Master of the Senate (22 page)

And the building, grand though it was, was merely a setting for the men for whom it had been built—those ninety-six human institutions known as “senators.”

The senators were very conscious of their prerogatives. Carl Hayden of Arizona was outwardly polite and courtly to the members of his staff, and to anyone who greeted him in the halls, but when he had lunch, or a cup of coffee, in the cafeteria, he would lay his cane on the table at which he had decided to sit, even if there were already staffers sitting at it, and, recalls one, “when he got to the head of the line and came back, you’d better be gone.”

And more than a few senators were not friendly and polite at all—except to their fellow senators. Staff was staff, and that meant they were so far below the level of senators that even the most ordinary courtesies would be wasted on them. There were senators who would not even return the greeting of a staff member if they met him in a corridor of the Senate Office Building. Some senators—Taft was a prime example—seemed to make a point of not returning a greeting. “If you saw Senator Taft coming down the hall, you wouldn’t say hello to him,” one staff member says. “He just wasn’t a man you would say hello to. He was always deep in thought.”

They knew how to deal with violations of their prerogatives. A senator wanting to use an elevator pushed the buzzer three times. The elevator operator was supposed to ignore all other buzzes and proceed immediately to pick the senator up. In fact, even if there were passengers already in the elevator, with the elevator going in the opposite direction, the operator’s instructions were to immediately reverse direction and proceed to the senator’s floor, bringing his passengers along. These instructions were ignored at an operator’s peril. If he was not on the alert and did not immediately respond to the magical three buzzes, some senators were understanding, but others were not. Hearing an elevator
car continue to move away from him after he had rung, Senator William Jenner of Indiana would, in an instantaneous burst of rage, smack his palm repeatedly against the bronze elevator door. And everyone in the building knew what had happened when, one day, Pat McCarran of Nevada “got passed by” after he had rung. “He just turned on his heel and went back to his office and called the Sergeant-at-Arms and the kid was fired on the spot,” recalls an aide.

Senators were deeply conscious of what they called their “dignity.” One of them, forced by defeat to leave the Senate, lamented what he had lost. “Where else in our land can be found perquisites so plentiful, traditions so rich, individual respect so deep … dignity and honor so complete?” he asked. There were occasional angry outbursts and individual feuds that lasted for years, and it had become noticeable during the 1940s that some of the new senators were a little more informal than their frock-coated predecessors. But the older senators—and these were, of course, the ones who ran the Senate and set its tone: most of the twenty-two southerners, of course, and the New England Brahmins like Lodge and Saltonstall, and Republican leaders like Taft and Eugene Millikin, and, naturally, Chairman Hayden of the Rules Committee—were, in dealing with each other, models of senatorial formality. They talked to each other in private, in fact, as they talked to each other in public, addressing each other not by name but by title, and duplicating the elaborate formality of the Senate floor even behind the closed doors of executive sessions. During one such Rules Committee session, for example, Chairman Hayden began a statement by saying: “My distinguished colleague, the Senator from New Hampshire, Mr. Bridges, advised the chairman of this committee that …” Another member of the Rules Committee then said: “I think that is right. The wise chairman of this committee, as usual, has made a very valuable statement.” The closed doors of their offices were a symbol of the fact that informality was not encouraged. Personal relationships were governed by ceremony and ritual. When one senator wanted to visit another in his office, he would telephone to ask when it would be convenient for him to drop by and, when he arrived, would never walk into the senator’s private office until the receptionist had telephoned to announce him. And on such visits, the business talk was invariably preceded by a long ritual of senatorial friendship. “You just didn’t barge in and start talking business,” one administrative aide recalls. “It just wasn’t done.” The Senate Office Building was, in January, 1949, a place of courtesy, of courtliness, of dignity, of restraint, of refinement and of uncompromising austerity and rigidity. Its corridors were corridors of power—of the Senate brand of power, cold and hard.

A
S SENIORITY’S
grip had tightened on the Senate, so had the grip of the South. The correlation between the two had, of course, been apparent even before the Civil War; seniority had, after all, given “the chairmanship of every
single committee” to the “slaveholding states” by 1859. Republican opposition to slavery had made the South so solidly Democratic that it was the most rigidly one-party section of the United States. Its senators were sent back to Washington term after term, long-running stars (“Human institutions with southern accents,” one journalist called them) on a capital stage on which the rest of the cast seemed to be constantly changing. (A notable exception were the southern members of the House of Representatives.) And although the eleven states of the Old Confederacy held only twenty-two of the ninety-six seats on the Senate floor, they held a far larger proportion of the gavels in the Senate committee rooms—particularly the gavels that represented the greatest power. In 1949, when Lyndon Johnson came to the Senate, the three most powerful Senate committees, by most rankings, were Appropriations, Foreign Relations, and Finance. Southerners were chairmen of all three. And southern dominance extended further down the list of the fifteen Standing Committees. Only two of the fifteen—District of Columbia, which administered the capital city, and Rules, which handled “the housekeeping administration of the Senate”—were, White was to say, “not especially relevant to great public issues.” Of the other thirteen committees, exactly one was not chaired by either a southerner or by a senator who was a firm ally of the South. Nor was the dominance limited to the chairmanships of those committees. The more powerful the committee, it seemed, the more its membership was stacked in depth by southerners. If there was one committee which in 1949 was considered the most powerful of all, it was Appropriations, because of its control of funding for the departments and agencies of the federal government; “No matter how much you legislate, the main ingredient is money and whatever type of program you have, its success is dependent on adequate financing,” a senator was to say. Successful though a senator might be in winning authorization from one of the legislative committees for a project vital to his state, the money for the project still had to be appropriated. Of the thirteen Democrats on Appropriations, seven were southerners. And decisions on appropriations requests were made first—and very seldom overruled—by one of Appropriations’ subcommittees, each of which was given, as a student of the process noted, such great “latitude” in its field that decisions went “largely unchallenged” by the full committee. In 1949, Appropriations had ten subcommittees. Southerners were chairmen of six. Nor was the dominance of subcommittees—of Appropriations or other committees—limited to
their
chairmen. One senator—not a southerner—was to describe “an interlocking directorate of southerners who are on every subcommittee in depth. If you get rid of one, you still have another southerner.”

