Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson

by Robert A. Caro

  The new Majority Leader was going to be his whip, Mike Mansfield. In the past, the Leader had routinely been elected chairman of the caucus—as Johnson himself had of course been elected. Sometime in December, however, the Vice President-elect asked a few key senators—Russell, Kerr, Smathers and Humphrey—to have lunch with him, not on Capitol Hill but in a private dining room at the Sheraton-Carlton Hotel, “probably hoping,” Hubert Humphrey was to say, “to keep it a secret.” And at this lunch, he revealed his plan: that at the caucus, he, not Mansfield, would be elected chairman—that he would remain in the post that he had held for the past eight years.

  It was apparent to the men in the dining room that Johnson intended to use the chairmanship to do more than merely preside over the caucus—that, in Humphrey’s words, he wanted to use the post to “hang on to [the] power” he had had as Majority Leader as a “de facto Majority Leader”; Johnson, Humphrey was to say, “had the illusion that he could be in a sense, as vice president, the Majority Leader.” Although the men in the room were all friends of Johnson’s, doubts were immediately expressed. Humphrey, worried always about inflicting pain, said the plan “would offend Mike Mansfield and other leaders,” and when Johnson said he was sure Mansfield would go along, the fact that the plan would violate the constitutional separation of powers between the Executive and Legislative Branches was raised. But, Humphrey was to say, “he’s not an easy man to tell that you can’t do something.” Johnson may have said—he was to use these arguments later—that the Constitution already assigned the Vice President functions in the Senate: to preside over it, and to vote in it in case of a tie; he was later to say that chairing a party caucus would be only another, similar, function.

  Whatever he said, he apparently believed he had persuaded the others to go along. He certainly persuaded Mansfield to go along—by telling him the caucus chairmanship was only a symbolic honor. He persuaded Mansfield, in fact, not only to let him be chairman, but to nominate him for the job. Johnson, Mansfield was to say, “asked if I would propose that he be permitted to attend future caucuses as Vice President and also to preside. In my view, this would constitute only an honorary position, and I had no objection.” While he was at it, Johnson also persuaded Mansfield to allow him to retain not only the chairmanship but another symbol of his power: the Taj Majal. It had formerly been designated the Majority Leader’s Office; now it would become the Vice President’s Office, so Johnson would still be operating out of it when he was in the Capitol. Mansfield said he would be happy to use a much smaller suite—about half the size of the Taj Majal—on the other side of the Senate Chamber. And Johnson also persuaded Mansfield that he should retain Bobby Baker as Secretary for the Majority. When Baker received a call to come to the Taj Majal, he found Lyndon Johnson exultant. “There was a buoyancy about him that lately had been missing,” Baker was to say. Johnson seemed, in fact, almost “manic.” Waving Baker to a chair, he paced around the room. “Bobby,” he said, “I’ve been thinking about where I can do Jack Kennedy the most good. And it’s right here on this Hill, the place I know best.” Jack Kennedy, he said, “never learned how things operate around here,” and “all those Bostons and Harvards” with whom Jack was surrounding himself “don’t know any more about Capitol Hill than an old maid does about fuckin’.” His eyes shining with triumph, he gave Baker a piece of good news. “I’m gonna keep this office,” he said, waving his arm in an expansive arc to emphasize its grandeur. He gave him another piece of good news—good news for Baker as well as for himself. “You can keep on helpin’ me like you’ve always done,” he said. “It’s gonna be just the way it was!”

  Then, coming over to Baker and standing close to him, Lyndon Johnson lowered his voice dramatically as he gave him the best news of all. “Just between me and you and the gatepost, Bobby,” he said, “I’m workin’ it out with Mike and Hubert to attend meetings of the Senate Democratic Caucus. Maybe even preside over ’em. That way I can keep my hand in. I can help Jack Kennedy’s program, and be his eyes and ears. Whatta you think of that?”

