Master of the Senate (131 page)

Rayburn, Grace Tully (along for symbolism), Stevenson, and Stevenson’s aide Newton Minow arrived about eleven o’clock at night, expecting to find a man recuperating from a heart attack already asleep. Instead he was waiting for them in front of his house. And the discussion among the three leading figures in the Democratic Party, held on the porch, under a huge Hill Country moon and a sky filled with stars, lasted until well past midnight.

Among the subjects of discussion was how to handle the press the next day. The reporters, Johnson said with his usual hyperbole, “think that you, Adlai, and you, Mr. Sam, and I are here plotting to take over the government while Ike is dying. We’re not going to let them do that.” And the next morning was, to Reedy, who had spent a very worried night, another “Lyndon Johnson paradox,” with his boss the most gracious of hosts. Coming out onto the front porch at 6:30 a.m., while his guests were still asleep, Johnson found a crowd of newsreel, newspaper and radio reporters on his front lawn. “Are you going to throw me off, Senator?” Dave Cheavens asked. “Of course not,” Lyndon Johnson said, with a laugh and a broad smile. Walking over to his station wagon and saying, “Hop in,” he took a half dozen reporters, with the others following in their own cars, on a forty-minute tour of the ranch. When they returned, Stevenson was outside, and Johnson beckoned him to come over to the barn, then walked ahead of him, noticeably faster than usual with his long strides so that Stevenson was forced to trot to keep up. He loaded Stevenson into an electric golf cart, in which the two men zoomed along the concrete walk past the herd of white-faced Herefords near the river, and when Rayburn emerged from the house, the three men had a Texas ranch breakfast: orange juice, Pecos cantaloupe, scrambled eggs, bacon, venison sausage, hominy grits, popovers, and coffee. “Please,” said Stevenson after the meal. “Let’s skip lunch.” Then they sat down on three chairs on the lawn, the journalists crowded around, and a press conference was held.

Rayburn didn’t do much talking, sitting with no expression at all on his face, declining to smile for the cameras, and Stevenson wasn’t required to do much, either. When, asked if he thought Texas would return to the Democratic column in 1956, he started to reply, Johnson cut him off. “I think Mr. Rayburn and myself are in a better position to answer that question,” he said. “Texas will be in the Democratic column.” “Who am I to contradict?” Adlai said with a smile. When, at the end of the conference, a reporter asked Stevenson if he was planning to return to Texas, he said, “I’d like to come back to Texas and either
talk or listen—whatever they’ll permit me to do.” All three men said that they had agreed not to take advantage of President Eisenhower’s illness. Johnson and Stevenson said the visit had been just a purely social call. Stevenson had the grace to make the statement with a slight smile, which seemed to suggest that everyone there knew he was saying what had to be said, and when pressed on whether any politics had been discussed, he said, “I am in the presence of politicians, and it is possible the talk may have reverted to politics.” Johnson, however, insisted that
his
statement be believed. “It was purely a social visit with an old friend,” he said firmly, and his elaboration on this point was summed up by
Time:
“No politics had been discussed, said Johnson, and as far as he was concerned none were going to be. The visit had absolutely no relationship to any political situation arising from Eisenhower’s illness.”

The visit had not been purely social, naturally. Stevenson had been “pointedly advised by Senator Johnson,” as William White was later to report, that he must contest Kefauver in at least one or two state primaries in order to prove he was more popular. This course might well lead Stevenson into a trap “in the light of [Kefauver’s] demonstrated skill in that type of campaigning,” White noted; should Stevenson “fail to score heavily in the primaries, he then would be only one of several candidates” and “no longer the odds-on favorite at the convention.” Aware of that danger, Stevenson told Minow on the flight back to Chicago that “I’m not going to do it. If the party wants me, I’ll run again, but I’m not going to run around like I did before to all those shopping centers like I’m running for sheriff. The hell with it.” Johnson’s “advice,” however, had been accompanied by a subtly worded warning about what might happen if it was not followed: in White’s phrase, if Adlai entered the primaries, “no all-out ‘Stop Stevenson’ movement would be likely to arise at the Convention.” And in the event, the advice was followed.

