Master of the Senate (121 page)

Though these barons were called Democrats, they were unenthusiastic about the leading Democratic presidential contenders—Stevenson, Harriman, and Kefauver, all liberals—and may have preferred another four years with the safely moderate Eisenhower in the White House. By cooperating with the President on such issues as the tariff and foreign aid and by hamstringing investigations that might have embarrassed the Administration, Johnson was acting not only in his own interest but in their interest as well.

The “cooperation” issue was raised publicly in April, in a very dramatic setting. Washington’s great annual Democratic gathering, the black-tie Jefferson-Jackson Day Dinner, was usually held in a hotel ballroom, but the guest of honor in 1955 was the man whom the Associated Press called “the beloved ‘Mr. Sam’ of legions of Democrats.” No ballroom in Washington could accommodate the more than thirty-seven hundred Democrats from across the United States, the largest such crowd in history, who were coming to pay tribute to Sam Rayburn, and the dinner had to be moved to Washington’s National Guard Armory. Facing the audience above the dais was a gigantic cartoon of Jefferson and Jackson welcoming Rayburn to the Democratic pantheon, and the cartoon was flanked by huge portraits of FDR and of the most famous living Democrat, Harry S Truman.

Following tributes to Rayburn by Eleanor Roosevelt (“My husband counted on him and never found him wanting”) and Adlai Stevenson (“He was there when the record was made”), and Rayburn’s characteristically humble response (“I accept this honor feeling my inadequacy”), Lyndon Johnson, in his speech, repeated the statement he had made so frequently: that Democrats wanted a “party of moderation” in 1956. But when the seventy-one-year-old Truman spoke, assailing the GOP’s “cynicism”—the “most cynical political behavior” since the Harding era—in the familiar Truman rhythms, suddenly the audience, chanting “Give ’em hell, Harry,” louder and louder, seemed to
remember that the Democratic Party, in leading America out of the Great Depression, and in fighting for social justice, had not been the “party of moderation” at all. And the next morning, in his suite at the Mayflower, the ex-President gave William White an interview in which he made clear that it was not only Republicans who he felt had recently been guilty of “cynical political behavior.”

He did not want to criticize the Eisenhower Administration’s Formosa policy, Truman said, because “I haven’t got a great deal of information on the subject.” But, he said, he did want to criticize one aspect of the situation: “that,” as White put it, “the Senate had not adequately debated the subject. Had there been such a debate, the former President observed, he would have felt no anxiety at all over the ultimate decision, whatever it might have been.” And Truman made clear, with Trumanesque vividness of phrase, whom he blamed for the lack of debate—and for other aspects of recent Democratic policy as well. “I have got tired a long time ago of some mealy-mouthed senators who kiss Ike on both cheeks,” he said. “Mr. Truman did not name these senators,” White wrote. “The implication seemed inescapable, however, that he was far from satisfied with the restrained partisan activity of the present Democratic leadership of the Senate headed by Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas.”

Arrangements had been made earlier for Truman to pay a nostalgic visit to his old Senate desk (“My heart has always been at this desk,” he said, adding that his ten years in the Senate had been “the happiest years of my political life”), and to be honored by Senate leaders at a luncheon in the Capitol on Monday. Johnson had no choice but to deliver the Senate’s formal welcome, written by Reedy: “This is a better Senate because he was part of it. Welcome back, Harry. The latch string is always out when you pass this way.” Then he had to stand next to Truman as reporters asked the former President to confirm the quotes White had used, and he did so, quite firmly. He had to pose beside Truman at the luncheon (from which several southern senators were noticeably absent), and ride beside him on the Senate subway as photographers took pictures. Truman seemed in high spirits; Johnson’s smile was noticeably wan.