  Baker knew what he thought of it. “To tell the truth, I was both astonished and horrified,” he was to say. “If anyone knew the United States Senate, its proud members and its proud traditions, it was Lyndon B. Johnson. Surely he knew that the prerogatives of membership were jealously guarded, that no member of the Executive Branch—even a Lyndon Johnson—would be welcomed in from the cold. Indeed, it seemed apparent that senators who long had chafed under LBJ’s iron rule would have conniptions at the very idea of his continuing to exercise control over its affairs.” Johnson certainly understood all this, Baker felt. “I originally couldn’t believe that LBJ believed” he could successfully carry off his plan. But as Johnson “continued to expound on his new scheme,” Baker “realized he was serious. I saw a disaster in the making.” But when, after a while, Baker worked up the nerve to voice a few reservations, Johnson, “blinded by his plans, his ego, and his past Senate successes … overrode them,” and just kept talking. The most he would agree to do was to allow Baker to “do a little pulse-taking.”

  Taking the pulse, Baker found that his fears were justified. News had already seeped out about the proposed retention of the Taj Majal and of Baker, raising what he called “apprehensions” among Senate liberals that Bobby would be in the future as in the past less the Democrats’ agent than Johnson’s. The Democratic liberals were, Evans and Novak explain, “brooding that Johnson would try to run the Senate from the Vice President’s chair, with Mansfield, the self-effacing, introspective former professor who was uncomfortable with power, deferring to him.” And, although Baker kept his hints about a retention of a caucus role by Johnson carefully vague, these hints heightened senatorial fears. “Having watched him [Johnson] operate for eight years, Democratic senators were fearful of what he might do now if he got a toe in the door,” Evans and Novak were to explain. “An unspoken sentiment among many senators was the fear that if Johnson became de facto chairman of the conference, he would use that position as a lever to become de facto Majority Leader, with tentacles of power into both the Steering and Policy Committees, newly headed but not controlled by Mansfield.” Wary of Baker’s closeness to Johnson, senators were, Baker was to say, “reserved in their responses,” but he had been taught to “listen to what they weren’t saying,” and his findings were “not comforting.”

  Refusing to take Baker’s findings seriously, Johnson put his plan into operation. When the Democratic caucus was held at 9:45 a.m. on January 3, he had not yet resigned as senator—he would do so after the Senate convened at noon—so he was still a senator, and still Majority Leader, and he strode into the caucus with a broad, easy smile, the faithful Baker at his side, went up to the table that had been set up in front, sat down in the seat he had held for eight years, and called the conference to order. Mansfield was then elected Majority Leader by acclamation—but Johnson did not hand him the gavel and vacate his chair. Mansfield took a chair that had been set up next to Johnson’s at the table, and made a motion, the minutes report, that “the Vice President-elect preside over future conferences.”

  As one of the senators in the room, Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia, was to write, “Can you imagine that? This action by the new Majority Leader reflected the quiet and unassuming nature of Mike Mansfield, but it was a mistake.” As Evans and Novak were to write, “Mansfield was proposing that the Senate of the 87th Congress do what no other Senate had done: breach the constitutional separation of powers by making the Vice President the presiding officer of all the Senate Democrats whenever they met in a formal conference.”

  Several senators jumped to their feet to object. Johnson, as chairman, had to recognize them. Among the first were Joe Clark and Albert Gore. Looking directly at Johnson, Gore said angrily, “We might as well ask Jack [Kennedy] to come back up to the Senate and take his turn at presiding. I don’t know of any right for a Vice President to preside or even be here with senators. This Caucus is not open t
o former senators.” As Gore defied him, standing only a few feet away from him and staring him in the eye, an angry flush spread over Johnson’s face, but Gore and Clark were liberals; their opposition had been anticipated, and it could be disregarded; for eight years, Johnson had been disregarding liberal objections with the support of the Old Senate Bulls.

