Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson

by Robert A. Caro

  Johnson did, indeed, act like a heart patient for a while, following his doctors’ orders. He took a nap in the midafternoon, on the couch either in G-14 or in Skeeter Johnston’s inner office, or, occasionally, in the Marble Room, with an aide stationed outside the door to make sure he wasn’t disturbed. Because the ordinary sofa was too short for him to stretch out, he had Senate cabinetmaker Renzo Vanni make a number of new couches, seven feet long, extra wide, so big that Vanni called them “battleship couches”; one, called by others the “Johnson Couch,” remains in the Marble Room to this day. And for a while these naps were not to be interrupted. He would tell Skeeter’s assistant, Dorothye Scott, “how soon to call him,” and tell her he wasn’t to be disturbed until then.

  But only for a short while. After a week or two, when he came through Skeeter’s outer office, Ms. Scott recalls, “he would walk in his great, big strides, like an antelope, and by the time he would get from my outer office into the inner office he would have said about seven things he wanted me to do.” And long before the time he had told Ms. Scott to wake him, the door to the inner office would burst open, and he would stride out, asking her if the things had been done. More and more days were uninterrupted by any nap at all. Clements was in trouble in Kentucky, where he would have to stand for reelection in November against a very popular Republican, tall, handsome Assistant Secretary of State Thruston Morton. By February, the Assistant Leader was spending a lot of time back home, and Johnson asked George Smathers to be “acting whip.” The suave Floridian knew Johnson the senator, but he didn’t know Johnson the boss, and he quickly found out that, as he was to put it, Johnson “was very, very difficult to work for.” Senator though he might be, Smathers found himself treated as if he were a member of Johnson’s staff, and he learned that when Johnson gave an assignment, no excuses were accepted. “He used to say, ‘I want only can do people.’ That was one of his favorite expressions. ‘I only want can do people around. I don’t want anybody who tells me that they can’t do something.’” If the assignment was to obtain a senator’s vote, “Johnson was very unsympathetic” if that vote was not forthcoming. Once “Quentin Burdick…didn’t vote like Johnson wanted. ‘Why didn’t you get on that, goddamn you, so-and-so and so-and-so two weeks ago!’” And the assignments never stopped coming. “He demanded not just one hundred percent of your time, but more than that,” Smathers recalls. Every morning, early, “Lyndon came by my house on Garfield Street,” and I was with him until ten-thirty at night. As soon as we walked into the Capitol, he started his sixty-cylinder engine, and he didn’t slow up during the entire workday.” He wanted Smathers to be available until he left for home, and “Then it seemed like only a few hours later [that] Lyndon and his limousine were back at my front door to start a new day.” There was no time to nap, or to slow down, because the first major business Lyndon Johnson put before the Senate, within three weeks after the session began, was the part of his “Program with a Heart” that he considered the most significant for his political future: that proposal he had tried to conceal in the middle of the program so that no one would notice it.

  DURING THE SIX YEARS that had passed since 1949, the Senate’s refusal to advise and consent to the reappointment of Leland Olds had had the desired effect on the Federal Power Commission. Olds’ replacement by the malleable Mon Wallgren meant that three of the FPC’s five members were consistently reluctant to stand between the wealthy natural gas producers and the still greater wealth they coveted—understandably reluctant, in Paul Douglas’ view. “All know the great pressure which has been exerted by the big producers on the Commission…and the punishment which has been meted out to those who took an opposite stand,” Douglas wrote in 1956. “Since this is a real world, it is not to be wondered at that the majority of the Commission have chosen to play it safe.” Not only had the FPC reversed, one by one, the policies and regulations that Olds had promulgated to moderate the producers’ greed, it had even taken the stance that its jurisdiction did not extend to the independent producers who sold gas to the pipeline companies—a stance which allowed the producers to claim steadily higher costs and to charge steadily higher rates—and when House liberals moved to formally give it that jurisdiction, the commission declined to accept it. During those six years, therefore, the price of natural gas had risen and risen again, from six cents per one thousand cubic feet of gas in 1949 to ten cents in 1955, and so had the profits of the natural gas companies, and the price of their stock: a share of Superior Oil Company stock sold for $150 in 1949; in 1956, it was selling for exactly $1,000 per share; since the Keck family owned 21,977 shares of Superior stock, it was easy to calculate the value of their holdings: $21,977,000. As for Herman and George Brown’s Texas Eastern Transmission, a share of its stock, priced at $12 in 1949, was selling for $28 in 1955, which meant that the holdings of the two brothers—only a small share, of course, of their overall assets—was worth $8,379,000.

