Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson

by Robert A. Caro

  Jim Rowe got the bad news at five o’clock Tuesday morning from one of his “spies” in the Michigan delegation, and he put on a bathrobe and hurried down the hall to relay it to Lyndon Johnson.

  Rowe would never forget how Johnson looked when he opened the door. All of him looked asleep—he was in pajamas and his rumpled hair was standing on end—all of him except his eyes. Piercing and intent, they were very wide awake, and when Rowe gave him the news, they narrowed in that calculating look that Rowe had seen so often. But then Johnson responded, and his response was not the usual Johnson response to bad news. “I don’t believe it,” he said.

  Rowe tried to convince him it was true. He knew it was important that Johnson understand what was happening, that Stevenson was about to win, and that if Johnson did not support him, give him Texas’ fifty-six votes and bring in other southern states as well, he would lose all his power in the convention. He recalls saying, “It is absolutely true. It is going to happen. Reuther has given his pledge.” Michigan was going to caucus at 11 a.m., he said, and once it did, it would be too late for Johnson to do anything. He said, “You have approximately six hours to deliver Texas and to control the convention.” But Lyndon refused to believe it.

  BELIEVE IT OR NOT, however, it was true, and with the Michigan decision, the bandwagon was rolling. On Tuesday morning, the Arizona delegation also caucused, and, ignoring a last-minute plea by Bob McFarland, voted to cast its sixteen votes for Stevenson. Lyndon Johnson had been pinning a lot of his hopes not only on Michigan but on New Jersey, which had come to the convention with its thirty-six votes ostensibly behind its favorite son, Governor Robert B. Meyner, but Meyner had come to the same conclusion as Soapy Williams: that Harriman couldn’t win, and that the South could not be allowed to dominate the convention. On Tuesday morning, he flatly refused to allow his name to be placed in nomination, and New Jersey voted unanimously for Stevenson. Hearing the news, a Harriman aide silently drew his finger across his throat.

  Finnegan’s gambit was working with southerners as well, as they saw the northern states clambering aboard the Stevenson bandwagon and realized that it was, indeed, leaving without them. Moreover, some of them were by this time quite annoyed at Lyndon Johnson. If they had declined to back Stevenson, it was on Johnson’s behalf that they had done so—had remained committed to their favorite sons—and yet he was still refusing to give them a firm commitment to stay in the race to the end. By Tuesday evening, it was apparent that Virginia would go for Stevenson. And since it was also becoming apparent Tuesday that “moderates” would control the Platform Committee, even Russell’s Georgia had less reason to hold out. Predicting a civil rights plank that “may not be all that we want but [that] we hope … will be one that we could live with,” Governor Griffin added—in a jibe at Johnson’s indecision—“Of all the candidates here that we know about, I would say that the Georgia delegation holds Mr. Stevenson in the highest esteem.”

  Truman launched a second, more intemperate, attack on the man he had once persuaded to run for the presidency, calling him “too defeatist to win,” but while for the former President’s first press conference, the Blackstone’s Crystal Ballroom had hardly been big enough to hold all the reporters and cameramen, this time it was half empty—and his attack, as Lawrence wrote, served only “to confirm reports that his backing of Governor Harriman had not shaken” Stevenson’s support. Indeed, by Tuesday night, the former President’s actions had so “greatly minimized his own stature,” James Reston wrote, “that he was in danger of becoming” an ex-President “who no longer has the consolation of being powerful within his own party.”

