And it was time for the captain of the team. Not only did Lyndon Johnson install Clark and Connally in the Democratic Policy Committee office—“at whoever’s desk was vacant,” secretary Nadine Brammer recalls—so that they could make their telephone calls right out of the Capitol Rotunda, not only did he allow them to use his private office when face-to-face lobbying was needed, he also threw his weight behind them. “He [Johnson] would call senators up and ask them to come in and see me,” Clark says. And Johnson made sure that senators knew that when Clark and Connally spoke, they spoke for him.
Johnson, of course, was lobbying himself—“harder than anyone,” Oltorf says—as well as mapping strategy and directing the overall campaign. Every evening, after the Majority Leader had finished his work on the Senate floor, Connally would be waiting for him in 231 to give him what Oltorf calls “daily reports.” Then Connally would have dinner with Oltorf—who would relay the reports to Herman Brown in Houston.
And Johnson was not lobbying only in his office. In obtaining the necessary votes from the other side of the aisle, he needed more than Eisenhower’s support, so he was deepening his alliance with the Republican senator who, as chairman of the GOP Policy Committee and ranking GOP member of the Appropriations Committee, held power over bills vital to GOP senators. The glue for part of that alliance was social: “He had Styles [Bridges] down [to Huntlands] during the natural gas fight,” Oltorf recalls. Part was philosophical—to Bridges, of course, any assault on business had to be Communist-inspired—and part, as always in the Johnson-Bridges relationship, was pragmatic. The five thousand dollars in cash from Johnson that Bobby Baker carried to New Hampshire for Bridges was only one episode—in either October or November of 1955, Elmer Patman had made a “lobbying” trip to that state. And in the overall pattern of the Johnson-Bridges relationship, these were minor episodes. The key figures in the major episodes were Connally and Clark. Asked why Bridges would not only support the natural gas bill himself but would also bring the support of other Republican senators, Connally replied, “The reason was money.” He said he did not recall the amount involved, but that it was large. “I told you, I carried inordinate amounts of cash,” he said. Asked the reason for Bridges’ support, Clark smiled and rubbed together his thumb and index finger in the gesture that means money. Asked how much money, Clark said he could no longer recall, but, asked if it might have been about five thousand dollars, he laughed. “It would have been many times five thousand,” he said. “Styles Bridges was no piker.” Nor was such “lobbying” confined to New Hampshire. Patman sent an emissary, John Neff, to pay visits to several Republican senators in the Midwest.
Whatever terrain he picked for his battle, Lyndon Johnson fought well. “I was worried,” Claude Wild recalls. “It [natural gas deregulation] was not a popular issue. If you don’t have a good champion there—well, it’s awful easy for a senator to vote against it.” But, Wild says, natural gas had “a real champion”: not Rayburn (“I doubt he had any impression [of the stakes]. He had no idea what money was”) but Johnson. “In Lyndon, we really had one.” Says Oltorf: “He [Johnson] got Bridges. Johnson really wanted him involved—and he got him involved.” Hardly had the Senate convened on January 3 when Johnson knew he had enough Republican votes to win.
The captain had devised a devastatingly effective strategy. Northern newspapers and magazines were already seething with outrage. The New York Times called the bill wrong “socially, economically and politically.” The Nation called it a “gouge,” saying that “the producers are convinced they will get away with it because of their power over Congress” (and reminding its readers that “oil interests helped to finance McCarthy’s four-year anti-Democratic crusade”). The New Republic said that “the contention that natural gas ought to sell in a free market, like coal or wheat, loses some force when one notes that buyers of natural gas can never buy in a free market.” Johnson kept debate on the Senate floor from turning the temperature up any higher. Proclaiming repeatedly that he would not “ram” the bill through, that of course there must be “full debate” on so important a measure, Johnson gave the northerners all the time they wanted—a full month, with the vote scheduled for February 6. His only request, he said, was that the debate be “gentlemanly.” What he didn’t give them was arguments, or opposition, or even an audience—anything that would furnish grist for the journalistic mill. When liberal opponents of the bill were speaking, there were few comments, or even questions, from the bill’s supporters. There were, in fact, few supporters. Johnson had told them to stay away from the Chamber.
