Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson

by Robert A. Caro

  In some areas, these papers are illuminating. The series in the Johnson Senate Papers labeled “Papers Relating to the Armed Services Preparedness Investigating Subcommittee,” for example, are valuable because in order for freshman Senator Lyndon Johnson to obtain the staffing and funding he wanted for this subcommittee, he had to submit to senior senators detailed requests, and not only these requests but the work papers that went into the final requests provide significant insight into his thinking and maneuvers. The Senate Papers (which are described at the end of this Note) contain the office files and memoranda of various Johnson assistants, most notably Walter Jenkins, George Reedy, Solis Horwitz, and Gerald Siegel, and their reports to Johnson are detailed and informative.

  I have found the Johnson papers rather unrevealing, however, about an area that is a major concern of this book: the nature of senatorial (or, in a larger sense, legislative) power, and how Johnson acquired and employed that power; how the Senate works, in other words, and how Lyndon Johnson made it work.

  Primary written sources for the Senate itself, in the National Archives and the Senate Library and in other collections in Washington, are also not as helpful as they might be. For one thing, the source that should be the most basic and complete record for events on the Senate floor—the Congressional Record—cannot always be relied on as an accurate reflection of what occurred there. Senators and their assistants routinely “corrected”—meaning “edited,” and, not infrequently, meaning expunged, or made more politic—the words they actually spoke on the floor. Lyndon Johnson made extensive use of this opportunity to alter the historical record, which during his later years in the Senate took place, as his assistant Colonel Kenneth E. BeLieu, staff director of Johnson’s Preparedness Subcommittee from 1957 to 1961, states, in a room behind the Senate floor that “we called Dino’s room, only because it was supervised by a man named Dino. This was … where staffs corrected the Senators’ floor statements for spelling, grammar and content.”

  “Often,” BeLieu says, after Senator Stuart Symington and Johnson “had engaged in a spirited floor argument, Ed Welch and I went to Dino’s to do our duties, Ed for Symington and I for the Leader. We both had written their respective and suggested remarks. I announced to Ed, ‘What Lyndon said bears no resemblance to what I wrote for him.’ Ed countered, ‘What Symington said will bear no resemblance to what I’m now writing.’”* During Johnson’s earlier years in the Senate, the editing was often done by Donald Cook and George Reedy, sometimes by other members of his staff, and sometimes by Johnson himself. His staff member Solis Horwitz, who worked for him from 1957 to 1959, was to recall that one morning in 1957, when a number of Johnson staffers were meeting in the office of Secretary of the Senate Felton (Skeeter) Johnston, “the Senator came in, and he had made a long speech on the floor that morning and had gotten into a great deal of dialogue. He had the transcript with him, and … he was correcting the transcript while sitting there.” (Horwitz says he “never saw him do that again in all the years that I was with him. Because after that, we always corrected the transcript.”)† Other members of the staff said that while Johnson did the editing himself infrequently during the years after he became Democratic Leader, he did it more frequently during the years before that. One area in which this altering of the Record is particularly damaging to historical accuracy is that of civil rights; during interviews, journalists and Senate staff members would vividly recall for me venomous racist remarks that some southern senator or other had made during a debate, but time and again when I went to the Record for the relevant date, no such remark (or any approximate version of it) was there.

  Primary written sources are also not particularly helpful because of the nature of Senate life in the 1950s, in which so much crucial business—negotiating, persuading, the fashioning of compromises—was conducted not in writing but orally, face to face, or over the telephone, between the people involved, so that the only way to try to re-create the world of the Senate, and of Johnson’s role in it, was to talk to these people.

  I began my work on this volume in time for it to be possible for me to do this—but only just in time, as I was reminded, poignantly, by a letter written to the Caros (actually to my wife, Ina), on April 16, 2000, by Johnson’s longtime assistant Horace W. Busby. Buzz, as Ina and I had come to call him, had been rushed to a hospital in Santa Monica, California, the previous weekend. “Quite a time,” he wrote. “In and out of it for two nights—remember thinking it will be hard on Robert, nobody else can tell him about the Vice Presidency.”

