He wasn’t grabbing now.
IN THE AFTERNOONS NOW, Lyndon Johnson would sometimes leave 231, without telling his staff where he was going, and would be gone for hours. For a while, no one in the office knew where he was spending those hours—until one day a Senate page telephoned with a message for Horace Busby. Senator Johnson wanted him to come over to the Capitol and join him on the Senate floor.
After that, Busby would be summoned frequently, either by telephone or by a page who would come to 231 in person and escort him to a side door of the Senate Chamber. Seeing his curly-haired young aide, Johnson would motion him over to his desk, and the page would bring a folding chair and place it next to Johnson’s.
Sometimes the reason for the summons was apparent: a speech was being given that Johnson wanted Busby to hear. Busby understood that Johnson wanted his speeches to sound senatorial, so he wanted his speechwriter to hear what senators sounded like. “He paid particular attention to Senator George,” Busby says, but he also wanted Busby to hear senators who were not regarded as particularly outstanding orators, but who sounded senatorial. “He always wanted me to hear [Leverett] Saltonstall. And he was kind of taken with Henry Cabot Lodge.”
Often, however, Busby would be called to the floor when no major speech was being given, and the Senate was merely transacting routine, monotonous, business. He would sit down next to Johnson as a desultory discussion or slightly more interesting debate ensued, or as a quorum call droned on. Sometimes Johnson would whisper to him behind a cupped hand. “Somebody would be making a motion, and he’d be very attentive to that. He hadn’t had to do that in the House—he wasn’t part of the action over there, and the Speaker or whoever was in the Chair had all the authority over there. There would be some maneuver, and he’d talk to me behind his hand: ‘You think he’s going to succeed at that?’” But often Johnson wouldn’t say anything at all—for quite a long time.
“Usually, there weren’t many senators around,” Busby recalls. Two or three senators interested in a particular bill would come onto the floor, and, the bill disposed of, would leave, to be replaced by two or three others. Individual senators would wander in and out. Stars and spear carriers changed: the majority and minority leaders wandered in and out; the Senate reporters who recorded every word spoken on the floor changed regularly, every thirty minutes; clerks would come and go on the lower level of the dais. But Lyndon Johnson would remain, sitting at his desk, intent and still, a long, motionless figure slouched down deep in his chair, his head resting on a big hand, among the long, empty arcs of desks. “He was just sitting there watching the Senate,” Busby recalls.
Busby soon came to understand that he had really been summoned because Johnson was going to be there for many hours, and wanted company. “It was like part of him was a spectator, and he liked to have someone sitting there with him,” Busby says. But for a long while he couldn’t understand why Johnson was there for so many hours. “It was obvious that the reason was very important to him, but I didn’t know what it was,” he says. “I didn’t know what he was doing there,” sitting hour after hour on the almost-deserted Chamber floor as the afternoon oozed away in quorum calls and the dull staccato chant of the Calendar Call. And then Busby did understand. “He was learning, studying.”
In part, he was studying senatorial procedure, those arcane Senate rules, although, Busby noticed, after Johnson observed that on thorny parliamentary points the party leaders or the senator in the chair usually consulted the Senate Parliamentarian, Charles L. Watkins, instead of relying on their own knowledge, he became less interested in procedure; he, too, would be able to refer questions to Watkins. In part, he was studying senatorial demeanor—the manners of senators of the United States.
Woodward says, “He [Johnson] had a general feeling that when you moved to the Senate you had to be more statesmanlike, more senatorial.” Saltonstall and Lodge and Alabama’s Lister Hill were being studied not merely because they spoke in a senatorial manner, but because they acted “senatorial”: formal, dignified, courtly in the best sense of those words. Saltonstall and Lodge, Busby says, “were gentlemen, real New England gentlemen, the kind of person you didn’t find in Texas.” Hill was a gentleman, too, if of the southern mode. What Johnson was trying to learn from them was not merely speech-making but a mode of senatorial discourse, the manner in which they introduced motions and bills, and spoke in debate.
And in part, Johnson was studying men, not their demeanor but what lay underneath.
