Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson

by Robert A. Caro

  There was the same emphasis on publicity, the same squeezing out of every possible drop of that mother’s milk of politics. “Johnson’s running things … hit the extreme this week,” John Steele was to report to his editors. “He was running the photographers and they were, for once, not objecting. He’d usher them [to closed committee sessions] for pictures, then usher them out and turn his attention to newsmen. Speaking so fast that no one could take a word-by-word account, he would rip through a briefing on a committee session, pant that he was ten minutes late for a luncheon speech he had to make. ‘The statements will be up in a minute anyway,’ burst out of the room to give the television interviewers time for ‘just three’ questions, then flaring up when a fourth was asked—‘I told you, just three.’”

  There was the same cultivation of the press, the same leaking of news to the most influential newsmen, the same long background sessions with columnists, a cultivation that extended into evenings, when he would invite them home to dinner, or weekends, when especially favored newsmen would be invited down to Huntlands, or even to Texas, with the most favored newsmen of all, Bill White and Stewart Alsop and Rowland Evans, coming to the ranch. (White, the most favored newsman of them all, secured the prize invitation: a visit to the ranch for Christmas.)

  And there was the same skill in the obtaining of publicity, the same sure touch for public relations: for the right witnesses, the nation’s most renowned nuclear and rocket scientists, like Edward Teller, Vannevar Bush, and Wernher von Braun, and the nation’s most bemedaled generals and admirals of the nuclear age—Curtis LeMay, Hyman Rickover, James Gavin—called in the right order: the scientists first—“To elevate the hearings into the realm of space and away from interservice battles in the Pentagon,” Reedy explains—and, first of all the scientists, the one whose reputation as “the father of the hydrogen bomb” assured maximum press interest. Teller didn’t disappoint: in Reedy’s words, he “painted a verbal picture of a universe in which mastery of outer space meant mastery of the world. The message he sent was clear. The Soviet Union had taken the first step into the heavens and unless we hurried to catch up, the later steps would find us under Communist domination.” Then came the generals, to paint a disturbing picture of how an overly economy-conscious Administration had allowed its emphasis on a balanced budget to interfere with the nation’s security.

  During the Korean War, the Senate Preparedness Subcommittee had been a source of vivid, apt, headline-making phrases. One phrase that Reedy now tried to suggest to Johnson, in fact, would have repeated a key word from the subcommittee’s earlier heyday: Reedy suggested that Johnson say that Sputnik presented the American people with a challenge, a challenge that would require “a call to action instead of a summons to a siesta.” Johnson rejected the suggestion out of hand: why would a great phrasemaker need to repeat himself? New phrases evolved in his press relations, press conferences, and letters to constituents. Some linked this moment of unpreparedness to another—one worse even than Korea. Sputnik was “a disaster … comparable to Pearl Harbor,” Lyndon Johnson said. The Space Age is “an even greater challenge than Pearl Harbor,” he said on another. Pledging nonpartisanship, he said, “There were no Republicans or Democrats in this country the day after Pearl Harbor.” Some evoked—not all that subtly—the speeches of a man whose speeches he wanted to imitate. By pulling together, Americans could make the Space Age “our finest hour,” he said. (To Texans he likened Sputnik not to Pearl Harbor but to the Alamo. Texans had lost that battle, he said, but had won the war against Mexico: “History does not reward the people who win the battles, but the people who win the war.”)

  His very demeanor made newsmen feel, as they had felt in 1950, that the nation was in trouble, that there was not a moment to lose, that news of the subcommittee was big news. A memo from Rowe reminded Johnson of the necessity of creating “a sense of urgency to counteract the complacency of the administration,” and it would be hard to imagine a more superfluous piece of advice. Yet Johnson did not, in fact, seem to feel all that much urgency himself. News of Sputnik had come on October 4, and Russell had in the next day or so turned over the investigation to Johnson, but Johnson did not come to Washington until October 16, and he returned to Texas two days later—and, except for a day he spent sightseeing in Monterrey, Mexico, he stayed in Texas until, on November 2, the Russians launched a second, much larger, satellite that carried a live dog (and was therefore named “Muttnik”); only then, on November 3, did he return to Washington for the subcommittee’s organizational meetings and a seven-and-a-half-hour briefing for himself, Russell, and Bridges at the Pentagon. He stayed in Washington for four days, and then went back to Texas for twelve days, returning to the capital on November 20 to prepare for the subcommittee’s hearings, so that during the more than six weeks following the launching of Sputnik, he was in Washington for six days. But during those six days—and when, in January, he returned to the capital full time—he put on quite a show. (A memo from Steele told his editors: “This was the pace Johnson was traveling at as he breakfasted one day at the Pentagon with McElroy, another day at the Pentagon with [Wilber] Brucker, as he whisked the Senate through its opening session…. Johnson was moving through days of seven hours of committee sessions, hours of planning future sessions with his staff, the long party conferences, innumerable confabs with fellow senators and other party officials, speeches … television films for a Texas network, innumerable telephone conversations with government officials, a mountain of mail—all with a lopping [sic] speed but with a deadly purpose. Johnson was working this week as though the orbiting of an American Sputnik was his own responsibility and that it should have been done yesterday. His speed, intensity, and energy was contagious. An Army Brigadier General grabbed a sheaf of news releases to hurry the distribution to reporters at a Johnson committee session….”) Leaving Capitol Hill in the evening after filing their stories for the next day’s papers, reporters would glance back at the darkened Capitol and see lights still blazing in that corner office on the third floor. “There seems to be a terrible sense of urgency about all this, doesn’t there?” one reporter said to another, as he snatched up his notepad and ran down the hall to cover still another Johnson press conference. Watching Lyndon Johnson hurry through the corridors, coat-tails flapping, journalists coined jokes about his intensity. “Light a match behind Lyndon and he’d orbit,” was one.

  There was new proof that, in 1958 as in 1950, no matter how skilled Reedy might be, Lyndon Johnson was his own best public relations man. One day in January, the Preparedness Subcommittee, which had met in open session that morning, was scheduled to meet behind closed doors to hear sensitive testimony from Major General John B. Medaris, commander-in-chief of the Army Ballistic Missile Agency. During the noon break, however, while Johnson was, in John Steele’s phrase, “lapping up a creamed chicken dish in his ornate green and gold Senate office,” the phone rang. Defense Secretary McElroy wanted to tell him that he was about to make an important announcement: that the Army was being authorized to proceed on a “top-priority basis” with the development of a solid-fuel missile instead of relying on liquid-fueled missiles as in the past. Johnson didn’t hesitate. Without so much as a pause, he asked McElroy not to make the announcement himself, but instead to let General Medaris make it—during his testimony before the subcommittee.

  The headline-making news would therefore come not from the Pentagon, but from the Johnson Subcommittee, and Johnson made sure that the headlines would be big. The time was already about 2:22 p.m. The closed-door session was scheduled to begin in eight minutes. Johnson sent aides and secretaries scurrying to the Press Room and to the Senate cafeteria where some journalists ate lunch, to announce that at 2:30 sharp the subcommittee’s doors would be thrown open—very briefly—for an important announcement. Reporters and photographers came running, some still chewing, and as they entered the room, Johnson, pounding his gavel for order, shouted, with the air of someone delivering a communi
qué from a war zone, “General Medaris has a brief announcement to make. Copies of his statement will be ready in a few minutes.” Two senators—Saltonstall and Flanders—were entering the committee room at a leisurely postprandial senatorial pace, and then, as soon as Flanders sat down, he got up again and started to leave the room. “Senator, Senator—where are you going?” Johnson asked. “Oh, I’ll be back in fifteen seconds,” Flanders replied. “But you can’t leave us—this isn’t going to take fifteen seconds,” Johnson said curtly. Flanders sat back down, and Medaris made his announcement. And although there had been very little time to prepare a quotable phrase, one was ready on Lyndon Johnson’s lips. As soon as Medaris had finished reading, Johnson told the General, as reporters’ pens scribbled, “I hope this is not just a directive but that it is backed up with cold, hard cash. If you will convey that message to him [McElroy] maybe it will persuade him to make some more decisions.” In case anyone had missed them, Johnson repeated the key words—twice. “Cold, hard cash,” he said. “Cold, hard cash.”

  There was still television to be accommodated. This was a problem, because the TV camera crews, anticipating a closed session to which their bulky cameras would not be admitted, had left them down by the Caucus Room while they had lunch and had not been able to lug them downstairs in time for the announcement. Even as Medaris was speaking, Johnson aides were telling the cameramen to set up their cameras in the corridor outside the committee room, and as soon as the General had finished, Johnson stepped around the committee table, grabbed his arm, pulled him bodily out of his chair, and propelled him into the hall. “Now fellas, let’s roll it!” Johnson said, standing so close to Medaris that it would have been difficult to show the General without showing him, too. One of the cameramen, still panting from his race upstairs, managed to say that one of their number had not yet arrived. “Well, you take it and give it to him,” Johnson said angrily, and when the cameramen said that was impossible, he replied, “Now, listen, I told you to be ready.” (“No one dared to mention that he had given them eight minutes to do so,” Evans and Novak said.)

  THERE WERE OTHER SIMILARITIES between 1958 and 1950, the same tendency toward hyperbole and oversimplification, for example. Dramatic though the Sputnik launchings may have been, their military significance—their significance, in other words, for America’s safety—was minimal. The launchings showed that the Russians had indeed developed rockets with more thrust than America’s, but it was not thrust but rather the rockets’ accuracy and the destructive power of the nuclear warheads they carried that would count in war, and in both accuracy and explosive power the United States was still far ahead. In addition, America’s bomber fleet of huge B-52S, constantly on alert or in the air, was vastly superior to Russia’s bomber fleet, and had the added advantage of access to airfields virtually on Russia’s borders. A Soviet attack on the United States would, for all Nikita Khrushchev’s blustering, have been suicidal: America had enough nuclear capacity and missile technology—many times more than enough—to reduce the Soviet Union’s cities and factories to ruins should the USSR launch an attack. Moreover, during the Eisenhower Administration the American margin of superiority had not narrowed but widened.

  Quite sure of these facts—in part because of amazingly detailed photographic evidence from U-2S, supersonic reconnaissance aircraft that overflew the USSR at heights of up to 85,000 feet—Dwight Eisenhower attempted, in the weeks after Sputnik, to reassure a jittery America (although believing, incorrectly, that Russia was unaware of the U-2 flights, he shied away from revealing any facts that might have given the Russians a hint of their existence). In an October 9 news conference, in which journalists’ questions, reflecting the mood of the moment, were more suspicious than at any other conference during his presidency, Eisenhower said that the satellite “does not raise my apprehensions, not one iota”; he would “rather have one good Redstone nuclear-armed missile than a rocket that could hit the moon,” he said. “We have no enemies on the moon.” Repeatedly during this period, the President sought to explain that we had more than enough nuclear capacity already so that massive emergency spending to develop more bombs was “unjustifiable”; “What is going to be done with this tremendous number of enormous weapons?” he asked on one occasion; how many times “could [you] kill the same man?” he asked on another. Furthermore, he said, the greatly accelerated spending would have “unfortunate effects” which his critics did not seem to have considered. As Ambrose puts it: “He deplored the Pearl Harbor atmosphere, the readiness to forget economics and spend whatever had to be spent to win the war. ‘We face,’ the President said, ‘not a temporary emergency but a long-term responsibility…. Hasty and extraordinary effort under the impetus of sudden fear … cannot provide for an adequate answer.’ He said he knew he could get whatever he asked for from Congress in the way of defense spending … but the suggested expenditures were at the expense of needed civilian expenditures and were ‘unjustifiable.’… We must remember that we are defending a way of life.” Turning America into a “garrison state” would mean taking the risk that “all we are striving to defend … could disappear.”

  Lyndon Johnson, briefed repeatedly by the Pentagon, must have been aware of these reassuring facts, but his statements continued to be short on facts and long on “Pearl Harbor atmosphere.” His subcommittee’s first report, filed on January 23, 1958, said: “We have reached a state of history where defense involves the total effort of a nation.” Total effort meant in 1958 what it had meant in 1950; once again, the Senate Preparedness Subcommittee called for America to place itself—immediately—on an all-out war footing. In a prepared speech Johnson delivered on October 17, he said that the forty-hour workweek “will not produce intercontinental ballistic missiles,” and therefore the entire nation “must go on a full, wartime mobilization schedule.” His rhetoric escalated. America’s first attempt to orbit a satellite, the Vanguard 1, failed on December 6, when the missile exploded as it was leaving the Cape Canaveral launching pad. The news was delivered to Johnson as he was chairing a subcommittee hearing before a large crowd in the Senate Caucus Room. “How long, how long, oh, God, how long will it take us to catch up with the Russians’ two satellites?” he asked. His speeches, the author Alfred Steinberg says, “painted a frightening picture of the horror that would overtake the United States if it did not treat Soviet leadership in missilery as a war.” “Control of space means control of the world,” Johnson said. “From space, the masters of infinity would have the power to control the earth’s weather, to cause drought and flood, to change the tides and raise the levels of the sea, to divert the Gulf Stream and change temperate climates to frigid.” The subcommittee hearings were to generate headlines day after day, but even Reedy was to admit that “in retrospect some of the material should have been examined more carefully before being spread on the record in ex parte proceedings. One of the results was the public creation of a ‘missile gap’—a concept that we were hopelessly behind the Soviets in the possession of ICBMs.”

  And in 1958 as in 1950, the Preparedness Subcommittee produced a publicity bonanza—hearings in the Senate Caucus Room jammed with radio and television cameras and microphones; cover articles in national magazines (“In a week of shot and shell in Washington … Lyndon Johnson went a far piece toward seizing, on behalf of the legislative branch, the leadership in reshaping U.S. defense policy,” Life asserted)—and there were again, in ’58 as in ’50, indications that it was less preparedness than publicity that was the subcommittee chairman’s primary concern. Eisenhower’s calm assurances began to be understood, and they were bolstered by the successful launching of America’s first satellite, Explorer, on January 31, 1958—and the resultant slackening of media interest in the missile crisis was mirrored by a corresponding slackening in the chairman’s interest.