INTRODUCTION
When you come into the presence of a leader of men, you know you have come into the presence of fire; that it is best not incautiously to touch that man; that there is something that makes it dangerous to cross him.
—WOODROW WILSON
THE ROOM on the first floor of the Barbour County Courthouse in the little town of Eufaula, Alabama, was normally the County Clerk’s Office, but after it had closed for the day on August 2, 1957, it was being used by the county’s Board of Registrars, the body that registered citizens so they could vote in elections—not that the Board was going to register any of the three persons who were applying that day, for the skin of these applicants was black.
It was not a large room, and it was furnished very plainly. Its walls, white and in need of a fresh coat of paint, were adorned only by black-and-white photographs of former county officials. Against the rear wall stood a row of battered old filing cabinets that contained records of deeds and mortgages and applications for driver’s licenses, and in front of the cabinets were six small, utilitarian gray metal office desks, each with a small, worn chair. Then there was a waist-high wooden counter at which people doing business with the County Clerk’s Office usually stood. Today, the three registrars were standing behind the counter, and the applicants were standing in the bare space in front of it. No one offered them a chair, and the registrars didn’t bother to pull up chairs for themselves, because the hearing wasn’t going to take very long.
Trying to register to vote took courage for black people in Alabama in 1957, even when physical intimidation or violence wasn’t employed to discourage them—as it often was. Everyone knew about black men who had registered and who shortly thereafter had been told by their employers that they no longer had a job, or about black farmers who, the following spring, went to the bank as usual for their annual “crop loan”—the advance they needed to buy the seed for the crop they were planning to plant that year—only to be informed that this year there would be no loan, and who had therefore lost their farms, and had had to load their wives and children into their rundown cars and drive away, sometimes with no place to go. Indeed, David Frost, the husband of Margaret Frost, one of the three applicants that August day, would never forget how, after he himself had registered some years before, a white man had told him that “the white folks are the nigger’s friend as long as the nigger stays in his place,” but that “I had got out of my place if I was going to vote along with the white man,” and how, for months thereafter, instead of calling him “David” or “Boy” as they usually did, white people called him by the word he “just hated, hated”: “Nigger”—pronounced in Alabama dialect, “Nigra”—and how, when they learned he was planning to actually vote, a car filled with men had stopped in front of his house one night and shot out the porch lights, and how, cowering inside, he had thought of calling the police, until, as the car drove away, he saw it was a police car.
And of course there was the humiliation of the registration hearings themselves. Many county Boards of Registrars required black applicants to pass an oral test before they would be given the certificate of registration that would make them eligible to vote, and the questions were often on the hard side—name all of Alabama’s sixty-seven county judges; what was the date Oklahoma was admitted to the Union?—and sometimes very hard indeed: How many bubbles in a bar of soap?
The Barbour County registrars used a less sophisticated technique. They asked more reasonable questions—the names of local, state, and national officials—but if an applicant missed even one question, he would not be given the application that had to be filled out before he could receive a certificate, and somehow, even if a black applicant felt sure he had answered every question correctly, often the registrars would say there was one he had missed, although they would refuse to tell him which it was. Margaret Frost had already experienced this technique, for she had tried to register before—in January of 1957—and forty years later, when she was an elderly woman, she could still remember how, after she had answered several questions, the Board’s chairman, William (Beel) Stokes, had told her she had missed one, adding, “You all go home and study a little more,” and she could still remember how carefully blank the faces of Stokes and his two colleagues had been, the amusement showing only in their eyes.
Nonetheless, despite the humiliation of her earlier hearing in the County Clerk’s Office, Mrs. Frost—a soft-spoken woman of thirty-eight—had returned to that dingy room to stand in front of that counter again. “I was scared I would do something wrong,” she recalls. “I was nervous. Shaky. Scared that the white people would do something to me.” But, she says, “I wanted to be a citizen,” truly a part of her country, and she felt that voting was part of being a citizen. “I figure all citizens, you know, should be able to vote.” In the months since January, she had, with her husband asking her questions, studied, over and over, all the questions she felt the Board might ask, until she thought she would be able to answer every one. And on August 2, she put on her best clothes and went down to the courthouse again.
