that except for small arched windows, the long lines of that hard stone stretch unbroken down Constitution Avenue. The capitals of those formidably paired columns are very simple, and the long entablature, a football-field-length entablature, that the columns support is very different from the Capitol’s entablatures, crammed as are the Capitol’s with reliefs of heroic figures. The entablature of the Senate Building is unbroken by a single decoration: on its entire length there is not a single carving of a leaf or an acorn or a bird—stretching down Constitution is nothing but a long, broad band of gleaming white marble, with, above it, only the simplest narrow classic egg and dart molding, and that simple balustrade. Architectural historians noted that the Senate Building was “more conservative” than other government buildings of the time. If the exterior was stately, even majestic, the stateliness and majesty were restrained, dignified, severe, uncompromisingly austere—testimony in granite and marble, that very hard marble, to the Senate’s grandeur and power, and to its philosophy.
THE BUILDING’S INTERIOR was testimony to other aspects of that philosophy. Inside its main entrance across from the Capitol was a circular arcade of piers (modeled on the piers of the Royal Chapel at Versailles) out of which rose arches supporting a circle of eighteen columns that in turn supported a coffered dome that soared up to a circular skylight sixty-eight feet above the floor. But the grandeur of this spacious rotunda was a grandeur of utter simplicity, of what one critic described as an “elegance” that was “almost stoic” in its “exceptional restraint.” Suggestions had been made that colored marbles be used on the columns, but this was the home of the body that had kept its Chamber untainted by a single painting; “Color would take away from the dignity and monumental character of the design,” John Carrère replied. He allowed gray marble circles to be set into the rotunda’s shining white marble floor.* Otherwise, the white marble of the entire grand entrance to the Senate Office Building—piers, arches, columns, dome—was unrelieved by any color except for the marble’s grayish veins. Opposite the doorway, beyond the circle of piers, was a palatial double stairway, in the same white marble and in the style of the Italian Renaissance, and at the top was the Senate’s “Conference Chamber,” a room (later known as the “Senate Caucus Room”) worthy of the Senate: spacious (it would seat three hundred spectators comfortably), high-ceilinged, its marble walls ranged by twelve massive Corinthian columns. And out from the rotunda stretched the corridors lined with other, smaller marble chambers for public investigations and hearings, and with the individual office suites of the senators themselves.
These were senatorial corridors.
They were long—four hundred feet long, some of them; there were more than three miles of corridors in the Senate Office Building—and their ceilings were so high that, broad though they were, they appeared narrow. And they were dim and somber. A row of old-fashioned lighting globes dotted the ceilings, and their lights were reflected down the center of the white marble floors in a line as rigid as if it were an element set into the marble. But the globes were too high and spaced too far apart to cast much light, and the corridors were so long that even on sunny days the light from the window at their far end penetrated only a little way down them, and some corridors had no windows at the end. And along each side of a corridor was a row of very tall, dark mahogany doors, towering over anyone walking past them and stretching down each side of the dim corridor like a long line of forbidding sentinels guarding the dignity of the men within.
The corridors were empty—empty not only of ornament (there were no flags, national or state, in the hallways of the Senate Office Building then, no state seals on the doors; “it was considered beneath the dignity of a senator to put out a flag or a seal,” one reporter who spent a lot of time in that building recalls; “the only thing you would see in the halls was umbrellas on rainy days”) but of people. There were relatively few visitors—the influx of constituents dropping by their senators’ offices in 1949 was only a trickle compared to what it would later become in the era of mass air travel—and so vast was the building that visitors were swallowed up by it. And so were the approximately eleven hundred people—ninety-six senators, their staff and Senate maintenance people—who worked in the building in 1949, particularly because there was very little visiting between offices then. The building’s mores were as rigidly formal as its architecture. In his thirty-fifth year in the Senate, John L. McClellan of Arkansas was to boast that during those thirty-five years he had never once been inside another senator’s office. Robert C. Albright, who covered the Senate for the Washington Post, wrote in 1949 that “You can tread marble miles of Senate Office Building corridors without ever seeing an open door.” When a door was opened,
furthermore, the face of the receptionist inside was not always all that welcoming; “dropping in was not encouraged,” a secretary recalls. About ten in the morning, many staffers congregated in the “cafeteria” (a cafeteria lined with fluted pilasters) on the second floor for coffee, and to socialize with their counterparts on other staffs; the rest of the time there was little socializing—and little traffic in the halls. Sometimes when you turned into one of those corridors, there would be a little knot of reporters waiting outside a closed door or questioning a senator who had just come out; a remarkably large proportion of committee sessions then were executive, or closed, sessions. Sometimes a figure—black against the light from the window behind him, his face all but unrecognizable in the gloom even if he was a senator—would be walking toward you. But quite often, it seemed, when you turned into a corridor there would be, in that long, long space, no one at all.
