Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson

by Robert A. Caro

  “Get ’em on the line for me,” Johnson would say, and Baker would give the numbers to the telephone clerks, and the first call would go through into Booth Ten, the telephone booth closest to the clerks’ desks.

  The matter to be discussed might be only one of attendance, and then Johnson might only say into the telephone: “Lister, we’re gonna motion up the District bill tonight, and Ah want you to be standin’ by. Ah’ll need you over here. Ah’m not even gonna tell the Republicans until Ah bring it up. And Ah want you guys to be ready.”

  But the matter might be more delicate. Then the door to Booth Ten would close, and a senator or aide passing by would see Lyndon Johnson hunched over the phone inside. One hand would be holding a cigarette, from which he would take frequent deep drags. The other would be holding the receiver, and Johnson’s mouth would be very close to it. As he spoke into it, he would sometimes rise to his feet, his tall body filling the booth, or he might remain seated and hunched over on the little seat, but, standing or sitting, if he was having difficulty persuading the senator on the other end of the line to his way of thinking, Lyndon Johnson’s whole being would be poured into that persuasion. His head would be bowed low over the mouthpiece, and sometimes as he talked and he became more and more wound up in his effort, he would lower his head until it was beneath the receiver, and then it would cock to one side and come up under the receiver as if it was the senator’s face.

  Sometimes Johnson would want to make sure that nobody could hear what he was saying. “If you stepped out of Booth Ten you could see the whole cloakroom,” one of the telephone clerks recalls, “and he would stand up, open the door [of the booth] and look around the corner to see if anyone could hear.” Then Lyndon Johnson would duck back into Booth Ten to say the things he didn’t want anyone else to hear.

  What he said might have the desired result, and he would replace the receiver, step out of the booth, and snatch up the phone in the next booth, where the clerks had another senator waiting on the phone. Or it might not have the desired result. Then, as the conversation came to a close, Johnson, still inside the booth, door closed, might kick the booth as he hung up, or pound his fist into its wall. In the cloakroom, men would watch the booth shaking with the Leader’s rage. Or, stepping out of the booth after hanging up the phone, his face the “thundercloud” that men feared, he would kick the outside of the booth, “viciously,” as one Senate staffer puts it, or slam the door.

  By this time, there would be lights, signals that senators were waiting for him on the line, over several booths. “He would go right down the row, getting his players lined up,” the telephone clerk says.

  Often, while he was talking to one senator, a call he needed to take immediately would come in on another line. A clerk would tap timidly on the door of the booth in which Johnson was talking, and tell him the other senator was ready. Stepping out of the booth, the telephone still in his hand, the cord stretching with him, Johnson would reach into the other booth and take that receiver, and then stand between the two booths, with the cords stretching out from them to his hands. Or he might want to talk to two or three or even four of his “players”—senators with disagreements about the same amendment—at the same time, and he talked to them at the same time, on two or three or four phones, standing in the narrow aisle between the two rows of phone booths with a receiver, or two receivers, grasped in each big hand, talking first into one receiver, then into another, long black cords stretching out from his tall figure in all directions.

  Sometimes this telephone persuasion would be successful. Then, moving from booth to booth, Johnson would slam the receivers back into their cradles, a thin smile of satisfaction on his face. Sometimes it wouldn’t. Then, with a grimace of disgust and fury, Johnson would drop the receivers, or hurl them to the floor so hard that they bounced and their cords would still be quivering when a clerk scurried to pick them up. He would smash his foot into one of the booths so hard that it shook, and as he strode out of the cloakroom back entrance to collect himself in the corridor outside, the telephone area still vibrated with Lyndon Johnson’s rage.

  “Or,” the clerk recalls, “he might look around the corner of Booth Ten to see if anyone was in the cloakroom that he wanted to work on.” If there was, Lyndon Johnson would go over to him, to persuade in person.

  The quarry might be seated on one of the leather couches that lined the cloakroom walls. They were low and soft—ideal locales for persuasion, in the words of the clerk “good places for him to pin a senator into so that he couldn’t get away.”

