The Passage of Power (4 page)

This assessment proved accurate. With ninety-six men in that body, there were only a relatively small number of texts to be read, and because of senators’ six-year terms, these texts were not constantly changing, as they were in the House, and therefore could be perused at length—some Senate subcommittees
had only three members, so on these subcommittees it was literally necessary for the great salesman to sell only one man to obtain a majority for his views—and he rose to power in the Senate with unprecedented speed. In a body previously dominated by the strictures of seniority, he became Assistant Leader of his party in 1951, two years after he arrived there; in another two years, still in his first term, he became the party’s Leader; two years later, in 1955, when the Demo-crats became the majority party in the Senate, Lyndon Johnson became the youngest Majority Leader in history, the most powerful man in the Senate after just a single term there.

The youngest—and the greatest. By 1955, in the opinion of its journalistic chroniclers and a growing number of historians and political scientists, the Senate was the joke it had been for decades, only more so—so much an object of contempt that, more and more frequently, a suggestion was being heard that perhaps the institution might be dispensed with entirely: its
“obsolesence
,” said the era’s most authoritative work on Capitol Hill,
George B. Galloway’s
The Legislative Process in Congress,
“may lead the American people in time to recognize that their second chamber is not indispensable.” Revolutionizing the Senate, not only pushing long-stalled social welfare legislation through it but making it, for the first time in over a century, a center of governmental energy and creativity, Lyndon Johnson brought a nineteenth-century—in many ways an eighteenth-century—institution into the twentieth century. The role of Leader—legislative leader—was, furthermore, clearly a role he was born to play. As he stood at the Leader’s commanding front-row center desk in the Senate Chamber directing the Senate’s actions with the surest of hands, as he strode the aisles of the Chamber and Capitol with colleagues addressing him by title—“Good morning, Leader.” “Could I have a minute of your time, Leader?” “Mr. Leader, I never thought you could pull that one off”—he was completely in charge, a man at home in his job. His twelve years in the Senate, his wife, Lady Bird, was to say,
“were
the happiest twelve years of our lives.”

To him, however, the Senate remained only a rung on the ladder—as was demonstrated in 1956, at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. He had stayed out of the primaries and other pre-convention maneuvering because he had concluded he had no chance to win the party’s presidential nomination, but when at the very last moment, on the very eve of the convention, he suddenly came to feel that he
did
have a chance, he grabbed for the prize. Although his effort lasted only two days, the frenzied urgency with which, during these days, he grabbed (“Deep down, he understood the realities,” Jim Rowe recalls, “but he wanted to be President
so much.
” Adds Tommy Corcoran: “On most things, you could talk sense to Lyndon. But there was no talking to him about this”) showed how desperately he wanted it. And when the two days were over, and with another two days still remaining before the actual balloting, it became clear that the ballot would be only a formality and that
Adlai E. Stevenson of Illinois was assured of an overwhelming victory, Johnson, in the past invariably the most
pragmatic of politicians, nevertheless refused to withdraw his name—against all logic, in the face of every pragmatic consideration—his supporters felt they understood the reason. After explaining that Johnson’s actions “made no sense to anyone, myself included,”
John Connally added that in politics “you can always have a dream,” that “you always have hope”—and that Johnson had simply been unable to bring himself to give up his great dream. “He wanted it so much he wasn’t thinking straight,” Corcoran said. Resting up at
Brown & Root’s hunting lodge in Falfurrias, Texas, after the convention, Johnson spent hours talking to
George Brown, who says, “He hadn’t thought he would be so close … and then when all of a sudden, he felt he was close, he got carried away with the thought that he might get it, and he simply couldn’t bear to just admit he didn’t have a chance.” That was the explanation, Tommy Corcoran agrees; Johnson hadn’t withdrawn “Because he couldn’t bear to.” And these men knew he would try again—at the next convention, in 1960. Standing ankle-deep in discarded sandwich wrappers, coffee containers and Johnson placards on the Convention floor after Stevenson had won (he received 905 votes, Johnson 80), Connally shouted defiantly,
“Don’t
you worry, this was just a practice run. We’ll be back four years from now!”

