“After a while,” Oltorf recalls, “Lyndon said he’d like to discuss committee assignments, and he’d like to be on Foreign Relations and of course he’d like to be on Finance.”
Senator Connally, Oltorf recalls, took out of his breast pocket a little book with the list of Senate committees, and pulled his glasses down on his nose to leaf through it. He took a long, leisurely puff on his big cigar. Then, looking at Johnson over his glasses, he said, “Well, now, Lyndon, let’s see. Oh, now, here’s the Agriculture Committee. You could get on that, and you could help the farmers. You’re for the farmers, ain’t you, Lyndon?”
Johnson said he was. “I thought I heard you say something about it during the campaign,” Senator Connally said. Connally’s “eyes were just twinkling,” Oltorf recalls, and he paused to savor the moment. “And you can get on the Armed Services Committee,” Connally said, “and then you could help A&M [the Agricultural & Mechanical College of Texas, which depended on federal grants for military research and Officers Training Corps programs]. You’re for A&M, ain’t you, Lyndon?” Oltorf does not recall whether or not Johnson made any reply to this question. “By this time he was sitting there with his arms crossed; he never cracked a smile. Johnson didn’t like to get worked over.”
Connally looked at him again over his glasses. “And then, Lyndon, after you’ve been in the Senate for a while, then you can get on the Foreign Relations Committee or the Finance Committee, and render a real public service.”
Speed was of no more assistance on office space. Within days of his election, Johnson was telephoning Carl Hayden, whose Rules Committee assigned offices. Of course, he said, he understood that offices were generally allocated according to seniority, but he hoped that an exception could be made in his case, since under seniority he would be entitled only to a three-room office, not one of the more desirable four-room suites, and his circumstances were exceptional, since Texas was the largest state in area and sixth-largest in population, and he would need a large staff to serve his constituency. Hayden gave him a noncommittal reply on the phone, and then sent a letter, saying simply that as a result of retirement or defeat, six four-room suites were to be vacated, and they would be “tendered to the six senior senators now occupying three-room suites.”
These rebuffs only made Johnson intensify his efforts, using the lever which could move so much in Washington. Aware that both Hayden and former Majority Leader Alben Barkley, who was leaving the Senate to become Vice President but was still immensely popular on Capitol Hill, were old friends of Rayburn, he asked the Speaker to intercede with them, and Rayburn did. And Johnson had his own coterie of friends within the Truman Administration, most notably his fellow Texan, Attorney General Tom Clark, who assured him that he could persuade the President to “put in a good word with” Barkley, and he asked these friends to make some calls, and they did. He wrote more letters. Giving up on Foreign Relations and Finance (since without Connally’s support, appointment to either one would be highly unlikely), he switched his attention, writing to Appropriations Chairman Kenneth McKellar that “I want very much to … have you as my chairman,” and to Barkley and the influential Walter George that “Since Texas joined the Union in 1845, only one Texas Senator has served” on Appropriations, “and this was more than twenty-five years ago,” and that this inequity was all the more glaring because Texas was currently receiving more federal appropriations than all but three other states. And in mid-December, Johnson went up to Washington to make his mark on the Senate in person.
His first encounter was with a young Capitol policeman who was stationed outside the Senate Office Building entrance to ensure that no one but senators parked near that door—he was one of the young men who had been told, about senators, “Whatever they want you to do, you do it.” There were no assigned parking spaces, but as could be expected the more junior senators left the three or four spaces nearest the entrance for their seniors.
