The image was summarized in Healy’s lead paragraph, which said that “the junior United States Senator from Texas maintains the most rigidly one-track mind in Washington. Johnson is entirely preoccupied with the science of politics, which for him is an exact science and one which he has mastered superlatively. Politics is, naturally, Topic A for most social circles in the national capital. But for Johnson it is Topic A-to-Z…. He refuses to be trapped into thinking about or discussing sports, literature, the stage, the movies, or anything else in the world of recreation.”
IN NOVEMBER, the yearlong flood of publicity reached its crest. This time, when a photographer—Ed Wergeles of Newsweek magazine—arrived at Lyndon Johnson’s office to take his photograph, he wasn’t satisfied to pose him just behind his desk or against a wall. He had to have a better background, Wergeles said, for unless some breaking major news story erupted during the next two or three days, this photograph was for the cover.
Johnson had bid for the cover—the cover of a national magazine with a circulation of more than two million—with the tried and true technique of which he had, during this year, so repeatedly demonstrated his mastery: a leak of a still-secret subcommittee report. He had privately assured a Newsweek correspondent that this report, the thirty-fifth the subcommittee had issued, was its most significant; it revealed, he said, that America’s overall defense production program—deliveries of planes, tanks, ships and guns—was lagging “dangerously behind schedule.” He had given the magazine not merely a draft of the report but the final version, signed by all seven subcommittee members and already in the final printed form in which it would be released to the rest of the press on November 29. And he had given it to Newsweek well enough in advance so that the magazine could use it in its issue that would appear on newsstands on Wednesday, November 28.
Even George Reedy, author of the report’s Introduction and Conclusions, and of the accompanying press release, was to admit later that “That report was not very substantive.” But Reedy’s written words at the time—particularly a phrase designed to catch the journalistic eye—certainly made it seem substantive. The reason for the lag, he wrote, was that “We didn’t have the courage to put guns ahead of butter.” In the press release, Johnson said: “This report spells out for the American people the payoff for the wasted months that have been spent in a fruitless search for a formula that will give us both butter and guns in ample quantities. The results have been excellent in terms of butter. But unfortunately butter—even fortified butter—is not enough to stop Communist armies. That takes guns and when it comes to the production of guns, our formula has not worked out well.”
During the week before the cover story was scheduled to appear, Johnson received a letter that might have raised concerns among Newsweek’s editors had they learned about it. One of Johnson’s key contentions for some weeks had been that America’s “dangerous lag” in defense production included production not only for American troops but for those of NATO nations. To document his point, he had cited what he said was a shortfall behind various schedules. But on Wednesday, November 21, Acting Secretary of Defense William C. Foster wrote Johnson that he was confusing two schedules: that for NATO arms deliveries scheduled for 1951, and that for 1951 fiscal appropriations for NATO arms which required substantial “lead time” to design and had never been intended to be delivered that year. Furthermore, Foster said, there was no need for these arms to be delivered in 1951, since they were intended for use by NATO units which had not yet even been formed. Johnson did not release that letter, nor show it to any other member of the subcommittee. And, although Johnson was in frequent communication with Newsweek reporters during this week, he never let them know about it, either.
Wergeles’ prediction had made Johnson hopeful that he might attain the cover, but the prediction was conditional, and Johnson, who had left Washington for the ranch shortly after the photograph was taken, spent several days filled with anxiety over the possibility of some major news development. Finally, on Tuesday, unable to bear the waiting, he telephoned Walter Jenkins and told Jenkins to get an advance copy that very night, he didn’t care how; Jenkins apparently flew to New York to get one.
Jenkins still had not telephoned, however, when Johnson and Lady Bird had to leave to go out to dinner with some neighbors. While they were gone, the call came—to Mary Rather in Austin. Mary typed a note to Johnson, and a car sped out of the city on the lonely road through the dark hills to the Johnson Ranch, and when the Johnsons returned, the news was waiting for them. “Walter says the cover is a beautiful picture in color,” Miss Rather wrote. “Very vivid. The background is that Scotch plaid blanket…. You are leaning forward with your hands up to your face—head resting on right arm and cigarette in left hand. Underneath the picture: ‘Watchdog in Chief.’” The next morning copies of Newsweek arrived in Johnson City, and there he was, on the newsstand in Fawcett’s Drugstore, where Sam Ealy Johnson’s credit had been cut off so that his son had had to stand by watching while his friends charged purchases to their fathers’ accounts.
