Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson

by Robert A. Caro

  “Get down there right away and find out what’s going on,” he told Tyler. “He points his finger at me, and says, ‘You’re an FBI man. Find out what’s going on!’” There was no time to be lost, Johnson said. Mothers were worried about their boys. Busby, snug in a public relations berth in Austin, could hardly believe the telephone call that was sending him out into a tent on the freezing Texas plains, but Johnson had no patience with his attempt to beg off. “Listen,” he said, “this is important. We’ve got to tell these mothers something!”

  The initial headlines—“INVESTIGATORS SLEEP IN LACKLAND TENTS,” the Dallas Morning News said—were as dramatic as any senator could have desired, particularly because on the day the investigators arrived, a Texas storm swept across the plains, and temperatures plummeted to fifteen degrees. And so were the initial stories from Texas reporters who rushed to the camp because of Johnson’s announcements. “An estimated 20,000 new recruits sleeping in tents at Lackland Field in subfreezing temperatures had company Tuesday night when four investigators crawled in with them,” said the Morning News. “Chairman Johnson had the four draw GI clothing, sleep outdoors in unheated tents and eat every meal at a different mess hall,” said the Austin American-Statesman. Within the stories, however, were statements of a different tone. Writing that “Lackland officials emphatically deny [the] rumors,” Jerry Banks of the Morning News added that the denials appeared accurate. He reported that as he was leaving one tent, “an older recruit—perhaps twenty-four—stepped up and said: ‘Don’t pay any attention to these kids…. I was in the Army before, and it was the same then as it is now.’” In fact, Banks found, it was. “For the most part, the gripes of the recruits are the same ones their older brothers had in World War II and their fathers in World War I.”

  That was also the finding of Johnson’s own investigating team. Even on that fifteen-degree night—the coldest night of the year—on which they had slept in the tents, the four investigators had, as Busby was to write in the report summarizing their findings, experienced “no undue cold or other discomfort.” What’s more, Busby’s report stated, there had been no suicides at Lackland, absolutely none. There had been no pneumonia epidemic; in fact, there had been not a single death from pneumonia. “During the past 18 months, there have been only two deaths on the base—one from cancer, one from an automobile accident.” The average daily sick-call attendance at the base was actually lower than it had been when the Korean War began. “The enlistees at Lackland were generally well-clothed…. Food was good.” Morale problem? “No morale problem was found…. The men were generally in good spirits.” And Johnson was informed of the true situation by a telephone call from his own investigators the next day, February 1.

  Reassuring though this news would have been to the recruits’ relatives, however, it was not news to which they were immediately given access. Somehow, the urgency about telling mothers “something”—giving them some form of comfort—disappeared. In fact, the Johnson Subcommittee told them nothing for almost three weeks (during which, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported, “many parents, relatives and friends of the enlistees … made special trips to [Lackland] because of rumors about conditions there”). Not a single word came from the subcommittee on the subject of the Lackland Air Force Base until February 19.

  And when news did come, it was presented with the Johnson touch. The facts that disproved the rumors—that “There have been no suicides at the base as alleged,” no pneumonia “epidemic,” “no morale problem,” and plenty of clothing, blankets, heat and food—were certainly all in the subcommittee report. But while these facts would have provided reassurance for parents, they would have caused embarrassment for Lyndon Johnson, who by casting doubt on the Air Force’s reassurances—reassurances which had turned out to be true—had helped make the rumors a “public issue.” And these facts were not the main purport of the February 19 newspaper stories. For Johnson’s report presented the facts from a different angle, emphasizing not the points on which the Air Force could not be criticized but rather a point on which it could: the fact that it had accepted more enlistees “than it was capable of processing” at Lackland. In its Conclusion, the report called the Air Force policy on enlistments “irresponsible” and charged, with only the scantiest documentation, that the resultant “overcrowding” had resulted in “the total breakdown of training.”