As it turned out, however, the diligence with which Margaret Frost had studied turned out to be irrelevant, because the Board examined her and the two other applicants as a group, and one of them wasn’t as well prepared as she.
When she asked Stokes for an application, he said, “There’s twelve questions you have to answer before we give you an application.” He asked just two. Mrs. Frost answered them both correctly, as did one of the other applicants. But the third applicant answered the second question incorrectly, and Stokes told them that therefore they had all failed. “You all go home and study a little more,” he said.
MARGARET FROST left the room quietly, and she never sued or took any other legal action to try to force the Board to register her. Doing so, however, would almost certainly not have helped. In August, 1957, black Americans in the South who were denied the right to vote, and who asked a lawyer (if they could find a lawyer who would take their case) what law would assist them to do so, were informed that there was no such law—and that information was accurate. Summarizing the situation, a study made that same year by the United States Department of Justice concluded that “There is no adequate legal remedy” for a person who had been denied a registration certificate by a county Board of Registrars.
The scene that had occurred in the Eufaula courthouse was not an unusual one in the American South in 1957. After the Civil War almost a century before, there had been an attempt to make black Americans more a part of their country, to give them the basic rights of citizens—which included, of course, a citizen’s right to vote—and in 1870, the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution had supposedly guaranteed that right, forbidding any state to “deny or abridge” the “right of citizens … to vote” because of their race or color. But the amendment proved to be an insufficient guarantee in the eleven southern states that had seceded from the Union and formed the rebel Confederacy; specific laws to give the amendment force and make it meaningful—federal laws, since there was no realistic possibility that any southern state would pass an effective statute—were going to be necessary. During the eighty-seven years since the Fifteenth Amendment had been ratified, scores, indeed hundreds, of proposed federal laws had been introduced in the Congress of the United States to ensure that black Americans would have in fact as well as theory the right to vote. Not one of these bills had passed. And in Barbour County, in which there were approximately equal numbers of black Americans and white Americans, out of 7,158 blacks of voting age in 1957, exactly 200—one out of thirty-five—had the right to vote, while 6,521 whites had that right. In Alabama as a whole, out of 516,336 blacks who were eligible to vote, only 52,336—little more than one out of ten—had managed to register. For the eleven southern states as a whole, out of more than six million blacks eligible to vote, only 1,200,000—one out of five—had registered. And of course, even those blacks who had registered to vote often didn’t dare go to the polls to cast ballots, because of fear of violence or economic retaliation. In 1957, there were scores of counties in the South which had tens of thousands of black residents, but in which, in some elections, not a single vote had been cast by a black.
THE ROOM in another city eight hundred miles to the northeast—in Washington, D.C.—was hardly more impressive than the Eufaula County Clerk’s Office. It was L-shaped, and the short leg of the L was lined with telephone booths only slightly larger than conventional booths and distinguished from them only by a small light bulb above each one that was lit when the booth was in use. The other leg—the main part of the room—was narrow and drab, its two long walls a pale tan in color and undecorated except for a few black-and-white lithographs and dull green draperies. Aside from a rickety little desk and a small fireplace on the right wall and a pair of swinging doors on the left, both walls were lined with couches and armchairs covered in cracked brown leather, and they were set so close together that their arms almost touched. On the room’s far wall, however, was a feature that didn’t fit in with the rest of the furnishings: a huge mirror. Twice as tall as a man and wide enough to fill almost the entire wall, bordered in a broad frame of heavy gold leaf, it was a mirror out of another age, a mirror large enough for a man to watch as he swirled a cloak around himself and to check the way it sat on his shoulders—or, having removed the cloak and handed it to a waiting pageboy, to check every detail of his appearance before he pushed open those swinging doors. And when those doors swung open, suddenly, framed between them in the instant before they swung shut again, were long arcs of darkly glowing mahogany, semi-circles of desks whose deep reddish-brown surfaces had been burnished so highly that they gleamed richly with the reflection of lights in the ceiling high above them. There were ninety-six desks. The narrow room, drab though it was, was one of the cloakrooms, the Democratic cloakroom, of the United States Senate.