  All that Tuesday, Lyndon Johnson stayed in his suite, but in the corridor outside there were signs of the change in his status. During the morning, the cables and cameras were as thickly clustered as they had been on Monday, the callers were still lined up in the hall waiting for an audience, but, as one reporter wrote, “All through the day the Stevenson bandwagon kept on rolling. State after state, delegation after delegation, decided that instead of being on the fence, the place to be was on the side of the winner,” and by that afternoon, the television cameras had disappeared, and the number of visitors to Johnson’s suite was noticeably fewer. And two of the visitors were Stevenson and Finnegan, keeping an appointment that had been scheduled the previous day. Johnson tried to bargain with them, saying that in order for him to support Stevenson, he needed assurance that the civil rights plank would be acceptable to the South. Jim Rowe, the only Johnson aide present during the meeting, recalls Johnson saying, “I have got to have something that will not hurt my people too much.” Stevenson, ever courteous, said, “Well, I would like to think about it,” but Finnegan simply said: “No.”

  “What did you say?” Johnson asked him. “I said no,” Finnegan replied. “We are not going to give you anything.”

  When Johnson asked, “Why not?” Finnegan vouchsafed a further explanation, saying, “Look, all we are asking for [in the platform] is a shotgun. If we don’t give this crowd in the North that, they are going to use machine guns, [so] you’d better take it [the proposed plank]. But the answer to you is no.” If Lyndon Johnson needed proof that he no longer possessed meaningful power at the Democratic National Convention of 1956, that one-word reply gave it to him. Finnegan and Stevenson no longer had to bargain with him; he no longer had anything substantial to bargain with. Johnson said simply, “All right.” And then, Rowe says, “they left.”

  Rowe was later to hear Johnson recounting the conversation to Richard Russell. “He said, ‘Well, you know, Dick, I was really making some progress with Adlai. I took my knife and held it right against him. All of a sudden I felt some steel in my ribs and I looked around and Finnegan had a knife in my ribs.’ He laughed, and Russell said, ‘Finnegan is a pro,’ and that was it.”

  By Tuesday evening, a reporter who ventured into 2306-A found the outer rooms empty except for Johnson’s secretaries. In the living room, Johnson was chatting with Hubert Humphrey, who had thought that Johnson would have only a brief moment or two to spare him. Instead, Johnson had time for a long talk. There was no one else waiting to see him. After a while, he left for a leisurely dinner. When he returned about midnight, he was greeted by an aide who said one wire service was reporting that he was about to withdraw as a candidate. Calling a press conference, he said the report was “a baseless, fantastical rumor. I’m still in. You will always find a lot of panicky folks trying to blitz things in the hours just before the balloting.” He talked with his usual bravado—asked if Stevenson had used “any pressure” to get the nomination, Johnson said that pressure wouldn’t work on him: “I’m used to pressure, and I know how to handle it”—but the reporters weren’t fooled. “The fire was out” on Lyndon Johnson’s candidacy, one wrote.

  FOR THE NEXT TWO DAYS, however, Lyndon Johnson remained a candidate. Rowe’s repeated attempts to persuade him to withdraw and announce that Texas would vote for Stevenson, as so many other states were doing, met with no success.

  This obduracy brought Johnson a measure of satisfaction—and a measure of what he was always saying he feared.

  The satisfaction came on Wednesday, when, before a huge audience that packed the great stockyard arena to the rafters, the candidates’ names were placed in nomination, Johnson’s by John Connally. The speech nominating Adlai Stevenson, delivered by John F. Kennedy, and written by Kennedy and his aide Theodore Sorensen, was graceful, urbane and witty. The speech nominating Lyndon Johnson was quintessentially Texan: loud, filled with hyperbole, but delivered by a tall, handsome man with the presence of a movie star.

  Connally emphasized the key point Johnson wanted—needed—to have made: “Let there be no mistake about it. He is not the candidate of a state or a section,” and his speech was filled with the usual stock phrases—“a dedicated American,” “a forceful and persuasive leader of men”—but John Connally had known Lyndon Johnson a long time, and his speech also contained some phrases very particu
larly suited to the man he was describing. “This man has known poverty,” John Connally said. “He is a son of the Hill Country of Texas, where the sun is hot and the soil is meager and life itself is a never-easy challenge.” And Connally also said: “Call off the roll of great Democrats of this day. By the name of each, there may be entered many fine qualities and many splendid attainments. But alongside of this man there will surely be written the summation: ‘This man works hardest of all.’”

