Master of the Senate (48 page)

And Johnson’s contention would have come as a shock to journalists who, over the years, interviewed southern senators about him, for these senators told them that Johnson had attended some of the Caucuses. In 1958, members of
Time
magazine’s Washington bureau interviewed a number of southern senators for a cover story on Johnson, and the story dealt with the matter this way: “During his first Senate days he was invited to a Southern caucus by … Russell. There was an argument over Southern strategy in fighting a proposed change in the Senate’s cloture rule, and Johnson sided with Russell, who was both pleased and impressed.”
Time
correspondent James L. McConaughy had been told about the same incident in 1953, apparently by Russell himself. He reported that “Russell knew little about Johnson until he invited him one day to attend a caucus of Southern senators … There was a fight over strategy; Johnson sided with Russell.” In 1963, journalist Margaret Shannon was to write in the
Atlanta Constitution
that “authoritative sources say”—she does not identify the sources, but from the story they appear to be sources close to both Johnson and Russell—that Johnson had, at one early meeting of the Caucus, seen with his own eyes (and been deeply impressed by) the accuracy of Bobby Baker’s statement that “Dick Russell was
the
power.” Shannon wrote that “At the first Southern Caucus that Johnson attended, Senator Russell had occasion to chew out Texas’ then senior senator, Tom Connally, as no other Texan would have dared to do and as perhaps no other senator would have dared to, either.”

The contention that Johnson was distancing himself from the southern fight would also have come as a shock to the southern senators; on March 7, 1949, John Stennis, for example, replied to a correspondent who inquired about Johnson’s role: “Senator Lyndon Johnson is cooperating fully with us in this fight to prevent the adoption of the cloture rule.”

A
LL THROUGH 1949
, the fight went on. Victory did not lessen Russell’s vigilance; look what had happened at Antietam! And in June, the need for vigilance
was demonstrated. Another anti-lynching bill, Russell noticed, had been quietly slipped onto the Senate Calendar. The general decided to post sentries.

“In view of our experience in the past when one of these bills was almost passed by unanimous consent due to the absence from the floor of all Senators opposing it… one Senator from the South” must be “responsible for watching the floor each day to see that no legislative trickery is employed to secure the passage of any of these bills,” Russell wrote to the members of the Southern Caucus. The schedule for this “guard duty,” Russell said, would be drawn up by his aide William Darden. Johnson was one of those sentries. “Relative to my ‘guard duty,’ I will do my best when Mr. Darden notifies me,” Johnson replied. And even on the most controversial measures, Johnson’s vote was a vote of which Russell could be confident. In May, for example, he voted for the passage of an amendment, proposed by Bilbo’s successor, James Eastland of Mississippi, to the District of Columbia Home Rule Bill. The amendment would have made segregation by race mandatory in public accommodations in the nation’s capital.

And, of course, during all these months, not only while the Senate was in session but in the evenings and on weekends, Richard Russell was spending a lot of time alone with Lyndon Johnson. We do not know what these two men talked about, but we do know that Russell, a notably sharp-eyed observer of his colleagues—and a man who on racial matters was the most suspicious of men—had no suspicions at all about Lyndon Johnson. He had not the slightest doubt about Johnson’s feelings about civil rights, about his loyalty to the Cause. “This great movement to [restrict] cloture—Johnson stood right with us on that,” Russell was to say. “Our political philosophy was very closely parallel.”

All that year, moreover, there were the baseball games, the dinners and Sunday brunches at the Johnson home, the outings to the Civil War battlefields. All that year, the two men were working together on Armed Services Committee matters. And when Johnson had a problem in some other area of Senate business, he would ask Russell’s advice. “In a way without boasting because he was a new senator then and I had been there for years, he kind of put himself under my tutelage, or he associated himself with me you might say—that sounds better, I hope you can use that,” Russell would tell an interviewer.

Johnson’s attentions to him, his courtship, flattered and pleased Russell not only emotionally, of course, but, more importantly, in an intellectual, dispassionate way. Russell, after all, had himself zeroed in on power in the Senate from the moment of his arrival there, and was, in his coolly rational way, very aware of his own position in the Senate. He understood Johnson’s tactics and appreciated them. “Senator Russell was extremely favorably impressed by how he just got started on the right foot and seemed to know where the sources of power were, and how to proceed,” Darden would say.

