Chris Matthews Complete Library E-book Box Set: Tip and the Gipper, Jack Kennedy, Hardball, Kennedy & Nixon, Now, Let Me Tell You What I Really Think, and American

by Matthews, Chris

  But King had already had his fill of the care and feeding of Lyndon B. Johnson. He left the phone list sitting on a table near the bathroom door. When Johnson reemerged, King, his Congressman and others in the local political party came to attention before a Johnson enraged by the neglected calls.

  “Who did I tell to make those calls?” Johnson demanded.

  King, equally wrought up, replied, “Look, Senator, the list is on the table. I’m busy enough being lackey to one member of Congress, I’m not going to be lackey to two.”

  King’s boss, stricken with fear, hustled his aide out of the room, mumbling excuses about “the boy” being “tired and overworked.” “Go out and get a drink, go anywhere,” he said to King once they were safely out in the hall. “Just stay out of sight till he leaves town early tomorrow morning.”

  At six o’clock the next morning, King crawled into bed. At sixten, the phone rang. “Had your coffee yet?” Through the haze, King could recognize the husky and unmistakable voice of LBJ. Arriving at the scene he had been hustled out of the night before. King was greeted by a Johnson standing in a room scattered with the morning newspapers. From the looks of things, he had already been up for an hour.

  “How do you take it?” demanded the giant figure, looming over King, the pot of scalding coffee in his hand. King asked for cream and sugar. “I take it black,” Johnson said as he poured King a cup of unadulterated java.

  Larry King was about to undergo the “treatment.”

  “Now, I used to be a young man like you,” Johnson began, standing so close that King’s glasses were fogging, “and I know what it means to be working for someone else and yet wanting to get on and be your own boss. What’s your training?”

  When King said he had been a newspaperman, Johnson was unimpressed. “Not much money in that. You should go to law school. You can always go back to journalism if you want to, but you’ll have the degree.”

  King never knew for sure why the great man had summoned him for this thirty seconds of predawn fatherly counsel. What he does recall vividly is the picture of himself, the don’t-take-shit-from-no-man Larry King, dutifully lugging the Senator’s baggage down the stairs and then going back to ask whether there was anything more he could carry.

  Johnson had not only transformed an adversary into a bellhop, he had also recruited a future minion to the LBJ campaign team.

  Theodore Sorensen, who wrote great speeches for John F. Kennedy and stayed on briefly after Dallas, described the Johnson method of personal dealings this way: never bring up the artillery until you bring up the ammunition. In other words, to gain a senator’s vote on a bill, Johnson would spend days studying every conceivable source of motivation. When he was ready, he would just happen to bump into him. The fellow never knew what hit him.

  Few were immune to the treatment. Paul H. Douglas, the great economist who became a great senator, was once opposed to LBJ on a pending vote, but doubted his own sales resistance. “I’m not going out on the floor,” he told an aide. “He’s going to convince me.”

  On rare occasions, Johnson would launch into his famed treatment without having done his homework.

  Russell Baker of The New York Times was witness to one such instance. One day in 1961, Baker, then assigned to covering the Senate, was standing in the hall when Johnson grabbed him by the arm and hauled him into his office. “You, I’ve been looking for you. I just want you to know that you’re the only reporter that knows what’s going on around here, that if it weren’t for me Kennedy couldn’t get the Ten Commandments through this place.”

  As he commenced his harangue, Johnson scribbled something on a note pad and called in his secretary, who took the note, went out, and returned with it. For an hour and a half, Baker listened in astonishment to Johnson’s unexpected tribute to his work and talent as a reporter.

  Afterwards, Baker learned from a subsequent visitor to Johnson’s office what the message was that the Vice President of the United States had scribbled on that note he slipped to his secretary: “Who is this I’m talking to?”

