Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson

by Robert A. Caro

  “The Senate is my life and work,” he told a reporter once. “I don’t have any family or home life. If I don’t get home till late, that’s all right.”

  AFTER LYNDON JOHNSON’S DISCUSSION with Bobby Baker (“Dick Russell is the power”), in late December 1948, Johnson abruptly dropped his requests for a seat on Appropriations. There was, he would explain, only one way to get close to a man whose life was his work: “I knew there was only one way to see Russell every day, and that was to get a seat on his committee. Without that we’d most likely be passing acquaintances and nothing more. So I put in a request for the Armed Services Committee.” There was less demand for that committee than for Appropriations (or for Foreign Relations or Finance) and four vacant Democratic seats on it, and when, on January 3, the Senate was organized, and the list of Democratic Steering Committee assignments was read, he was given one of those seats. (His other committee was Interstate and Foreign Commerce, which under the chairmanship of Ed Johnson—“Mr. Wisdom”—supervised the oil and natural gas industries vital to Texas, and on which Johnson had an assignment to carry out for those industries in 1949.) Johnson threw himself into the Armed Services Committee’s work, and he began dropping by Russell’s office to discuss it.

  At first, he would drop by only in the late afternoon, after the Senate had adjourned for the day. He was very deferential and formal in his approach. He would not ask the receptionist to tell Senator Russell he was there; instead, he would write a note asking if it would be convenient for Senator Russell to see Senator Johnson, and ask her to take it in. And he would keep the conversation focused on the committee’s work, asking Russell questions about it, asking advice on how best to carry out some committee assignment he had been given. And he would listen to the answers, and listen hard. “If you saw them together, you would not see Johnson walking back and forth, and talking, like he usually did,” John Connally says. “Russell would be doing the talking. He [Johnson] would be sitting quietly, listening, absorbing wisdom, very much the younger man sitting at the knees of the older man.” Had the chairman of Johnson’s other committee been given a nickname? The chairman of this committee wasn’t neglected. Richard Russell, Johnson began saying, was “the Old Master.” The phrase was used frequently—often to the Old Master himself. When Russell offered him a piece of advice, Lyndon Johnson would say, “Well, that’s a lesson from the Old Master. I’ll remember that.”

  After a while, the conversations no longer took place only in Russell’s office. Russell would be drafting a committee report, or reading over one that he had assigned Johnson to work on, and there might be more work to do on it. Or there might be a line of questioning to be worked out for witnesses in the next day’s hearings. Johnson would be helping. Why didn’t they finish over dinner? he would suggest. Lady Bird had dinner waiting for him. It would be no trouble at all for her to put on another plate. It would make things easier all around. “You’re gonna have to eat somewhere anyway,” he would say. And after a few such invitations, Russell accepted one.

  When the dinner guest at Thirtieth Place was Richard Russell, Lyndon Johnson’s table manners would have pleased even his mother. Says Posh Oltorf, who was occasionally a fellow guest, “He was an entirely different person with Russell than he was ordinarily. There was no reaching, no slurping. Johnson was on his very best behavior.”

  At Thirtieth Place, moreover, Johnson had his great helpmate, and she was as valuable with Russell as she had been with Rayburn. The help was of a different kind, of course. The bond between Lady Bird Johnson and Sam Rayburn—lovingly daughterly on the one hand, lovingly paternal on the other—was the bond between a fierce, stern man whose fierceness and sternness concealed a terrible shyness and a young woman whose unwavering smile concealed a shyness and timidity just as terrible. And she saw Rayburn, whose portrait was the only one she would place in the living room of the Johnson Ranch, as the exemplar of all that was great in the common American people from which she, her husband, and the Speaker all sprang. Talking of “the Speaker,” she says, with a passion very unusual for her: “He was the best of us—the best of simple American stock.”

  Richard Brevard Russell wasn’t one of us, and had no desire to be, and Lady Bird’s keen eyes saw it all in an instant. “I early knew that his father was, I think the chief judge in Georgia, and I remember a very patrician picture of him swearing in his young son, Dick Russell—and I would hear stories [from Georgians] of seeing the Russell family drive into town on a Saturday afternoon with Mrs. Russell sitting very erect and very starched, and extremely well groomed…. They were quality.” When an interviewer from the Lyndon Johnson Library tries to suggest that her husband and Russell were intimates, Mrs. Johnson quietly sets him straight. “Senator Russell was always—there was a certain aloofness in him, it’s my feeling,” she says. “Although he had humor and he could have warmth, he was something of a loner. There was an aloofness, and you would be presumptuous to say, ‘He’s my best friend.’… He was a great friend, a dear friend, but he was not the sort of person with whom you could broach intimate things….”