  Even before the peroration—“Fellow Americans, fellow Democrats, I offer you for the Presidency of the United States, that son of the Texas hills, that tested and effective servant of the people: Lyndon B. Johnson”—the big Texas delegation had begun to roar, and now they leapt up in their tall red-white-and-blue “Love That Lyndon” hats, and grabbed their “Love That Lyndon” banners and moved into line behind a twenty-piece band playing “The Eyes of Texas Are upon You,” and started to march through the aisles. Delegates from other states—many other states—grabbed their state banners and followed, so many that, as Booth Mooney wrote, “television commentators noted with some surprise—had they missed something?—that participants were by no means confined to the whooping Texans and their southern neighbors”; was support for Johnson broader than they had thought? But most of the non-southern states were parading because of the short, stocky man, his visage stern and impassive, who was standing on the podium above them, looking as if he was bored by all the noise. Knowing how much demonstrations of affection meant to Lyndon, Sam Rayburn had called in the Texas congressmen attending the convention, and told them to pass the word among their House colleagues from other states that he would appreciate their states’ participation in the Johnson parade. He did not threaten, of course; Sam Rayburn never threatened. But, as Mooney wrote, the congressmen “reminded” their colleagues “that Sam Rayburn would go right on being Speaker. No doubt he would be watching with interest, and would remember, which states helped to add to the … demonstration for his friend.” Because of television constraints, a twenty-minute time limit had been placed on parades, and Rayburn had enforced it strictly for every other candidate. Now, “without a flicker of expression,” as one reporter wrote, he stood watching as the river of “Love That Lyndon” signs flowed past him and then wound around the convention hall two more times. An officious convention official went up to the old man and told him that the time limit had been exceeded. Rayburn turned and stared at him. The official went away and sat down. The old man stood unmoving, looking down on the signs bearing the slogan that expressed his feelings, too.

  Johnson himself, observing the tradition that candidates do not attend the convention as long as their names are before it, was watching on television, upstairs in Wesley West’s Imperial Suite at the Hilton with Richard Russell, but seated in a box on the side of the big hall was not only Lady Bird but his family: his mother, his brother, and his three sisters, who had gone through that terrible childhood with him; who had lived, as he had lived, “at the bottom of the heap”; who had watched their father lose the ranch; who had lived in dread of losing their house in Johnson City, too. As the parade reached their box, Connally, its leader, halted for a moment and raised his banner in tribute to them. Who knows what was in their minds at that moment? Who knows what was in the mind of Lyndon Johnson watching in the Imperial Suite? But how far from that childhood he had come.

  But the next day was Thursday, when the convention voted on the candidates.

  While Johnson had been watching his parade in the Imperial Suite Wednesday night, Russell had given him a warning. “Lyndon,” he said, “don’t ever let yourself become a sectional candidate for the presidency. That was what happened to me.” If you are labeled as a sectional—southern—candidate, Russell said, “You can’t win.”

  Although Johnson certainly understood, at least intellectually, the wisdom of that advice, that the southern label would be hard to shake off and that it would hurt his chances of winning the nomination not only in 1956 but in 1960, and although day by day he was being given the same advice with increasing urgency by Rowe and others and was always assuring them that he understood that advice and agreed with it, he hadn’t followed it on Wednesday. When, that evening, the dimensions of the Stevenson landslide were clear, a reporter asked him skeptically, “Senator, are you really going to keep your name in front of the convention to the end?” Johnson wheeled on him angrily and said, “I’ve told you forty times since I’ve been here what Johnson’s position is. I’ll tell you again.” His position, he said, was that his name was going to go before the convention, and stay there.

