Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson

by Robert A. Caro

  THIRTY YEARS AGO, Bob Gottlieb and I began working together, over the 3,300-page manuscript of the Robert Moses book, The Power Broker. We are still working together, so all four of my books have benefited from the unique literary gifts of this talented and energetic editor. I am very grateful for that, as the dedication of this book attests.

  Thirty years ago, another person was often in the room with her “two Bobs.” Katherine Hourigan, Knopf’s managing editor, has also been an integral part of both the editorial and production process on all four of my books. After the last one, I wrote that “Her editorial judgments are characterized not only by perceptivity but by an unflinching integrity that has only grown stronger over the years.” Now more years have passed. The statement is still true. I also wrote, after that book, that it “presented daunting production problems. I have seen the ingenuity and tireless effort she put into solving them—and I have appreciated it.” I would have to amend that. The production problems for Master of the Senate, a book by an author who can’t seem to stop rewriting at every stage, were even more daunting. And I have appreciated even more deeply her efforts to solve them.

  In a literary world of which so many aspects seem increasingly transitory, it seems marvelous to me that I have somehow managed to have been working with the same people for such a long time. And I don’t mean just Bob and Kathy. As I walk around the halls of my publishing house, Alfred A. Knopf, they seem filled with friends of three decades. The ads for every one of my four books have been designed by the same person: Nina Bourne. When I came to Knopf in 1970, while I was still writing The Power Broker, Nina was Knopf’s advertising manager, and when the book was published in 1974, she designed the ads for it, and I can still remember how thrilled I was by them. She designed the ads for the first two volumes of the Johnson project, and she is still Knopf’s advertising manager. Nina offers editorial criticism of my books, too. She never presses it on me, but I have learned that when this uniquely gifted woman says something, I’d better listen. When I came to Knopf, Bill Loverd and his enthusiastic love of books were part of the house, and they are a part still. Every one of my Johnson books has been designed by the same person: Virginia Tan.

  Other people at Knopf have not been there quite as long, but they have been there long enough for me to appreciate them. The president and editor-in-chief, Sonny Mehta, published my last book as perfectly as a book could be published, in my opinion, and in the years since, he has always been there when I needed him. The guidance that Paul Bogaards, now Knopf’s executive director of promotion and publicity, gave me on my last book made me understand and appreciate his energy and intelligence.

  I have, luckily for me, had the same legal adviser for three decades—for longer than three decades, in fact, for when, during the 1960s, I was a young and totally inexperienced investigative reporter for Newsday, Andrew L. Hughes was its calm, deliberate—and ever wise—attorney. On Master of the Senate, as on my first three books, he has given me not only valuable legal guidance, but valuable literary guidance, too. It seems only a fitting part of the wonderful continuity of my writing life that his son Andrew W. Hughes is also a big part of my work. Andy, Knopf’s vice president of production and design, supervised the production of my first two Johnson volumes, and is of course supervising it on this volume, too. I want to say a special word about Andy. I am aware of all the problems that my possibly excessive attention to detail has caused, and I want to say thanks to him for solving them—and for the way my books look when, finally, they actually appear.

  Thanks also to these people at Knopf: Pat Johnson, Karen Mugler, Carol Carson, Kathy Zuckerman, Nicholas Latimer, and Gabrielle Brooks. For the past year and a half, Nathan Chaney has been Kathy Hourigan’s assistant. His unfailing cheerfulness has meant a lot to me in rushed times.

  As for Carol Shookhoff, also a longtime compatriot, she has been of help to me in so many ways that I hardly know how to thank her.

  My literary agent—she has, of course, always been my agent—is Lynn Nesbit. She was one of the first people to read the manuscript of this book, and I waited anxiously for her opinion, for I have learned that she has a literary sensibility I can always trust.

  Lynn has always been there when I needed her. Thanks.