  But then other hands went up, and among them were the hands of three Bulls: Olin Johnston, Willis Robertson, and Clint Anderson. One after another, Johnson recognized them, expecting them to support Mansfield’s motion; one after another, they attacked it. “Unbelievably” to Baker, even Anderson attacked it. He was a friend of Lyndon’s, Anderson said, he had supported him in the Senate, and, he said, all Democratic senators owed Lyndon a great debt for his leadership. But, Anderson said, the Vice President was an official of the Executive Branch. Selection of a member of that branch to preside over a senatorial body would not only shatter the principle of separation of powers but would also make the Senate “look ridiculous.” Bobby Baker sneaked another look at Johnson. The Leader’s face, red a moment before, had “gone completely ashen.” He recognized Mike Monroney, for so long the most loyal of allies. If we support Mansfield’s motion, Monroney said, “We are creating a precedent of concrete and steel. The Senate will lose its powers by having a representative of the Executive Branch watching our private caucuses.” All of the Old Bulls included praise of Johnson in their remarks, Bobby Baker was to say, “but there was no getting around that they were inviting him out of their Senate inner circle.”

  It was obvious that sentiment in the room was heavily against the motion, but Mansfield spoke in favor of it. He had no intention of “sharing either his responsibility or authority,” he said; he intended the motion only as recognition for Johnson’s achievements. And the new Majority Leader made it personal, threatening to resign from the post to which the senators had just elected him if they did not support his proposals.

  “Under Mansfield’s threat to resign, the Caucus did uphold his motion”—the vote was 46 to 17—“but everyone in the room knew that Johnson had been rebuffed,” Bobby Baker was to say. “Even though we lost, we won,” Gore said, “because the size of the vote didn’t reflect the true sentiment. You could feel the heavy animosity in the room, even from many who voted for Lyndon—and Lyndon does possess a long antenna.” As John Goldsmith of the United Press was to report, “With senators—no and aye alike—filing out of the conference room with grim expressions and angry whispers, it was clear … that it wasn’t going to work.” Word soon was circulating along the corridors of the Senate Office Building that, if necessary, there could be another vote—one that would have a different result.

  THAT WOULD NOT PROVE NECESSARY. Several friendly senators tried to make Johnson grasp the reality of the situation. “I was one of those who told him that it was no good, and no good for him,” Hubert Humphrey was to say. “It was just building up animosities….” They also saw how difficult it was for him to accept the reality. “It was too much for him to leave that center of power,” Humphrey says. “He was just very reluctant to give up those reins….” Realizing that the situation had to be made clear to Johnson by someone who could make him understand, and realizing that there was only one senator capable of doing that, they delegated the task to him. “It fell to Richard Russell, his old friend, to bring him the obvious news that he could not hang on to the power he once had,” Humphrey says.

  After Russell spoke to him, he did understand. When the Democratic senators caucused again the next day, Lyndon Johnson was not present. Nor was he present at the next two caucuses. He did attend one on February 27, perhaps so that a statement from his new boss, relayed through Mansfield, would not sound like a rebuke of him. Mansfield told the caucus that he had been meeting with President Kennedy about a legislative program. He said, “The President has made suggestions, but he wanted the conference to know that the President and Vice President know the line of demarcation between the legislative and executive branches of government.”

  After that, Lyndon Johnson did not attend another caucus for almost two years; by the time he did appear at a Democratic conference again—at two caucuses in January, 1963—his attendance was no longer a threat to anyone, since by that time Washington understood that he had lost all his power, so completely that he had become almost a figure of ridicule in the capital. He called those two caucuses to order, and, when their business was completed, said they were adjourned. Aside from those functions, he did not, in the memory of senators who were present, participate in the caucuses at all, sitting through them saying little or nothing, staring gloomily down at the top of the table in front of him.

  DURING HIS EARLY WEEKS AS VICE PRESIDENT, when he was presiding over the Senate while a senator was delivering a lengthy speech to an almost-empty chamber, he would sometimes step down from the dais, walk over to one of the few senators on the floor and begin to chat. The senators he approached were always courteous to him, but often they had to break off the conversation. They had other things to do. When he had had power, they had been anxious to talk to him, eager for a few moments of his time. They weren’t anxious now. After a little while, he stopped coming down from the dais.

