Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson

by Robert A. Caro

  And there were other personal responses particularly hurtful to a man of Humphrey’s open and gregarious nature.

  The Senate was such a convivial place, a place of pats on the back and hearty handshakes and warm, welcoming smiles, of banter and friendly exchanges. But there were few pats and handshakes for Hubert Humphrey, and few smiles, either. Paul Douglas would smile, of course, and Estes Kefauver, and Jim Murray, but not other senators, including the most influential, the ones who were the center of the chatting groups in the cloakroom or on the Senate floor. When Humphrey walked into the cloakroom or out onto the floor, there would, in fact, often be a turning away by these men, just slightly but enough to discourage conversation. It began to be noticeable that he was, in fact, being snubbed outright by the southerners and many of their allies.

  And there were responses more hurtful than snubs. There were sotto voce comments about him, little jokes. Once, when Humphrey, still a freshman, was speaking yet again on the Senate floor, William Jenner whispered that Humphrey reminded him of some tomatoes he had once planted “too early in the spring and the frost got them.” Some of the whispers got back to Humphrey.

  And there were remarks pitched loudly enough for Humphrey to hear. Richard Russell was always polite except when someone was trying to improve the lot of the black man in America, and Hubert Humphrey, who had made those unforgivable statements in Convention Hall, simply would not stop trying in the Senate to improve the black man’s lot. One afternoon, Humphrey was to recall, “I walked from the Senate chamber past a group of Southern senators. They ignored me and I moved silently on, but not out of earshot, and one of them, Senator Richard Russell of Georgia, said, obviously for my benefit: ‘Can you imagine the people of Minnesota sending that damn fool down here to represent them?’”

  Late in 1949, staff members of Harry Byrd’s Committee on Reduction of Non-Essential Federal Expenditures quietly “analyzed” the cost of every bill that Humphrey had introduced in the 1949 session, came up with estimates—inflated estimates—that put the total at thirty billion dollars, and leaked the figures to right-wing columnist Fulton Lewis Jr. and to newspapers back in Minnesota. Republican senators then used the figures against Humphrey on the Senate floor, Kenneth Wherry saying sarcastically: “That is how he believes in economy.” In retaliation, Humphrey introduced a resolution to abolish the Byrd Committee, which, he charged, “is merely used as a publicity medium” by Byrd, its work virtually duplicating that of a Government Operations subcommittee. He added that its “very existence is a wanton waste and extravagance” and the appropriation for its staff and printing costs “stands as the Number One waste of the taxpayers’ dollars.”

  Humphrey’s charges had substance, as most of the Senate might privately have admitted—Byrd’s committee had not even met since 1947—but a public attack by a junior senator on one of the pillars of the Senate club was a tactical mistake. And, in a violation of Senate protocol, Humphrey had unknowingly made the charge when Byrd was away from Washington visiting his ailing mother. The counterattack came six days later, and when it began, the Senate Chamber was, as one of Humphrey’s biographers was to put it, “ominously full.” Byrd’s patrician accent had never been softer as the ruddy-faced Virginia apple-grower begged the Senate’s permission to “correct some misstatements” by Humphrey about his committee. When he had finished, he said, “I have mentioned nine misstatements in 2,000 words. This is on average one misstatement in every 250 words—and the Senator speaks like the wind.” Harry Byrd’s drawl grew even more pronounced. “As the Senator from Minnesota is a publicity expert himself,” he said, “his statement, although not intended as such, could be regarded as a compliment from one who welcomes and has been signally successful in creating publicity for himself and his objectives. If he has ever hid his light under a bushel, I am unaware of it. And I have not observed any indication that he is of the shrinking violet type evading publicity.” The Senate in its wisdom could, if it so desired, abolish his committee, Harry Byrd said. If the Senate thought that best, he would not oppose so many colleagues whose opinion he deeply respected. But, he said, “I do not want it done as the result of misinformation such as that which has been presented to the Senate.”

  Byrd’s attack, biographer Carl Solberg was to write, was only “the initial salvo of a verbal barrage that has seldom been equalled in modern Senate history.” One by one, southern and conservative senators defended Byrd—and assailed his attacker in personal terms that verged on the vicious. Rising at his front-row desk and turning to stare directly at Hubert Humphrey, Walter George said that of course the Byrd Committee should not be abolished. It was “doing a magnificent job.” The attack on the committee was, he said, “the height of reckless irresponsibility.”