Pulling around the corner from Massachusetts Avenue, Johnson drove his Cadillac onto Delaware and pulled into the parking space nearest the door. Since Johnson had not yet been given a District of Columbia license plate with a senatorially low number, the young policeman did not know he was a senator, and came up to the car to protest. Johnson simply ignored him, and went inside; the young man, having ascertained his identity, didn’t say anything when he returned. Arriving earlier than any other senator for the next few mornings, Johnson parked in the same space, but one day he found another car already in it. Although there were other empty spots along the curb immediately behind it, Johnson’s fury led the policeman to secure a “Reserved” stanchion and put it in that spot the next day to ensure that it would be available for Johnson. Nonetheless, not long thereafter there was again another car in that spot when Johnson pulled up. Telephoning the Capitol Police Chief, Olin Cavness, Johnson told him to “Get that goddamned car out of there!” Calling Johnson back a few minutes later, Cavness said that he had checked with the policeman, and the car belonged to a senior senator. Cavness evidently felt that that explanation would end the matter, but it didn’t. “Well,” Johnson said, “while I’m getting some more seniority, you put a cop there every morning to guard my space until I get there!” Cavness told the policeman to put not one but two “Reserved” signs in that space. That device worked because no one cared to inquire about the signs, and they would remain until Johnson’s car would turn onto Delaware, and the officer, who had been watching for him, would hastily roll them up out of the space so Johnson could park there.
But that was his only victory on the mid-December trip; he may have been able to win in a conflict with a young “policeman”; he had less luck with senators.
For two or three days he did what he had done during his days in the House, striding around the Senate Office Building corridors to various offices, bounding in the door with a big smile, saying, “Hi! I’m Lyndon Johnson from Texas, How’s everyone from Pennsylvania today?” saying it so winningly that he would draw smiles even from the traditionally dour Senate receptionists, asking, “Is the Senator in?” “Is he alone?” and, if the answers were affirmative, walking over to the door to the private office, knocking on it, opening it, and asking if he could come in and chat for a few minutes.
He got the chats—the invariably courteous Hayden, for example, “never refused to see anyone,” and of course he would never be too busy to see a friend of Mr. Sam’s—but the chats (and pro forma promises to “do everything I can to help”) were all he got. The levers Johnson had tried to use were levers outside the Senate, and the Senate reacted to their use as the Senate always reacted to outside pressures. Barkley brushed him off with a letter so cold that Rayburn, to whom Johnson showed it, tried to console him by saying that “of course” it must have been “written and signed by one of his secretaries.” Walter George was courtesy itself at first as he let Johnson know that it was “inappropriate” for a new senator to try to bypass the seniority system, but when Johnson persisted in his arguments, he all but showed him out of his office. He tried writing Barkley again; this time the former Majority Leader did in fact let his secretary reply to “your letter with further reference to your desire to be assigned to Appropriations,” in a missive even colder than the first. After all the letters he had written and the phone calls he had made to try to force his way onto Foreign Relations or Finance or Appropriations, he was no closer to a place on these committees than if he had written no letters or made no phone calls at all. As for office space, Hayden told Johnson that while he had more seniority than four of the House members who had “come over” with him, and, of course, more than the eight newly elected senators who had no House service, he had less seniority than the eighty-three other senators, and he wouldn’t be assigned an office suite until all eighty-three had chosen theirs. It appeared to him, Hayden said, that the most desirable three-room suite available for Senator Johnson might be Number 231, which would be appropriate since it was the suite that had been occupied by h
is two predecessors from Texas, Senators Morris Sheppard and Pappy O’Daniel. Perturbed not only by 231’s size but by its location—next to a snack bar and, in the northwest corner of the building, inconveniently distant from the “subway” to the Capitol—and possibly misled by the softness of Hayden’s tone, Johnson may have pressed him too hard to alter this line of reasoning; Hayden finally ended the discussion with a remark which, for Hayden, was unusually sharp: “The trouble with you, Senator, is that you don’t have the seniority of a jackrabbit.” And not long thereafter another letter from Hayden arrived: “I am pleased to inform you that the three-room suite 231, Senate Office Building, now occupied by Senator O’Daniel, has been assigned to you for your office.” And when Johnson said he assumed that, in that case, he would also be assigned the extra little room in the basement—102-B—that O’Daniel had had the use of, Hayden replied that unfortunately Senator Forrest Donnell of Missouri had requested that extra room. Senator Donnell had more seniority than Senator Johnson. That room would be assigned to Senator Donnell. Lyndon Johnson’s trip got him nothing that he had gone to Washington to obtain.
