Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson

by Robert A. Caro

  THE CONVERSATIONS IN 231 were in a way a testing—a test (of which Humphrey was evidently unaware) of whether Humphrey could and would be the means to Johnson’s ends—and Humphrey evidently passed. Slowly but steadily Johnson began to move Humphrey into a position where he could one day be a bridge between liberals and conservatives, and an instrument of compromise.

  During that 1951 session, Johnson began telling Walter George, “Senator, Hubert isn’t such a bad fellow, you know.” He told George how interested Humphrey was in foreign affairs. When Humphrey walked into the cloakroom, Johnson would bring him over to George’s armchair and begin discussing foreign affairs; Humphrey by this time had realized the necessity of listening when George was pontificating, and he listened. And when he himself occasionally interjected a thought, George listened, too; it was difficult to be in a conversation with Hubert Humphrey and not be aware of his intelligence. And of his warmth; the more Walter George saw of Humphrey, the more he began, despite himself, to like him. Simultaneously, Johnson was working on Russell, telling him that Humphrey’s views on agriculture were remarkably like his own—which was, in fact, the case; “the South and the Midwest have always been together on farm legislation,” Humphrey would say. “We needed each other.” Once or twice, when Johnson invited Humphrey over for a drink and a talk, Russell would be there, too. Then Johnson told Russell that Hubert would appreciate having his opinion on an agricultural bill he wanted to introduce. “Humphrey utilized this opportunity to show deference by his repeated ‘sir’ to Russell when they discussed the measure,” Steinberg relates. Russell, too, as John Goldsmith puts it, “came to appreciate Humphrey’s intelligence.” And he came to appreciate his sincerity; Russell had a passion to help the poor farmers of the South, Humphrey had a passion to help the poor farmers of the Midwest, and this shared passion brought them a little closer together. And always Johnson was putting in a good word for Hubert with Russell.

  “Johnson was actually becoming a bridge for me with some of the more conservative members of the Senate,” Humphrey was to say. Their feelings about him had eased to a point at which Russell Long of Louisiana, his neighbor in Chevy Chase, felt able to bring him one day to the round table in the senators’ private dining room. “Since there was seldom talk of issues or legislation, lunch was usually a relaxed social hour of storytelling, chatter about the sports page, whatever was not political or controversial.” The southern senators started to get to know Hubert Humphrey not as a fighter for civil rights but as a human being. And, like most people who got to know Hubert Humphrey as a human being, they liked him. And Humphrey knew who had gotten them to like him. “My apprenticeship of isolation drew to a close as I got to know Lyndon Johnson,” he was to say; it was Johnson who brought even “Dick Russell around to look with some favor on me.” He knew that his relationship with the southerners—his key to acceptance in the Senate, to the end of his time as a “pariah”—was due to Lyndon Johnson. He knew that Johnson had given him a great gift. And, being an intelligent man, he knew that what had been given could be taken away.

  IF IN 1951 AND 1952, Hubert Humphrey was charmed and impressed by Lyndon Johnson, friends with him and eager to stay friends, he was nevertheless still the dominant figure in the Senate’s liberal bloc and not at all disposed to relinquish that role. His loyalty to that bloc was as undivided as ever. On controversial issues, his views and those of Johnson and the conservatives were not similar, and Johnson didn’t try to modify his views. Nor did Johnson make any attempts during those two years, the years when he was only Assistant Leader, to make use of Humphrey’s new understanding of the virtues of compromise, nor of Humphrey’s new, easier relationship with the southerners, a relationship that would have made it easier for Humphrey to deal with them on the liberals’ behalf. And if Johnson had made such attempts, they would not have succeeded. Humphrey was aware that whatever Johnson’s true philosophy might be, the Texan was very much part of the southern bloc and represented its interests. While during those years, Johnson, as Doris Kearns Goodwin puts it, “seemed to foresee that someday Humphrey might be useful to him,” that day had not yet come. For it to come, an additional, final ingredient would have to be added to the relationship between the two senators: power, more power than an Assistant Leader possessed.

  20

  Gettysburg

  NINETEEN FIFTY-TWO, of course, was a presidential election year. Lyndon Johnson would not be forty-four years old until August of that year, and he was still a first-term senator, but neither of those facts precluded a try for the great goal which never left his mind. An interview published in January demonstrated that, and demonstrated also that he viewed the Senate as only a way station on the road to that goal.

  The interview was conducted—symbolically—in the Capitol’s glittering President’s Room, with Johnson and Alfred Steinberg, who was writing an article on the House and Senate whips for Nation’s Business magazine, sitting, under the immense gold-plated chandelier and the richly colored Brumidi frescoes, in two low, deep-burgundy leather armchairs on wheels.

  Johnson, Steinberg recalls, “was outraged when he learned he would be only one of four men featured in the article.” Wheeling his chair so close to Steinberg’s that their knees touched, and leaning forward so that their noses were only inches apart, he pressed the reporter back at an uncomfortable angle, seized one of his lapels to hold him steady, and asked loudly, “Why don’t you do a whole big article on me alone?” When Steinberg asked (“from my strange sitting position”), “What would the pitch be?—that you might be a Vice-Presidential candidate in 1952?” Johnson said, this time in a whisper and after a glance around to make sure that no one else was present, “Vice President, hell! Who wants that?” His voice boomed out again. “President! That’s the angle you want to write about me.”

