Master of the Senate (136 page)

He had been planning to vote for the bill, Case said—“The principle of maintaining free enterprise appeals to me”—but the payment (which “would be the largest single contribution I could remember for any campaign of mine”) reminded him of Hennings’ warning that the oil companies’ “money power” is “a menace to the proper functioning of free government.”

“I object,” Case said, to “doing something so valuable to those interested in natural gas that they advance huge sums of money as a down payment, so to speak, on the profits they expect to harvest.” Since the bill evidently “has prospects of unusual monetary profit to some, and with that profit would go the means for a continuing effort to influence the course of government for private gain, I must vote” against it.

Suddenly the press had all the grist it needed, “
SENATOR TELLS OF BRIBE ATTEMPT
,” headlines blared. Summoning Gulf Oil’s chief lobbyist, David Searls, to his Mayflower suite, Ed Clark gave him some very serious advice. “You are in the wrong place today. I wouldn’t want to be in Washington today.”
There would almost certainly be an investigation of Case’s charge, Clark said, and that investigation might easily expand to include other contributions. If Searls was in Washington, it would be easy to serve a subpoena on him. “And if you ever get called to testify, you’re going to be in a position where you have to tell the truth or lie. And if you lie, you’re going to be in danger of perjury. If it were me, I would leave
today!”
Whether or not Searls himself followed Clark’s advice is not known, but it was followed by so many others that the Mayflower found itself with an unexpectedly high number of vacant rooms that Friday evening: all that afternoon, the private planes had been taking off from National Airport, heading southwest.

John Connally was not nearly as tough as Clark. And he was far more immediately threatened by Case’s bombshell. Although the Senator had not yet named the lobbyist who had offered him the cash, saying he wanted to do so not on the Senate floor but to some “properly constituted authority” such as the FBI or a Senate Committee, Connally knew that it was John Neff, a lobbyist for Keck’s Superior Oil Company, and that the cash had come from Elmer Patman and the General Gas Committee, whose lobbying operations Connally was directing. And Connally didn’t move as fast as Clark, either. When Tommy Corcoran rushed into Connally’s suite at the Mayflower, he found him “white-faced,” all the self-assurance gone in an instant. For an entire day, he “sat paralyzed,” one of his biographers, James Reston Jr., was to write. Then he, too, left town. As Reston says, “The widely held rumor was that Lyndon Johnson had spirited his friend out of Washington for fear that Connally would be questioned and then implicated and indicted in the scandal.” (In his own memoir, Connally says, in an attempt at exculpation that is unintentionally revealing: “No attempt had been made to bribe anyone. A contribution that would have been given routinely was handled clumsily, with atrocious timing. But this was unfortunately one of the quirks of character of people who lived and died in an industry where fortunes were made and lost almost overnight. Many oilmen of that period carried with them staggering amounts of cash, and they treated it as though they were tossing around chips in a Las Vegas casino.”)

Lyndon Johnson wasn’t paralyzed. His instant reaction was to rage at Case—“I think we ought to investigate the morals of some people in South Dakota for bringing this up,” he said—and to try to make him seem like a guilty party in the matter. First, he tried to impugn Case’s veracity by casting doubt on the truth of the story, saying (in a statement with no basis in fact) that it was based upon “a vague recollection of a lady clerk.” The next day he said: “Thus far, Senator Case has declined to reveal the name of the man who left the money. Unless the senator from South Dakota voluntarily divulges the name of the fellow, and the impropriety, if any, the Senate is going to investigate.” Then, when Case gave Neff’s name—together with the envelope and the twenty-five hundred-dollar bills—to the FBI, Johnson switched to impugning Case’s motives. Ignoring the fact that Case had been a supporter of the natural gas bill,
and the fact that he had reported the contribution as soon as he realized it was connected with the bill, Johnson told reporters that he considered the timing of Case’s revelation—so close to the date of the vote—a deliberate attempt to sabotage the measure, an attempt he said would not succeed; when several senators urged that the vote be delayed until, as Mike Mansfield put it, “a complete and thorough investigation” could ascertain “whether other senators had received similar offers,” Johnson said there would be no delay. The vote, he said, would be held on Monday as scheduled.

