Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson

by Robert A. Caro

  Republican Saltonstall, the epitome of the dignified New Englander, had both a manner that Johnson wanted to emulate, and weaknesses that Johnson could exploit. He had learned, as he told his assistants, that the lantern-jawed Boston Brahmin, “as trustworthy and straight as he looked,” had a total lack of understanding of the more sordid aspects of politics, and of life in general (“Why, you could be screwing every secretary in his office and he wouldn’t have any idea that anything was going on,” Johnson told Booth Mooney), as well as a patrician aversion to disputes or controversy that made him “shrink from quarreling.” When Saltonstall disagreed with some aspect of a subcommittee report, Johnson would call on him and discuss it. The situation was so complicated, Johnson would say; solving it was so difficult; he had tried to accommodate all the different sides; wouldn’t Saltonstall help him on this? I’d really appreciate it if you could see your way clear to helping me on this, he would say. I sure need your help. Putting the issue on such a personal basis made continued refusal to help almost a personal matter, the kind that might lead to a quarrel. Lyndon Johnson never became strident with Saltonstall; his argument would be made in a calm, courteous voice, and would be interspersed with jokes and anecdotes to prove his point. But the arguing wouldn’t stop. Johnson had correctly deconstructed the Saltonstall text: if he didn’t stop, eventually Saltonstall, to avoid what might escalate into a serious disagreement, would give in.

  With Morse safely off in Oregon, the remaining GOP text was Bridges. The New Hampshire Republican was too powerful and shrewd to be gotten around, so Johnson, who had already given him two staff positions, now gave him anything else he wanted, including help with his constituents. New Hampshire manufacturers of wool blankets were demanding that their senator do something about recent increases in the price they had to pay for wool, increases that were reducing their profits. Following an inquiry by the subcommittee staff, Bridges was able to give them the good news that the Office of Price Stabilization would shortly be setting a ceiling on the price of wool. And when Bridges wanted help against some of his constituents, Johnson gave him that, too—as is made clear by the transcript of a closed subcommittee session that was held one Monday morning, July 9, 1951, in the Armed Services Committee room.

  Local opposition to a proposal, dear to Bridges’ heart, to construct an Air Force base near Manchester, New Hampshire, was infuriating him—and he wanted to find out who was behind it. It was possible, he said, that the opposition came from people who simply didn’t want an airfield near their homes, but he doubted that explanation; there were, after all, Communists even in New Hampshire. Perhaps, he suggested, “some investigator from our committee” should go up and find out… whether there might be some people with rather deeper feelings who don’t believe in preparedness in our country that are behind it…. Who is behind it? People very prominent, for instance, in the American Legion tell me they think very deeply there is something beyond just ordinary opposition.”

  Although Bridges didn’t push the suggestion—“I don’t think I am ready to ask that it be formally investigated yet, but I may”—Johnson leapt at the opportunity to be of service. After an “off the record” discussion (off the record even for a closed session), Cook told Bridges, “whenever you tell us that you would like that investigation made we will send somebody up there immediately and get to the bottom of it.” Who could ask for more than that? “Thank you very much,” Senator Bridges said. A rapport sprang up between Johnson and Bridges, and often in the late afternoons they would have a drink together in one of their offices.

  THESE LATE-AFTERNOON SESSIONS had one aspect which Horace Busby, adoring Lyndon Johnson though he did, found disturbing—for the young speechwriter had grown fond of Virgil Chapman.

  By late afternoon, he says, Johnson and Bridges could be sure Chapman would be drunk. Johnson would telephone Chapman’s office, “and a secretary would answer and say the Senator was taking a nap.”

  “Johnson would say—this was a part of Johnson I didn’t like—well, ‘Wake him up!’ and when he [Chapman] would come to the phone, Johnson would have him come on up. He would come rolling in, and they [Johnson and Bridges] would keep pouring him drinks. Some people think it’s good sport.”

  (On March 8, 1951, Virgil Chapman was killed when the car he was driving collided with a tractor-trailer on Connecticut Avenue at two in the morning. His replacement on the subcommittee was John Stennis of Mississippi.)

  DILIGENT AS WAS THE CHAIRMAN’S CULTIVATION of his six subcommittee members, however, occasional disagreements arose—if not over some philosophical issue then over some proposed criticism of an industry or a defense contractor of which some senator felt protective—and one or more of the senators would let the chairman know that he wouldn’t be able to sign the report, or even that he wanted to issue his own, dissenting, minority report.

  But the chairman would not allow disagreement. Considerable rewriting by Cook and Siegel and Reedy would already have gone into the numbered drafts which had been circulated to the six senators, and one of the principal objectives of these revisions had been to remove material to which some senator objected. Now, if a senator wanted something else rewritten, the draft would be returned to the three staff members for more work. And if problems still remained, Johnson would personally discuss them with the objecting senator. Then he would try to find a way of modifying the report yet again to meet the objections while not modifying it so much that some other subcommittee member might object. In seeking such compromises, he was notably amenable to his colleagues’ points of view, so much so that staff aides—not Cook or Siegel, perhaps, but others less closely tied to Johnson—came to feel that he cared less about the content of the report than about the fact that there be a report. Says McGillicuddy: “Sometimes, if there was something there a senator didn’t like—a sentence, a paragraph, a whole page—it would be deleted. All he [Johnson] wanted was a report to show action.” Occasionally, however, the views of two of the subcommittee’s members seemed irreconcilably opposed. Johnson would shuttle back and forth between their offices, talking first to one and then the other, editing, altering, trying to persuade them to a compromise that both could sign.

  During these negotiations, he would compliment the senators, with that gift for the perfect compliment. Says Colonel BeLieu, who sat in on many such sessions: “He’d tell one of them that he knew he wanted to help his country, that he was a real patriot, so many times that the guy thought he was a patriot.” He would charm them: if one of the senators complimented him back, Lyndon Johnson would grin, with a warm grin that crinkled up his big face, and say, “Well, Ah sure do wish mah parents had been here to hear you say that, Senator. Mah father would have enjoyed it. And mah mother would have believed it.”

  He used his stories, those wonderful stories, told in that persuasive Texas drawl, to make points—whatever points needed to be made. If he wanted the subcommittee to accept a recommendation made by the military, and one subcommittee member was refusing to go along, he might tell him an anecdote about Rayburn. “During the war, the Army was just determined to have Mr. Sam get on a plane and go all the way down there to some base and inspect these new tanks they were building. This whole bunch of generals comes to his office to tell him he’s just got to go, and give them his opinion. And Mr. Sam, he just looks at them and says, ‘Well, gentlemen, if you all can’t tell about those tanks better than I can, we’ve sure been wasting a lot of money at West Point.’”

  If, on some other matter, he wanted the subcommittee to criticize the military, he would tell a different story—to make the point that testimony from lower-ranking officers couldn’t be trusted because military protocol forbade them to disagree with their superiors. “You hear about the latest computer that the Army’s using?” he would ask. “Well, this general puts in a question. The question is this: ‘Will there be peace or war in our time?’ The wheels whir. The lights flash. The machine grinds out the answer: Yes. The general is upset. He
feeds back the question: ‘Yes, what?’ The answer comes: Yes, sir!”

  If the compliments and the stories didn’t work, he would cajole and plead with a senator for his signature, would work from the high ground (a unanimous report would demonstrate that the subcommittee members weren’t motivated by partisan considerations, he would say, and with a war going on, that was important; “Hell, we’ve got boys dyin out there”) and from lower ground (framing his arguments in pragmatic political terms, he would explain to a colleague precisely how a proposed report would strengthen him in his own state, displaying a remarkably detailed familiarity of that state’s political situation). He would use every variety of argument, all couched in sentences whose very rhythms infused them with a force and persuasiveness that made them hard to resist: telling one of the subcommittee members that he was the only one still refusing to sign a report, he would say, “Ah talked to Styles. He’s goin’ along. Ah talked to John. He’s goin’ along. Hell, even ol’ Wayne’s goin’ along.” Implied, if not stated, was the question: Do you want to be the only member standing in the way of the subcommittee’s work?

  And most significantly, if, despite all the charm and the cajoling and the pleading, one senator still continued to refuse to go along, said he simply could not sign the report, that would not be the end of the matter.

  Perhaps the senator had made clear that he didn’t want to discuss the matter any further, and had done so in terms so firm it would have been a mistake for Lyndon Johnson to try to schedule yet another meeting with him. In that case, no new meeting would be scheduled—although one would in fact occur. Alone behind the closed door of his private office, Johnson would prepare new arguments, forecast the senator’s replies to them, prepare his own responses to those replies, rehearse his delivery. Through the door his aides would hear the Chief’s voice: “Now, Styles, you’ve got a real strong point there, but here’s the thing….” He would, in Doris Kearns Goodwin’s words, fashion “a detailed mental script from which he would speak—in a manner designed to seem wholly spontaneous—when the meeting took place…. The meeting itself might seem like an accidental encounter in a Senate corridor; but Johnson was not a man who roamed through halls in aimless fashion: when he began to wander, he knew who it was he would find.”

  For a recalcitrant subcommittee member, even home offered no sanctuary. The telephone would ring, and on it would be the subcommittee’s chairman, wanting to discuss the matter again. If the senator continued to disagree, Johnson would telephone him again—later in the evening or on a weekend. In these conversations, he never threatened—he had nothing to threaten with, of course—or demanded. He was respectful, deferential—humble, even. But he was also untiring. Other senators wanted to spend time with their wives and children. They had other things they wanted to do besides talk about a subcommittee report. But if he did not have agreement—the signature he needed to make the report unanimous—Lyndon Johnson would not stop talking about the report.

  “Most chairmen—if some senator kept insisting on filing a minority report, they’d finally say okay,” Ken BeLieu explains. “Johnson would keep saying, ‘Let’s talk about it.’ Home, family, Lady Bird—all this was strictly secondary with him. And the thing is: he got them to change. He got them to change, even guys who had said flatly they weren’t going to change. The reason was that he was going to invest more time than they would.” No matter how much time a man was willing to spend arguing with Lyndon Johnson, Lyndon Johnson was willing to spend more. “He would just wear you down. Finally you’d agree—anything to get it over with. You’d agree just to get rid of him.” He just wouldn’t stop until you gave in. He hadn’t stopped in Courthouse Square, and he didn’t stop now, wouldn’t stop, because he couldn’t stop. He had to win, had to. “One way or another, he just refused to have a single vote against him,” BeLieu says.

  And he didn’t have one. “This unanimity is especially remarkable because the group is a cross-section of Senate political opinion,” one journalist said.

  ALL THROUGH 1951, Lyndon Johnson drove his subcommittee. After Congress recessed in September, the corridors of the Senate Office Building were even quieter than usual, but in the second-floor corridor outside the Armed Services Committee suite, the clatter of Reedy’s typewriter could still be heard, announcing, after President Truman signed the new defense appropriations bill, that the Preparedness Subcommittee was—as Sen. Lyndon B. Johnson (D-Tex.) said today—set to guard the new defense spending against “chiselers, spendthrifts, grafters and blue sky artists”; announcing that the subcommittee was—as Sen. Lyndon B. Johnson (D-Tex.) disclosed today—subpoenaing Biloxi’s mayor and police chief about slot machines on the wide-open Mississippi Gold Coast which were fleecing airmen at Keesler Field of their pay; that Senator Johnson was concerned about the “inexcusable failure” by the Army and the Department of Agriculture to coordinate their specifications for food purchased for the armed forces despite Preparedness Subcommittee warnings. (“Our reports are not written as literary exercises,” Senator Johnson declared. “We expect our recommendations to be implemented or we expect to be shown the reason if they are not.”)

  Johnson had flown back to Texas, and was to remain there for three months, but every day, of course, his staff was telephoning him from Washington with a report on the day’s mail, and if there was a possibility in it, he grasped it in an instant. When families of servicemen in Korea wrote him wondering if there would be enough warm clothing for the frigid Korean winter ahead, Johnson telephoned Army Secretary Frank Pace, and as soon as Pace assured him that there would be, Johnson rushed to reassure the parents—in an announcement, typed by Reedy, that made front pages across the country.

  It was a great show. And it got great reviews. “Congress has gone home, but… Preparedness keeps grinding out its detective stories, which are invariably the despair of guilty or sloppy operators and the delight of anybody who enjoys seeing such miscreants put to witty and delicate torture,” columnist Holmes Alexander wrote. The subcommittee’s work, he said, is “like watching a super vaudeville show with pratfalls and belly laughs coming faster than it’s easy to count….”

  If 1950 had been, for Lyndon Johnson, a year of bold black headlines in newspapers, 1951 was a year of color photographs, illustrating long articles about him in national magazines. They were the kind of articles about which a politician dreams. In a Collier’s article accompanied by a full-page picture of a smiling Johnson being fed a piece of birthday cake by Dorothy Nichols as Busby, Woodward, Stegall, and Mary Rather looked on adoringly, and by a picture of his wife in a red dress and his two little girls in matching blue pinafores sitting in their pale green living room, Leslie Carpenter reported that “Johnson has surprised many of his colleagues by emerging as a national leader for the millions of Americans who believe their government failed miserably in meeting the challenge of the Korean War.” In the New York Times Magazine, there was “JOHNSON OF THE ‘WATCHDOG COMMITTEE.’” (“He Is Interested in Results, Not Headlines,” the subhead said.) “He is tall, dark and handsome,” Eliot Janeway wrote. “He inhabits an oral universe of discourse … and from 6:30 a.m. to the small hours of the next day, he ranges across it, arguing, listening, ‘needling,’ explaining, compromising, chain-smoking and chain-telephoning. Yet out of this whirl of extroverted activity Johnson has distilled the seemingly contradictory virtues of patience and tolerance.” The subcommittee’s unanimity reflects his “placing of patriotism above party,” Janeway said.

  Even the Saturday Evening Post, which, as one newspaper put it that year, “never says anything kind about a Democrat if it can avoid it,” couldn’t avoid it. While Paul Healy’s Post article mentioned Johnson’s treatment of his “underlings” (who “jump like marionettes”) and of motorists on Connecticut Avenue (whom he “continually addressed in unparliamentary language”) and, after quoting his statement that Roosevelt “was like a Daddy to me,” mentioned that “He says much the same thing” of Rayburn, Fred Vins
on, Carl Vinson, and Alvin Wirtz, Healy also admitted that “In Washington, Johnson is given the major share of the credit for keeping this investigation nonpartisan and devoid of a circus atmosphere…. He succeeded in getting a unanimous vote from his committee every time.” Healy called him “dynamic,” with an “extraordinary quick and incisive mind” and “a willingness to work like a dray horse.” Johnson “is a student of human nature,” the article said. “He reads other senators like a psychologist.” And, it concluded, he was

  just about the hottest young senator in the Capitol, in terms of legislative results. One senator says Johnson is the most effective freshman he has seen…. [R]eally fervent admirers, such as his good friend W. Stuart Symington … call him a “man of destiny.”

  These articles created a particular image of the young senator. When, Carpenter wrote, a visitor to Johnson’s office commented, “Why, you have one of the most beautiful views in Washington from your window,” Johnson “turned his head,” looked out, and said, “I’d never noticed before.” John Connally told reporters that when he suggested they go to see a Lana Turner movie, Johnson replied, “Who is Lana Turner?” When a reporter mentioned Johnson’s golfing afternoons at Burning Tree, Johnson emphasized that he played golf only as a means of advancing some purpose with Symington or some other influential partner. “He confesses privately that he does not enjoy the game and can’t waste the time it would take to really learn it.” He had no interest in life other than his work, these interviews suggested. “Leave Lyndon Johnson alone in a room with a telephone and he will make a long-distance call,” his staff member Arthur Perry told Carpenter. And Busby, as always, had a vivid anecdote ready. Meeting his boss at an airport, he recalled, he found him pacing back and forth near a row of three telephone booths. “Watch those phones!” he yelled, as he started toward the newsstand. “I’ve got a long-distance call working in each one.”