The Senate Chamber, was, after all, a good place to observe his new colleagues. Most of the time, senators were in their offices or in the hearing rooms of their committees; you might get to know the senators who served on the same committees as you yet see other senators seldom—unless you saw them on the floor. In the Chamber, Johnson could study all the senators—could read them.
From his desk at the far end of the lowest arc, Lyndon Johnson watched the figures moving among the desks, coming up and down the center aisle, chatting together in the well. He watched which senators went over to other senators to chat with them—and which senators sat at their desks and let other senators come to them. He watched two senators talk, and watched if they talked as equals. He watched groups of senators talk, and watched which one the others listened to. And he watched with eyes that missed nothing. Woody understood. Other observers thought the “Big Bulls” were simply the committee chairmen, that being a chairman automatically made you a “Big Bull.” Lyndon Johnson knew better; the reader of men was doing a lot of reading sitting there in the Chamber. Lyndon Johnson was studying which senators had the respect of their fellows—and why they had that respect.
Studying men—and making friends with them. “Just because he was there,” Busby explains, some of the other senators would “come by and say something to him.” The senators who wandered over to say a word would not be Taft or Kenneth Wherry: Johnson was too junior for the Republican Leaders to cross the aisle to talk to him. “But occasionally” his own Leader, Scott Lucas, “might come over and say something.”
These studies took a lot of time. The session would go on for hours, and hour after hour Lyndon Johnson would sit slouched down in his chair, head on hand, all but unmoving. All his previous life had been marked by burning impatience—by a restlessness terrible in its urgency, by an unwillingness to wait, by a feeling that he couldn’t wait. But in the Senate, he had seen at once, waiting—patience—was necessary. So there would be patience.
FINALLY SCOTT LUCAS would move that the Senate adjourn for the day. Standing and stretching, Lyndon Johnson would say, “C’mon, Buzz,” leave the Chamber, and walk down to the subway to the Senate Office Building. Entering 231, he would often throw a violent tantrum, bellowing at his staff. After he went into his private office, slamming the heavy door behind him, one of the four buttons on Jenkins’ telephone would light up with the pale yellow light that meant it was in use; Walter and John and Buzz and Woody would know the Chief was on the telephone. But often the person he had called was another senator, and if that was the case, the Chief wouldn’t be doing much talking. Recalls John Connally: “Time and again, I’d go in there, and I would see him leaning back in his chair, just listening”—saying hardly a word.
The big leather chair was in front of the wide, high, arched window, which faced west so that the late-afternoon sun came through the Venetian blinds in bright bars. As Lyndon Johnson leaned back in the chair, or slouched down into it on the base of his spine, his big, brightly polished black shoes resting on the desk, one hand holding a telephone to his ear, the other hand would almost invariably be holding a cigarette, and another cigarette or two would be dying in an ashtray on the desk, and the smoke from the cigarettes would curl lazily up through those bars of light. And often those curls of smoke would be the only things moving in that end of the room, so intently was Lyndon Johnson concentrating on what he was hearing. The big head that loomed dark, almost black, in front of those bright bars was ve
ry still. Woodward, in whose mind the face of Lyndon Johnson was never still, could hardly believe what he was seeing. He knew—after years of traveling with Johnson, no one knew better—how hard it was for Lyndon Johnson to listen. But after listening on the Senate floor all afternoon, now, in the evening, Lyndon Johnson was listening still.
How complete was the transformation in Lyndon Johnson? How successfully did he change his outward character? When, in 1950, the first major article appeared about him in a national magazine, it described him as “mild-mannered.” The first cover story about him, in Newsweek in 1951, said, “His manner is quiet and gentle, and everything he does, he does with great deliberation and care.” And perhaps the definitive word came from that epitome of senatorial civility, Majority Leader Lucas. Asked about Lyndon Johnson, Lucas said, “I found him at all times what I would term a gentleman of the old school.”
AND LYNDON JOHNSON had other gifts which made the Senate, at first glance so unsuited to him, very well suited indeed.