Texas’ powerful and reactionary governor, Allan Shivers, had expected to be chairman of the state’s delegation, but Johnson had on his side the only man in Texas capable of breaking Shivers’ hold on the state, and Sam Rayburn was willing to do so because, he believed, Shivers had in 1952 committed the sin that was unpardonable to this man to whom “there are no degrees in honorableness—you are or you aren’t”: he had broken his word to him, promising to support Stevenson and then throwing the state to Eisenhower. After Stevenson left the ranch, Johnson apparently told Rayburn—Rayburn was shortly to repeat the conversation to Tommy Corcoran and Jim Rowe when they visited him on his ranch in Bonham—that he knew he couldn’t win the Democratic presidential nomination, but that he wanted to try for it at the convention so that he would be in a stronger position to get the vice presidential nomination—which would put him ahead of the field for the top spot in 1960.

Feeling that Stevenson had the nomination sewn up, and aware of the depth of liberal antipathy to Johnson, Rayburn was not enthusiastic about Johnson’s candidacy, believing it would split his beloved party after fate—Dwight
Eisenhower’s heart attack—had handed it a chance to retake the White House. Although he had little more respect for Stevenson than Johnson did, he wanted a short, harmonious convention. In addition, loving Johnson, he didn’t want him running so soon after his heart attack.

But, loving Johnson, Sam Rayburn knew what Lyndon really wanted (not for a minute, Corcoran and Rowe understood, did Mr. Sam believe that what Johnson was aiming for was the second spot on the ticket), and he knew how much he wanted it. He agreed to help. Rowe was to write Johnson in a very confidential letter that at Bonham “he spoke of you, as he often does to me, with a certain amount of pride in you and also with some hedging, like an over-fond uncle who thinks his favorite nephew should get a lot more spankings than he does.” Rayburn told the two Washington insiders that he had “regretted agreeing” to Johnson’s proposals “as soon as he left” the LBJ Ranch. “He made it clear that… he wants a quick convention giving the nomination to Stevenson, so that the Democrats don’t get themselves in a first-class row…. He felt that you were making a serious error in forming the Southern coalition because it meant that you would become the prime target of the Northerners.” And Rayburn told the two Washingtonians that if what Johnson wanted was really the second spot, “he, Rayburn, could get it for you by himself and without any trouble.” (Tommy Corcoran asked him how he would do that. Years later, Tommy the Cork would recall Rayburn’s reply. “Sam just looked at me, for a long time, and said, ‘I will go to him [Stevenson] and ask him for it.’ But it wasn’t what he said, but the way he looked when he said it. That was the end of that conversation. I thought, ‘God help Adlai if he tries to take on Mr. Sam.’”) In his contemporaneous letter reporting the conversation with Rayburn, Rowe, who was not given to reporting facial expressions, wrote Johnson that Rayburn had said “he would go to Stevenson and demand it and he knew he would get it.” But he
had
agreed to Johnson’s proposals, had given his word. Shivers was loudly vowing to fight for the delegation chairmanship; Sam Rayburn simply said to reporters, “Lyndon will be Texas’s ‘favorite son’ for President at this year’s convention and he will also serve as chairman of the Texas delegation to that convention.” And that was the way that, after a brutal fight, it turned out.

T
HE REACTION TO
Dwight Eisenhower’s heart attack emphasized to Lyndon Johnson the gulf between where he was and where he wanted to be: the fact that while a Senate Leader might be big news in Washington, and to some extent in New York, he was decidedly less big—indeed, not even particularly well known, compared to the President—in the rest of the country. The Dow Jones Industrial Average plummeted, in its most disastrous day since the Crash of 1929; losses were estimated at more than $12 billion. There had not been a tremor in the stock market on the news of his own attack. He had been so proud that the number of letters and telegrams he had received had eventually risen to
seven thousand. The White House received tens of thousands of letters and telegrams every day. Bulletins about the President’s condition were on newspaper front pages day after day; his cardiologist, Paul Dudley White, of Boston, became the most famous physician in the country, his every pronouncement analyzed and reanalyzed by columnists for clues as to whether Ike could run again. (Question: “Is your answer yes?” Dr. White: “I would say that it is up to him.” Question: “Did you say he would be physically able to do it?” Dr. White: “Oh yes…. But many things are possible that may not be advisable. If I were in his shoes I wouldn’t want to run again, having seen the strain.”) After an Eisenhower press conference on January 8, 1956, newsmen would conclude by four to one that Ike would not stand for re-election; not until later that month did the President begin to hint that he would run again.