Russell was also impressed by other qualities that Johnson possessed: his diligence, for one. Russell had little patience with colleagues not familiar with
all the facts regarding a piece of legislation. Men had said of Richard Russell that he read the
Congressional Record
every day; now men were saying that about Lyndon Johnson. No one could fool a senator who worked as hard as did Russell about how hard another senator was working, and he saw that now, at last, there was another senator who worked as hard as he. He was impressed—this general who worried that he was letting down his Cause by not being sufficiently in tune with the modern age—by “how well-organized his [Johnson’s] office was”; he was impressed by Johnson’s energy and drive, by how he got things done.

Lyndon Johnson, Richard Russell was to say, “was a can-do young man.” He had played tutor or patron to other young senators, he was to say; Johnson “made more out of my efforts to help him than anyone else ever had.” The master legislator, the matchless parliamentarian, knew that there was another master in the Senate now.

W
HEN
L
YNDON
J
OHNSON
called Lady Bird to tell her he would be bringing Dick Russell home for dinner in a few minutes, she always had something ready for them to eat. She had something ready every evening, no matter how late the hour, for she never knew when Lyndon would call to say, “I’ll be home in twenty minutes. We’ve got four guests for dinner,” and when he got home, he didn’t want to be kept waiting. As he walked through the door, he would say without preamble, “We’re hungry, Bird. Let’s get dinner on the table.” He had been doing this for years, often calling just as he was leaving his office, four guests—or six or eight—in tow.

Having something ready was easier now, for with the money rolling in from the Austin radio station they had bought in 1943, they had hired a cook, a young African-American woman from Texas, Zephyr Wright. But Johnson had begun bringing guests home before 1943—before they had even owned a house, in fact: while they were still living, without any domestic help, in an apartment on Connecticut Avenue—and Lady Bird had always had something ready then, too, along with her warm, welcoming smile. And often her husband didn’t want a simple dinner. “I’m bringing four guests home tonight,” he would say. “Let’s have something special.” And if he didn’t consider it special enough, his temper would boil over. One year, he had announced in advance that he would be bringing Sam Rayburn home on the Speaker’s birthday. “The dinner was turkey hash,” recalls the journalist Margaret Mayer, who was temporarily working for Johnson and living at Thirtieth Place at the time, “and Lyndon flew into a rage—a
rage!
‘What do you mean serving turkey hash for Mr. Sam’s birthday?’” (Mr. Sam said, “‘If I had my choice of anything I could have, there is nothing I’d rather have for my birthday than Zephyr’s turkey hash,’” Ms. Mayer recalls. “That stopped
that
explosion.”) And there were the meals with staff members—his own staff, or lower-ranking officials in government agencies whom Johnson needed for something at the moment; “Lady Bird makes me feel as important as Chief Justice [Frederick] Vinson when she
introduces me to him,” one lower-level bureaucrat commented. On Sundays, of course, Russell would come for brunch, and Rayburn for dinner—along with the group of Rayburn’s friends—and if the men stayed up in the study after Drew Pearson’s broadcast talking politics into the evening, Lyndon would come to the top of the stairs and shout down, “Bring us up some sandwiches, Bird.” (“By God, he’s gonna kill her!” Rayburn once muttered to his nephew Robert Bartley but, holding the husband-wife bond sacrosanct, he almost never interfered between the Johnsons.)

The relationship of Lady Bird (that nickname had been given Claudia Alta Taylor at the age of two by a black nurse because “She’s purty as a lady bird”) and her husband was, in 1949, the same as it had been since their marriage in 1934—although there were reasons why it might have changed. Readers of the earlier volumes of this work will perhaps remember her painful shyness and loneliness as a young girl. (Her mother had died when she was five; her father, a tall, coarse, ham-handed cotton gin owner, the richest man in his East Texas town, had little interest in his daughter.
*
) In high school, she was to remember, “I hoped no one would speak to me”; she dreaded so deeply the prospect of standing up in front of an audience that she prayed she would finish no higher than third in her graduating class since the first two students had to give speeches—she prayed that if she did finish first or second, she would get smallpox so that she wouldn’t have to speak. (She finished third.) At college, she was a lonely young woman—plain and almost dowdy in dress—who, a friend says, was “so quiet she never seemed to speak at all,” and as the wife of Congressman Lyndon Johnson her shyness had kept her from giving even the brief talks expected from a congressman’s wife; at the mere suggestion that she give one, friends recall, there was real panic in her face; when she could not avoid standing in a receiving line, her friends winced at the effort it cost her to shake hands with strangers, so rigid was the bright smile she kept on her face. She played almost no part in her husband’s political life; he didn’t even tell her he was going to ran for the Senate in 1941 until after he had announced the fact to the rest of the world in a press conference. And readers may remember the contempt, indeed cruelty, with which her husband treated her, humiliating her in public, this woman who had an almost visible terror of having attention called to herself—how at parties he shouted at her across crowded rooms (“Bird, go get me another piece of pie.” “I will, in just a minute, Lyndon.”
“Get me another piece of pie!”)
, how he publicly mocked her appearance, often comparing her to her friend, John Connally’s beautiful wife Nellie (“That’s a pretty dress, Nellie. Why can’t you ever wear a dress like that, Bird?” “You look so muley, Bird. Why
can’t you look more like Nellie?” “Get out of those funny-looking shoes, Bird. Why can’t you wear pretty shoes like Nellie?”).