  IN 1975, the Senate created a Senate Historical Office, and within a remarkably short time thereafter the institution possessed, for the first time, an institutional memory, and, for journalists and historians, a storehouse—a treasure house, really—of information about it.

  This occurred because of the two historians who were appointed—and to this day have been its only—Senate Historian and Associate Historian, respectively: Richard A. Baker and Donald A. Ritchie. It would have been easy for the Historical Office to become simply another bureaucratic backwater lodged in a few rooms in the Senate’s Hart Office Building. But Drs. Baker and Ritchie are historians in the highest sense of the word. They made it their business to learn their subject, previously a real terra incognita on the American political landscape—to learn it, and to know it, inside and out, in all its ramifications, and to make that knowledge available to anyone who wanted to write about it.

  A principal beneficiary of their largesse has been me. Since I began trying to learn about the Senate twelve years ago, I have badgered Dick Baker and Don Ritchie incessantly for information about the institution’s history, its rules and precedents, its procedures, and the men who have served it.

  I have been impressed times beyond counting with the extent to which these two men have had the most arcane facts at their fingertips—and impressed even more by their willingness, which so far as I can tell has no limits, to spare no effort to find out facts they didn’t know. A single example—it involves Dr. Ritchie but plenty of other examples would involve Dr. Baker—will show what I mean. To illustrate how early in his Senate years Lyndon Johnson’s quest for extra office space had begun, members of his staff laughingly told me about his attempt, during 1950, his second year in the Senate, to do something—it is not clear exactly what—to commandeer a tiny passageway (four square feet in size) that had once existed in the thick wall between his office—SOB 231 in what is now the Senate’s Russell Building—and the Senate Cafeteria next door; the passageway had at some time in the past been boarded up and plastered over on the side leading to Johnson’s office and used as a closet for cafeteria workers. Johnson’s staffers couldn’t tell me exactly how the attempt had been resolved, and I couldn’t find out, so I asked Don Ritchie to help. He ran down architectural drawings, and correspondence, but, as it happened, he couldn’t find out. On May 2,1994, after a final effort, he wrote me, “Dear Bob: I’ve spent this morning in search of four square feet…. How I wish I could report that I know exactly the answer to your question, but honestly I don’t.” In a sense, then, he had not been able to help me in that instance (which is the reason the incident is not in the body of my book), but in a more important sense, what mattered was his willingness to make so earnest an effort to help. And the closet inquiry was one of the few inquiries I made during the twelve years I was working on this book to which Don—or Dick Baker—didn’t find the answer, often after painstaking effort. I have abused shamefully the helpfulness of these two distinguished historians—each of them is the author of several books of his own—interviewing and telephoning them constantly, at their homes and in the evenings and on weekends, to fill in the vast blanks in my knowledge about the Senate. They never complained, were always helpful—and I will be forever grateful for that help. Any mistakes about the Senate in this book are there in spite of them; the responsibility is all mine. But to whatever extent the book is an accurate depiction of the Senate, it is accurate because of them.

  • • •

  FOR ME, during the past twelve years, the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library has meant a single person: Claudia Wilson Anderson.

  Claudia came to work on Johnson’s papers before there was a library. It opened in 1971; she had already been working on
Johnson’s papers since March, 1969, when the archives of the newly departed President were still stored at the Federal Building in downtown Austin.

  During the intervening years, she has become the Library’s great expert on the domestic presidential papers of the Johnson Administration, and on what the Library calls “Pre-Presidential Material”—which includes, of course, the Senate archives which form so large a part of the foundation for this volume.

