The Passage of Power (36 page)

As for the possibility of a President making a more informal delegation of powers to a Vice President, that possibility was hazy. Nothing specific stood in the way of his being given major responsibilities within the executive branch—should the President wish to do so. But there was a practical consideration that might make him reluctant to do so. Under the Constitution, the Vice President is not a subordinate of the President; the document mentions only one method of removing
a vice president from office—through impeachment by Congress; it confers on a President no power to remove him (as he could remove a Cabinet officer, for example) should he use the delegated powers to initiate policies that conflicted with a President’s wishes, or to defy a President. For a President to confer power on someone whom he can fire is one thing; conferring power on someone he can’t fire is a risk, and a big one. At the beginning of 1961, the Vice President had only one position to which he was entitled by law—membership in the
National Security Council, a body that had been created not to make decisions but to advise a President. Kennedy had proposed that another law be passed that would make Lyndon Johnson not merely a member but chairman of the
National Aeronautics and Space Council, but this, too, was an advisory, not a decision-making, body. Kennedy also told Johnson that he wanted him to succeed his predecessor Vice President, Nixon, in another virtually powerless role: the chairmanship of a committee monitoring racial discrimination in government contracts. When Johnson analyzed the three positions he would be holding, “he discovered something very quickly,” George Reedy says—that they carried with them only “a derivative power of the President.… He discovered that none of the power was his … that any power that a vice president has is just power which has been given him by a president and can be taken back.” When, shortly after his inauguration, Johnson asked Deputy Attorney General Nicholas de Belleville Katzenbach for a study of other possible duties in the executive branch, he would be told that “the nature and number of” those duties “are, as a practical matter, within the discretion of the President.” In later decades, the role of the Vice President would be gradually and substantially enlarged—at the discretion of the President—but at the time of the 1960 election, that was where the office stood. No legislative powers, no executive powers, and obstacles, hitherto insurmountable obstacles, to obtaining any—except what the President might choose to give him.

But “power is where power goes.” Hardly had he been elected to the vice presidency than Lyndon Johnson launched a campaign, unprecedented in American history on several levels, that, had it succeeded, would not only have dramatically transformed the nature of the office—but would also, in the process, have undermined the concept of the separation of executive and legislative powers embedded in the Constitution.

T
HE
L
YNDON
J
OHNSON WHO
was maneuvering for power now, however, wasn’t the Lyndon Johnson who throughout most of his career had calculated so thoughtfully, made his moves so subtly, demonstrated always so deft a hand, when he was seeking power. He was the Lyndon Johnson of the last year or two, when, with the great prize so close at last, the fear of failure so great, he had made, over and over again, the stops and starts, the frantic flurries of desperation—when he would listen to nothing he didn’t want to hear, when “you couldn’t reason with him.”

The campaign had two fronts, a mile and a half apart on Pennsylvania Avenue.

One was on Capitol Hill. The formal conference, or “caucus,” of the Senate’s Democratic members had traditionally been presided over by the senator who had been elected their Leader: Johnson, of course, had been the conference chairman for the past eight years. Now Johnson asked the senator who was to succeed him as Majority Leader—his Assistant Leader, Mike Mansfield—to allow him to continue as conference chairman. He assured Mansfield that the chairmanship would be merely a symbolic honor in recognition of his past services, a
pro forma
position, as Mansfield was to put it; Johnson may have said—he was to use this argument later—that since the Constitution already gave the Vice President the duty of presiding over the Senate as a whole, presiding over a party caucus was only another, similar function.

Persuading Mansfield was not difficult. The Montanan was a quiet, accommodating, philosophical man who, as one account noted,
“owed
his prominence in the Senate solely to Johnson’s selection of him as his Assistant Leader,” and who in that job had had, as he himself said,
“no
work to do: he [Johnson] kept control even when he went to Texas” through “his conduit,
Bobby Baker.” Taking Johnson at his word—
“In
my view,” Mansfield was to say, “this would constitute (only) an honorary position, and I had no objection”—he agreed.

This, in itself, would have been a revolutionary step. As Evans and Novak were to say, Mansfield was agreeing to do
“what
no other Senate had ever done: breach the constitutional separation of powers by making the Vice President the presiding officer of all the Senate Democrats whenever they met in formal conference.” But Johnson was not in fact intending the chairmanship to be
pro forma
at all—as became clearer when he also persuaded Mansfield to let him retain what was to Washington the symbol of his senatorial power: his awesome
“Taj
Mahal” office. Although this office, convenient to the Senate Chamber, had been the Majority Leader’s office, Mansfield agreed to let Johnson keep using it, saying he himself would be more comfortable operating from a less pretentious suite. Then it was announced that the conduit through which the power flowed would remain in place as well; Bobby Baker would stay on as secretary for the majority.
“I
think that Mansfield inherited Baker passively,” Larry O’Brien says. “Baker had the job, and he wouldn’t throw him out any more than he would demand the Majority Leader’s office and that the Vice President remove himself from it.”

