The 1948 elections proved the point. Infuriated by the liberalism of their party’s President and their party’s platform, which actually included a fairly strong civil rights plank, a States Rights Party was formed, with its own presidential candidate, Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, who denounced the FEPC as “Communistic,” Truman’s proposed integration of the armed services as “un-American,” and said, “There’s not enough troops in the Army to force the southern people to admit the Negro race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our churches.” But despite all the furor engendered by the new party, it carried a mere four states. Not only had President Truman won, he had won by turning the election into a referendum on Congress. In terms of majority rule, the South had been thoroughly repudiated. Although Truman had won, however, the southern senators hadn’t lost. A liberal tide had washed over the rest of the country, as it had washed over the country in 1904 and 1912 and 1936. But while it had swept a liberal majority into the Senate, not a single southerner standing for re-election had been defeated. The majority party—in both houses of Congress—would be Democratic, not Republican. But in both House and Senate, the committee chairmanships would again be held by southerners. If anything, southern power on Capitol Hill would be stronger, not weaker; the attribute which in the Senate meant power was seniority, and seniority was inexorable and cumulative; the senators who would return in January would return with more—not less—of that asset. The South’s point of view might have been repudiated; its “position of entrenched minority” in the Senate was untouched.
Although Truman had won on the basis of his “Fair Deal” program, that program’s fate would still be controlled by anti-Fair Deal southerners. And in the unlikely event that Truman’s proposals somehow emerged from committee, there was still the filibuster in the Senate. What was the legislation that had been defeated in the Senate in 1948? Legislation for civil rights, for aid to education, for aid to housing, for a fairer minimum wage, for better health care. An entire agenda of social justice—to a considerable extent endorsed by the nation—had been blocked in the Senate. Similar legislation had been blocked in the Senate for a decade and more. There was no reason, despite Truman’s victory, to think it would pass now.
The Senate’s Golden Age had ended almost a century before. During the ensuing decades, the institution had been subtly altered, decade by decade, into something significantly different from the body that had been envisioned by the Founding Fathers. They had wanted it to be independent, a place of wisdom and deliberation armored against outside forces. But the rise inside the Senate itself of forces they had not sufficiently foreseen—the rise of parties and party caucuses, and of party discipline; the transformation of America’s infant industries into gigantic economic entities which had representatives sitting in the Senate itself—had undermined the Senate’s independence from within, and the impact of these new forces on the Senate had been heightened because the armor against outside forces remained in place. Still protected against the people and the President, both of which wanted social progress, the Senate was unprotected against internal forces that opposed social progress, and that were indeed making it much less a place of wisdom and deliberation. Other internal developments—most importantly, seniority and the filibuster—had further distorted the Founders’ dream. They had envisioned the Senate as the moderating force in government, as the cooler of the popular will; cool had become cold, had become ice, ice in which, for decades, with only a few brief exceptions, the popular desire for social change had become frozen. Designed as the deliberative power, the Senate had become instead the negative power, the selfish power. The “necessary fence” against executive and popular tyranny had been transformed, by party rule and by the seniority rule, into something thicker and higher—into an impenetrable wall against the democratic impulses it had originally been supposed only to “refine” and “filter,” into a dam against which waves of social reform, attempts to ameliorate the human condition, dashed themselves in vain. Except for brief moments—the beginning of Wilson’s presidency, for example, and the Hundred Days of Roosevelt’s—when the floodgates in the dam suddenly swung wide and the tides swept through, cleansing the great Republic, the Founders’ armor had resisted every attempt by others to force them open; the Senate had been designed as the “firm” body; it had become too firm—too firm to allow the reforms the Republic needed.
Never had the dam been more firm than during the last decade, the decade since the conservative coalition had learned its strength. During that decade, despite the mandate of three presidential elections, it had stood across and blocked the rising demand for social justice, had stood so solidly that it seemed too strong ever to be breached.
In January, 1949, when Lyndon Johnson arrived in it, it was still standing.
