But now, whenever McFarland was back in Arizona, that practice was changing. Lyndon Johnson didn’t want blank spaces on the voting sheets; he wanted every vote accounted for. So, more and more, the job was turned over to Bobby Baker, Bobby who would “always have a phone number” even when a senator had left for someplace where he “didn’t want to be reached.”
Arranging pairs, arranging schedules, getting minor bills called off the Calendar—mundane chores that no one wanted to do, mundane chores that, left undone, clogged the schedule and slowed the Senate down, little chores that, for many years, no one had done with any diligence. They were being done with diligence now.
If you do everything… The days were long days, and the nights were not just for sleeping. The counting didn’t stop then, the planning didn’t stop. On the night table beside Walter Jenkins’ bed, there lay, every night now, a yellow legal pad, so often did the telephone jangle in the bedroom’s darkness. And it was not only in the homes of Lyndon Johnson’s own assistants that the phone would ring in the night. More and more frequently, “sometimes at three a.m.” Bibolet would be jolted awake. “Roland, I can’t find McFarland!” No one could remember a whip ever really working at that “nothing job” before, but Lyndon Johnson was working at it now. And he was making it into something it had never been before.
AND THOUGH MOST of Lyndon Johnson’s activities as his party’s Assistant Leader were matters merely of scheduling and vote-counting, there were, at times, signs that he was capable of doing more: flashes of something that was beyond just hard work or flattery—and beyond just talent, too.
One came in 1952, during the annual end-of-session struggle over foreign aid. The Administration was losing the struggle that year—losing in a year when losing would be particularly disastrous, since Western Europe, attempting to unite to meet the threat of Communist aggression, badly needed to feel that the United States was solidly behind NATO. President Truman had requested seven billion dollars for aid to NATO’s members. The House had reduced the amount to six billion. Dwight Eisenhower, now NATO commander, had warned that the alliance might be able—barely able—to live with that lower figure, but that any further reductions would cripple it. Yet Senate isolationists and conservatives, led by Taft and Herman Welker, were determined to make further reductions—big ones. “We’ve already poured seventy-five billion dollars down a rathole and still are losing people by the millions to Communism,” Welker said. “Unless we call a halt to this crazy spending and these give-away programs … we will revert to the Dark Ages.” And the conservatives had the votes to make those reductions—partly because of what the Herald Tribune called “heavy absenteeism among northern Democrats and liberal Republicans” who, with the Senate on the verge of adjourning for the long summer vacation, had left Washington and were not willing to return; among the fifteen absent senators were eleven who might have supported the Administration. Welker, “sensing the weakness of his opponents,” in Newsweek’s words, offered an amendment to cut an additional half billion dollars from the House figure, Russell Long offered one to cut $400 million, and both amendments seemed certain to pass.
In the Senate Chamber, before galleries as full (of summer tourists) as the floor was empty, the famous internationalist orators raised their voices in support of the Western alliance, Walter George telling his colleagues in majestic, organ-like tones that “Nothing less is involved than the will of free men, especially in Western Europe, to stand up and integrate themselves in a federation which is the hope of the free world…. If we overcut here, it would discourage the very people in Europe we hope to encourage at the time of their greatest need.” Tom Connally, managing the bill in his swan song in the Senate, was making his final performance memorable. Thumping his chest, his voice quavering in imitation of old-fashioned stump speakers, he advised his opponents sarcastically to cut the entire appropriation—“Then you can go home and strut your stuff before your constituents and make Fourth of July speeches and tell them ‘I saved seven billion dollars and let the free world go to hell.’ Then go out and beat your breasts while war is breaking out in Europe,” and as he spoke his fellow senators laughed out loud in appreciation, and the galleries roared. Richard Russell, customarily in favor of cutting foreign aid, understood that this time the cutting had gone too far; he was talking privately, gravely judicious yet passionate in his conviction, to individual senators in the rear of the Chamber. But Welker, Taft, and William Jenner were pressing for a vote—and the Administration knew it didn’t have the votes. Of the eighty-one senators still in Washington, forty-one were committed to cutting foreign aid, and available to cast votes. Even if every one of the other forty senators was persuaded to be present, the Long and Welker amendments would still be passed. Standing at the Leader’s desk, McFarland was running his hands through his hair in frustration. Internationalists felt, as Newsweek reported, that “without a minor miracle, they could never muster enough votes to hold the line.”
