Master of the Senate (38 page)

W
HEN HE WAS
S
PEAKER
, other traits became apparent. One was an integrity and independence that became a byword in Atlanta. Powerful lobbying groups had become accustomed to dictating the membership of key House committees, and one “prominent citizen” now approached Russell and held out a list of names, saying, “These are the persons we would like to see appointed to committees.” Russell did not extend his hand to take the list. He told the lobbyist that he would be better advised not to give it to him: any man whose name was on it, he said in that quiet voice, would never be appointed to a committee, even if Russell himself had previously been planning to appoint him. “Dick Russell
is the closest thing I’ve seen to an honest politician,” a Georgia legislator said. Not only would he “tell you if it’s impossible to get what you want,” he would “tell you if he doesn’t think you should be asking for what you want.”

He also had the ability, so lacking in his father, to persuade men to cooperate and unite behind his aims. Georgia’s decades-long governmental disorganization had reached a level of chaos that seemed to defy solution, with no fewer than 102 departments, boards, bureaus and commissions, each capable of mobilizing a constituency to resist change, with duplicating functions and salaries, and no semblance of central budgetary controls or of control over expenditures, which annually exceeded revenues by so much that for three years the state had been unable to pay many of its bills. Not only was the public school system inadequate, many students could not even afford to buy textbooks, so high were prices kept by a legislatively sanctioned “schoolbook trust.” And a “bond crew” whose hold over the Legislature was well-known in Georgia saw to it that the state repeatedly passed huge bond issues, which drained its revenues to make highway contractors and politicians rich while the state’s highway system became more and more outdated. Russell proposed paying for new highways not by bonds but by a gasoline tax, which could provide money also for the schools. But he didn’t make the proposals publicly. He “liked to work things out in private.” He let others make suggestions, and supported them, and let them think the ideas came from them. When there were differences of opinion, he mediated between them, and a solid front was maintained. The supposedly unstoppable bond issue was stopped—and replaced with a gasoline tax, the revenues earmarked for education. Russell, a legislator said, was the type of “leader who leads without one’s consciousness of his leadership.” He always gave credit to others. And his colleagues, as this legislator said, had come to “love him and trust him.” In 1930, at the age of thirty-two, Russell entered the race for Governor.

T
HREE OF THE STATE’S
most prominent politicians, each with a well-financed statewide organization headquartered in Atlanta, were already running for the post. Russell had neither organization nor money; his campaign, run out of a small store in Winder, was financed mainly with a thousand dollars he borrowed on a life insurance policy. He was mocked by his opponents as “the schoolboy candidate” because of his age, or as “the Boy Scout candidate” because of his emphasis on honesty in government, and by the press, which called his campaign “small-town” because it did not have an Atlanta office. In fact, his candidacy was not taken seriously at first, with political observers and press concurring that he had entered the race only “to get his name before the people” in preparation for a later, more serious, campaign. But to reports that he was trailing so badly that he would drop out of the campaign, he replied that “nothing save death” would make him drop out. Though he didn’t have a formal
campaign organization, he had his family. There may have been newspapers, and politicians, in Georgia who ridiculed his father, but there were also people throughout the state who remembered the old Judge, and respected him, and who wanted to help his son—so many of them that there was almost an informal statewide network of support. The Winder campaign headquarters was a family operation. Dick’s younger brother Robert E. Lee Russell was the campaign’s public relations man; Dick’s other brothers and sisters typed letters and manned the phones. They worked very hard; they all knew, as Dick knew, that he wasn’t running only for himself. And he had friends: while in many of the state’s counties he knew few voters, in each county there was at least one person who knew
him
—the county’s legislator. Of the politicians who knew Richard Russell best—the state’s legislators—fully ninety percent were supporting him.

And he had himself. Forty years later, sitting on the porch in Winder and reminiscing about that gubernatorial race, he would say, “No man has ever worked as I did,” traveling from one dusty Georgia town to another in a battered old Oldsmobile coupe, giving twelve, fifteen speeches a day, sleeping in the car’s back seat or in friends’ houses because he couldn’t afford hotels.