The articles that accompanied the cover (under the headline “too much butter, not enough guns”) were equally satisfying. Newsweek’s editors, who, an editor’s note said, had given the “Johnson Report” a “searching examination,” accepted it without reservation, saying “When the Senate Preparedness Subcommittee calls the armament lag ‘dangerous,’ it is not just indulging a taste for rhetoric.” Noting that the subcommittee had found American air strength to be “below what the American public expects,” Newsweek said that “If the Korean War continues and the Chinese decide to challenge American air supremacy, the result could be a military disaster for America.”
And there was a separate article on the subcommittee, and on him. The subcommittee, the editors said, “has been likened to the Truman Committee.” Actually, the editors said, it was better than the Truman Committee.
The [Truman Committee] sought to correct mismanagement and eliminate corruption by holding open hearings, which exposed them amid explosive newspaper headlines. The resulting clamor usually brought about reforms, and drove the grafters to jail.
In contrast, the Preparedness Subcommittee holds few public hearings. And it doesn’t wait for a situation to become a public scandal before investigating.
As for its chairman, “Johnson has made a great and growing reputation,” Newsweek said. “His manner is quiet and gentle, and everything he does, he does with great deliberation and care. Yet, when he believes the facts warrant it, he can be two-fisted and tough.”
NO SOONER HAD HIS WORK on the report been completed than George Reedy, who had never before participated in the subcommittee’s in-the-field investigations, abruptly found himself dispatched on one—to one of the most isolated military installations in the United States: Goodfellow Air Force Base southeast of San Angelo in the remote prairies of West Texas.
Arriving there, Reedy quickly saw that the trip was a waste of time. “There had been some complaints about the quality of the training,” he was to recall, but “even I could see that most of the complaints were absolutely nothing except the standard sort of thing that bobs up at any military post.” He couldn’t understand why he had been sent until he saw the Newsweek cover. “He got me out of town deliberately on that one because he sensed that I would be opposed to what he did,” Reedy was to recall. “He literally got me out of town…. When I came back I discovered they had wrapped up this Newsweek deal.”
Johnson was correct in thinking that he would have been opposed, Reedy says. “You really can’t do anything much worse than that. If you’re going to give a newspaperman or a magazine … an exclusive, for the love of God don’t make it a formal committee report. It’s too obvious, among other things.” It would infuriate other journalists, he knew. While they had not subjected any of the previous thirty-four subcommittee reports to intensive scrutiny, they would scrutinize this one, he felt. And, he felt, this “not very substantive” report would n
ot hold up under scrutiny.
Reedy’s premonitions were well founded. Even a master of an art can sometimes overreach himself, and by thus stretching the leaking technique to its limit—leaking an entire formal report for a cover story while describing the report in exaggerated terms—Lyndon Johnson had overreached. Analyzing a Preparedness report in depth for the first time, the press now found what some subcommittee staff members felt it would have found about many of the subcommittee’s previous reports had it analyzed them in depth: that the promise of the catchphrases was not fulfilled by the content.
“He got this cover of Newsweek… and in return for that he had the enmity of every economics writer in Washington,” Reedy was to explain. “And they all set out to prove the report was a phony, and they did.
Oh, Lord, I’ll never forget when that storm broke. They [Johnson’s subcommittee] were not able to come up with one single demonstration of a gun or a weapon system or anything needed by the armed forces that had been delayed in production because a higher priority had been given to any civilian need or desire. Oh, the thing was ridiculous! I can recall at one point arranging one of these off-the-record conferences where facts could be used but nobody’s name could be cited, with Don Cook and some of his hotshots. And, Lord, though, the press tore him to pieces…. It became apparent to everyone very quickly in Washington that the report did not have any substance to it and that he [Johnson] had used it as bait to get this cover on Newsweek magazine.