Then the double doors to the Democratic cloakroom swung open and the party’s tall young whip came through them. He said something to Russell, and Russell nodded, and Lyndon Johnson strode down the center aisle and spoke to McFarland, and McFarland walked over to old Matt Neely and asked him to hold the floor for the rest of the day’s session, and Neely did so for the full hour and a half—which gave Johnson eighteen hours to work with before the Senate convened the next day. And when the Senate adjourned, Lyndon Johnson went with McFarland to McFarland’s office, and told him what he thought they should do with those hours.
If there were too many votes against them, Johnson said, the only thing to do was to get rid of those votes. And that could be accomplished, he said, by using live pairs. If they could persuade isolationist senators who were still in Washington and who were planning to vote for the aid-cutting amendments to agree to pair with absent senators who would have voted against the amendments, each senator who agreed to do so would be depriving the amendments of one vote. And pro-amendment senators would agree, Johnson said, for the usual reason—to do a colleague a favor by saving him the embarrassment of being recorded as absent on an important vote. The only reason they wouldn’t agree, as Johnson was later to explain, was if they realized that the ordinarily routine pairing device was being used for a very unroutine reason. And, as he was to explain, they wouldn’t realize unless someone on the other side checked around and found that an awful lot of live pairs were being arranged. And this checking would have to be done in advance: once a senator had assured a colleague that he would pair with him, that assurance was considered an unbreakable promise.
The pair that Johnson focused on first was the absent internationalist Warren Magnuson, back home in the distant state of Washington and unwilling to return, and Joe McCarthy, an adamant opponent of foreign aid. The two bachelor senators were dating buddies. “If Magnuson wasn’t going to be present, you’ve lost his vote anyway,” McFarland’s assistant Bibolet explains. “So if you can get a live pair with Magnuson, you’ve cut out an opposite vote.” Johnson asked McCarthy to save his friend “Maggie” from embarrassment with a live pair, and McCarthy agreed. And then Johnson focused on Guy Gillette of Iowa and Kerr of Oklahoma, two other senators who didn’t want to return, and on McMahon of Connecticut, who couldn’t, because of illness.
The next day, the unsuspecting Russell Long called for the yeas and nays on his amendment, and the yeas and nays were ordered. But just before the clerk called the roll, a number of his amendment’s supporters asked to be recognized for brief statements.
“On this vote, I am paired with the senator from Washington,” Joe McCarthy said. “If he were present and voting, he would vote ‘nay.’ If I were permitted to vote, I would vote ‘yea.’ I withhold my vote.” Olin Johnston said: “I am paired on this vote with the senator from Iowa. If he were present and voting, he would vote ‘nay.’ If I were permitted to vote, I would vote ‘yea.’ I withhold my vote.” John Stennis said: “On this vote I have a pair with t
he senior senator from Oklahoma, who if present would vote ‘nay.’ If I were permitted to vote I would vote ‘yea.’ I withhold my vote.” A. Willis Robertson said: “On this vote I have a pair with the senior senator from Connecticut. If he were present and voting he would vote ‘nay.’ If I were permitted to vote I would vote ‘yea.’ I withhold my vote.” The Long Amendment therefore received not the expected forty-one yeas, but only thirty-seven. There were forty nays, so it was defeated. It fell four votes short of passage—the four votes Lyndon Johnson had stripped from it by using live pairs.
