The chairmen had, in fact, been to some degree removed from this new arrangement. It was not they with whom the Policy Committee—and that Leader who controlled the Policy Committee so absolutely—was communicating, but rather a member of their committee’s staff.
And while the degree was small, it was to become larger. Lyndon Johnson made it larger. By the mid-1950s, after Bobby Baker had been promoted to being Skeeter Johnston’s assistant, Baker had begun meeting, on behalf of the Policy Committee, with the fifteen committee staff directors as a group, ostensibly to encourage them, urge them forward, but in those meetings he of course not only inevitably learned more about the inner workings of their committees but also made them feel more comfortable about answering his specific, more detailed, more pointed questions when he would call them later on the phone. By the mid-1950s, in fact, Lyndon Johnson would be taking the unprecedented step of meeting himself with the staff directors as a group. The fifteen men were invited from their rooms in the Senate Office Building to the Capitol, where, over coffee, in the words of one staff director, “he came in and massaged us, about how important we were and how we should get back and get our chairmen cracking and get those bills out of committee.” “Of course it helped him to deal directly with the staff,” Bibolet says. “Sure it did. He couldn’t control chairmen. He could control staff. And he dealt with staff, or Baker and Reedy did, more and more.”
The change was gradual—very gradual during 1953 and 1954, because the Democrats had only a minority party’s input into legislative scheduling and content. But even in 1953 and 1954 the change was taking place. One of the constants in the Senate of the United States had always been the total independence of the chairmen barons. In 1953 and 1954, these senators still thought they were totally independent, but in reality a bit had been gently slipped into their mouths, a bit attached to a checkrein. Committee schedules—the chairmen’s schedules—had never been coordinated before. Their schedules were being coordinated now. In the past, discussions with the Policy Committee about the content of “their” bills, the bills before their committees, had been held, when a chairman deigned to allow the holding of them at all, only by them. Now the content of their bills was being discussed with the Policy Committee by members of their staffs. These staffs were consulting not just with them but with George Reedy, and with Reedy’s boss. In 1953 and ’54 the bit was hardly noticeable. The reins were still loose.
But they would be tightened.
LYNDON JOHNSON’S TRANSFORMATION of the seniority rule and the Policy Committee combined to give him so much new power that the entire old order of affairs on the Democratic side of the Senate was substantially altered, both for liberals and for conservatives.
This alteration had greater implications for the conservatives, of course, for in the old power structure the power had been theirs. During the days in which the alteration was occurring—during the earliest weeks of Lyndon Johnson’s leadership, in January and February, 1953—had there arisen an understanding among any of the party’s “Big Bulls” of its implications, it could have been easily stopped. Had even one of the mighty chairmen realized the long-term effect of what Lyndon Johnson was doing, and explained it to others, Lyndon Johnson would not have been able to do it.
If, however, even a glimmer of any such understanding arose, there is no evidence of it. On the contrary, the reaction of the Senate’s barons to the changes that would eventually drastically reduce their cherished power and independence was only praise: “Excellent,” said Walter George, “Excellent,” said Lister Hill. The southern conservatives were loudest in their praise. They saw the changes Johnson had made in the Policy Committee as a means of muffling the liberal firebrands. They appear not to have realized the implications of those changes for them.
Did even the wisest of them—the shrewdest, the most astute parliamentarian of all these astute parliamentarians—realize the implications? Richard Russell could of course have stopped the changes with a word, with a shake of his head, with a wink, but he supported the changes, and if Russell was for them, who would be against them? If Russell was for them, who, indeed, would even bother to analyze them, to think about them in the detail required to understand their long-term consequences?
We can never know definitively the extent to which Russell and the other southern barons supported these changes because they wanted Lyndon Johnson to be President, believing that if he became President, he would help prevent radical change in the nation’s racial laws; or because they wanted Johnson to have power in the Senate; or because they thought the changes would improve the Senate; or because they thought the changes would strengthen the Democratic Party. The extent to which Johnson kept the senatorial barons from understanding the true implications of the changes—the extent to which he may have tricked them—will also never be known definitively. But after long discussions about these very changes with Johnson, Doris Kearns Goodwin wrote that
He accomplished this almost without conflict or opposition precisely because authority and influence of this kind had been of no significance to the exercise of Senate power and were not perceived as a potential threat to those who ruled. It did not occur to his powerful associates—respectfully consulted in every move—that from such insubstantial resources Lyndon Johnson was shaping the instruments that would make him arbiter and, eventually, the master of the United States Senate.
THE CHANGES LYNDON JOHNSON had effected in the seniority system and in the Policy Committee had increased his power—but at the same time they had increased the power, and the effectiveness, of his party. That was why these first weeks after he was elected Democratic Leader were a watershed in his life. With only a single major exception—the bringing of rural electrification to his congressional district—his previous use of power had created power mainly for himself. Now, in 1953, for the first time, with his election as Leader, his fate had been linked indissolubly with something far larger than himself, something that transcended the boundaries of a single congressional district. Attaining power for himself without attaining power for his party had been impossible. His political genius had always been used only for himself; now it had been used for the Democratic Party in the Senate—and it had transformed both the Senate Democrats and, to a lesser extent, the Senate itself.
