Master of the Senate (70 page)

And the press followed the script he had written, “
GREED FOR MANPOWER CHARGED TO AIR FORCE BY SENATE INQUIRIES
” was the headline in the
Washington Star;
“
LACKLAND MESS LAID TO AF ‘GREED
,’” the headline in the
Washington Times-Herald;
“
SENATORS HIT MANPOWER HOARD BY AF
—Blistering Report Says Policy Brought ‘Total Breakdown in Basic Training,’” the headline in the
Washington Post.
Front-page articles across the country were dominated by the words “blistering,” “sizzling,” “greed,” “irresponsible,” and “total breakdown.” It was not in the headlines or the lead paragraphs but only further down in the articles that the reader would discover statements like: “Reports of epidemics, deaths, bad food, inadequate shelter and clothing … were found to be completely unwarranted.”

Coupled with the report was the promise of another report to come, a report that, Lyndon Johnson said, would be even more significant than this one.
There was, as always, the guarantee that this was only the beginning, that bigger revelations were just around the corner. Shocked by the overcrowding at Lackland, Johnson announced, the Preparedness Subcommittee had already launched investigations of other induction centers. “I want the parents of our young men to know that this committee is at present conducting a first-hand investigation of indoctrination camps for all three of the services all over the nation,” he said. “We want to find out what the services are doing and not doing.”

That report would be issued on April 15. Its conclusion was that “all branches of the armed services … are doing a generally commendable job at the indoctrination and training centers.” But that report, preceded by no leaks or adjectives, received relatively little publicity.

I
F THERE WERE STRIKEOUTS
, however, there were also home runs. With complaints increasing that in the vast buildup of the armed forces, inadequate provision was being made for housing servicemen’s families, so that families that wanted to accompany soldiers to their military bases were being exploited by civilian landlords, in July, 1951, Johnson dispatched three two-man investigating teams to military bases across the country. And, as McGillicuddy was to recall years later, “We hit pay dirt.” In Morganfield, Kentucky, near the Army’s huge Camp Breckenridge, for example, the investigators found that servicemen’s wives and children were forced to live in unsanitary hovels, often without electricity or indoor plumbing, for which they were charged outrageous rents. Some residences had become so notorious among Breckenridge recruits that they had acquired nicknames. There was the “Doll House,” which had once been a playhouse, fourteen feet wide and nine feet deep, built for a civilian family’s children on the back lawn of their home, and which now, divided into four cubicles that the landlord called “rooms,” housed a sergeant, his wife, and three children, who cooked their meals on a two-burner hot plate since there was no room for a stove, and drank water carried by bucket from the landlady’s house. There was the “Chicken Coop,” which “had once been just that, and now housed a family of three. There was the aptly named “Rat House.”

McGillicuddy showed his photographs of these dwellings to Reedy, who said happily, “This will catch them.” And Reedy made sure that the pictures did indeed catch the attention of the press and public, writing that they were evidence of “cruel indignity, irresponsible greed and casual disdain for the self-respect of our men in uniform…. Men who have been called into the service of the country have been forced to house their dependents in places not fit for human habitation.” On the morning of Monday, July 19, the release date on the Twenty-eighth Report of the Preparedness Subcommittee—“Interim Report on Substandard Housing and Rent Gouging of Military Personnel”—those pictures “were on front pages
everywhere
,” McGillicuddy recalls. Legislation to
provide on-base housing for the dependents of military men had already been introduced—by Senator Wherry—and the subcommittee’s findings played a major role in the passage of the Wherry Housing Act. In later years, McGillicuddy would be proud that “when you go to an Army base and see the housing with a nice playground in the middle of it—well, you can thank us for that.”

(At the time, McGillicuddy’s sense of accomplishment was tempered by Lyndon Johnson’s response. The ex-FBI man assumed, as did the five recently hired subcommittee investigators who had also gone on the inspection trips, that their boss would be pleased by the front-page headlines and when, on the morning on which the headlines appeared, the six men were summoned to Johnson’s office, “we were joking, as we walked up the hill from the SEC Building, that we were going to be decorated.” But that was only because they had never dealt much with Johnson. “I ask you to go out and do a simple investigation,” Lyndon Johnson said. “I ask you to go out and get pictures. Half of my team comes back with pictures. Half of my team comes back with
promises!
They’ll get pictures all right.
In ten days! IN TEN DAYS!!!”