All that day, other amendments to reduce foreign aid would be offered—and all that day Administration supporters fought them off, armed with live pairs. In the evening, Administration opponents finally passed an amendment, but only for a $200 million cut. And that was their only victory. At first, Welker had been puzzled. “I am concerned by the number of pairs,” he said at one point. “What is this—legislation by absenteeism?” Then, realizing that he had been outsmarted, he strode over to McCarthy, whom he had been defending against attempts to discipline him for breaches of Senate rules. “From now on, let Magnuson defend you,” he said, in a snarl that could be heard in the Press Gallery above. “McCarthy turned white,” Newsweek reported. But McCarthy’s reaction was the only satisfaction Welker could obtain from a day he had been confident would bring major victories. When he asked other pro-amendment senators to stop pairing, they told him they couldn’t do so—that they had given their promise. As Robert Albright was to report in the Washington Post, “By adroit ‘pairing’ of missing votes with a few ‘live’ (supporters of the amendment), the Democrats managed to stave off a serious cut.” Absenteeism had been crippling the Senate, and no one had seen a solution to the problem. And then suddenly someone had seen a solution—had seen a way, in fact, not only to solve the problem but to turn it to his party’s advantage. Within the clouds of legislative gloom that had shrouded the Senate for so many years, there had suddenly flickered, very brief but very bright, a bolt of legislative lightning.
AND OTHER CHANGES WERE also taking place during Lyndon Johnson’s two years as his party’s Assistant Leader in the Senate.
These changes had no relationship to the Senate’s internal workings. They were, however, to have a very significant relationship to the Senate’s future. For their relationship was to power.
Leader after Leader, Democratic and Republican alike, had complained about their lack of anything to “threaten them with,” of anything to “promise them”; about the paucity of sources of intimidation or reward that would give a Leader enough power so that he could truly lead. Their frustration was understandable. Generations of gifted parliamentarians, determined that the Senate not be led, had done their best to ensure that it couldn’t be, designing an institution in which there existed few levers with which a Leader could move it.
But of all Lyndon Johnson’s political instincts, the strongest and most primal was his instinct for power. The man who was to say “I do understand power…. I know where to look for it” was looking for it now. There were few places within the Senate where a Leader could find it—so he looked for it outside the Senate.
One place he looked was not on the Senate side of the Capitol at all but on the House side, in the little hideaway room on the ground floor with an unmarked, unnumbered door—the room that journalists called Sam Rayburn’s “Board of Education” but that Rayburn himself called simply “downstairs.”
Lyndon Johnson had become a “regular” in that room when he first came to Congress, a twenty-eight-year-old freshman hoisting a glass with the great House barons every afternoon after the House recessed for the day. His betrayal of Rayburn in 1939 had resulted in his exclusion from the hideaway for almost three years—“I can get into the White House; why can’t I get into that room?” he had shouted in frustration to House Parliamentarian Lewis Deschler in 1941—but on his first day back in Congress after his return from the Pacific in 1942, Rayburn not only had invited him to “come downstairs” but had even handed him the most prized of status symbols on the south side of the Capitol: his own key to the hideaway door.
Lyndon Johnson was a senator now, but he still had that key—the only senator who had one, the only senator who was a regular at Rayburn’s “Board Meetings”—and that key meant power if it was used correctly. Senate passage of a bill vital to a senator was only half the action required on Capitol Hill; the bill also had to be passed by the House, and in the House, Rayburn ruled. It was during this era that, angry over the defeat of a bill he favored, he simply announced that there would be a second vote, and, calling twenty freshmen representatives to his office, flatly ordered them to vote for it—which they did, so that the measure was passed. It was during this era that, the night before the vote on a controversial resolution, he said, “I don’t want one word said against this resolution on the floor”—and not one word was said. Sometimes, when he was up on the triple dais, his stocky body, massive, totally bald head and grim, unsmiling face dominating the Chamber, a member would attempt to raise a perfectly legitimate point of order. “The Chair does not desire to hear the gentleman on the point of order,” Rayburn would say—and would stand there, impassive, unmoving until the gentleman sat down.
