Master of the Senate (76 page)

Ernest W. (Bob) McFarland of Arizona fit that bill. A chubby, ruddy-faced, easygoing man of fifty-six with a habit of running both hands through his mop of gray hair when he was puzzled (a gesture he made rather frequently), he was shy but genial and friendly and not at all a boat-rocker. He was a middle-of-the-roader—except on the issue that mattered most: his record
against cloture and civil rights was rock solid. And, “perhaps yearning for a few moments in the political sun,” as Evans and Novak speculated, McFarland accepted the job, although his Senate term expired in two years, and he would have to run for re-election then.

The choice of McFarland dismayed liberals. He is “an amiable, inoffensive, genuinely likeable ex-judge,” said columnist Lowell Mellett. “He is my friend and everybody’s friend.” But he is “no leader”; during his ten years in the Senate, “he had just gone along … content to be led.”

But although liberal senators decided to unite behind Joseph O’Mahoney of Wyoming, there was no chance that they would have the votes when, in January, 1951, the forty-nine Democratic senators convened in caucus. The southerners and their allies would have the votes—and votes to spare. During the two months between Election Day and the caucus, Russell didn’t have to devote much time to the question of the majority leadership.

Nor did he have to devote much time to the question of Assistant Majority Leader, or “whip,” which was after all a job of even less significance. To Johnson’s request for a “leadership position,” he replied that the whip’s job was his if he wanted it.

As a Senate historian was to summarize, “Johnson had no claim to the position, except that he had the backing of Dick Russell.” But that backing was all he needed. “Once he had Russell he had the whole South,” recalls Neil Mac-Neil, who was covering the Senate for
Time
magazine. “The [Democratic] caucus [was] simply a formality to ratify those privately selected with Dick Russell’s assent,” Evans and Novak were to write. When Johnson telephoned Senator William Fulbright of Arkansas to ask for his support, MacNeil, who had been talking with Fulbright, recalls that the Senator’s “eyebrows went flashing up, he was so startled that Johnson wanted the job. It wasn’t a job that people wanted. And he [Fulbright] was startled that someone would campaign for it. You didn’t campaign for it; you were drafted.” But Fulbright said he would go along with whatever Russell wanted. When Johnson telephoned John Stennis in Mississippi, Stennis told him that, as he was to put it, “Lyndon, you might have known that I wasn’t just going to promise a whole lot out of the clear sky…. Senator Russell and I are very close and … I would naturally consult with him before I would give a final answer to anyone.” “You must think that I am foolish,” Johnson replied. “I wouldn’t have been calling you or anyone else about … this position unless I already had a firm position from Dick Russell that I am the man.”

On January 2, 1951, an article in the
Washington Star
on the Democratic caucus, which was to be held that morning, said that “The Democrats also must elect a whip, or assistant leader, but there has been little interest in the post.” As Evans and Novak wrote: “The world outside … had little interest in the Senate Democrats’ tribal ritual…. The official Senate leadership was an unwanted burden, stripped of power and devoid of honor.” Walking down a Senate Office Building corridor to Room 201, the big corner conference room in which the caucus would be held, Russell told Johnson that he had decided to nominate him himself, and after McFarland had been elected Leader by a 30–19 vote, Russell did so. Liberal Paul Douglas tried to nominate Sparkman, but Spark-man could hardly withdraw fast enough, and when no other names were proposed, Russell said that in that case, he supposed that Lyndon was the whip, and there was no dissent.

No detailed analysis of Johnson’s selection as Assistant Democratic Leader—at the age of forty-two and after just two years in the Senate—is necessary. He had gotten the job for the same reason he had gotten the chairmanship of the Preparedness Subcommittee: because of the support of one man. But he had gotten it.

D
URING THE TWO YEARS
—1951 and 1952—that Lyndon Johnson was Assistant Democratic Leader, the Senate would have a moment of glory, an episode that would show what the Senate could be at its finest—and why Russell was, in aspects other than racial, the personification of that ideal.

The episode almost became one of America’s gravest constitutional crises. “It is doubtful if there has ever been in this country so violent and spontaneous a discharge of political passion as that provoked by the President’s dismissal of the General,” Arthur Schlesinger and Richard Rovere wrote. “Certainly there has been nothing to match it since the Civil War.”

