Master of the Senate (99 page)

After Murray was nominated, McFarland called for the vote. Humphrey was to recall that “Senator Murray had his own vote and mine, plus three or four others,” and those, despite the list in Humphrey’s pocket and the promises he had received, were all he had. (He did not have Hunt’s.) “You’ll find out,” Johnson had warned Humphrey—and now Humphrey had found out. “I’ll never forget it,” he was to say. “He was just as right as day. They voted for Johnson.” He quickly moved that Johnson’s election be made unanimous without a formal vote, and it was.

Humphrey was to explain later that he had made that motion because “Number One, I didn’t want to have Murray embarrassed … by getting only a handful of votes from his colleagues…. For an old gentleman who had been there all those years, that didn’t look good at all.” But that was only Number One. Humphrey had learned a lot about Lyndon Johnson (although, as would in later years become apparent, not nearly enough). He had seen that Johnson was not a man to forgive and forget, to let bygones be bygones, to tolerate opposition. He had seen in Johnson a determination to make opponents pay for their opposition, and pay dearly. And that last, “stern,” interview—in that new, “take-charge,” tone—had reinforced that insight; he had seen a side of Lyndon Johnson he had not seen previously, and an element of fear, of intimidation, had been added to their relationship, as is revealed by the rest of Humphrey’s explanation for wanting to dispense with a formal vote: “Number Two, I knew that Johnson would keep book. I mean, when that roll call came he’d watch to see who each one of them was.” Whatever the explanation for Humphrey’s motion, however, it gave Johnson not merely unity but unanimity.

After the caucus, Johnson summoned Humphrey to 231, and told him to come alone: “Don’t come down here with any committees.”

When Humphrey came—alone—Johnson asked him: “Now, what do you liberals really want?” Humphrey was to recall that “The dialogue was brief and to the point. ‘The first thing we want is some representation on the Policy Committee.’

“‘All right, you’ll have it. Who did you want?’

“‘Well, I think it ought to be Jim Murray.’

“‘I don’t think he’s the right man, because he’s older and he won’t be effective, but if that’s who you want, that’ll be done. What else do you want?’

“I listed our other requests [formerly demands]” for liberal representation on a number of committees, Humphrey was to recall, and Johnson agreed to them. And then Johnson said, “Since you had enough sense not to drive it to a vote down there and made it unanimous, I am perfectly willing to deal with you.” But, the new Leader said, “I don’t want you bringing in a lot of these
other fellows. When you’ve got something that your people want,
you
come see me. I’ll talk to you. I don’t want to talk to these other fellows. Now you go back and tell your liberal friends that you’re the one to talk to me and that if they’ll talk through you as their leader we can get some things done.”

What Johnson was offering Humphrey now was power—the first power Humphrey had had in the Senate. Those “other fellows” would be told that if they wanted something from their party’s Leader (and of course they would all, at one time or another, want something from the Leader), they would have to ask Humphrey to approach him on their behalf.

Humphrey understood the offer, and its significance for him. “I would be the bridge from Johnson to my liberal colleagues.” He would hold the power only at Johnson’s pleasure. “I had become his conduit and their spokesman not by their election, but by his appointment.” As long as he and Johnson got along—but only as long as he and Johnson got along—he would keep that power.

And he accepted the offer. He was to say in his autobiography that he accepted it in the interests of getting things done. “I knew clearly by then that I had no chance of influencing legislation in any major way without the help of the … Leader. With his influence, I might get the necessary votes for legislation I was interested in.” But, as time would make clear, he had accepted it also in his own interest. For whatever reason, the offer was accepted, and in accepting it, Humphrey was in effect pledging his allegiance to Lyndon Johnson.

The significance of this pledge for Johnson’s prospects as Leader can hardly be exaggerated. He had needed to unify his party, which meant bringing the liberals to his side. Now he had succeeded in bringing the liberals’ leader to his side, in binding him there quite firmly.