The power thus conferred on the South was reinforced by other factors. One was ability. Unlike senators from other sections, southern senators, White wrote, “had no chance of getting a serious nomination for the Presidency, and they knew it.” And because in the South
United States Senator
was therefore the
highest title at which political men could realistically aim, that title attracted men of a very high caliber, so that many southern senators were exceptional individuals, of great personal force and talent.

Another factor was a particular use to which abilities were put. When southerners came to the Senate, they came to stay; they studied the Senate’s rules and precedents with the concentration of men who knew they would be living by them for the rest of their lives. Forty “Standing Rules” had been adopted by the Senate in 1884, and amended and re-amended over the ensuing decades, and there were hundreds of pages of precedents establishing the rules’ meaning. Many of the southern senators did a lot of reading in those rules and precedents. They gave themselves individual seminars in them: in the 1920s, Vice President Charles G. Dawes, presiding over the Senate, realized that on the lower dais before him was “a modest young man who knew all the rules”; in 1935, Charles L. Watkins of Arkansas, a lowly clerk who had been helping to keep the Senate
Journal
, or minutes, was appointed the Senate’s Parliamentarian, and southern senators would drop in to his office just off the Senate floor and sit for long, leisurely conversations about rules and precedents, and about the theory and logic behind them. As a result, they knew what they covered, and what they didn’t cover; knew how to use them—and how to get around them. “Because of his instinctive sympathy with the Institution and all that is in it, the southern senator is like a man who can put his hand instantly to any book in a cherished library,” White wrote. “In consequence he is a past master of the precedents, the practices, and even the moods of the Senate and as a parliamentarian formidable in any debate or maneuver.” With a frequency that would be almost unimaginable at the end of the century, there would be detailed discussions on the Senate floor about parliamentary procedures. In skirmishes and pitched battles in any parliamentary body, of course, rules and precedents play an important role, and the degree to which the southerners had mastered them more fully than their opponents was repeatedly apparent: it was striking, for example, how often, in such fights, after the South’s opponents had launched a maneuver, a southern senator would rise to beg to point out, courteously but firmly, that the maneuver was, under one precedent or another from some long-past decade, simply out of order, and how often, when the presiding officer looked up the precedent, he had regretfully to rule that that was indeed the case. Once, in a Democratic caucus, one of the Senate elders was saying that he had made a practice, at the beginning of each new Congress, of reading through the volume of
Senate Procedures
, hundreds of pages long, underlining passages as he went. “I recommend that every senator read that book frequently,” he said. Turning to a colleague, a non-southern senator whispered sneeringly, “This is one senator who has no intention of
ever
reading that book.” The senator who was not from the South thought he was demonstrating his sophistication, or perhaps his sense of humor. What he was really demonstrating was why, when liberals tried to fight on the Senate floor, they were like children in the southerners’ hands.

And the South’s power in the Senate rested on another keystone that was as solid as the chairmanships and the seniority rule, although it was not a rule, not even an informal one, but rather a rule’s absence. This missing rule was one that would force senators to stop talking about a bill, and vote on it.

A provision to make possible this most fundamental of legislative functions—a provision for “moving” the “previous question,” for a senator to make a motion demanding that a measure be brought to a vote without further debate or amendment—had been adopted by the British Parliament in 1604. America’s House of Representatives had adopted it in 1789, later—because it had so many members—coupling it with a provision that the maximum time a member could hold the floor was one hour. By 1948, some version of this motion had been incorporated into the functioning of forty-five of America’s forty-eight state legislatures, and of most of the legislative bodies in the world’s other countries as well. Indeed, the so-called “previous question” motion had been one of the first rules adopted by the Senate itself in 1789, but when the rules were modified, in 1806, it was omitted, as was perhaps understandable in a body created as insurance against the will of a majority of states being imposed over the wishes of a minority of states, since what better insurance could there be than to make sure that a measure embodying the majority will would never come to a vote so long as a small group of states, or for that matter one state (or for that matter one senator), didn’t want it to? For many years after 1806—for 111 years, to be precise—the only way a senator could be made to stop talking so that a vote could be taken on a proposed measure was if there was unanimous consent that he do so, an obvious impossibility. And there took place therefore so many “extended discussions” of measures to keep them from coming to a vote that the device got a name, “filibuster,” from the Dutch word
vrijbuiter
, which means “freebooter” or “pirate,” and which passed into the Spanish as
filibustero
, because the sleek, swift ship used by Caribbean pirates was called
filibote
, and into legislative parlance because the device was, after all, a pirating, or hijacking, of the very heart of the legislative process.

Like seniority, filibustering became a tool of the South early on. The first senatorial
filibustero
, in fact, was Randolph of Virginia, who in 1825 talked day after day to prevent a vote on a series of measures, proposed by President John Quincy Adams, that Randolph felt would give industrial New England an advantage over the agrarian South. During the decades after the Civil War, the filibuster would be used by senators of other sections or persuasions to block votes on a variety of subjects—the elder La Follette was one of the most aggressive filibusterers—but most frequently by southerners, and in 1872, at southern instigation, the device was strengthened by a precedent that held that, in the absence of any rule to the contrary, a senator could not be called to order for irrelevancy in a debate, that he could therefore prevent a vote on any bill by talking about any subject he chose.