Master of the Senate (113 page)

T
HEY WERE
being tightened in other ways as well. Was Lyndon Johnson already arranging with the chairmen the schedule of when their bills would reach the floor? Now he began suggesting to some chairmen that he manage the bills on the floor.

In the past, chairmen had managed major pieces of legislation on the floor except when they assigned one to a committee member with a particular interest in it. Says Floyd Riddick, who in 1955 was the Senate’s assistant parliamentarian, and had been observing the Senate, in one capacity or another, for almost twenty years: “In the past the chairmen would never have let the Majority Leader do that.
They
managed their bills on the floor.” But some of the
chairmen—not only Finance’s seventy-seven-year-old Walter George but Interior’s seventy-eight-year-old Jim Murray and Rules’ eighty-seven-year-old Theodore Francis Green (whose eyesight, hearing, and mental faculties had all declined to a point at which he sometimes required an aide’s assistance even to find his way around the Capitol hallways)—were elderly now, and it was no longer easy for them to manage controversial or complicated measures. They had grown accustomed to Johnson’s assistance in so many matters; George and Green were now quite appreciative of the way in which, when they were confronted with a crowd of question-shouting reporters as they emerged from a White House foreign affairs briefing, Johnson, standing between them, would field the questions. Fielding questions on the Senate floor seemed only a logical extension. Furthermore, their paternal fondness for Johnson made his offers of assistance seem the offers of a loyal young friend, eager only to help. Johnson was not exaggerating when he told Doris Kearns Goodwin that these elderly senators were as grateful for the offers “as for a spring in the desert.”

With younger chairmen—William Fulbright of the Banking and Currency Committee, for example—Johnson would use a different tactic. He would point out that unwanted amendments would be offered on the floor. The chairmen would realize that while they had been able to squelch those amendments within their committees, the Leader would be in a better position to squelch them on the floor and keep the bills in the form they wanted. And Johnson would use his power to keep the bills as intact as possible.

Once, for example, after a long battle in committee, a bank regulatory bill emerged in a form favored by Chairman Fulbright and by the bill’s proposer, the committee’s ranking Democratic member, A. Willis Robertson. Robertson told Johnson that while Fulbright had been able to force the bill through the committee, some of its members were determined to introduce major amendments on the floor, and that some of them would pass. Fulbright couldn’t do anything about this, but Johnson could. He told Robertson to tell the would-be amenders that in that case the bill wasn’t going to come to the floor, that he would not make a motion to have the Senate consider it unless Robertson gave him “assurance that … no amendments will be offered.” Robertson relayed this message to the dissidents, and some of them, eager for the bill to pass, agreed to drop their amendments. Three would not. “The nearest I can come to your request” would be to reduce the number of amendments to three, Robertson wrote Johnson, but he also reported that all three could be voted down quickly on a voice vote. That was good enough for Johnson—and for Fulbright. Johnson had, by negotiating on his behalf, obtained most of what the chairman wanted.

Noting such developments from his seat on the dais, Riddick saw their significance. “Now, for the first time, you had a Leader who’s going to keep it [a bill] intact…. They [the chairmen] went along [with letting Johnson manage their bills] because by letting him take over the management of the bills,
they knew they would get what they wanted,” Riddick says. “Out of loose consideration of legislation was emerging leadership control [of legislation]—control by Lyndon Johnson. Johnson just gradually pulled the management [of bills] out of the hands of the chairmen. They were surrendering their powers—not intentionally, but it was a growth process. There was gradually growing an attitude, ‘Let Lyndon do it.’ You don’t realize you’re losing power, you don’t realize that things are changing. You think the Leader is only helping you. But the first thing you know, he’s integrating everything. He knows everything about every bill, he can change one thing for another with different senators. Things
were
changing.”

H
E WAS ALSO USING
other powers he had acquired, or created, as Minority Leader, and he was using them with less restraint.

