Now that the story of Lyndon Johnson’s life has been told, I would like to draw together a number of observations on personality and politics which come to mind by treating the material as a case study in the interaction of leadership, institutional momentum, and the forces of history.
I PERSONALITY
The picture of Johnson’s early life suggests a childhood torn between the irreconcilable demands of his mother—who hoped to find in his intellectual and cultural achievement a recompense for her dead father, unhappy marriage, and thwarted ambition—and those of his father, who considered intellect and culture unmanly pursuits. This may not, of course, be a wholly accurate or complete description, but the evidence we have—Johnson’s recollections, his early letters to his parents, and his later behavior—supports this conclusion. His parents, most significantly his mother, seemed to bestow or withdraw approval on the basis of his behavior at home and, later, his accomplishments at school. All her expressions of satisfaction and love were related to something her son had done, just as his implied appeals for approval were accompanied by descriptions of all the good deeds he had accomplished.
Thus as Johnson grew up, he identified the success of his performance as the source of love. He could not allow himself to doubt that his mother loved him or that her praise was evidence and expression of her love. Unfortunately, however, words of admiration, praise, satisfaction, joy, even of love, which seemed a response to Johnson’s activities in the many worlds through which he moved, could never truly fulfill his need for love. For the “love” whose experience, denial, or withdrawal is basic to the configuration of a given psychic structure must be, psychoanalysts tell us, perceived as a response to one’s own being, unqualified by success or failure, by mental or physical defects, or by relationships to the external world. When this fundamental love is denied, or, as in Johnson’s case, attached to external performance, then no recognition of personal qualities and gifts, such as integrity, warmth, energy, and talent, can suffice to satisfy inward needs. Performance alone can prevent the sense of failure and that performance must be continually displayed since past effectiveness is swiftly erased and soon counts for nothing at all. Thus continual motion and limitless ambitions become the necessities of daily life.
Lyndon Johnson found the source of his achievement in the acquisition of power and control. Yet control is not the only road to success, even in public life. For Johnson, however, control fulfilled another need as well: mastery of the outer world was necessary to mastery of the self; controlling his home environment was the only means for reconciling the profound inward tensions imposed by the contradiction between his mother’s demands for intellectual achievement and his father’s notions of manly pride. And control of the external world was also the only way of containing the powerful mixture of hate, rage, and love he experienced at various times toward his mother, his father, and himself. Mastery of the outer world was necessary to mastery of the self. And the drive for control was a surrogate for his urgent childhood desires to control the earliest of his environments and change his position within his parental family, thus enabling him to compel love and prevent conditions that created inner conflicts, dangers, and fears.
This understanding of the inward forces that contributed to Johnson’s pursuit of power should not diminish respect for his extraordinary achievements; on the contrary, it should increase our regard for the masterful way in which—most of the time—he was able to harness and direct his personal needs toward constructive, social ends. Why some men cope and others do not remains a mystery. While we are able to suggest a number of possible bases for Johnson’s strength—his grandfather’s reliability, his mother’s early devotion, his father’s interest and attention—we have no theory to connect these observations in a coherent pattern. The psychoanalytic literature is able to analyze sources of weakness better than sources of strength.
It is also important to recognize that, while the demands of psychic structure led Johnson to pursue power, they did not determine that politics would be the avenue for that pursuit. The larger social setting provided content for Johnson’s ambitions. Had his father and his father’s friends been engaged in business or finance, one can imagine Johnson pursuing a very different career. But the options for a poor boy from a poor place in central Texas were limited—practically, if not theoretically. Politics was the one profession that seemed to offer both a reasonable chance of entry and a limitless future. In short, the same drives set in a different society or in another age might have led to very different pursuits.
And one thing is certain: his childhood relationships, the manner in which he sought, out of necessity, to resolve conflicts, protect his identity, and find personal fulfillment, may have shaped and energized his ambitions, but they did not, and could not, ensure their realization.
Johnson’s success and achievements—his performance—were made possible, to a very large extent, by his unusual capacities, his intellect, energy, talent, and insight into men and the nature of institutions, through which he developed techniques of incredible and intricate subtlety. To his knowledge and skill he applied an innovative genius to construct a large variety of instruments which increased the coercive powers that enabled him to impose his will. And that very success only strengthened and increased his ambition.
On the foundation of the basic elements of his psychic structure, Johnson constructed characteristic forms of behavior and conduct. We have seen how they recurred constantly throughout the various stages of his career. Indeed, most of the more significant and typical methods of advancing his ambitions had already been manifested, at least in incipient forms, at San Marcos.
Every time he entered an institution whose structure made such a relationship possible and productive, Johnson apprenticed himself to a man with superior power—Evans, Vinson, Russell, Kennedy; he became the invaluable helper, the deferential subordinate willing and able to perform a dazzling range of services for his master, until, step by step, the apprentice accumulated the resources that enabled him to secure the master’s role.
But Johnson was not alone in playing the role of apprentice, a role marvelously suited to a political system marked at important institutional levels by seniority and gradual ascent. What distinguished his behavior from others’ was the skill with which he managed to avoid remaining a completely loyal subordinate (a position that halted the ambitions of others), yet, even while changing his role, to retain his master’s support. The skills he evidenced here resonated of ones he had shown much earlier in his life as he walked the even more treacherous path between his parents’ conflicting demands. The boy’s earliest relationship with his mother was shaped by the idea that she needed him, and the confidence that he was capable of fulfilling that need. But with his mother, more than with anyone else, the role of apprentice required a distance; nothing less than survival of the self was at stake. So Johnson instinctively reached for the only other base of power he knew: identification with his father provided the independence he needed to separate from his mother.
In the exercise of his power, Johnson used a related technique drawn from an old tradition: he obligated his followers by providing them with services or benefits which they desired or needed. But the line between obligation and coercion was often thin. In return for his gifts, Johnson demanded a high measure of gratitude, which could only be acceptably demonstrated by the willingness to follow his lead. Though with some colleagues (those not central to his pursuit of power) he was able to grant the leeway and independence he himself had demanded, his more typical pattern required a continuing proof of loyalty so extreme that their autonomy was endangered. These demands for submission invariably worked against him, insulating him from the give and take of an adversary proceeding. He seemed to fear that any relaxation of control, even in front of his closest colleagues, would open the door to unknown enemies.
Of course, this kind of behavior cannot be attributed solely to Johnson’s inner needs. It was also a response to the nature of the political world. When every situation is translated into one of power lost or gained, all relationships, including friendships, are reduced to a series of shifting, undependable alliances. In such a world it is easy to succumb to the belief that even one’s closest “friend” must be watched for signs of treason.
But the vicissitudes of the political career account for neither the urgency beneath Johnson’s demands for submission nor the passions he projected onto his critics. These emotions can be understood only by recognizing the fears of illegitimacy and loss that plagued Johnson from his earliest experience with power (his position in his mother’s home), where he knew that all the power he commanded, while momentarily great, was subject to instant removal the moment his father returned. And these fears of illegitimacy and loss were undoubtedly reinforced by the circumstances of a political career that depended over and over on death (Buchanan, Sheppard, Kennedy) and political defeat (Lucas and McFarland). Nor was his sense of the precariousness of his power relieved by the narrow victory that launched his Senate career.
Throughout his career, Johnson exhibited an unmatched capacity to persuade individuals in one-on-one or small private settings, coupled with a crippling incapacity to present himself effectively before large public audiences. This juxtaposition of traits has long served as a puzzle for Johnson watchers. Countless descriptions have been offered of his uncommon skill in personal encounters, his brilliant blend of calculation and instinct, his unmatched richness of language and tone. One can safely assert that no American political leader has ever equaled Lyndon Johnson in the capacity to know the motives, desires, and weaknesses of those with whom he dealt. He seemed to possess a wholly intuitive ability to perceive a man’s nature so accurately and profoundly as almost to be unnatural. Yet this same man, forced to speak before a large public audience, invariably stiffened up, his words delivered in monotone voice, his smile frozen, his hands tightly gripping the lectern.
This contrast is partially accounted for by the recognition that formal settings were less suitable to Johnson’s particular talents—crude and colorful metaphors are less appropriate in formal speeches, and the power of physical touch is obviously reduced when the speaker stands before an audience of ten thousand or sits alone in a bare television studio. And part of the explanation for the problem in his later years can be found in the concept of the President as a statesman above the fray, a concept that Johnson shared with many others.
Yet many of the skills involved in the one were applicable to the other, as Johnson’s own successes showed. His best speeches were those in which he departed from the text, and by far his most effective television appearance as judged by a poll of viewers was a long, informal conversation with three reporters during which he alternately sat in his chair, roamed around the room, or stood beside his desk, raising and lowering his voice at will. After this appearance, the opinions of his advisers were unanimous: he must adapt his informal style to his public appearances. Johnson refused with a stubborn persistence that can only be understood by searching back in his past, to the contrast already mentioned between the rich and natural mode of talk he adopted from his father and his mother’s very different standards of acceptability, which produced in him a measure of shame and a determination, at least in public, to meet his mother’s ideal. Yet the son of the woman who taught elocution and debate was dismissed from his lessons in public speaking for mumbling too much—suggesting perhaps an unconscious impulse to take revenge on his mother—and he never conquered his terror of speaking before an audience.