By thus arranging for the liberals to be ignored rather than answered, he had ensured that their speeches received less attention than would have been the case had there been controversy—newsmaking controversy—on the floor. And since many liberals had a natural reluctance to sit at their desks listening to someone else give a long speech, and they had no leader strong enough to ensure that they stayed on the floor anyway, liberals often found themselves speaking to a very small audience indeed. On January 25, for example, Paul Douglas took the floor for a long, carefully researched speech against the Harris-Fulbright Bill. There were only two other senators present, the presiding officer and Frank Carlson of Kansas. The presiding officer signaled to Carlson to take the chair, and, stepping down from the dais, left the Chamber himself. “That left Senator Douglas talking to four rows of desks” in which there was not a single senator present, Frederick Othman wrote. “In the press gallery, reporters were busy interviewing each other on the question of whether anybody remembered seeing a senator speaking to nobody at all. Even the oldest correspondent couldn’t remember a time when at least two or three senators weren’t on the floor.”
Unwilling to blame themselves for the situation (which of course could have been at least partially improved had they simply been willing to sacrifice a little time to listen to one another speak), the liberals blamed Johnson. “For the sake of appearances it would seem that Senator Lyndon Johnson, who cleverly stage-managed this puppet show, would have arranged for more senators to…attend to make it look good from the galleries,” Thomas Stokes said. As it was, Stokes said, the “farce gives itself away. Too slick was his careful arrangement of ‘full debate.’… The scene in the Senate reflecting the apathy and cynicism of the elected servants…carries me back to the 1920s when big money was moving the pawns about here in Washington.” But the strategy worked. While some of the arguments against the bill were eloquent—“the concentrated power of the great oil companies, wielded today to influence the decision of national Government by contributions to both parties in many parts of the United States, is a menace to the proper functioning of free government within this country,” Hennings said—the arguments were delivered before galleries that were almost as empty as the floor. Writing angrily that “perhaps the most cynical aspect of Johnson’s management of the issue was his pious decree that the debate must be ‘gentlemanly,’” Doris Fleeson had to admit that the decree, “of course, had the effect of dampening tension and excitement, emotions that do sometimes communicate themselves to the Senate and the public and affect the outcome of debate.” The Washington Post could only observe helplessly that because “senators have stayed away from the Senate in droves,” the “arguments on the floor have attracted far less attention than they deserved.” “Never in the many years I have covered Washington have I seen such a skillful job of backstage manipulation,” Drew Pearson had to confess. So completely did Johnson feel he had the situation under control that in the middle of the debate, he left for a brief vacation in Florida—on a Brown & Root plane.
AND THEN, WITHOUT WARNING, the Natural Gas Bill of 1956 became a moral issue. On Friday, February 3, as the Senate was droning toward the weekend recess before the scheduled Monday vote on the measure, Senator Francis Case of South Dakota suddenly rose at his desk and announced that a lobbyist for a natural gas company had come to his campaign headquarters in Sioux Falls and left an envelope to
be given to him—an envelope containing hundred-dollar bills, “twenty-five of them, in fact.”
He had been planning to vote for the bill, Case said—“The principle of maintaining free enterprise appeals to me”—but the payment (which “would be the largest single contribution I could remember for any campaign of mine”) reminded him of Hennings’ warning that the oil companies’ “money power” is “a menace to the proper functioning of free government.”
“I object,” Case said, to “doing something so valuable to those interested in natural gas that they advance huge sums of money as a down payment, so to speak, on the profits they expect to harvest.” Since the bill evidently “has prospects of unusual monetary profit to some, and with that profit would go the means for a continuing effort to influence the course of government for private gain, I must vote” against it.