  In 1954, however, the states of Michigan and Wisconsin, whose residents and factories constituted the captive market of gigantic Phillips Petroleum, were paying almost 40 percent more for natural gas than in 1949, took the FPC to court to force it to give consumers the protection that Franklin Roosevelt had created it to give them, and the Supreme Court, holding for the states, specifically ordered the agency to accept jurisdiction over the independent producers, and regulate their rates.

  Responding to this verdict as slowly as it dared, the FPC issued its decisions on rate applications so slowly that they caused what Fortune called “the biggest logjam in the history” of any federal regulatory agency. Delayed though regulation might be, however, it was coming, unless something was done about the court ruling. Legislation was needed to supersede it. In October, 1954, therefore, the country’s largest oil companies formed two committees. The activities of one, the “Natural Gas and Oil Resources Committee,” would be public: an advertising and public relations campaign to create support for the legislation; the committee would spend $1,753,000 during 1955 “to educate the public.” The activities of the other committee—budget and expenditures kept tightly concealed—were more private. Its educational efforts were directed not at the public but at members of Congress; it was formed, as a memorandum by the committee’s attorneys was to explain, “for this express purpose.” The funds for the lobbying carried out by this “General Gas Committee” were collected under the direction of another figure from the Olds hearings, Lyndon Johnson’s old ally Maston Nixon of Corpus Christi, president of the Southern Minerals Corporation, and were distributed by two principal lobbyists: Johnson’s former administrative assistant John Connally, and Elmer Patman, a loud, arrogant attorney from Austin, Texas, who was on Superior Oil’s payroll. Early in 1955, a bill was introduced by Arkansas Representative Oren Harris to in effect nullify the Supreme Court decision by exempting independent producers from FPC regulation, and on July 28, 1955, after extensive lobbying by both public and private committees, it was passed, 209 to 203, by the House of Representatives. A companion bill, introduced by Arkansas Senator Fulbright, was reported out of the Senate Commerce Committee that same day.

  BRINGING THE HARRIS-FULBRIGHT NATURAL GAS BILL to the Senate floor would angrily divide Democratic senators. The resulting split would run along geographic rather than the usual ideological lines: senators from the gas-producing southwestern and western states were adamantly in favor of deregulation; senators from the gas-consuming northern and eastern states adamantly opposed. The intra-party floor fight would be bitter, for not only were Democratic liberals against the measure, so were some of the party’s many conservative senators—because the injustice was too raw for them. More than 70 percent of America’s natural gas was owned by only forty-two companies, many of which were controlled by a small, often overlapping, group of individuals like Richardson, Murchison, Abercrombie, the Kecks, and the brothers Brown. It was this small group that was reaping, at the expense of more than 21 million familes, most of them middle or lower class
, enormous, almost unimaginable profits. If there could be said to exist a “national interest” in natural gas regulation, it most certainly lay on the side of the consumers, not the producers. The producers, in addition, possessed a virtual monopoly over a natural resource which should, in the last analysis, belong to the people as a whole, and in the absence of federal regulation, the monopoly would only grow stronger, and the consumers would be only more and more defenseless against it. Millions of urban families owned gas-powered stoves, hot-water heaters and furnaces; purchasing new appliances run on other fuels would be expensive—too expensive for most of them. “Once the lines are laid, the homes hooked into the utility systems and the cooking and heating appliances bought, the chance for the users of gas to get any real protection against unfair producers’ prices by competition is nil,” Walter Goodman said. Speaking for the mayors of fifty American cities, Philadelphia’s Mayor Joseph Clark told a Senate committee: “To eliminate controls … is to leave the consumer at the mercy of [a] small group of oil companies.” The southerners on whose support Lyndon Johnson could usually rely were split. Brown & Root’s Posh Oltorf would never forget his surprise when he learned that “Lyndon was having as much trouble with the conservatives as with the liberals—with Russell as much as Humphrey. They [leading conservative senators] were opposed to it [the natural gas bill]. They were for free enterprise, but this was just too much. They thought it was terrible. They thought it was a damned bonanza for the oil companies. We had a terrible time with Russell and Byrd. I remember my shock that they would be opposed to something for businessmen.”