  Approaching the senator, Johnson would lean over him, perhaps chatting amiably for a moment or two about inconsequential matters, but with his weight resting on one hand that had been placed on the back of the couch, close by the senator’s shoulder. Then, switching to the real subject of the conversation, Johnson would sit down beside him. The hand would remain on the back of the couch, so that when Johnson, continuing to talk, leaned forward to look the senator more directly in the face, his arm would be stretched out beside the other man’s head. In the urgency of his appeal, Johnson would lean further forward, sliding to the edge of his seat, and twist his body so it was more in front of the senator. Then he would cross the leg furthest from the senator over the knee closest to the other man. Already faced with the difficulty of pushing up from those deep, soft cushions, the senator would find the difficulty increased by the fact that not only was there a big arm like a bar on one side of him, but also a big leg like a bar in front of him. If the senator exhibited signs of restlessness, Johnson would grab the ankle of that leg with his free hand, so that there were in effect two bars in front of the senator, not to mention a size 11 shoe in front of his face; “the poor guy,” the clerk notes, “couldn’t get out.”

  With the senator’s continued presence thus assured, the first Johnson arm, the one that had been resting on the back of the couch, would stretch along it, so that the senator was almost completely surrounded. And the trap would be tightened. As Johnson talked faster and faster, that heavy arm would come down around the senator’s shoulders, hugging them. His hand would grasp the senator’s shoulder firmly. He would lean further and further into him, the hand that had been on his own ankle now on the senator’s knee or thigh. “I can still see those big meaty hands,” the clerk would recall decades later. “One would be massaging the poor guy’s shoulder, and the other one would be grabbing his leg. I can still see Johnson leaning into him.” His face would be very close to the senator’s now, pushing closer and closer, his head coming up under his companion’s so that the senator’s head was often forced back against the back of the couch. No matter how much he may have wanted to retreat further, he couldn’t, and as he was held helpless, Johnson would talk faster and faster, pleading, cajoling, threatening.

  Some of these sessions on the cloakroom couches—or in the deep, soft cloakroom armchairs, better even than the couches for Johnson’s purposes, since by sitting down on one armrest and stretching an arm across to the other, he could imprison its occupant more effectively—lasted quite a long time. He had to win, and to win he needed the senator’s vote. And he wasn’t going to get up until he got it. “I’ve seen him devote an hour to work on one senator,” the clerk says.

  Then that vote would be secured. Lyndon Johnson would be up off the couch, standing in the center of the cloakroom, dispatching Humphrey or Molly Malone to hold the floor with a speech (“Don’t quit talkin’ ’til you see me back in there”), asking Russell or Eastland to exert his influence with one of their conservatives or Humphrey to exert his influence with one of his liberals, going over the tally sheets again, reading—quickly but with great care—the latest text of an amendment, ironing out the last details of the unanimous consent agreement, and then sending Baker on the run to have Floyd Riddick’s fastest typist type it up. And then he would have the agreement back, and, holding it in one hand, and shoving open the double doors with the other, Lyndon Johnson would come back out on the fl
oor to announce it—or, if he had not been able to get an agreement, to push the Senate to a vote without it, with, in his hand, the tally sheet that almost invariably showed that the vote was going to be very close.

  IF HE HAD THE VOTES, debate—even the limited debate permitted under the unanimous consent agreement—could only hurt, could allow opponents to realize what he was up to, could give Knowland time to get a more accurate count, could give men whose minds he had changed with his relentless persuasion time to change their minds back, to think better of what they had agreed to. He wanted the question called, and called fast; although the unanimous consent agreement allowed a certain number of hours or minutes for debate, he wanted to be able to yield his time back, and have his opponents yield their time back.