  And if the report’s Conclusion was much stronger than the facts contained in the body of the report, the interviews which Johnson gave about the report—before it was issued—were much stronger than the Conclusion. These interviews were designed to influence journalists, who of course had not yet seen the report, to place on it the emphasis that Johnson wanted. Since a critical evaluation of the document might have resulted in articles embarrassing to him, he called in first—for an exclusive, nationally syndicated interview—a journalist he could be confident would not give it such an evaluation, Marshall McNeil, who during the 1948 Texas senatorial campaign had written not only articles for the Scripps Howard chain of newspapers but speeches for Lyndon Johnson. The day before its release, Scripps Howard’s millions of readers were prepared for it by McNeil’s story that predicted a “blistering report that tans the hides of high Air Force Commanders.” In other interviews Johnson said the report would be “sizzling,” and explained that “It was the greed of the Air Force for the best of the nation’s available manpower” that had led to overcrowding at Lackland. These interviews created the impression that Johnson wanted, even though it would turn out on closer examination that the “total breakdown” meant little more than that the overflow of enlistees had had to be sent to other bases for their basic training.

  And the press followed the script he had written, “GREED FOR MANPOWER CHARGED TO AIR FORCE BY SENATE INQUIRIES” was the headline in the Washington Star; “LACKLAND MESS LAID TO AF ‘GREED,’” the headline in the Washington Times-Herald; “SENATORS HIT MANPOWER HOARD BY AF—Blistering Report Says Policy Brought ‘Total Breakdown in Basic Training,’” the headline in the Washington Post. Front-page articles across the country were dominated by the words “blistering,” “sizzling,” “greed,” “irresponsible,” and “total breakdown.” It was not in the headlines or the lead paragraphs but only further down in the articles that the reader would discover statements like: “Reports of epidemics, deaths, bad food, inadequate shelter and clothing … were found to be completely unwarranted.”

  Coupled with the report was the promise of another report to come, a report that, Lyndon Johnson said, would be even more significant than this one. There was, as always, the guarantee that this was only the beginning, that bigger revelations were just around the corner. Shocked by the overcrowding at Lackland, Johnson announced, the Preparedness Subcommittee had already launched investigations of other induction centers. “I want the parents of our young men to know that this committee is at present conducting a first-hand investigation of indoctrination camps for all three of the services all over the nation,” he said. “We want to find out what the services are doing and not doing.”

  That report would be issued on April 15. Its conclusion was that “all branches of the armed services … are doing a generally commendable job at the indoctrination and training centers.” But that report, preceded by no leaks or adjectives, received relatively little publicity.

  IF THERE WERE STRIKEOUTS, however, there were also home runs. With complaints increasing that in the vast buildup of the armed forces, inadequate provision was being made for housing servicemen’s families, so that families that wanted to accompany soldiers to their military bases were being exploited by civilian landlords, in July, 1951, Johnson dispatched three two-man investigating teams to military bases across the country. And, as McGillicuddy was to recall years later, “We hit pay dirt.” In Morganfield, Kentucky, near the Army’s huge Camp Breckenridge, for example, the investigators found that servicemen’s wives and children were forced to live in unsanitary hovels, often without electricity o
r indoor plumbing, for which they were charged outrageous rents. Some residences had become so notorious among Breckenridge recruits that they had acquired nicknames. There was the “Doll House,” which had once been a playhouse, fourteen feet wide and nine feet deep, built for a civilian family’s children on the back lawn of their home, and which now, divided into four cubicles that the landlord called “rooms,” housed a sergeant, his wife, and three children, who cooked their meals on a two-burner hot plate since there was no room for a stove, and drank water carried by bucket from the landlady’s house. There was the “Chicken Coop,” which “had once been just that, and now housed a family of three. There was the aptly named “Rat House.”

  McGillicuddy showed his photographs of these dwellings to Reedy, who said happily, “This will catch them.” And Reedy made sure that the pictures did indeed catch the attention of the press and public, writing that they were evidence of “cruel indignity, irresponsible greed and casual disdain for the self-respect of our men in uniform…. Men who have been called into the service of the country have been forced to house their dependents in places not fit for human habitation.” On the morning of Monday, July 19, the release date on the Twenty-eighth Report of the Preparedness Subcommittee—“Interim Report on Substandard Housing and Rent Gouging of Military Personnel”—those pictures “were on front pages everywhere,” McGillicuddy recalls. Legislation to provide on-base housing for the dependents of military men had already been introduced—by Senator Wherry—and the subcommittee’s findings played a major role in the passage of the Wherry Housing Act. In later years, McGillicuddy would be proud that “when you go to an Army base and see the housing with a nice playground in the middle of it—well, you can thank us for that.”