  Personal attacks were supposedly forbidden on the Senate floor, and Humphrey tried repeatedly to get the floor to make that point, or to respond, but Barkley, in the chair, refused to recognize him, and Humphrey finally gave up, and sat slumped at his back-row desk as one after another of his colleagues assailed him. When, after four hours, Byrd’s allies finally yielded the floor, Humphrey rose to reply. As he did so, Byrd and every one of his supporters turned their backs on him and strode out of the Chamber.

  Humphrey tried to fight back by publishing a letter in the Times, and accepting an invitation to debate Byrd before a liberal group in Richmond. When Byrd declined to appear, President Truman wrote him: “The senator from Virginia wouldn’t have dared to debate with you.” But in the Senate, the hostility to him became increasingly overt. Following an angry debate in the radio studio in the Senate Office Building, Homer Capehart called him a “Commie,” and tried to shove him out the door. Humphrey was only stopped from punching the burly Indianan by an aide who wrestled him away. When news of this undignified display was brought to the Democratic cloakroom, Barkley knew immediately who was to blame, and made a crack, playing on the name of Minnesota’s senior senator, Edward Thye, that within minutes was circulating all over the Capitol: “Minnesota is a great state—first they send us their Ball, then they send us their Thye, and now they send us their goddamned ass.”

  Such remarks, which invariably seemed to make their way to Hubert Humphrey’s ears, would be seared into his memory. Talking to an interviewer in 1977, not long before he died, he could still recall how he had felt when he heard Richard Russell call him a “damn fool.” “I just felt sick…. This hurt me more than anything in my private or public life, anything.” Humphrey would call those first years in the Senate “the most miserable period of my life.” They were, he would say, “dark days…. I despaired.” Despair was a word Hubert Humphrey would, in the last years of his life, use frequently in describing those first years in the Senate, despair and bitter—and, most of all, lonely. He “just couldn’t believe” the way he was treated, he would say. “I was prepared for the normal political opposition you could expect to encounter,” and of course he was aware of the South’s anger at his convention speech, but “I always worked on the basis that when the election was over, you didn’t hate anybody, and you sort of shook hands and you went to work.” And, he would say, “I was a more than normally gregarious person, who wanted to be liked,” and “I wanted to do well, and I knew that my political intensity, my personal enthusiasm, needed a friendly environment to blossom. I didn’t feel any comradeship, any friendship. Nobody showed us around…. We didn’t go to many parties and the few we went to weren’t very helpful.” He envied, he was to say, freshmen like Johnson, Kerr, and Long. “They had friends in the South,” he was to say. “That’s all you needed. I had nothing. Absolutely nothing. No friends anyplace.”

  At the time, of course, he tried not to let his hurt show. “I hated to expose my feelings….” And, except to his wife (“Without Muriel, I might have given up…. She was never too tired to listen …”), he didn’t let his hurt show. His broad smile was always in place in public. But that was in public. In the evening, after the Senate day, he would get into
his old Buick and drive home to Chevy Chase. And sometimes, driving home, he would cry—Hubert Humphrey, the youngest, and perhaps the best, mayor in the history of Minneapolis, elected to the Senate at the age of thirty-seven in a landslide, Hubert Humphrey who had brought a Democratic convention to its feet with the greatest speech since the Cross of Gold, Hubert Humphrey, as brave as any David who ever faced a Goliath, driving up Connecticut Avenue in the stream of rush-hour cars, with tears running down his face.