O
NE OBSTACLE MADE CLIMBING TO
the next—the top, the ultimate—rung, reaching the prize of which he had so long dreamed, especially difficult for him. He was from the South, from one of the eleven states that had seceded from the Union and formed the rebel Confederacy, and that, despite America’s Civil War almost a century before, still largely denied basic civil rights to their black citizens—to the indignation and anger of the heavily populated northern states, the states whose convention votes determined the Democratic nominee. With growing black protests focusing attention on southern injustice, northern anger against the South was mounting steadily during the late 1950s. No southerner had been elected President for more than a century,
¹
and it was a bitter article of faith among southern politicians that no southerner would be elected President in any foreseeable future; when members of the House of Representatives gave their Speaker,
Sam Rayburn, ruler of the House for more than two decades, a limousine as a present, attached to the back of the front seat was a plaque that read “To Our Beloved Sam Rayburn—Who Would Have Been President If He Had Come from Any Place but the South.”

During his first twenty years in Congress, through 1956, Lyndon Johnson’s 100 percent southern voting record on civil rights and his work as a southern strategist, a Richard Russell lieutenant, against rights bills—work that had won him the trust and respect of the “Georgia Giant” so completely that Russell
anointed him to one day succeed him, and the Southern Bloc raised him to the Senate leadership—had put what one journalist called “the taint of magnolias” on Lyndon Johnson; in 1956, there had been no realistic possibility that the North would support him for the nomination, or that it would, should he be nominated, vote for him for President. He could never scrub off that taint completely, but during the year following the 1956 disappointment, he managed to remove part of it. Throughout his life, there had been hints that he possessed a true, deep compassion for the downtrodden, and particularly for poor people of color, along with a true, deep desire to raise them up. During his previous career, that compassion, subordinated always to ambition, had revealed itself only in brief flashes, quickly suppressed, but in 1957, compassion and ambition had finally come into alignment, pointing at last in the same direction. His allies in Washington told him bluntly what he already knew: that the crux of the North’s animosity to him was its belief that he was opposed to civil rights, and that the only way to dilute that animosity was to pass a
civil rights bill.
“Consequential
action … is essential for LBJ,” warned a confidential memo he received from his supporter
Philip Graham, publisher of the
Washington Post.
Otherwise, Graham told him, he might wind up his career as only another southern legislative leader, “only to be (another) Dick Russell.” Corcoran, that ultimate Washington insider, was, as always, blunter; he was to recall telling Johnson flatly in 1957 that
“If
he didn’t pass a civil rights bill, he could just forget [the] 1960 [nomination].” And these warnings were being given to a man who didn’t need them.
“If
I failed to produce on this one,” Lyndon Johnson himself said,
“everything
I had built up over the years would be completely undone.” In 1957, he set out to pass a civil rights bill. And when, after months of effort, that attempt seemed to have failed, and he retreated to his ranch, as if to avoid being identified with another civil rights defeat, Rowe pursued him with a memo warning him that he had no choice but to come back and fight: “This is Armageddon for Lyndon Johnson.… I would not like to see the 1960 nomination go down the drain because of … 1957.” It had been upon receipt of that memo at the ranch that Lyndon Johnson had returned to Washington, and, in a monumental feat of legislative maneuvering, of bullying, cajoling, threatening, of lightning tactical decisions on the Senate floor, and of parliamentary genius on a grand scale, including a strategic masterstroke that brought into line behind his efforts, in a single transaction, a dozen western senators, had succeeded in persuading his twenty-one fellow southern senators—the mighty “
Southern Caucus”—to allow the passage of the first civil rights bill since Reconstruction, eighty-two years earlier. It was not a strong bill. By the time Johnson had finished fashioning a compromise that the southerners would accept, provisions that would have enforced school desegregation and banned racial segregation in housing, hotels, restaurants and other public places—provisions liberals considered essential—had been removed; only a single civil right, voting, remained, and the provisions for enforcing that lone right proved largely useless. But the mere fact of the bill’s
passage—that after eighty-two years in which every civil rights bill that reached the Senate had died there, one had finally been passed—was of historic significance.
“It
opened a major branch of American government to a tenth of the population for which all legislative doors had been slammed shut,” Johnson’s longtime press secretary, George Reedy, said. And Johnson argued—in a contention that would be vindicated by history—that although there was only one right remaining in the bill, that was the right that mattered: that it gave blacks the power to at least begin fighting for other rights. Furthermore, he pointed out, once a bill was passed, it could be amended to correct its deficiencies.
“It’s
just a beginning,” he said. “We’ll do it again, in a couple of years.… Don’t worry, it’s only the first.”