  In the letter, Buzz said he was recovering. I was not sure he meant that; he closed the letter with a word he had never used before: “Farewell.” He never really recovered, and he died, on May 31, 2000, at the age of seventy-six, without talking to me again.

  Buzz’s memory had failed him a bit in the hospital on one point: he had talked to me about “the Vice Presidency”—Lyndon Johnson’s vice presidency—and about the presidency, as he had, of course, about Lyndon Johnson’s years in the Senate. I had begun interviewing Buzz in 1976 in Austin. During the 1980s and 1990s, the interviews continued in Washington, some in his office, some in his apartment, some in a coffee shop, the Cozy Corner on Twentieth Street NW, that he liked to frequent, some in restaurants of a higher caliber. Some went on all day. In 1999, in failing health, he moved to Santa Monica, where his children could care for him, and the interviews continued by telephone. And he would write letters to clarify points he felt he had not made clear enough—or that I had stubbornly refused to accept because of conflicting information from other sources—during the conversations. Sometime after he moved, he lost his eyesight. He could still touch-type, however, and the letters continued. The occasional line which ran off the page, and the large, scrawled, very shaky B with which he signed the letters in hand, was the only sign of his disability. (“This B is not an affectation—best I can do since stroke,” he typed once.)

  It is difficult to calculate how many interviews I had with Horace Busby. I formally transcribed only seventeen of them; for scores of other lengthy interviews I made only handwritten notes (sometimes these, too, ran many pages); and is it correct to dignify with the title “interview” a brief telephone call he made to me in order to add a detail to a story he had previously told me, or to tell me a new anecdote about Lyndon Johnson that he had just remembered? I only know that when Buzz died, I still had so many more questions I wanted to ask him.

  I had received previous reminders that among the problems involved in the writing of this volume was that of the human life span. Horace Busby was not the only member of Lyndon Johnson’s staff who made an extensive effort to help me understand the extraordinary individual for whom they had worked, and to understand the years Johnson spent in the Senate of the United States. And he was not the only member of Johnson’s staff whose help was cut off abruptly. George Reedy, whom I began interviewing in 1985 over gargantuan platters of choucroute in Milwaukee’s German-American rathskellers, was in later years talking to me by telephone from his room in a nursing home in that city, with the same eagerness as Busby for me to get it right. My notes for a call I made to him on January 14, 1999, show that his first sentence was “I was hoping you would call me back. One point I didn’t make clear …” One day in March, 1999, when I telephoned his room, there was no answer. I didn’t attach any significance to that; there had been other occasions when I hadn’t been able to get in touch with him for a few days. But this time, a day or two after my call, I picked up the New York Times and found myself reading his obituary. Ken BeLieu, John Connally, Walter Jenkins, Gene Latimer, Dan McGillicuddy, Mary Rather, Jim Rowe, Slug Tyler, Mary Louise Glass Young—all these people worked in Lyndon Johnson’s various offices during his Senate years, all talked to me at length, and the assistance and insights of each of them were cut off while I still had questions to ask—as has also been the case, I must add, with an unfortunately large number of other men and women who were, in one capacity or anoth
er, involved in Johnson’s life, and who have also died. Over and over again during the course of researching these books, I was abruptly reminded of the opportunity I was being given by the cooperation of these men and women—and of how that opportunity wasn’t going to last indefinitely.

  I feel it would be gratuitous to say that some of them—perhaps all of them—would not agree with everything I have written. But whatever success I may have had in re-creating the Senate of Lyndon Johnson is due beyond measure to the effort of these people to help me understand him, and the world of the Senate (and it is also due, of course, to the help of members of Johnson’s staff who thankfully are still with us; particularly valuable insights and descriptions have been given me by Roland Bibolet, Yolanda Boozer, Nadine Brammer Eckhardt, Ashton Gonella, Gerald Siegel, and Warren Woodward). Some other members of Johnson’s staff refused my requests for interviews, but they have given extensive oral history interviews to the Johnson Library, so that at least some of their views are on record. And the help of those who did talk to me has, I hope, reduced the significance of those refusals.

