Master of the Senate (73 page)

More damaging still, the press now began to look beyond the specific report and to examine for the first time the subcommittee’s work as a whole—and the examination yielded decidedly mixed results. As the
Herald Tribune
reported: “People in Washington differ on the merits of Sen. Johnson and his committee. Undoubtedly some of his reports are extremely valuable, and have struck the Administration at vulnerable points. Others, however, while making good headlines, have apparently not stood up to later examination.”

In addition, the subcommittee’s work as a whole amounted in effect to a demand for greatly expanded mobilization, a placing of the nation on an all-out war footing almost as if it were engaged in a global conflict. There began to be, for the first time, an examination of this premise also, and even such a staunch Johnson redoubt as the
Washington Post
editorial page said that “if rearmament is directed at the long pull,” the balance between civilian and military goods “makes sense. It is of course important to correct bottlenecks. But before the country is pressured into what would be tantamount to full mobilization, it needs to assess both the external danger and the probability that despite the bottlenecks it will soon have military equipment running out of its ears.”

The
Post
now assigned one of its most respected reporters, Alfred Friendly, to look thoroughly into the current defense effort, and Friendly’s study, a seven-part series that was perhaps the most searching contemporaneous journalistic examination of the mobilization situation, would find that “with respect to the charge, could we have had more guns if we had less butter?, despite loud and general cries in the affirmative no compelling proof has yet been adduced, Sen. Johnson to the contrary notwithstanding…. It is a fact, and has not been denied, that no military production schedule fell short of
accomplishment because an insufficient allocation, out of the total available supply, was made to the military use.”

The Truman Administration had decided against full immediate mobilization, Friendly wrote, not because of any lack of toughness or of concern about the Russian threat but partly because such a mobilization “cannot be maintained over a long period in the absence of war itself.” Furthermore, Friendly said, immediate massive mobilization would have meant producing weapons that would shortly be outmoded instead of creating new production facilities to produce “a new generation of weapons,” so that, as he summarized, “if war did not come until three or four years later, the nation would be less, rather than better, able to win it.” While Johnson and other critics had conveyed the impression that the Administration had decided not to go all-out in military production, the fact, Friendly said, was that the Administration had decided not “to go all-out in the production of models it believed were rapidly being rendered obsolescent.”

As to Johnson’s specific contention that the United States was losing air supremacy in Korea—that contention, Friendly found, was false. “Although the critics seem to be conveying the impression that it was otherwise, the fact is that we, not the Communists, have the superiority in Korea…. It is our planes, and not the Reds’, which bomb the supply lines. The MiGs do not come over our lines and bomb our troops.” And Friendly’s overall conclusion was harsh. “From the cries of the calamity-howlers it might be concluded that the national defense program has fallen flat on its face and that, as a consequence, the Kremlin is giving us a military trouncing,” Friendly wrote. Of course, the Russian forces greatly exceed our own in terms of men and planes alone. “But it is not true that we are suffering military defeats. Nor is there evidence to suggest that we have been going so slowly and taking it so easy that we are losing our chance to achieve our supreme goal, the prevention of war.”

O
NCE THE PRESS
had taken its first hard look behind the catchphrases, it would never again view Lyndon Johnson’s Defense Preparedness Subcommittee in quite the same way. Coverage of the subcommittee reports that followed the “Guns and Butter” embarrassment was notably less enthusiastic than had previously been the case. So dramatically was the perception of the subcommittee altered that by 1953,
Time’s
James McConaughy would report confidentially to his editors that while he himself considered the criticism unjust, the subcommittee was in fact “often criticized as too publicity seeking.” Another
Time
reporter, Clay Blair, summed up its work as “much ado about nothing.”

Not that there was, after “Guns and Butter,” all that much ado. From the moment the subcommittee received its first widespread criticism, Lyndon Johnson showed little enthusiasm for its work. Its production declined: in 1951, it had issued twenty-six reports; in 1952, it would issue nine, one of
which was merely a summary of the year’s activity. The clearest sign of Johnson’s declining interest was the fact that in May, 1952, he allowed Don Cook to leave for the SEC chairmanship.