And for years there had been that extramarital affair that was so special in Lyndon Johnson’s life. The fact that Alice Glass was the lover (and later the wife) of a man as important to Johnson’s career as Charles Marsh was one reason that the few men and women aware of the affair between Lyndon and Alice felt, as did John Connally, that it was “unlike any other” in which he engaged. They agree that it juts out of the landscape of his life as one of the few episodes that ran counter to his personal ambition. “Knowing Lyndon, I could hardly believe he was taking a chance like that,” says Harold H. Young, a member of the Longlea “circle,” who was later to marry Alice’s sister, Mary Louise Glass. “It just didn’t fit in with the Lyndon Johnson I knew.” And then there was the fact that, as John Connally was to recall, “He guarded the secrecy of that relationship. He never talked about her, never revealed his feelings—that alone set it apart. It was the most intense and longest-lasting of any affair he engaged in.” Noticing that Lyndon came to Longlea weekend after weekend, sometimes with Lady Bird and sometimes with Lady Bird remaining in Washington, and seeing the young congressman, normally so restless, sitting quietly staring at Alice as she read poetry, the members of the Longlea circle speculated that Alice’s feelings were reciprocated and that she had reason for her belief that Lyndon would divorce Lady Bird and marry her.

In 1941, the alacrity with which Johnson jumped into the Senate race made Alice feel that her lover’s political ambitions would always be put ahead of his feelings. In 1942, Johnson, a lieutenant commander in the Naval Reserve, went to the West Coast, leaving with his staff and constituents—and with Alice—the impression that he was en route to active service in a Pacific combat zone. He invited Alice out for a visit, however, and she realized that in fact combat service was not in his plans. In a letter years later, she told a friend, “I can write a very illuminating chapter on his military career in Los Angeles, with photographs, letters from voice teachers, and photographers who tried to teach him which was the best side of his face.” An idealist who had believed that Johnson was an idealist (“She thought he was a young man who was going to save the world,” her sister says), Alice “was disgusted, just disgusted with him after that trip.” The intense, “sexual side” of their relationship ended, Mary Louise says, although all during the 1950s he would from time to time make the hour-and-a-half drive to Longlea. And it was in 1945, of course, that Lyndon met Helen Douglas. Lady Bird was, in the opinion of the Longlea circle, a drab little woman whom no one listened to.

Readers may also recall, however, that throughout Lady Bird Johnson’s life, there had been hints of something more—of ambition, of determination, and of dignity: when her husband would bellow orders at her across a room or insult her, she would say simply, “Yes, Lyndon,” or, “I’ll be glad to, Lyndon,” and would carry out his request as calmly as if it had been polite and reasonable,
doing so with a poise that was rather remarkable in the circumstances. And there were hints of courage as well: suddenly thrust into her husband’s political world when, after Pearl Harbor, he went into the service and she was forced, on one day’s notice, to take over his congressional office, she not only did so, but did so very well, nerving herself to deal with constituents and Cabinet officers, pestering them when necessary (“The squeaking wheel gets the grease, I learned”) to get things done for the district that Lyndon would have gotten done. Sometimes when Lady Bird had to call someone like “that formidable man, Mr. Ickes,” Mary Rather, glancing into Lyndon’s office, would see her staring at the telephone on Lyndon’s desk, “looking as if she would rather have done anything in the world than pick up that phone and dial,” but she always picked it up and did what had to be done, and did it with an unexpected graciousness and poise—and efficiency—that led constituents to joke that maybe she should be the congressman, and that led Nellie Connally to say, “She changed, but I think it was always there. I just don’t think it was allowed out.”