I
N
J
ANUARY, 1953
, Lyndon Johnson was forty-four years old, and he was therefore not only the youngest senator in history to be elected either Majority or Minority Leader, but the youngest by quite a margin. Neither party had ever before elected a Leader who was in his forties; the average age of the seven previous Democratic Leaders at the time of their election was fifty-eight; the average age of the six Republicans who had been elected before 1953 was sixty-two.
*
In addition, Johnson had been elected Leader while still in his first term; in an institution in which seniority was considered so vital, only once previously had a first-term senator been elected Leader, and that was the first Leader, John Worth Kern (who had been elected at the age of sixty-three).
When he had been young, Lyndon Johnson had come along his path so fast, and then, for seven years, he had stopped. Now he was coming fast again.

On the day they had been sworn in, several members of the Class of ’48 had seemed far more likely than he to advance within the Senate. But Douglas and Humphrey had chosen the public route, becoming spokesmen for liberal causes, using the Senate floor as a national forum, as a pulpit for ringing speeches. Kefauver had chosen as his arena not the Senate floor but the television screen.

Lyndon Johnson had, in his defense preparedness work, sought national recognition as avidly as they, as avidly as any senator, but by a very different route: a route to publicity that was, up to the final moment of the press release or the leak about the press release, remarkably unpublic—the preparation, behind tightly closed doors, of subcommittee reports. And publicity had not in fact been a major factor in his advancement within the Senate. If the Douglases and Humphreys had chosen the outside route, he had chosen the inside route: the Senate route. And the key to his advancement had fit the pattern of his entire life: as he had done at San Marcos and in the House of Representatives, he had identified the one man who had the power that could best help him, had courted that man, had won his support, and through that support, had been given the opportunity to attain the position he sought. But if that was how he had been given the opportunity in the Senate, he had made the most of the opportunity, by following not the pattern of his previous life—the pushing, the grabbing—but rather the pattern of the Senate. The work that had been most significant in his Senate advancement had been quiet chats behind closed office doors; he had concentrated not on the podium but on the cloakroom and the Marble Room. It was in these private precincts of the Senate that he spent most of his time and energy.

These places suited him. In a way, Lyndon Johnson had never before been at home anywhere in his life—certainly not in the Hill Country, the trap he had longed to escape; not in the NYA, from which he had wanted to escape back to Washington; not in the House of Representatives, where he had been just one of a crowd. He was at home now. The Senate was his home. He had fit into it. His tone, his mannerisms, had been transformed utterly—transformed into the Senate tone, the Senate mannerisms. He had become the true Senate man.

Now that he had the leadership, there were, also with remarkable speed, hints of new mannerisms. Hubert Humphrey had noticed a new tone: “take-charge, no-nonsense, stern.” Late in the afternoon of the day of the Democratic caucus, Drew Pearson encountered Johnson in a corridor. “He had just been made Democratic floor leader by the Southern reactionaries, and he felt supremely in the saddle,” Pearson wrote in his diary. As Johnson brusquely dismissed a Pearson request, the columnist wrote, he could not help remembering “the days when Lyndon used to call me from Texas saying he had a tight primary fight and asking me” for help. The next day, the Senate convened before
the usual packed galleries of opening day, and reporters in the Press Gallery, looking down at the new Democratic Leader at the front-row center-aisle desk, saw a new Lyndon Johnson. He wasn’t so much sitting in his chair as sprawling in it, sprawling, as Evans and Novak were to write, “almost full length … legs crossed, laughing and joking … the picture of self-satisfaction.”

N
OW THAT
L
YNDON
J
OHNSON
had become the Leader of the Democratic senators, his personal ambitions were bound up with that divided and disorganized band. The bond was unbreakable: for him to use the leadership as a stepping-stone to his real goal, he would have to be an effective Leader—and he could be an effective Leader only to the extent that his Senate Democrats were an effective party.