*After a revision of the Senate rules in 1921, the seniority that determined rank within a committee was seniority within that committee, not in the Senate as a whole.
*Although the House and Senate Office Buildings were originally quite similar in design, a fourth story was added to the House Building in 1908. (To ease overcrowding, a second House Office Building was built in 1933.) Trying to economize, the House used imitation marble and limestone in the interior; the Senate insisted on the finest marble throughout the interior, at an additional cost of about a million and a half dollars. The contrast in the cornerstone-laying of the two buildings displayed the difference in philosophies. The cornerstone-laying for the House Office Building, in 1905, was carried out with pageantry and speeches, including one by President Theodore Roosevelt: his celebrated “muckraking” speech. The Senate instructed the Capitol architect to “omit everything that would give the laying of the stone any prominence.” There were no speeches at all; as the Washington Post reported, “workmen went about the job as if it were an ordinary piece of stone.” Only a few spectators—and, so far as can be determined, no senators—were present.
*The coffered panels in the ceiling would, decades later, be painted crimson and outlined with gold leaf.
Part II
LEARNING
4
A Hard Path
NEWLY ELECTED SENATORS of the United States are sworn in in groups of four. They stand in the rear of the high-ceilinged Senate Chamber, their “sponsors” (generally their state’s senior senator) at their side, and when each new senator’s turn comes, his sponsor takes his arm and escorts him ceremoniously down the broad, shallow steps of the center aisle, between the rows of mahogany desks at which Webster sat, and Clay and Calhoun, and Borah and Norris and the La Follettes, father and son, down to the well, where, on the dais, above it, the Senate’s President is waiting, framed by marble columns. When, on January 3, 1949, the Secretary of the Senate called Lyndon Johnson’s name, old Tom Connally, a hero in Texas since Johnson had been a boy, took his arm in a firm grip, and they walked together down to the dais where the legendary Arthur Vandenberg was standing, stiffly erect, right hand already raised for the oath. “Do you solemnly swear that you will support and defend the Constitution of the United States?” Vandenberg asked, and Lyndon Johnson said “I do.”
He had traveled a hard path to get to the Senate—from a hard place: the remote, barren Texas Hill Country, a land of loneliness and poverty, and for the young Lyndon Johnson, born on August 27, 1908, son of failed and ridiculed parents, a land of humiliation and fear, even the fear of having his home taken away by the bank.
For a while he had come along that path fast—remarkably fast.
At twenty-one, while still an undergraduate at a little teachers college known as a “poor boys’ school,” he was running two campaigns, one for a state legislator, the other for a candidate for lieutenant governor, in a block of Hill Country counties, and politicians all over Texas began hearing about “this wonder kid” who “knew more about politics than anyone else in the area.” By the time he was twenty-three, a congressman’s aide who had only recently arrived in Washington with a cardbo
ard suitcase and no clothes warm enough for a northern winter (and who for months didn’t have enough money to buy any), he was the “Boss of the Little Congress,” a club of congressional aides that he had made influential on Capitol Hill. By twenty-six, he had been appointed the National Youth Administration’s director for the State of Texas, thereby becoming perhaps the youngest person the New Deal ever put in charge of a statewide program. At twenty-eight he was elected to Congress, after a campaign against seven better-known opponents. Within four years, using money from Texas contractors and oilmen, he injected new energy into a stagnant Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, gained influence over other congressmen, and a toehold on national power. And when, in April, 1941, one of his state’s senators died, and a special election was called to fill the vacancy, Franklin Roosevelt allowed him to announce his candidacy from the White House steps, and the belief in Washington was that Lyndon Johnson, still only thirty-two years old, would become America’s youngest senator. During that campaign, polls showed him pulling steadily away from his principal opponent, Texas Governor W. Lee (Pappy) O’Daniel, and that belief seemed justified.
And then, in an instant, with one slip, he was stopped.