Flying home in April, 1951, after his dismissal by President Harry Truman from his proconsulship in the Far East and his command of the empire’s armies in Korea, General Douglas MacArthur was uncertain of the reception he would receive in the United States, and timed his arrival in San Francisco so that his plane, the famed chariot
Bataan
(named for one of the many battles with which his name was indelibly linked), would set down after dark. But as he stepped out of the plane’s door, suddenly the battered gold-braided cap and the familiar old trench coat were bathed in massed spotlights. He had prepared a brief speech, in case it was needed, but no one could hear it. In the dark beyond the spotlights an Army band was playing; cannon were firing—a thundering salute to the hero who had, for so long, held the empire’s perimeter against its enemies, to the hero who, forced into terrible retreat, had promised “I shall return” (and who
had
returned, and had conquered), to the hero who, until the moment of his sudden dismissal, had been fighting against the empire’s new enemies. California’s Governor was waiting to greet him, and San Francisco’s Mayor, but they were swept away by the crowd that surged through police lines to try to touch the hero’s hand. From the airport, it was fourteen miles to his hotel; the journey took more than two hours; the streets were lined with half a million
San Franciscans. The next day MacArthur flew across the continent to Washington—flew over hundreds of towns in which flags were being flown at half-mast or even upside down, flew over hundreds of towns in which the President was being burned in effigy and automobiles were blossoming with bumper stickers that read “Impeach Truman,” in which people were parading carrying banners with the same two words;
Life
magazine was not exaggerating when it said that “The homecoming of the legendary MacArthur was like nothing else in American history.” His arrival in Washington had been preceded by a tidal wave of mail; Senator Richard Nixon of California had received six hundred telegrams, most of them advocating impeachment of the President, during the first twenty-four hours after the dismissal (“the largest spontaneous reaction I’ve ever seen,” he said happily); the White House admitted that of the first seventy thousand letters and telegrams it received, those critical of the General’s recall outnumbered those in favor twenty to one; at that point it stopped counting. Truman had tried to keep the welcome at the airport as low-key as possible—his only emissary was his military aide, General Harry Vaughan, “a gesture,” as
Life
put it, “strictly according to protocol but less than cordial”—but the Joint Chiefs of Staff and a crowd of congressmen and VIPs had also shown up, and when, after midnight, the
Bataan
touched down, a cheering crowd charged out of the shadows with a great roar, engulfing Vaughan, Chiefs, and congressmen.

The next day, April 20, was the day of the General’s speech to a joint session of Congress, in a Chamber so full that even some senators had to sit on the floor. When the doorkeeper shouted, “Mr. Speaker, General of the Army Douglas MacArthur,” and he appeared in the door, erect, impassive, dressed in a trim jacket without medals or ribbons except for the five stars of his rank, a nation’s elected representatives leapt cheering to their feet. And as he spoke, the cheers came again and again—thirty times in thirty-four minutes. All his life, Douglas MacArthur had been holding audiences spellbound, and now he had his largest audience. “Most Americans listened, and 30 million or more watched on television as he spoke, and they were magnetized by the vibrant voice, the dramatic rhetoric and the Olympian personality,”
Life
said. The speech was an unapologetic argument for his policies, and a defiant denunciation of the policies of the civilian Administration, and they were couched in the phrases of a master phrasemaker. He said that his policies—to blockade China, to bomb the Chinese forces in Manchuria, to place no limits on his war against the North Koreans—were absolutely necessary: “Once war is forced upon us, there is no alternative than to apply every available means to bring it to a swift end. War’s very object is victory—not prolonged indecision. In war, indeed, there can be no substitute for victory.” He said that “practically every military leader concerned with the Korean campaign, including our own Joint Chiefs of Staff,” had agreed with those policies. And he said that those who had not agreed—those who he said were mainly civilians in the Truman Administration—were
wrong. “History teaches with unmistakable emphasis that appeasement but begets new and bloodier wars…. Why, my soldiers asked of me, surrender military advantage to an enemy in the field?” There was a dramatic pause, and the General’s voice dropped to a husky whisper. “I could not answer.” The last words of the speech were unforgettable words. “The world has turned over many times since I took the oath on the Plain at West Point,” he said, and his “boyish hopes and dreams have long since vanished.” But, he said,

And the last word of all was spoken in a whisper—a whisper into a great hush: “Good-bye.”

A
S
M
AC
A
RTHUR LEFT THE PODIUM
he “stepped down,” in William Manchester’s prose, “into pandemonium.” Representatives and senators “were sobbing his praise, straggling to touch his sleeve.” In a voice that could be heard in the Press Gallery, Representative Dewey Short of Missouri shouted, “We heard God speak here today, God in the flesh, the voice of God!” Across the country, the congressmen’s constituents, who had been glued to their radios or television sets, were just as moved. When a reporter asked Herbert Hoover for a comment, he called MacArthur “a reincarnation of St. Paul into a great General of the Army who came out of the East.” MacArthur left the Capitol for the Washington Monument, where he was to give another speech. During his progress down Pennsylvania Avenue before a quarter of a million cheering onlookers, Air Force jets screamed overhead and a phalanx of growling motorcycles and armored personnel carriers carrying helmeted soldiers preceded the open car in which he stood at rigid attention, as Manchester wrote, “a senior officer in full uniform contemptuously defying a President and a Constitutional Commander-in-Chief and undertaking to force an alteration in the highest decisions of the civil government.” It was a parade more fitting for the capital of a South American republic ruled by a junta than the capital of a democracy.

