A MEETING WITH TRUMAN on June 10, a meeting Russell requested in an attempt to translate the President’s 1945 sentiment into a 1952 endorsement, might have made the Georgian recognize the folly of his hopes. Russell came as close as he could to pleading. “I told him [Truman] that I would like to have his support and that with a little more help than I now had there was no question about my nomination and election. He then said, substantially: ‘I would give my right eye to see you President, but you know that the Left-Wing groups in Chicago, New York, St. Louis and Kansas City must be kept in the Democratic Party if we are to win and they will not vote for you. We must keep these groups in the party.’” According to Russell, Truman also said: “Dick, I do wish that you lived in Indiana or Missouri. You would be elected President hands down. We have differed on a great many issues but we have always understood each other. You are a great Democrat and I respect you….”
But Russell was by this time beyond the reach of logic. His aide William Darden says that “When he started [his campaign], he was realistic. But as he progressed, and had a little bit of success here and there, and nobody else pulled out of the pack, I think he got a little bit of hope in a way that was very uncharacteristic of him.” John Connally says that “He had convinced himself he had a chance. Any man who [runs for President] has convinced himself there is a way he can be successful. And he had convinced himself.” Deriding the idea that a southerner could not be elected President “as more a fixation of timid politicians than it is any widespread feeling on the part of the American people,” Russell told reporters that he expected to arrive at the convention with between 300 and 400 votes, that neither Kefauver, Barkley nor Harriman would be able to amass the necessary 616, and that by the seventh or eighth ballot, he would win. The depth of his hopes can perhaps be measured by the fact that, in an effort to remake his image with liberals, he even attempted for a time to portray himself as a “moderate” on racial issues, stating that he was for “constitutional” government and that the Constitution “enumerated the basic and fundamental rights which are the heritage of every citizen without regard to race or creed.” His long opposition to the FEPC, he added, was not based on racial considerations but on his opposition to government interference in private business. (“He could not,” however, as his biographer Fite notes, “muster enough moderation to criticize segregation,” and the attempted makeover didn’t last long. Pressed by reporters to comment on segregated food counters at Washington drugstores, Russell said that he was “American enough to believe that, if a drug store owner wants to serve only red-headed people with brown eyes, he can do it.” Even his desire to be President couldn’t overcome his prejudices. After Kefauver said he would feel “morally bound” to accept a strong FEPC plank, reporters pressed Russell on what he would do if the convention adopted such a plank; he would, Russell said, ignore it.)
Then, in the latter part of June, Russell made the same mistake that Lee had made—the mistake that led to Gettysburg. He took his campaign into the North.
The Democratic Party officials and convention delegates whom Richard Russell met on this trip responded to his personality as people always responded to his personality. One of the men who met him in Maine, Edmund Muskie, who would later be that state’s Governor and a United States Senator, was then a young county committeeman meeting all the potential candidates for the first time. “Of all of them, Russell made the biggest impression on me,” Muskie would recall years later. “He had the look of an eagle. There was strength there. He knew he was coming to a Northern state. He made no apologies. He was coming so we could see what he was. When he walked into a room, instantly you knew here was a man you could trust. You knew from his demeanor, the way he moved: that quiet projection of authority, authority in the sense of knowing what they’re about, who they are. And when he spoke—Russell’s intellect was very impressive.”
Impressed though they were by the personality, however, the northern Democrats did not forget the principles for which Russell stood. When he met with “the New Jersey leaders,” George Reedy was to recall, “he got the same reaction from all of them: ‘My God, Senator, we’d like to support you. You’re the best man around, but we can’t support a southerner.’” There was to be no support for Russell in Maine, none in New Jersey, and none in the other northern or western states—New York, Pennsylvania, Wyoming, California, Colorado—to which he traveled. He had thought Big Ed Johnson’s support would give him Colorado, he had counted on Colorado. But when he arrived in Denver, Big Ed had to give him bad news: there was no hope that the delegation would support him; the only possibility of keeping Colorado’s votes out of the Harriman column would be to persuade the delegation to vote for a favorite son on the early ballots. Then the two senators walked out on a stage together before the delegation; despite Ed Johnson’s immense popularity in his home state, there was little applause, and even some scattered boos. From Colorado, Russell flew to California, where he had hoped for a bloc of votes in California’s big delegation. The response in California was very cold.