  “Don’t talk, we’ve got the votes. Don’t talk, we’ve got the votes,” Bobby Baker would whisper, standing at the corridor door to the cloakroom as the senators came through on the way to the Chamber—which, with a vote imminent, was beginning to fill up. Some senators didn’t get the idea and insisted on speaking. “I’d go up to him [Johnson] on the Senate floor and say Senator Lehman would like to have the floor as soon as possible,” Julius Edelstein recalls. “He’d say” (and as Edelstein shows Johnson’s response, his face twists into a snarl), “‘Well, he can have the goddamned floor!’” Rushing over to Edelstein, Gerry Siegel said: “I know Lehman has to talk for his constituents, but make it short. Make it short! Otherwise, it’ll make the Leader mad.”

  As a supporter of a measure was rising to speak, Johnson would go over to the supporter’s desk and growl, “Make it short. I’ve got the votes for it.” The reminders would continue during the senator’s statement. Once, Richard Neuberger of Oregon was giving an impassioned statement at a moment Johnson considered propitious for a vote. Johnson whispered to him to stop, but Neuberger didn’t. Circling Neuberger’s desk—in John Steele’s words, “like a coon dog does a treed animal”—Johnson whispered to him “from in back and then to the right side to tell Neuberger to knock it off.” Olin Johnston’s southern drawl was so slow! “Olin,” Johnson whispered urgently, “get the lead out of your ass!” “Lyndon,” Johnston said calmly, “you know I always read slow.” Says a Senate staffer who was standing nearby, “Then Olin goes back to reading. I thought Lyndon was going to have a fit.” Looking on another occasion at a speech that Olin was insisting on reading, Johnson saw to his dismay that it covered quite a few pages. “Two minutes, that’s all I can give you,” he said. “You’ve got to hold it to two minutes.” Johnston kept refusing. “Olin,” Lyndon said, forcing a comradely smile to his face, “why don’t you speak for two minutes and tomorrow you can put your whole speech in the Congressional Record and you can mail it to all the folks in South Carolina, and they won’t know the difference.” “Well, I guess that’s all right, Lyndon,” Johnston said, and read only a small part of the text—“so quickly,” an observer said, “that he scarcely could be understood.”

  The long arcs would be filling up now—senators coming in and walking along them to their desks, and then standing talking quietly with a colleague or sitting listening to the debate on the proposed bill—as if a painter, having finished the background, was putting in the figures. Other senators would have congregated in the well, bantering with each other in the relaxed senatorial way. The Chamber floor would be the familiar, still Senate tableau.

  Except that, on that floor, there would be one figure who, now, with the vote coming closer, seemed never to be still.

  He was prowling the big Chamber now, ranging restlessly up and down, side to side. He rarely listened to the debate, except occasionally for a moment or two to see if the speaker was saying anything he hadn’t anticipated. Rather his eyes would be constantly roaming the Chamber, “seeing how things were going—seeing if they were going,” as one aide put it.

  What was going on in the Republican cloakroom? How could he find out? What could he read in the faces of the senators coming out of that cloakroom? Where were his senators: why weren’t they all here? Raising his hand over his head, he would beckon Bobby Baker or one of Baker’s aides, or, if they didn’t see him, snap his fingers loudly to get their attention, and order them to see that the senators were on their way. Were two or three on whom he had counted likely to be absent? He’d hurry across the floor to arrange live pairs. Was something going wrong? Was the chairman of Public Works drunk again, confused and rambling as he tried to manage one of his committee’s bills? Striding across the floor to another senator, he would whisper, “You ready to do five or ten minutes on Defense? I want to get Denny off the floor.” Then, forcing himself to move slowly so as not to attract attention, he’d walk down the aisle to where Chavez was standing, take his arm—if that wasn’t enough, take his lapel and put his other arm around his shoulder—whisper, “Denny, I’d like to talk to you outside for a minute,” raise a hand for recognition, tell the presiding officer, “Mr. President, I’d like to suspend discussion, and if it be the will of the Senate, take up the Defense Appropriations bill, and we will bring Public Works back in a few minutes,” and then lead Chavez up the aisle and out the door. Did he catch a glimpse, as the doors to the Republican cloakroom swung open, of a GOP senator on whose vote he was counting, talking inside the cloakroom, in a suspiciously cordial manner, to a White House liaison man? Waiting until the senator came out on the floor, he would check to see if the vote was still firm, and if it wasn’t he’d be moving quickly to some other senator, to try to replace it.