  (At the time, McGillicuddy’s sense of accomplishment was tempered by Lyndon Johnson’s response. The ex-FBI man assumed, as did the five recently hired subcommittee investigators who had also gone on the inspection trips, that their boss would be pleased by the front-page headlines and when, on the morning on which the headlines appeared, the six men were summoned to Johnson’s office, “we were joking, as we walked up the hill from the SEC Building, that we were going to be decorated.” But that was only because they had never dealt much with Johnson. “I ask you to go out and do a simple investigation,” Lyndon Johnson said. “I ask you to go out and get pictures. Half of my team comes back with pictures. Half of my team comes back with promises! They’ll get pictures all right. In ten days! IN TEN DAYS!!!”

  Life magazine, it turned out, was contemplating a major story on the subcommittee report, but it needed additional pictures, some from other bases, and when Johnson had asked Tyler about more pictures, he had been told it might take as long as ten days for the investigators to fly to bases, locate suitably photogenic housing, take the pictures and get them back to Washington. Johnson “was snarling,” McGillicuddy says, “just snarling. ‘I want you all out of this town by tonight!! Take cameras, take film, take whatever you need—but get out of town, and get me the pictures.’ He had been shouting. His voice got low, and he just snarled: ‘By tonight!’ ”)

  THE WORK OF THE SENATE PREPAREDNESS SUBCOMMITTEE, and in particular the forty-four formal reports it published before the Republican victory in 1952 removed Lyndon Johnson from its chairmanship, demonstrated another aspect of Johnson’s political ability, one that went beyond the technical—and was revealing of his personality. For each one of the reports was signed not only by him but by every one of the subcommittee’s other six members.

  There were the strongest of political reasons for the subcommittee’s chairman to want seven signatures on every report. Unanimous was a word that carried a lot of weight with a Senate bitterly divided, even hamstrung, by party divisions, and with journalists, particularly when they were writing about a group whose membership was divided, 4 to 3, along party lines; unanimity would be regarded as proof that the subcommittee’s decisions, being bipartisan, were above politics, that they were based on higher, more objective considerations.

  And there were the strongest of personal reasons as well—reasons that had governed, and would always govern, Lyndon Johnson’s life. Years later, in 1960, when he was running for vice president, his campaign train was backing into the New Orleans train depot. Standing beside him on the train’s rear platform was his fellow senator, George Smathers. Seeing the huge, cheering crowd in which, Smathers recalls, “there had to be at least a thousand signs, ‘Kennedy/Johnson, Kennedy/Johnson.’” Smathers thought “we were doing great”—until Johnson “jumped like he was shot,” whirled on him, and said, “‘Look at that son of a bitch! Look at that sign there!’ There was one [unfavorable] sign! It wasn’t a foot high. There were thousands of signs, and that was the one he picked out. ‘Goddammit it! Look at that sign!’ I thought, this is the damndest fellow I had ever seen in my life, here we had all this, and all he could see was [that one sign]. But that was typical Johnson…. It had to be unanimous as far as he was concerned.”

  It had always had to be unanimous—starting, years before, in Johnson City’s Courthouse Square, where a gangling boy barely into his teens would refuse to stop arguing politics with older barbershop hangers-on so long as there remained one man who was not subscribing to his point of view: on that small, bare stage it had been clear that the young Lyndon Johnson was so starved for respect that he needed every last taste of it he could get; that the psyche of this son of ridiculed parents had been rubbed so raw that to him disagreement was also disrespect, so that anything less than total agreement burned like salt in his wounds. “If there was an argument, he had to win, just had to…. he just wouldn’t stop until you gave in.” And now, watching Lyndon Johnson’s unwillingness to allow even one member of his subcommittee to refuse to sign a majority report, Gerald Siegel realized the depth of the forces behind Lyndon Johnson’s insistence on seven signatures, every time. “Any kind of criticism”—even a single negative vote on a subcommittee report—was unbearable to him, Siegel says. “He really wanted one hundred percent, and anything short of that was a great blow. He was a man who, for some reason, seemed to want unanimity in acceptance of himself.” To Lyndon Johnson, those seven signatures were a sign of approval not merely of the report but of him, and not merely of approval of him but of the respect and affection for which he hungered.