He hadn’t made many slips. He was always telling his aides, “If you do everything, you’ll win,” and during his decade-long ascent of the political ladder, he had done “everything,” had worked so hard that a tough Texas political boss said “I never thought it was possible for anyone to work that hard,” had worked with a feverish, almost frantic intensity that journalists would describe as “energy” when it was really desperation and fear, the fear of a man fleeing from something terrible. Throughout all that decade, moreover, he had planned and intrigued, trying to think of everything, unceasingly careful and wary. But at the very end of that 1941 race—on Election Day itself—he had relaxed. In his euphoria over apparent victory, he violated an old adage of Texas politics by reporting too early in the day the vote totals from the corrupt counties he controlled, thereby letting O’Daniel know how many votes were needed from the corrupt counties he controlled, and giving him the opening necessary to win.
And with that defeat, the years of triumph ended—to be followed by very different years. He had expected that another chance at a Senate seat would come almost immediately, with the election in 1942 for the full term, but the Second World War deprived him of that chance—and he was not to get another for seven years.
THOSE YEARS—1941 to 1948—were Lyndon Johnson’s years in the wilderness. He had been lured always by the gleam from a single goal. As a youth, working on a road gang with the reins of a mule-drawn “fresno” scoop shovel looped around his back so that he was in effect in harness with the mules, his hands blistered and bleeding from the fresno’s handles, his face seared in Summer by the fierce Hill Country sun and in Winter by the fierce Hill Country wind, the tall, skinny, awkward youth had told his fellow workers, “I’m going to be President of the United States one day.” Once he was on the path he had mapped out to that goal, mapped out with a sophistication and pragmatism striking in one so young, he almost never spoke of it, but despite his silence those who knew him best understood his ambition. James H. Rowe Jr., who spent more time with Johnson than any of the other rising young New Dealers, says, in words echoed by other members of their Washington circle, “From the day he got here, he wanted to be President.” Johnson was later to tell journalists that his two daughters had been given the same initials as he because “this way we can use the same luggage,” but during his House years he would be more frank with his aide Horace Busby. Telling Busby to refer to him in press releases as “LBJ,” the young congressman said: “FDR-LBJ, FDR-LBJ—do you get it? What I want is for them to start thinking of me in terms of initials.” It was only presidents whom headline writers and the American public referred to by their initials; “he was just so determined that someday he would be known as LBJ,” Busby says. And sometimes, as if he could not endure the frustration of his hopes, what he really wanted burst out of him, as it did one evening when he was alone with his old friend Welly Hopkins: “By God, I’ll be President someday!” So long as the path to that goal lay open before him, nothing could make him turn off it. It ran only through Washington—national power, not state power, was the key. He refused to run for the governorship of Texas; to aides who assured him he would win the governorship, he explained that he didn’t want to—that that job could never be more than a “detour” on his “route,” a detour that might turn into a “dead end.”
So long as the path lay open, not even the chance for financial security could turn him from it. Tormented during his prewar House years by his lack of money, continually complaining that he had “nothing” (not a thousand dollars in the bank, he said), he spoke constantly of ending up like his father, who had died penniless, and pleaded with the Texas tycoons who had bankrolled his career, to bankroll him; to put him in the way of making “a little money.” But when, in 1940, they offered him a lot of money—a partnership in an oil company, offered on terms that made it virtually a gift, worth perhaps three quarters of a million dollars—he turned the offer down because, he explained, “I can’t be an oil man”; if the public knew he had oil interests, “it would kill me politically.” In discussing his political ambitions, Johnson had previously spoken to these men only of the House and Senate—he had said over and over that, as one of them recalls, “he wanted to remain in Congress until a Senate seat opened up, and then run for that seat, that the Senate was his ultimate goal in politics”—and had never mentioned any other office. But Johnson’s congressional district was safe—being an oilman couldn’t hurt him there. And it certainly couldn’t hurt him if he ran for the Senate in oil-dominated Texas. Then these supporters realized that there was another office for which, indeed, a candidate would be “killed” by being an “oilman”—and they realized at last what Lyndon Johnson really wanted, and how much he wanted it.