  With the vote all but upon him now, he seemed always to be in motion, and the motion would be faster, almost frenzied. As he talked to senators, his hands never stopped moving, gesturing expressively, chopping the air with that snake-killing gesture, opening a palm to illustrate a point, punching the air with a fist, jabbing a lapel with a finger, patting a senator’s shoulder, straightening his tie, grabbing his lapel, hugging him if he agreed to the proposition being made.

  If he dropped down into his own front-row center chair, he might sprawl down in it, stretch out both long legs across the aisle, or lean far back, crossing them. But he wouldn’t stay in any pose long. “Jiggling, scratching, crossing and uncrossing his legs,” leaning back in his chair with a hand up to his face as he whispered to Russell close behind him or to a senator who had approached with information or an inquiry, pulling out a tally sheet, writing something on it, tucking it back in his pocket, “he seemed,” in the words of one reporter, “simply unable to sit still for a moment.” Abruptly, galvanized by a sudden thought, he would leap out of his seat, “going from slouched to almost frenetic in an instant,” as another reporter put it, to rush over to a senator. “You’d see him with the finger right in the face. He’d be over on the Republican side as much as the Democratic. Then he’d be back across the floor, pulling someone else off to the side,” a slash of vivid movement through the senatorial still-life.

  And if something was going wrong, Lyndon Johnson would be moving even faster, moving so fast that, Neil MacNeil reported, “his baggy-cut, almost zoot suit flies open.” Once, when Johnson was away from the floor, a number of senators unexpectedly began proposing one controversial, contradictory, and often confusing amendment after another to a routine Post Office appropriation bill being managed by Olin Johnston. The mere discussion of those amendments would plunge the Senate into the kind of angry debate that, in past years, would have brought it to a halt for endless days, Steele wrote; passage of any of the amendments would result in a certain Eisenhower veto. “The Senate was in a turmoil. The babble on the floor prevented senators from hearing and being heard. There were amendments to amendments; amendments offered and withdrawn; senators arose to protest they couldn’t hear the debate, didn’t understand what was transpiring.”

  Then, into this “mixed-up mess” roared Lyndon Johnson. “Quickly sizing up the situation, he began to act. He paced from one side of the Senate Chamber to the other, moving at a loping gait, the coat tails of his gray flannel suit w
inging out behind. He whispered with Bill Knowland, with Frank Carlson, the Administration’s spokesman on postal matters; he conferred with Olin Johnston and Johnston’s aide; he talked with Russell Long, Ev Dirksen, Parliamentarian Charlie Watkins, with Dick Russell; he slipped to a phone, one equipped with a baffled mouthpiece, in an alcove just off the Senate rostrum. He snapped his thumb and second finger with the retort of a firecracker to summon a page for water…. The Senate Majority Leader was ready to straighten things out.

  “It would take some straightening out—seven different maneuvers…. Johnson was running the whole show. From his Majority Leader’s desk, he hand-signalled the various players in the drama. He peremptorily cut senators off to seize the floor. He barked harsh orders to Jack Kennedy in the presiding officer’s chair to put this question, make that ruling. He pleaded with senators to defer speeches, he whispered to aides to summon this or that senator, he snapped his fingers like a whip to fetch more water. He sped to the cloakroom for a conference and back to his desk. He ranged the aisles…. A legislative catastrophe [was] averted.”

  And that was on a non-controversial, relatively minor bill. On a bill on which the vote was going to be close, and the result of genuine political significance, the frenzy of Lyndon Johnson’s actions escalated another notch. As the moment approached for the roll call—the call that would determine the actual, irrevocable winning or losing for this man who had to win—Lyndon Johnson’s orders grew sharper, more punctuated with fury.