Although both houses of Congress were indicted for failure, the focus of criticism was shifting gradually to the Senate. In part, this was because of its larger role in foreign affairs. “Now that the United States has become the leading democratic world power, the future of the Senate is a subject of general concern,” Galloway wrote. “The quality of its performance and the nature of its output have worldwide repercussions.” And in part, it was because of its role in domestic affairs. The absenteeism that had plagued Majority Leaders Barkley and Lucas was even worse under McFarland, so the body couldn’t even pass urgently needed domestic legislation on which both parties agreed. When, for example, increased federal financing of medical facilities—a measure supported by both parties and favorably reported by the Senate Labor Committee—was brought to the floor, so few of its supporters were present that it was defeated. The passage of time had had its inevitable effect on the seniority problem. The Senate Appropriations Committee had become a particularly notorious bottleneck because, as Drew Pearson reported, “Tennessee’s never-say-die Kenneth McKellar, grandpa of the Senate, is now so feeble that he can no longer run the Committee, which passes on all the funds for the entire government. Yet he is so jealous of his powers as chairman that he won’t let another senator run it.” And then there was the Senate’s peculiar institution. The responsibility for Congress’ failures, Galloway wrote, “lies in large part at the door of Senate filibusters…. Filibusters have delayed for decades the enactment of social legislation passed by the House of Representatives and desired by a majority of the American people.”
Neither Galloway nor any other realistic observer saw any substantial hope of even modifying, much less abolishing, the sacred senatorial tradition of unlimited debate—or of passing other needed procedural reforms. Despite almost universal disapproval of the seniority system, Senator Mike Monroney was only expressing another universal sentiment when he said that any Senate Majority Leader who suggested a substitute for that system “would be cutting his political throat.”
Mounting concern was expressed on the Senate floor. “The Senate of the United States has in recent years been losing its hold on the confidence and respect of the American people,” Senator Morse said. “The complaint is universal.” Condemning the “blind rush” to pass legislation in the session’s closing days, the Acting Minority Leader, Republican Guy Cordon, said, “We are mighty close today to acting not as a parliamentary body but like members of a group in a riot…. I feel that I am part of a vast failure of public duty.” There was even being heard, still faintly but with increasing insistence, the suggestion that perhaps America no longer needed a Senate, that in a modern world a Senate might be an anachronism, as Galloway put it, a “relic of the days when checks and balances were needed to prevent tyranny,” that perhaps the Senate’s powers should be reduced—or that perhaps the Senate should be abolished entirely. That, Galloway pointed out, would only be in keeping with a world-wide trend: “the decay of second chambers and the trend toward unicameralism in the democratic constitutions of the post-war world are widespread phenomena”; twenty-nine democratic countries now had unicameral legislatures. And perhaps that would be the fate of America’s Senate, too. “The obsolescence of the Senate, so the argument runs, together with its tolerance of unlimited and irrelevant debate and its frequent absenteeism, may lead the American people in time to recognize that their second chamber is not indispensable,” Galloway wrote.
THE PREDICTIONS THAT INOFFENSIVENESS and amiability would prove insufficient qualifications for the job of Senate Majority Leader had been borne out—embarrassingly—at Ernest McFarland’s very first encounter with the press following his election to the post. When the reporters crowding around the four Democratic congressional leaders—House Majority Leader John McCormack and whip Percy Priest, McFarland and Johnson from the Senate—as they emerged from their first Monday conference at the White House asked likable old “Mac” for a statement, he stammered for a moment, and then said, “Uh, John is more experienced at this than I am.” McCormack and the reporters reminded him that the statement traditionally came from the Senate Leader. Well, McFarland finally said, “The President expressed confidence in Congress and what we can get done in the next two years.” Only when reporters pressed him did he think to add that of course “I share his confidence. I think we will be able to work out a unity that will be good for the country.” McFarland seemed to have forgotten a piece of news that the conference participants had agreed should be told to the press. When Lyndon Johnson whispered a reminder, McFarland told him to make the announcement himself, and Johnson thereupon stated that his “Preparedness Committee” would start hearings on the Selective Service Bill that week, and that “General [George] Marshall will make the first statement.” Only then did McFarland remember what he had been supposed to say to demonstrate Democratic unity on the draft issue: “The President emphasized that General Marshall’s proposal will be an Administration proposal, and Marshall will speak for all departments and agencies of the government. If you hear any rumors to the contrary they are not true.” And he delivered that message with the air of an actor trying to remember difficult lines. McFarland was not to improve with practice; it was soon an open secret on Capitol Hill that Old Mac just couldn’t think very fast on his feet. Nor was this man who said, “I just try to get along with people,” adept at the exercise of power. When a senator—even one whose vote was crucial—told him that he was going to vote against an Administration proposal, McFarland’s standard response was: “That’s all right. I’ll never ask you to vote against your convictions.” As William White was to say: “There are not many times when a Senate leader can afford to ‘get tough.’ To McFarland there was no time at all.”