*In all the previous postwar Congresses, fourteen committees had had thirteen members, Appropriations twenty-one members, for a total of 203.
Part IV
USING IT
22
Masterstrokes
AND NOW THE LIFE of Lyndon Johnson was to become linked with something larger than a party or the Senate. The chorus of approval that greeted Hubert Humphrey’s motion in the Democratic Caucus of January 2, 1953, to make Johnson’s election unanimous had installed him as his party’s leader in one of the two houses of the national legislature, and his party was the opposition party; there was no Democratic President to whom he had to defer; that vote in the caucus made Lyndon Johnson one of the two or three most prominent and influential Democrats in America. His life was now to be indissolubly entwined with his country’s. And, within a very short time after that link was soldered fast, it became apparent that Lyndon Johnson’s political gifts were not limited to the institutional or to the tactical—that they could operate on levels far above those.
THE ENTWINING HAD BEGUN, of course, before January 2, had begun with the maneuvering to win the leadership, and with the planning of his strategy for using the leadership, which had taken place on the ranch, and on his trips to Washington in November and December, 1952, when he had grasped so quickly the fact and the implications of Eisenhower’s popularity.
Eisenhower’s first moves after the election had demonstrated that he might become more popular still: fulfilling his campaign pledge to “go to Korea,” he went there even before his inauguration, and his actions on the trip reminded Americans of his calm decisiveness before D-Day. General Mark Clark, commander-in-chief of the UN forces in Korea, an
d South Korean President Syngman Rhee had developed plans for an all-out new offensive; Eisenhower gave them no chance to present them. Instead, as his biographer Stephen Ambrose writes,
for three days, Eisenhower did what he had done so often during World War II; he visited frontline units and talked with the senior commanders and their men. Despite the bitter cold and snow-covered ground, Eisenhower bundled up in a heavy pile jacket, fur-lined hat, and thermo boots to see for himself. He flew a reconnaissance mission over the front. He studied the artillery duel with his binoculars, chatted with troops, ate outdoor meals from a mess kit….
Plans for an all-out offensive, he concluded, were irrational. The situation was intolerable, he said; the only solution was to end the war on honorable terms as soon as possible, and get the troops home. America nodded in agreement.
And as the new President’s personality impressed itself on America, America was coming, day by day, to love it more and more. While some columnists had expressed disappointment over the failure of Eisenhower’s Inaugural Address to speak to domestic issues—it dealt almost entirely with foreign policy—and while the speech had not been nearly partisan enough for the more rabid Republicans, even the liberal columnist Richard Rovere had to call it “statesmanlike” and admit that it “was appreciated by most people and fervently admired by some.” And the most significant moment of the Inauguration had occurred not during the Address but in the moment before it. Repeating the oath of office after Chief Justice Fred Vinson, Eisenhower wore a serious, determined expression, but as he said “I do,” he turned toward the huge crowd below and suddenly shot his arms up high over his head in a wide V-for-victory sign, and he grinned, and as his great wide smile beamed over the crowd, the cheering began, and the warmth of it was enough to make even hardened politicians and observers understand, some of them for the first time, just how much America liked Ike.
As the implications of the size of Eisenhower’s margin had sunk in on Democrats, along with the figures from the suburbs and even from the cities that had once been Democratic strongholds, many Democratic leaders had come to “privately fear that the November vote may represent a more or less permanent shift in the party balance of power,” the Alsops wrote. While Johnson had still been down on the Pedernales, and making his quick trips back and forth to Washington to sew up the leadership, a feeling almost of panic set in among Democrats, a feeling that centered on the Senate. As the Alsops wrote, “The great movers and shakers of the recent past, the chairmen of powerful committees—Southerners almost to a man—are movers and shakers no longer. Accustomed to page one in the newspapers, they now find themselves among the want ads—if they are lucky.” Senatorial barons who had for decades dispensed patronage with a lavish hand suddenly found many of the elevator operators, doorkeepers, file clerks, secretaries, and committee staffers who had depended on them out of work. And even the most cursory look ahead at 1954 showed that the situation was likely to remain unchanged. “A whole series of shaky Democrats are up for re-election, while only two or three Republicans need worry…. [T]he Senate will remain Republican.” The southerners bitterly blamed northern liberals for their plight, and the liberals, with equal bitterness, blamed the South. The Democrats were a party in disarray, a party, as Time would put it, “looking for an excuse to fly to pieces,” a party reeling and bloody amid the wreckage of a battlefield on which they had suffered a great defeat.
