Master of the Senate (120 page)

The reciprocal trade bill was one example. For decades—after the Second World War as before it—the bill’s arrival on the floor had caused the Senate to grind to a halt, sometimes for weeks, as free-trade senators fought protectionists and the protectionists fought among themselves, no fewer than twenty states having products they insisted be protected by tariff, and with the rates of each tariff the subject of separate bargaining.

In 1955, the bargaining had—thanks to Johnson—taken place within the Finance Committee, where the logrolling went far more smoothly than it would have done in public. And with the necessary compromises agreed, he had been able to secure a unanimous consent agreement to limit debate. There was still another hurdle, a high one for previous reciprocal trade bills: there was traditionally a roll call on the measure, since there always seemed to be some senators who demanded one, and protectionist senators privately in favor of a bill often voted against it to avoid having to explain an affirmative vote to their constituents. The hurdle was removed for the 1955 bill. Putting a supporter of the bill in the chair, Johnson armed him with a surprise parliamentary tactic. Instead of calling for the yeas and nays whenever there was a show of a few hands requesting one, the presiding officer responded to the request by invoking Article I, Section 5 of the United States Constitution, which said that yeas and nays should be ordered only “at the desire of one-fifth of those present.” And Johnson made sure that there were always enough senators present with instructions not to vote for the roll-call request so that the necessary one-fifth was never achieved. The Reciprocal Trade Act of 1955 passed in three days.

Reciprocal trade was only one example. The Upper Colorado River Reclamation Bill—one of the most vital but controversial measures among westerners—had been brought up in session after session, hotly (and often lengthily) debated, but never passed. In 1955, it, too, passed in three days. The Paris accords, which, as Stewart Alsop wrote, “could have been expected at the very least to have elicited a lot of oratory for the folks at home,” were passed in less than two hours of floor debate. Then there were the dozen departmental appropriation bills, those measures that had been stalling Senate machinery for years—decades, in fact. “Traditionally,” as Alsop wrote, “the agriculture appropriation bill, touching as it does many sensitive farm pocketbooks, is the subject of loud, long and angry argument.” In 1955, “it passed, all but unnoticed, after exactly an hour of debate.”

The other appropriation measures were handled with comparable dispatch—even one, the bill covering the Departments of State and Justice, that was being handled by an Appropriations subcommittee whose chairman, Harley Kilgore, was one of the few chairmen who had refused to coordinate, or even discuss, his subcommittee’s deliberations with Johnson because he viewed such discussions as an infringement on his independence. Despite Kilgore’s secretiveness, Johnson knew exactly what was going on in his subcommittee, and when, near the close of Senate business at the end of one May week, Kilgore suddenly appeared on the floor to announce that his subcommittee had completed its work and had a bill prepared, Johnson was ready. He asked a question to which he already knew the answer: “Was the subcommittee report a unanimous report?” “It was a unanimous report,” Kilgore replied. In that case, Johnson said, the bill would be brought up at the earliest possible moment the next week. He had already discussed that schedule with “the distinguished Minority Leader,” he said; the distinguished Minority Leader had agreed. As for routine business, in a single day, as
Newsweek
reported, “the Senate passed 90 bills, confirmed an ambassador and a Federal Trade commissioner and then knocked off because it had temporarily run out of business. The elapsed time: four hours and 43 minutes. Washington was jolted to attention.” The first session of the Eighty-fourth Congress, Alsop wrote, “is certainly the most efficiently run session in recent memory.” In less than six months as Majority Leader, the youngest Majority Leader in its history, Lyndon Johnson had tamed the untamable Senate.

A
LTHOUGH THE
S
ENATE
was running more efficiently, however, it sometimes seemed to be running in opposite directions. But underlying most of its significant actions was a single principle that determined which legislation would be passed—and which wouldn’t. The principle was the ambition of its Leader. As Leader of the majority instead of the minority, Lyndon Johnson’s personal
interests affected America’s interests more directly than ever before, and when they conflicted, his interests came first.