And, of course, had Old Mac wanted to exercise power, he didn’t have much to exercise. Though he was called the Democratic Leader, more than half the Democrats took orders not from him but from Richard Russell, and should it come to a showdown involving the entire Senate, a majority would take orders from Russell and Taft; the conservative coalition, not the Administration, had the votes in a crunch. Liberal senators and the President might insist that he get a bill out of a committee that was letting it die by inaction, but what was he to do when the committee chairman flatly refused even to put the measure on the committee’s agenda? Obtaining a majority vote for a motion to discharge a bill from a committee would be all but impossible. And if a liberal measure did somehow reach the floor, what was the “Majority Leader” to do then? Once, with Truman demanding that a bill giving home rule to the District of Columbia be brought to a vote, McFarland gingerly raised the subject with the southerners—who informed him that should the bill reach the floor, they would discuss it “at length,” because, as one southerner put it, home rule would open the door for “a ‘Nigra’ mayor of Washington.” And where was McFarland to find the votes to shut off the filibuster? He let the home rule bill die—he had no choice but to let it die—in committee. Day after day, the genial, inoffensive Arizonan had to listen to the Douglases and Lehmans pillory him to his face for inaction, had to read, day after day, that “McFarland was simply ineffectual” or that “Majority Leader McFarland was no leader at all”; there was nothing he could do about it.
The number of senators on the floor—for years so disgracefully small—grew smaller; endless quorum calls were required to round up enough senators to conduct even routine business. In August, McFarland convened a caucus of his Democratic senators. At the Senate’s present pace, he said mournfully, “we’ll be here until Christmas.” The “useless quorum calls,” he said, “were wasting the equivalent of “one day a week. It’s got to stop.” Not an hour after the caucus adjourned, he went to the Chamber; the first voice he heard when he opened the doors at the rear was that of one of his Democrats—calling for a quorum. When he did manage to get a measure to the floor, even a non-controversial measure on which no one wanted to filibuster, he could not put a halt to speeches, often on so
me unrelated topic, designed for home consumption. In September, with the Washington Post saying that “Congress is taking longer to pass fewer bills than it ever did in recent history,” he took the floor, and as the Post reported, “pleaded with senators to stop talking and start voting ‘so that we can get out of here.’” He is, the Post said, “getting positively plaintive about it.” By the end of his first year as Leader, McFarland was a figure of ridicule in the Senate, and in national publications as well.
ALTHOUGH THE FAILURE of the congressional “leadership”—in particular, of the Senate leadership—was a theme much emphasized as the Eighty-second Congress drew to a close, the leadership referred to was that of McFarland and the committee barons. None of the criticism included Lyndon Johnson, for he was not considered part of it. His title, “Assistant Leader,” had always been little more than honorary; journalists had the impression that the whip’s job was still the “nothing job” he himself had called it.