The corridors were silent. Voices seemed to be swallowed up by their length and their height. And of course so empty were they that often there was no voice to be heard, and you would be walking down a corridor in a silence broken only by the click of your heels on the marble floor and the distant pings of elevator bells, walking in silence between the rows of tightly closed doors that towered over you in the gloom.
And the building, grand though it was, was merely a setting for the men for whom it had been built—those ninety-six human institutions known as “senators.”
The senators were very conscious of their prerogatives. Carl Hayden of Arizona was outwardly polite and courtly to the members of his staff, and to anyone who greeted him in the halls, but when he had lunch, or a cup of coffee, in the cafeteria, he would lay his cane on the table at which he had decided to sit, even if there were already staffers sitting at it, and, recalls one, “when he got to the head of the line and came back, you’d better be gone.”
And more than a few senators were not friendly and polite at all—except to their fellow senators. Staff was staff, and that meant they were so far below the level of senators that even the most ordinary courtesies would be wasted on them. There were senators who would not even return the greeting of a staff member if they met him in a corridor of the Senate Office Building. Some senators—Taft was a prime example—seemed to make a point of not returning a greeting. “If you saw Senator Taft coming down the hall, you wouldn’t say hello to him,” one staff member says. “He just wasn’t a man you would say hello to. He was always deep in thought.”
They knew how to deal with violations of their prerogatives. A senator wanting to use an elevator pushed the buzzer three times. The elevator operator was supposed to ignore all other buzzes and proceed immediately to pick the senator up. In fact, even if there were passengers already in the elevator, with the elevator going in the opposite direction, the operator’s instructions were to immediately reverse direction and proceed to the senator’s floor, bringing his passengers along. These instructions were ignored at an operator’s peril. If he was not on the alert and did not immediately respond to the magical three buzzes, some senators were understanding, but others were not. Hearing an elevator car continue to move away from him after he had rung, Senator William Jenner of Indiana would, in an instantaneous burst of rage, smack his palm repeatedly against the bronze elevator door. And everyone in the building knew what had happened when, one day, Pat McCarran of Nevada “got passed by” after he had rung. “He just turned on his heel and went back to his office and called the Sergeant-at-Arms and the kid was fired on the spot,” recalls an aide.
Senators were deeply conscious of what they called their “dignity.” One of them, forced by defeat to leave the Senate, lamented what he had lost. “Where else in our land can be found perquisites so plentiful, traditions so rich, individual respect so deep … dignity and honor so complete?” he asked. There were occasional angry outbursts and individual feuds that lasted for years, and it had become noticeable during the 1940s that some of the new senators were a little more informal than their frock-coated predecessors. But the older senators—and these were, of course, the ones who ran the Senate and set its tone: most of the twenty-two southerners, of course, and the New England Brahmins like Lodge and Saltonstall, and Republican leaders like Taft and Eugene Millikin, and, naturally, Chairman Hayden of the Rules Committee—were, in dealing with each other, models of senatorial formality. They talked to each other in private, in fact, as they talked to each other in public, addressing each other not by name but by title, and duplicating the elaborate formality of the Senate floor even behind the closed doors of executive sessions. During one such Rules Committee session, for example, Chairman Hayden began a statement by saying: “My distinguished colleague, the Senator from New Hampshire, Mr. Bridges, advised the chairman of this committee that …” Another member of the Rules Committee then said: “I think that is right. The wise chairman of this committee, as usual, has made a very valuable statement.” The closed doors of their offices were a symbol of the fact that informality was not encouraged. Personal relationships were governed by ceremony and ritual. When one senator wanted to visit another in his office, he would telephone to ask when it would be convenient for him to drop by and, when he arrived, would never walk into the senator’s private office until the receptionist had telephoned to announce him. And on such visits, the business talk was invariably preceded by a long ritual of senatorial friendship. “You just didn’t barge in and start talking business,” one administrative aide recalls. “It just wasn’t done.” The Senate Office Building was, in January, 1949, a place of courtesy, of courtliness, of dignity, of restraint, of refinement and of uncompromising austerity and rigidity. Its corridors were corridors of power—of the Senate brand of power, cold and hard.