Richard Russell had by now made most of the Southern Caucus understand that the way to make the South part of the United States again, “to really put an end to the Civil War,” would be to elect a southerner President, and they understood that their beloved Dick, giving up his own dream, had anointed Lyndon as that southerner. With the unbeatable Eisenhower expected to run again in 1956, victory that year would probably not be possible, but the Democratic nomination might be, and the nominee in 1956 would be a front-runner for the 1960 nomination. And they understood—to those of them slow in grasping the fact, Russell had
made
them understand—that in order for Johnson to attain the nomination he would first have to be perceived as a strong and successful Senate Leader, and that therefore he would have to have a unified party behind him, and they must bend their views to support him and not simply oppose the Leader’s every attempt to pass even moderately liberal legislation; that they must, in fact, even allow him at times to, in George Reedy’s words, “engage in maneuvers” that would facilitate the passage of legislation with at least a tinge of liberalism, legislation they would never have permitted another Leader to pass.

This understanding had allowed Johnson, again in Reedy’s words, to obtain “elbow room from the Southern Democrats” in his attempts to establish at least a modicum of rapport with Senate liberals. “The Southern dons of the Senate, the conservative men with seniority and power…regarded him with pride as their boy,” Booth Mooney says. “The southerners did not always agree with their Leader, but they wanted him to do well, and when it was necessary, were usually willing to stretch their own convictions to support him.” As Johnson advanced toward a more liberal position, his rear and his flank had therefore been protected against the southern attacks that would normally have made that advance impossible. There was even a symbol of that protection; the fact that as Lyndon Johnson sat in the Senate, the desks directly to his rear and at his side were manned by Russell and Walter George, the two most important southerners. Some of the less senior southerners had even made sacrifices (short-term sacrifices for which they had been assured they would be recompensed in the long term): to help him do well, to help him achieve the unity with liberals he needed, they had agreed that young liberal senators be appointed to committee seats into which they themselves would otherwise have moved through seniority; they had allowed the entrance of Humphrey into high party councils (some southerners still couldn’t understand how they had been talked into
that:
Harry Byrd said to Johnson one day, “Lyndon, I’ll never understand how in the world you got me to liking Hubert Humphrey so much”). And there were more subtle means of assistance: Johnson was no longer placed in the embarrassing position of attending, or declining to attend, meetings of the Southern Caucus; he simply was no longer invited.

On a number of issues, however, “Dick Russell and His Dixieland Band” would alter their position not an inch—and on those issues, Lyndon Johnson marched to their tune.

On the issue that mattered above all others, the southerners were, as Strom Thurmond’s aide Harry Dent puts it, “just as sure as ever that in his heart he was on their side”—a confidence that was understandable, since added to his eighteen years of votes on their side and his other actions of support for them in the past were the actions he was taking now, in 1955, as Majority Leader.

Almost the first major policy issue that confronted Johnson upon his assumption of the leadership was the issue that would make possible progress in civil rights: the long-dreamed-of change in Rule 22. The Senate liberals who had fought for the change in the past hoped that the liberal Democrats elected in November, 1954, would provide the reinforcements needed to vote it through at last. “We had [a] chance for a significant step forward,” Paul Douglas was to recall. But Johnson crushed the hope, in part, in the opinion of some observers, by making it clear to the newly elected senators that his offer of choice committee seats was contingent upon their support of “the leadership” in the Rule 22 fight (Walter White of the NAACP was to blame the defeat on “shrewd horse-trading over committee memberships”); in part by using Hubert Humphrey to sabotage the liberal caucus from within. After listening to Humphrey argue, with his customary eloquence, that the liberals should “abandon the devil theory of history,” stop thinking of Johnson as the devil and give him, now that he was equipped with the new powers of the majority leadership, “a chance to see what he could do with the South,” and to fight for civil rights not through “a frontal assault” on the rules but through the regular Senate committees,” Douglas went along with Humphrey’s pleas to shelve the rules-change motion. He knew almost at once that “we had made a bad mistake,” Douglas was to say. “There was no change in Johnson’s opposition to civil rights and not the slightest softening in the attitude of the South,” which, in fact—emboldened by Johnson’s success—“sharply stiffened its opposition.” Humphrey’s persuasiveness, Douglas was to say with bitterness, may not have resulted in any gains for blacks but it resulted in gains for Humphrey; his “role in this matter sealed his alliance with Johnson.” (Douglas was not alone in this opinion. John Steele informed his editors that in the Rule 22 fight, “behind Humphrey stood the off-stage figure of Lyndon Johnson.”)