Johnson’s career was marked by a continuing effort to avoid confrontation and choice, to prevent passionate and emotional divisions over issues. This inclination can be understood as a response to his particular family situation. From his earliest days, as we have seen, he had learned that if he chose his father, he might jeopardize the love and respect of his mother; if he chose his mother, his identity as a man would be in danger. The challenge then, as always, was to find a method of satisfying both—to shape an intermediate path, to find consensus. But Johnson’s drive for consensus was not simply a product of inner need; its roots can be seen in the traditions and historical experience of his cultural environment, in the prevailing attitudes and ideals that comprised his view of the world.
The political heritage of Johnson’s hill country was that of populism. There Johnson absorbed the established concept that government existed to help the ordinary citizen, and that the ordinary people’s basic wants were essentially the same. He built his first campaign for the Congress on the promise that he alone could bring the benefits of the New Deal to the people of his district. And once elected he kept his promise: he brought water and electric power to the 10th District; he developed a slum-clearance project for the poor; he focused on the problems of the Mexican-Americans. But the populism that influenced Johnson did not include a theory of class conflict. Johnson’s family was poor, but it did not identify with the poor, choosing instead to identify with the great majority of Americans, who believed in the possibility of progress and quelled their resentments of the rich by the conviction that someday they, too, would be rich.
Over time, as Johnson stretched his ambition from the 10th District to the state of Texas, he stretched his conception of “the people” to include the oil and gas men, the big ranchers, the big builders, and the cotton growers. Needing the support and the money of these powerful men, Johnson revised his definition of governmental responsibility to include help for the few as well as services for the many. He became a specialist in defense, a friendly agent ready to deliver any number of government contracts in return for campaign contributions and political support. He moved up in the world, but he never forgot the place where he had been born; he simply added new constituents to the ones he had originally served. Separate packages separately designed for separate groups—this was the winning strategy as Johnson defined it. Thus Johnson built his career on a series of disparate layers; he added one incompatible constituency on top of another; he juxtaposed contradictory ideas without choosing between them. This was a source of his personal strength in rising to power, but it also reflected the nature of a political system that rewards those capable of appealing to a variety of interests.
Johnson wanted many things, but among them, without doubt, that every American should have enough nourishing food, warm clothing, decent shelter, and a chance to educate his children; and later, as the Presidency extended his reach, he wanted to restore nature, rebuild cities, even build a Great Society. He wanted to out-Roosevelt Roosevelt and, at the same time, thought that what he wanted, everyone wanted, or would want if only he could explain it to them.
So as President he took the course that was most congenial to his character, and probably the only course possible in 1963. He would persuade everyone—businessmen, union chiefs, bankers, politicians—that his goals were in their interest, an interest that he thought, perhaps naïvely, was buried somewhere in every man—the desire to contribute, to leave behind a mark of which he could be proud. This drive to avoid conflict was a source of his greatest achievements in using his power: his success in bringing the Senate to its peak of effectiveness in the 1950s and in forging a consensus on the Great Society that went beyond the splitting of differences. Yet the drive was also a source of weakness. The American political system, superb in developing the technique of consensus, proved less capable of providing direction. Where positive goals were lacking, consensus could not supply them. Where hard choices had to be made (between constituents and ideas), Johnson could not choose. He could not choose between the Great Society and Vietnam; not only when—as in 1965—that choice seemed unnecessary because of an expanding economy and a faith in technology, but, more revealingly, when the failure to choose was obviously destroying the Great Society, the prospects of the war, and Lyndon Johnson himself. Still refusing to face even the necessity of choice, Johnson evolved an elaborate and illusory system (statistics on the continuing progress of the Great Society, statistics on Vietnam proving that the war was indeed being won), which distorted his vision and limited his real options. But practical necessity could not shift his course; the fear of choice had its roots too deep in his character and experience.
II INSTITUTIONS AND EVENTS
Experience would strengthen Johnson’s capacities, modify and supplement his modes of behavior. Man’s identity, as Erikson has pointed out, is not fixed; it continually evolves through different phases of life. Some experiences induce growth in character, others provoke regression or even mental disintegration. Johnson’s life history shows that he could adapt his conduct to the requirements of different political settings, that his priorities and commitments could change with the circumstances of the time. But that adaptation was possible only within limits. Some of his techniques and his ways of dealing with the world were so deeply rooted in his character and his nature that alteration proved impossible, even when those techniques proved no longer effective.
Having examined these characteristic techniques, let us consider each of the successive institutions Johnson encountered in order to assess the impact of personality in varying settings. In the present state of knowledge, it is not possible to describe the interaction of men and institutions in full and accurate detail. Institutions like individuals change over time; history moves on. The process itself cannot be frozen for inspection. The requisites for success in the same institution are different at different periods of time. This does not, however, make it impossible to analyze the interaction of men and events at a specific period of time and to draw conclusions, which I shall now attempt to do by examining each institution in turn, beginning with the House of Representatives.
The House of Representatives
From the moment of his arrival at the old Dodge Hotel to begin his work as a legislative assistant in the House, Johnson displayed and put to use those capacities and forms of behavior which—sharpened, strengthened, and modified—were to characterize and advance his entire political career. In retrospect, one can see that—behind the bursts of excitement, the frenetic motion and shifts of attention, and his almost comic behavior as within a single morning he entered and re-entered the common bathroom so he could brush his teeth alongside different groups of his colleagues—there was already the single-mindedness of purpose of a complete but yet unacknowledged politician, the inexhaustible energy that he exhibited but seemingly never consumed for most of the next four decades, directed characteristically toward learning about his new environment. From the knowledge he gained and the ability to work harder and more effectively than most other legislative secretaries, he earned a reputation as a performer on the Hill which gained him the respect of older colleagues and peers and success in the Little Congress.
The problem was that no amount of success in impressing members of the House or colleagues with his qualities, no display of skill and energy, no increase of influence among congressional staff members—then a relatively small and manageable group—could gain him real power in the House of Representatives. It might have been possible over time for Johnson to have become the trusted intimate and adviser of the House leadership—and some congressional staff members have had a great deal of influence over the course of legislation—but that of course was not a role Johnson could have wanted, accepted, or even thought about.
In order to acquire power within the House, it was necessary to be a member. And no one in the U.S. government—neither the Speaker of the House nor President Roosevelt—could appoint him to membership. Johnson realized that the indispensable foundation of power in the legislative process was elective office. So he bent his behavior to the requirements imposed by the political structure. Taking advantage of the leeway in his job, which allowed him to help Representative Kleberg in a variety of ways, he concentrated on fulfilling requests from constituents, making influential friends for himself in Texas, and earning a reputation within the Roosevelt administration. For though Roosevelt did not have the power of direct appointment, he did have the power to appoint him to other positions—such as the NYA—from which he could better build his elective base. Obviously, it was not difficult for any aspiring politician to understand the necessity of building a political base of his own. However, the acuteness and comprehensiveness, part instinct and part calculation, with which Johnson understood the process and recognized his own goals within that process enabled him to evaluate and act upon opportunity with startling immediacy. It must have been apparent to him, the moment he knew Texas would need an NYA Director, that the job would permit him to increase his reputation and widen his relationships in Texas, especially because the task was ideally suited to his particular energies and talents. All of this enabled him to act swiftly and purposefully, giving him an advantage over others—who were also politically ambitious, perhaps equally qualified and with even better credentials, but who required time to consider and calculate. Later this capacity and consequent mode of conduct were to foreclose opposition from the wife of the Congressman whose death created the vacancy that was the object of his first campaign, and to abate opposition for the party leadership in the Senate, where, before his opponents had finished planning the strategy, he had already won the fight. The experience of Johnson’s career suggests that the capacity to recognize and reach for opportunity is a significant asset for high achievement within the structure of American public life. Though there is usually no paucity of candidates for a particular job, elective or appointive, time often matters and many hold back, finding it hard to put themselves forward, waiting to be selected on merit. And while the others wait, those who step forward define the field.
Thus if events and circumstance created the moment of opportunity—the New Deal, enactment of the NYA, establishment of statewide directorships—personal qualities made the opportunity, Johnson’s opportunity. And once he had become Director, the same qualities and skills enabled him to build the political base that would make his next success—election to the House—possible.
When he entered the House, Johnson had all the skills and qualities that had brought him success before and would again, but he did not become a leader, or even a powerful figure. Understanding that unusual failure helps to clarify the ways in which institutional structures and events can obstruct and limit the accumulation of power by even the most formidable and ambitious of men.
In the House of Representatives of the 1930s, leadership went to those who calculated and acted through a long period of patient waiting. Important Congressmen had invested years, even decades, to increase the chances of accession to leadership positions. Such positions would not be handed over to a relatively junior member who had proven his loyalty and was anxious to assume irksome burdens. Moreover, the seniority system, which led to key committee chairmanships, was firmly established, and Johnson had no access to any means of modifying this structure. And without a chairmanship it was hard to influence the content of legislation or the course of national affairs.