  Steinberg recalls that when “I smiled at the obvious impossibility of Johnson’s ever becoming President,” Johnson said, “You can build up to it by saying how I run both houses of Congress right now.” And when Steinberg asked for an explanation of “this extraordinary remark,” Johnson said, “Well, right here in the Senate I have to do all of Boob McFarland’s work because he can’t do any of it. And then every afternoon I go over to Sam Rayburn’s place.” One of Johnson’s hands was still firmly gripping the reporter’s lapel, but Johnson’s other hand had been unoccupied. Now, for emphasis it took a firm grip on one of the reporter’s thighs. “He tells me all about the problems he’s facing in the House, and I tell him how to handle them. So that’s how come I’m running everything here in the Capitol.”

  Other journalists were aware of the same ambition. After an off-the-record conversation with Johnson, a member of Time magazine’s Washington bureau informed his editors in New York that “despite his Southern origins,” Johnson “is interested in the Number 1 spot.”

  But 1952 was to be the year Richard Russell ran for President himself.

  Although Russell’s “sense of the sweep of history” made him feel, as George Reedy realized during their long conversations together, “that the only way to ever really put an end to the Civil War, to heal the breach, would be to elect a Southerner President,” the Georgian also appears when he first entered the race to have been aware that, as Time said on March 19, “Russell has as much chance of being nominated as a boll weevil has of winning a popularity contest at a cotton planter’s picnic.” “The chances of any Southern Democrat residing at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue during our lifetime are very remote,” the Senator had written a friend a few months earlier; when, in December, 1951, John Stennis urged him to run, Russell replied, “I’m under no illusions about any Southerner being elected President of the United States.”

  He appears to have begun running more for the South than for himself. The South’s great stronghold was Capitol Hill, the keys to the stronghold were the House and Senate committee chairmanships, the southerners would hold those chairmanships so long as the Democrats held the majority in Congress—b
ut holding the majority wasn’t going to be easy. Foreseeing who the Republican candidate would be, Russell was uneasily aware of the genial Eisenhower’s popularity. A large Eisenhower plurality might sweep the GOP into the majority in Congress; Democratic unity in the face of this threat was crucial. The party could simply not afford to be split again, as it had in 1948, over the civil rights issue. And beyond the political considerations were the historical: his desire to make the South part of the United States again. Should the Democrats renominate Truman, or nominate another candidate with similarly unacceptable views on race, the South would break away from the party again, thereby reemphasizing the gulf between it and the rest of the country. The candidate might, in fact, be Estes Kefauver, who, detested though he was in the Deep South, was viewed by the rest of the country as the “southern” candidate. A Kefauver victory at the Democratic Convention—an event which in the Spring of 1952 seemed more likely with every passing week as he won a string of primaries—would trigger another walkout by southern delegates, and Russell believed that this would weaken the South by revealing the split within its own ranks. The way to avoid these scenarios would be for the South, a unified South, to have a candidate who would arrive at the convention with a bloc of votes large enough so that even though the candidate himself might not be able to win the nomination, he would have sufficient influence to force the selection of a candidate, and the writing of a platform, acceptable to the South. Russell knew that the old Confederacy would unite behind him, and that he would be its strongest candidate; it seems that he began running more to keep the South and the party together than because he felt he could win the nomination.

  Nonetheless, illusions came, particularly after Truman, buffeted by seemingly endless revelations of corruption in his Administration (nine of whose members, including his appointments secretary, would go to prison), by his inability to end the war in Korea, and by “soft on Communism” allegations, was defeated by Kefauver in the New Hampshire primary in March and then announced that he would not run for re-election. Entering the May 6 Florida primary against Kefauver to prove that he, not the Tennessean, was the true candidate of the South, Russell won an easy victory. The announced candidates—Kefauver, Vice President Alben Barkley, and Averell Harriman—were hardly formidable. The big-city bosses whose machines had been embarrassed by the Kefauver investigations were determined that he would not get the nomination, no matter how many primaries he won. Barkley, at seventy-four, was considered too old, Harriman had never run for national office. Truman had in mind another candidate, Adlai Stevenson, landslide victor in the 1948 race for the Illinois governorship and a noted orator, but Stevenson had declined the President’s offer of support in language so firm that the New York Times said in April that he “has to all intents and purposes taken himself out of the race.” When Russell, fresh from his Florida victory and “exuding optimism,” spoke to the National Press Club on May 8, the assembled journalists realized to their shock that he had come to believe that he could win the nomination, and the general election as well. “That,” Russell told the Press Club, “would destroy a fable of long standing that no citizen from the southern part of our nation can be elected President.”

