Master of the Senate (80 page)

And, of course, had Old Mac wanted to exercise power, he didn’t have
much to exercise. Though he was called the Democratic Leader, more than half the Democrats took orders not from him but from Richard Russell, and should it come to a showdown involving the entire Senate, a majority would take orders from Russell and Taft; the conservative coalition, not the Administration, had the votes in a crunch. Liberal senators and the President might insist that he get a bill out of a committee that was letting it die by inaction, but what was he to do when the committee chairman flatly refused even to put the measure on the committee’s agenda? Obtaining a majority vote for a motion to discharge a bill from a committee would be all but impossible. And if a liberal measure
did
somehow reach the floor, what was the “Majority Leader” to do then? Once, with Truman demanding that a bill giving home rule to the District of Columbia be brought to a vote, McFarland gingerly raised the subject with the southerners—who informed him that should the bill reach the floor, they would discuss it “at length,” because, as one southerner put it, home rule would open the door for “a ‘Nigra’ mayor of Washington.” And where was McFarland to find the votes to shut off the filibuster? He let the home rule bill die—he had no choice but to let it die—in committee. Day after day, the genial, inoffensive Arizonan had to listen to the Douglases and Lehmans pillory him to his face for inaction, had to read, day after day, that “McFarland was simply ineffectual” or that “Majority Leader McFarland was no leader at all”; there was nothing he could do about it.

The number of senators on the floor—for years so disgracefully small—grew smaller; endless quorum calls were required to round up enough senators to conduct even routine business. In August, McFarland convened a caucus of his Democratic senators. At the Senate’s present pace, he said mournfully, “we’ll be here until Christmas.” The “useless quorum calls,” he said, “were wasting the equivalent of “one day a week. It’s got to stop.” Not an hour after the caucus adjourned, he went to the Chamber; the first voice he heard when he opened the doors at the rear was that of one of his Democrats—calling for a quorum. When he did manage to get a measure to the floor, even a non-controversial measure on which no one wanted to filibuster, he could not put a halt to speeches, often on some unrelated topic, designed for home consumption. In September, with the
Washington Post
saying that “Congress is taking longer to pass fewer bills than it ever did in recent history,” he took the floor, and as the
Post
reported, “pleaded with senators to stop talking and start voting ‘so that we can get out of here.’” He is, the
Post
said, “getting positively plaintive about it.” By the end of his first year as Leader, McFarland was a figure of ridicule in the Senate, and in national publications as well.

A
LTHOUGH THE FAILURE
of the congressional “leadership”—in particular, of the Senate leadership—was a theme much emphasized as the Eighty-second Congress drew to a close, the leadership referred to was that of McFarland and the committee barons. None of the criticism included Lyndon Johnson, for he
was not considered part of it. His title, “Assistant Leader,” had always been little more than honorary; journalists had the impression that the whip’s job was still the “nothing job” he himself had called it.

Johnson was careful not to disturb that impression. While he was still photographed emerging from the White House, after that first Monday morning he seldom if ever again made the mistake of injecting himself into the exchanges between the Leaders and journalists; he stood silently in the background with his House counterpart, Priest, as McFarland and McCormack answered—or tried to answer—reporters’ questions. When reporters called him off the Senate floor, or interviewed him in his office, he took stands on no subjects other than those that dealt with preparedness. Sometimes he would be asked, by the White House or by McFarland, to persuade a senator to vote for an Administration measure, but he almost invariably demurred. Resurrecting a sobriquet from Johnson’s past, Drew Pearson wrote that he “has adopted a policy of antagonizing no one—a policy which has won for Lyndon the nickname of ‘Lying Down Johnson.’” But that barb was drowned in the wave of publicity for the Preparedness Subcommittee and for the Watchdog-in-Chief; 1951 was the year of the long profiles that climaxed in the
Newsweek
cover. Most of those articles concentrated on the subcommittee chairmanship; almost no attention was paid by the press to Johnson’s other job, as party whip; that job was not, in fact, so much as mentioned in the
Newsweek
article.