Now had Johnson entered the House in another era, he might have risen to power more rapidly; in the nineteenth century leadership positions were available to even the youngest members; Henry Clay was thirty-four when he was elected Speaker; and at the turn of the century, committee assignments were made by the Speaker in a bargaining exchange at which Johnson might well have excelled. By his time, however, power was institutionalized and professionalized to such a degree that Johnson’s typical pattern of apprenticing himself to his elders could bring only limited rewards. (With FDR’s help he received a seat on the Committee on Naval Affairs, and with the administration’s support he was able to bring to his district federal programs, such as rural electrification, that solidified his political base and increased his general reputation for effective action.) But no one—not FDR nor Rayburn nor Vinson—could shorten the period of waiting within the House.
One opening provided by the institutional structure was the possibility of Johnson’s mobilizing a majority to reform the seniority system and revolt against the established leadership. There were, however, barriers to this. The House had a large membership, and one that was continually changing as a result of biennial elections. In such a situation Johnson could not build the network of personal relationships—gradually constructing support through his usefulness to others—that would enable him to expand his power. Nor did Johnson have anything to offer—he lacked the resources—relevant to their legislative, political, and personal priorities. Yet even these institutional barriers might have been overcome under vastly different circumstances. There had been movements before to reform the House—some of them successful. However, this requires an atmosphere in which reform is an important issue. This condition, though there was resentment against recalcitrant conservative opposition to the continuation of the New Deal, was not sufficiently realized. Nor was Roosevelt temperamentally suited to lead such a reform. Nor for that matter was his protégé, who all his life had avoided conflict, undue risk, and public advocacy.
So the structure of the House blocked his way to power. As a result, he did what he did worst—he waited. He waited eleven years for an opportunity to leave the House to run for the Senate, not because he wanted to but because of the compulsions of institutional process. Had he possessed a different set of ambitions, these compulsions might have been less compelling. He could have used his seat in the House to speak out on various issues, to become a crusader. But Johnson always sought power in the form of control within and over public institutions. Moreover, his ambitions required continual upward movement. At each stage in the political system, the number of possible routes to the next stage is diminished. If, for example, the NYA directorship had not been available, there still would have been many ways, many kinds of jobs and activities, with which Johnson could have built his first political base. Once in Congress, however, there was only one possibility, election to the Senate (by then the governorship, even had he wanted it, was foreclosed by the circumstances of Texas politics), and that institutional reality compelled him to conduct himself in a manner that was neither characteristic nor satisfying.
He was not, of course, inactive: directing his energies in ways that would be helpful in Texas, preparing for the advent of opportunity. As soon as a Senate seat opened up, he ran and lost. It was his only electoral defeat, and it plunged him into despair. This defeat and his reaction afford us a good opportunity to analyze Johnson’s attitude toward elections. Of course, all politicians are nervous about the outcome of elections, and unhappy at defeat. But to Johnson, they had a special meaning.
His skills were personal, enabling him to persuade, influence, bribe, or coerce other individuals—to understand them well enough to know how to impose his will. He generally established goals he knew he could achieve, unwilling as he was to commit himself until he was certain that the situation was under his control. This was not possible in elections. Try as he would to shake every hand and look every voter in the eye, he could not hope to evaluate the intentions or manipulate the decisions of such large numbers. Nor could he modify the results, reduce his objectives, in order to enhance the possibilities of success. In an election, there was no form of compromise between victory and defeat. In Johnson’s mind, confusion, uncertainty, and doubt assumed enormous and menacing proportions. He was always driven to withdraw from situations that would not yield to his particular powers of domination and control. But to withdraw from elections would also mean closing the door to power and domination, denying his most powerful and compelling desires.
So he was at war with himself, a combat that went on in the deepest levels of his mind. The same, most fundamental attributes of his nature that compelled him to run for office also insisted that he leave the scene. And finally, most of the time, he did run because he was strong enough to resist irrational impulses in favor of practical necessities, and because of an unusual awareness that, however great the risk or intense his fears, withdrawals were irrevocable, and that destructive inner conflict would soon supplant temporary relief. However, before each of three elections (1948, 1964, and 1968) he drew up statements of withdrawal. And before almost every other election (the 1937, 1941, 1966 by-elections) he fell ill and had to be hospitalized, his body asserting the desires that the mind was restraining.
And elections had another characteristic. He wanted and needed to control other men, to dominate institutions. Still, this was unsatisfying. People did as he wanted because, in varying ways, he had imposed his will, not because of who he was. Elections were different. The votes were for him an expression of love. The word is extravagant, a metaphor, but the closest one can come to the reality. And they help explain why he also despised his own greatest and most successful abilities: by exerting power over others he was forever prohibited from discovering or experiencing their true feelings toward him. For, we must remember, they were the same capacities he had evolved in order to conceal his own emotions from himself.
This lengthy digression will, perhaps, enable us better to understand some of his actions as President, confronted with problems he could not control and a constituency he could not influence or persuade. And the fear of electoral loss is also a quality that made this man—who overrode so many institutional restraints—vulnerable to one of the most important checks in our constitutional system: the power of popular opinion, more formally incorporated in the power to elect.
The Senate
When Lyndon Johnson became a Senator, he entered an institution extremely well suited to his capacities, and at a time in the history of both Senate and country that made it possible for him to exert those capacities with great effect. No matter how great his abilities, Johnson’s rise to power would not have been possible if the institutional conditions of the Senate had, like those of the House, not been favorable.
First, power in the Senate was less institutionalized than it was in the House. It was, for the most part, exercised by an informal group known as the “inner club”—the chairmen of important committees, mostly Southerners and predominantly conservative—whose acknowledged leader was Richard Russell. The hierarchy was not rigid, nor did it attempt to extend control over all the details of Senate activity. The formal leadership positions had little actual authority, and were not sought by ambitious men who had invested years of service in anticipation of being selected; their occupancy was seen more as a duty than as a base of power. Moreover, as Truman’s administration neared its close the Democratic Party was in disarray, the President himself preoccupied with the Korean War, his influence dwindling. Thus there was no external party influence either on the current leadership or on the process of selection, as there might have been under a strong Democratic President and a united Democratic Party.
All these factors contributed to a situation where Johnson was able by skillfully cultivating one man—Russell—to provide an entry for himself into the power structure without infringing on the authority and prerogatives of others. There was no need to displace existing leadership—happenstance opened the posts—or to fight the organized candidacies of others. He had simply to make himself both desirable to Russell and the inner club and at least acceptable to the Northerners. And meeting the requirement, he played a skillful game: he apprenticed himself to Russell, performing all manner of tangible and psychic services, yet he avoided being placed in an ideological category that would have made him totally unacceptable to the other Senators. Thus he was prepared for the leadership opportunity when it came through—the successive vacancies of the offices of party whip and Minority Leader. Here again swift and skillful action to secure the posts was essential, but success was possible only because he was also claiming a reward—a kind of compensation—that seemed of little significance to those with the power of bestowal.
Once he became minority whip and leader, Johnson was able to accumulate power by exploiting institutional vulnerabilities—some the very ones that had made his selection possible—and the changing conditions of national and political life.
Slack in the system was perhaps the most important condition. The inner club exercised its power only over those matters it considered important or of special interest. In other areas there was no real authority, nor was there any leadership concerned with the interest of the Senate as a whole. Moreover, the inner club tended to exercise its power along ideological lines, enforcing interests and attitudes that were generally conservative and Southern. Its members were not concerned with the inevitable resentments of other Senators who did not share their convictions, because their power was based not on majority vote but on control over committees and tacit acknowledgment of their right to authority. Nor did the inner club try to placate the inevitable resentment of an increasing number of new Senators who felt that the established customs, leadership, and procedures barred them from a significant role in the legislative process, diminishing their opportunity to perform as they wanted and as their constituents expected.
Yet, if resentments smoldered and needs went unmet, there was no organized or coherent effort on the part of any group to displace the present leadership with a majority leadership of their own. The formal discipline that would have been required for such a revolt was hard to find in a body characterized by independent bases of power for each of its members. Each Senator had interests distinct from those of every other—derived primarily from the necessities of his own political career. While a Senator’s concern for the effective functioning of the Senate as a whole was not absent, it was not generally a priority concern compared to his relationship with his constituents. Thus the alternatives history provided—strong, elective party leaders with party caucuses to bind votes and men—seemed even less appealing than a disorderly, uninstitutionalized Senate.
The situation was ripe for a personal leadership style: one that could lessen the tensions resulting from the Southerners’ tight control, concern itself with the smoother operation of the Senate, gather central resources to help individuals, but always remember that a Senator’s relationship with his constituency was the primary concern.