  His optimism, at least about the nomination, was, in some ways, understandable. With 1,230 votes to be cast at the Democratic Convention, 616 were needed for nomination, and Russell could count on the votes of every Confederate state but Tennessee: 262 votes, a solid base. And he was counting on a substantial number of nonsouthern votes because of the support of senatorial colleagues. Big Ed Johnson of Colorado had agreed to be his national campaign manager, Pat McCarran of Nevada had enthusiastically endorsed him, and not a few senators from the Midwest and West, while not actually endorsing him, had spoken warmly of his candidacy: having lived for almost twenty years in a world in which these men possessed genuine power, Richard Russell could be excused for assuming that they possessed it in their states as well. And senators from farm states had been appearing for years before Appropriations’ agricultural subcommittee asking for his support for their projects; pointing out that “Those in the Midwest who are concerned about agriculture would be wise to support Russell,” Senator Milton Young of North Dakota now said that “if the Democrats have sense enough” to nominate the Georgia Giant, he, although a Republican, would support him.

  Calculations relating to the general election, and to Dwight Eisenhower’s immense popularity in the South, were also feeding Russell’s belief that his party would turn to him. There were 146 electoral votes, vital to Democratic chances, in the thirteen “contiguous” states—the eleven Confederate states plus border states Kentucky and West Virginia—and polls were showing that, as Russell put it, “I am the only Democratic candidate who can defeat a certain military personage” in those states. And if he did so, he said, “it will only be necessary to obtain an additional 118 votes from the other 35 states to win in … November.”

  Beyond such rational calculations there was the euphoria produced by a national campaign: the enthusiastic applause from audiences in Florida, and the rolling cheers from the huge throng that lined the streets of Atlanta as he paraded through it, seated high atop the back seat of an open convertible as the bands marching before it played “Rambling Wreck from Georgia Tech,” a song to which new words had been written: “The Senator from Georgia / Dick Russell is his name—/ Will Take His Place among the Great / of U.S. History’s Fame. / His Years of Public Service Devoted to our Nation / Will Lift him from his Senate seat / the Presidential station!” (Flying down from Washington that morning for the parade, Russell had landed first in Winder, so that he could visit his mother [who so long ago had written him that she had not brought “my R. B. Russell, Jr.” into the world “to ever fail in anything he might undertake”].) For so many years now, his colleagues had been telling him that he was the man in Washington best qualified to be President, and that they hoped that one day he would be. He still kept close to hand the cherished note Harry Truman had written him in 1945: “Dick: I hope you [will] be recognized next. And you will be.” Was Truman’s prediction to come true at last?

  In addition, once Russell had entered the race, Johnson had put his own ambitions on hold, and thanks to him the Georgian’s campaign organization was of impressively high caliber. Although John Connally was now working for one of Eisenhower’s most generous financial backers—Sid Richardson had, in 1951, hired him away from Alvin Wirtz’s law firm—he was a key part of it; Johnson had persuaded Richardson to lend Connally to the Russell campaign, because, Connally explains bluntly, “We felt that he [Russell] was going to be a power in the Senate, win, lose or draw.” Furthermore, “Richardson regarded Russell as one of the greatest public servants this country ever developed”; had he won the Democratic nomination, Richardson “would have supported both [him and Eisenhower].” Although Atlanta banker Erie Cocke Sr. had the title of Russell’s “convention manager,” most of the contacts with individual delegates were handled by the young Texan whose political competence was already well known in Washington. And, thanks also to Johnson, working in offices near Connally’s at Russell campaign headquarters in the Mayflower Hotel were two speechwriters whose competence Russell admired: Reedy and the conservative Booth Mooney. Johnson had arranged for ample supplies of money as well as talent. Russell’s Georgia campaigns hadn’t required much money, and he was astonished and at first daunted by the amount required for a presidential campaign. This, he wrote to a supporter, was “a new league.” It was, in fact, Johnson’s league, and he made playing in it easy for Russell, arranging for lavish financing by ex-Texas regulars H. R. Cullen and E. B. Germany, and by the three conservatives whose wallets were always open to Johnson: Richardson, Murchison, and of course, Herman Brown. The dignified Georgian didn’t even have to soil his hands. When at one point the campaign ran short of ready cash, Connally simply flew down to St. Joe Island and returned with an envelope, and, Connally says, Russell may not even have known about the
trip.

  Johnson was, in fact, working very hard for Russell in every area of the campaign. The Texas Democrats were split, with liberals supporting Kefauver, but Johnson, in alliance with the state’s Dixiecrats, including reactionary Governor Allan Shivers, arranged for the announcement, the day Russell won the Florida primary, that Texas’ fifty-two votes would be cast for him as a block. All through the campaign, Johnson would use his contacts across the nation on Russell’s behalf, always making sure that Russell knew he was doing so, and in Chicago, his tall figure was conspicuous as he roamed hotel corridors and convention floor, draping an arm around delegates’ shoulders and urging them to vote for Russell. Johnson even provided Russell with a campaign slogan, which he said had been coined by a Texas constituent: “Let’s Hussle for Russell.” (“A number of others have suggested the same slogan, though they spelled it differently,” Russell wrote back.) The staff, the money, the national contacts—all these added to Russell’s optimism.