The Passage of Power (115 page)

“Will Johnson show the perseverance to keep his program on target?” Cater asked. “Though his activities to date are largely on the propaganda side, there are some promising signs.” And, despite the efforts of Kennedy adherents, who hurried to explain to columnists and reporters that the poverty program was really Kennedy’s program, the program was accepted as Johnson’s.
“In
launching a campaign against poverty President Johnson is carrying on what President Kennedy was intending to do,”
Walter Lippmann wrote. “I am told that the basic policy was Kennedy’s, and that its translation into a program is Johnson’s.” But, Lippmann made clear, that quibble had little significance to him. The new President “knows about the hidden and forgotten American poor.… In style and in substance the President’s message is an intimate and personal display of the political gifts for which Lyndon Johnson is celebrated. He shows himself to be a passionate seeker with an uncanny gift for finding, beneath public issues, common ground on which men could stand.”

T
HE NEW PROGRAM
he announced, combined with the demeanor with which he announced it, had achieved another of his purposes.
“Once
before, during the nightmare that was November, Lyndon B. Johnson stood at the Speaker’s rostrum and addressed himself to Congress, but while the voice was the prairie drawl of President Johnson, the words echoed the program of the fallen President Kennedy. There was no mistaking either voice or words last week,”
Newsweek
said. “This was President Johnson speaking, very much his own man in his first State of the Union Message, forcefully determined upon a program of his own making.… His own Administration had clearly begun.”

The transition between the thirty-fifth and thirty-sixth presidencies of the United States, the period that had begun at the moment on November 22, 1963, when Ken O’Donnell had said of the thirty-fifth President, “He’s gone,” had been brought to an end with Lyndon Johnson’s speech on January 8, 1964. It had lasted forty-seven days, just short of seven weeks. Now it was over. “I’ve got to put my own stamp on this administration,” Johnson had known. In his State of the Union message he had done just that—had made the presidency his own, put a stamp, a brand, on it.

He had done it with an announcement of a program with goals so new and ambitious that it was necessary to go back to Franklin Roosevelt’s
New Deal to find, perhaps not an equal, but at least a comparison.

The ranch on which, during that Christmas vacation, he had created the program’s outline was just down the road from the Junction School, where, as a
small boy, he had scrawled his name across two blackboards in letters so large that schoolmates become old men still remembered the huge “
LYNDON B.
” on one blackboard and “
JOHNSON
” on the other. The program he had announced in the State of the Union was of dimensions so sweeping that with it he was trying to write his name across the whole long slate of American history.

A
MONG THE HUNDREDS
of representatives and senators crowded into the long curved rows of seats as Lyndon Johnson spoke of the state of the union was the one whose reaction was most crucial. From her front-row seat in the gallery above,
Lady Bird Johnson was
“searching
for Harry Byrd every time the word
‘budget’ was mentioned.”

The new President’s efforts to bring Old Harry over, to “get” him as he had sometimes gotten him in the past, had been resumed before the speech, on the day following Johnson’s return from Texas. The Finance Committee chairman had made his cooperation on the tax cut bill contingent on Johnson’s promise not only to bring the budget in under $100 billion without gimmicks, but to show him and John Williams, Finance’s ranking Republican, written documentation of that; despite the acceleration in his committee’s processing of amendments, enough of them were being held in reserve to ensure that the Finance hearings could take whatever length of time the chairman desired. Knowing that the promise would have to be redeemed, Johnson’s response when, on January 6,
Kermit Gordon finally reported that the budget was
“locked
up,” was to ask him, “When am I going to get the galley proofs” (of the final, printed version) and the “tally sheets” (the unofficial ledgers used by the
Budget Bureau for its calculations)? “I’m going to have to show [them] to Harry Byrd sometime,” he said. As soon as the proofs and sheets were ready the next morning, a car was sent to the Senate Office Building for
Byrd and Williams.

“I’ve
got a surprise for you, Harry,” Johnson said when the two senators arrived at the White House. “I’ve got the damn thing down under one hundred billion … way under. It’s only 97.9 billion. Now you can tell your friends that you forced the President of the United States to reduce the budget before you let him have his tax cut.”

Not only was the budget indeed below Byrd’s magic figure, there was magic also in Johnson’s words, appealing as they did to an old man’s pride in his principles and in the victory he had won for them—and appealing also to his pride in
his power. Harry Byrd could indeed know that he had forced a President of the United States to bow to his demands: The President himself was acknowledging that, admitting it to his face. Given Johnson’s hatred of losing, his feeling that any defeat was “humiliation,” there was a sacrifice in Johnson’s statement. He was admitting that he had lost, that he had been forced to bow to someone’s demands, and he was admitting it face-to-face to the man who had beaten him. It was still the early days of his presidency—less than seven weeks after Dallas; if the price of achieving governmental progress was such a face-to-face admission, it was a price he was still willing to pay. And not only had he paid it, face-to-face, graciously, he had put it, from this man looking always for words that would “touch,” in words designed to touch.

And they
did
touch. Byrd’s reaction to the State of the Union speech—
“I
congratulate the President on his estimated reduction in federal expenditures and deficits. His references to cutting waste and extravagance have been impressive”—was all Johnson could have hoped.

The White House press office had been alerted to look for it. As soon as it clattered over the wire service ticker, a press office secretary tore it off, showed it to
Pierre Salinger, ran with it into the Oval Office, and the President telephoned the senator and said,
“I
appreciate [it] very much.”

In that call, the chord of pride he had newly struck in Byrd was struck along with the old one, Byrd’s affection for him. “I’ve got to represent the whole country and do my best,” the President said. “We’re going to have some differences as we always do.… But I’ll tell you this.… One thing I’m going to try to do—I’m going to try to stop and arrest the spending and try to be as frugal as I can make them be.… You’re my inspiration for doing it. And I want to work with you. And I want you to advise me.… I want you to be proud that you supported me in 1960.”