If the changed perception had a crippling effect on the subcommittee, however, it had no such effect on Lyndon Johnson’s career.

He had, after all, already gotten out of the subcommittee a great deal of publicity—a favorable national image, even a cover story in a national magazine. He had gotten it because of the rare political gifts he possessed. To obtain the chairmanship, he had not merely grasped the potential in the post and reached for it faster than any other senator, he had maneuvered for it more sure-handedly, had won it against very long odds (what odds longer than a desire by his committee’s chairman, Tydings, to head the subcommittee himself?). Although the success of his maneuvers had been made possible by the backing of a single powerful older man, that fact did not diminish the impressiveness of the speed and the sureness of touch. Once he had the chairmanship, he used it with the matchless talent for the practical aspects of politics he had displayed during his entire life, assembling, seemingly overnight, a staff of a caliber unique on Capitol Hill, and then wielding that staff with brilliant ingenuity, demonstrating an instinct for publicity, and a skill in obtaining it, possessed by very few even in a city filled with men avid for publicity. If—because a police action was not, after all, a war—his image was not as strongly imprinted on the national consciousness as Senator Harry Truman’s had been, it was imprinted there nonetheless. And Truman had been fifty-seven years old when he created his Preparedness Committee. Johnson was forty-two. Twenty years earlier, when, fresh out of college, he had displayed the skills and sureness of a master politician, he had been called “the wonder kid” of Texas politics. No one now called him the wonder kid of the Senate. But that was what he was. In less than a year and half—if one dates the golden era of his Preparedness chairmanship from July, 1950, when he was named to it, to November, 1951, the month of the
Newsweek
cover—he, a senator hitherto all but unknown to the general public, had been on the front pages of newspapers not just in Texas but in every state in the country—over and over again. His life—or, to be more precise, the life he portrayed—had been described at length in
Collier’s
, in the
Saturday Evening Post
, in
Time
, in
Business Week
, and in
Labor.
The man who could not stand—“just could not
stand”
—to be merely “one of a crowd” had been one of a crowd so long. Now he would never be one of a crowd again. He was “Johnson of the Watchdog Committee,” the “Watchdog in Chief.” In a single great leap—with a single issue, preparedness; with a single instrument, a brand-new subcommittee—he had thrust himself up out of the mass of senators.

T
HE SIGNIFICANCE
of the damage to the subcommittee’s image was also diminished by another factor, moreover. Even in the midst of that great leap,
even as Lyndon Johnson had still been directing the subcommittee, issuing the reports, holding the press conferences, his eyes had been focusing on something else.

Lyndon Johnson’s political genius was creative not merely in the lower, technical aspects of politics but on much higher levels. And if there was a single aspect of his creativity that had been, throughout his career, most impressive, it was a capacity to look at an institution that possessed only limited political power—an institution that no one else thought of as having the potential for any more than limited political power—and to see in that institution the potential for substantial political power; to transform that institution so that it possessed such power; and, in the process of transforming it, to reap from the transformation substantial personal power for himself. Lyndon Johnson had done that with the White Stars. He had done it with the Little Congress. He had done it with the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. And now the eyes of Lyndon Johnson were focused on another institution: the Senate of the United States.

L
EADERSHIP POSITIONS
in the Senate were hardly among the prizes of American politics—with good reason.

The Constitution had provided that there be a Speaker for the House of Representatives, and during the century and a half since its ratification, a succession of forceful Speakers had buttressed that office with rules and precedents that made it strong. Over the Senate, however, the Founding Fathers wanted no one to have authority, and the Constitution they wrote therefore provided only that it be presided over by the Vice President (who “shall have no Vote, unless they be equally divided”) or, in his absence, by a president
pro tempore.
And the Senate’s rules limited the powers of the Vice President or any other presiding officer so strictly that they were little more than figureheads. “The Senate shall chuse their other officers,” the Constitution said, but the only officers to be chused were administrative subordinates: a Secretary of the Senate, a Sergeant-at-Arms, a Chaplain. The Senate had certainly chosen no “leaders”; why would the ambassadors of sovereign states want to be
led?
A senator referred to as a “Leader”—Majority Leader or Minority Leader—was therefore leader not of the Senate but only of his party’s senators, elected not by the Senate but by them in a party conference, or “caucus,” to chair the caucuses and “lead” their parties on the Senate floor.