The cloakroom was generally rather empty, a comfortable, comradely place whose manners as well as furniture resembled those of a men’s club (the only woman among the ninety-six senators was a Republican), a place of handshaking and backslapping and bluff camaraderie; a sleepy place—literally sleepy, since among the dozen or so senators present on a typical afternoon, several elderly men might be taking naps in the armchairs. In that August of 1957, however, the cloakroom was often crowded, with senators talking earnestly on sofas and standing in animated little groups, and sometimes the glances between various groups were not comradely at all—sometimes, in fact, they glinted with a barely concealed hostility, and the narrow room simmered with tension, for the main issue before the Senate that summer was civil rights, a proposed law intended to make voting easier for millions of black Americans like Margaret Frost, and the liberals among the Democratic senators were grimly determined to pass that law, and the southerners among the Democrats were grimly determined that it should not be passed.
The liberals in the Democratic cloakroom—the majority cloakroom; there were forty-nine Democratic senators in 1957 and forty-seven Republicans—included some of the great figures of the fight for social justice in America in the middle of the twentieth century. Among them was Hubert Horatio Humphrey of Minnesota, who as a crusading young mayor had courageously fought not only underworld gambling interests but the racial and religious bias that had made Minneapolis “the anti-Semitism capital of America”—one of the mightiest orators of his generation, he had, in the face of warnings that he was fatally damaging his career, delivered one of the most memorable convention addresses in the nation’s history, a speech that roused the 1948 Democratic National Convention to defy the wishes of its leaders and adopt a tough civil rights plank. Among the other liberals in the cloakroom were white-maned Paul Douglas of Illinois, war hero and renowned professor of economics, who had battled for rights for black Americans on a dozen fronts with the same unwavering independence with which he had taken on Chicago’s rapacious public utilities and corrupt political machine, and Estes Kefauver, who had won his Senate seat by defeating Tennessee’s notorious, venal—and racist—Crump Machine. Among them, too, was a younger senator who would become a great figure: John Fitzgerald Kennedy of Massachusetts.
With the exception of Kennedy, the names of these senators, and of others, too—Wayne Morse of Oregon, Stuart Symington of Missouri, Frank Church of Idaho, Henry (Scoop) Jackson of Washington—would be all but forgotten forty years later, when this book was being written, so exclusively had the history of America come to be thought of in terms of America’s Presidents, but in 1957, these men were icons of the liberal cause. In their ranks were eloquent orators, profound believers in social justice, senators of principles and ideals. Their ranks included senators who had long stood staunchly for the rights of man. And now, in 1957, these heroes of liberalism were united behind the latest civil rights bill, all of them determined that this year, at last, a civil rights bill would be passed.
Yet, eloquent though they were, courageous and determined though they were, honorable as their motives may have been, these men had been eloquent, courageous, determined and honorable in many previous fights for civil rights legislation, and each time they had lost. If, for eighty-seven years, every attempt to enact federal voting rights legislation had been blocked in Congress, most of the more significant of these bills had been blocked in the Senate, for it was in the Senate that the power of what had come to be called the “Southern Bloc”—the congressional delegations from the eleven former Confederate states—was strongest. And the situation was virtually the same with the Fourteenth Amendment, which had been passed two years before the Fifteenth—in 1868—supposedly to guarantee black Americans “the equal protection of the law” in areas of life outside the voting booth. During the intervening decades, generations of senators committed to the rights of black Americans—Progressives, reformers, liberals; from Charles Sumner of the mid-nineteenth century to Herbert Lehman of the mid-twentieth—had attempted to pass laws that would make that amendment effective. Hundreds of pieces of legislation had been proposed—bills to give black Americans equality in education, in employment, in housing, in transportation, in public accommodations, as well as to protect them against being beaten, and burned, and mutilated—against the mob violence called “lynching.” Exactly one of those bills had passed—in 1875—and that lone statute had later been declared unconstitutional. It was not, therefore, only in the area of voting rights that black Americans had been denied the help of the law. No civil rights legislation of any type had been written permanently into the statute books of the United States since the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment. And, despite the determination that this latest generation of liberal senators had displayed in the civil rights battles they had waged in recent years, not only had they been unable to reach their goal, they were not getting closer to it; rather, it was receding from them. In the last battle—in the previous year, 1956—not only had a civil rights bill been crushed in the Senate, it had been crushed by a margin greater than ever before.
