The Passage of Power (19 page)

L
YNDON
J
OHNSON MIGHT HAVE BEEN
able to blunt at least the sharpest edges of the suspicions of blacks and liberals: to emphasize that, however weak the 1957 Civil Rights Act might be, its very passage was an historic achievement, and it was he who had gotten it passed; to explain that voting was indeed the most important right; to sell them on the idea that he had done all that he could, and would eventually, as soon as possible, do more. Men and women who had watched him sell that idea in Washington felt he could have sold it anywhere. But it was a very difficult sale—and no one could make it for him.

The proof of that came in his attempts to let others make it for him—in his decision to stay in Washington instead of traveling to northern states and explaining his civil rights stance in person.

Trying to persuade black political leaders in Detroit to withdraw their opposition to his candidacy, Johnson asked
Hobart Taylor, a young black assistant district attorney in that city whose father was a longtime Johnson ally in Texas, to invite the leaders to meet not with Johnson but with four of his Texas surrogates. The room full of black faces and southern accents must have made an interesting scene. And although young Taylor was a popular figure, and the Texans did their best, they weren’t Lyndon Johnson. After the meeting, one of the leaders told a reporter that they “tried to convince us that Senator Johnson was a friend of the Negro and was trying to help them to the best of his ability. We were told that if we withdrew our opposition as a race, it would help Johnson’s campaign, and would help us.… We were not convinced.” Another said simply, “They are wasting their time.”

And it wasn’t just northern blacks whom Lyndon Johnson was failing to placate on the civil rights issue. He wasn’t doing any better in the North with whites, as
India Edwards was finding out.
“I
talked to the northern delegations, and
that
was some experience,” she was to recall; at a meeting of the
Minnesota delegation,
“They
laughed at me.… When I began telling them that Lyndon Johnson would be a liberal President, well, the delegates just put their heads back and screeched; it was the funniest thing they ever heard.”

After another discussion in Detroit—this one on March 28 in a hotel room—
David S. Broder, a young reporter from the
Washington Evening Star
who had been allowed to attend, on condition that he not identify the participants, felt that he understood the problem: that Johnson hadn’t come to Detroit himself.

The discussion took place after the annual dinner of the
Democratic Midwest Conference, which had been attended by three of the four invited speakers—Kennedy, Humphrey and Symington—but of course not by Johnson. For hours, a Johnson aide tried to persuade two key
Michigan politicians—one a high-level aide to Governor Williams—to support Johnson, with a lack of success so total that, in Broder’s words, the participants “were on the verge of exhaustion and tears.”

“The coolness toward Senator Johnson rests not on what he has done, but on what he has not done,” Broder wrote. “He has not taken the Michigan Democrats into his confidence and made them feel they have a part in his efforts. For all their carping about his compromises, Michigan Democrats—whose own Governor has faced a Republican legislature for 12 years—have an underlying sympathy for the frustrations that beset” a leader facing a Senate with such a powerful conservative wing. “If Senator Johnson had visited the state, they would [have been] reminded of these facts.” Had he done so, and explained the facts to Michigan Democrats (as Broder had watched him do with such success in Washington, to so many groups of varying political sympathies), they would have seen “what larger purpose animates Senator Johnson’s technical maneuvers.” But nothing but such a visit, and such discussions, would help, Broder explained. “So long as he leaves them in ignorance, they find it easy to accept the popular liberal characterization of him as a representative of a Texas dominated by segregationists and oil barons.”

The Johnson aide had given the standard explanation for his absence: that the Majority Leader would have “neglected his duties” had he come to Detroit. That argument might be valid, Broder wrote, “but unless Senator Johnson can find some means of communicating directly with his fellow Democrats in states such as Michigan, it is difficult to see how he can satisfy the ambition no one doubts he harbors.”

B
RODER’S BELIEF IN
Johnson’s ability to win over even blacks suspicious of him if only he communicated with them “directly” was validated during a long plane flight in 1960, for on that flight he communicated with one man quite directly.