  Once he came into the Democratic cloakroom which had been his domain, the cloakroom where he had stood holding fistfuls of telephone receivers, the wires stretching out from his hands, the cloakroom in which he had kicked the telephone booths, the cloakroom in whose center he had stood, Bobby Baker running up to him for whispered conferences, senators clustered around him waiting for instructions, trying to get a minute to plead with him for a favor, the cloakroom in which, for eight years, he had been the center of attention. When he came in now, several senators were there, sitting in the armchairs or on the sofas. He said hello to them. They said hello to him. He stood there for several minutes, apparently waiting for someone to stand up and talk to him, or to invite him to sit down. No one did. Says one of the men who were present, “I don’t think he ever came into the cloakroom again.”

  IN LATER YEARS, when Lady Bird Johnson would talk about the time that her husband had been a senator, she would sometimes say, “Those were the happiest twelve years of our lives.”

  Those years had been happy—and now they were over. The Senate had been Lyndon Johnson’s home. Now he had left it.

  DEBTS

  SOURCES

  NOTES

  INDEX

  Debts

  DURING THE TWELVE YEARS since the previous volume of The Years of Lyndon Johnson was published, the research team that works with me on the project has published its own book, and is well under way on a second, yet it has found time—made time, really—to continue doing research on the current volume.

  The team—Ina Caro, that’s the whole team, the only person besides myself who has done research on the three volumes, or on the biography of Robert Moses that preceded them, the only person I would ever trust to do so—has, during these twelve years, ranged all across the United States in search of information about Lyndon Johnson and the years he spent in the Senate. She has traversed mountains of files in presidential libraries: the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park, New York; the Harry S Truman Library in Independence, Missouri; the Dwight D. Eisenhower Library in Abilene, Kansas—archivists in each of these libraries have taken occasion to tell me how deeply, watching her at work, they came to admire her tirelessness and diligence. And of course she has searched painstakingly and perceptively through the red and gray document boxes at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library in Austin, Texas. That’s just presidential libraries. Archival collections from Athens, Georgia (the Richard B. Russell Library) to Williamsburg, Virginia (the A. Willis Robertson Papers at the College of William and Mary), to Norman, Oklahoma (the Robert Kerr and Elmer Thomas Papers at the University of Oklahoma) have been subject to her incisive historian’s eye, as have collections at a place to which she didn’t have to take a plane but only a subway: Columbia University, where she
has gone through, among many archives, the papers of Herbert H. Lehman.

  Among the more memorable pieces of original research she accomplished is her work at the Russell Library, and she may also have read through more letters, memoranda, drafts of legislation and other documents from the members of the Senate’s Southern Caucus of the 1950s than any human being on the face of the earth. For the previous volumes, the libraries in which Ina worked included the tiny libraries of isolated towns all across the Texas Hill Country, where she found early histories of the towns, and copies of ancient weekly newspapers that the librarians had thought no longer existed, and for those books, also, she accomplished other notable feats of research—transforming herself into an expert on rural electrification and soil conservation, for example—that I tried to acknowledge at the time. But I don’t think that even for those books, Ina Caro achieved more in the way of pioneering archival research than she did for this one.

  Ina was meant for libraries. She doesn’t like to do interviews, but is always happy when she knows that the next week—or month—will be spent among books and papers, and there is still the same lilting joyfulness in her voice when she telephones me about some new discovery as I remember in her voice thirty years ago. This book, like the others before it, is improved in a hundred—or a thousand, who can count?—ways by the discoveries she has made in the files of vanished statesmen and bigots. The more I learn about history and historians, the more I realize what an exceptional historian she is: a researcher of remarkable tenacity and unshakable integrity—my beloved idealist, always.