In this summer of 1957, it seemed all but certain that the liberals—and the black Americans like Margaret Frost for whom they were fighting—were going to lose again. Among Democratic senators, it was not the liberals who held the power in the Senate; it was the senators who stood in their own, separate groups: the southerners. Of the eight most powerful Senate committees, the southerners held the chairmanships of five; another was held by a dependable ally of the South. And the southerners were led by a senator, Richard Brevard Russell of Georgia, who during a quarter of a century in the Senate had never lost a civil rights fight, a legislative strategist so masterful that he had, in long years of uninterrupted victory, been called the South’s greatest general since Robert E. Lee. Russell was a senator whose name is also all but lost to history, so that most Americans touring Washington today hardly know for whom the “Russell Senate Office Building” is named, but during his years in the Senate he was a figure so towering that an admiring journalist would recall years later, “Back then, when the U.S. got into trouble and Truman or Ike or Kennedy asked for help, Russell would gather up his six-foot frame, stick a forefinger into his somber vest and amble down those dim corridors to see if he could help his country. Everybody watching felt better when he arrived.”
• • •
IN THE CLOAKROOM AS WELL, however, standing near its center, the focus of activity in it, was another senator, the Democratic Leader and hence the Senate’s Majority Leader, Lyndon Baines Johnson.
He was not a member of the liberal faction, far from it. His state, Texas, had been one of the eleven Confederate states, and his accent was often (not always, for his accent changed depending on whom he was talking to) the same syrupy southern drawl as that of the Barbour County registrar, and he used many of the same words and phrases—including the word that David Frost hated; Lyndon Johnson was, in fact, using that word a lot in the Democratic cloakroom that Summer. “Be ready to take up the goddamned nigra bill again,” he told one of the southern senators, Sam Ervin of North Carolina. Walking over to a group of southerners, he told them there was no choice but to take it up, and to pass at least part of it. “I’m on your side, not theirs,” he told them. “But be practical. We’ve got to give the goddamned niggers something.” “Listen,” he told James Eastland of Mississippi, who was anxious to adjourn for the year, “we might as well face it. We’re not gonna be able to get out of here until we’ve got some kind of nigger bill.”
Johnson’s voting record—a record twenty years long, dating back to his arrival in the House of Representatives in 1937 and continuing up to that very day—was consistent with the accent and the word. During those twenty years, he had never supported civil rights legislation—any civil rights legislation. In Senate and House alike, his record was an unbroken one of votes against every civil rights bill that had ever come to a vote: against voting rights bills; against bills that would have struck at job discrimination and at segregation in other areas of American life; even against bills that would have protected blacks from lynching. His first speech in the Senate—a ringing defense of the filibuster that was a key southern tactic—had opened with the words “We of the South,” and thereafter, as this book will demonstrate, he had been not merely a member of the Senate’s southern anti-civil rights bloc, but an active member; not merely one of the senatorial “sentries” whom Richard Russell deployed on the floor to make sure that the liberals could not sneak a bill through (although he was a vigilant sentry), but one of the South’s strategists. He had been raised to power by the Southern Bloc, had been elected Democratic Leader through its support. He was, in fact, the protégé, the anointed successor, of the bloc’s great general, the senator Richard Russell had chosen to carry its banner when he himself should one day be forced to lay it down.
