Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson

by Robert A. Caro

  His method of making the race was somewhat unconventional. All that Monday, Stevenson and Harriman (and Kefauver, who was trying to persuade his two hundred delegates to switch to Stevenson) rushed from caucus to caucus behind police motorcycle escorts with wailing sirens. The Texas caucus was the only one Johnson attended. He spent the rest of the day—the entire day—on the Hilton’s twenty-third floor, in his suite, behind closed doors. He had received four formal invitations from delegations to address them that day; he declined all four. Party leaders who wanted to talk to him were told he would be glad to meet with them—in his suite. “He wouldn’t go out to seek delegations or to meet with them,” Jim Rowe recalls. “It was a very odd performance”—odd unless one takes into account what Rowe calls Johnson’s “ambivalence”: the conflict between a desire to run and a dread of being seen to be running, lest he lose, since losing would then be “humiliation” (that word was on his lips constantly during the convention, particularly when he was asked why he wasn’t out appealing for votes; “I didn’t come here to be humiliated,” he told Marshall McNeil when McNeil asked him that question); the conflict between his emotions and his intellect, which told him how long the odds were against his winning. His emotions veered constantly between extremes: between the despair and depression when he thought he wasn’t winning and the overconfidence or euphoria that made him so overbearing when he thought he was winning (when, at a press conference, reporters pointed out that “serious” candidates usually address delegations, he replied, “Different people have different methods. Sometimes they come to you”). His performance is difficult to understand, furthermore, unless one also takes into account two other considerations. One was the self-knowledge that had made him say, when he first got to the Senate, that it was “the right size”—the awareness that he was most effective when he dealt with men in private, behind closed doors, and least effective when he had to speak to them in large groups. The other was not a personal but a political calculation. If he tried openly to rally support for himself, the first states that would announce their support would be southern states. Not wanting to be labeled a southern, regional candidate, he wanted at least one or two states from other regions to announce first.

  And, indeed, on that Monday, the leaders did come to him. “While the other candidates rushed through the city in cavalcades heralded by sirens, to swoop down on wavering and uncommitted delegates, Lyndon Johnson sat in his white-walled suite overlooking Lake Michigan and received the mighty of his party,” Mary McGrory wrote. The Hilton’s twenty-third floor, on which Rayburn, Daley, and Stevenson also had suites, was the most crowded spot in Chicago, its long hallways crammed with the heavy, clumsy television cameras and cables of that era, with TV cameramen and newspaper and magazine photographers and reporters and delegates, and most of the delegates in the halls were wearing the “Love That Lyndon” buttons, and most of the visitors turned left after getting off the elevators, toward the wing that he had commandeered, not toward the suites of the other big names.

  In the hallway that had in effect become his private corridor, the crush intensified, television cameramen and newspaper photographers shoving each other for vantage points, the TV cameras and cables so thick that when a waiter tried to push through them with a table containing Johnson’s lunch, the scene, one reporter wrote, was “not unlike the ship cabin scene” of the Marx Brothers farce A Night at the Opera. And down the corridor that day, pushing past the photographers and reporters to the door at the end numbered 2306-A, Stevenson, Harriman, and Kefauver made their way, as did the favorite-son candidates Symington and Magnuson, vice presidential possibilities Humphrey and Kennedy, as well as Ernest McFarland, “flown in,” as one reporter wrote, “to deliver his state,” Richard Russell, in town to deliver several states, and twenty-one other men. They would knock on the door and sometimes be admitted at once, and sometimes have to wait outside in the corridor, either because someone else was inside or because, alone in the suite or with only Rowe or John Connally present, Johnson was working the phones; so many telephones had been installed in 2306-A and the adjoining small sitting room that wires seemed to stretch everywhere, and Johnson spent hours that day pacing back and forth with a big hand wrapped around a receiver, talking, persuading, selling. Lyndon Johnson’s suite, Bill White wrote, “was the most crowded in Chicago”—the epicenter that day of convention maneuvering. Reporters clocked the visits, and attached significance to the length of time Lyndon Johnson deigned to spend with each man—Stevenson, it was noted, was allowed thirty minutes, Kefauver a mere five—before they emerged, to be backed against a corridor wall by the press while they gave carefully noncommittal comments about what had taken place inside. Johnson would emerge and pose for a minute for photographers with a favored few—Stevenson and Harriman, for example—joking and smiling, a bronzed, confident figure towering over shorter men, obviously enjoying himself. Occasionally he would drop a tidbit for the reporters. Harriman had invited Johnson to his suite in the Blackstone Hotel, but Johnson had had one of his secretaries say he would rather have Harriman do the visiting, and Harriman had done so—Johnson made sure the reporters knew that he had made Harriman come to him. All that day, he was the center of attention, and he was reveling in it.