  The stakes involved in passage of the bill were huge, however. Estimates of the short-term increases in gas prices that could be expected following its passage ranged between $200 million and $400 million per year, an increase that would boost the values of the producers’ gas reserves by between $12 billion and $30 billion. In expectation of passage, immense quantities of gas were being held off the market so that it could be sold at higher prices. Divisive though the bill would be, Lyndon Johnson’s cherished “unity” had to be sacrificed to higher considerations. To win the Democratic presidential nomination, he would have to become friendlier with northern liberals, and his principal financiers, rabid reactionaries almost to a man, would not ordinarily tolerate that. But the natural gas bill could be the key to greater tolerance, for these Texas tycoons held huge natural gas reserves. As the astute Oltorf was to explain, “This [the natural gas bill] transcended ideology. This would put something in their pocket. That’s how they viewed politics. Any son of a bitch who makes me a million dollars can’t be all bad. As long as you put dollars in their pockets, they’d forgive your ideology.”

  Divisive though the Harris-Fulbright Bill might be, therefore, in 1955 Lyndon Johnson had only been waiting for it to be passed by the House before bringing it to the Senate floor and passing it. With a majority of Democratic senators against the bill, he would have to pass it, over the wishes of his own party, with Republican votes—and he had been intending to do just that, with the support of Eisenhower, who firmly believed that the measure would liberate businessmen from unwarranted governmental restrictions.

  Johnson didn’t want these arrangements upset by his heart attack. When Acting Majority Leader Clements visited him at the Bethesda Medical Center in July, 1955, Johnson expressed himself, as Clements reported to the Democratic Policy Committee upon his return from the hospital, “very frankly”; “he [Johnson] would like the bill taken up yesterday and passed the day before yesterday.”

  Clements was not the man for so difficult a job, as he himself appears to have recognized. Telling the Policy Committee that “opponents were ready for extended discussion,” he betrayed a lack of confidence that the bill could be passed without Johnson’s personal participation in the fight, saying, “In January, we will have back with us our distinguished friend from Texas. He will be back with us strong…. I will be happy to have it come up as early as possible in January.” The committee agreed that that would probably be best.

  Now Johnson was back—strong. Opposition within his party had filtered into even his rubber-stamp Policy Committee. Trying to show, as he put it in a committee meeting on January 5, 1956, that “I wanted to lean over backwards so I could not be accused of ramming the bill down the throats of the Senate,” he had invited the leading proponents and opponents of the natural gas bill to make their case before the committee, and Paul Douglas made the opposition case with his usual eloquence. The bill, Douglas said, shouldn’t be passed, or even introduced, “under Democratic sponsorship.” In 1954, Douglas said, one of the most effective Democratic issues against the Republicans had been the “giveaway to big business.” If the bill “comes out under Democratic sponsorship,” he said, “it is going to deprive our presidential, senatorial and congressional candidates of our strongest arguments…. If any Democratic speaker talked about giveaway favors to big business, it would be thrown back in his face…. This might well be a factor in our losing control of committees in both houses.” Johnson tried to counter that argument, but as usual when he confronted Douglas in argument, he did not get the better of the exchange. “Senator Johnson said he had heard that [Douglas’] viewpoint expressed strongly in the Tidelands argument, but it didn’t seem to have that effect on the 1954 elections,” the Policy Committee minutes report. “Senator Douglas replied that the Tidelands Bill was brought up under Republican leadership.” Conceding that “the majority of the Policy Committee” was probably against the natural gas bill, Johnson said, “the only question was whether it should be brought up.” Was there any objection to bringing it to the floor? he asked. “I won’t object, but I want to say that it will be very unfortunate in my state,” Hennings of Missouri replied. Five of the nine committee members hadn’t said a word during the discussion, and the committee finally looked where it always looked for direction. When “Senator Russell said his memory was” that in July the committee had agreed that it would be bought up “as early as possible in January,” the committee agreed that it could be brought up.