  The secret to Johnson’s success, then and later, was his jeweler’s eye for the other man’s ego. Just as he had patiently introduced himself to one staff aide after another at the Dodge, the future Senate Majority Leader would give the same personal attention to his colleagues in the 1950s. Even as president he would employ the same exhaustive method in gaining approval of the most massive, historic legislative program since the New Deal: Medicare, civil rights, tax reduction and trade expansion. These landmarks were a tribute to this one man’s commitment to political retail. When it came to winning, LBJ had the patience and the humility to work each legislator one at a time. “JFK would call five or six,” House aide Craig Raupe recalls; “LBJ would take nineteen names and call them all.” Such painstaking retail paid dividends: where the dashing wholesaler John F. Kennedy had been stalled in his tracks on Capitol Hill, the Great Retailer would get his way.

  Lyndon Johnson was an avid student of others’ success. He wanted to learn all the tricks. “What’s his secret of getting ahead?” he would ask. “How did he do it?” This is not to say that LBJ’s attention to the personal was based on altruism. He loathed Robert F. Kennedy, but this did not stop him from studying every habit of John F. Kennedy’s brash little brother once Johnson became president himself. He knew that Bobby liked to stay up late at Hickory Hill discussing weighty issues of art and politics with his highbrow friends. Johnson always made a point of setting his appointments with the younger Kennedy at 8 A.M. sharp: better to have the little fella as groggy and vulnerable as possible.

  When several of the country’s editorial writers began writing high-toned critiques of Administration policies in the late ’60s, LBJ invited a coterie of them to lunch at the White House. Upon their arrival, they were escorted to the West Wing swimming pool. There they beheld, to their shared dismay, the President of the United States splashing away in his altogether. After protesting their lack of swimming suits, the now fully intimidated men of letters permitted an intimacy of communication with the Commander in Chief they had never anticipated when leaving their desks that morning. They could never again scold him with the same impunity. When it came to establishing rapport with someone, LBJ would say and do exactly what he divined was necessary.

  But there are limits to political retailing, as Johnson soon discovered. In the late 1950s, while the new-breed John F. Kennedy was laying the public-relations foundation for wholesale victory in the important presidential primaries, Johnson was counting on the relationships he had developed in the Senate to carry the day. Unaware of the emerging power of the media, he would sit in a room checking off the list of Senate supporters, acting as if they could deliver their states like precinct captains. “I’m okay in Arkansas, I’ve got McClellan and Fulbright; I’m okay in . . .” The man who assembled a national strategy won the presidency; the one pursuing the insider’s method became his VP.

  Often, Johnson would be on the verge of going wholesale politically, then allow his instincts to pull him back. White House counsel Harry McPherson tells how Johnson would often encourage him to write a presidential speech that captured the “big picture” of the Great Society’s goals, and then insist that his aide include Johnson’s record in adding to the number of chicken inspectors at the Agriculture Department.

  As long as he lived, LBJ was unable to grasp the power of television. Veteran journalist Martin Agronsky, then correspondent for CBS, recalls being summoned to the family quarters of the White House to be told by LBJ himself, eating a late supper in the kitchen, that he wanted CBS to give live coverage to an upcoming dinner he was having for the nation’s governors. The dinner would include a question-and-answer period that would give Johnson the chance to make a public case for his Vietnam policies. Agronsky called Fred Friendly, chief of his network’s news division, and hastily organized the program. On the night before the broadcast, Agronsky was again summoned to a kitchen scene at the White House
, but this time Johnson wanted the program canceled because Mrs. Johnson thought that putting the dinner on television would “abuse the hospitality of the White House to the governors.” Johnson was willing to pass up this rare prime-time TV opportunity in order to ensure his personal courtesy toward the governors, their wives and, last but not least, Mrs. Lyndon Baines Johnson.

  Few politicians today would make such a choice. New-breed pols, their instincts honed to the age, fly toward television cameras like moths to a lightbulb. Still, even in the era of Boss Tube, smart politics begins with learning the basics of one-to-one communication. Johnson knew that the key to success is sometimes not to think big, but to think small, that the best way to feed a giant ego is to feed first those of the people you need to influence.