  DURING HIS EARLY YEARS IN THE SENATE, Humphrey was to say, “Johnson and I had virtually no contact, reflecting, I suppose, the general attitude of the senators toward me.” Johnson’s attitude toward him was, in fact, distinctly chilly. Then, one day in the spring of 1951, Humphrey came out of the underground door of the Senate Office Building to catch the subway to the Capitol, and Johnson and George Reedy were standing on the platform. During the ride, the two senators sat together, and a surprised Reedy heard Johnson speaking warmly to Humphrey. As Reedy was to recall it, Johnson said, “Hubert, you have no idea what a wonderful experience it is for me to ride to the Senate Chamber with you. There are so many ways that I envy you. You are articulate, you have such a broad range of knowledge, you can present it with such absolute logic.” And then, in what Reedy describes as “a sudden change of voice,” Johnson said harshly: “But goddamn it, Hubert, why can’t you be something but a gramophone for the NAACP? Goddamn it, Hubert, why can’t you make a speech about labor for once? Goddamn it, Hubert, why can’t you make a speech about farmers?” And Johnson ended by saying, “Goddamn it, Hubert, why can’t you do something for all those people and the NAACP besides talking about them? You’re spending so much time making speeches that there is no time left to get anything done.” Reedy does not record Humphrey’s reaction to the harshness, but it evidently reinforced whatever it was that Lyndon Johnson’s reckoning eye had seen in him. It was in the spring of 1951 that, Humphrey would recall, “He started to show some interest in me. He didn’t treat me as if I was a pariah.” He began, in fact, “to invite me to his office for talk and frequently for a drink.”

  “I found him fascinating right from the beginning,” Humphrey would recall. “A marvelous conversationalist in private conversation. Told a lot of stories, a lot of human interest stuff. He had been close to Roosevelt, who was my political hero. And he knew the operations of the House, and he knew all the personalities. And he knew all the little things that people did. He was a great mimicker, too, you know.” To hear Hubert Humphrey recall those talks in 231 is to hear a man utterly charmed by Lyndon Johnson.

  Charmed—and impressed. Humphrey had a master’s degree in political science, and had been the mayor of a major American city, but in these conversations with Lyndon Johnson, Humphrey was learning a political science that couldn’t be learned in college, or even in City Hall. Beside Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey was only a student, and he knew it. A note he wrote Johnson at the time says, “I am learning a great deal from you. You are one teacher who makes a fellow like what he’s taught.”

  Some of the lessons that Johnson taught about politics were pragmatic, basic. “Johnson said the first lesson of politics is to be able to count,” Humphrey would recall. “I have never forgotten that.” Some were about personalities. “From the very beginning, it seemed to me, he understood the most intricate workings of the Senate. It seemed that he got there aware of the backgrounds of most of the members, and he took the trouble to find out about the ones he didn’t know about. He was like … a psychiatrist. He knew how to appeal to every single senator and how to win him over. He knew how to appeal to their vanity, to their needs, to their ambitions.” And some of the lessons were at a higher level. With every conversation, it seemed, Hubert Humphrey was becoming increasingly aware that Lyndon Johnson was operating on a level of politics of which he himself had been only dimly aware. “He knew Washington as no other man in my experience. He understood the structure and pressure points of the government, and the process and problems of legislation. He understood … the appointed officials. He knew the satellite worlds of Washington: the business lobbyists, the labor movement, the farm and rural-electrification lobbyists, the people interested in health research and social security….”

  “I was always fascinated by his knowledge of politics,” Hubert Humphrey was to recall. “If you liked politics, it was like sitting at the feet of a giant.”

  HUMPHREY WAS IMPRESSED not only by Johnson’s politics but by his personality. The words and phrases with which he describes that personality—words and phrases sprinkled through Humphrey’s autobiography, and through the texts of interviews he gave to writers and to oral history interviewers—reveal an admiration that verges on awe.

  Big is a word that recurs frequently in these descriptions. “You have just almost got to see the man,” Humphrey says. “He’d get right up on you. He’d just lean right in on you, you know. Your nose would only be about—he was so big and tall he’d be kind of looking down on you, you see….” “He was like a plant reaching out for water,” Humphrey says. “Like a tree. And his whole demeanor was one great big long reach.” He talks about Johnson’s hands—“those great big hands of his. I can still see him clap them.” Recalling Johnson’s use of Hill Country maxims to make a point, Humphrey says: “One of his favorite expressions was ‘If you’re going to kill a snake with a hoe, you have to get it with one blow at the head.’ And he’d give a dramatic expression of what he meant with his hands, those hands that were just like a couple of great big shovels coming down.”

  Strong is a word that recurs frequently—along with words that are evocations of strength. “This fellow is a very strong man, strong willed, strong of body,” he said of Johnson; “he was a muscular, glandular political man.”