But Johnson also had to persuade senators far less malleable than Mansfield—and that proved a very different story.

Sometime in December, with Mansfield’s agreement secured, Johnson invited four longtime senatorial allies—Robert Kerr, Hubert Humphrey,
George Smathers and Richard Russell—to a meeting not in the Capitol but in a private dining room at the Sheraton-Carlton Hotel,
“probably
hoping,” as Humphrey puts it, “to keep it a secret,” and told them of his plan to retain the caucus chairmanship.

It was obvious to the four senators that Johnson’s plans for the post included more than merely presiding over the caucus.
“He
had often controlled, constantly influenced the course of legislation” from that “powerful position” for eight years, Humphrey was to say, and now he was planning to continue doing so, to use the chairmanship, in Humphrey’s words, “to hang on to [the power] he had wielded as Majority Leader” as a “
de facto
Majority Leader”; Johnson
“had
the illusions that he could be in a sense, as Vice President, the Majority Leader.”

His proposal violated what was to these senators one of the Senate’s most sacred precepts—its independence of the executive branch; he was proposing that a member of that branch preside over their meetings. Misgivings were voiced, but, as Humphrey puts it,
“Johnson
was not an easy man to tell you can’t do something,” and he evidently felt he had persuaded his old allies. Summoned to the Taj Mahal, Baker found
“a
buoyancy about him that lately had been missing.” “Bobby,” he said, “I’ve been thinking about where I can do Jack Kennedy the most good. And it’s right here on this Hill. All those Bostons and Harvards don’t know any more about Capitol Hill than an old maid does about fucking. I’m gonna keep this office, and help Mike Mansfield and Bob Kerr and Hubert Humphrey pass the Kennedy program. It’s gonna be just the way it was! You can keep on helping me like you’ve always done.… Bobby, I’m working it out.”

And, in fact, had Johnson’s plan succeeded, in many ways it would indeed have been “just the way it was.” In several conversations during this period, he also mentioned, seemingly casually, that he
planned to “sit
in” on meetings of the Democratic Policy and Steering Committees. These committees—the first, known for years as “Johnson’s rubber stamp,” exercised considerable control over the fate of legislation Democratic senators wanted passed; the second had absolute control over the committee assignments crucial to senators’ careers—had been keys to his domination of his party’s senators; most of their members had been his allies, long accustomed to accede to his wishes; that was why they were on the committees. He had always been able to count on them to do his bidding and evidently felt they would continue to do so. Had his plan succeeded, although he would no longer be Majority Leader in name, both of these key instruments through which he had controlled the Senate would still be in his hands, not in those of the “amenable” Mansfield.
“He
was going to be vice president
and
Majority Leader,” Ken O’Donnell says. And if he was—if the Vice President was also the leader of the Senate majority—the Vice President would possess a source of power totally outside the executive branch, power separate from, and independent of, the President. Kennedy would not be able to deal with him as if he was merely a subordinate. Johnson had told Baker that he was keeping the caucus leadership to “help Jack Kennedy’s program.” But what if he opposed some aspect of that program, this leader with a firm control of the Senate? His opposition might have behind it an institution that, as he had already demonstrated, could be quite successful in opposing a President.

However, Johnson’s belief that his plan would be accepted was only another example of how his loss of confidence had eroded his gift. Certain though he was
that it would succeed, it never really had much of a chance. When
Baker heard it, he was to recall,
“I
was both astonished and horrified. If anyone knew the United States Senate, its proud members and its proud traditions, it was Lyndon B. Johnson. Surely he knew that the prerogatives of membership were jealously guarded, that no member of the Executive Branch—even a Lyndon Johnson—would be welcomed in.”

Though
“I
saw a disaster in the making,” Baker says, when he attempted to “interpose reservations …, I had a hard time doing so.” Having worked himself up into believing that the plan would succeed, willed himself into the state in which he believed that whatever was in his mind was reality, Johnson just talked over him. “Blinded by his plans, his ego and his past Senate successes,” Baker says, he refused to listen to anything he didn’t want to hear. As had been the case ever since he had accepted the vice presidential nomination, in fact, this “revving up” was at a level of intensity rare even for him. Baker had often seen him in what he calls a “manic mood”; this time, he says, Johnson “seemed excessively manic.”