Suddenly the press had all the grist it needed, “SENATOR TELLS OF BRIBE ATTEMPT,” headlines blared. Summoning Gulf Oil’s chief lobbyist, David Searls, to his Mayflower suite, Ed Clark gave him some very serious advice. “You are in the wrong place today. I wouldn’t want to be in Washington today.” There would almost certainly be an investigation of Case’s charge, Clark said, and that investigation might easily expand to include other contributions. If Searls was in Washington, it would be easy to serve a subpoena on him. “And if you ever get called to testify, you’re going to be in a position where you have to tell the truth or lie. And if you lie, you’re going to be in danger of perjury. If it were me, I would leave today!” Whether or not Searls himself followed Clark’s advice is not known, but it was followed by so many others that the Mayflower found itself with an unexpectedly high number of vacant rooms that Friday evening: all that afternoon, the private planes had been taking off from National Airport, heading southwest.
John Connally was not nearly as tough as Clark. And he was far more immediately threatened by Case’s bombshell. Although the Senator had not yet named the lobbyist who had offered him the cash, saying he wanted to do so not on the Senate floor but to some “properly constituted authority” such as the FBI or a Senate Committee, Connally knew that it was John Neff, a lobbyist for Keck’s Superior Oil Company, and that the cash had come from Elmer Patman and the General Gas Committee, whose lobbying operations Connally was directing. And Connally didn’t move as fast as Clark, either. When Tommy Corcoran rushed into Connally’s suite at the Mayflower, he found him “white-faced,” all the self-assurance gone in an instant. For an entire day, he “sat paralyzed,” one of his biographers, James Reston Jr., was to write. Then he, too, left town. As Reston says, “The widely held rumor was that Lyndon Johnson had spirited his friend out of Washington for fear that Connally would be questioned and then implicated and indicted in the scandal.” (In his own memoir, Connally says, in an attempt at exculpation that is unintentionally revealing: “No attempt had been made to bribe anyone. A contribution that would have been given routinely was handled clumsily, with atrocious timing. But this was unfortunately one of the quirks of character of people who lived and died in an industry where fortunes were made and lost almost overnight. Many oilmen of that period carried with them staggering amounts of cash, and they treated it as though they were tossing around chips in a Las Vegas casino.”)
Lyndon Johnson wasn’t paralyzed. His instant reaction was to rage at Case—“I think we ought to investigate the morals of some people in South Dakota for bringing this up,” he said—and to try to make him seem like a guilty party in the matter. First, he tried to impugn Case’s veracity by casting doubt on the truth of the story, saying (in a statement with no basis in fact) that it was based upon “a vague recollection of a lady clerk.” The next day he said: “Thus far, Senator Case has declined to reveal the name of the man who left the money. Unless the senator from South Dakota voluntarily divulges the name of the fellow, and the impropriety, if any, the Senate is going to investigate.” Then, when Case gave Neff’s name—together with the envelope and the twenty-five hundred-dollar bills—to the FBI, Johnson switched to impugning Case’s motives. Ignoring the fact that Case had been a supporter of the natural gas bill, and the fact that he had reported the contribution as soon as he realized it was connected with the bill, Johnson told reporters that he considered the timing of Case’s revelation—so close to the date of the vote—a deliberate attempt to sabotage the measure, an attempt he said would not succeed; when several senators urged that the vote be delayed until, as Mike Mansfield put it, “a complete and thorough investigation” could ascertain “whether other senators had received similar offers,” Johnson said there would be no delay. The vote, he said, would be held on Monday as scheduled.
ON MONDAY, on a packed Senate floor, several senators on both sides of the aisle called for a delay until, as Republican Potter of Michigan put it, it could be determined whether Neff’s approach to Case had been an isolated instance or “just a small part of the big overall effort of certain people to influence the passage of this bill.” But the Majority Leader was having none of it. “The Senate of the United States can ill afford to prostrate itself before phantoms,” he said. “That is what we would be doing if we delayed the vote now at hand.” When the clerk called the roll, the only senator who changed his vote because of the uproar over the Case contribution was Case, who voted against it. Every other senator voted as Johnson’s tally sheet showed he was going to vote. And while Democrats voted against the bill, 24 to 22, Republicans supported it by a 31–14 margin. “The Senate, casting aside suggestions that it was voting under a cloud of suspicion, passed the natural gas bill tonight, 53 to 38,” John Morris reported in the New York Times. “All signs indicate that President Eisenhower will sign it into law.”