Truman had told White that he had only one remaining political purpose in life: “to keep” the Democratic Party “over on the liberal side.” And his trip to Washington had at least succeeded in reminding some liberals that that was the side the party was supposed to be on. Reporting that “many Democrats were stirred by his [Truman’s] fighting speech—partly because they got so little of the same from the party’s actual presidential hopefuls,” John Steele commented specifically on Johnson’s call for a “party of moderation.” “Some thought this was a strange Democratic doctrine,” he said. And following that April weekend, the attitude of liberal journalists underwent an abrupt and dramatic alteration. “Some Democrats feel the party is compromising with principle,” Doris Fleeson wrote in May. Her column of June 3 said: “Southern senators are sensitive to the charge that they are perfectly satisfied to let Eisenhower
continue in the White House. The record they make in support of the President proves, however, that they certainly aren’t unhappy. And it is under Southern leadership that all investigations of the Administration have faltered and no majority program has been approved.”
The New Republic
had come to realize that despite the Senate’s new efficiency, there was little political gain in the bills it had passed, and because of the dearth of senatorial investigations of the Administration, “there will be … no heavy ammunition for the Democrats’ candidate for the White House” in 1956. Columnist Roscoe Drummond began referring to Lyndon Johnson as “malleable.” In Drew Pearson’s columns he was again being called “Lyin’ Down Lyndon.”

I
F, HOWEVER
, Lyndon Johnson’s interests always came first with Lyndon Johnson, there were times when those interests coincided with America’s interests—with the highest of America’s interests, the great liberal cause, the cause of social justice. And when they did, the cause advanced.

In some areas, conservatives and southerners would not give Johnson “elbow room,” but in other areas they would. And when Johnson had it, he used it. In June, 1955, in a single week, as the attacks on him by Fleeson and other liberal commentators were continuing to escalate, there arrived a moment in domestic legislation comparable to that which had occurred two years before with foreign legislation: a moment in which Johnson’s ultimate ambition did not conflict with, but instead coincided with, the aspirations of the liberals who had been attacking him. And, in that week, he accomplished—suddenly and without warning—gains the liberals had not believed possible.

He did it on two days of that week: Tuesday, June 7, and Wednesday, June 8, 1955.

On that Tuesday, the Senate voted on housing.

The conditions in which America’s poor and lower-middle-class families were housed had been a national disgrace for decades, and the situation was growing not better but worse, in part because in 1954 the Republican majorities in Congress had brought to a near standstill even the meagre low-rent public housing programs then in existence. Witnesses before the Senate Banking and Currency Committee, which had jurisdiction over housing, had testified earlier in 1955 that more than ten million American families were living in substandard dwellings, that the number was growing by hundreds of thousands of families each year, and that at the current rate of construction by the private real estate industry, the number was going to grow even faster.

The Eisenhower Administration’s 1955 public housing proposal was to fund 70,000 units over two years—a mere 35,000 per year—but Banking and Currency was one of the few Senate committees with a strong liberal bloc, and after hearing Philadelphia’s Mayor, Joseph Clark, testify that his city alone had 70,000 substandard units, the committee reported out a bill authorizing the construction of 540,000 units over four years, or 135,000 per year.

The very concept of public housing was anathema to Senate conservatives, who regarded it as pure “socialism.” And it provoked particular opposition from southern conservatives, because so many of the families that would be helped by this particular form of socialism would be black. Liberal housing bills had been reported to the floor before and had been killed or drastically scaled back there, and conservatives were confident that this one would be scaled back, too. The Indiana Neanderthal, Homer Capehart, had introduced an amendment reducing the number of units to the Administration’s original 35,000-per-year figure, and the amendment’s passage, George Reedy recalls, “was taken for granted.” An extremely careful head count by the real estate lobby, which, as Sam Shaffer put it, “exercises genuine power in virtually every congressional district,” had concluded that it would pass by a margin of 51 to 37. Capehart’s and Knowland’s counts were approximately the same, although, trying to be cautious, they were predicting victory by only eight votes.

Johnson reinforced the prevailing feeling. When reporters asked him about the eight-vote prediction, he said, with an air of dejection, that that was about right; his own count, he said, showed that the margin would be seven. Liberals, as Evans and Novak would recall, “had no hope at all”; Lehman and Douglas “were resigned to fighting” yet another “lonely, futile battle for public housing.” And the liberals knew who was to blame. That very weekend, the ADA had again assailed Johnson for “affably acquiescing to the Republican assault upon liberalism” and thereby “betraying the Democratic party’s traditional claim to be the party of the people.” The Majority Leader, the ADA said, “has consistently used the pretext of ‘party unity’ to avoid action on liberal legislation.”

But Johnson’s pessimism was only a mask—behind which he was preparing a surprise. His opponents’ head counts had as a matter of course included all the Senate’s twenty-two southerners with the exception of public housing advocates Sparkman, Hill, and Ellender (Sparkman was, in fact, the author of the 540,000-unit bill), and by traditional Senate standards that count would have been accurate. But in 1955 there was a new, non-traditional element: the southerners’ desire to help Johnson look liberal if they could do so without damage to their basic principles or to their popularity with their conservative political constituency. And at the last moment—over the long Memorial Day weekend before the Tuesday vote—Johnson had thought of a way in which they could vote against the Capehart Amendment without such damage.

It was true, he told the southerners, that the amendment cut back on public housing. But, he said, it nonetheless still authorized those 35,000 units per year. A vote for the amendment might be hard to explain to their constituents; it could make them vulnerable to some rabble-rouser back home who would charge them with voting for public housing; trying to explain that it was a reduced bill, he said, would be like saying, “My daughter is only a little bit pregnant.” Why vote for public housing at all? Johnson asked them. It wasn’t necessary to do so. All they had to do was vote against the Capehart Amendment,
and then vote against the overall bill—that way, he pointed out to the southerners, they could assure their constituents that they had voted against
all
provisions for public housing.

“O
NE OF THE ADVANTAGES
of dealing with the Southern Bloc in those days was that its members knew how to reach complete and binding agreement without any word of their intentions leaking to the outside,” George Reedy was to recall. No one—including Homer Capehart or William Knowland—had the slightest inkling of what was in store. That very Tuesday morning,
Time’s
John Steele had bumped into the Indianan in a corridor outside the Senate Chamber, and had asked if the eight-vote margin was still firm. It sure was, Capehart said. At that moment, Lyndon Johnson walked by. “Lyndon,” Capehart said loudly, with his customary gift for the elegant phrase, “Lyndon, this time I’m going to rub your nose in shit.” Johnson’s reply, delivered in a rueful tone, was, “Okay, I guess you’ve got me.”

The debate, which began at about one o’clock that afternoon, was enlivened by a touch of drama. There was no more ardent supporter of public housing, of course, than the onetime pioneering mayor of Minneapolis, but months earlier Hubert Humphrey had scheduled an important speech in Minnesota for Monday evening, and the earliest he could return to Washington was via a seven-thirty Tuesday morning plane scheduled to arrive in the capital at about two o’clock. Johnson had promised him to delay the vote until that time, and had obtained Knowland and Capehart’s agreement on the grounds of collegial courtesy. But now Johnson’s staff, checking with National Airport, was told that the flight, delayed by inclement weather in the Midwest, was running more than an hour behind schedule.

Otherwise, the debate proceeded along the expected lines. After Spark-man had introduced and explained the Banking Committee’s bill, Paul Douglas, who had been fighting for public housing for so many years, stated his position forcefully. “Anyone who walks into any city of any size in this country, away from the central business district, will find in nearly every case a slum—streets without trees, houses that are many years old and in disrepair, and children growing up in circumstances that are very difficult.” Some of those children, Douglas said, grow up into fine men. “All credit to men like that and all credit to families like that.” But, he said, “Most children growing up under those conditions swim against the tide.” Over and over again, since almost “my maiden speech in the Senate,” “I showed that the death rate in the slums was very much above the average of the community; that the sickness rate, particularly from tuberculosis and other diseases, was very much greater than the average for the whole community. I showed that the fire rate was high, that the crime rate was high, and that the juvenile delinquency rate was high.

“After all,” Paul Douglas said, looking around at the few senators who
were on the floor, “juvenile delinquency is just a fancy name for kids getting into trouble.”

And, he said, “the slums are expanding…. The cities need help…. The people for whom we are speaking on the floor of the Senate this afternoon are the low-income people. They are inarticulate. It is difficult for them to voice their needs. We provide aid and assistance to virtually every other group…. We provide assistance to private builders, real-estate groups…subsidies galore to those who do not need them, but none, or little to those who most need assistance.