So upon taking over, Johnson assumed some burdens of leadership that had not previously been exercised—allotment of office space, scheduling of legislation, appointments to committee delegations. Able to comprehend the current structure of the Senate as a whole, he formed a mental picture of a different structure and moved toward it with such skill that he managed to bring everyone along with his changes, even those who would potentially lose power under the new system. He began by persuading the inner club to relax seniority just a little, to provide more seats on important committees to new members as a token means of quelling incipient resentment and as a way of making the Senate function more effectively. By this move, however, he obligated the freshmen Senators to him; he established the appearance that his authority was the source of their ability to do their work effectively. At the same time, the small size of the Senate allowed him to gather information about every Senator: what he was going to do, was likely to do, or might be persuaded to do. Over time, Johnson became the only source of authoritative information on the Senate as a whole. Thus he became useful, and often indispensable, to other Senators who were forced to rely upon his judgment about, for example, the chances of passing legislation in which they were interested, or what form of compromise could bring agreement, or when they could take a trip without missing a crucial vote. In addition, he made it impossible for others to separate the appearance of power from its reality. If, for example, he told a Senator that he would make sure of a favorable vote on his bill and the bill passed, one could not know whether Johnson had exerted his authority or whether he had already known what the result would be. In this way he secured obligations not only by rendering real services and rewards but by seeming to produce results that were not, in fact, of his doing.
The insulation of the cloakroom, where much of the Senate’s business occurred, allowed Johnson to impose his will separately on each Senator and in such a way as to reduce awareness of the coercive nature of his leadership. Had there been collective forums of decision in which he had forced individuals to go his way, the coercive nature of his tactics would have been all too clear. And, in fact, Johnson drained the collective organs, the caucus and the conference, transforming most of the Senate’s business to his own office, where his relations were seen as bargaining. And, true, his capacity to bargain and persuade was undoubtedly an important element in his leadership. Yet the process was essentially coercive; over time, Johnson’s power became increasingly necessary to the capacity of others to sustain and exercise their own authority. Every time he bargained there was always the implicit threat—never voiced, but inherent in the very disproportion of power and rewards—that failure to go along might have damaging consequences. And in most cases the Senators yielded, except, of course, on matters of fundamental concern to their constituencies—a limit Johnson understood and respected. When he anticipated failure, he didn’t try to persuade—a fact that only enhanced his reputation as a leader who accomplished what he set out to do.
The disguise was essential. For no Senator could afford to let others know he was being compelled to act by another, that he was submitting to Lyndon Johnson’s will. The nature of the Senate required unanimous acceptance of the mask—continual recognition of the Majority Leader’s skills, his brilliance in argument, his effectiveness in conducting the business of the Senate, his genius at compromise—but not of his power to enforce his will. It is true that Johnson disliked, even feared, direct and open confrontation. But he was essentially a coercive personality, working in a situation in which bargaining and persuasion were the necessary forms for the acquisition of power and the exercise of control. Such forms were also more congenial to his personal qualities, reducing the possibility of failure, since one could not be defeated in a discussion or defied and overcome by another’s inability to understand the wisdom of one’s advice and arguments.
If institutional process and structure made the most important contribution to Johnson’s power and the manner of its use, he was also helped by historical conditions and political circumstances, which—and partly because they were so congenial to his own character—in turn, influenced his conduct in the Senate. It is, for example, difficult to imagine Johnson’s achieving a similar concentration of power in the Senate of Daniel Webster or John Calhoun. He came to Senate leadership during a time of relative quietism. The economy was doing well, and occasional recessions seemed nothing more than transient interruptions in the steady growth of personal affluence. There were no passionate issues of the kind that led to deep and irreconcilable divisions along lines of fundamental interest or ideology.
And the political circumstances were also congenial: a President uninterested in social reform, whose popularity restrained most Democrats from too open or strong opposition, permitted Johnson to avoid disruptive debates whose outcome he could not control. And that same President, because he was a Republican, made it unnecessary for Johnson to subordinate his conduct to the White House as he might have had to do with a strong Democratic leader.
Let us now turn to the influence of his power on the structure of the institution and on national events.
Clearly, he had achieved more power as leader than any other leader in decades. And he had built that power from the qualities and structure of the institution. But he had not created institutionalized power. His powers had not, with a few exceptions, been incorporated into the formal authority of the Majority Leader. He had transformed a position of limited significance into one of great power. But he had used the majority leadership and not transformed it. His system depended on his capacities, knowledge, and command over a variety of procedures which he enforced but did not establish. As a result, when he left, the Senate had no centralized structure of leadership—unless it could find another Lyndon Johnson, which seemed unlikely, since it had waited two centuries for the first one.
Despite the failure to institutionalize his power, we must conclude that Johnson did bring the Senate during his reign to unprecedented heights of effective function. Legislation was moved from introduction to committee to floor and then enacted smoothly and with dispatch. Conflicts were reduced and respect for the Senate increased. Johnson’s leadership is also responsible for speeding up the process through which the powers of the conservative Southern coalition were redistributed to the Senate as a whole, a process made inevitable by population shifts and the loss of a one-party South, and for reducing some of the inequalities resulting from the seniority system. The old system had rested on accepted traditions and procedure, informal alliances based both on common outlook and mutual interest and on established procedure—seniority—for the acquisition of authority. Once that system had changed, then the belief that the way things were was the only way they could be was shattered. Nor was it likely that any new group of Senators would now deliberately grant authority to a group of committee chairmen dominated by Southern authority.
Yet the powers once held by the inner club were not, after Johnson, lodged in a new leader; they were simply fragmented to the benefit of individual Senators. These Senators have since developed a stake in the existing system of leadership. Any change now would entail a transfer of power, a probability that familiar modes of conduct would be changed; the ultimate consequences are uncertain and thus appear as risk. This is precisely why structures of power in the Senate are not codified, but, instead, continually evolve over a long period of time with changes in the nature of the Senate membership. Johnson’s rise was exceptional in this regard. The Senate would never have voted to give him the powers of leadership that they so often praised. Nor are they likely to bestow the same powers on any other Majority Leader or on the position itself. That would require a sense of devotion to the Senate as a whole, which would only be possible in an institution that was a collective body—that is, in a different institution.
Johnson’s system of power and leadership influenced not only the Senate as an institution but national conditions and events. For one thing, he inhibited the development of effective and coherent opposition on domestic issues. There were serious national problems—persisting poverty, inadequate health care, recurrent recession and unemployment—along with questions of defense policy and foreign affairs. There was debate on these issues, both in the country and, later, during the 1960 presidential campaign. But the Senate was potentially the most important forum for the expression of opposition. It could influence the national dialogue; many of its members were themselves significant political figures, and with a Democratic majority could force a confrontation. Historically, it had often taken this role (congressional opposition during the later New Deal, the great and partly decisive debate over the Marshall Plan, etc.). This does not mean that the Senate could have substituted its policies for those of Eisenhower, but it abdicated the possibility even of stimulating national debate; of influencing, if not decisively changing, the course of events and those administration policies that needed senatorial acquiescence. Yet the days of the Senate’s involvement with legislation had been steadily waning even before Johnson, and on the other side of the ledger is the fact that Johnson’s leadership was vital to the passage of the first civil rights act since 1867, and in forcing the government to initiate a large-scale space program. And there were other accomplishments. Nevertheless, we must conclude that while Johnson’s leadership style—his avoidance of issues and his fear of confrontation—may have increased his power over the Senate, it lessened the influence of the Senate on the country.
Under Johnson’s reign, floor debate was substantially reduced in importance, and with it, the role of the Senate in foreign policy. Again we must acknowledge an institutional evolution toward increased executive authority in foreign policy. Yet in the decades before, Congress had felt free to debate—often along partisan lines—to oppose, and occasionally to act against the President’s foreign policy. Since then, the felt requisites of unity in the difficult period of the cold war had worked to reduce open debate. But Johnson led in a time of peace, in a time when the Senate might have—as Senator Joseph Clark repeatedly suggested—moved to increase its supply of information without threatening executive authority. But Johnson refused, preferring always to resolve issues by private compromise followed by public agreement, and thus contributed to the general weakening of the Senate’s role.
And once the traditional responsibilities were abandoned, there was little move to reclaim them. Because Senate constituencies had little interest in most matters of foreign policy, the most important incentive to action was missing. And the irony was that Johnson’s own performance in the Presidency would itself be seriously influenced by this weakening of the Senate—by reducing an important check that might well have constrained his decisions on Vietnam in ways helpful to him as well as to his country.
The Nomination Process
That Johnson ran a poorly conceived and poorly executed campaign for the Presidency in 1960 is a commonplace observation. My interest is in why this happened to a man so skillful at acquiring power in so many other arenas. Part of the answer lay in the changing nature of the nomination process. Had Johnson been trying for the Presidency in the early nineteenth century, when the legislative caucus nominated the President, his chances would obviously have been much enhanced. Or had the system remained as it was through most of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, one in which a national convention controlled the choice, we can imagine Johnson exerting his enormous persuasive powers at that convention, face to face, wheeling and dealing behind closed doors. But the system he confronted in 1960 had moved away from a pure convention choice. Although deadlock was still conceivable, making it possible for the dealings at the convention to be of primary importance, the more likely occurrence was that one of the candidates, through a rounding up of delegates and primary votes, would be able to produce a near majority before the convention even began.