As outcry over the report mounted, so did embarrassment. After an official of the Office of Defense Mobilization demanded to know “one instance where materials or equipment… needed for the Korean fighting was not available,” reporters asked the subcommittee to name such an instance, and the subcommittee proved unable to do so. Releasing Acting Secretary Foster’s letter to Johnson, the Department of Defense charged that Johnson “sat on it”—delayed releasing the letter—until after the Newsweek article had appeared. Confronted by reporters holding copies of the letter, a flustered Jenkins disappeared into Johnson’s private office to telephone the Senator in Texas. Emerging, he said that the charge was “unfair,” and that Johnson would respond to it the next day. The response was as aggressive and headline-catching as always—characterizing Foster’s statements as “doubletalk,” Johnson made a new charge, in a new colorful phrase, saying, “It certainly does the public confidence no good to find that the Department of Defense, behind a cloak of security, keeps for all practical purposes a double set of books”—but the Defense Department refused to retreat, saying, as the Herald Tribune put it, that “the Texas legislator just didn’t know what he was talking about,” and in effect defying Johnson to provide one example of double bookkeeping—an example Johnson did not provide. For a year and a half Johnson had been claiming, as proof of his subcommittee’s fairness, that it always afforded departmental officials the opportunity in executive session to rebut any negative findings in a draft report so that the report could, if necessary, be modified in its final version. It was now clear that in preparing this report, at least, Preparedness had never spoken to a single departmental official—either to give him a chance to put the department’s side of the story on the record, or for any other reason.
More damaging still, the press now began to look beyond the specific report and to examine for the first time the subcommittee’s work as a whole—and the examination yielded decidedly mixed results. As the Herald Tribune reported: “People in Washington differ on the merits of Sen. Johnson and his committee. Undoubtedly some of his reports are extremely valuable, and have struck the Administration at vulnerable points. Others, however, while making good headlines, have apparently not stood up to later examination.”
In addition, the subcommittee’s work as a whole amounted in effect to a demand for greatly expanded mobilization, a placing of the nation on an all-out war footing almost as if it were engaged in a global conflict. There began to be, for the first time, an examination of this premise also, and even such a staunch Johnson redoubt as the Washington Post editorial page said that “if rearmament is directed at the long pull,” the balance between civilian and military goods “makes sense. It is of course important to correct bottlenecks. But before the country is pressured into what would be tantamount to full mobilization, it needs to assess both the external danger and the probability that despite the bottlenecks it will soon have military equipment running out of its ears.”
The Post now assigned one of its most respected reporters, Alfred Friendly, to look thoroughly into the current defense effort, and Friendly’s study, a seven-part series that was perhaps the most searching contemporaneous journalistic examination of the mobilization situation, would find that “with respect to the charge, could we have had more guns if we had less butter?, despite loud and general cries in the affirmative no compelling proof has yet been adduced, Sen. Johnson to the contrary notwithstanding…. It is a fact, and has not been denied, that no military production schedule fell short of accomplishment because an insufficient allocation, out of the total available supply, was made to the military use.”
The Truman Administration had decided against full immediate mobilization, Friendly wrote, not because of any lack of toughness or of concern about the Russian threat but partly because such a mobilization “cannot be maintained over a long period in the absence of war itself.” Furthermore, Friendly said, immediate massive mobilization would have meant producing weapons that would shortly be outmoded instead of creating new production facilities to produce “a new generation of weapons,” so that, as he summarized, “if war did not come until three or four years later, the nation would be less, rather than better, able to win it.” While Johnson and other critics had conveyed the impression that the Administration had decided not to go all-out in military production, the fact, Friendly said, was that the Administration had decided not “to go all-out in the production of models it believed were rapidly being rendered obsolescent.”