Majority Leader or not, he still needed the support of the old Democratic Bulls—of Russell, George, Hayden, Byrd, Ellender, Eastland, McClellan, three or four others; while Walter George, elected President pro
tempore
at the Senate’s 1955 opening session, was laboriously ascending the dais to accept the gavel, a reporter in the Press Gallery above muttered, “Save your Confederate money, boys. The South is rising again.” With southerners as chairmen of six of the nine most powerful Senate committees (and its ally Hayden ascending, thanks to McKellar’s death, to the chairmanship of a seventh, Appropriations), “its hold seems even stronger than previously,” Thomas Stokes wrote. Were the Big Bulls to turn against Johnson, they could wreck his leadership as easily as they had wrecked McFarland’s and Lucas’ before him—and to the Big Bulls Johnson was as deferential as ever. He praised them publicly at every opportunity, telling one reporter, “We have the master craftsmen in the legislative field in the Democratic Party,” noting to another that these chairmen “have been twenty-five years in Congress, on the average. Hell, every one of ’em’s an old pro.” In private, he was as obsequious, as fawning, as ever. “He didn’t rant and rave at the Harry Byrds of the world,” Senator George Smathers of Florida would say. “Oh no, he was passive, and so submissive, and so condescending, you couldn’t believe it! I’ve seen him kiss Harry Byrd’s ass until it was disgusting: ‘Senator, how about so-and-so? wouldn’t you like to do this? can’t we do this for you?’”

But with the Big Bulls solidly behind him, the addition of his new powers made the support of the rest of the Democrats less important to him; they needed him much more than he needed any one of them. For the first time since college and the NYA, Lyndon Johnson had direct power over other men. And as soon as he got it, he showed how he was going to use it. Power, Lord Acton said, corrupts. Not always. What power
always
does is
reveal.
And now there began to be revealed a Lyndon Johnson who would have been familiar to those who had known him in college.

It began quickly—in his first action as Majority Leader: the making of committee assignments. In the appointment calendar on Johnson’s desk the pages headed January 6, January 7, and January 8 were blank except for a numeral he had scrawled large across each one: “231.” His office in the Capitol was too accessible: once again, in the first days of a new Congress, Lyndon Johnson was operating from behind a closed door in his old suite in the SOB; once again, the left-hand button on Walter Jenkins’ telephone console glowed yellow-white; once again, by the date of the Democratic Steering Committee’s first meeting—this year on Monday, January 10—the Standing Committee checkerboard was already filled, and Steering Committee ratification had been arranged. There was, however, a difference between the telephone calls Lyndon Johnson was making now and the calls he had made two years earlier. Throughout his two years as Minority Leader, despite the power over committee assignments that had been ceded to him by the Steering Committee, he had, in making and explaining controversial assignments, hidden behind that committee, telling disappointed or angry colleagues that it was the committee that decided, that he was only one of its members. Though that veil had become increasingly transparent, he had nonetheless kept it in place, and to some extent it had softened the harsh reality of his wielding of power. Now the veil was allowed to fall.

A number of younger senators had accumulated sufficient seniority to expect seats on major committees, seats for which they were well qualified—in some cases, extremely well qualified. But their committee assignments were not going to be made on the basis of seniority or of qualifications. Their assignments were going to be made on the basis of their personal allegiance to Lyndon Johnson. And Johnson let them know it.

Estes Kefauver, for example, had been trying for four years to get on the Foreign Relations Committee or the Policy Committee (making, in regard to the Policy Committee, the argument, strong in traditional Senate terms, that Tennessee had historically had, in McKellar, a Policy seat), and Johnson had always told him in the past that these selections were determined by the Steering Committee. On Tuesday, January 11, 1955, Kefauver learned that he had again been passed over for Foreign Relations. The makeup of the Policy Committee had not yet been announced, and he telephoned Lyndon Johnson and, with Walter Jenkins listening, mouthpiece unscrewed, taking notes, said, “Lyndon, I want to be a member of the Policy Committee.”

“Well, Estes,” Lyndon Johnson replied, “I appreciate your wanting to be there.” But, Johnson said, you’re not going to be there. And in explaining why, Johnson didn’t bother to cite the Steering Committee. The pronoun he used was the first person singular. “The man I selected hasn’t been you,” he said.