That Johnson failed to recognize these changes can be attributable in part to his preoccupation with the Senate. Unlike Kennedy, he had not spent time in the states learning who the important powers were, who controlled the delegations. And without personal knowledge and touch his usually acute powers of perception were substantially reduced, leading him to the mistaken notion that the leaders of the Senate were also the leaders of the delegations, that if he could round up the Senators from Arkansas and Idaho, for example, he would secure their delegations. Viewing the election through the prism of the Senate also led to an underestimation of Kennedy’s qualities. True, Kennedy was not an impressive Senator, but the qualities needed or desired for success within the Senate were not necessarily those that would produce success in the electoral arena. There, more public qualities were important—for those states where the primaries determined the delegation vote—as well as large-scale-organization skills, which were necessary for holding together a national campaign structure.
Moreover, Johnson’s identification as a nonliberal was a principal obstacle to his ambitions. In modern times, the Democratic Party had always nominated a liberal candidate. The membership of the convention was more liberal than the national constituency needed to elect a Democratic President; just as the Republican Convention tended to be more conservative than the constituency they needed to elect a President.
To secure the nomination, Johnson needed some identification with issues. Yet he had always sought to avoid a campaign based on divisions over issues, just as he sought to avoid division in the Senate. Such divisions were uncontrollable, at least were not susceptible to his capacities and ingenious modes of control. To take a position on an important issue, at least in the context of an election, meant creating opposition that could not be won over by bargaining or techniques of informal coercion. Always before he had depended on performance rather than on his stance on issues (with the exception of his first campaign, where he distinguished himself by support for Roosevelt’s court-packing, but in fact that support was read more as support for FDR and the New Deal, and in his district Roosevelt and the New Deal were not issues, but secular manifestations of divine goodwill). From then on, the particular structure of Texas politics, although not permitting him to avoid issues entirely, made election largely dependent on support from identifiable sources of political power—a varied assortment of bosses, some political, some representatives of dominant economic interests. Johnson knew these men, what they wanted, and how to convince them—in action and through persuasion—that his election was in their interests, that, in fact, he was to be desired over other, equally reliable men, since he would approach the task with greater energy and skill than anyone else. Moreover, the interests of the variety of men and groups who were necessary to political success, although different, were rarely in direct conflict. The minorities in the state of Texas were unorganized, politically impotent, and were not, at that time, capable of organizing or expressing opposition. It was unnecessary to appeal to them on issues, although it did help a candidate if he could demagogue a little—to establish an identification through manner and rhetoric—even if his votes and actions showed his allegiance was somewhere else.
But if Texas politics allowed an avoidance of issues, national politics did not. The primary object in a national campaign was to take a position most likely to win the election; this required a judgment of the motives, intentions, and governing influences—not of knowledgeable individuals, but of a great number of people whose views, and, more important, the intensity of whose views, could not be ascertained by Johnson’s powers of perception, observation, judgment, and intuition in the presence of those he was trying to assess or influence. One had to guess, or make a judgment based on indirect information, and to Johnson—because his political techniques, although of great practical value, were related to inner needs—those kinds of judgments, which most politicians make constantly, seemed to involve almost unbearable risk, a source of terror that was an inevitable response not to external circumstances but to inner conditions.
Thus it was not possible for Johnson to stand on an issue, or on his personal qualities, or on an image of strength or honesty that could be projected before the people. The only appeal he could make was the one he had always made—that he deserved election on the basis of his past performance—and in 1960, at a time when the people were looking for a change, that appeal had no appeal.
The Vice-Presidency
In accepting the Vice-Presidency, Johnson thought he could do again what he had done before: take a position with limited power and then, by recasting and expanding its function, pyramid its slight resources into substantial political holdings. But this time Johnson miscalculated, and his miscalculation tells us something not only about Johnson’s limits but about the limits of the institution of the Vice President.
Theoretically, Johnson’s notion of the Vice President as apprentice to the President made sense, but the evolution of the office itself had made that role very difficult to work out in practice. Out of political rivalry and habit, Presidents had rarely been inclined to include their Vice Presidents in the central decisions, preferring instead to give them special assignments, occupying their time in essentially peripheral areas. Nor did Johnson have many services, once the election was over, to offer Kennedy in return for the master’s rewards. The one resource he could have mobilized—his talents with the Congress—was removed from him because he overreached in his attempt to restructure his formal relationship by his proposition to allow the new Vice President to remain the leader of the Conference Committee. He took the rebuff—essentially a reassertion of checks and balances—as a personal affront and was unable to help Kennedy on the Hill. In the absence of this resource, there was little he could do of vital importance. Nor was he able, temperamentally or institutionally, to use his base to build his own power for the future. Recent tradition had eschewed open rivalry and Johnson was not temperamentally suited for the role; it would force him into a position of direct conflict, when he knew only how to be the loyal subordinate. All these difficulties were compounded by the presence of Robert Kennedy, who became the power behind the throne that Johnson had wanted to be and who was more likely than he to receive John Kennedy’s support in any subsequent election campaign.
It is conceivable that Johnson saw more than he gave indication of seeing, that he did recognize the limits of the Vice-Presidency, but that he had to believe in its possibilities, however slim, because there was nowhere else to go.
The Presidency
In 1963 Johnson entered an arena vastly different from the legislative institutions in which he had spent nearly all his adult life. Yet for the first twelve months the circumstances of the transition period and the election allowed him to conduct his Presidency in a manner consistent with his previous efforts to acquire and exercise power.
Upon his succession to the Presidency, Johnson confronted a dual problem: he had to guide the country through a traumatic and uncertain moment and work to ensure his nomination at the Democratic Convention, which was only eight months away.
The course he chose to meet the first objective—the theme of continuity—was natural to his character and to the needs of his time. Moreover, he was helped in this endeavor by the institutionalized process of succession—established by constitutional and historical precedent—which immediately placed in his hands all the powers, institutional authority, symbolic functions, and impressive trappings of the American Chief of State—a transfer that was more than a transfer, but rather a replacement thought so necessary and appropriate that not a single dissenting voice marred the population’s unquestioning acknowledgment of its legitimacy.
The circumstances of the public mood even allowed Johnson while in the Presidency to assume his accustomed role of the faithful follower—this time of the memory of a dead President. Now, unlike the Vice-Presidency, where he had nothing to give, he could, as he had done with Russell, provide a significant service (the enactment of the dead man’s program) and then reap the rewards that would enable him to consolidate his power.
This was possible because he had come into the legislative cycle at the ideal moment for his particular talents. Kennedy had already articulated the goals—most of the issues on Kennedy’s agenda were suspended between formulation and approval—leaving the new President the familiar task of mobilizing congressional support.
Moreover, 1964 was a year of relative tranquillity in foreign policy, while the country itself experienced relative economic stability, and there were no serious or turbulent manifestations of domestic distress. Serious and visible crises would have required him to devote attention to unaccustomed responsibilities. In their absence, the enormous resources and elaborate machinery of the modern presidential institution—bureaucracies, established hierarchies of authority and decision, experts, a White House staff large and specialized enough to exercise some form of White House jurisdiction over every activity of importance and make decisions in his name—could ensure that the activities of government were continued, decisions made, foreign leaders placated, etc., without compelling him to divert his attention to unfamiliar matters or to consider and resolve problems unrelated to his immediate objectives: legislative achievement and election.
In the election, too, the circumstances created an ideal situation for Johnson. He had always sought to avoid campaigns based on divisions over issues, trying instead to focus attention on his performance. Now his performance would be the main issue—a transition performance whose circumstances allowed him to combine a deferential dignity with a dazzling display of effectiveness, which brought first relief, then approval and even admiration from the press and the general public. Indeed, his display of large abilities and presidential stature was so significant that he could, even though he’d been in office for only a few months, run on the record; and the shortness of his incumbency enabled him to define that record as a demonstration of stature and performance rather than of the substance and directions of his policies, which would obviously be more divisive.
To these conspicuous and influential circumstances was added the nomination of Goldwater, reflecting the culmination of an evolution—a shift part ideological, part geographical—of power within the Republican Party. Goldwater’s candidacy—his insistence that he was truly ideological, the nature of some of his support for the nomination, and some of his speeches—gave the impression that he wanted to eliminate many of the programs and institutions established in the decades since Roosevelt took office, which had come to be viewed by moderates and many conservatives not as liberal experiments or intrusions but as part of the established order. The same interests who had opposed Social Security and government regulation of business activity had no desire to tear apart a structure they were now accustomed to, had conformed their activities to, and under which, moreover, they were doing better than before.