In other ways, too, he was an untraditional candidate. In Georgia, it was said, “the rustics rule,” and the typical candidate therefore tried to make the farmers—“the woolhat boys,” “the one-gallus boys,” “the red-suspender boys”—believe he was one of them. Richard Brevard Russell Jr. was not one of them, and he would not pretend that he was. He was a Russell of the Russells of Georgia, and he wore a white shirt, and a necktie, and a suit, and, except on the hottest days, he would not remove his jacket when talking to a crowd of farmers. And while he joked with the farmers, in a wonderfully friendly way, in the words of one observer he “never used poor English or engaged in emotional tirades against far-off interests who were oppressing the farmer,” and he would not tone down his classical or biblical allusions; asked about one opponent, Russell said he “made Ananias look like a man of great integrity.”

And somehow the farmers didn’t seem to mind that he hadn’t undone his tie or taken off his jacket. “Russell sincerely believed that farming was a superior way of life,” as his biographer Fite puts it. “A true Jeffersonian, he emphasized that the nation’s purity and stability, and its economic strength, depended on its farmers.” And, Fite writes, “farmers seemed to appreciate his direct, honest approach to their problems…. He did not promise to do things for them that were impossible…. He refused to make unrealistic promises. Farmers responded to his friendly but somewhat reserved manner, his realism, and his integrity.”

And so did the state as a whole, which was coming to understand the affection and respect with which his colleagues regarded the clean-cut, earnest young politician. As “Russell met more and more people, his personality began to play a vital role in his growing strength,” Fite says. “People just liked Dick
Russell.” In the first primary, he received more votes than any of the three veteran politicians, and in the runoff against one of them (whose campaign, Russell said dryly, should be referred to with reverence “as one should do in speaking of the dead”), he won by the largest majority recorded by any gubernatorial candidate in the state’s history.

When he was sworn in, in front of the State Capitol in Atlanta, on June 27, 1931, Richard Brevard Russell Jr. became, at thirty-three, the youngest Governor in the history of Georgia. His left hand rested on the family Bible, which was held by the Chief Justice of the Georgia Supreme Court, a tall, white-haired and white-mustached old man in an old-fashioned wing collar. As the Judge recited the oath—the oath he had wanted so desperately, for so long, to take himself—the new Governor stood opposite him, at rigid attention, staring into his father’s eyes. His right hand, upraised to take the oath, was held so high it might almost have been a salute.

R
USSELL WAS AN UNCONVENTIONAL
G
OVERNOR.
He conducted gubernatorial business only until about four o’clock in the afternoon, and then, closing the door to his private office, began what, in his biographer’s words, “he considered his real work.” Part of that work was answering mail. Routine correspondence was disposed of by his assistants, but if a letter, whether from a prominent figure or a farmer, dealt in any depth with a governmental issue, Russell insisted on answering it—in detail—himself. And part of the work was reading: novels (Borodino was almost as real to him as Gettysburg, so many times had he reread
War and Peace:
decades later, during a tour of Russia, he would be guided around that battlefield by an expert on the battle, who realized, as he was talking with this American, that he was talking to another expert), biographies, works of history: Roman historians and Greek historians, and English—Livy and Thucydides and Macaulay—works that described how kings and emperors and prime ministers had handled issues. And of course anything at all—anything and everything—that was written on the War Between the States. This work went on for hours. Russell dated women frequently, although, as had been the case during his legislative days (and, in fact, during his college and law school days), whenever one of the romances threatened to become serious, he broke it off. But on many evenings, he did not go out at all. “The lights glow at midnight through the windows of the Governor’s office,” a reporter wrote—glowed as they had once glowed in the office of the Governor’s father.