AS SENIORITY’S grip had tightened on the Senate, so had the grip of the South. The correlation between the two had, of course, been apparent even before the Civil War; seniority had, after all, given “the chairmanship of every single committee” to the “slaveholding states” by 1859. Republican opposition to slavery had made the South so solidly Democratic that it was the most rigidly one-party section of the United States. Its senators were sent back to Washington term after term, long-running stars (“Human institutions with southern accents,” one journalist called them) on a capital stage on which the rest of the cast seemed to be constantly changing. (A notable exception were the southern members of the House of Representatives.) And although the eleven states of the Old Confederacy held only twenty-two of the ninety-six seats on the Senate floor, they held a far larger proportion of the gavels in the Senate committee rooms—particularly the gavels that represented the greatest power. In 1949, when Lyndon Johnson came to the Senate, the three most powerful Senate committees, by most rankings, were Appropriations, Foreign Relations, and Finance. Southerners were chairmen of all three. And southern dominance extended further down the list of the fifteen Standing Committees. Only two of the fifteen—District of Columbia, which administered the capital city, and Rules, which handled “the housekeeping administration of the Senate”—were, White was to say, “not especially relevant to great public issues.” Of the other thirteen committees, exactly one was not chaired by either a southerner or by a senator who was a firm ally of the South. Nor was the dominance limited to the chairmanships of those committees. The more powerful the committee, it seemed, the more its membership was stacked in depth by southerners. If there was one committee which in 1949 was considered the most powerful of all, it was Appropriations, because of its control of funding for the departments and agencies of the federal government; “No matter how much you legislate, the main ingredient is money and whatever type of program you have, its success is dependent on adequate financing,” a senator was to say. Successful though a senator might be in winning authorization from one of the legislative committees for a project vital to his state, the money for the project still had to be appropriated. Of the thirteen Democrats on Appropriations, seven were southerners. And decisions on appropriations req
uests were made first—and very seldom overruled—by one of Appropriations’ subcommittees, each of which was given, as a student of the process noted, such great “latitude” in its field that decisions went “largely unchallenged” by the full committee. In 1949, Appropriations had ten subcommittees. Southerners were chairmen of six. Nor was the dominance of subcommittees—of Appropriations or other committees—limited to their chairmen. One senator—not a southerner—was to describe “an interlocking directorate of southerners who are on every subcommittee in depth. If you get rid of one, you still have another southerner.”
The power thus conferred on the South was reinforced by other factors. One was ability. Unlike senators from other sections, southern senators, White wrote, “had no chance of getting a serious nomination for the Presidency, and they knew it.” And because in the South United States Senator was therefore the highest title at which political men could realistically aim, that title attracted men of a very high caliber, so that many southern senators were exceptional individuals, of great personal force and talent.
Another factor was a particular use to which abilities were put. When southerners came to the Senate, they came to stay; they studied the Senate’s rules and precedents with the concentration of men who knew they would be living by them for the rest of their lives. Forty “Standing Rules” had been adopted by the Senate in 1884, and amended and re-amended over the ensuing decades, and there were hundreds of pages of precedents establishing the rules’ meaning. Many of the southern senators did a lot of reading in those rules and precedents. They gave themselves individual seminars in them: in the 1920s, Vice President Charles G. Dawes, presiding over the Senate, realized that on the lower dais before him was “a modest young man who knew all the rules”; in 1935, Charles L. Watkins of Arkansas, a lowly clerk who had been helping to keep the Senate Journal, or minutes, was appointed the Senate’s Parliamentarian, and southern senators would drop in to his office just off the Senate floor and sit for long, leisurely conversations about rules and precedents, and about the theory and logic behind them. As a result, they knew what they covered, and what they didn’t cover; knew how to use them—and how to get around them. “Because of his instinctive sympathy with the Institution and all that is in it, the southern senator is like a man who can put his hand instantly to any book in a cherished library,” White wrote. “In consequence he is a past master of the precedents, the practices, and even the moods of the Senate and as a parliamentarian formidable in any debate or maneuver.” With a frequency that would be almost unimaginable at the end of the century, there would be detailed discussions on the Senate floor about parliamentary procedures. In skirmishes and pitched battles in any parliamentary body, of course, rules and precedents play an important role, and the degree to which the southerners had mastered them more fully than their opponents was repeatedly apparent: it was striking, for example, how often, in such fights, after the South’s opponents had launched a maneuver, a southern senator would rise to beg to point out, courteously but firmly, that the maneuver was, under one precedent or another from some long-past decade, simply out of order, and how often, when the presiding officer looked up the precedent, he had regretfully to rule that that was indeed the case. Once, in a Democratic caucus, one of the Senate elders was saying that he had made a practice, at the beginning of each new Congress, of reading through the volume of Senate Procedures, hundreds of pages long, underlining passages as he went. “I recommend that every senator read that book frequently,” he said. Turning to a colleague, a non-southern senator whispered sneeringly, “This is one senator who has no intention of ever reading that book.” The senator who was not from the South thought he was demonstrating his sophistication, or perhaps his sense of humor. What he was really demonstrating was why, when liberals tried to fight on the Senate floor, they were like children in the southerners’ hands.
Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson Page 17