One can hypothesize a moderate to liberal Republican candidate who could have made a serious issue of Johnson’s already expressed intentions and their implication of greatly increased federal activity and spending, who might have accused him of dangerous incapacities in foreign policy, or have debated the Democratic Party’s intention—already manifested by the actions of Kennedy and Johnson—to reverse Eisenhower’s refusal to intervene militarily in Indochina; a debate that would have permitted the Republicans to exploit the public’s recollection of Truman and Korea and the vague identification of the Democratic Party as the party of war. Instead, however, the Republicans nominated a candidate whose campaign imposed upon his candidacy the most serious traditional vulnerabilities of both parties.
This made possible the kind of campaign most congenial to Johnson’s own temperament. His election was in everybody’s interest: to the conservative, complacent or fearful, he was the protector of the system; to a people whose enthusiastic response to the Test Ban Treaty had surprised even Kennedy, he was the man of peace who would meet crises with restraint; to the poor and the blacks, he offered not only understanding but a demonstrated capacity for effective action; to the middle class, he could appear as both a guarantor of increasing affluence and, without seeming inconsistent, as one who understood and would try to alleviate many of the sources of middle-class discontent—the state of the environment, pollution, the conditions of urban life. He was under no compulsion to set forth a coherent program, which might have revealed the difficulties of fulfilling such diverse and often conflicting expectations, whose content and potential consequences would have increased opposition. The unusual conditions of political life in 1964 allowed him to rely, instead, on general statements of purpose, principle, and intention. His opponent not only did not challenge him from the middle, but made himself and not Johnson’s policies the issue (McGovern was to perform a similar service for Nixon in 1972). Johnson was, therefore, in the fortunate circumstance of being able to combine elements of the kind that contributed to the disparate appeals of both Eisenhower and Roosevelt.
So everywhere he went huge crowds assembled to greet his arrival, attend his movements through the streets. Millions of people he hadn’t met, didn’t know, whose motives and interests he had not calculated in order to decide how best to impose his will, cheered, almost screaming, often jumping excitedly, in their enthusiasm at his presence. No advance men or organization could have produced such multitudes or intensities. He had accomplished some significant things, but less than several other Presidents, far less than he intended, yet he was hailed as if he were a national conqueror. And even if he didn’t understand and only half-trusted it, he couldn’t get enough of it, traveling from place to place, descending into every crowd, touching the few he could reach as if to reassure himself it was really happening, and more obviously out of an uncontrollable and understandable exuberance. And who could blame him? It was the closest he could come to feeling loved, and who would not express—in his own manner and to the extent he could—exultance at the unexpected approach toward satisfaction of this universal longing?
The election of 1964, both the victory and its size, changed the nature of Johnson’s political constituency. The Democratic Party itself was no longer a factor in the exercise of power or its renewal. His election left the party apparatus in his hands, and he would soon move to eliminate any remnants of independent authority or access to resources that the Kennedy White House had left intact. As an incumbent, his renomination, if he wanted it, was assured—or so he had every right to assume, and must have assumed. It was, therefore, no longer necessary to direct efforts or policies to cultivate the support of groups because of their potential influence on the party. Their importance to Johnson now depended on their potential influence on the outcome of a national election, and—of more immediate and pressing significance—on the extent to which they could help or obstruct the achievement of his objectives, mostly the passage of legislation.
After the 1964 election, Johnson found himself in command of an institution very different from the institutional and political settings in which he had spent virtually his entire life, and through which he had pursued his ambitions with enormous, if not uninterrupted, success. He had great powers, whose acquisition he could now regard as the consequence of his own abilities and that could, therefore, be exercised for his own purposes. However, it is unlikely that he fully understood the extent of the differences in function and structure between the Presidency and the earlier settings for his activity and ambition, nor the extent to which presidential powers were not only greater but of a different nature.
In the Presidency, unlike in the Senate, the standards of achievement had to be established in relation to accomplishments external to the presidential institution. Here Johnson’s own skill and natural inclination, reinforced by the experience of the transition, led him to establish standards of achievement based on his success in designing and enacting a program of domestic reform. Moreover, institutional relationships between the President and Congress required that he must also determine the substance of that program—the general policies and the content of the legislation he would propose. Here Johnson could benefit from the ideas of a liberal tradition institutionalized in his agencies and the Bureau of the Budget, which for twenty years had been proposing legislation that had never passed; now their time had come and they had a ready agenda.
However, neither Johnson’s own ambitions and convictions nor the ready agenda would have prevailed under adverse conditions. But in 1965 conditions could not have been more auspicious for domestic reform. Sustained economic growth combined with a relative stability of prices had strengthened a conviction that affluence was inevitable. Moreover, there was still a general desire for the re-establishment of some form of shared national purpose: a sentiment that had formed the theme of Kennedy’s successful 1960 campaign. The absence of paramount domestic divisions made it unnecessary for him to take positions that would have aroused the kind of opposition that would have extended beyond the issues themselves to him and his administration. Economic conditions and, even more, established economic expectations made it possible to convince people that the poor and disadvantaged could be helped and that national problems—conditions of urban life, disintegration of the natural environment, transportation facilities, etc.—could be resolved without requiring any group to sacrifice income or significant interests.
Finally, there was the influence of Johnson’s own leadership—his natural capacities and unequaled knowledge of Congress, which enabled him to confound the traditional relationship between President and Congress, mixing the two so that both branches were involved in the acts of proposing and disposing. Moreover, the familiar resources of the presidential institution enabled him to provide a great variety of benefits and services that would create obligation and various degrees of dependency. Most importantly, as President, Johnson could now bargain directly with leaders of powerful interest groups—business executives, leaders of financial communities, union chiefs, the acknowledged spokesmen for minority groups, etc. As President, he could virtually command their presence, allowing him to exert his formidable personal powers. Even more significantly, every important group in the society was affected by the activities of the federal government, especially by the executive branch Johnson commanded. Thus every encounter also involved an awareness—rarely, if ever, expressed—of mutual interest more direct and specific than their shared patriotism and belief in the American dream. Thus Johnson was able to enlist support, or, at the least, mute potential opposition, from those interest groups whose views could influence the decisions of Congress. They were important, not just because of their wealth or numbers, but because there was no member of Congress whose political base was not subject to the influence of one or more of them. As President, Johnson could thus do what he could not do in the Senate—extend his reach to the foundation and source of office.
Of course, without general public support this would have been to no avail. But the aspect of consensus politics that made effective performance possible was a consensus among a limited number of special groups, whose leaders could be identified, making possible the personal contact that was the medium through which Johnson could make the most effective use of his personal powers and tangible resources—to persuade, convince, bargain, obligate, or coerce. As long as the objective was congressional action—the passage of legislation—the presidential institution enormously increased the effectiveness of behavior that had been successful in other contexts.
In particular, in the area of civil rights Johnson’s legacy is clear: his position on racial issues was more advanced than that of any other American President; had he done nothing else in his entire life, his contributions to civil rights would have earned him a lasting place in the annals of history.
But if the modern Presidency permitted Johnson an unparalleled authority in domestic affairs for the successful exercise of his qualities and abilities, modes of conduct and methods of exercising power, it also permitted an equally unparalleled failure when those same qualities and patterns of behavior were applied where all Johnson’s talents and skills were not merely inadequate but irrelevant and, even more, counterproductive.
Lyndon Johnson did not create the framework within which his country defined its commitment to South Vietnam. That framework, developed in the space of more than twenty years by three previous Presidents and their many advisers, rested on a series of assumptions derived from historical experience: the experience of World War II and the events that precipitated it; the initial confrontations between the Soviet Union and the United States; the fear of making concessions to adversary powers; the identification of the potentially dangerous power—the Soviet Union—with the ideology of Communism, an identification which required that any political leader or insurgent chief who called himself a Communist was simply an extension of Soviet power.
Of course, experience was not all so one-sided. We had resigned ourselves to the “loss” of Eastern Europe and China, accepted stalemate in Korea, refused to intervene in Indochina; in other words, had shown that our policies, the underlying convictions, and their sometimes violent expression by leaders such as Dulles had not destroyed our ability to assess realities, and to accept limits imposed by the calculation of practical possibilities.
But the institutional structure Johnson inherited in 1963–1964 narrowed access to the information and perceptions that might have placed Vietnam in one of the above categories. All Johnson’s principal advisers agreed on the critical nature of the goal of a non-Communist Vietnam, on the interpretation of the internal struggle as a struggle against Communism, and on the possibility of achieving that goal with gradual escalation short of large-scale war.
Clearly, Johnson’s own qualities influenced his initial decision to escalate. In domestic affairs, particularly in the passage of legislation, he was used to grasping practical realities first and then adapting his goals to those realities. But his lack of intimate knowledge about foreign policy and Vietnam led him to rely, instead, on the goals and principles themselves, losing sight of the question of available means. The failure to ask “Will it work?” was reinforced by a pristine concept of foreign policy as an arena of choice that should be removed from ordinary political consideration. Therefore his means were subordinated to his ends; his ends became his means. Lack of experience and confidence also produced in Johnson an unquestioning acceptance of the “experts’” advice, something he would never have accorded to anyone in domestic affairs. Moreover, Johnson’s adversary in Vietnam—unlike nearly all his opponents at home—was unwilling to bargain. Even if Johnson had been able to sit down with Ho Chi Minh, there was nothing to talk about so long as the goals of the two countries remained irreconcilable. So, faced with a situation he could not control and an adversary who was unwilling to bargain, Johnson would force him to bargain. And since he could not compel in his usual way—the denial of rewards or necessities—he was forced to act more directly, in this case with the only instrument of compulsion he had: military force. And, given his character, that force would be exercised in graduated degrees (thus avoiding the even more uncontrollable situation of all-out war).