  Howard H. Baker, Jr., who served as Senate Republican leader in the early 1980s, shared Johnson’s realism about the Senate, if not his success. “The most important part of a Senate majority leader’s education,” he once remarked after years of leadership frustration, “is over by the third grade: he has learned to count.”

  Some of Johnson’s successors have understood how to use this basic, retail truth; others have not. When Jimmy Carter ran for president in 1976, he ran against Watergate, bureaucracy, red tape, the arrogance of power and the establishment. All of this was conveyed in a single code word, “Washington.”

  Carter’s decision to “run against Washington” was a brilliant bit of political positioning. It allowed him, a member of the party that had dominated Washington for most of the previous generation, to posture as the “out” candidate. It gave him the populist edge that carried him to victory against a well-liked Gerald R. Ford.

  But his mistake was allowing this anti-Washington posture, so formidable out in the country, to hinder his effectiveness once in the capital. It is one thing to run against institutions. It’s another to declare war against the very people you are going to have to work with. No president can carry out a program if the Congress refuses to pass it in the first place or if the bureaucracy refuses to support its vigorous execution. “People don’t do their best work while they’re being pissed on,” an old Washington hand once remarked to me.

  The professionals still wonder, therefore, why Carter’s top people allowed themselves the luxury of walking over the congressional leaders they would soon be imploring for support. The Speaker of the House, Tip O’Neill, was told that of course his family and friends could have tickets to the Inaugural Ball, but they’d be in the back of the hall!

  That single incident with O’Neill—embellished over time—plagued Carter’s relations with the congressional leadership for four sad years. Jody Powell, Carter’s closest aide, later acknowledged that the new Administration “neglected the social” back in those early days, and it hurt. It would have been better if they had worked the establishment a bit. “We simply had no group of supporters around town who would reflexively come to our defense,” he admitted.

  Not all of this was accidental, of course. In crafting his early White House image, Jimmy Carter made much of his effort to deflate the “imperial presidency,” which had become a major national concern during the years of Vietnam and Watergate. One stunt was his decision to abandon the convoy of limousines and walk down Pennsylvania Avenue in the inaugural parade. A less successful gambit was his selling the presidential yacht, Sequoia. For years, presidents have found that nothing else loosens up difficult members of Congress like a quiet evening cruise down the Potomac. As one White House lobbyist put it, getting rid of the Sequoia was the “stupidest thing Carter ever did.” It gave the new President a short blurb in the newspapers for being careful with the taxpayers’ money; it cost him a great deal more at the retail level.

  Ronald Reagan did it differently. He, too, ran against “Washington.” More than that, he said that “government is not the solution to our problems, it is the problem itself,” not a phrase to win the hearts and minds of the city devoted entirely to the business of government. Yet, learning through Carter’s mistake, he did not make a vendetta of it. No one ever got the message that the new President was aiming his barbs at him.

  The first thing Reagan did after being elected was attend a series of well-planned gatherings in the homes of the capital’s most prominent journalists, lawyers and business people. The initial event was a party the President-elect and his wife, Nancy, gave at the F Street Club. The guests were the “usual suspects” of Washington political society; in other words, they were mostly Democrats. “I decided it was time to serve notice that we’re residents,” Reagan told The Washington Post’s Elisabeth Bumiller. “We wanted to get to know some people in Washington.” They went to dinner at the home of conservative columnist George Will, where they met Katharine Graham, publisher of the Post and bête noire of recent Republican Administrations. Next, they attended a party thrown by Mrs. Graham at her home in Georgetown. All this sent a clear signal: the Reagans and their people had come to join Washington society, not scorn it.

  The social courtship paid lasting dividends. As late as July 1987, President Reagan served as chief toastmaster at Mrs. Graham’s seventieth-birthday party. Carrying his wineglass to the head table, the President tilted his head in characteristic fashion, smiled at the lady of honor and said in his practiced Humphrey Bogart style, “Here’s lookin’ at you, kid.”

  Reagan launched a similar offensive de charme in the direction of Capitol Hill.