ARRIVING AT THE CONVENTION that was being held in the International Amphitheatre, near the Chicago stockyards, a week after Eisenhower had ended forever Robert Taft’s dream of following his father into the White House (and had chosen as his running mate thirty-nine-year-old freshman Senator Richard M. Nixon), Russell and his Georgia supporters still believed he had a chance to win. Walter George himself was going to deliver the nominating speech, the great Walter George whose speeches could change votes in the Senate. “They thought Walter George could work a miracle,” John Connally recalls. More dispassionate observers were startled at their optimism. Visiting Russell’s campaign headquarters, two Georgians with experience in national politics and an awareness that by this time Russell had no realistic “expectations of getting the nomination,” Chip Robert, the knowledgeable Georgia national committeeman, and Roy V. Harris, publisher of the Augusta Courier, got what Harris calls a “surprise.” Harris recalls convention manager Cocke saying, “‘Now, we’re going to get so many votes on the first ballot, and … on the seventh ballot Dick will be nominated. This state will come, and this state will come.’ And I scratched my head, and I’d look at Chip and he’d look back at me… We found out they were serious. We found out Dick was serious….”
The jammed Amphitheatre was not the Senate Chamber; Walter George tried in vain to make himself heard as the hundreds of delegates would not stop talking among themselves. With only a handful of exceptions, the only marchers in the parade for Russell (in which, one article stated, “Senator Lyndon Johnson was among the most enthusiastic paraders”) were southern delegates. The convention’s decision had in fact become a foregone conclusion on the day before George spoke, for on that day the Governor of the host state had spoken, welcoming the delegates—and had demonstrated vividly why he was known as a great orator. “In one day,” the New York Times reported, “all the confused and unchannelled currents seemed to converge upon the shrinking figure of Governor Adlai Stevenson as the one and only, the almost automatic, choice of the Convention,” and Stevenson had finally agreed that if he was chosen, he would run.
Even so, Russell refused to give up hope. After the second ballot, on which he had received 268 votes, only five more than he had received in 1948 when he hadn’t campaigned and almost all of them again from the South, “things began to fall apart,” says Ernest Vandiver Jr., a Georgia politician working on Russell’s staff, and the Arizona delegation (which in loyalty to Carl Hayden had added twelve votes to the southern total) “came to me asking me if I could release them from their pledge so that they could vote for the winning candidate, so … I called the Senator and told him the situation and he said, ‘No, I won’t release. No, I want them to stick in there. You can’t ever tell what might happen.’” On the second ballot, the move to Stevenson began, and he won easily on the third, with Russell receiving 261 votes.
FOR A MAN WHO LOVED and idealized his “Southland” a
s deeply as did Richard Russell to be told to his face that no southerner could be President was, in Goldsmith’s phrase, a “visceral blow.” He “had indeed known, rationally, that he could not be nominated. Before campaigning in the North, however, he had not heard political leaders … tell him to his face that he was obviously the best-qualified candidate, but that they could not support a Southerner.” As George Reedy says, “It’s one thing to know something academically; it’s another to have it hit you in the face.”
He had planned to go on a fishing vacation off the Florida coast arranged by George Smathers—Lyndon Johnson and two or three other senators would be along—following the convention, but now he said he wouldn’t be going. He returned to Winder for a while. For the first time, he began to complain about his health, talking about a pain in his left shoulder, a cough, headaches.