Johnson was careful not to disturb that impression. While he was still photographed emerging from the White House, after that first Monday morning he seldom if ever again made the mistake of injecting himself into the exchanges between the Leaders and journalists; he stood silently in the background with his House counterpart, Priest, as McFarland and McCormack answered—or tried to answer—reporters’ questions. When reporters called him off the Senate floor, or interviewed him in his office, he took stands on no subjects other than those that dealt with preparedness. Sometimes he would be asked, by the White House or by McFarland, to persuade a senator to vote for an Administration measure, but he almost invariably demurred. Resurrecting a sobriquet from Johnson’s past, Drew Pearson wrote that he “has adopted a policy of antagonizing no one—a policy which has won for Lyndon the nickname of ‘Lying Down Johnson.’” But that barb was drowned in the wave of publicity for the Preparedness Subcommittee and for the Watchdog-in-Chief; 1951 was the year of the long profiles that climaxed in the Newsweek cover. Most of those articles concentrated on the subcommittee chairmanship; almost no attention was paid by the press to Johnson’s other job, as party whip; that job was not, in fact, so much as mentioned in the Newsweek article.
But within the private world of the Senate—in the cloakroom and the Marble Room and behind the tall closed doors of the offices in the SOB—attention was beginning to be paid. For, without the press noticing it, the job was changing.
Part of the change was simply a matter of information.
Senators wanted to know—needed to know—at what time a roll call vote would occur, so that they could be present, and have their vote recorded. They needed to know what day a bill in which they were interested would come to the floor, so that they could arrange to be present to argue for or against it; to offer, or oppose, amendments. Not infrequently, they needed to know at least the approximate hour it would come up, which meant knowing if amendments would be introduced to bills on the schedule ahead of it, and how much time might be consumed discussing those amendments. They needed to know if a Monday or Friday session would be, as was so often the case, only a brief pro forma session without roll-call votes, in which case their weekend fence-building trips back home could be extended.
McFarland often didn’t know. Overwhelmed by the responsibilities he had accepted, he seemed increasingly helpless as the pace of the session picked up and the backlog of bills mounted. And during the second year of his term, worried about his re-election campaign, he spent more and more time back in Arizona.
Lyndon Johnson began checking with the chairmen on the status of bills before their committees, and when senators asked about a particular bill, he knew the answer, or said he would find out. And in talking with senators, he acquired as well as provided information. His colleagues found him an attentive listener as they told him about amendments they were planning to introduce, in committee or on the floor. And Johnson was therefore able to provide information to the Democratic Policy Committee, of which, as party whip, he was an ex officio member. When that committee discussed issues, he was silent, and followed Russell’s lead in voting. But when the committee turned to schedules, all of a sudden the discussions were no longer as haphazard as they had been in the past. Johnson could report what amendments were going to be introduced, and who was planning to speak for or against them, and how heated, and how long, the discussion on each amendment was likely to be. And when the schedule had been decided on, he could bring more precise information back to individual senators. There began to be, in the Democratic cloakroom, a realization that now, when a senator needed to know when a certain bill would come to the floor, there was, suddenly, someone he could ask.
THE INFORMATION wasn’t only about schedules. It was also about votes.
The White House needed to know if it had the votes for a bill it wanted brought to the floor. A senator needed to know if there would be sufficient support to pass a measure he had introduced. “Vote-counting”—predicting legislators’ votes in advance—is one of the most vital of the political arts, but it is an art that few can master, for it is peculiarly subject to the distortions of sentiment and romantic preconceptions. A person psychologically or intellectually convinced of the arguments on one side of a controversial issue feels that arguments so convincing to him must be equally convincing to others. And therefore, as Harry McPherson puts it, “Most people tend to be much more optimistic in their counts than the situation deserves…. True believers were always inclined to attribute more votes to their side than actually existed.”