  But the love Lady Bird Johnson had for Rayburn was no deeper than the respect she had for Russell. “He was a patriot right through and through,” she says. “In appraising him I think you would have to get in the words, ‘enormous sense of integrity.’… If he told you something, that was so.” He was, she says, “a towering person…. I never looked at him without admiration.” And of course Mrs. Johnson was a very southern woman, very devoted to the ideals and philosophy of the South, and, as she puts it, “Dick Russell was the archetype and bellwether of the South.” And, in a way, the help Lady Bird gave her husband with his third R was the same she gave him with his second. No one, no matter how reserved, could remain untouched by the warmth with which Lady Bird Johnson would say, as she bid a guest good-bye, “Now you all come back again real soon, you hear.” In both cases, her warm graciousness made a man who seldom visited other people’s homes feel at home in hers, sufficiently at home so that he would come again and again.

  The wisdom of Johnson’s choice of committees—his insight that the only way to get to know Russell was to work with him—was documented, for, as Mrs. Johnson says, “As far as trying to sign him up for a dinner party three months in advance, I doubt if I’d have had much luck, or if I would have had the nerve to try…. He was always much sought after for parties, you know, and very unlikely to go…. He was our visitor so many times, but it was much more likely to be on the spur of the moment. They’d be working together on something and they would not be finished with it, and Lyndon would say something about, come on and go home with him, and Lady Bird will give us some—whatever we had. That was the way it usually happened.” And when he got to the Johnsons, there would be, no matter what the hour, that wonderful welcoming smile.

  If the hour wasn’t too late, Lynda Bird and Lucy Baines would be awake. “He was always very nice to them and apparently at ease with them,” Mrs. Johnson says. “And they remember him with affection.” They called him “Uncle Dick” (their parents encouraged them to do so). But there are different types of uncles. “It was with just respect and affection, not intimacy,” Mrs. Johnson says. “He did not wish to have too strong a tie to [people], in my opinion. Ties of family, dear Lord, he had them strongly and lovingly, but he just didn’t go around becoming intimate with men, women or children.” (Speaking of the entire twenty-year relationship between Richard Russell and the Johnsons, during which Russell made scores of visits to the Johnson home, the interviewer from the Johnson Library asked, “Did he ever bring little token-type gifts? I was just wondering, over the years did he bring any kind of little remembrance to you or the children?” “No, not that I remember,” Mrs. Johnson replied.)

  And after Spring arrived, occasionally, in the late afternoons, Lyndon Johnson would make another suggestion, one to which Russell always responded with uncharacteristic enthusiasm. Asked years later what drew the two men together, Russell
mentioned first the sport he loved. “We both like baseball,” he explained. “Right after he came to the Senate, for some reason we started going to the night baseball games together.” Sometimes Lady Bird was invited to accompany them. “They would buy hot dogs … and sit and watch and talk about the prowess of this player or that player.” And, she noticed, at baseball games Russell was less “aloof…. He really liked that.” If no box seats were available, they would sit in the grandstand above the boxes—two tall men in double-breasted suits and fedoras, hot dogs in hands, sitting close together, talking companionably and laughing together.

  Johnson’s sudden interest in baseball surprised people aware of his previous total lack of interest in any type of sport. “I doubt that Lyndon Johnson had been to a baseball game in his life until he heard that Dick Russell enjoyed the sport,” John Connally says. Connally, the only one of Johnson’s aides who dared to joke with him, would say, “‘Well, I see you’ve become a baseball fan. Do you know the pitcher from the catcher?’ He [Johnson] would smile and laugh, and say, ‘You know I’ve always loved baseball.’ I said, ‘No, I’ve never been aware of that.’” But Connally understood: “He knew Dick Russell liked baseball games, so he went to games with Russell.”

  He began spending time with Russell not only after the Senate recessed for the day but before it convened. Although Johnson had generally eaten breakfast in bed ever since, with his wedding ceremony, he had acquired someone to bring it to him, he now began rising early and breakfasting in the senators’ private dining room—as it happened, at the same hour that Russell ate breakfast there. More and more frequently, the two senators had breakfast together, discussing Armed Services Committee business.

  And, more and more, he was spending time with Russell on weekends. Not many senators worked on Saturdays, but Russell did, of course, and Johnson did, too. Years later, he would say:

  With no one to cook for him [Russell] at home, he would arrive early enough in the morning to eat breakfast at the Capitol and stay late enough at night to eat dinner [at O’Donnell’s]. And in these early mornings and late evenings I made sure that there was always one companion, one Senator, who worked as hard and as long as he, and that was me, Lyndon Johnson. On Sundays the House and Senate were empty, quiet and still, the streets outside were bare. It’s a tough day for a politician, especially if, like Russell, he’s all alone. I knew how he felt for I, too, counted the hours till Monday would come again and knowing that, I made sure to invite Russell over for breakfast, lunch, brunch or just to read the Sunday papers.

  This necessitated some juggling because once Sam Rayburn had been the older man having brunch and reading papers with Lyndon, but the juggling was made easier by the fact that there was more than one meal on Sundays. During his last years in the House, Johnson had begun inviting a number of New Dealers—most of them Rayburn’s friends, like Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas and Tommy Corcoran and Jim Rowe—to Thirtieth Place for Sunday dinner. At seven o’clock he would switch on the radio so that they could all snarl at Drew Pearson’s revelations about congressional activities. Rayburn enjoyed being one of that group, and had begun coming for dinner instead of brunch, so now Russell was invited for brunch, Rayburn for dinner. Frequent guests at Thirtieth Place noticed that, as Oltorf says, “You never, ever, saw them at Lyndon’s house together.” “Lyndon didn’t want his two daddies to see how he acted with the other one,” explains Jim Rowe.