  Claudia is a Senior Archivist at the Library—a title which does not adequately do justice to her abilities, or to her significance in the study of American history. Like Dick Baker and Don Ritchie, she is an historian in the highest sense of the word. She knows—she has made it her business to know—the archival material in her charge as thoroughly as it is possible for a single human being to know those thousands of boxes of documents. And she wants historians—and through them history and the world—to know that material. And in addition to this motivation—the motivation of the true historian—there is about her work a rare integrity and generosity of spirit. I can’t even imagine how many questions I have asked of Claudia (Where would I find material on this senator or that issue? Didn’t I once, years ago, see a piece of paper somewhere in which George Reedy was advising Johnson not to keep ignoring Hubert Humphrey? What file might that be in?). No matter how many questions I asked her, however, I cannot remember one on which she didn’t make as much of an effort as possible to answer it. And beyond such help on individual inquiries, her overall expertise—her guidance through the Lyndon Johnson Archives—has been the guidance of a perceptive and discriminating expert. I notice that every biographer of Lyndon Johnson has thanked Claudia for her help. They should have. History’s knowledge of Johnson will be richer for her help. I can’t imagine any biographer who owes her more than I do.

  AT THE JOHNSON LIBRARY ALSO, Linda Seelke, E. Philip Scott, Ted Gittinger, and Kyla Wilson have been of help with this volume, and I thank them.

  INA AND I are deeply indebted to a number of librarians at archival collections around the United States. We are especially indebted to the Russell Library’s Sheryl Vogt. Her knowledge of the Russell papers was invaluable in steering Ina through the manuscript collection, as was her assistance in reading Russell’s handwriting. Not only did she make Ina’s trips to Athens productive, she was always available, even years later, to answer any questions we might have. The Eisenhower Library’s Dwight Strandberg was also invaluable to Ina, both with his archival expertise and in making the library a pleasant and efficient research facility. The archivists at the Truman Library were so helpful and efficient that they had every file relating to Lyndon Johnson available and waiting every time Ina arrived in Independence. And Robert Parks at the Roosevelt Library, who remembers Ina from the time she first came to that library twenty-nine years ago as the researcher for The Power Broker, has for all that time been unstintedly generous in his assistance. Our gratitude also goes to Norman Chase at the Library of Congress, to Michael Gillette at the National Archives, and to Matthew Gilmore and Roxanna Deane at the Martin Luther King Library in Washington. The morgue of the defunct Washington Star, now in residence at that library, has been an invaluable resource for Master of the Senate, and Mr. Gilmore and Ms. Deane were very helpful in making it available.

  I first met Greg Harness, the Senate Librarian, twelve years ago, when I was starting on this book, and for twelve years he has, with great expertise and unfailing graciousness, been providing me with information that I needed.

  WILLIAM H. JORDAN JR. went to work for Richard Russell in 1955, and worked for him until Russell died in 1971, staying in the Senator’s office every night until Russell went home. Bill revered the Senator, whom he considers one of the greatest of American statesmen, and during the three decades since his death has worked faithfully to ensure that he received his proper place in history. To try to ensure that I understood Russell and portrayed him accurately, Bill spent many hours talking to me, as well as driving me to Winder and arranging for me to spend time in Russell’s home, and in the family graveyard behind it, as well as to talk with the Senator’s grandnephew, Richard Brevard Russell III. I thank him for that, and for the hospitality that he and his wife, Gwen (who was also a member of Russell’s staff and whose comments on him were also perceptive) extended to me. I thank Bill the more especially because he did all this although I think he understood that my view of Russell would coincide with his only in some respects. There was an honorableness about that that I admire.

  Howard E. Shuman brought to the Senate the keen eye of a political scientist and economist, and he observed the Senate close-up for twenty-seven years, as an administrative assistant first to Senator Paul Douglas and then to Senator William Proxmire. His perceptive observations have been embodied in books and in many articles, and they were embodied also in the many hours of his time which he spent educating me about the Senate. I thank him for them.

  Many journalists who covered the Senate during the 1950s and Lyndon Johnson during his senatorial and presidential years generously gave me the benefit of their observations and insights in hundreds of hours of interviews. These included Bonnie Angelo, John Chadwick, Benjamin Cole, Allen Drury, Tex Easley, John Finney, Alan Emory, Rowland Evans, John A. Goldsmith, Seth Kantor, Murray Kempton, William Lambert, Anthony Lewis, Sarah McClendon, Karl Meyer, John Oakes, Irwin Ross, Hugh Sidey, Alfred Steinberg, J. William Theis, Theodore H. White, and Frank Van der Linden.