Thwarting a new liberal attempt in 1955 to attain another long-sought objective—statehood for Hawaii—was easy for Johnson, but in May came an assault more threatening to those who believed in separation of the races. The black congressman from New York, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., attached to one of the South’s—to one of Richard Russell’s—most cherished proposals, the military reserve bill, an amendment to ban racial segregation in reserve units, and the House of Representatives passed it. The bill was before Russell’s
Armed Services Committee, and there it stayed, for as much as Russell wanted a reserve system adopted, the threat to separation of the races was too grave; the Senate might pass the bill without the amendment, but the bill would then eventually be returned to the House, which might reinstate the amendment. Elated by the success of the maneuver, liberals were planning to attach a similar amendment to the school construction bill; House conservatives had responded by holding that measure in committee.

Attacking Powell’s military reserve amendment publicly, Lyndon Johnson said: “The issue that is now holding up passage of this crucial measure is one that has been settled in a number of different forms by the courts and by the executive agencies. Congress is no longer a meaningful forum for such debate. I sincerely hope that this issue can now be worked out and that we will not imperil the existence of our Nation by raising issues which can have no meaning in terms of results.” And Johnson maneuvered privately as well, getting Eisenhower out front on the issue as he had gotten the President out front on the Bricker Amendment. After Johnson urged him to do so, Eisenhower spoke against the practice of attaching anti-segregation amendments to major bills, saying, “If you get an idea of real importance, a substantive subject, and you want to get it enacted, then I believe the Congress and I believe our people should have a right to decide upon that issue by itself, and not be clouding it with amendments that are extraneous.” As for the reserve bill amendment, Eisenhower said, “It is entirely erroneous to try to get legislation of this character through by tacking it onto something that is so vital to the security of the United States.” Neither of the Powell amendments was enacted into law.

Another aspect of Johnson’s strategy—and its coordination with the strategy of the South—had been dramatized in January, at the conclusion of Eisenhower’s State of the Union address. As the President stepped down from the dais, Knowland had hurried over to congratulate him, but Johnson had moved faster, and had been the first to reach Eisenhower’s side, thereby, as Frank Cormier of the Associated Press put it, winning “the informal Capitol Hill footrace” to congratulate him. During the months since January, the considerations that had motivated Johnson to thus demonstrate his solidarity with the President had only been strengthened. In late spring of 1955, with the economy booming, the Formosa Strait crisis ended. With the world generally at peace, “millions of Americans” had, in Stephen Ambrose’s words, “a feeling of near-euphoria,” and Eisenhower’s promise of peace, progress, and prosperity seemed fulfilled. Johnson was more convinced than ever that opposing Ike would be politically unwise. Proposals were made repeatedly by Democratic senators for investigations of questionable Administration activities such as the Dixon-Yates “giveaway” of hydroelectric power to southern power companies. The proposals were shunted by the Democratic Leader into the Democratic Policy Committee, from which none of them ever emerged.

The Senate’s southern barons likewise had strong reasons for not opposing
the President, not only because of the similarities in their philosophies but because of something that Lyndon Johnson and the barons never discussed in public. As
The New Republic
was to state: