Master of the Senate (168 page)

But he had to believe it now.

T
WO INTERNATIONAL CRISES
in the Fall of 1956—the brutal Russian suppression of the Hungarian uprising and the escalating Mideast conflict over the Suez Canal—rallied Americans behind their President, whose smile was as fatherly reassuring as ever. Dwight Eisenhower’s landslide popular plurality in his rematch with Adlai Stevenson approached ten million; Adlai won only seven states (all in the South). The Democrats hung on to Capitol Hill, however, overcoming Earle Clements’ medical discharge from the Senate to hold their 49–47 margin there. When Congress reconvened in January, 1957, Lyndon Johnson would still be Majority Leader.

Down in Texas, furthermore, with Sam Rayburn and the state’s conservative establishment behind him, Johnson had solidified his power in the state’s Democratic Party by ruthlessly putting down a liberal uprising. Freed from the restraints of civility imposed on him in the Senate, his tactics had been very blunt: he ordered Texas congressmen and their aides to determine which delegates to the party’s state convention were flirting with the liberals, and these delegates, one congressional aide said, were confronted by their “banker, preacher, lawyer, congressman, brother, and threatened unless they got back in the fold.” Some were confronted by Johnson himself, in his most aggressive, lapel-grabbing, chest-poking mode. Holders of federal or state jobs were asked, in a tone described as “ferocious,” how they liked their jobs; to others, hoping for jobs, Johnson made the price clear: “If you don’t help me, you ain’t never gonna get to be a judge!” he said to one. Johnson had supported County Judge Woodrow Bean in an intra-party convention fight in return for Bean’s promise of support from his El Paso delegation on other issues; when Bean was unable to deliver, Johnson called him in, and, glaring at him and jabbing his forefinger into his chest, demanded, “You with me or against me?” When Bean tried to explain his dilemma, Johnson cut him off. “Woodrow Bean,” he said, “I’m going to give you a three-minute lesson in integrity. And then I’m going to ruin you.” And he had the convention’s credentials committee decertify Bean’s entire delegation.

Nonetheless, during the post-election weeks of November and December, 1956, Lyndon was in one of his black depressions. Not getting the Democratic presidential nomination that year had proven to be something of a blessing: the election results had convincingly reaffirmed that no one could have beaten Eisenhower. But the lesson he had had pounded into him in Chicago—that you couldn’t win the nomination as the “southern candidate,” that you had to have substantial northern support, and that northern antipathy to him ran very deep—had devastating implications for his chances to win the nomination in 1960. He understood now that there was only one way to change his image in liberals’ eyes: to support the cause that mattered to them above all others; that so long as he didn’t change his position on civil rights, it didn’t matter what he did for them on other issues. That hard fact of Democratic political life was being reiterated that December in a letter written to Paul Douglas by Herbert Lehman. “In all fairness,” Lehman wrote, “it must be said that the Democrat-controlled 84th Congress did pass some fairly good legislation in fields like social security and health research. But … the civil rights issue was buried alive.” This could not be allowed to continue, the New York liberal said. “We must put principle above so-called party unity.” Lyndon Johnson will not learn this, Lehman said—“cannot or will not learn it.” Therefore, he said, Johnson must be removed as Leader. “I want to run the Senate,” Lyndon Johnson told allies in private conversation. “I want to pass the bills that need to be passed. I want my party to do right. But all I ever hear from the liberals is Nigra, Nigra, Nigra.” He knew now that the only way to realize his great ambition was to fight—
really
fight, fight aggressively and effectively—for civil rights; in fact, it was probably necessary for him not only to fight but to fight and
win:
given their conviction that he controlled the Senate, the only way the liberals would be satisfied of his good intentions would be if that body passed a civil rights bill. But therein lay a seemingly insoluble dilemma: that way—the only way—did not seem a possible way. Because while he couldn’t win his party’s presidential nomination with only southern support, he couldn’t win it with only northern support, either. Scrubbing off the southern taint thoroughly enough within the next four years to become so overwhelmingly a liberal favorite that he could win the nomination with northern votes alone was obviously out of the question, so dispensing with southern support was not feasible: he had to keep the states of the Old Confederacy on his side. And yet a public official who fought for civil rights invariably lost those states.

The problem seemed one without a solution. Lyndon Johnson’s path to power had always been a hard, treacherous, twisting path. Had it now become too twisting, too tortuous, for even him to negotiate?

D
URING THE MONTHS
following the 1956 election, Lyndon Johnson tried to make himself more appealing to liberal northerners—tried, in the words of one, John Kenneth Galbraith, “to cultivate us, to some degree.”

He asked for their pity. Delivering a memorandum from Paul Douglas to Johnson’s office in the Capitol one day that December, Douglas’ administrative aide Frank McCulloch, accustomed to being treated by Johnson with disdain as the representative of the despised “Professor,” was surprised to find that Johnson was making an effort to be friendly. Inviting him into his private office, the Leader had him sit down for a chat, and after a few minutes, asked, in an earnest, sincere tone, “Frank, why do the liberals hate me?” McCulloch responded, “Senator, they don’t hate you but they certainly are displeased by your positions and your conduct on some of the key issues on which the Democratic Party has taken a position,” but Johnson said that no, it was personal, that liberals just didn’t like him, he didn’t know why—“He was appealing to me for sympathy as an object of hatred. I tried to explain that they really cared about civil rights, about justice, and that he kept opposing, but I can’t recall that it [that argument] fazed him in any way; he just kept on about the personal stuff… about people’s attitude toward him, about how they just
hated
Lyndon Johnson, speaking in a gloomy, mournful tone. ‘No, Frank, they just hate me, and Ah can’t understand why.’”

He tried to charm them, and to impress them: to convince them of his selflessness and altruism—of his utter selflessness, total altruism; of his complete lack of interest in political advancement, of the absolute absence in his makeup of any personal ambition whatsoever—and to make them appreciate the difficulties he had to face as Democratic Senate Leader, and the brilliance with which he overcame them; and he tried to convince them as well that he was on their side, that he had always been on their side, that he was more liberal than they thought, particularly on civil rights.

Jim Rowe and George Reedy had made him understand the growing importance in liberal intellectual circles of thirty-nine-year-old Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., a noted Harvard historian with a gift for incisive phrasemaking, and he wrote Schlesinger inviting him to call on him the next time he was in Washington. And when Schlesinger did so, coming to his office on a Saturday, Johnson pulled out all the stops.

It was a memorable conversation—or, to be more precise, monologue; it lasted for an hour and a half, and although Schlesinger, “never known,” as a friend says, “for his shyness,” had prepared a long list of questions, Johnson talked the whole time almost without interruption.

First came the disclaimer of ambition. According to an
aide-mémoire
which Schlesinger wrote after the conversation, Johnson reminded him that he had had a heart attack; he was a sick man, he said. He had no political future, and he didn’t want one. “His main desire, he said, was to live a few more years. He had no interest in the presidential nomination”; he wasn’t cut out for the presidency anyway; he knew that. In fact, he said, he wasn’t even going to run for the Senate again. All he wanted to do was “to serve out his present term. Being entirely disinterested, he wanted only to do the best he could for his party and his nation in the three, or two, or one year remaining to him.” Then he
could go back to Texas, where he belonged, and live out whatever few years the Good Lord gave him in peace.

Then he turned to the Senate—as only Lyndon Johnson could. That morning, Reedy had given Johnson a memorandum on how to handle Schlesinger: “He is a man of genuine intellect and eye
[sic]
think all you really have to do is leave him with the feeling that Senate leadership may be much more complicated than he has realized.”

That was indeed the feeling that Johnson left him with. In what Schlesinger’s memo calls a “stream-of-consciousness on the problems of leadership in the Senate,” Johnson “described the problems of keeping the conservative southerners (he called them ‘the Confederates’) and the liberal northerners in the same harness; he analyzed a number of insoluble parliamentary situations which he had mastered through his own brilliance and perseverance; he gave a generally fascinating account of the role which timing, persuasion, parliamentary knowledge, etc., have in getting bills through.”

Then he turned to the individual senators, the other forty-eight Democratic senators. “I want you to know the kind of material I have to work with,” he said. Schlesinger was to recall that “he didn’t do all of them, but he did most of them”—in a performance the historian was never to forget. Senator by senator Johnson ran down the list: each man’s strengths and weaknesses, who liked liquor too much, and who liked women, and how he had to know when to reach a senator at his own home and when at his mistress’s, who was controlled by the big power company in his state, and who listened to the REA cooperatives, who responded to the union pleas and who to the Grange instead, and which senator responded to one argument and which senator to the opposite argument. He did brief, but brilliant, imitations; “When he came to Chavez, whose trouble is alcoholism, Johnson imitated Chavez drunk—very funny.”