Johnson arranged for Russell to go to the Mayo Clinic, where a week-long physical examination found his health “excellent.” Although he was still only fifty-five years old, however, aides would notice, from this time on, a loss of what they called “energy,” and when, that fall, he visited the Johnson Ranch, Lady Bird noticed the same thing. “Energy; it’s my feeling that after 1952 he did not exhibit as much of that,” she says. And her sharp eyes noticed other changes, which she felt she understood. “I have a distinct feeling” that the 1952 campaign “was sort of a benchmark in his life,” she was to say. “It was the time when he really put his chips in and tried, and not receiving the nomination probably caused him to retreat into the ivory tower … sort of withdrew him from the field of battle to some extent.” Upon his return to Capitol Hill, some journalists noticed the change, although none of them would do more than hint at it in print until after his death in 1971. Samuel Shaffer of Newsweek would write at that time that “Something happened internally to Richard Russell after the 1952 campaign.” He “lost some of his zest for legislative battles.” And George Reedy, who often heard Russell refer to that campaign “with some bitterness,” began to notice creeping into Russell’s conversation “a little querulous tone” that had not been there before. “He had just been hurt so deeply.”
This bitterness was to have a significant effect on Lyndon Johnson’s career. It made Russell more determined than ever that one day the North would accept the South back into the nation in the most dramatic manner possible, by electing a southerner to be its President. He wouldn’t be that southerner, he knew that now; he would never try for the presidency again, he told people around him. But by the end of 1952, it was becoming clear to a number of these people that Richard Russell had settled on the southerner it was to be.
Russell’s growing affection for Lyndon Johnson had now been cemented by gratitude—gratitude for Johnson’s help in his campaign. “He [Johnson] worked very earnestly in my behalf,” Russell would say. “He did everything in the world—everything he could…. He really meant it when he supported me in ’52.” And beyond these personal considerations—and far more important to Russell in matters vital to the South—during the campaign Lyndon Johnson had demonstrated a political qualification that the Georgian, from his own experience, now understood was essential for any southerner who wanted to become President.
Watching Johnson talking familiarly at the convention to delegates and political leaders from New York, from Chicago, from Montana—from all across the North—Russell had seen that these men knew the Texan and liked him, these men whose feeling toward most southerners was contempt. What other southern senator was a friend of Dubinsky? What other southern senator knew Dubinsky? He was already, of course, aware that in Washington Johnson was a member not only of southern but of New Deal circles, a pal not only of John Stennis and Lister Hill but of Tommy Corcoran and Abe Fortas—one of the relatively few men in Washington to have a foot firmly in both camps. Before he had taken his campaign north, Richard Russell might not have realized fully the importance of such a national acquaintance, an acquaintance on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line, but he realized it now. If his goal—to make a southerner President—was to be realized, that southerner, while absolutely committed to “constitutional principles,” would have to be someone with whom northerners, even northern liberals, were nonetheless comfortable. With at least one southern senator committed, Russell believed, to “constitutional principles,” northerners were comfortable already.
Johnson possessed other qualifications that Russell now understood to be essential. A national campaign, he had learned, was indeed “a new league,” requiring financing on a scale of which he had previously been unaware. Johnson, he had seen, had access to such financing—easy access. Watching Johnson discuss politics with northern delegates, Russell had seen that he understood their states’ internal politics. Russell’s knowledge of, and ability to relate to, intra-state politics across the country had been unequaled by that of any other senator. There was, he now saw, another senator who knew, and could relate to, these politics perhaps as well as he.
And there were yet other qualities, vaguer to define but even more important. During the campaign, Richard Russell and Lyndon Johnson had spent many hours in conversation not about senatorial or Armed Services Committee strategy but about political strategy on a national scale. Who can recognize a master of politics better than another master? As succeeding years were to make clear, Richard Russell was indeed beginning, if very gradually and hardly perceptibly at first, to withdraw from “the field of battle.” But he was not abandoning the field to his enemies, to the enemies of the South. He believed that he had found a new champion, younger, with more “zest,” who would, relying always on his advice and counsel, take the field in his place. Not long after the campaign, Richard Russell, who so much wanted a southerner to become President, began to make his feelings clear in confidential conversations. A year before, he had “soberly predicted” that “Lyndon Johnson could be President and would make a good one.” Now, shortly after the 1952 election, George Reedy “became aware that Russell wanted to make Johnson President.”
“Russell made no bones whatsoever” about that, Reedy recalls. “He was quite open with me. He was determined to elect a southerner president. And he could not see any other southerners that could be elected president except LBJ. He talked about that to me as early as 1953.” As to his reasons, it is impossible today to know with certainty what they were, or what weight to give to each. Reedy says that Russell saw Johnson “as an instrument of this purpose—to heal the breach so the South would no longer be a separate part of the nation.” But did he also mean something more—something darker? By far the best book on the Russell-Johnson relationship is a little-known work, Colleagues, by John A. Goldsmith, who began covering the Senate for the United Press in 1946 and was head of its Senate bureau for almost twenty years. In his book, Goldsmith speaks of Russell’s “hope that Johnson might … become a President attuned to southern culture.” What does that last phrase mean? Did it mean attuned to southern culture in the best sense, in the sense of civility and graciousness and tradition and the political creativity that made southerners principal architects of America’s system of government? Or did it also mean attuned to that worst aspect of southern culture—that blacks had to be kept in their place? Had Johnson convinced Russell that in his heart he believed that? When one reads words spoken at the time by members of Russell’s Southern Caucus, the senators to whom the Georgian explained his reasoning to secure their support of Johnson, it is difficult to escape that suspicion. In 1957, Herman Talmadge would arrive in the Senate as a new senator from Georgia, and receive Richard Russell’s explanation of why he was supporting Johnson for the presidency: because “Johnson would be more favorable to the South’s position on States’ Rights and local self-government.” In Talmadge’s view, that statement was not about breach-healing, as became apparent when the author interviewed Russell’s fellow Georgia senator in January, 2000. Johnson, Talmadge said, “gave me the impression” that his views on the appropriate relationship between white and bl
ack Americans were the views of the southern senators. And what were Johnson’s views, Talmadge was asked. “Master and servant,” Talmadge replied. Didn’t Johnson have any sympathy for the plight of blacks? “None indicated,” Talmadge said. “He was with us in his heart,” he said—and, he said, that was what Russell believed. It was when he was asked if Russell was boosting Johnson for President out of friendship that John Stennis replied that Russell “wasn’t a bosom friend of anyone when it came to … constitutional principles.” The concept of segregation—continued segregation—was of course deeply embedded in “States’ Rights,” “local self-government,” and “constitutional principles.” A Georgia friend once told Russell, “You’re just fighting a delaying action.” Russell replied: “I know, but I am trying to delay it—ten years if I’m not lucky, two hundred years if I am.” A delay of some decades would be a considerable victory. And, during those decades, a lot could happen. The mood of the country could change, could become more conservative, more supportive of the southern way of life, or at least less overwhelmingly determined that that way be changed. A long enough delay might almost be the equivalent of victory for the South. Did Russell feel that one way of ensuring a long enough delay would be to make Lyndon Johnson President? Whatever the reason, Richard Russell, Reedy says, “was very determined to elect Lyndon Johnson President of the United States.”
THE LESSON OF RICHARD RUSSELL’S DOOMED, quixotic campaign of 1952 was not lost on Lyndon Johnson, for whom it had the deepest implications. After all the acknowledgments that Russell was the best qualified candidate for the presidency—acknowledgments that had come from the North as well as the South—he had received virtually no northern votes at the Democratic Convention; the fact that he had never had a realistic chance of winning his party’s nomination, much less the presidency, had been made dramatically clear. And if the strongest possible southern candidate had never had a chance, no southern candidate had a chance. If Lyndon Johnson had ever entertained a hope of winning the nomination as a candidate identified largely with the South, Russell’s fate demonstrated conclusively the futility of such a hope. In order to attain his great goal, Johnson would have to make the party and the nation stop thinking of him as a southerner.
Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson Page 76