Although passage of the 1957 Civil Rights Act did not eliminate the distrust with which liberals viewed him—far from it; his previous record on civil rights was too long, and too southern, for that, the bill he had forced through too weak—his Washington allies felt that the sharpest edges of that distrust had been blunted. As for the southern senators, a key reason they had allowed the measure to pass was their hope that enactment of a bill with which Johnson was identified might, by lessening northern distrust of him, enable the South to get its first President in a century; they were confident that as President, Johnson would keep civil rights reform to a minimum. He had, in years of private conversations, convinced the southerners that in his heart he was on their side.
“We
can never make him President unless the Senate first disposes of civil rights,” Russell had explained to Reedy. So if he ran for the 1960 nomination, expectations were that the eleven southern states would be solidly behind him—a bloc of 352 votes out of the 761 needed for nomination in the Democratic convention. And he had a real chance, political observers said, to go into the convention with a large bloc of votes from the West as well. Now, at last, was the moment Lyndon Johnson had been waiting for all his life. While Adlai Stevenson was still the idol of many Democratic liberals, his two losses in presidential campaigns disqualified him in the eyes of party professionals, and anyway he had said quite definitively that he would not be a candidate. The party’s perennial hopeful,
Estes Kefauver of Tennessee (Adlai’s running mate in 1956), was distrusted by these same professionals because of his stubborn independence. And Kefauver, like the other potential candidates,
John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts, Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota and
Stuart Symington of Missouri, was a senator, and he, Lyndon Johnson, was the Senate’s
Leader, their
leader, the man they had to come to—and
had
been coming to, for years—for every large and small favor in the Senate pantry. As Lyndon Johnson surveyed the field in early 1958, none of these men seemed a particularly formidable opponent.

If he won the nomination, furthermore, he would not have to face Eisenhower, since the beloved President would have served the two terms the Constitution allowed. Neither of the two potential Republican nominees—William Knowland of California and Eisenhower’s Vice President,
Richard M. Nixon—
would be nearly as formidable. Lyndon Johnson had positioned himself as well as was possible for a southern candidate. Now was the moment to strike.

B
UT HE DIDN’T
.

Sometime in 1958—no one involved knows the exact date—he summoned to his LBJ Ranch six or seven men who were veterans of previous campaigns, greeted them on the front lawn that sloped down from the house to the little Pedernales River, asked them to pull the lawn chairs into a semicircle around him, and told them he had called them together to discuss his upcoming campaign for the presidency. “He was convinced that he was the best man to be President,” recalls one of the group, Texas State Senator
Charles Herring, and “he was convinced that he could be nominated and win if we’d work hard enough.” “I’m going to be President,” he told them. That was his destiny. “I was
meant
to be President.”

Having worked for Johnson in earlier campaigns—Herring, for example, had been a part of the first Lyndon Johnson campaign, two decades before, when he ran for Congress in 1937, and of every campaign since (the other five congressional races, and three races for the Senate: the losing campaign in 1941, the legendary eighty-seven-vote victory
of 1948 and the walkaway
of 1954);
Joe Kilgore, now a congressman, had worked the Rio Grande Valley for Johnson in ’41 and carried it with him in ’48 and ’54—the men in that group had heard similar speeches at the start of campaigns, of so many campaigns, in fact, that among themselves they had given the speech a name: “The sales pitch.” No matter what office he had been running for, he “would make that pitch: that he was going to be President one day,” Kilgore recalls.