Walter Jenkins had one assignment that took precedence over all others: to notify Johnson—immediately—when the House adjourned for the day. Johnson would usually set out on the long walk to the south side of the Capitol as soon as Jenkins’ call came; on the rare afternoons on which he was delayed, Rayburn would telephone 231, without identifying himself would bark, “Tell Lyndon I’m waiting for him,” and slam down the phone, as if embarrassed at this admission of need. When Johnson was told that the Speaker had called, he would abruptly cut short whatever he was doing, and hurry out of the Senate Chamber or the cloakroom. As he walked along an arcaded passage and then around a small, colonnaded rotunda, a tall figure, alone and intent, he would be leaning forward in his haste, his ungainly but very long stride eating up the bright blue and gold tiles, his arms swinging stiffly and out of rhythm with his steps. He had to walk almost the whole length of the long Capitol, and as he reached the immense central Rotunda beneath the dome, and then, beyond the Rotunda, Statuary Hall, he would sometimes break into an awkward, gangling trot, his suit jacket flaring out, as he crossed their wide spaces, past the statues of Benton and Houston and La Follette. Reaching the House side, tiles now red and white, he would check his stride, though still walking very fast, pass the Speaker’s Lobby, crowded in the late afternoon with members who could not go where he was going, run down a flight of stairs two at a time, and enter the unmarked door.
Sometimes he seemed to resent these trips as if they were journeys to Canossa. One afternoon he was talking to Jim Rowe when Jenkins’ call came. “I’ve got to go over there to the Board of Education and kiss his ass again, and I don’t want to do it,” Lyndon Johnson said. But this feeling was never in evidence in the “Boardroom.” He came through its door every afternoon with a smile on his face so broad that, as one of the other regulars says, “Every time Johnson saw Rayburn he would light up like I do when I see my grandson.” House members in Rayburn’s hideaway for the first time—intimidated, as most men were intimidated, by the stern, unsmiling Speaker—were astonished at what Johnson did next. Walking over to the huge mahogany desk at which Ray-burn sat, he would bend over and kiss the Speaker on the top of his bald head. Sometimes he would say, in a loving, deeply solicitous tone, “How are you, Mr. Sam?” And sometimes he would say, “How are you, my beloved?” (“Mr. Ray-burn would play gruff.”) Other men watched how Johnson “handled” Rayburn. “In that room, he [Rayburn] was boss, and Johnson acknowledged that,” one says. Says another: “It was never ‘Sam.’ It was always ‘Mr. Sam,’ or ‘Mr. Speaker,’ and ‘Lyndon.’ There was never a feeling that they were equals. Never.” Says another: “Johnson was quite deferential to him. He would argue with him, but always in such a way that you knew who was the boss
.” Another sums up Johnson’s tone and demeanor simply as “Sirring.” Occasionally Rayburn would grow irritated with Johnson. “Lyndon couldn’t sit still,” one regular says. “He was always jumping up and walking around. And the Speaker would say, ‘Sit down, Lyndon. You’re making me nervous.’” Johnson might ask him for an opinion, or a decision, on some matter, and Rayburn would give it. And if Johnson tried to argue, Rayburn would simply repeat what he had said—repeat it in exactly the same words. “That was the conclusive remark. That was the end of that conversation.”
The regulars also saw that Rayburn acted very differently toward Lyndon Johnson than he acted toward any of them. After the betrayal, his affection for Johnson was never again uncritical. Talking about the younger man, he at least once used the phrase “vaulting ambition.” Ramsey Clark says, “He understood Johnson. I’ve heard him talk about Johnson and his ambition. I don’t think it was blind love at all.” Says Richard Boiling: “A constant refrain was about [Johnson’s] arrogance and egotism. He [Rayburn] said to me several times the same words: ‘I don’t know anyone who is as vain or more selfish than Lyndon Johnson.’” But these men agree that although the “love” was no longer “blind,” love it certainly was. Says Rayburn’s assistant D. B. Hardeman: “It was a father-son relationship, with all that implies…. Johnson would just infuriate him, but he would defend Johnson against all comers. He loved him in the way: I’d like to wear the bottom of his britches out.” He loved him—and wanted to help him in any way he could. So when Lyndon asked for a favor—such as House passage of a bill vital to some individual senator—Rayburn would usually grant it.
Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson Page 65