O
N
M
ONDAY
, on a packed Senate floor, several senators on both sides of the aisle called for a delay until, as Republican Potter of Michigan put it, it could be determined whether Neff’s approach to Case had been an isolated instance or “just a small part of the big overall effort of certain people to influence the passage of this bill.” But the Majority Leader was having none of it. “The Senate of the United States can ill afford to prostrate itself before phantoms,” he said. “That is what we would be doing if we delayed the vote now at hand.” When the clerk called the roll, the only senator who changed his vote because of the uproar over the Case contribution was Case, who voted against it. Every other senator voted as Johnson’s tally sheet showed he was going to vote. And while Democrats voted against the bill, 24 to 22, Republicans supported it by a 31–14 margin. “The Senate, casting aside suggestions that it was voting under a cloud of suspicion, passed the natural gas bill tonight, 53 to 38,” John Morris reported in the
New York Times.
“All signs indicate that President Eisenhower will sign it into law.”

The calls for an investigation did not die away, however. In a coincidence that Johnson viewed as unfortunate, the Rules Committee had the previous year appointed a three-member subcommittee to look into the broad question of campaign financing. Not only was it the obvious body to conduct the investigation, but its chairman was Missouri’s Hennings, who, facing a re-election campaign in November, had vowed to stop drinking, had in fact kept that vow for some months, and was therefore once again a dynamic and effective senator—and who, as a former District Attorney, knew how to investigate. Moreover, the other Democratic member was the lamentably independent Albert Gore. Surrounded by reporters, in the lobby outside the Senate Chamber, Hennings said his subcommittee would begin the very next morning a “thorough and complete look into the Case matter and every other damn matter in connection with it and get at the big boys if we can.”

Lyndon Johnson could not allow such an investigation. The “big boys” in question were
his
big boys—Herman and George, and Sid and Clint and the other oilmen with whose lobbying efforts he had been so closely connected. They were Ed Clark and John Connally, who had worked right out of his office. Any “thorough and complete” investigation could hardly help turning up his name. It had to be stopped.

And he stopped it—on the next day, Tuesday, February 8, 1956, a day of fast-paced, and often brutal, maneuvering in the Capitol and the Senate Office Building. He was not the only senator who wanted it stopped, of course. Some of his colleagues had personal reasons. “What [Mr. Case] did was to raise in the Senate the whisper: ‘Oil money,’” William White wrote. Campaign financing was a sensitive issue with many senators, and no aspect of such financing was more sensitive than “oil money.” In “recent years,” the issues “in which there were truly vast sums of money involved have concerned the oil and gas lobby.” Who knew how many senators’ names might be blackened in a probe of “oil money”? Others feared a blackening not only of themselves but of what Russell Baker described as the entire “political structure supporting them.” There was “a growing uneasiness in the Senate about having itself subjected to a ‘tough’ investigation on this most delicate of issues,” Baker said, a growing “doubt as to whether the voting public could stomach the facts of political life.” And the mere fact of such an investigation might tarnish the Senate’s image. “Nothing” disturbs “the Senate type” more than “evidence that the Senate may be losing the respect of the country,” White wrote. For all these reasons, James Reston Sr. said, “If there is anything that exceeds the need for a fundamental investigation and revision of the present system of financing campaigns it is the unwillingness of many senators to encourage such an investigation.” But Johnson was the senator most involved, and he was the senator who played the leading role in stopping the investigation.

Pleading with Hennings to restrict his subcommittee’s investigation to the single contribution, Johnson pulled out all the stops. The agitation over the natural gas fight was causing his heart to act up again, he said; the doctor was even threatening to put him back on digitalis. “I felt as though I were being cast in the role of his murderer,” a shaken Hennings would tell a friend the next morning. And when Hennings nonetheless tried to stand his ground, he abruptly found it opening beneath his feet.

As soon as the Senate convened on Tuesday, Johnson and Knowland, in a move which Johnson devised and to which Knowland acquiesced, jointly introduced a resolution, which passed unanimously, without discussion, establishing a “Select Committee for Contribution Investigation.” Its four members were Democrats Walter George and Carl Hayden, and Republicans Edward Thye of Minnesota and Styles Bridges.

The Select Committee’s mandate was as narrow as was implied by the lack of any plural in its title: the resolution empowered it to “investigate the circumstances surrounding” the “alleged improper” contribution to Case—and no other contribution. Included in the resolution was a budget—$10,000—adequate only for so narrow an inquiry. And in the committee’s first meeting, held in Vice President Nixon’s office, steps were taken to make sure that its investigation of that contribution would be the only investigation of that contribution.