Life
magazine, it turned out, was contemplating a major story on the subcommittee report, but it needed additional pictures, some from other bases, and when Johnson had asked Tyler about more pictures, he had been told it might take as long as ten days for the investigators to fly to bases, locate suitably photogenic housing, take the pictures and get them back to Washington. Johnson “was snarling,” McGillicuddy says, “just
snarling.
‘I want you all out of this town by
tonight!!
Take cameras, take film, take whatever you need—but get out of town, and get me the pictures.’ He had been shouting. His voice got low, and he just snarled:
‘By tonight!’
”)

T
HE WORK OF THE
S
ENATE
P
REPAREDNESS
S
UBCOMMITTEE
, and in particular the forty-four formal reports it published before the Republican victory in 1952 removed Lyndon Johnson from its chairmanship, demonstrated another aspect of Johnson’s political ability, one that went beyond the technical—and was revealing of his personality. For each one of the reports was signed not only by him but by every one of the subcommittee’s other six members.

There were the strongest of political reasons for the subcommittee’s chairman to want seven signatures on every report.
Unanimous
was a word that carried a lot of weight with a Senate bitterly divided, even hamstrung, by party divisions, and with journalists, particularly when they were writing about a group whose membership was divided, 4 to 3, along party lines; unanimity would be regarded as proof that the subcommittee’s decisions, being bipartisan, were above politics, that they were based on higher, more objective considerations.

And there were the strongest of personal reasons as well—reasons that
had governed, and would always govern, Lyndon Johnson’s life. Years later, in 1960, when he was running for vice president, his campaign train was backing into the New Orleans train depot. Standing beside him on the train’s rear platform was his fellow senator, George Smathers. Seeing the huge, cheering crowd in which, Smathers recalls, “there had to be at least a thousand signs, ‘Kennedy/Johnson, Kennedy/Johnson.’” Smathers thought “we were doing great”—until Johnson “jumped like he was shot,” whirled on him, and said, “‘Look at that son of a bitch! Look at that sign there!’ There was one [unfavorable] sign! It wasn’t a foot high. There were thousands of signs, and that was the one he picked out. ‘Goddammit it! Look at that sign!’ I thought, this is the damndest fellow I had ever seen in my life, here we had all this, and all he could see was [that one sign]. But that was typical Johnson…. It had to be unanimous as far as he was concerned.”

It had always had to be unanimous—starting, years before, in Johnson City’s Courthouse Square, where a gangling boy barely into his teens would refuse to stop arguing politics with older barbershop hangers-on so long as there remained one man who was not subscribing to his point of view: on that small, bare stage it had been clear that the young Lyndon Johnson was so starved for respect that he needed every last taste of it he could get; that the psyche of this son of ridiculed parents had been rubbed so raw that to him disagreement was also disrespect, so that anything less than total agreement burned like salt in his wounds. “If there was an argument, he
had
to win, just
had to
…. he just wouldn’t stop until you gave in.” And now, watching Lyndon Johnson’s unwillingness to allow even one member of his subcommittee to refuse to sign a majority report, Gerald Siegel realized the depth of the forces behind Lyndon Johnson’s insistence on seven signatures, every time. “Any kind of criticism”—even a single negative vote on a subcommittee report—was unbearable to him, Siegel says. “He really wanted one hundred percent, and anything short of that was a great blow. He was a man who, for some reason, seemed to want unanimity in acceptance of himself.” To Lyndon Johnson, those seven signatures were a sign of approval not merely of the report but of
him
, and not merely of approval of him but of the respect and affection for which he hungered.

Unanimity was easier to obtain on this subcommittee than it might have been on some others, for the reports’ subjects were in general such easy targets as “waste” and “mismanagement” and “gouging,” and they were being issued against a national backdrop of frustration and anger over what the public was convinced was the nation’s lack of proper readiness. Landlords exploiting servicemen were fair game for Democrats and Republicans alike. Nonetheless, the subcommittee included both the staunchly liberal Hunt and the rabidly conservative Bridges—and Morse, who was known to disagree for the sake of disagreeing, and for the publicity involved. It would be, a journalist would write, “a real challenge for any chairman to bring such a group to consensus.” But
Lyndon Johnson had to have unanimity,
had to.
And to get it, this reader of men read his six members, and read them well, particularly their weaknesses, and used what he read.