  Many of the reporters were from Washington, and they assumed that the closed-door conferences meant what they meant in the Senate: that, as Mary McGrory wrote, “what Lyndon wants Lyndon gets,” “that Senator Johnson, whose success in persuading senators to go along with him is nothing less than spectacular, suddenly saw in the delegates some 2,000 twin-brothers of his colleagues, that in this crowded arena he saw a reasonable facsimile of the Senate floor which he so indisputably dominates.” That assumption was incorrect, however. The famous political figures beating a path to his door were not offering support for his candidacy but asking for his support for their candidacies, and for the support of the southern delegates they thought he controlled. Not one of his visitors from the North was even considering supporting him. And there was another resemblance between suite and Senate, and it was not one that boded well for Johnson’s chances. Both locales were filled with senators—almost exclusively with senators. Among the visitors to 2306-A that Monday were no fewer than fifteen senators—and exactly two governors (Harriman and Luther Hodges of North Carolina) and one labor leader. The men with whom Lyndon Johnson was meeting did not have the power to give him what he wanted.

  Furthermore, with the exception of Richard Russell, who came by twice that day, few of the visitors were from the South. Since he didn’t want journalists’ attention on the southerners, he dealt with them that day mostly over the telephone. Once, Lyndon Johnson could have had the southern states, could have had them easily. But he had declined their offers—and the South, determined to exercise enough power at the convention to block an unacceptable platform plank or candidate, couldn’t wait for him to make a firm commitment to run. The only way for the South to be powerful was for the South to be solid, which meant lining up behind a single candidate. So the South had gone looking for a candidate, and, in Stevenson, had found one. In addition, the senators had stepped out of the picture, leaving the selection of convention delegates to the governors, most of whom were only casually acquainted with Johnson and some of whom were more than a little offended by his rejection of their offers. Most of the eleven southern states had arrived at the convention with the intention either of supporting Stevenson from the opening ballot or of casting that first-ballot vote for a favorite son, so as to keep their leverage over Stevenson and the platform, with the expectation that they would switch to Stevenson later. Nonetheless, that Monday, with Johnson at last—suddenly—a declared candidate, and with pleas from Richard Russell, offers of support for him had been renewed by several of the Old Confederate states in telephone calls to Johnson’s suite.

  Most of these offers, however, came with a request: that he promise to stay in the race until the end, or close to the end; that he not drop
out on an early ballot. For many of the southern states, this pledge was the sine qua non for their support; they couldn’t take the chance of lining up behind a candidate who might drop out too early in the convention, leaving them without a rallying point in the fight over the civil rights platform plank. The Dallas Morning News, well attuned to the southern viewpoint, reported that as soon as Johnson said he was “serious,” “Southern states … asked him what they could do to help along a fellow southerner,” but they also asked, “Would he ride hard to the finish, as Sen. Dick Russell had done in 1952? … Southern states wanted that ironclad guarantee.” But Johnson still believed he could pick up the southern states whenever he wanted, and was still afraid of the “humiliation” a losing fight to the finish would entail, and, the Morning News reported, “That firm assurance never came.”