Byrd’s response showed how strongly the chords resonated in him. Johnson said he wanted him to be proud of him—and the older man assured him that he already was.
“That
was an eloquent speech you made,” he said. “You’ve made a good start,” he said. And, as almost immediately became apparent, he was going to help him. The very day after their telephone conversation, the Finance Committee, in what the
New York Times
called a
“speed-up
,” held an unusually long session, in which it defeated, often by a 9–8 vote, a number of amendments. By the next week, many journalists had noted that, as the
Washington Post
put it, “Byrd has been moving in
high
gear” in
“what
appeared to be a footrace with the Calendar.”

“Harry
started to regard the
budget, well, almost as
his
budget—
he
had gotten it down,”
Neil MacNeil says. “And because the tax reduction [bill] was so tied in with it [the budget], and he had done so much work on that bill—well, it was almost as if the tax bill had suddenly become
his
bill, too.”

All Byrd’s help, and all his power, would be needed to get it passed. Developments that Johnson had not foreseen—a new line of attack orchestrated by
Richard Russell and a series of last-minute amendments introduced in the Finance Committee by Republican Leader
Everett Dirksen and other GOP committee members, as well as by some Democratic members, to exempt the products of industries in their states from the excise taxes in the tax bill—threatened to upset Johnson’s timetable: with Finance suddenly faced with more work than had been anticipated, and House Rules moving faster than had been anticipated, there was suddenly, thanks to Russell’s maneuvers, the danger that Rules might complete its work before Finance, and send the civil rights bill to the Senate floor before the tax bill arrived there; there was suddenly, again, the possibility that the tax bill might get behind civil rights, that it would be “good night, Grace.” But all that January the chords were played, in telephone calls in which Johnson used the tone he had used years before, as a young senator, when he had sat at Harry Byrd’s knee, and pride and affection overcame even the fear of what might happen if black children and white children rode in school buses together. Harry Byrd no longer wanted the tax bill—
his
tax bill, now, in his mind—behind civil rights; he wanted his bill passed. He became, in Evans and Novak’s phrase, “Johnson’s
secret
ally”—and a very effective one. On Thursday morning, January 23, as the committee was about to complete its work, there was almost a derailment. Without warning, Dirksen suddenly introduced yet another new amendment, to repeal excise taxes on luxury goods such as jewelry and expensive handbags and luggage, and it was approved, 12 to 5. A
“stunned
” Treasury Department estimated that the amendment would cost the government $450 million—almost half a billion dollars—in tax revenue each year.

That vote broke the dam. Three Democratic committee members—
Clinton Anderson of New Mexico,
Vance Hartke of Indiana and Abraham Ribicoff of Connecticut—who had, in the interest of getting a bill passed, agreed to withdraw excise tax amendments that would benefit industries in
their
states immediately decided to resubmit them. Each amendment would have to be debated individually within the committee, and the debates, as senators fought for constituencies in their states important to them, might be long ones. And there remained the other amendments that had not been taken up by the committee: their sponsors might now want them debated individually as well.

J
OHNSON LEARNED
of these developments at thirty-four minutes past noon on the 23rd,
in
a panicky phone call from
George Smathers, who told him that the previous agreement to get the tax bill out fast had fallen apart. “The goddamned thing came unglued,” he said, and he didn’t think there was anything that could be done about it in the committee. “I don’t think there’s anything we can do except … just take it [accept Dirksen’s amendment] as it is.”

Taking it as it was, however, would mean that all the careful balancing of the budget would be undone, and the careful scheduling to ensure the tax bill arrival on the Senate floor before civil rights might be undone, too. But Smathers
was talking to the master of the Senate. Long before he was finished explaining that the problem was unsolvable, Johnson had thought of a way—possibly the only way—to solve it.

His solution would require two far-from-routine rulings from the committee chairman, rulings that would in fact fly in the face of the committee’s vote that morning: first, that the Dirksen amendment could be brought back that afternoon and voted on again; and, second, that it be brought back by a motion that lumped in with it all remaining amendments before the committee, even those that had not yet been debated, so that a single vote by the committee—a vote to defeat the Dirksen amendment—would be a vote to defeat all the remaining amendments as well, thereby concluding the committee’s work on the tax cut bill and removing the last obstacle to its release to the Senate floor. And since only five committee members had voted against the amendment before, Johnson’s solution would require also that the three rebellious Democratic senators be persuaded not only to withdraw their amendments, but to reverse their vote on the Dirksen amendment, and this time vote to defeat it. Even their three votes would not provide the nine necessary to defeat it; not only Byrd’s ruling to allow the motion but his vote against the amendment, a fourth vote that would be reversed, would be essential; it was going to be another “9–8 thing.”

“I think we just got to go right on with the bill,” Smathers said, but Johnson refused to accept that. “Can’t you redo it in the committee?” he demanded. “Can’t you repeal what you did in the committee? Can’t you put those votes together?”

“I don’t think so,” Smathers said. “I just don’t see how.”

“That’s what I’d try to do,” Lyndon Johnson said.

There was little time to do it. He hung up the phone with Smathers at 12:42. The Finance Committee was scheduled to reconvene at two o’clock. He told Colonel Roberts to get the three Democratic senators on the phone.

Luckily, Anderson and Hartke had been in the Senate while Johnson was Leader. They knew that Lyndon Johnson was a bad man to cross but could be a good man to have on your side. And they—and Ribicoff—knew that a President had a lot of ways to help or hurt a senator. The persuasion went fast. Agreeing to withdraw his amendment, Anderson said Ribicoff would never withdraw his—“He won’t do it! He won’t go with anybody.”