  In addition to Johnson’s staff, there were other interviews. Eleven were with senators: Bill Bradley of New Jersey, Robert Byrd of West Virginia, Carl T. Curtis of Nebraska, William J. Fulbright of Arkansas, Eugene J. McCarthy of Minnesota, Edmund S. Muskie of Maine, William Proxmire of Wisconsin, Abraham A. Ribicoff of Connecticut, Stuart Symington of Missouri, Herman Talmadge of Georgia, and Ralph W. Yarborough of Texas. Some of these interviews—with Fulbright, Muskie, and Symington—were extensive and valuable. And about others a particular word might be said. Ralph Yarborough was interviewed, after his retirement from the Senate, in a one-man law firm in Austin that seemed out of a daguerreotype of the Old West, with the mounted horns of a Texas longhorn over the receptionist’s desk and, in his inner office, a long, long old-fashioned conference table covered, from one end to the other, in deep stacks of legal papers. He lavished time on me, in five intensive discussions, in an attempt to make me understand the Senate as he found it when he arrived there in 1957, and Lyndon Johnson as he had known him since he began encountering him in Texas politics during the 1930s. The interview with Herman Talmadge at his home in Henry County, Georgia, was painful—literally, since he was suffering badly from congestive heart failure, and every answer he made to my questions required an effort that was hard to watch. But the answers were given, and they provided me with new insight into Lyndon Johnson’s relationship with the southern senators. Bill Bradley had thought quite deeply about the workings of the Senate, and about the nature of power in it. A series of interviews with him in 1996 both in Washington and in New York were more like lectures from a very thoughtful and perceptive scholar. In addition, Senator Bradley provided one bit of assistance that he was unusually (almost uniquely, in fact) qualified to give. Many of the men who had been present on the Senate floor during the 1950s had told me how Lyndon Johnson was so tall that he “towered” over senators in the well as he stood at his Majority Leader’s front-row desk one step above it, and how his eyes were almost at the level of the clerks and the presiding officer on the dais across the well. Bill Bradley, as I realized from perusing an old program I had kept from a Princeton University basketball game, was six feet four and a half inches tall, just slightly taller than Johnson. When, near the end of the wonderful day on the floor that he arranged for me, he asked if there was anything further he could do to be of assistance, I said there was. The then Majority Leader, Bob Dole, wasn’t at his desk. I asked Senator Bradley if he would mind going over and standing at it, so I could get a picture of precisely to what degree Johnson had in fact “towered” as he stood there. Bill was gracious enough to comply. Since this was an opportunity I was not likely to have again, I was determined to get the picture fixed firmly in my mind no matter how long that took. After a while, I realized that Bill had been standing there for quite some time, and that he was in fact looking at me as if to inquire if he had been there long enough. I said I would appreciate it if he would stand there a while longer, and he did, uncomplainingly—for as long as I needed.

  It seems to have become a custom for biographers to total up the number of interviews they conducted for a book. I see by my notes that the number of people I interviewed is 263, but of course not just Busby and Reedy and Yarborough but many of these people were interviewed many times. With some of the key sources for this book—Bob Barr, Dick Bolling, Herbert Brownell, Ed Clark, Ava Johnson Cox, Tex Easley, Bryce Harlow, L. E. Jones, Bill Jordan, Margaret Mayer, Neil MacNeil, Posh Oltorf, Joe Rauh, Jim Rowe, Howard Shuman, John Steele, Arthur Stehling, many others, too—our relationship became so friendly that whenever I had a question, I was able to simply pick up a telephone and call them, informally. And of course those names do not include Dick Baker and Don Ritchie, who during these twelve years have spoken to me, formally, informally, in person, over the telephone, from their office, from their homes, so many times that I am sure they never want to hear from me again. Adding up the interviews I conducted is difficult, but by the most conservative estimate the number is more than a thousand.

  Here is a description of the papers in the Johnson Library that form part of the foundation for this third volume—and an explanation of how they are identified in the Notes that follow.