The man was
Howard B. Woods, the editor of a black newspaper, the
St. Louis Argus,
and his presence aboard Johnson’s Convair was the outgrowth of a conversation between Johnson and one of his largest campaign contributors,
August Busch, owner of the Anheuser-Busch Company, during a visit to Busch’s country home outside St. Louis. When Johnson began complaining about how blacks didn’t appreciate—or, apparently, even know about—his accomplishments
in civil rights, Busch telephoned
Alfred Fleishman, a St. Louis public relations man, and put Johnson on the line. When Johnson told Fleishman that if he could only dispel the image that he was an anti–civil rights southerner, “lightning might strike” at the convention, Fleishman suggested that he allow himself to be interviewed by Woods, and a week or two later, the short, bespectacled editor found himself on Johnson’s Convair.

Lady Bird and Lucy Baines
¹
were aboard, and his secretary
Mary Margaret Wiley, and several Texans, and Woods was made uneasy at first by what he was to describe as “a cabin filled with yards and yards of honey-coated southern drawl.” But all his misgivings vanished after Johnson came over, and sat down facing him across a narrow table. The Senator, tie-less and in shirtsleeves, was eating cookies and drinking a tall, and stiff, Scotch, but when Woods asked him about the civil rights bill “which seems to please no one,” saying,
“Senator
, the bill, as it was finally passed, was admittedly watered down,” Johnson forgot about the cookies and the Scotch, and leaned forward across the table, looking Woods
“straight
in the eye” in a way the editor found quite memorable.

“When we say every man has a right to vote, that is not watered down,” Lyndon Johnson said. “The important thing in this country is whether or not a man can participate in the management of his government. When this is possible, he can decide that
I’m
no good.”
George Reedy slipped into the seat next to Woods’, but Johnson didn’t need Reedy now. “Civil rights are a matter of human dignity,” he said. “It is outrageous that all people do not have the dignity to which they are entitled. But we can’t legislate human dignity—we can legislate to give a man a vote and a voice in his own government. Then with his vote and his voice he is equipped with a very potent weapon to guarantee his
own
dignity.”

Johnson continued talking for quite some time, Woods was to write, and he “does not exude” at all “the craftiness and cunning attributed to him. Rather, he is homespun, warm”—and utterly convincing. “You ask me if I’m a Southerner or a Westerner,” he said to Woods at one point.
“I
don’t think it makes any difference.” And, he said, it didn’t matter if he was a Protestant or “a Catholic, or a Jew, white or colored. I am an American.”

A man’s religion didn’t matter, shouldn’t matter, Lyndon Johnson said, and neither did the region of the country he came from. “What is the difference if it’s LBP or LBW?”—Lyndon B. Protestant or Lyndon B. Westerner? And a man’s color shouldn’t matter, either, he said, and, extending his huge hand across the table, he took Woods’ hand in his, and stroked it—“vigorously,” in Woods’ terms—as if to rub its color off.

The more trips Lyndon Johnson took into the North, the more black people who actually got to meet him—“the better it will be for him,” Woods wrote.

H
IS REFUSAL TO ADMIT
that he was a candidate was still leading to scenes that would have been funny, except to those who, like
Sam Rayburn, saw him throwing away his great chance at the prize he had worked for so long and so hard. “Horace, what’s wrong with him?” the Speaker asked
Busby once.

One of these scenes took place at a busy Washington intersection. National campaign headquarters were being set up on the entire mezzanine floor of the Ambassador Hotel at the corner of Fourteenth and K Streets. Furniture had been rented, telephone lines were being installed. But the existence of a campaign headquarters was proof that there was a campaign, so even while Johnson was staffing it himself—personally giving out assignments—he wanted its existence kept secret. And then suddenly, there was a story about it in
Sarah McClendon’s column.