For one thing, it was a place ruled by old men; the most powerful senators, the Big Bulls who could help him along his path, were almost all old. And Lyndon Johnson had always had a gift with old men who could help him. As with all his talents, he had analyzed it himself. “I always liked to spend time with older people,” he would tell Doris Kearns Goodwin, and, besides, spending this time had a purpose, even when he had been a boy. “When I was a boy, I would talk for hours with the mothers of my friends, telling them what I had done during the day, asking what they had done, requesting advice. Soon they began to feel as if I, too, was their son and that meant that whenever we all wanted to do something, it was okay by the parents as long as I was there.”
It was a remarkable gift. At college, his deference, humility, obsequiousness with older men and women who possessed the academic world’s version of power—college administrators and professors—had been carried to such extremes that his awed classmates say that if they described it fully, “no one would believe it.” It included the posture he adopted with his professors. “Literally sitting at [their] feet,” a classmate would recall; if a professor or dean was holding an informal bull session on a lawn on College Hill, sitting on a bench, other students might be sitting next to him or listening while standing up; Lyndon Johnson would almost invariably be sitting on the ground, his face turned up to the professor, his expression one of deep interest and respect. He would, another classmate says, “never disagree with anything a faculty member” said, and he would go further: “he would make a statement that he knew the faculty member would agree with”—make it with the deepest enthusiasm, although, not long before, the same classmate had heard him, with a professor of opposite views, espousing those views with the deepest enthusiasm. It included flattery not only oral but written, written privately in notes to his teachers strategically placed at the end of his examination papers (such as one to an English professor who was a devout Baptist thanking her for “strengthening” his religious faith), and publicly: during his editorship of the College Star, the traditional sly digs at college administrators of earlier years were replaced with editorials full of extravagant praise—flattery from a young man gifted not only in reading men but in using what he read. Instead of ignoring a trait embarrassing to his subject, Johnson’s editorial would focus on that trait, praising it, as if, only twenty years old though he was, he possessed an instinctive, untaught understanding that his subject must be aware of his weak point, so that a word of reassurance about it would be the word that would mean the most: describing a speech by a professor whose pedantic dullness made students snicker, Johnson wrote that “he made his talk bristle with interesting facts”; writing about a stern Dean of Women so rigid about campus morals that she had once expelled a boy for giving a coed a lift in an automobile, Johnson said that “the boys think [Dean Brogden] is one of the best sports on the Hill.” And much of the flattery had a particular—and very cunningly calculated—objective: to make the subject feel for Lyndon Johnson that particularly strong form of fondness, maternal or paternal affection. After telling a female administrator how much he loved and respected his mother, he would tell her that she reminded him of his mother. He would ask her advice about some problem, and when she gave it, would say, as one administrator recalls, that “what I had said was like what his mother had said…. I was sort of flattered.” He would tell a male professor how much he loved and respected his father. He would tell the professor that he so much appreciated his help. “If you were my own father, you couldn’t have done more for me,” he said to one.
In Washington, as secretary to Congressman Richard Kleberg of Corpus Christi, the techniques were the same—right down to the posture and the particular form of flattery. Kleberg’s office was the site of a late-afternoon drinking group of powerful reactionaries, including the Red-baiting Congressman Martin Dies and the legendarily powerful lobbyist and financier of Red-baiting causes, Roy Miller of Corpus Christi, any one of them so anti-Roosevelt that he might have posed for Peter Arno’s New Yorker cartoon of wealthy businessmen ranting and raving against That Man in the White House. Through an open door in Kleberg’s office suite, the Congressman’s two other young assistants could see Johnson, even when there was a vacant chair, sitting on the floor, face worshipfully tilted up toward whoever was speaking, in L. E. Jones’ words, “very much the young man, very starry-eyed, very boyish, very much the junior to the senior. ‘Yes, sir.’ ‘No, sir.’” And when only one of the older men was with him, he again played the paternal card, telling one powerful lobbyist, “You’ve been like a Daddy to me.”