UNPRODUCTIVE THOUGH THAT TRIP to Washington may have been, however, Lyndon Johnson did not return from it unhappy. For the Senate Office Building had not been the only place he had visited on that trip. He had also gone over to the Capitol—and had looked, for the first time as a senator, at the Senate Chamber.
Walter Jenkins, who was with him at the time—they had entered the Chamber by the side door near the Senate Reception Room, he would recall years later—would never forget that moment. With the Senate not in session, only a single row of lights was turned on in the ceiling high above, and the Chamber was shadowy and dim, but those lights reflected off the polished tops of the ninety-six senators’ desks as the long arcs stretched away in the gloom.
Lyndon Johnson stood just inside the doorway, silently staring out over the Chamber, for what Jenkins would remember as “quite a long time.” And then he muttered something, speaking in such a low voice that Jenkins felt he was “speaking to himself.” And if Jenkins would not recall Lyndon Johnson’s exact words, he did recall the gist of what he said—that the Senate was “the right size.”
Jenkins felt he understood what Johnson meant by that, as did Horace Busby, to whom Jenkins repeated the words not long thereafter.
While Lyndon Johnson was not, as his two assistants knew, a reader of books, he was, they knew, a reader of men—a great reader of men. He had a genius for studying a man and learning his strengths and weaknesses and hopes and fears, his deepest strengths and weaknesses: what it was that the man wanted—not what he said he wanted but what he really wanted—and what it was that the man feared, really feared.
He tried to teach his young assistants to read men—“Watch their hands, watch their eyes,” he told them. “Read eyes. No matter what a man is saying to you, it’s not as important as what you can read in his eyes”—and to read between the lines: more interested in men’s weaknesses than in their strengths because it was weakness that could be exploited, he tried to teach his assistants how to learn a man’s weakness. “The most important thing a man has to tell you is what he’s not telling you,” he said. “The most important thing he has to say is what he’s trying not to say.” For that reason, he told them, it was important to keep the man talking; the longer he talked, the more likely he was to let slip a hint of that vulnerability he was so anxious to conceal. “That’s why he wouldn’t let a conversation end,” Busby explains. “If he saw the other fellow was trying not to say something, he wouldn’t let it [the conversation] end until he got it out of him.” And Lyndon Johnson himself read with a genius that couldn’t be taught, with a gift that was so instinctive that a close observer of his reading habits, Robert G. (Bobby) Baker, calls it a “sense”; “He seemed to sense each man’s individual price and the commodity he preferred as coin.” He read with a novelist’s sensitivity, with an insight that was unerring, with an ability, shocking in the depth of its penetration and perception, to look into a man’s heart and know his innermost worries and desires.
Such reading is a pursuit best carried out in private—Lyndon Johnson alone with a man, getting to know him one on one. And Johnson’s gift was not only for reading men but also for using what he read—for using what a man wanted, to get from him what he wanted, to sell the man on his point of view, or on himself. And this, too, as Jenkins and Busby knew—as indeed everyone who had spent much time with Lyndon Johnson knew—was a talent that operated best in private. “Lyndon was the greatest salesman one on one who ever lived,” George R. Brown said of him, and in that sentence “one on one” was the operative phrase. The essence of his persuasiveness was his ability, once he had found out a man’s hopes and fears, his political philosophy and his personal prejudices, to persuade the man that he shared that philosophy and those prejudices—no matter what they happened to be. In words that are echoed by Busby and Jenkins, and by many others who had an opportunity to observe Lyndon Johnson at length, Brown was to say that “Johnson had the knack of always appealing to someone about someone [that person] didn’t like. If he was talking to Joe, and Joe didn’t like Jim, he’d say he didn’t like Jim, too—that was his leadership, that was his knack.” But such a technique worked, of course, only if Jim wasn’t around—and only if there was also no one around who might one day happen to mention to Jim what Johnson had said about him. It worked best if no one was around, if the conversation was strictly “one on one.” Moreover, since Johnson used the technique not only about personalities but also about philosophies—liberals thought he was a liberal, conservatives that he was a conservative—it worked best if there was no one present from the other side. He “operated best in small groups, the smaller the better,” Jenkins said.