But within the private world of the Senate—in the cloakroom and the Marble Room and behind the tall closed doors of the offices in the SOB—attention was beginning to be paid. For, without the press noticing it, the job was changing.

Part of the change was simply a matter of information.

Senators wanted to know—needed to know—at what time a roll call vote would occur, so that they could be present, and have their vote recorded. They needed to know what day a bill in which they were interested would come to the floor, so that they could arrange to be present to argue for or against it; to offer, or oppose, amendments. Not infrequently, they needed to know at least the approximate hour it would come up, which meant knowing if amendments would be introduced to bills on the schedule ahead of it, and how much time might be consumed discussing those amendments. They needed to know if a Monday or Friday session would be, as was so often the case, only a brief
pro forma
session without roll-call votes, in which case their weekend fence-building trips back home could be extended.

McFarland often didn’t know. Overwhelmed by the responsibilities he had accepted, he seemed increasingly helpless as the pace of the session picked up and the backlog of bills mounted. And during the second year of his term, worried about his re-election campaign, he spent more and more time back in Arizona.

Lyndon Johnson began checking with the chairmen on the status of bills
before their committees, and when senators asked about a particular bill, he knew the answer, or said he would find out. And in talking with senators, he acquired as well as provided information. His colleagues found him an attentive listener as they told him about amendments they were planning to introduce, in committee or on the floor. And Johnson was therefore able to provide information to the Democratic Policy Committee, of which, as party whip, he was an
ex officio
member. When that committee discussed issues, he was silent, and followed Russell’s lead in voting. But when the committee turned to schedules, all of a sudden the discussions were no longer as haphazard as they had been in the past. Johnson could report what amendments were going to be introduced, and who was planning to speak for or against them, and how heated, and how long, the discussion on each amendment was likely to be. And when the schedule had been decided on, he could bring more precise information back to individual senators. There began to be, in the Democratic cloakroom, a realization that now, when a senator needed to know when a certain bill would come to the floor, there was, suddenly, someone he could ask.

T
HE INFORMATION
wasn’t only about schedules. It was also about votes.

The White House needed to know if it had the votes for a bill it wanted brought to the floor. A senator needed to know if there would be sufficient support to pass a measure he had introduced. “Vote-counting”—predicting legislators’ votes in advance—is one of the most vital of the political arts, but it is an art that few can master, for it is peculiarly subject to the distortions of sentiment and romantic preconceptions. A person psychologically or intellectually convinced of the arguments on one side of a controversial issue feels that arguments so convincing to him must be equally convincing to others. And therefore, as Harry McPherson puts it, “Most people tend to be much more optimistic in their counts than the situation deserves…. True believers were always inclined to attribute more votes to their side than actually existed.”

Lyndon Johnson had seen firsthand the cost of wishful thinking, of hearing what one wants to hear, of failing to look squarely at reality, when his father, that “man of great optimism” sentimentally attached to the old Johnson Ranch, purchased it for a price higher than was justified by the hard financial facts. Lyndon Johnson had felt firsthand the consequences of romance and sentiment every time the reins of the fresno bit into his back. And Lyndon Johnson had been a master of the vote-counting art for a long time. Of all the aspects of his political talent that had impressed the group of fast-rising young liberal pragmatists of which, as a young congressman, he had been a member, none had impressed them more than this ability. These men, to whom politics was life, were uninterested in party games; at Georgetown parties, while others played charades, they would go off and amuse themselves by trying to predict the exact vote on some bill that would be coming up in Congress that week.
And they learned that, as Jim Rowe recalls, “He was a great counter. Someone would say, we’ve got so many votes, and Johnson would say, ‘Hell, you’re three off. You’re counting these three guys, and they’re going to vote against you.’” Says Abe Fortas: “He would figure it out—how so-and-so would vote. Who were the swing votes. What, in each case—what, exactly—would swing them.”

