The Passage of Power (7 page)

After Sam’s fall (and the change was so dramatic that, as the first volume of this work relates, it is possible to date it), his relationship with Lyndon was very different: cold—hostile, in fact—with Lyndon refusing his father’s requests and orders, defying him so blatantly that, legislators say, “He wouldn’t pay attention to anything his father wanted.”

It was at this time, too—the time during which his father was failing on the ranch—that Lyndon began making the prediction; it was at the school he attended when he was thirteen, the tiny school in the little village of Albert, four miles away, that he first began making it: a classmate,
Anna Itz, remembers that during a recess, when a group of children were sitting under a hackberry tree near the school,
“All
of a sudden, Lyndon looked up at the blue sky and said, ‘Someday, I’m going to be President of the United States.’ We hadn’t been talking about politics or the presidency or anything like that. He just came out with it.” (Mrs. Itz says that the other children laughed at him and said they wouldn’t vote for him, and Lyndon replied, “I won’t need your votes.”)

In the opinion of men and women who were children with Lyndon Johnson, his father’s fall affected him all his life. His brother, Sam Houston, says that
“the
most important thing for Lyndon was not to be like Daddy.” That feeling had several dimensions: for example, Sam Ealy was an idealist, a romantic, a dreamer, a man who had “no sense”; it was important—terribly important—to Lyndon that he be regarded as a man who scorned ideals and causes as impractical dreams, that he be regarded as pragmatic, cynical, tough, shrewd. But another dimension had to do with Lyndon’s feelings about failure and defeat. His father’s fall had shown him that failure could mean not merely failure but terror, the terror of living in a house that, month by month, you were afraid would be taken away from you by the bank; that failure could mean not merely terror but ruin, permanent ruin; that failure—defeat—might be something from which you would never recover. And failure in public—failing in a way that was visible: having to move off your ranch; having your credit cut off at stores you had to walk past every day; no longer holding your public office—could mean a different, but also terrible, kind of pain: embarrassment, disgrace, humiliation.

When, in 1948, the place he had wanted so long—a seat in the United States Senate—finally opened up, Johnson had not leapt at the opportunity as his allies had expected him to do, but instead had vacillated endlessly, until it was almost too late to enter the race, agonizing over the decision as to whether or not to run; his allies had finally threatened to run
John Connally instead of him to nerve him up to announce his candidacy. And those men understood what was holding him back. Lyndon Johnson had long had the habit, in times of crisis, of telephoning Ed Clark, “the Secret Boss of Texas,” at six o’clock in the morning to discuss the situation and ask for advice, and in 1948, in these calls, Ed Clark heard, over and over, one word.
“ ‘Humiliation
,’ ” Clark would recall. “That was what he kept repeating. ‘I’ll be humiliated. I’ll be ruined. If I run, I’m going to lose—I’ll be humiliated.’ ” Now, in 1958, a race for a much greater prize stretched before him—a race for a prize so vast that the attention not just of a state but of an entire
country would be focused on it. So the possibility of defeat—of humiliation—loomed before him larger than ever, and
“If he didn’t try, he couldn’t fail.”

So he didn’t try.

On the Senate floor, in 1958, he was the same as he had always been: a man in command—from the moment, just before noon each day, when he pushed open the tall double doors at the rear of the Chamber so hard that they swung wide as he strode through them, and came down the four broad steps to the front-row center Majority Leader’s desk.

No assistant accompanied him as he walked down to the little clutch of journalists waiting for him in the well below his desk. He knew all the details himself: the intricacies of bills, not only major bills but minor ones, too; the number that each bill had been assigned on the Senate Calendar; where in the subcommittee or full committee approval process it stood at the moment; what new amendments had been added to the bill, or defeated, that day, and why they had been added or defeated; what the arguments on each side had been; when the bill would be brought to the floor for a vote.