For eleven years, however, Lyndon Johnson had been trapped in a body so large that he couldn’t work in small groups, much less one on one. Everything in the House of Representatives was done en masse, from the swearing-in by the Speaker at the opening of each Congress—where all 435 members, crowded together on the long benches in the House Chamber, stood up together, raised their hands and repeated the words of the oath in unison, as if they were a group of draftees being inducted into the Army—to committee meetings: each House committee was a substantial body in itself; on the House Armed Services Committee Johnson had been one of thirty-six members, so many that at meetings they had to sit on a long dais in two tiers. With its hundreds of members, its crowded, noisy corridors and cloakrooms, with its strict formal rules and leadership structure made necessary by its size, the House was an environment in which, as one observer put it, members “could be dealt with only in bodies and droves.”
The Senate was very different. With fewer than a hundred members, it was less than a quarter of the size of the House, a much more personal, more intimate, body, one in which, as a commentator puts it, “most interactions were face to face.” The great reader of men would have to read only a relatively small number of texts. Furthermore, because of the longer senatorial terms, those texts would not be constantly changing as they were in the House. They could be perused at length, pored over; studied and restudied. What text could, under such favorable circumstances, remain impenetrable to Lyndon Johnson’s eyes? He would have ample opportunity not only to read his men, but to make use of what he read—in ideal conditions. In subdivisions of the Senate, the contrast with the House became even more dramatic. Most Senate committees had only thirteen members, so that a committee meeting was a small group of men sitting relaxed around a table. Each Senate committee had subcommittees to handle specific areas of the committee’s business, and most Senate subcommittees had only five, or perhaps seven, members; not a few had only three. A member of a three-man subcommittee needed to sell only one other senator to carry his point. And Lyndon Johnson was “the greatest salesman one on one who ever lived.”
And, Jenkins would say, Johnson appears to have felt all this—to have felt the implic
ations of the Senate’s smallness for his particular talents—in that moment in the doorway of the Senate Chamber, in that moment when he stood staring out at those ninety-six individual desks. “From the first day on,” Jenkins says, and Jenkins explains that he means from that day when Johnson stood in the doorway, “from the first day on, he knew he could be effective there, make his influence felt. It was the right size—just the right size. It was his place. He was at his best with small groups, and he was one of only ninety-six senators. With only ninety-five others—he knew he could manage that.”
THE DIFFERENCE—and the implications—must have been dramatized to Johnson even more vividly by the swearing-in ritual for the thirty-two newly elected or re-elected senators at the opening ceremonies of the Eighty-first Congress. He was in the fifth group of four senators to be sworn in, and it was a distinguished group. Behind Johnson as he walked down the aisle, escorted by old Tom Connally, Chairman of the mighty Foreign Relations Committee, was the young Tennessean, Estes Kefauver, his arm held by the old Tennessean McKellar, Chairman of Appropriations, and then Robert S. Kerr of Oklahoma, escorted by old Elmer Thomas of Oklahoma, Chairman of Agriculture, and South Carolinian Olin Johnston, escorted by the Charleston aristocrat Burnet Rhett Maybank, Chairman of Banking and Currency. They walked down the aisle slowly—McKellar hobbling on his cane, Thomas, his eyesight almost gone, shuffling, feeling for each of the four steps with his feet—but with dignity, and the face of Vandenberg above them as they approached was the face of “the Lion of the Senate” familiar from a score of magazine covers. All four of the just-elected senators were over six feet tall; they stood very straight as, their right hands raised, they took the oath with the older men beside them. And after they had answered, “I do,” a clerk pushed the Senate Register (“a well-bound book kept for that purpose”) toward them, and Lyndon Johnson signed, at nine minutes past noon, and went not to a crowded bench but to a desk, his own desk.
Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson Page 24