To say Johnson’s qualities were expressed in the decision to escalate is not, however, to say that his character caused that decision. On the contrary, in late 1964 and early 1965, as we have seen, all the relevant elements of the governing process moved in the same direction, making it impossible to filter out the particular weight of personality. Indeed, given the momentum, the necessity of choice—since at this point not choosing would have meant turning South Vietnam over to the Communists—and the consistency of advice from almost every corner, it is easy to imagine many other Presidents, acting under very different internal compulsions, making the same decision.
The influence of Johnson’s personality on the decision-making in Vietnam is easier to observe in his conduct of the war—in the decision to conceal its nature and extent from the American people. Here the advice was not unanimous; indeed, most of Johnson’s principal advisers recommended a different course from the one Johnson chose, urging him to go to the Congress, declare a state of emergency, and put the economy on a wartime footing. Johnson refused, opting instead to hide the costs of the war in the Defense Department budget, keeping the pretense of a peacetime economy, and letting the public know as little as possible about the nature and extent of the war—all of which he assumed would allow the Great Society to continue on course.
This decision was Lyndon Johnson’s decision. It is easy to imagine another President, less concerned with domestic reform, more capable of choosing between goals, less confident of his ability to move in contradictory directions at the same time, less experienced in the arts of secrecy, deciding differently. Indeed, this decision seems almost to sum up the character of the man. The very qualities and experiences that had led to his political and legislative success were precisely those that now operated to destroy him. His tendency to resolve conflict instead of accepting it—responsible for his rise to power and his success in the Senate—now led him to manipulate and orchestrate the political process in order to shape a formula that could accommodate both the Great Society and Vietnam. Years of experience in gaining and exercising power had taught Johnson that the leader could move in contradictory directions at the same time so long as he compartmentalized everything he did and kept his dealings with one group secret from those with the next. Finally, the bipartisan tradition in foreign policy, responsible for producing consensus behind World War II and the Marshall Plan, now led to the conclusion that complicated decisions of foreign policy should be left in the hands of the leaders; the people would only be hurt by knowing too much.
As it turned out, however, the people were not hurt by knowing too much; Lyndon Johnson was hurt by knowing too little. The loss of public debate on the war lessened the possibilities of judgment, depriving Johnson of the chance to test various responses to different policies and of the opportunity to dispel misconceptions. Nor, in the absence of any clear understanding of the goals in Vietnam, could he expect to sustain the public’s support.
He had hoped that a middle course at home and abroad would secure his place in history as a leader of war and a leader of peace. Instead, halfway measures on both fronts produced a condition of half-war and half-peace which satisfied no one and created resentments on all sides.
Moreover, the failure to increase taxes produced inflation, which produced, in turn, a squeeze on moneys for the Great Society instead of the steadily expanding supply of resources Johnson had originally promised. (At this stage of the Great Society, the difficulties Johnson experienced on questions of implementation were similar in nature to those that plagued him on Vietnam. Here, too, because he was so sure of the ends and because the persons involved in implementing the means were so far away, he underestimated the problems of making his programs work.) Furthermore, diversion from the Great Society was not only a question of economic resources; the war drained time, energy, and attention as well.
As the Great Society crumbled and the war continued with no end in sight, Johnson’s popularity began to drop. The effective performer was no longer performing effectively, and once that measure of favorable judgment was gone, there was nothing else on which to base his relations with the people—except all those qualities he had never trusted: public advocacy, personal integrity, credibility.
Gradually, and for almost the first time, Johnson now found himself amid events and men he could not master: Vietnam and the Kennedys, and, later, the press, Congress, and even the public whose approval was all he could experience of love. One could have anticipated the result. As his defenses weakened, long-suppressed instincts broke through to assault the carefully developed skills and judgment of a lifetime. The attack was not completely successful. The man was too strong for that. Most of Johnson—the outer man, the spheres of conscious thought and action—remained intact, for most of the time. But in some ways, increasingly obvious to his close associates, he began to crumble; the suspicions congenital to his nature became delusions; calculated deceit became self-deception, and then matters of unquestioned belief.
Moreover, Johnson was aided—or, more accurately, hurt—in this process of deception by the nature of the institutional relationships around him. The White House itself—as opposed to the Senate—was not manned by individuals with independent political bases and formal authority. Here Johnson was in command, and, expectedly, the coercive aspects of his nature manifested themselves. He could impose his will much more directly upon colleagues—members of his staff and of his Cabinet—whose positions and power within the government rested primarily on him. Of course, he, in turn, depended on the abilities of these men, but that meant that the only hold they had was the right to resign. And it was not much of a hold. For Johnson knew that few men easily relinquished their high positions in government. Both Johnson and his subordinates knew that resignation involved forfeiting recognized status and power in return only for escape. Under these conditions, the independence of the Cabinet members and of those in charge of the most important White House functions was gradually reduced. The President’s will, once expressed, was not challenged. Advisers began to anticipate his reactions before they said or did anything; self-deceptions multiplied in this hall of distorting mirrors. The more Johnson’s energies turned to his critics, the more obsessed he became with the need to discredit his opponents, the less anyone tried to stop him.
Nor did the President have to listen to the Congress so long as it continued, out of tradition, habit, and deference, to appropriate funds for the war, and so long as it refused to take a single vote on the war itself. Nor—for three years—did any other external force break through. Surrounded by the White House staff, cocooned in an institutional framework protecting him from the outside world (his schedule, secretaries, planes and cars), Johnson effectively insulated himself from information he did not want to hear.
But there was a limit to Johnson’s insulation and his self-defeating belief in the possibility of turning the corner in Vietnam. The Tet offensive and the presidential primaries changed the framework within which Johnson had to work. Finally, the checks and balances of the political system came back into play.
Forced to confront a precipitous drop in his public standing, a sharp shift in editorial reaction, and the loss of support from key-interest-group leaders, Johnson finally accepted the fact that he was in a situation he could no longer control and that further escalation would produce only more uncontrollability. Faced at the same time with loss of love and gratitude on what seemed an irretrievable scale, Johnson had no choice but to withdraw. Nor did he have any choice but to believe, since he had to believe it in order to survive, that eventually his withdrawal would make possible even more control over and more love from history—the only constituency that really mattered in the end.
III GENERAL CONCLUSIONS
Lyndon Johnson’s public career, with the exception of a single election defeat, was one of uninterrupted and unparalleled success in the accumulation of power and—although with less consistency—in the use of power to achieve practical results. This implies that varied repositories of public authority share common elements of structure, which are, moreover, relatively resistant to rapid historical change. Our examination of Johnson’s leadership proved to be a study not only of particular institutions but of attributes and vulnerabilities which are common to several institutions, and which, therefore, probably derive from the more comprehensive institutional processes of politics and government.
I offer these general observations more by way of suggestion than conclusion, but useful, perhaps, in framing questions that might enable us to understand better the relationship between leaders and the qualities of leadership, events and historical circumstances, and institutional structure. I offer these as only a few possibilities. The reader hopefully will see many more.
First: Different institutions reward different qualities—although what constitutes “reward” depends not only on the institution but upon the nature of the individual leader’s ambitions. Neither John Kennedy nor Richard Nixon wanted to become a great Senate leader; to them the Senate was a useful platform, though not the only one possible, to advance their careers. Of equal importance, the abilities and characteristic modes of conduct of both men kept them from attempting to become powerful Senate leaders, and would have kept them from accomplishing such an objective.
Johnson, on the other hand, in psychic nature, modes of conduct, and natural abilities, possessed all the qualifications required by the structure in the Senate as it existed at a particular moment for becoming an enormously powerful leader. The institution rewarded his qualities, and that reward was the object of his ambitions. Of course, he, too, had higher aspirations. But his qualities, forms of conduct, the demands and fears that were an aspect of his nature seemed to foreclose other routes. He had to depend, as he always had, upon effective performance—which meant controlling his institutional environment. He was further restrained by the fact that this performance not only was his means of advancing his ambition but was also an end in itself, and he was not capable of risking it for actions that might seem to enhance his chances for more significant power in another institution.
In fact, the qualities the Senate rewarded were not adapted to the institutional process of presidential nomination nor, probably, to that of presidential election, for it was unlikely that Johnson could have moved from Majority Leader to election as President on his own.