And there was never any question of him making a slip and giving the journalists information he didn’t want them to have. “You didn’t get any more than Lyndon Johnson wanted to tell you,” one of them says. “Never.… He knew exactly what he wanted to say—and that was what he said. Period. I never felt in all those years that he ever lost control [of one of those briefings]. He was always
in charge.
”

In charge—“in command”—journalists said about him. In part, they say, it was because of the aura around him, what one of the journalists says was “the knowledge we had of what this guy
had
done, of what this guy could do. Of what he wanted to be.” But there was something more. As another reporter says: “Power just emanated from him. There was that look he gave. There was the way he held his head. Even if you didn’t know who he was, you would know this was a guy to be reckoned with. You would feel: don’t cross this guy.… He would look around the Chamber—it was like he was saying, ‘This is
my
turf.’ ”

Prowling the Chamber during debates, he would put a long arm around a senator, grasp his lapel firmly with the other hand, put his face very close to his colleague’s as he tried to persuade him. His hands never stopped moving, patting a senator’s shoulder, straightening a senator’s necktie, jabbing a senator’s chest, gesturing expressively, his face breaking into a grin if the senator agreed to the proposition being made, turning cold and hard if he didn’t. He would be snatching a tally sheet out of
Bobby Baker’s hands—or, dispatching Bobby on an errand, grabbing his shoulders and shoving him violently up the aisle if he wasn’t moving fast enough; rasping at the assistant of some other senator, who was still back in the Senate Office Building, “Get your fucking senator
over
here!”

During votes he controlled the very rhythm of the roll call. For some reason—perhaps all his senators were present, and there were absentees on the other side—he might want the roll call to be fast, before anything could change.
Or, if he didn’t have all his men there, he wanted the vote to be slow. Standing at that front-row desk, towering over the well, dominating the Chamber of the Senate of the United States, Lyndon Johnson would raise his right hand high in the air and make “revving-up circles” to hurry the clerk through the names, or make a downward shoving motion with his hands meaning “slow down,” “for all the world,” as
Time
said, like “an orchestra conductor” leading the Senate as if it were an obedient orchestra. “It was
a
splendid sight,” the journalist
Hugh Sidey would recall years later. “This tall man with … his mind attuned to every sight and sound and parliamentary nuance.… He signaled the roll calls faster or slower. He’d give a signal, and the door would open, and two more guys would run in. My God—running the world! Power enveloped him!”

And one of the key elements in Lyndon Johnson’s command of his world—the Senate world—was his decisiveness.

During the previous four years of his majority leadership (the situation would not be ended until a Democratic landslide in November, 1958) he was usually operating with a mere one-vote margin, and in a Senate in which both parties contained differing, hostile blocs, the vote on proposed measures was constantly shifting, changing; amendments that could alter the balance were constantly being introduced, so a Leader had to know the moment at which to allow (or not allow) an amendment, or the moment at which, if he called a bill to the floor, it would pass—to know the moment, and to seize the moment. Month after month, year after year, when those moments came, Lyndon Johnson knew them—and seized them, with a decisiveness so quick and firm that it obviously came naturally to him, that it was obvious that deciding—acting—was something he enjoyed doing, something that he had the will, the desire, the need to do.

And in his office after the day’s session, in that incredible office with its desk up on a low pedestal so that he sat higher than his guests and its spotlight in the chandelier focused on his chair, that office so opulently furnished that it was nicknamed “the Emperor’s Room” and “the Taj Mahal,” he was in 1958 the same as always, too. Holding court for senators and favored journalists, with his feet, clad in either highly polished black shoes or elaborately hand-tooled “LBJ” boots, up on his desk and a glass of Scotch in his hand (he would hold it out, rattling the ice in it, to summon a pretty secretary for a refill), he would dominate the conversation as he recounted the day’s triumphs and the next day’s strategy: at ease, confident, purposeful, assured.

E
XCEPT WHEN THE SUBJECT
turned to the presidential nomination.

George Reedy or
Walter Jenkins might bring in a sheaf of speaking invitations—they were pouring into Johnson’s office every day from all over the country. The boots would come off the desk, and Lyndon Johnson would begin to pace back and forth around the office. Or he would walk over to the window, plunge his hands into his trouser pockets, and stand looking out for long minutes,
his tall figure, silhouetted against the fading late-afternoon light, very still—except that his assistants would hear a continual low jingle as his hands restlessly shuffled the coins and keys in his pockets. Returning to the desk, he would agonize over each invitation, unable to decide whether or not to accept it, at one moment saying he would, the next moment changing his mind, wavering back and forth.