  In some cases, Johnson’s declaration came too late. The illness of Harry Byrd’s wife had prevented him from coming to Chicago, but early Monday morning Johnson telephoned Byrd at his Winchester estate, and for more than two hours, Byrd was on the telephone to Chicago, trying to swing the Virginia delegation to Johnson. But, with Byrd having bowed out of the picture months before, the delegation had been selected by former Governor John Battle, and Battle and the delegation wouldn’t switch. Monday evening, there was a meeting of leaders from the eleven southern states. Texas was for Johnson, of course. Two states decided to stay with the candidate who would stay in until the end, who appeared likely to win—and who was so much more acceptable to them than Harriman: Adlai Stevenson. The other eight decided to support favorite sons “until an agreement was reached on a civil rights plank.” Some of these delegations were planning at that point to announce for Johnson, but their failure to announce immediately meant that no southern barricade had been thrown up in front of the Stevenson bandwagon.

  Lyndon Johnson’s failure to acknowledge these realities ran counter to the previous pattern of his political life. A political convention is at bottom an exercise in counting, and if he had been counting delegates as he counted senators—coldly, unemotionally, looking unflinchingly at reality, no matter how unpleasant that reality might be—he would have seen that he had no chance for the nomination. But in Chicago, he was hearing what he wanted to hear, believing what he wanted to believe. At one point late Monday afternoon, Harry Byrd Jr., hastily dispatched to Chicago by his father, gave Johnson an overly optimistic report on the Virginia delegation. Instead of checking it, Johnson simply believed it. Inviting reporters into his suite that evening, Johnson was brimming over with self-confidence. He had had “a very fruitful day,” he said—the same type of day that he was accustomed to having in Washington: a day of talks with “many members of the Senate, leaders of the party, for whom I have respect and to whom I have obligations,” talks “about the problems which confront us,” “the same kind of talks which happen on the third floor of the Capitol when I’m there.” And, he said, he expected the results in Chicago to be just as satisfactory as they were in Washington. He had had many pledges of support, he said. Texas would not be the only state in his column; “There will be other states that will vote for me.” In particular, he said, one big northern state had been won over. “The biggest bloc of votes that I expect I’ll have was a complete surprise to me.”

  Standing at the back of the room listening to the press conference, Corcoran and Rowe could not even imagine what big state Johnson might be referring to; they knew that nothing that had happened that day offered any hope that Johnson would receive the votes of any big state other than Texas. John Connally recalls that “for one day”—that Monday—“there was the feeling that there was hope.” But in truth there was no hope, and that day should have made Johnson understand that. The man who had always looked facts in the face wasn’t doing so this time. Years later, at their Washington law firm, Corcoran and Rowe would be talking to the author of this book about the 1956 convention. Rowe, thoughtful and analytical, was using terms like “ambivalence” to analyze Johnson’s behavior when the blunt Corcoran interrupted with a blunter explanation. “Listen,” he said. “He just wanted it [the nomination] so much. He wanted it so much he wasn’t thinking straight.” There was a pause, and then Rowe nodded agreement. Trying to run for President from behind the closed door of his Hilton suite, Johnson was insulated from reality by his hopes and dreams.

  OUTSIDE THE SUITE, however, there was reality just the same.

  Truman himself was finding out on Monday, to his chagrin, that his announcement had had little effect on Stevenson’s firmly committed delegates. Invitations to his Blackstone suite were accepted far more eagerly—delegates were thrilled to meet a former President—than was his advice. By evening, Murray Kempton wrote, “the old man was down to haggling for the votes of single delegates from Montana and one such came, and came out saying it was an honor to meet one of the great men of American history, but, no, he guessed he hadn’t quite made up his mind.” And, Kempton wrote, “all afternoon the word rolled in from the Kennedys, the ADAers and the Monroneys—all the names of the future in the Democratic Party—and every one said that he was still for Stevenson.” In fact, Truman’s statement had boomeranged against Johnson. Worried that Truman’s move might improve the chances of the hated Harriman, many southerners felt they could not wait any longer for a Johnson commitment to stay in the race and climbed back off the fence—into Stevenson’s camp. Byrd was still making telephone calls, but the growing sentiment in the Virginia delegation was expressed by Thomas Broyhill, who told a reporter that it was time for Virginia to stop “fooling around with dark horses. It’s Stevenson or Harriman, and we had better get Stevenson in there as quick as possible.” Almost every poll of delegates taken Monday evening, the evening of Johnson’s “very fruitful day,” showed that in fact Stevenson’s delegate count was either close to or over six hundred.