With Kefauver and Hunt preoccupied with their own subcommittees, Johnson could concentrate on his remaining Democrat, Virgil Chapman, whose weakness for alcohol made him particularly vulnerable.

“Drinking makes you lose control,” Johnson told Bobby Baker, and control was something he never wanted to lose. In 1950 and ’51, he made a show of being a heavy drinker, in the accepted, senatorial, one-of-the-boys, manner, and indeed he was—sometimes. But usually he wasn’t. “Drinking makes you let your guard down,” he would say, and he didn’t want his guard down, ever. When, therefore, he was drinking along with another man, he had as many drinks as the other man—but his were weaker. In his own office, the instructions were strict: the other man’s drinks were to be made regular strength—two or three one-ounce jiggers of whiskey per drink—but, unknown to the other man, Johnson’s own drinks, Cutty Sark Scotch and soda, were not. Says his secretary Ashton Gonella, who mixed them for years: “His drinks could have no more than an ounce of liquor in it, and if there was more than an ounce, you were in trouble.” In public, at the cocktail receptions that were so much a part of Washington life, he would dispatch Bobby Baker, whom he had begun to bring along to receptions, to fetch him a drink, and would order him to “make it weak.” If the bartender mixed it too strong, he would grow so angry—“You trying to make an ass of me?” he snarled at the young page once; on another occasion, Baker recalls, “the Senator thundered: ‘Bobby, you tryin’ to sandbag me so I’ll make a fool of myself?’”—that Baker took to tasting each drink himself before bringing it over to Johnson.

When Johnson discussed subcommittee business with Chapman, the discussions would be held in the late afternoon or evening, in 231’s inner office, over drinks. Feet up on his desk, his body extended so fully in his chair that it seemed almost parallel with the carpet, the host was seemingly totally relaxed as he drank along with his guest, holding out a long arm to a secretary whenever his glass was empty and rattling the ice cubes for refills—frequent refills. But while the host didn’t get drunk, the guest did, and, a happy, friendly drunk, the chubby Kentuckian was soon agreeing to whatever Johnson wanted. Sometimes—not often—at the next formal subcommittee meeting, Chapman might raise a question about some part of a subcommittee report, only to be told that he had agreed to it the previous afternoon—a statement which never failed to end his objections. Chapman’s alcoholism was rapidly growing worse. His round face with its heavy double chin seemed almost invariably flushed with drink now, and, more and more often, when he waddled through the tall door of the subcommittee’s meeting room, he would be too inebriated to follow the proceedings, and would ask Busby to sit behind him and signal him when his vote was needed, by touching him on the right shoulder for an “aye” vote,
on the left shoulder for a “nay.” Busby did so—always on the right shoulder; nay votes were not wanted. “I’d tap him on the shoulder; he’d jerk awake, and in this big voice boom out, ‘Vote “AAAH!”’”

Republican Saltonstall, the epitome of the dignified New Englander, had both a manner that Johnson wanted to emulate, and weaknesses that Johnson could exploit. He had learned, as he told his assistants, that the lantern-jawed Boston Brahmin, “as trustworthy and straight as he looked,” had a total lack of understanding of the more sordid aspects of politics, and of life in general (“Why, you could be screwing every secretary in his office and he wouldn’t have any idea that anything was going on,” Johnson told Booth Mooney), as well as a patrician aversion to disputes or controversy that made him “shrink from quarreling.” When Saltonstall disagreed with some aspect of a subcommittee report, Johnson would call on him and discuss it. The situation was so complicated, Johnson would say; solving it was so difficult; he had tried to accommodate all the different sides; wouldn’t Saltonstall help him on this? I’d really appreciate it if you could see your way clear to helping me on this, he would say. I sure need your help. Putting the issue on such a personal basis made continued refusal to help almost a personal matter, the kind that might lead to a quarrel. Lyndon Johnson never became strident with Saltonstall; his argument would be made in a calm, courteous voice, and would be interspersed with jokes and anecdotes to prove his point. But the arguing wouldn’t stop. Johnson had correctly deconstructed the Saltonstall text: if he didn’t stop, eventually Saltonstall, to avoid what might escalate into a serious disagreement, would give in.