  Unanimity was easier to obtain on this subcommittee than it might have been on some others, for the reports’ subjects were in general such easy targets as “waste” and “mismanagement” and “gouging,” and they were being issued against a national backdrop of frustration and anger over what the public was convinced was the nation’s lack of proper readiness. Landlords exploiting servicemen were fair game for Democrats and Republicans alike. Nonetheless, the subcommittee included both the staunchly liberal Hunt and the rabidly conservative Bridges—and Morse, who was known to disagree for the sake of disagreeing, and for the publicity involved. It would be, a journalist would write, “a real challenge for any chairman to bring such a group to consensus.” But Lyndon Johnson had to have unanimity, had to. And to get it, this reader of men read his six members, and read them well, particularly their weaknesses, and used what he read.

  With Kefauver and Hunt preoccupied with their own subcommittees, Johnson could concentrate on his remaining Democrat, Virgil Chapman, whose weakness for alcohol made him particularly vulnerable.

  “Drinking makes you lose control,” Johnson told Bobby Baker, and control was something he never wanted to lose. In 1950 and ’51, he made a show of being a heavy drinker, in the accepted, senatorial, one-of-the-boys, manner, and indeed he was—sometimes. But usually he wasn’t. “Drinking makes you let your guard down,” he would say, and he didn’t want his guard down, ever. When, therefore, he was drinking along with another man, he had as many drinks as the other man—but his were weaker. In his own office, the instructions were strict: the other man’s drinks were to be made regular strength—two or three one-ounce jiggers of whiskey per drink—bu
t, unknown to the other man, Johnson’s own drinks, Cutty Sark Scotch and soda, were not. Says his secretary Ashton Gonella, who mixed them for years: “His drinks could have no more than an ounce of liquor in it, and if there was more than an ounce, you were in trouble.” In public, at the cocktail receptions that were so much a part of Washington life, he would dispatch Bobby Baker, whom he had begun to bring along to receptions, to fetch him a drink, and would order him to “make it weak.” If the bartender mixed it too strong, he would grow so angry—“You trying to make an ass of me?” he snarled at the young page once; on another occasion, Baker recalls, “the Senator thundered: ‘Bobby, you tryin’ to sandbag me so I’ll make a fool of myself?’”—that Baker took to tasting each drink himself before bringing it over to Johnson.

  When Johnson discussed subcommittee business with Chapman, the discussions would be held in the late afternoon or evening, in 231’s inner office, over drinks. Feet up on his desk, his body extended so fully in his chair that it seemed almost parallel with the carpet, the host was seemingly totally relaxed as he drank along with his guest, holding out a long arm to a secretary whenever his glass was empty and rattling the ice cubes for refills—frequent refills. But while the host didn’t get drunk, the guest did, and, a happy, friendly drunk, the chubby Kentuckian was soon agreeing to whatever Johnson wanted. Sometimes—not often—at the next formal subcommittee meeting, Chapman might raise a question about some part of a subcommittee report, only to be told that he had agreed to it the previous afternoon—a statement which never failed to end his objections. Chapman’s alcoholism was rapidly growing worse. His round face with its heavy double chin seemed almost invariably flushed with drink now, and, more and more often, when he waddled through the tall door of the subcommittee’s meeting room, he would be too inebriated to follow the proceedings, and would ask Busby to sit behind him and signal him when his vote was needed, by touching him on the right shoulder for an “aye” vote, on the left shoulder for a “nay.” Busby did so—always on the right shoulder; nay votes were not wanted. “I’d tap him on the shoulder; he’d jerk awake, and in this big voice boom out, ‘Vote “AAAH!”’”