Not only do institutions reward different qualities, but their demands are often contradictory. The same qualities and capacities that make success probable in one setting may be inconsistent with success in another setting. Johnson was fortunate that conditions in 1964 and 1965 permitted him to use many of the abilities and qualities with which he had mastered the legislative process to conduct his Presidency with some success. However, when circumstances changed, these capacities proved ill-suited to the Presidency, which was a vastly different institution. He could not lead or inspire the nation by secret deals; he did not understand foreign policy; he could not deal with conflicts taking place in a setting where he could not establish personal detailed knowledge of the problems and the participants; and the same search for control that gave such force and direction to his legislative career caused him now to move toward coercive action and to transform the executive branch into a personal instrument, and a weapon for concealing facts and policies from other branches of government and the people.
Of course, Johnson was unique, as was his career. However, that career suggests that many of the qualities that make for success in the legislative branch—compromise, avoidance of conflict, secrecy, the effort to submerge personal responsibility for success or failure in a collective body, the vision of law as the end of the process, etc.—may be contradictory to those required for effective national leadership: indeed, that a career in the legislative process may inculcate modes of behavior or strengthen existing qualities inconsistent with the nature of the presidential institution. This conjecture, which I believe to be true, is of special importance at a time when the Congress has become a significant platform for presidential candidates.
However, it demonstrates the fact that talent for public life is not a unity, but that there are distinct, often contradictory, talents, which are relevant to success in one area of public life and not in another. This is important in assessing not only whether a leader is likely to achieve his ambitions in a particular setting, but—more significantly—whether his leadership is likely to benefit or damage the country.
Second: Johnson demonstrated hitherto unsuspected powers in the executive branch. There was, as many have observed, a growing evolution toward concentration of power in that branch. However, Johnson did not merely continue this evolution. He gave it a new dimension. Previous evolution had rested on changing circumstances, e.g., federal intervention in economic policy and problems of public welfare, the growing significance of foreign policy, the size of the defense establishment, involvement in war, etc. For the most part, this expanding power was exercised with the knowledge and acquiescence of Congress and the informed public. Johnson discovered that the resources of the Presidency allowed him to conceal much of the exercise of power; that presidential authority could be exerted on the basis of undisclosed information and the private interpretation of information; indeed, that in many cases even presidential actions and decisions could be concealed. Of course, the effects of many such decisions would eventually become visible, thus revealing the decision itself. But not all. Moreover, concealment of the decision-making process shut out the opportunity for public discussion that is an essential part of the institutional process in our representative democracy. Johnson’s actions became known because they were directed toward public goals, their objectives were of a public nature, and, hence, their effects would inevitably be revealed. Nixon illustrated how this power of concealment could be used for other kinds of objectives so that the probability of continuing concealment was increased. The development or discovery of a capacity to exercise substantial executive power in secret is not simply an increase in the power of the Presidency; it represents a change in the relationship of institutions within the constitutional framework, a change which, in some part, has the potential of moving the presidential institution outside the framework itself.
Third: This aspect of institutional change, developed under Johnson, and reinforced by the fate of the Nixon administration, suggests that the most effective checks on presidential power are not the institutions that form the constitutional system of “checks and balances.” They are the media and public opinion, catalyzed, in Johnson’s case, by the presidential primaries. In both administrations these nongovernmental institutions were more effective restraints on presidential actions and usurpations than established governmental institutions.
Fourth: Johnson’s career also helps to reaffirm the significance, probably the necessity, of consensus politics to effective presidential leadership. Historically, the only exceptions have been under special conditions—depression under Roosevelt, shifts and growth of population under Jackson—which produced large popular majorities whose interests were opposed to those protected by the dominant structure of economic and political power. Jefferson, after all, moved to placate the Federalists, even at the cost of disappointing some of his Republican followers, while Theodore Roosevelt took steps to placate his business supporters even while establishing a reputation as a trust buster. Johnson, however, showed that consensus could be a foundation for an extensive program of domestic reform even at a time when there were no serious class hostilities nor any economic crisis. That accomplishment requires a modification of what is meant by “consensus,” or, rather, a recognition that the term is susceptible to different definitions. Eisenhower’s consensus consisted of the fact that a large popular majority was satisfied with his policies, and no substantial proportion of the population was urging him in another direction. Under Johnson as well, there was no significant movement for domestic reform (with the exception, for a time, of the civil rights movement). He himself was the initiating force. Admittedly, the absence of serious division, and favorable economic conditions, made it possible for him to initiate such a program. However, he also saw that consensus did not require him to marshal public enthusiasm and support. He would achieve consensus among groups of special interests and concerns, usually organized and with identifiable leaders, who could influence congressional action directly. And each program required a different kind of appeal to different kinds of groups. By persuading religious and educational associations, he could remove obstacles to a program for aiding education. Certain programs of public welfare required union support and the willingness of business groups to, at least, withdraw opposition. Thus, in a manner similar to the way in which he imposed his will in the Senate, he constructed a consensus from an assembly of particular groups and interests, most of them led by individuals with whom he could deal directly. He created an interlocking web of services and obligations. Finally, many were willing to support particular programs about which they had reservations because they believed that, on the whole, Johnson’s program was good for them and for the country. It was a pluralistic consensus, an agreement among groups of limited, often contradictory interests. This consensus, Johnson knew, would shape the actions of Congress. Popular support, that other form of consensus, would be a consequence of achievement, not its source.
We cannot determine, however, the extent to which Johnson had developed a method for public action that can be applied in other situations, and how much its effectiveness depended upon his unique qualities and capacities. And of course, events during the last years of his administration showed that even a consensus built on majority support and the desire for action cannot survive serious public divisions.
Fifth: Johnson’s career also provides further evidence that the basic qualities of a leader do not change when he assumes new and larger responsibilities. It is more a metaphor than an accurate description to say, for example, that a man “grows” in office. Of course, individuals do learn from experience—some better than others, and some become more skillful. But basic abilities, ambitions grounded on inner needs, modes of conduct, and inclinations of behavior are deeply and permanently embedded. It may be that these qualities cannot be displayed in a particular setting, or are not suited to achievement within a particular institutional framework and/or under certain historical conditions; yet in another place they can be the basis of accomplishments and actions that others would not have anticipated. One thinks of Truman. Or it may be that the widened constituency of the Presidency allows a broadening of goals. Yet, while Johnson’s landslide victory did stretch his aspirations, it did not change the essential elements of his behavior. Even his possession of the most powerful office in the country did not diminish his need to extend control or increase his capacity to deal with certain kinds of conflict or resistance. All his newly acquired ability to command did not reduce his drive to coerce. And under the right conditions, these qualities, which many had seen in him previously, were bound to emerge. And just as great office could magnify, if not change, his strength, so it could disastrously extend the consequences of his flaws. So, too, we discovered that the new Nixon was the old Nixon with much more power.
Therefore the best evidence of what can be expected of a candidate for high office—especially the Presidency—can better be found in an examination of his pattern of activity at other stages of his public life than in his statements or goals, and particularly in situations of stress, when he was confronted with difficult decisions that were bound to affect his ambitions, his leadership, and his concept of himself.
Sixth: The dilemma of the modern Presidency is not as simple as the contemporary talk of the imperial President suggests. Admittedly, the presidential institution has widened in power, as has the capacity of the President to concentrate that power in his own hands—a consequence less of tyranny than of the steady weakening of the various institutions designed to check the President—the Cabinet, the Congress, and the party. But the same centralization of resources that allows an almost unconstrained initiation of policies in some areas (the making of war and peace) and the exercise of almost unilateral authority in others (the dropping of bombs) incapacitates implementation of both domestic and foreign programs and eventually weakens the President’s ability to lead. With a weakened Cabinet, the President has less chance of controlling his vast bureaucracy; with a shattered party and diminished Congress, he is unable to command that restrained public support essential for the continued viability of both his policies and his leadership. Thus the concentration of resources is at once enabling and constricting; the analytical problem is to understand not only where the President is too strong but also where he is too weak; to delineate what is meant by strong and weak and to describe the curious relationship between the two.
Seventh: The President’s ability to focus national attention upon his every word and deed—which is made possible, and almost inescapable, by the nature of the national media—is a source of both power and illusion. And the same can be said of the enlarged White House staff and the use of a technological apparatus unparalleled in history. For five years, between 1963 and 1968, Lyndon Johnson dominated public life in Washington to such an extent that the Cabinet was his Cabinet, the Great Society his program, the Congress his instrument. With every technological innovation at his disposal, he could tape his own television shows, tell his pilots ten thousand miles away where and when to bomb, talk with the Soviet Premier on a moment’s notice, and fly around the world in less than two days. But the man in the center when things are good remains in the center when things go bad, and the resources technology provides are often illusory, substituting the sense of control for real control. Thus the war in Vietnam became Lyndon Johnson’s war; he personally was dropping the bombs, disrupting the economy, making prices rise, setting back the progress of black and poor. Obviously, neither image—villain or hero—is valid; historical circumstances and institutional conditions were vital to both success in the Great Society and failure in Vietnam. And this understanding is of more than intellectual interest, for exaggeration of the President’s personal powers (both self-induced and media propelled) is an inevitable source of frustration as the President’s actions invariably fall short of expectations, producing a destructive cycle for the man, the office, and the nation.