  Senate Papers, 1949–1961 (JSP): The papers kept in files in Johnson’s various offices, including the one he maintained in Austin, Texas; his “Texas Office” in the Senate Office Building; his Democratic Majority Leader’s Office in the Capitol; and from files of the Democratic Policy Committee, from 1949 through January, 1961. These include memoranda (both intra-office and with others), correspondence from and to constituents, correspondence relating to presidential nominees to federal and diplomatic positions for which Senate confirmation was required; correspondence, drafts of bills, reports and drafts of reports as well as memoranda and work papers and press relating to his work on the various Senate committees and subcommittees of which he was a member; transcripts of committee and subcommittee executive sessions and hearings. These papers include Congressional Record tear sheets. They also include the “Papers of the Democratic Leader,” which are made up of the files of individual members of his staff, including Policy Committee staff members George Reedy, Solis Horwitz, and Gerald W. Siegel. They include meeting agenda, analyses of proposed legislation, intra-office and inter-office memoranda, correspondence with other senators, and with members of the House of Representatives, and with lobbyists, officials of federal agencies; speech drafts and final versions, and drafts and final versions of press releases. “George Reedy’s Confidential Memo File,” part of these Senate Papers, contains memos on many topics. Many have no date recorded, but some are filed in folders by month. Some are from Reedy to Johnson, giving him information; some were written by Reedy at Johnson’s instructions, or dictation, to be shown to other senators as if they were Reedy’s own thoughts, to reinforce arguments Johnson wanted to make to them.

  Senate Political Files (SPF): These files cover a time period from 1949 to 1960. They concern the consolidation of Johnson’s position in Texas following the 1948 campaign; the 1954 Senate campaign; his 1956 bid for the presidency; and his bid in 1960 for the presidential nomination. They also contain numerous Texas county files. They were made into a separate file by the Library staff.

  Lyndon Baines Johnson Archives (LBJA): These files were created about 1958, and consist of material taken both from the House of Representatives Papers and from Johnson’s Senate Papers. It consists of material considered historically valuable or of correspondence with persons with whom he was closely associated, such as Sam Rayburn, Abe Fortas, James Rowe, George and Herman Brown, Edward Clark, and Alvin Wirtz; or of correspondence with national figures of that era. These files are divided into four main categories:

  Selected Names (LBJA SN): Correspondence with close associates.

  Famous Names (LBJA FN): Correspondence with national figures.

  Congres
sional File (LBJA CF): Correspondence with fellow congressmen and senators.

  Subject File (LBJA SF): This contains a Biographic Information File, with material relating to Johnson’s year as a schoolteacher in Cotulla and Houston; to his work as a secretary to Congressman Richard M. Kleberg; to his activities with the Little Congress; and to his naval service during World War II.

  Pre-Presidential Confidential File (PPCF): This contains material taken from other files because it dealt with potentially sensitive areas.

  Pre-Presidential Memo File (PPMF): This file consists of memos taken from the House of Representatives Papers, the Johnson Senate Papers, and the Vice Presidential Papers. While these memos begin in 1939 and continue through 1963, there are relatively few prior to 1946. While most are from the staff, some are from Johnson to the staff. The subject matter of the memos falls in numerous categories, ranging from specific issues, the 1948 Senate campaign, and liberal versus conservative factions in Texas to phone messages and constituent relations.

  Family Correspondence (LBJ FC): Correspondence between the President and his mother and brother, Sam Houston Johnson.

  Personal Papers of Rebekah Baines Johnson (RBJ PP): This is material found in her garage after she died. It includes correspondence with her children (including Lyndon) and other members of her family, and material collected by her during her research into the genealogy of the Johnson family. It also includes scrapbooks.

  Personal Papers of Alvin Wirtz (AWPP): Twenty-five boxes.

  White House Central File (WHCF): The only files in this category used to a substantial extent in this volume were the Subject Files labeled “President (Personal)” (WHCF PP). They contain material about the President or his family, mainly articles written after he became President about episodes in his early life.