  And, unlike Johnson, Stevenson and his canny campaign manager, James Aloysius Finnegan, a tough Irish politician from Philadelphia, were talking to the right people: all that Monday, while Johnson, in his room at the end of one wing of the Hilton, was conferring with senators, Stevenson and Finnegan, in their room at the end of the next wing (when Johnson looked out the window, he could have seen into Stevenson’s suite across a fifty-foot courtyard had the blinds in Stevenson’s suite not been kept closed), were conferring with the men who really ran the delegations.

  Finnegan was using some very strong arguments. To southern leaders still supporting favorite sons, he was saying that Adlai had the nomination all but sewn up and needed only a few votes to win. If southern states supplied those votes, those states would have Stevenson’s gratitude, and sympathetic treatment from a Stevenson Administration. On the other hand, if they didn’t supply those votes, the North might do so—several northern states were about to throw their votes to Stevenson, he said. If they didn’t get aboard the train quickly, he told the southerners, they might find that it had left without them, and that there was no longer a seat for them on it.

  To northern leaders, Finnegan was using the same argument in reverse; several southern states were about to throw the decisive votes to Adlai, he said; if northern states didn’t board the train quickly, they might find that it had left without them. And to northern liberals, Finnegan added another argument: If Stevenson didn’t get his majority, and the convention therefore was thrown into deadlock, who would benefit? he asked. Lyndon Johnson. Johnson would be in a position to demand concessions from Stevenson in exchange for the South’s support, he said. Do you really want to take a chance on that happening? A prolonged deadlock might even result in Lyndon Johnson eventually winning the nomination, Finnegan warned. Do you really want to take a chance that Lyndon Johnson will be the nominee?

  These were chances that northern liberals indeed didn’t want to take. As W. H. Lawrence reported that night in the New York Times: “Some of the northern liberals [are] restive about the possibilities that the pressure on Mr. Stevenson might force him to make an accommodatio
n with Senator Johnson.” Even liberals from Harriman’s own state were restive. The New York Post reported “uncertainty as to how long Harriman could hold New York’s delegation back from Stevenson if it looked like a coup by Johnson was in the making.”

  One northern leader who didn’t want to take such chances was Walter Reuther. Lyndon Johnson had been confident that the big Michigan delegation would hold fast behind favorite-son Williams or would go for Harriman; he kept mentioning that Reuther was his friend, that he used to sleep on the spare bed in Johnson’s home when he came to Washington in the 1940s, that Reuther had helped swing labor support to him in his 1948 Senate race. He appears not to have grasped that for Walter Reuther, friendship was not as significant as Emmett Till, and that, in addition, since 1948 there had been Leland Olds and the natural gas bill and the destruction of Paul Douglas. And the Michigan delegation, as Murray Kempton wrote, “is the great fruit of the social revolution of the thirties; there are people in it who were arrested on sitdown strikes twenty years ago. The old CIO is stronger there than anywhere else at this convention.”

  Monday evening, Michigan held a closed-door meeting, and Stevenson came to it, with a smile, a few jokes—and Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt.

  Entering the room, she saw a photographer, Sammy Schulman of International News Service, who had been her husband’s favorite photographer. “Hello, Sammy,” she laughed. “Still going around?” Yes, he was, Sammy replied. And you, Mrs. Roosevelt, he asked, are you still going around? Yes, she was, Eleanor Roosevelt replied—and then she told Michigan why she was going around: that there are some things more important than winning—that principles are more important—and that therefore Michigan should be for Adlai Stevenson. The delegation stood up and cheered, and then Walter Reuther spoke, and said he was for Stevenson. And Soapy Williams had understood Finnegan’s warning. The convention was drifting dangerously, the Governor told a reporter; if the liberal forces didn’t unite, he said, there was a danger that “a minority power bloc” might name the nominee. By the time the meeting broke up well after midnight, it was clear that when Michigan caucused the next day, Adlai would receive the delegation’s vote.