Now Lyndon Johnson’s counting was not a social pastime but an exercise in hard political reality—and he was still “a great counter.” He kept his counts on the long, narrow Senate tally sheets on which the ninety-six names were printed in alphabetical order in a column down the center with a blank line on either side of each name, on the left side for the “yea” votes, on the right for the “nays.” When he knew which way a senator would vote, he would write a number—the number that the new vote raised the tally to—on the appropriate side of the senator’s name. And no number was written until he
knew
, knew for sure. To a staff member who, after talking with a senator, said he “thought” he knew which way the senator was going to vote, he snarled, “What the fuck good is
thinking
to me? Thinking isn’t good enough. Thinking is never good enough. I need to
know!”
Often, he didn’t know. He had no power to make a senator tell him which way he was going to vote, and some senators didn’t want to be asked. Pat McCarran, asked once by Walter Jenkins, warned Jenkins never—ever—to do it again. And he never tried to persuade a senator to vote one way or the other; it was information, not votes, that he was collecting. But if he didn’t
know
, he didn’t guess: the lines flanking the senator’s name stayed blank.

In this collecting of information, there had been an important development, what Evans and Novak call the “ripening of the relationship between Lyndon Johnson and Bobby Baker.” Owing a favor to a political operative from the South Carolina hamlet of Pickens, Senator Burnet Maybank paid it in 1942 with the offer of an appointment to the Senate’s corps of teenage pages, and the man recommended Bobby Gene Baker, the fourteen-year-old son of a Pickens mailman. Bobby was working in a drugstore; he had been hired six years before to sweep out the place, but, as he was to say about himself, he was “an eight-year-old boy who had it in him to hustle,” and the store’s owner was to say that it wasn’t long before Bobby was “doing everything but filling prescriptions.” One of his teachers said he was “so vivacious, just a little trigger. If you wanted something done, you gave it to Bobby and you knew it would be done.”

For the first ten nights the boy was in Washington, he wrote in his diary each night, “I’m so homesick,” but when one of his Pickens teachers, hearing of his loneliness, wrote him an encouraging letter, Bobby’s reply, scrawled on a lined piece of paper from a notebook, was “Miss Hallum, Bobby Baker don’t quit,” and he got ahead in the Senate as he had gotten ahead in the drugstore: in his words, by “hard work and hustle.” The twenty-two pages, all boys, wore dark blue knickers, went to school each day in a special school in the Capitol,
and, on the floor, filled the inkwells and snuffboxes in the Chamber, “brought the senators public documents, newspapers, telephone messages, or anything they desired. To call us, they’d snap their fingers and we’d scurry to them.” He carried out such errands eagerly, and sought more: “I [learned] to anticipate what each senator might require…. When I learned that a given senator would be making a speech on a given day, I stationed myself nearby to quickly fetch some documents or materials or fresh water as he might need.” (His favorite senator was Truman: “Not once did I see him act imperiously toward lowly page boys. ‘Young man,’ he would say—not ‘Sonny’ as so many called us— ‘Young man, when it’s convenient, could you please get me a glass of water?’”) Before long, senators were asking for him by name, and giving him another type of assignment. “‘Bobby, I’m having a rubdown in the gym. Can you hold the vote for half an hour?’ I then would go to another senator, explain the situation, and ask him to request a time-consuming quorum call….”

He loved the institution; wandering around the floor, he would open the drawers of the desks so that he could read the names burned or carved into the wood, “running my fingers over the names—Daniel Webster, Stephen Douglas, Andrew Johnson—and marveling that I stood where they had stood.” He was “very early” intrigued by “the give and take of Senate debate.” When a parliamentary maneuver was underway, and he didn’t understand it, he would later approach Parliamentarian Charles Watkins in his office; “He was a kindly, gracious man from Arkansas and he patiently educated me.” So earnestly did he ingratiate himself with senators that at the age of sixteen he was named chief page, and at eighteen he was given a title on the Senate staff so that he, unlike the other pages, “might remain on the Senate payroll even after Congress had adjourned for the year.” When he married, it was to a woman from the Senate world: Dorothy Comstock, one of Scott Lucas’ secretaries.