But that was not how Lyndon Johnson saw the defeat, not even in its first, worst, moments. He had grasped the unpleasant facts of the election very quickly, of course, as was shown by the analysis he made in the “Reedy” memorandum of November 12. And while he had had to delay using these facts to support his plan to change the seniority system, waiting until after his election as Leader was a. fait accompli to reveal his potentially controversial plans for the system, no such discretion had been necessary in using those facts to propose an overall strategy for the Senate Democrats. And he had also seen, almost immediately after the election, that those facts had a deep significance for such a strategy, a strategy that went far beyond the seniority system—because while Eisenhower was popular with voters, in the Senate it was not the Eisenhower wing of the GOP but the Taft wing that ruled, and with those Old Guard senators Eisenhower was not popular at all.
It was still in November, 1952, that Dallas-based public relations man and political speechwriter Booth Mooney received a telephone call from Walter Jenkins asking him to come down to Austin for a job interview with his boss, who, Jenkins said, was going to be elected Democratic Leader when the new Congress convened. The “interview” lasted for three and a half hours, and, Mooney was to recall, “He talked nearly non-stop. We left his office only once, to go to the men’s room, and he continued to talk as we stood side by side” at the urinals. And the gist of Johnson’s monologue, Mooney was to recall, was that if he was elected Democratic Leader, he would have a great opportunity, “an opportunity to lead his colleagues in support of the Republican President.”
Mooney was not the only person to whom Lyndon Johnson tried to explain that Dwight Eisenhower’s popularity could be not a disaster but an opportunity. It could be an opportunity for himself. “The way he [Johnson] looked at it, about half the voters of Texas were against him,” Mooney recalls. “He had to make a dent in that large body of citizens before 1954, when he would be up for re-election…. He wanted to—he must—project a more conservative image,” and what better way to do that than by supporting a Republican President? And it could be an opportunity for his party as well.
Since Eisenhower was so popular, Lyndon Johnson explained, whoever was supporting him would be on the popular side. The Democrats, he said, could be on the popular side—particularly if they were supporting Eisenhower and the Republicans weren’t.
And, Lyndon Johnson said, if they handled things right, the Democrats could be supporting the President against his own party. At a time, between the election and the Inauguration, when the prevailing opinion not only of Democrats but of commentators of all shades of political opinion was that mounting a comeback in any near future would be difficult if not impossible for the Democrats, Johnson said that that opinion was wrong—that, in fact, mounting a comeback in the near future would be easy.
It would be easy, he said, because the first issues that were going to come up in the Eighty-third Congress would be foreign policy issues, and in foreign policy the dominant Republicans in Congress (and in particular in the Senate, which would, because of its treaty-approving power, be the focus of foreign policy debate) were not Eisenhower’s natural allies but his natural enemies. It was the support of the eastern, internationalist wing of the party that had given Ike the presidential nomination over Taft, but the Taft wing consisted mostly of Republicans from the Midwest, bedrock of isolationism. The Ohioan’s midwestern allies—Jenner, Bourke Hickenlooper, Welker, Ferguson, Molly Malone—had yearned for years to dismantle the Roosevelt and Truman policies that the liberals thought were so wonderful. Now, they felt, their time had come at last. They would, Johnson was certain, move at once to repudiate Yalta, slash away at the Marshall Plan, and loosen or sever America’s ties with the United Nations and with NATO. But Eisenhower was not merely a supporter of NATO; he had been commander of NATO. Says George Reedy, who was down on the ranch with Johnson and was familiar with his thinking, Eisenhower “had actually spent most of… the preceding twenty or thirty years in virtual support of the foreign policies of Roosevelt and of Truman. The Republicans … under Taft were opposed to that policy, [so] he and the congressional Republicans were just bound to be at loggerheads.” All the Democrats had to do was “take advantage” of the situation.
JOHNSON SAID THIS FIRST, of course, to Rayburn and Russell in long telephone calls from his paneled, comfortable study in the white house near the Pedernales, and both Rs agreed, wholeheartedly.
With one, the reasons for agreement included the personal. Sam Rayburn knew Dwight Eisenhower, and he liked him. Eisenh
ower had been born in Denison, a town in Rayburn’s district, and although his family had moved to Kansas when Ike was still a baby, that meant something to Rayburn. “He was a wonderful baby,” he would say with a grin. And Eisenhower’s parents had been poor, and that meant more. And Rayburn admired the General, not only for his wartime leadership but for the candor of his testimony during his frequent appearances before congressional committees; Sam Rayburn, who put such a high premium on truthfulness, regarded Dwight Eisenhower as a truthful man. Besides, he trusted Ike’s judgment on international affairs and defense. He would soon be writing a friend that “I told President Eisenhower … that he should know more about what it took to defend this country than practically anyone and that if he would send up a budget for the amount he thought was necessary to put the country in a position to defend ourselves against attack, I would promise to deliver 95 percent of the Democratic votes in the House….” As for domestic programs, Rayburn said, he would oppose Eisenhower if the President tried to undo “the good things we Democrats did” in the New and Fair Deals, but would provide the votes if the President tried to expand them. Beyond this, the adage that the opposition’s duty was to oppose was not Ray-burn’s adage. He didn’t want to oppose simply for the sake of opposing. “Any jackass can kick a barn down,” he said. “But it takes a good carpenter to build one.”
Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson Page 83