Johnson’s personal fortunes had been interwoven with institutions before, when he had been leader of the White Stars, or of the Little Congress, or of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Each of these entities had also in its own way been so disorganized and ineffective that in order for him to use them as vehicles for his personal, political advancement, it had been necessary for him not merely to make them more efficient but to change them completely, to transform them into institutions capable of accomplishing a political purpose. Each time, so creative was his political genius that he
had
transformed them. Now, however, the institution to which he was linked was not a college or staff members’ social club or a political fund-raising committee but the Democratic Party in the Senate of the United States; now Lyndon Johnson’s personal fortunes were bound up inextricably with the fortunes of something far larger than anything he had ever led before. This link carried with it, moreover, a threat, one that was terrible to a man who feared humiliation as much as Lyndon Johnson feared it, for every recent Democratic Leader had
been
humiliated, made a figure of public ridicule. And this institution had been insulated against change. Not only did a Senate Leader have little power—“nothing to promise them, nothing to threaten them with”—to cajole or force his party’s senators into line behind him, the Senate’s rules and customs had been designed to prevent him from acquiring any.

The link carried with it another threat to Lyndon Johnson’s greater ambitions. Difficult though the acquisition of power would be for any Senate Leader, it would be especially difficult for him—because of the place from which he had
come, and the place to which he wanted to go, because his true objective lay not in the Senate but beyond it. Power in the Senate was held by the southern senators who were his allies, and who had made him Leader. The natural human reluctance to surrender power would be reinforced in the southerners’ case by their devotion to the institution and the region that were both sacred to them. Since their power was derived from the Senate’s rules and precedents and constitutional prerogatives, bound up in the body’s very fabric, any reduction in their power would entail drastic change in an institution they were determined to keep unchanged. And reinforcing that determination also was the fact that it was their power that made the Senate the South’s stronghold, so that any reduction would also weaken the South. They would never give up their power voluntarily. Nor could they be forced to give it up—it was fortified far too strongly for any Leader to take it away. Lyndon Johnson’s only hope of obtaining the power that the southerners now held was to persuade them to give it to him, and he would be able to do that only if they didn’t realize that they were giving it to him—if he was able to conceal from them the implications of what he was doing.

Difficult though this would be, however, what would be even harder than getting the power would be what he would have to do with it once he got it. Power in the Senate might be in southern hands, but it was northern hands that held the prize at which he was really aiming. He could reach it only with northern support, and to get that support, he would have to make the Democratic Party in the Senate more responsive to northern wishes, would have to advance liberal causes. He would have to use the power that he took from the South on behalf of causes that the South hated.

But if senatorial power was the South’s to give, the South also had the power to take it back. Even if he succeeded in enlarging a Leader’s powers, the South not only would still hold its committee chairmanships but would still command a majority in the Democratic caucus. The South had made a Leader; the South would be able to unmake a Leader. If in furthering the causes of the North, he antagonized the South, the South could, in a very few minutes—in the time it took to take a vote in a caucus—make sure that he had no power to further anybody’s causes, including his own. So he couldn’t antagonize the South. Not only would he have to take power from the southern senators without them realizing what he was taking, he would have to use that power without them realizing how he was using it.

This would be very difficult, for deceiving the southern senators meant deceiving men who were expert parliamentarians, expert legislators, masters of their craft.

Masters. But not geniuses.

I
N FRONT OF THE
C
APITOL
, during the first two weeks of 1953, scores of carpenters were hammering into place the stands for the presidential inaugural.
Pennsylvania Avenue was draped with red, white, and blue bunting, the full panoply that accompanies the transfer of executive power in America.

The hammering couldn’t be heard down Delaware Avenue, where, on the second floor of the Senate Office Building, in Suite 231, the door to Lyndon Johnson’s private office stayed closed, hour after hour, during those two weeks, while, on the four-button telephone on Walter Jenkins’ desk, the left-hand button, the one that was lit when Johnson was using his phone, stayed lit hour after hour. Behind that door, Lyndon Johnson was attempting a transfer in legislative power, a transfer without precedent in American history; he was taking a gamble that would, if successful, change the nature of power in the Senate, a gamble in which the odds against him were very long—and in which the stakes were so high that, describing the maneuver later, he was to say, “I shoved in my whole stack.”