When Kefauver began to argue—“Lyndon, you remember I started trying to be a candidate for [the Policy Committee] when Tom Hennings got it…”—Johnson reverted to traditional terms, mentioning the need for geographical
diversity on the committee, and the requirements of seniority, and Kefauver attempted to swallow his chagrin. “Of course, if it is already settled …” he said. “I was of course kind of disappointed about Foreign Affairs…. How about keeping me in mind?” And when Johnson replied this time, he made things clearer. There were no more traditional terms; instead the new reality was spelled out—in the “new tone” that Hubert Humphrey had heard. “I will sure keep you in mind,” Lyndon Johnson said. But, he said, “I have never had the particular feeling that when I called up my first team and the chips were down that Kefauver felt he … ought to be on that team.” The price of his favor was stated. “If you feel you ought to be and want to be [on my team], it is the best news I have ever had,” Lyndon Johnson said. “I will meet you more than fifty percent of the way. I will push you into every position of influence and power that you can have…. If you and I can ever get on that basis …”

Kefauver began to plead a little. “As far as I am concerned, I have always wanted to be on that basis,” he said. “I will let my hair down on this point, Lyndon: honestly, you have never given me a break since you have been the Leader.” But Johnson was having none of that. “Maybe I just felt like I wasn’t positive you wanted me to be the captain—that’s letting your hair down,” he said. Proof, clear proof, of Kefauver’s willingness to be on the Johnson team—and to let Johnson be the captain—would be required, Johnson made clear. “You have got to have a lot more than desire on these committee appointments,” he said. Kefauver had not provided such proof in the past, he said. “You just look through your documents and see when you have said to Johnson that you were on my team…. There’s no use in our kidding each other.”

Johnson apparently felt there was at least a chance that Kefauver could be brought to heel. With liberals like Lehman and Douglas, uncompromising in their principles, there was no such chance, and Johnson knew it. So with them he was more brutal. Long determined to end the injustice and prejudice codified in existing immigration laws, Lehman badly wanted a seat on Judiciary, the committee with jurisdiction over those laws. His seniority for that seat was sufficient, his expertise unique: not only did he represent the state which, as Drew Pearson put it, “was more concerned with immigration than any other,” possessing as it did, New York City, lodestar of immigrants, he had been that state’s governor for ten years. But he didn’t get the seat, and when he asked Johnson why, Johnson gave as his reason, as he later told reporters, that Lehman was not a lawyer, an excuse so transparent (no Senate rule made a law degree a requirement for membership on the committee; degreeless Earle Clements had only recently been serving on it) that he obviously did not care whether or not it was believed.

Lehman’s qualifications for Judiciary were equaled by those of Douglas for Finance, and since Johnson had proclaimed expertise a criterion for committee appointments, it was assumed that he would not dare to continue keeping the Senate’s most respected expert on taxation off its tax-writing
committee, particularly since it had not one but two vacancies to be filled (and since, as Evans and Novak were to write, although Douglas was opposed to the oil-depletion allowance, “the Finance Committee was already so stacked in favor of the oil and gas industry” that one vote on it could not affect its decisions). “It had been assumed that he [Douglas] would get it up to the time the lists were made public,” Thomas Stokes was to write.

But Johnson had another plan for the economist, one with a particular sting in it. There was a committee with the word “Economic” in the title: the Joint Economic Committee. But whereas Finance had vast power, this committee had no power at all; it was authorized only to issue reports. “I’m gonna name him chairman of the Joint Economic Committee,” Johnson told Bobby Baker. “It can’t do a damn thing. It’s as useless as tits on a bull. But it’ll give Professor Douglas some paper to shuffle.” And for Douglas’ exclusion, Johnson vouchsafed no explanation at all.

In 1955 as in 1953, every newly elected senator received an assignment to a major committee, and columnists were once again full of praise for the “Johnson Rule.” “Johnson at his best again,” Doris Fleeson wrote. “Senator Johnson has once again quietly worked a revolution in the ancient system.” All but unremarked by journalists, however, was the fact that the nature of the revolution had changed. No longer was it only the assigning of freshmen, or the use of expertise as a criterion. Added to the Johnson Rule now was another factor—one which did indeed prove that Johnson ruled.