The calls for an investigation did not die away, however. In a coincidence that Johnson viewed as unfortunate, the Rules Committee had the previous year appointed a three-member subcommittee to look into the broad question of campaign financing. Not only was it the obvious body to conduct the investigation, but its chairman was Missouri’s Hennings, who, facing a re-election campaign in November, had vowed to stop drinking, had in fact kept that vow for some months, and was therefore once again a dynamic and effective senator—and who, as a former District Attorney, knew how to investigate. Moreover, the other Democratic member was the lamentably independent Albert Gore. Surrounded by reporters, in the lobby outside the Senate Chamber, Hennings said his subcommittee would begin the very next morning a “thorough and complete look into the Case matter and every other damn matter in connection with it and get at the big boys if we can.”
Lyndon Johnson could not allow such an investigation. The “big boys” in question were his big boys—Herman and George, and Sid and Clint and the other oilmen with whose lobbying efforts he had been so closely connected. They were Ed Clark and John Connally, who had worked right out of his office. Any “thorough and complete” investigation could hardly help turning up his name. It had to be stopped.
And he stopped it—on the next day, Tuesday, February 8, 1956, a day of fast-paced, and often brutal, maneuvering in the Capitol and the Senate Office Building. He was not the only senator who wanted it stopped, of course. Some of his colleagues had personal reasons. “What [Mr. Case] did was to raise in the Senate the whisper: ‘Oil money,’” William White wrote. Campaign financing was a sensitive issue with many senators, and no aspect of such financing was more sensitive than “oil money.” In “recent years,” the issues “in which there were truly vast sums of money involved have concerned the oil and gas lobby.” Who knew how many senators’ names might be blackened in a probe of “oil money”? Others feared a blackening not only of themselves but of what Russell Baker described as the entire “political structure supporting them.” There was “a growing uneasiness in the Senate about having itself subjected to a ‘tough’ investigation on this most delicate of issues,” Baker said, a growing “doubt as to whether the voting public could stomach the facts of political life.” And the mere fact of such an inv
estigation might tarnish the Senate’s image. “Nothing” disturbs “the Senate type” more than “evidence that the Senate may be losing the respect of the country,” White wrote. For all these reasons, James Reston Sr. said, “If there is anything that exceeds the need for a fundamental investigation and revision of the present system of financing campaigns it is the unwillingness of many senators to encourage such an investigation.” But Johnson was the senator most involved, and he was the senator who played the leading role in stopping the investigation.
Pleading with Hennings to restrict his subcommittee’s investigation to the single contribution, Johnson pulled out all the stops. The agitation over the natural gas fight was causing his heart to act up again, he said; the doctor was even threatening to put him back on digitalis. “I felt as though I were being cast in the role of his murderer,” a shaken Hennings would tell a friend the next morning. And when Hennings nonetheless tried to stand his ground, he abruptly found it opening beneath his feet.
As soon as the Senate convened on Tuesday, Johnson and Knowland, in a move which Johnson devised and to which Knowland acquiesced, jointly introduced a resolution, which passed unanimously, without discussion, establishing a “Select Committee for Contribution Investigation.” Its four members were Democrats Walter George and Carl Hayden, and Republicans Edward Thye of Minnesota and Styles Bridges.
The Select Committee’s mandate was as narrow as was implied by the lack of any plural in its title: the resolution empowered it to “investigate the circumstances surrounding” the “alleged improper” contribution to Case—and no other contribution. Included in the resolution was a budget—$10,000—adequate only for so narrow an inquiry. And in the committee’s first meeting, held in Vice President Nixon’s office, steps were taken to make sure that its investigation of that contribution would be the only investigation of that contribution.
Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson Page 106