Almost always, he wound up declining—declining even invitations that a candidate (even an unannounced candidate) for the presidency would obviously be well advised to accept; among the seventeen invitations to deliver major speeches he received during March, 1958, were personal requests from the
grande dame
of his party,
Eleanor Roosevelt, for a speech before the
American Association for the United Nations, and from the governor of Iowa,
Herschel C. Loveless, who had recently announced that he had not decided whom his state’s delegation would support in 1960. Some
times, Johnson would accept one or another invitation—but then invariably would change his mind and refuse (as he did eventually with every one of the seventeen March requests), and then would regret that he had refused. Finally, in October, he agreed to visit six states in which Democratic candidates for the Senate were involved in tight races, and he told Reedy to set up small private meetings in his hotel suite after each appearance so that he could meet local political leaders. But at these meetings, he told the leaders he had come to their state strictly in his capacity as Senate Majority Leader, to help the Democratic senatorial candidate get elected; when they asked him if he would be a candidate for President, he said he would not, and said it so emphatically that they believed him. And then, as soon as he returned to Washington, he, in secret, took a step in the opposite direction. While in Tennessee, he had spoken at a Democratic fund-raising dinner that brought in $10,000 for the
Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. Instead of having the money used in Tennessee, he directed the committee’s chairman, Senator
George Smathers, to have it sent to West Virginia, to be used by Democratic officials who would have influence in that state’s 1960 Democratic primary, and to make sure the officials knew the money was coming at his, Johnson’s, direction. He told Smathers he wanted the committee’s resources husbanded for the moment—so they could be used in 1960. All through 1958, Johnson wavered between his yearning for the prize and his fear of being seen to yearn for it.

His explanations for not becoming an active candidate—for not traveling to other states to rally delegates and leaders to his cause—varied widely. One day he would give someone the “tending the store” explanation, saying he wouldn’t campaign, at least not for a while, because that was the best strategy to win the nomination; he was going to remain the responsible leader above the fray, minding the nation’s business, while the other candidates killed themselves off in the primaries; then, when the party was deadlocked, it would turn to him.
Time
magazine’s
Hugh Sidey, who spoke to Johnson frequently during this time, says that he
“had
decided … that being above the battle was the big thing.” The next day—or
to someone else the same day—he would say he didn’t want the nomination: that the South’s power was on Capitol Hill (
“This
is my home,” Corcoran recalls him saying. “This is where
we
have our strength”) and that he had decided to stay there, in the Senate. On other occasions he said he wasn’t running because it was impossible for him, for anyone from the South, to win the nomination, that he was tarred not only with being a southerner but, despite his refusal of
Charles Marsh’s offer, with being an oilman as well, since he had supported legislation benefiting his state’s oil interests; even if he received the nomination, the North would never accept him, and he could not possibly win the election; therefore he would not allow himself even to be drafted; if he was drafted, he said, he would refuse. His decision, he would say on these occasions, was final.

The year was summed up in his relationship with Rowe, who kept urging him to run. But
“he
didn’t do anything, said he wasn’t going to do anything. This went on for a long time. Any reasons? Just that he couldn’t make it. My argument was that you certainly can’t make it if you do nothing.” The harder Rowe pushed, however, the more adamant Johnson became. A few days after the end of the year, Rowe finally gave up, in a way that dramatized the validity of at least one aspect of his warning. He had been telling Johnson that one reason he couldn’t wait—that while he could say publicly that he wasn’t a candidate, he had to let party insiders, men with influence or power over other delegates, know that he would announce his candidacy when he judged the time right—was that these insiders were choosing up sides; many of them favored him, Rowe said, but for these political pros, not having a candidate in the race was an unsupportable idea: if he convinced them he wouldn’t be a candidate, they would select someone else. He himself was in that situation, Rowe had been warning him.
“I
finally said, ‘I want to get into the campaign, and if you’re going to go, let’s go. If you aren’t, I’m going over and join Humphrey.’ I talked this way to him for two or three months, and he said, ‘I am not going. You can count on it. I am not going to run.’ ”