An aspect of the relationship between Lyndon Johnson and power that had been evident through his life was that the more of it he got, the more intoxicated he became with it. Now he had had a lot of it (“My God—running the world!”), and had had it for a long time: the eight years he had been the Democratic Leader of the Senate, minority and majority. And there was on Capitol Hill an understanding that he had restored the Senate to respect it had not enjoyed for more than a century, that he had transformed the institution from something very near a joke into a force to be reckoned with, and had therefore transformed its members as well, so that being a senator now meant so much more than before. Surely, he felt, these men wouldn’t want to go back to the situation that existed before he became Leader. He had boasted to his aides that he had the Old Bulls who ran the Senate in the palm of his hand, and indeed he did; the feelings of many of them toward him were almost paternal. As long as he had them behind him, the more junior senators didn’t much signify. But, he felt, the juniors, too, must of course be grateful for all he had done for them: changing the seniority system to place them in their freshman year in prestigious committee seats it would previously have taken them years to attain, giving them in other ways, too, opportunities to play a significant role in achieving governmental objectives of which they could be proud.
“They were his children; it was his Senate.”
“I feel sort of
like
a father to these boys,” he had explained to reporters. “A good father uses a gentle but firm rein.” He had been “enveloped” by power (“Good morning, Leader,” “Could I have a minute of your time, Leader?” “Mr. Leader, I never thought you could pull that one off”). Of course, they would be happy to let him keep running it.
“He
thought he
was
the Senate,”
Neil MacNeil says.

Johnson’s reasoning was overlooking two factors. One was personal, and had to do with those young senators he treated like “boys.” As had been the case throughout his life, the more power Johnson acquired, the more cavalier he
became in its use; respectful, even obsequious to men whose backing he needed to get power, as soon as he didn’t need them anymore, he became overbearing, domineering, in his dealings with them. In the Senate, too, that had been the pattern—not with the most powerful of the Old Bulls:
“He
didn’t rant and rave at the Harry Byrds of the world,”
George Smathers would say. “Oh no, he was passive, and so submissive, and so condescending, you couldn’t believe it! I’ve seen him kiss Harry Byrd’s ass until it was disgusting”; with these powerful committee chairmen, he was as fawning as he had ever been—but with the younger senators. Another continuing motif of Lyndon Johnson’s career—one that had been repeated in every institution in which he had climbed to power—was that the more power he acquired, the more he reveled in its use, flaunting it, using it often just for the sake of using it, bending men to his will just to show them he could, as, at college, no student was given one of those desperately needed jobs just because the student needed one, or because the student was a friend, no matter how close a friend, of Lyndon Johnson’s.
“You had to ask.”
And when the power had been solidified—when he was in charge, and confident of staying there—the flaunting was as dramatic as the fawning had been.
“During
his early years as Leader, he put on a humble-pie act that would have done credit to Ella Cinders,” George Reedy was to say.
“This
faded overnight.” With senators other than the Old Bulls, he made it clear that no disobedience to his wishes would be tolerated, that his leadership had to be accepted completely, that as he had told
Estes Kefauver, a senator who wanted to get ahead in the Senate not only had to be on his team but had to “
want
to be on that team.” Senators who accepted the rein received rewards from his hand—prize committee assignments; prize office space; prize junkets; a place for their bills at the head of the Senate calendar. Those who didn’t, he not only ignored but humiliated—in the hundred ways a Leader could humiliate a junior senator. And not all senators, no matter how junior, liked being reined in, liked having to ask for things to which, under Senate rules and traditions, they were entitled, liked having to beg. And those of them who were liberal—and this included not only junior senators but longtime liberal stalwarts like
Herbert Lehman,
Paul Douglas and
Albert Gore of Tennessee—felt, as well, that by allying himself on crucial matters with the southern Bulls, Johnson was the most formidable obstacle to the achievement of liberal objectives. They were already, in Evans and Novak’s description, “brooding that Johnson would try to run the Senate from the Vice President’s chair, with Mansfield, the self-effacing, introspective former professor who was uncomfortable with power, deferring to him,” and they felt their misgivings deepen as news leaked out about his plan. “Having watched him operate for eight years, Democratic senators were fearful of what he might do now if he got a toe in the door. An unspoken sentiment among many senators was the fear that if Johnson became
de facto
chairman of the conference, he would use that position to become
de facto
Majority Leader, with tentacles of power into both the Steering and Policy Committees,” which he, not Mansfield, would still control.