  Not all the time Johnson and Russell spent together on weekends was spent working, or reading the papers. For Russell found that this new senator from Texas shared—enthusiastically—some of his own interests. Those new enthusiasms that Johnson now revealed were as surprising to his assistants as his love for baseball. One, for example, was the War Between the States. All his life, Johnson had displayed a distaste for discussing history as intense as his antipathy for any subject that required reading: a feeling that went beyond lack of interest, and was disdain. That feeling had included the Civil War. Attempting to convince Lady Bird to marry him, he had assured her that “I shall take you … when you are mine” to the Civil War battlefields “and all of those most interesting places”; during the fifteen years since their wedding, she had been trying—in vain—to persuade him to take her at least once. Now Johnson told Russell that he had heard that Russell had a great familiarity with the battlefields. He himself was fascinated with the tactics and the heroism that had been demonstrated on them, he said; the next time Russell visited one of them, he would certainly consider it an honor to be allowed to accompany him. And, on more than one occasion, he was.

  Discussing in later years his early relationship with Russell, Johnson gave it a patina of generosity. “He was my mentor and I wanted to take care of him,” he said. But contemporary witnesses to that relationship “snickered behind their hands,” in the words of Bobby Baker, who says that Johnson was “pressing an ardent courtship on” Russell. “He flattered him outrageously.” Had Senator Russell been a woman, “He would have married him.” But Johnson’s courtship of older men had been the subject of snickers at San Marcos and in the House of Representatives, and those courtships had achieved their ends.

  And, with Russell, too, as Baker also says, “there’s absolutely no doubt that his campaign worked.” When, years later, it was suggested to Russell that he and Johnson were dissimilar personalities, the Georgian replied, “Well, I suppose that’s the public impression. Johnson and I had a good many things in common…. We just hit it off personally together.” (The things they didn’t have in common, and that might have repelled Russell, Johnson’s iron self-control kept to a minimum when they were together; the inhaler, for example, was never in use in Russell’s presence.) Within a remarkably short time after he was sworn in, this freshman senator was spending far more time than any other senator with the Senate’s most powerful member.

  BUT RUSSELL WASN’T RAYBURN. Rayburn hungered, yearned, for love—for a wife, for children, in particular for a son. It wasn’t a son that Richard Russell wanted, it was a soldier—a soldier for the Cause. Johnson may have made Russell fond of him, but fondness alone would never have gotten Johnson what he wanted from Russell. As another southern senator, John Stennis of Mississippi, was to put it, Russell “wasn’t a bosom friend with anyone when it came to … serious matters of government and constitutional principles.” For Johnson to get what he wanted from Russell, he would have to prove to him that they had the same feelings on the issue that dominated Russell’s life.

  So Johnson’s early efforts with Russell also included a speech. Delivered on Wednesday, March 9, 1949, it was his first speech on the Senate floor, and it was a major one: it took him an hour and twenty-five minutes, speaking in deliberate, grave tones, to read the thirty-five double-spaced typewritten pages that had been placed on the portable lectern that had been put on his desk. And it was delivered as a centerpiece of a southern filibuster against Truman’s proposed civil rights legislation that would have given black Americans protection against lynching and against discrimination in employment, and that also would have made it easier for them to vote.

  First, he defended the use of the filibuster. The strategy of civil rights advocates, he said, “calls for depriving one minority of its rights in order to extend rights to other minorities.” The minority that would be deprived, he explained, was the South.

  “We of the South who speak here are accused of prejudice,” Lyndon Johnson said. “We are labeled in the folklore of American tradition as a prejudiced minority.” But, he said, “prejudice is not a minority affliction: prejudice is most wicked and most harmful as a majority ailment, directed against minority groups.” The present debate proved that, he said. “Prejudice, I think, has inflamed a majority outside the Senate against those of us who speak now, exaggerating the evil and intent of the filibuster. Until we are free of prejudice there will be a place in our system for the filibuster—for the filibuster is the last defense of reason, the sole defense of minorities who
might be victimized by prejudice.” “Unlimited debate is a check on rash action,” he said, “an essential safeguard against executive authority”—“the keystone of all other freedoms.” And therefore cloture—this cloture which “we of the South” were fighting—is “the deadliest weapon in the arsenal of parliamentary procedures.” By using it, a majority can do as it wishes—“against this, a minority has no defense.”

  Then he turned to the substance of the legislation. Racial prejudice was not the issue, Lyndon Johnson said. Prejudice, he said, is “evil,” and “perhaps no prejudice is so contagious or so dangerous as the unreasoning prejudice against men because of their birth, the color of their skin, or their ancestral background.” And, he said, he himself was not prejudiced. “For those who would keep any group in our Nation in bondage, I have no sympathy or tolerance.” But, he said, prejudice was not the reason that the South was fighting the civil rights bills.