  In describing Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey describes him as subtle. “He was a born political lover. It’s a most amazing thing. Many people look upon Johnson as the heavy-handed man. That’s not really true. He was sort of like a cowboy making love.” He describes him as fierce: “a lion … clever, fast and furious when he needed to be and kind and placid when he needed to be.” He describes him as an elemental force of nature. “He’d come on just like a tidal wave sweeping all over the place. He went through walls. He’d come through a door, and he’d take the whole room over. Just like that. Everything.” In describing Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey paints with his own words—unwittingly, perhaps, but vividly—a portrait of two strong personalities in interplay, and of one, strong though it was, coming more and more under the spell of the other.

  OF ALL JOHNSON’S QUALITIES, none impressed Hubert Humphrey more than the fact that, as he was to say, “Johnson was always able to take the measure of a man. He knew those that he could dominate; he knew those that he could out-maneuver. Right off the bat he sized you up.”

  Did Lyndon Johnson “size up” Hubert Humphrey? Were these talks behind the closed door of Johnson’s office a perusal, a studying—a reading, by a master reader of men, of a very difficult text?

  It is possible that Lyndon Johnson never had a more difficult text to read, for the interplay between him and Hubert Humphrey was very complicated. It was, after all, not only Johnson whose life was fired by burning ambition; that quality was blazoned as boldly as idealism across Humphrey’s life; with his characteristic frankness, he had once asked a group of Minneapolis supporters, “What’s so un-American about being ambitious? Of course I’m ambitious.” Both men were, in fact, fired by the same ambition, reaching for the same distant goal. Joe Rauh, who first met Humphrey in 1947, recalls that “From the moment we met, he was talking about how he was going to be President someday.” In fact, about a month before the 1948 Democratic Convention, when he was still only a young mayor—utterly inexperienced in national affairs, and little known outside Minnesota—he persuaded Rauh and two other ADA friends who were acquainted with Eleanor Roosevelt, Eugenie Anderson and James Loeb, to travel up to Hyde Park and ask her if he should skip the Senate
race against Joe Ball and instead follow the course her husband had taken in 1920, when he ran as Vice President on a losing ticket, and try to go on Truman’s ticket (which virtually all the experts expected to also be a losing ticket) as a prelude to a later presidential run. (Mrs. Roosevelt replied that “Of course [if you run for Vice President] you’re going to get better known.”) It was only after the utter impossibility of obtaining the vice presidential nomination became apparent to him that he settled down to concentrate on the Senate race. That great goal was to glimmer before Humphrey, always out of his reach but always to be sought for, throughout his life. He was to make three all-out tries for the presidency—in 1960; 1968, when he received the Democratic nomination and almost won the election; and 1972—and he was about to make a fourth try, in 1976, when the realization was borne in on him that he was about to be defeated this time by cancer. These were two men, almost the same age, who never took their eye from the same target. It was not only Lyndon Johnson who was so driven that his quest was filled with “energy” that made other men, even men of great energy, marvel; it was not only Lyndon Johnson who brought to his quest a willingness to sacrifice sleep and family and so many other considerations that influence other men. And if Lyndon Johnson was strong, what was the man Paul Douglas had been moved to liken to the Bible’s heroic David? Hubert Horatio Humphrey, a spindly youngster with a sunny smile and a strikingly open, bright cheerfulness that “made you feel good when he was around,” was the son of a small-town druggist who struggled to make a living in a series of the little towns that dot the windswept prairies of Minnesota and South Dakota; he got himself to college, but then was forced to drop out for six years and work behind the counter to help his father survive in a Depression-ravaged area where their farmer-customers had no money to pay their bills; he eventually returned to graduate and then get a master’s degree through sheer determination. And as Mayor of Minneapolis—elected at thirty-four, he was the youngest mayor in the city’s history—he was uncompromising in ramming through measures for social justice: when even the publisher of the city’s leading black newspaper urged him to drop his fight for a municipal FEPC because of the bitterness it was engendering, he replied, “To hell with that, it’s right and it’s going through”; while he was Mayor, a mayor who hung two big portraits of Franklin Roosevelt in his office, Minneapolis became not only the first city with an effective FEPC but the first city to offer free chest X-rays to those who couldn’t pay for them. And he was so tough in ending police brutality toward blacks and union strikers that when he died, Thurgood Marshall, the great black attorney, would say that of all Hubert Humphrey’s achievements, none had impressed him more than “what he did with the police.” When Hubert Humphrey and Lyndon Johnson sat talking behind the closed doors of Johnson’s office, it was not only one of those two men whose life was a study in determination and strength of will.