  IT WAS TIME for the first team. “They [the oilmen] sent their best men up,” Posh Oltorf was to recall, in the tone of a Texas Homer relating the story of an historic battle. Across the crowded lobby of the Mayflower Hotel a big hand with two missing fingers waved to a friend, and, seeing that hand, Lobbyist Dale Miller whispered in awe to a friend, “Ed Clark’s here.” To get the legendary Secret Boss of Texas to Washington, the Humble Oil Company was paying him—in addition, of course, to the rent for his suite and all expenses—a fee of one thousand dollars per day, but, so that he wouldn’t have to suffer the indignity of registering as a lobbyist, “it was arranged,” as he would recall, “that although the ’Umble was paying me, it would be paid through Brown & Root,” a construction firm ostensibly unconnected with any legislation then before Congress. And Clark, of course, had his private incentive for winning the natural gas fight: those forty thousand shares of Texas Eastern in his lock-box back in Austin. The broad-shouldered, big-bellied, squeaky-voiced, rumpled, coarse Clark was one of the two men the natural gas industry considered its most effective champions; the other—tall, slim, handsome, smoother than smooth, custom-tailored in pinstriped banker’s blue—was also at the Mayflower. “John Connally had the entrees [sic],” Oltorf would recall. “He knew everybody from being on Johnson’s staff. And everybody liked Connally. And he could really get his side across. He knew how to talk to senators. He would say, ‘We’ll never forget you. You will be doing a wonderful thing for your country, and I’ll never forget it.’ And, of course, that implies future support.” The arrogant Patman had been supervising the General Gas Committee’s lobbying efforts; he was informed that from now on, he would be reporting to Connally.

  Other lobbyists, not of the stature of a Clark or Connally but heroic figures in the Texas oil industry nonetheless, took the field in the Natural Gas Battle of 1956: Charlie Francis, Colonel Ernest O. Thompson of the Texas Railr
oad Commission (“I remember seeing Colonel Thompson when I was a boy, in a tent in an oil field in East Texas,” Dale Miller would say. “And he was up there in Washington in 1956—old and bent, but he was there”), Robert Windfohr of Dallas. Some wore into that battle the mantle of their fathers. Dale Miller’s huge suite at the Mayflower—377—had been the suite of his late father, Roy Miller of Texas Gulf Sulphur, an almost mythical lobbyist possessed of so much power in Washington that, the Saturday Evening Post said, “For twenty years he has had the status of a quasi-public figure.” The executive director of the Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Association, Claude Wild Jr., a very canny young political string-puller, was the son of Claude Wild Sr., the canny old pol who had pulled strings for Lyndon Johnson’s early campaigns in Texas. And all these men knew that this battle would be remembered in years to come. Talking with the author decades later, some of them tried to ensure that their participation in it would be recorded for history. Claude Wild Jr. was discussing another matter when he interrupted himself to say, “You know, I was in charge of counting the votes for the natural gas bill.” After a pause, he added, “You’re not writing that down.” And he waited until the author had made the desired note before continuing. During that battle, some of the oilmen even came up to Washington themselves, staying at the Mayflower. “I saw Hunt there today,” Texans told each other excitedly. “Sid’s here, too. I saw him. And Old Man Keck in his wheelchair.” George Brown, suave and discreet, was seldom seen: his suite was not at the Mayflower but at the Hay-Adams.