And who, Lyndon Johnson demanded, had to make all these diverse temperaments and philosophies work together? Who had to unite them into a workable majority? The Leader. He had to do everything, he said. It was as if his senators were a football team. He had to be the coach. He had to be the quarterback and call the signals. He had to be the center who snapped the ball, and the running back who ran the ball, and the blocker who blocked for the running back. To demonstrate, he lunged out of his chair. I’m the center, he said, bending over and snapping an imaginary ball. I’m the quarterback, he said, taking the ball and throwing an imaginary pass. I’m the end, he said, holding out his arms to catch the pass. I’m the runner, he said, tucking the ball under his arm and taking a charging step or two across the office. And I have to be the blocker, too, he said, and he threw a block.

And finally Lyndon Johnson came to the crucial point that he wanted Schlesinger to understand. “He seemed quite annoyed,” Schlesinger wrote in his
aide-mémoire
, “that the organized liberals do not regard him as one of their [own].” “Look at Americans for Democratic Action,” Johnson said. “They
regard me as a southern reactionary, but they love Cliff Case. Have you ever compared my voting record with Cliff Case’s? I said, ‘No, I hadn’t,’ whereupon he opened his drawer and pulled out a comparison of his voting record … on fifteen issues. On each one he had voted for the liberal side and Case for the conservative side. ‘And yet they look on me as some kind of southern bigot.’ He added that maybe he was showing undue sensitivity to liberal criticism. ‘But what a sad day it will be for the Democratic Party when its Senate leader is not sensitive to liberal criticism.’” In particular, Lyndon Johnson said, there was the civil rights issue. On that issue, he said, the liberal feeling toward him was particularly unjust. “I’ve never said or done anything in my life to aggravate sectional feeling,” he said. Why, he said, every time he ran in Texas, he had the support of Negroes, because he had treated them fairly during his term as NYA director. “Maybe, he said sadly, the northerners won’t be satisfied until they split off and try to form a party of their own.” But all that would do is destroy the Democratic Party. And the northerners would not get very far on their own, “for several reasons—among them the fact that the southerners were better politicians.”

(There was a postscript to this conversation. During it, Schlesinger got to say very few words. “I had carefully thought out in advance the arguments to make when asked to justify my doubts about his leadership,” he was to recall, “but in the course of this picturesque and lavish discourse Johnson met in advance almost all the points I had in mind. When he finally paused, I found I had little to say…. After nearly two hours under hypnosis, I staggered away in a condition of exhaustion.” But evidently even a few words were more than was required. When, some months later, Galbraith, Schlesinger’s friend and fellow Harvard professor, was visiting Johnson in Texas, Johnson said: “I had a good meeting with Schlesinger. I found him quite easy to get along with. The only trouble was that he talked too much.”)

Another liberal object of his attentions were the Grahams of the
Washington Post
, and Johnson’s courtship of them was at its most effective, for it took place on his native heath. In December, 1956, Phil and Kay finally accepted his open, insistent, invitation to the Johnson Ranch. From the moment Lyndon loaded them into his car at the little Fredericksburg airstrip, it was a typical Johnson Ranch weekend: the ritual visits to the “birthplace,” to the little family graveyard on the riverbank, and to the stone barn in Johnson City; the stories about the Johnson forebears who had fought the Indians from that barn, about the Johnson brothers who had driven the great herds north to Abilene, about his grandmother Eliza Bunton who had ridden out ahead of the herd to scout and who had, during a Comanche raid, hidden under her log cabin and tied a diaper over her baby’s mouth so it wouldn’t make a sound. And the rituals and stories made vivid and believable one of the points he had been trying to make to northeastern liberals: that while Texas was certainly below the Mason-Dixon Line, he was, because of the part of Texas from which he came, not really a
southerner but more a southwesterner. “The idea was that they were fighting Indians and they were pioneers—this southwestern kind of pioneering,” Katharine Graham recalls. “And it was ‘my animals’ and ‘my ranch’—you see him ride over those acres; it was like he was saying, ‘This is my background, and my roots.’ After that visit, I understood him more.”