As to Johnson’s specific contention that the United States was losing air supremacy in Korea—that contention, Friendly found, was false. “Although the critics seem to be conveying the impression that it was otherwise, the fact is that we, not the Communists, have the superiority in Korea…. It is our planes, and not the Reds’, which bomb the supply lines. The MiGs do not come over our lines and bomb our troops.” And Friendly’s overall conclusion was harsh. “From the cries of the calamity-howlers it might be concluded that the national defense program has fallen flat on its face and that, as a consequence, the Kremlin is giving us a military trouncing,” Friendly wrote. Of course, the Russian forces greatly exceed our own in terms of men and planes alone. “But it is not true that we are suffering military defeats. Nor is there evidence to suggest that we have been going so slowly and taking it so easy that we are losing our chance to achieve our supreme goal, the prevention of war.”
ONCE THE PRESS had taken its first hard look behind the catchphrases, it would never again view Lyndon Johnson’s Defense Preparedness Subcommittee in quite the same way. Coverage of the subcommittee reports that followed the “Guns and Butter” embarrassment was notably less enthusiastic than had previously been the case. So dramatically was the perception of the subcommittee altered that by 1953, Time’s James McConaughy would report confidentially to his editors that while he himself considered the criticism unjust, the subcommittee was in fact “often criticized as too publicity seeking.” Another Time reporter, Clay Blair, summed up its work as “much ado about nothing.”
Not that there was, after “Guns and Butter,” all that much ado. From the moment the subcommittee received its first widespread criticism, Lyndon Johnson showed little enthusiasm for its work. Its production declined: in 1951, it had issued twenty-six reports; in 1952, it would issue nine, one of which was merely a summary of the year’s activity. The clearest sign of Johnson’s declining interest was the fact that in May, 1952, he allowed Don Cook to leave for the SEC chairmanship.
If the
changed perception had a crippling effect on the subcommittee, however, it had no such effect on Lyndon Johnson’s career.
He had, after all, already gotten out of the subcommittee a great deal of publicity—a favorable national image, even a cover story in a national magazine. He had gotten it because of the rare political gifts he possessed. To obtain the chairmanship, he had not merely grasped the potential in the post and reached for it faster than any other senator, he had maneuvered for it more sure-handedly, had won it against very long odds (what odds longer than a desire by his committee’s chairman, Tydings, to head the subcommittee himself?). Although the success of his maneuvers had been made possible by the backing of a single powerful older man, that fact did not diminish the impressiveness of the speed and the sureness of touch. Once he had the chairmanship, he used it with the matchless talent for the practical aspects of politics he had displayed during his entire life, assembling, seemingly overnight, a staff of a caliber unique on Capitol Hill, and then wielding that staff with brilliant ingenuity, demonstrating an instinct for publicity, and a skill in obtaining it, possessed by very few even in a city filled with men avid for publicity. If—because a police action was not, after all, a war—his image was not as strongly imprinted on the national consciousness as Senator Harry Truman’s had been, it was imprinted there nonetheless. And Truman had been fifty-seven years old when he created his Preparedness Committee. Johnson was forty-two. Twenty years earlier, when, fresh out of college, he had displayed the skills and sureness of a master politician, he had been called “the wonder kid” of Texas politics. No one now called him the wonder kid of the Senate. But that was what he was. In less than a year and half—if one dates the golden era of his Preparedness chairmanship from July, 1950, when he was named to it, to November, 1951, the month of the Newsweek cover—he, a senator hitherto all but unknown to the general public, had been on the front pages of newspapers not just in Texas but in every state in the country—over and over again. His life—or, to be more precise, the life he portrayed—had been described at length in Collier’s, in the Saturday Evening Post, in Time, in Business Week, and in Labor. The man who could not stand—“just could not stand”—to be merely “one of a crowd” had been one of a crowd so long. Now he would never be one of a crowd again. He was “Johnson of the Watchdog Committee,” the “Watchdog in Chief.” In a single great leap—with a single issue, preparedness; with a single instrument, a brand-new subcommittee—he had thrust himself up out of the mass of senators.
Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson Page 57