  Each year, the members of the House of Representatives, Republicans and Democrats together, hold a quiet little dinner in one of the employee’s cafeterias. It is sponsored by the men who manage the House gym, a congressional gathering place, like the cloakroom, where the members are cloistered from the outside world. There younger members play pickup basketball. Older members get rubdowns in the steam room, a place Tip O’Neill never went to without a handful of cigars to pass out.

  At the gym dinner, the fare is top-of-the-menu diner food—steak, baked potato, salad, apple pie for dessert. There is no program. The members simply come, serve themselves from a buffet, grab a beer and find a seat at one of the many long tables. They talk, greet friends—many former members make it back for the evening—eat, talk some more and leave. In an immensely political world, where congressmen send stacks of “regrets” every day of the week, attendance at the gym dinner is huge and enthusiastic.

  When I attended my first such dinner in 1981, I was surprised to see two other guests: George Bush and Ronald Reagan, the latter in a sporty glen-plaid suit. They had come for no other apparent reason than to share a drink and have their pictures taken with the members. George Bush, a congressman in the ’60s, knew the significance of the dinner and what a hit his new boss would make there. He knew that the members would be particularly taken with the fact that Reagan had come to an event that was an inside affair, off limits to the media.

  Jimmy Carter never attended a gym dinner.

  Reagan, whose contempt for government dwarfed Carter’s, was not about to make personal relationships suffer because of political or philosophical differences. He made an effort to win over that permanent Washington “establishment” that can either help an Administration or grease its decline. Despite the fact that he continued to campaign relentlessly against “Washington” as if he had never visited the place, he didn’t feel the sting of local rebuke that was visited on his predecessor.

  The lesson is obvious. If you want to do business with someone, don’t forget the personal aspect. The problem with new-breed pols is that in learning the skills of broadcasting they have forgotten the skills of schmoozing.

  I remember my own first conversation with Ronald Reagan. He had come to the House chamber to deliver the 1982 State of the Union address. It is traditional that the Speaker’s ceremonial office serves as the presidential “holding room” on such occasions. Greeting Reagan, with whom Tip O’Neill had been holding a daily political slugfest, I tried nervously to break the ice. “Mr. President, this is the room where we plot a
gainst you,” I offered, perhaps too gamely.

  “Not after six,” Reagan beamed. “The Speaker says that here in Washington we’re all friends after six o’clock.”

  The fact is, as novelists and screenwriters love to illustrate, a great deal gets done in Washington simply on the basis of after-hours relationships.

  Early in the Reagan Administration, for example, I was asked by journalist Nicholas von Hoffman to help keep a guy from committing suicide. The object of his concern was Mitch Snyder, a political activist who would later become famous as a crusader for the nation’s homeless. At the time, Mitch was engaged in a less celebrated cause. He was on the fiftieth day of a hunger strike, protesting the naming of a nuclear attack vessel the Corpus Christi. Unlike the Pentagon officials who make such designations, Mitch did not think “Body of Christ” a fitting title for a U.S. warship.

  As it turned out, I was able to help. I knew that despite Tip O’Neill’s many fights with President Reagan over national economic policy, he had established a cordial relationship with Reagan aide Michael K. Deaver, whom he had met one night at the home of columnist Mary McGrory. The Speaker had even sung a few songs that night with Deaver accompanying him on the piano.

  O’Neill called Deaver to check into the Corpus Christi matter. When Deaver returned the call, I told him the story and said the Speaker would appreciate anything he could do. The presidential aide was noncommittal; in fact, he seemed to be put off by the whole idea of the protest.

  Apparently, his interest was greater than it seemed. A few days afterward word leaked back to the Speaker’s office that Deaver had gone to see Reagan directly and with dramatic effect. The President overruled his Secretary of Defense, Caspar W. Weinberger, and personally changed the ship’s controversial name to City of Corpus Christi. Mitch Snyder, settling for this secularization of the ship’s name, started eating again. The President avoided a major PR problem and gave a few more years of life to a man who would become a heroic, troubled champion of Washington’s homeless.