  And he didn’t follow the advice on Thursday. During the balloting that evening, most of the favorite sons withdrew in favor of Stevenson. Only seven states did not do so, and five of them were southern states: Texas, Mississippi (the only state besides his own which voted for Johnson), and Georgia, Virginia, and South Carolina, who stayed with their favorite sons. So at the end of the first and only roll call, the figures on the big screen behind the rostrum were stark: Stevenson—9051/2; Harriman—210; Johnson—80. (Symington received 45 votes, most from his native Missouri.) So of the 4661/2 votes that Stevenson did not receive, 160 were southern votes. As one of the Texas delegates, Jerry Holleman, was to recall, “It became obvious before the first roll call was over that Adlai Stevenson was going to be the nominee, the Texas delegation wanted to switch over from Lyndon and change its vote, cast its final vote for Stevenson and be on the bandwagon. They were after John Connally, and John was on the phone talking to Lyndon, desperately trying to get Lyndon’s permission to let them ask for the floor to switch their vote.” But the permission was not given. After Rayburn announced that Adlai Stevenson “is declared the nominee of this convention,” Connally attempted to offer the traditional motion that the nomination be made unanimous, but Rayburn recognized Oklahoma instead.

  • • •

  MEN CLOSE TO JOHNSON would puzzle for years over his actions at the 1956 convention, offering different explanations. Rowe would say that “I never could understand why he didn’t [withdraw]. It [his reason] was obviously wrapped up in Texas and his base of power, and the Eisenhower feeling down there. And it may have been just a dislike for Adlai.” Others note that during the fight for the Texas delegation earlier that year, the conservative Shivers had charged that if Johnson was a candidate, he would be merely a stalking-horse for Stevenson, secretly pledged to turn over his delegates to him, and speculated that Johnson was afraid to release his delegates lest that action prove Shivers correct. But during the intervening months Johnson had been a leading figure—second only to Truman, the leading figure—in the “Stop Stevenson” campaign. Releasing his delegates after Stevenson had already been declared the nominee would not make even Texas conservatives believe he had been plotting for Stevenson all along. And in fact Connally, the representative of the anti-Stevenson, pro-Eisenhower conservative powers in Texas, was among those pleading for Johnson to withdraw. Connally himself was to say years later that Johnson’s actions at the convention “made no sense to anyone, myself included.”

  Men who, like Connally, knew Johnson very well, in the end fall back on considerations that are not political but personal, considerations that revolve around the single-mindedness with which Lyndon Johnson held to his great dream. Connally kept returning to the fact that in politics “you can always have a dream,” that even when all seems lost, in the hurly-burly of a convention “you always have hope.” He was also to note that 1956 was still in the era (although in fact near the end of that era) “when politicians believed in spontaneous forces, that delegates could be stampeded, in the eleventh-hour draft, in a deadlocked convention turning to a compromise candidate.” His statement is a reminder that in 1956 a reporter whose articles often reflected Connally’s views wrote that until the very end, Johnson was waiting for some “explosion” that would reverse the Stevenson tide, “the explosion that might send him into presidential contention.” George Brown, who s
ixteen years before had watched Lyndon Johnson turn down a small fortune because it might just possibly, at some long-distant future date, interfere with his pursuit of the presidency, and at whose Falfurrias hunting lodge Johnson rested up after the convention, says that “he hadn’t thought he would be so close [to the nomination] in ’56, and then when all of a sudden [after Truman’s endorsement of Harriman], he felt he was close, he got carried away with the thought that he might get it, and he simply couldn’t bear to just admit he didn’t have a chance.” A key word in Brown’s analysis is repeated by Tommy Corcoran. Asked why Johnson hadn’t withdrawn, Corcoran said flatly: “Because he couldn’t bear to.” That vast prize that Lyndon Johnson sought, the prize that had always seemed so far off, had suddenly seemed so close, almost within his reach. It was too hard for him to consign it again to the future, to admit that, under the best of circumstances, four years would have to pass before he could try for it again; he “couldn’t bear” to do that.

  And this emphasis on the personal is given weight by what happened after the convention chose its presidential nominee—and turned to choosing the vice presidential nominee.