Hennings had telephoned Senator Case that Tuesday morning to invite
him to testify at two o’clock that afternoon before his Campaign Finance Subcommittee, and Case had agreed to do so. Johnson, learning of this, moved fast—with Nixon’s help. In a formal ruling which the
New York Times
said was “without known example in the Senate,” Nixon awarded the Select Committee exclusive jurisdiction over the Case investigation. A letter, hastily typed for Walter George’s signature, and delivered to Case at 1:40, just twenty minutes before he was to appear before the Hennings Subcommittee, summoned him to testify before the Select Committee on Friday. The letter notified him of Nixon’s ruling, and said that therefore “they [the Select Committee] respectfully request that you appear before no other committee” prior to that time. The written request was reinforced by an oral communication, described by Arthur Krock: “Mr. George just sent word to Mr. Case that at two o’clock he was to come to the Vice President’s room, where Mr. George’s Select Committee was to assemble, and Mr. Case was to go nowhere else.” And when Case arrived, he was told by George that his first public testimony “had better be to the Select Committee.” He was not requesting Case to testify before the committee first, Walter George said; he was directing him to do so.

While Senator George was thus taking steps to keep the subcommittee from holding its hearing, Senator Johnson was taking his own steps, asking Senator Hennings to come to see him in his office, and then trying to persuade him, at length, to leave the investigation to the George Committee.

Johnson had wanted to see Hennings alone, but the Missourian had brought Gore along, and the three men were arguing heatedly when Gore told Hennings, “Let’s go. It’s after two o’clock and Case was scheduled to meet with us at two.”

“Go ahead,” Johnson said angrily. “I didn’t invite you here.”

The two senators went to the subcommittee room, but Case was not there. When the South Dakota senator finally did appear, he was carrying George’s letter, which he read to the subcommittee to explain why he couldn’t testify before it. And then Hennings and Gore were summoned to a hastily called closed meeting of their subcommittee’s parent Rules Committee, and although they angrily protested the “unprecedented” Johnson-Knowland attempt to gag a senator, the rest of the committee said that, in view of Nixon’s ruling, the George Committee had exclusive jurisdiction over the Case affair. Once again, all other arguments had faded before what Arthur Krock called “Mr. George’s unique prestige.” In a column bearing the accurate headline “IT DOESN’T PAY TO CHALLENGE MR. GEORGE,” Krock wrote that “The old man doesn’t hold with argument if he says a thing is so, or is to be done thus and thus. He doesn’t hold with it even if he is acting in his individual capacity, which is pretty powerful. And that goes double when Mr. George has been deputized by the Senate leaders of both parties, and another Senator tries to put on the same show in another tent.”

•    •    •

T
HE
S
ELECT
C
OMMITTEE TRIED
to keep the focus on the Case contribution, and on Case’s motives for disclosing it and on the timing of the disclosure. Questioning the Senator for four hours, committee counsel Charles W. Stead-man “bored in like a prosecuting attorney,” the
New York Times
reported, so that Case “was cast somewhat in the role of a defendant.” Nonetheless, it was impossible to avoid calling the man who had made the contribution, and asking where he had gotten the money, and as soon as Neff began to testify, the names of more senators began to surface.

Neff testified that he had gotten the $2,500 from Elmer Patman, and then Patman had to be called, and he testified that he had gotten it from Howard Keck. Asked the nature of his connection with Patman and Keck, Neff testified that he had been employed by Keck’s Superior Oil Company to represent it not only in South Dakota but in Nebraska as well. The name of an “old friend” in Nebraska, Donald R. Ross, the U.S. Attorney, came up, and Ross was questioned by the Justice Department. He was shortly to resign, but before he did he stated that Neff had offered him $5,000 after receiving assurance that both of Nebraska’s senators, Republicans Carl Curtis and Roman Hruska, would vote for the natural gas bill (as, in fact, both of them had). And, Ross added, Neff had offered to make additional contributions to Nebraska’s Republican State Finance Committee. Then the chairman of that committee, Joseph Wishart, revealed that Neff had pulled out “this handful of money,” had peeled off $2,500 and given it to him for the committee, and had said he wanted to make additional donations. And Ross also added that Neff had said his employers wanted to make contributions in other states where the people were not unfriendly to the natural gas industry. He had mentioned trying “to get in contact with somebody” in Montana, and had mentioned that he had also made trips to Wyoming and Iowa, and in Iowa had spoken to GOP national committeeman Robert K. Goodwin. It was impossible to avoid calling Goodwin, and he testified that Neff had indeed visited him, had told him that he “had $2,500 … to contribute to Senator Hickenlooper’s campaign,” and had “offered to leave one thousand dollars” with him “pending the time when he could see Senator Hickenlooper.” Goodwin said he had turned both offers down because they “seemed like a down payment on a purchase.” And then there was a development which made it seem likely that the names of other senators might surface. Goodwin said that when Neff had visited him, he had “apparently inadvertently” left behind a list of the ninety-six senators. Next to each name was written “For,” “Doubtful,” or “Against,” and against the names of ten of the fifteen “Doubtful” senators a checkmark had been made.