  To a number of journalists, I am more than usually indebted. The word pictures of Lyndon Johnson briefing the press on the Senate floor just before noon each day that were given to me by Robert A. Barr were especially helpful, as was the research on the Senate which Bob volunteered to do for me.

  In Neil MacNeil, who came to Washington with the United Press in 1949, and was immediately assigned to the Senate, and who later was the congressional correspondent for many years for Time magazine, I found a journalist with a remarkable knowledge of the institution, its history, its mores, and its men. Neil shared all this with me most generously, in many hours of interviews, and in rereading my notes on these talks, I was struck over and over with the depth of his insights. I could use almost the same words in thanking John L. Steele. Over and over again, when I needed a detail to fill out a scene, or a piece of Senate history or custom to augment my knowledge, I had only to pick up a telephone and call Mr. Steele, and my problem was solved. I thank him for both the keenness of his perceptions and his willingness to share them with me.

  I had long admired the photographs of George Tames, and after I began talking with him, I learned that his eye was sharp even when it was not behind a camera. On several days—long days—George took me from room to room in the Capitol and the SOB, recounting to me scenes he had observed in each one, and helping me immeasurably in my attempts to grasp what the Senate was like decades ago.

  Katharine Graham provided me with many hours of insights into Washington, into Lyndon Johnson, and into the relationship between Philip Graham and Johnson, so crucial in this volume, and crucial also in the volume to come. Moreover, she graciously provided me with transcripts of a few of her own interviews with people who figure in this book. I list Mrs. Graham here, among the journalists, because I believe this is where she would want to be listed. And I thank also her researcher, Evelyn Small.

  In Margaret Mayer, I found a remarkable journalist. Her interviews with Johnson, and the vivid portraits her words painted of him, helped me in my attempts to see him as he was. Ms. Mayer covered him for the Dallas Times-Herald for many years, and worked for a short time on his staff. She has a very keen eye, and a real gift for words, and she put both at my disposal.

  During our many visits to Austin, Greg Curtis and his wife, Tracy, made things very pleasant for Ina and me, generously driving Texas-length distances to introduce us to various versions of barbecue. My conversations with Greg, who during his many years as editor of Texas Monthly elevated that magazine to the first rank of American journali
sm, were an education to me about Texas’ changing culture. I am grateful for those conversations.

  Sources

  A NOTE ON SOURCES

  IN TRYING TO RE-CREATE the world of the Senate of the 1950s, and Lyndon Johnson’s place in it, a basic source is of course the written materials found in the Senate Historical Office, the Senate Library, and the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington; in the collections of the papers of individual senators in various libraries around the United States—the papers of Richard B. Russell at the Russell Library in Athens, Georgia, were especially helpful for this work, but so were the papers of senators like A. Willis Robertson at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia; Robert Kerr and Elmer Thomas at the Carl Albert Center at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, Oklahoma; and Herbert H. Lehman at Columbia University in New York City—and in collections such as the NAACP Papers at the Library of Congress. And of course there are the papers in the Johnson Library in Austin, Texas. As I have explained in previous volumes of The Years of Lyndon Johnson, the papers in the Johnson Library are stored in document cases, some plain red or gray cardboard, most covered in red buckram (and stamped with a gold replica of the presidential seal). There are 2,082 boxes that deal with the Senate, and they contain, by the Library’s estimate, about 1,665,000 pages of documents. Some of them are only newspaper clippings or form letters to constituents, but there are hundreds of thousands of pages of significant letters, inter- and intra-office memoranda, scribbled notes, transcripts of telephone conversations, and speech texts in various edited versions. I don’t know how many of those pages I’ve read during the twelve years I’ve been working on this volume, but I’ve read a lot of them.