These techniques aroused contempt from Johnson’s contemporaries on both College and Capitol Hills. In talking with the author, both a classmate and a fellow congressional aide used the same term—“a professional son”—to describe him. The college yearbook chronicled his “sucking up” in print (“Believe It Or Not—Bull Johnson has never taken a course in suction”), and his classmate Mylton Kennedy says, “Words won’t come to describe how Lyndon acted toward the faculty—how kowtowing he was, how suck-assing he was, how brown-nosing he was.” Hearing Johnson “talking conservative” with the ultra-reactionary Dies, and, a few minutes later, “talking liberal” with liberal Congressman Wright Patman—and espousing diametrically opposite points of view with equal passion—many of his fellow congressional assistants felt that, as one says, “There’s nothing wrong with being pragmatic. Hell, a lot of us were pragmatic. But you have to believe in something. Lyndon Johnson believed in nothing, nothing but his own ambition.” They sneered as they watched Johnson ignore the young, single women at the monthly Texas State Society dances in order to dance almost exclusively with the elderly wives of congressmen and Cabinet officers so that “the wives would introduce him to their husbands.” And on both hills the contempt was tinged with anger because Johnson was as overbearing to those beneath him, or on the same level as he, as he was obsequious to those above him; so much, in rapid alternation, the bully and the bootlicker that Charles Marsh’s daughter, who had a ringside seat as Lyndon fawned humbly over her father while, behind his back, sleeping with her mother (and who was a devotee of Charles Dickens), was reminded “every time I saw Lyndon” of “a Uriah Heep from Texas.”
But on both Hills, the reaction of Johnson’s targets was proof of the adage that where flattery is concerned, no excess is possible. “Boy,” one classmate says of the San Marcos faculty, “you could see they loved it.” And it was the faculty’s patronage that gave Johnson the rewards he wanted at college. In Washington, his techniques were observed by men capable of analyzing—and of appreciating—the talent, and these men say that “deference” and “flattery” are inadequate to describe it. Watching Lyndon Johnson “play” older men, Tommy Corcoran, a prince of flatterers himself, knew he was watching a king. “He [Johnson] was smiling and deferential, but, hell, lots of guys can be smiling and deferential. Lyndon had one of the most incredible capacities for dealing with older men. He could
follow someone’s mind around, and get where it was going before the other fellow knew where it was going. Lyndon was there ahead of him, and saying what he wanted to hear before he knew what he wanted to hear.” The very keen-eyed Ed Clark says, “I never saw anything like it. He would listen at them… and in five minutes he could get a man to think, ‘I like you, young fellow. I’m going to help you.’”
The man on whom his talents had been employed most intensively was Sam Rayburn.
Although adults backed away from the hard-faced, frowning Speaker, who was as powerful—awesome—in personality and in physical strength, with his short, massive body, as he was in position, children took to “Mr. Sam” instinctively, crawling all over him and rubbing their hands over his great bald head. Talking to a little boy or girl, he could sit for hours with that grim face transformed by a broad, gentle smile. But Rayburn had no children. Terribly shy and insecure with women—as, indeed, he was shy in any social situation—he had married once, but the marriage had lasted only three weeks; no one ever knew why. He dreaded loneliness. “Loneliness breaks the heart,” he said once. “Loneliness consumes people.” But, a man with so much power and so fierce a temper that some congressmen were “literally afraid to start talking to him,” he had to live—all his life—with what he dreaded. While the House was in session, of course, men crowded around him, clamoring for his attention, hanging on his every word, but in the evenings and on weekends, when the House wasn’t in session and other congressmen went home to their families, the Speaker went home to a small apartment near Dupont Circle. Convinced that he couldn’t make small talk, that he made a fool of himself whenever he tried, he seldom went to parties. Too proud to let anyone know he was lonely, he rejected dinner invitations from his assistants. On Sundays, he would walk for hours around the empty streets of downtown Washington, his face set in a stern mask as if he wanted to be alone, as if he didn’t want anyone to talk to him. Sometimes, unable to bear the loneliness, he would telephone an assistant and ask him to come to his office on a weekend, as if he had some urgent task for him. But these young men, watching him opening all the drawers of his desk and taking out every paper, “looking for something to do,” knew the truth—and pitied him. Once, he wrote to a friend, “God, what I would give for a tow-headed boy to take fishing.”
Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson Page 27