During the first 124 years of the Senate’s existence, there were no “leaders” even in this limited sense. Until 1913, when newspapers mentioned Senate “leaders,” they were referring, as one study states, to “leadership exercised through an individual’s oratorical, intellectual, or political skills, not from any party designation, formal or informal.” The chairmen of Standing Committees “were generally the ones to move that the Senate consider legislation reported by their committees”; the scheduling of legislation was coordinated—when and if it was coordinated—by party “policy committees.” As Woodrow Wilson wrote in his 1885 classic,
Congressional Government
, “no one is
the
Senator. No one may speak for his Party as well as himself; no one exercises …
acknowledged leadership.” When, during the Gilded Age, the GOP instituted tight control of its senators, the control was group control; the Republican Senate bloc was run not by one senator but by the “Senate Four”—and even then only through their domination of the larger party Steering Committee. After the turn of the century, as the ascension of America to world power and of Wilson to America’s presidency necessitated increased coordination of activities within the Senate, party caucuses began to regularly designate caucus chairmen who were sometimes called “leaders,” but there was still no official designation of a floor leader. “No single senator exercised central management of the legislative process,” Walter Oleszek states. “Baronial committee chairmanships” still “provided the chamber’s … internal leadership.” In the opinion of most students of the Senate (so murky is the body’s administrative history that there is little general agreement on the subject), it was not until 1913 that one of the caucus chairmen, Democrat John Worth Kern of Indiana, was generally referred to as a “Majority Leader,” although, as Floyd M. Riddick, the longtime Senate Parliamentarian, puts it, Kern still lacked “any official party designation other than caucus chairman.” (In 1913, also, the Democratic caucus elected an Assistant Leader, called a “whip,” after the “whipper-in” of a British fox hunt who is assigned to keep the hounds from straying, whipping them back into line if necessary.”)
*

Kern and the Majority Leaders who came after him—five Democrats (one of whom, Oscar Underwood of Alabama, became, in 1920, the first officially designated “Democratic Leader,” as well as the first Leader to sit at the front-row center-aisle desk) and four Republicans—had no formal powers. The Senate had given them none. In the forty rules that were designed to govern all its activities there is not a single mention of a Majority or a Minority Leader—of a leader of any type. Riddick’s 1,076-page volume,
Senate Procedure
, published in 1974 to expand and amplify the rules, contains exactly one reference to “leaders”—an explanation that custom had established the practice of “priority of recognition”: if more than one senator was requesting the floor, recognition should be granted first to the Majority Leader, and then to the Minority Leader.

The Democrats had decided to designate a Leader in 1913 primarily because Wilson, and progressive senators, felt that the President’s program would have a better chance of passage if the party’s senators were united under a single senator. Kern acted primarily as Wilson’s agent, following the President’s dictates in scheduling Senate business. Nor was Kern Wilson’s only agent in the Senate; indeed, at times the President seemed to be dealing more with the powerful committee chairmen than with the supposed Leader; and as the President’s power waned, so did Kern’s, since his authority as Leader was
merely a function of presidential backing (Kern was in fact defeated for reelection in 1916 when Wilson failed to carry Indiana). And the same was true of the Majority Leaders who followed Kern, even though the best known of them, Joseph T. Robinson of Arkansas, would be a memorable figure on the Senate floor, pounding his desk and flailing his arms; “he roars his sneers, and shouts … and bellows until” his opponents “are drowned out by the volume of sound and the violence of enunciation,” Alsop and Catledge wrote.