But now, after 1941, the path was closed. For the next seven years, Lyndon Johnson remained stuck in the House of Representatives. Men and women who knew him in Washington describe him in words that echo words used to describe him by men and women who knew him in Johnson City—words which, in fact, he had, in his youth, used about himself. “He had to be somebody,” they would say, “just had to,” could not stand, in the words of one of them, “to be one of a crowd—just could not stand it.” But in the House, with its 435 members who jammed its cloakrooms and jostled in the aisles of its chamber, its 435 members of whom only a few handfuls—members who had been there for decades—had significant authority, he couldn’t, as a junior congressman, be anything but one of a crowd.
His lack of interest in the body’s general legislative work had always been noticeable, and it remained so, particularly after a 1943 fiasco in which he tried to push himself into national prominence by introducing a bill that would have usurped the jurisdiction of a committee of which he was not a member. During the more than eleven years that Lyndon Johnson would eventually serve in the House, he would introduce only four bills that would have had an effect beyond the borders of his own congressional district. In fact, he introduced only three intra-district bills: a total in eleven years of only seven bills, less than the number introduced by any of the twenty other representatives who entered Congress in the same year he did. (Only two of his bills—two minor measures that affected only his own district—were enacted into law.) He made almost as few formal speeches as laws, and seldom participated in informal discussions and debates, the daily give-and-take of legislative business. Entire years passed in which he did not rise even once to make a point of order, or any other point; to ask or answer a question; to support or attack a bill under discussion; to participate, by so much as a single word, in an entire year’s worth of floor proceedings. Although Johnson adherents would contend in later years that he was active in the House in other ways—by quietly lobbying his colleagues in the cloakrooms on behalf of liberal causes, for in
stance—this picture could hardly be contradicted more strongly by the men who knew: the men he had supposedly lobbied. As one of his fellow congressmen says: “He just simply was not especially interested in general legislation that came to the floor. Some of us were on the floor all the time, fighting for liberal causes. But he stayed away from the floor, and while he was there, he was very, very silent.” Liberal colleagues believed him to be liberal at heart; conservative colleagues believed him to be conservative. Says one extremely conservative Republican congressman, “Politically, if we disagreed, it wasn’t apparent to me. Not at all.” In fact, no one really knew his heart because he seldom fought for an issue or even expressed a definite opinion about it.
His insistence on being the center of attention, of dominating any room in which he found himself, had never slackened. At Washington dinner parties, he wanted to do the talking, and if someone else held the floor for any length of time, he would go to sleep at the table—or pretend to, his eyes closing, his head nodding forward. When he woke up, friends say, “he woke up talking,” and if he was still not allowed to hold the floor, his eyes would close again. But in Washington, people’s willingness to listen is a coefficient of the power of the person talking. Lyndon Johnson didn’t have much power, and as it became more and more apparent that he wasn’t going to have much, at least in any foreseeable future, it became harder for him to hold the stage. And on Capitol Hill, Johnson was constantly trying to “domineer” over his fellow congressmen, to lecture them on politics in a dogmatic, overbearing tone, to act as if they owed him favors, and these efforts were arousing more and more resentment. Frequently, when he indulged in a characteristic habit of putting one arm around a colleague’s shoulders and grasping the colleague’s lapel with his other hand, the colleague would draw back from the hand; at least once, a colleague angrily knocked it away. All too frequently, colleagues with whom he had served for years would come into the House Dining Room and pointedly ignore him as they walked past his table. Lyndon Johnson hated his years in the House, the House in which—this man who could not stand being only “one of a crowd”—he was only one of the hundreds of congressmen who had no power or ability to accomplish anything, whose days were punctuated with reminders of his lack of status. He started avoiding the Democratic cloakroom and the floor; “He couldn’t work up the enthusiasm anymore,” a colleague says. The seven years from 1941 to 1948 were years of hopelessness and despair, seven years in what was for Lyndon Johnson the bleakest possible wilderness: a life without any political power that he considered meaningful.
Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson Page 20