The governorship of Richard Russell became one of the most significant periods in Georgia’s history. Taking office with the state broke, and with tax revenues so eroded by the Depression that it was unable to meet its obligations to public schools and public institutions or to pay the pensions it owed its veterans, he almost immediately secured passage of the Russell Reorganization
Act, which reduced the number of agencies from 102 to 18, and imposed on the eighteen department heads budget controls so strict (while simultaneously creating the state’s first central purchasing agency, and requiring that no purchase be made except on the basis of sealed bids) that within eighteen months the state had not only paid its obligations to schools, institutions, and veterans, but had also reduced its total debt by more than a third. He launched the construction of major highways and broke the power of the schoolbook trust. And, convinced that the impoverished state must cease relying so heavily on its cotton crop, the new Governor somehow found funds for agricultural research—establishing laboratories, for example, to develop a tomato-plant industry, and to find new uses for Georgia’s extensive pine forests—that would improve the state’s economy for generations to come.

These achievements were based on the same techniques he had employed as House Speaker. He neither publicized his ideas nor pressed them on legislative committees; he would, he promised one committee chairman, “get squarely behind the plan of reorganization that you finally decide on.” This was a tough job, he wrote the chairman, “but you are equal to it and when it is completed you will have rendered a real service to the state.” He would “flatter, cajole, encourage and support others to get out in front to achieve a desired goal,” Fite explains. “Russell had a knack for making other people feel important,” for giving credit to others; “he led without people realizing that the action was his rather than their own.” Within eighteen months, many of his goals had been achieved. The opinion of the
Atlanta Constitution
—“A new day for Georgia”—was a reflection of the attitude throughout the state toward its youthful Governor.

Yet eighteen months was to be his total term as Governor. In 1932, the state’s senior United States Senator, William J. Harris, suddenly died of a heart attack. Russell called a special election for September, and announced he would be running in it—for the post his father had “wanted most.” His opponent was United States Representative Charles Crisp, Dean of Georgia’s congressional delegation, acting Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, and member of one of Georgia’s most powerful political families. “He’ll be the worst defeated man you ever saw,” Richard Russell told reporters.

In this campaign, Russell showed his courage (he was hurled through the windshield of his car in an automobile accident, and his upper lip was torn open from one end to the other and four of his teeth knocked out; putting the teeth in his pocket, and fastening his lip down with adhesive tape, he continued campaigning without canceling a single speech). And he showed as well his skill as a campaigner. To dramatize Crisp’s close links with the “Power Trust,” which was driving up electric bills, Russell gave him a nickname that destroyed his campaign: “Kilowatt Charlie.” After a stunningly one-sided victory, the “boy wonder of Georgia politics,” the man who had been the youngest Governor in the history of Georgia, became, at thirty-five, the youngest Senator of the
United States, after he was escorted down the Senate’s center aisle for his swearing-in by the state’s senior Senator, Walter George, who had, not so long before, humiliated his father.

R
ICHARD
R
USSELL ROSE AS RAPIDLY
in the nation’s Senate as he had in his state’s legislature, in part because he displayed the same quiet, polite but unbending independence in Washington as he had in Atlanta, and in part because a rare concatenation of coincidences turned that independence into an asset instead of a liability.

The moment at which Russell was sworn in to the Senate—January 12, 1933—was the moment of the greatest upheaval in its membership in modern Senate history. The Democrats had been out of power since the elections of 1918; now, thanks to the massive Depression-induced repudiation of the GOP, they were back in the majority, and sixteen of them were newly elected like Russell, the largest number of new members of one party ever to come to the Senate in a single year. So sweeping had been the ouster of incumbents that there was an unprecedented number of vacancies on major committees, so many that senior Democrats, moving at last into the chairmanships and other prominent posts they had coveted so long, were willing to forgo their right to some of these other seats. When, immediately upon Russell’s arrival, Majority Leader Joseph Robinson asked him for a list of his committee preferences, Russell replied that he had only one: Appropriations. And when Robinson explained with a patronizing smile that the seniority system made a freshman’s appointment to the Senate’s most powerful committee extremely unlikely and asked for a second choice, Russell replied, he was to recall, that he didn’t have one—that “if I can’t be on Appropriations, I’d prefer not to be on any committee.”