“Who told her this!?”
Johnson screamed. At first, recalls
Ashton Gonella, one of his secretaries, he blamed
Bobby Baker. “ ‘Boy, that office better be closed by
tonight
! You’re trying to
ruin
me!’ He pinned him up against a wall.
‘I didn’t give you permission!’
” When Johnson was very upset, he would pace back and forth with lunging, somewhat awkward strides, making gestures with his long arms so frenetic that
Marie Fehmer calls them “flailing,” and he was pacing and flailing now. He ordered Connally to find out where McClendon had gotten her information, and finally ascertained that one of his own lawyers,
Leonard Marks, had let something slip while chatting with her at a cocktail party. And then, five days later, embarrassment escalated. Baker had indeed closed the office, the furniture and telephones had been removed, but someone had forgotten that large signs—one for the K Street side of the Ambassador, one for the Fourteenth Street side, each proclaiming in huge letters,
NATIONAL HEADQUARTERS—LYNDON B. JOHNSON FOR PRESIDENT CITIZENS COMMITTEE
, had been ordered. No one had canceled the order. All at once reporters were calling, and Johnson’s horrified staff learned that the signs were being hoisted into place at that very moment, and that television crews had arrived, along with newspaper photographers. Telephoning the sign company, Jenkins demanded that the signs be taken down immediately, but when workmen started to do so, it turned out that while the company had a permit to erect the signs, a different permit was required to remove them. A patrolman ordered the workmen to stop, and when they tried to go ahead anyway, the patrolman called for backup, and a patrol car arrived. It took two hours for
that
matter to be resolved, and for the signs to come down, and there were photographs in Washington newspapers the next day, and headlines like the one in the
Post:
PREMATURE BOOM A DUD—JOHNSON-FOR-PRESIDENT SIGNS GO UP, THEN DOWN IN TEXAS-SIZED FAUX PAS
.

Then, in March, Israeli Prime Minister
David Ben-Gurion visited the United States. New York attorney
Edwin Weisl, a major financial supporter of both Israel and Johnson, had arranged for the two men to meet in New York. Saying that the meeting would make him look like a candidate, Johnson backed out at the last moment, however, and wouldn’t meet with the prime minister in public
even when Ben-Gurion came to Washington. Johnson was finally taken secretly, without reporters being informed, to talk with Ben-Gurion at
Abe Fortas’ Georgetown home.

Telephoning Jenkins, the economist
Eliot Janeway—a Weisl friend and another longtime Johnson ally in New York—told him that Johnson’s actions made no sense.
“Why
didn’t he publicize it?” he asked. “He is his own principal source of defeat.”

“He makes the stories to flog him with,” Janeway told Jenkins. The nomination wasn’t going to be won “as an inside job.… He better come out and be a candidate.… You ought to call off this cloak and dagger business.… They are all laughing at Johnson.”

And, in fact, they were: journalists, politicians, his own supporters—their puzzlement over his tactics was turning to ridicule. Even Charlie Herring, loyalest of the loyal followers of his standard through so many campaigns, was losing faith.
“We
DO
have a candidate, don’t we?” he asked Jenkins in a call on March 23. “He isn’t going to run out on us, is he?”

“I wear the chain I forged in life,” Marley’s ghost admits to Ebenezer Scrooge. “I made it link by link.” During the early months of 1960, Lyndon Johnson was forging, link by link, his own chain, and it was a heavy one. “Humiliation” had always been what he most feared; during these months, again and again, through his own actions, he was bringing upon himself what he most feared.

H
IS LAST-DITCH ATTEMPT
to reach for the prize was being hamstrung as well by another aspect of his personality. When Lyndon Johnson was fighting hard for something—and he was fighting hard now, even if only behind the scenes (
“It
was like the old days,” Ed Clark says; “I could set my watch by getting a call from him at six o’clock in the morning”)—an aspect of the determination he always displayed during such efforts was conviction, a seemingly total belief in what he was fighting for. He felt that victory
required
belief. As a boy, friends recall,
“he
was always repeating” the salesman’s credo that “You’ve got to believe in what you’re selling”; decades later, in his retirement, he would say:
“What
convinces is conviction. You simply
have
to believe in the argument you are advancing; if you don’t, you’re as good as dead. The other person will sense that something isn’t there.” And Lyndon Johnson could make himself believe in an argument even if that argument did not accord with the facts, even if it was clearly in conflict with reality. He
“would
quickly come to believe what he was saying even if it was clearly not true,” his aide
Joseph Califano would write. “It was not an act,” George Reedy would say.
“He
had a fantastic capacity to persuade himself that the ‘truth’ which was convenient for the present was
the truth
and anything that conflicted with it was the prevarication of enemies. He literally willed what was in his mind to become reality.” He would refuse to hear any facts
which conflicted with that “reality,” to listen to anyone who disagreed with him. His oldest Texas associates, men like Clark, called the process the “revving up” or the “working up,” explaining, “he could start talking about something and convince himself it was right” and true—even if it wasn’t. The argument Johnson was advancing now was that Kennedy, needing to win on the first ballot if he was to win at all, would not be able to win enough primaries or enough delegates to win on that ballot—and he had convinced himself of that so completely that he discounted any suggestion to the contrary.