Covering that parade for the United Press, in his very last assignment before joining the staff of Lyndon Johnson’s Preparedness Subcommittee, was, George Reedy would recall, “the only time in my life that I ever felt my government to be fragile…. I’ll never forget watching him go up Pennsylvania Avenue. I had a very strong feeling that had he said ‘Come on, let’s take it’ and had started to charge toward the White House…. [T]he adoring crowds that
thronged the streets would have gone with him.” More thoughtful observers could not avoid, at least at the moment, the same thought. As William S. White walked with one of his senatorial friends—“one of the most balanced and soundest public men I have ever known”—back toward the Senate side of the Capitol after MacArthur’s speech, the sound of the pandemonium fading only slowly behind them, the Senator said, “This is new to my experience; I have never feared more for the institutions of my country. I honestly felt back there if the speech had gone on much longer there might have been a march on the White House.” The next day, the General pushed on to New York. That city’s monumental homecoming parades, in which Lindbergh and Pershing and Eisenhower had ridden down the skyscraper-lined Canyon of Heroes through blizzards of swirling confetti, had been the nation’s most memorable and exuberant welcoming receptions. MacArthur’s parade was, in
Time’s
words, “the greatest and most exuberant the city had ever seen.”

Republican senators—a delegation led by Taft and Wherry had called on MacArthur at the Waldorf Towers in New York—had already demanded a full-scale senatorial investigation, and Democrats, not only southern Democrats who held a brief for many of the General’s views but even liberal Democrats who did not, knew one had to be held. MacArthur’s arguments had to be countered, his hold on the public imagination weakened. While fears of Truman’s impeachment or of a march on the White House might be exaggerated, other concerns were more realistic. The next presidential election was only a year and a half away, and even were MacArthur not to be the Republican candidate (and, at the time, the odds seemed good that he would be), every cheer for MacArthur was a jeer for Truman—as was demonstrated at the Washington Senators’ opening game, when he became the first President to be booed (and the booing was long and loud) since Herbert Hoover in the depths of the Depression. And if in 1952 the Democratic Administration remained as discredited by MacArthur’s speech as it was at the moment, the re-election chances of Democratic senators and representatives would be hurt as well. And other concerns went beyond the political. The outpouring of admiration for MacArthur was to a large extent an indication of the emotional appeal to Americans of the General’s belief that wars were meant to be
won
—by whatever means necessary. Around the erect, heroic figure of MacArthur of Corregidor, MacArthur of Inchon, had coalesced the national impatience over the long-drawn-out stalemate in Korea, and his speech—with its defiant “There is no substitute for victory” and his insistence that a refusal to use all the force available amounted to “appeasement”—was a call, a call that had seemingly mobilized a substantial segment of American public opinion behind it, for such options as blockading China, bombing Chinese sanctuaries in Manchuria, crossing the Yalu River, unleashing Chiang Kai-shek’s troops to invade mainland China, and even the use of nuclear weapons. Around him also had coalesced the simmering discontent with the organization that, as much as
Truman, was tying his hands. In April, 1951, there was, William White was to report, “an almost runaway movement toward rejection of the United Nations.” And the most serious threat was to a principle basic to democratic government: the blurring of the lines between civilian and military authority. While he was still in Korea, MacArthur, in defiance of Truman’s policies, had suggested that he meet on his own authority with the enemy commander to discuss a truce; now
Life
magazine actually asked: “What was bad about that? In ordinary circumstances a field commander might have no business talking as MacArthur does. But these are extraordinary circumstances, created not by him but by the timidity of his bosses.” The United States, White felt, was in “perhaps the gravest and most emotional Constitutional crisis that the United States had known since the Great Depression…. The issue was the supremacy, written and unwritten, that a century and a half had given to the civil government over the military.” “Popular emotions,” George Reedy was to recall, had been raised “to a fever pitch and it was obvious that they could not be cooled by pretending that nothing had happened. Congress had to do something that would respond either affirmatively or negatively to the widespread belief that a patriot with a program to end a war was being shoved aside by an Administration that was incompetent and possibly infested with traitors.”