Lyndon Johnson had seen firsthand the cost of wishful thinking, of hearing what one wants to hear, of failing to look squarely at reality, when his father, that “man of great optimism” sentimentally attached to the old Johnson Ranch, purchased it for a price higher than was justified by the hard financial facts. Lyndon Johnson had felt firsthand the consequences of romance and sentiment every time the reins of the fresno bit into his back. And Lyndon Johnson had been a master of the vote-counting art for a long time. Of all the aspects of his political talent that had impressed the group of fast-rising young liberal pragmatists of which, as a young congressman, he had been a member, none had impressed them more than this ability. These men, to whom politics was life, were uninterested in party games; at Georgetown parties, while others played charades, they would go off and amuse themselves by trying to predict the exact vote on some bill that would be coming up in Congress that week. And they learned that, as Jim Rowe recalls, “He was a great counter. Someone would say, we’ve got so many votes, and Johnson would say, ‘Hell, you’re three off. You’re counting these three guys, and they’re going to vote against you.’” Says Abe Fortas: “He would figure it out—how so-and-so would vote. Who were the swing votes. What, in each case—what, exactly—would swing them.”
Now Lyndon Johnson’s counting was not a social pastime but an exercise in hard political reality—and he was still “a great counter.” He kept his counts on the long, narrow Senate tally sheets on which the ninety-six names were printed in alphabetical order in a column down the center with a blank line on either side of each name, on the left side for the “yea” votes, on the right for the “nays.” When he knew which way a senator would vote, he would write a number—the number that the new vote raised the tally to—on the appropriate side of the senator’s name. And no number was written until he knew, knew for sure. To a staff member who, after talking with a senator, said he “thought” he knew which way the senator was going to vote, he snarled, “What the fuck good is thinking to me? Thinking isn’t good enough. Thinking is never good enough. I need to know!” Often, he didn’t know. He had no power to make a senator tell him which way he was going to vote, and some senators didn’t want to be asked. Pat McCarran, asked once by Walter Jenkins, warned Jenkins never—ever—to do it again. And he never tried to persuade a senator to vote one way or the other; it was information, not votes, that he was collecting. But if he didn’t know, he didn’t guess: the lines flanking the senator’s n
ame stayed blank.
In this collecting of information, there had been an important development, what Evans and Novak call the “ripening of the relationship between Lyndon Johnson and Bobby Baker.” Owing a favor to a political operative from the South Carolina hamlet of Pickens, Senator Burnet Maybank paid it in 1942 with the offer of an appointment to the Senate’s corps of teenage pages, and the man recommended Bobby Gene Baker, the fourteen-year-old son of a Pickens mailman. Bobby was working in a drugstore; he had been hired six years before to sweep out the place, but, as he was to say about himself, he was “an eight-year-old boy who had it in him to hustle,” and the store’s owner was to say that it wasn’t long before Bobby was “doing everything but filling prescriptions.” One of his teachers said he was “so vivacious, just a little trigger. If you wanted something done, you gave it to Bobby and you knew it would be done.”
For the first ten nights the boy was in Washington, he wrote in his diary each night, “I’m so homesick,” but when one of his Pickens teachers, hearing of his loneliness, wrote him an encouraging letter, Bobby’s reply, scrawled on a lined piece of paper from a notebook, was “Miss Hallum, Bobby Baker don’t quit,” and he got ahead in the Senate as he had gotten ahead in the drugstore: in his words, by “hard work and hustle.” The twenty-two pages, all boys, wore dark blue knickers, went to school each day in a special school in the Capitol, and, on the floor, filled the inkwells and snuffboxes in the Chamber, “brought the senators public documents, newspapers, telephone messages, or anything they desired. To call us, they’d snap their fingers and we’d scurry to them.” He carried out such errands eagerly, and sought more: “I [learned] to anticipate what each senator might require…. When I learned that a given senator would be making a speech on a given day, I stationed myself nearby to quickly fetch some documents or materials or fresh water as he might need.” (His favorite senator was Truman: “Not once did I see him act imperiously toward lowly page boys. ‘Young man,’ he would say—not ‘Sonny’ as so many called us— ‘Young man, when it’s convenient, could you please get me a glass of water?’”) Before long, senators were asking for him by name, and giving him another type of assignment. “‘Bobby, I’m having a rubdown in the gym. Can you hold the vote for half an hour?’ I then would go to another senator, explain the situation, and ask him to request a time-consuming quorum call….”
Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson Page 63