And all during that fall and winter of 1955, the jangle of telephones and the clatter of typewriters were not the only additions to that still, quiet Pedernales landscape; there were plumes of dust in the air, fast-moving plumes from cars carrying visitors from the Austin and Fredericksburg airports to the LBJ Ranch along unpaved Hill Country roads. The flow of visitors increased: Russell, Clements, Symington, Fulbright, Price Daniel, George Smathers, John Connally, Bobby Baker—so many that Reedy could tell Johnson that his ranch had become his party’s “political capital.” Polls were telling Johnson one story, Gallup’s reporting that Stevenson was the favorite of 39 percent of Democratic voters, Kefauver of 33 percent, Harriman of 6 percent, and Johnson of only 3 percent, several other polls listing him only among the “other candidates” favored by less than 1 percent of the respondents. A survey of Democratic county chairmen showed him far behind Stevenson and Kefauver even among the 573 chairmen in the South. In the rest of the country he was the favorite of hardly any county chairmen at all: of only four out of 567 in the Midwest, of only six out of 214 in the West. And of the 142 chairmen in the East, not one preferred Lyndon Johnson for President. But he was telling himself another story. “The backing and filling around the candidacy of Adlai Stevenson … is by this time not merely obvious but blatant,” Doris Fleeson wrote. “Its basic cause, of course, is that Democrats now think they can win,” but not with Stevenson as the candidate. If the South’s county chairmen were not solidly behind Johnson, the South’s senators were, and other elements of a southern-border-state-western coalition seemed to be falling into place. Asked during a visit to the LBJ Ranch if Oklahoma might join Texas in making Johnson a favorite son, Senator Bob Kerr replied that “Outside of football, there is no state Oklahoma would rather go along with than Texas and no subject on which it would be easier to reach agreement.” Montana’s Mansfield said it was a “reasonable assumption” that Johnson “might become a figure around whom Southern and Western Democrats could rally.” “Here [on the Johnson Ranch] is where the southern bloc is being organized,” Richard Strout wrote in
The New Republic.
“Before the Roosevelt Revolution, the South had a two-thirds convention rule that gave Dixie something of a veto power over
the candidate. Now the effort is being made to organize the same device, in effect, through the offices of Senator Johnson.” White wrote in the
Times
that “Some of the Democratic professionals are maneuvering to gain for the South and conservatives generally an extraordinary and conceivably even a decisive influence on the Democratic national convention next year. The unofficial and unlabelled headquarters for this effort is the LBJ Ranch on the Pedernales River.”

T
HE REACTION OF
D
EMOCRATIC LIBERALS
—“growing resentment,” in a
Times
phrase—to these reports reinforced Johnson’s conviction that they would organize against him if he became an open candidate, and his denials were piously emphatic. Attacking “unjustified presumptions” in the press, he declared that his ranch “has not been a meeting place for discussions or evaluations or planning the strategy of any Democratic nominee,” and added that “It would be unfair and improper for a trustee of the party to set himself up as a kingmaker.”

Corcoran had come to the ranch bearing the offer of a substantial gift—from a man who had the power to make one: Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. In a meeting in New York, the Ambassador instructed Corcoran to tell Johnson that if he would publicly enter the race for the nomination, and would privately promise that if he won, he would select Jack Kennedy as his running mate, Joe Kennedy would arrange the financing for the ticket. If Johnson was not running, the Ambassador said, he would support Stevenson.

This offer revealed at least two drastic underestimations on the Ambassador’s part: first, about the extent of Johnson’s own financing, and, second, about Johnson’s political acumen. No sooner were the words of the offer out of his mouth, Corcoran saw, than Johnson understood the reasoning behind it: old Joe Kennedy was betting that Eisenhower would run again (in which case he would, of course, win again). The Democratic vice presidential nomination would give young, relatively unknown Jack Kennedy the national recognition he needed to give him a running start at the 1960 presidential nomination. And it would be more desirable for that candidacy to be on a Johnson rather than on a Stevenson ticket; Adlai, old Joe felt, would lose in a landslide, and an overwhelming defeat would be attributed partly to the Catholicism of his running mate, a belief which would damage Kennedy’s chances in 1960. Johnson, the Ambassador believed, would lose, but in a much closer race.