Johnson’s methods, moreover, were different from the methods of the liberals, not a few of whom disliked and deeply distrusted him. They spoke of principles and ideals—the traumas of his youth had made him despise men who spoke in such abstractions; calling them “crazies” and “bomb-throwers,” he cut off their attempts to move conversations to high ground by saying, “It’s not the job of a politician to go around saying principled things.” While they spoke of kindness, compassion, decency, he had already displayed a pragmatism and ruthlessness striking even to Washington insiders who had thought themselves calloused to the pragmatism of politics. While the Douglases and Humphreys spoke of truth and honor, he was deceitful, and proud of it: at that moment, in the Democratic cloakroom, as he talked first to a liberal, then to a conservative, walked over first to a southern group and then to a northern, he was telling liberals one thing, conservatives the opposite, and asserting both positions with equal, and seemingly total, conviction. Tough politicians though some of the liberals were, they felt themselves bound, to one degree or another, by at least some fundamental rules of conduct; he seemed to feel himself bound by nothing; he had to win every fight in which he became involved, said men and women who had known him for a long time—“had to win, had to!”—and to win he sometimes committed acts of great cruelty.
But he was about to become—beginning in that summer of 1957—the greatest champion that the liberal senators, and Margaret Frost and the millions of other black Americans, had had since, almost a century before, there had been a President named Lincoln.
THIS BOOK is in part the story of that man, Lyndon Baines Johnson. He is not yet the thirty-sixth President of the United States, but a senator—at the beginning of the book, in 1949, the newly elected junior senator from Texas; then the Democratic Party’s Assistant Leader, then its Leader, and finally, in 1955, when the Democrats became the majority party in the Senate, the Senate’s Majority Leader. And the Lyndon Johnson of this book is very different from the man Americans would later come to know as President.
His physical appearance was strikingly different. He was a tall man—a shade under six feet four inches tall—with long arms, and heavily mottled hands so huge that they seemed to swallow the hands of other men, and a massive, powerful head; the back of his skull rose almost straight out of his neck with only a slight softening curve. His features were boldly dramatic: his face, framed by large ears with very long lobes, was a portrait in aggressiveness with its downward-hooking nose that jutted far out of it, its big, sharply pointed jaw that jutted out almost as far, and, under heavy black eyebrows, piercing eyes. But during his Senate years, he was much thinner than he would be as President. Because of his gargantuan appetite, and his repeated attempts at dieting, his weight was constantly rising and falling, but as a senator, he usually weighed scores of pounds less than he would as President. Although his presidential weight was, as one aide puts it, “as closely guarded as a state secret” and he tried to conceal his girth with a heavy girdle, it was sometimes more than 240 pounds; in the Senate, it was generally far less—at the time of the 1957 civil rights fight, for example, he weighed about 180. And during his Senate years, not only did his body seem, in contrast with his presidential years, lean, hard, powerful, vibrant beneath his richly tailored suits, but, with nothing to blur their edges and soften them, the nose and jaw and eyes were even more prominent than they would be later. During the Senate years, furthermore, the furrows that care and time would later gouge cruelly deep into his cheeks and, in layer above layer, into his forehead were only beginning to appear. By the end of his presidency, the face of Lyndon Johnson, sixty years old when he left office, would be the face of a man harried, grim, beleaguered, and sometimes looking considerably older than his age; the face of Senate Leader Lyndon Johnson, in his forties for most of his senatorial years, was the face of a man confident, cocky, tough, the face of a man in the full flush of power.
It was, however, not in his appearance but in his manner that the contrast between President Johnson and Senator Johnson was most dramatic.
As President, conscious always of television, he tried to be what he conceived of as “presidential,” composed his face into a “dignified” (expressionless, immobile, carefully still) mask, spoke in deliberate cadences that he believed were “statesmanlike,” so that on television, which is where most Americans got to know him, he was stiff, stilted, colorless, unconvincing.
As Senator, he was the opposite.
Still was the last thing his face was then. The bold visage was as mobile as the face of a great actor; expressions—whimsical, quizzical, beseeching, demanding, pleading, threatening, cajoling—chased themselves across it as rapidly and vividly as if some master painter were painting new expressions on it; a “canvas face,” one journalist called it. It was a face that could be, one moment, suffused with a rage that made it a “thundercloud,” his mouth twisted into a snarl, his eyes narrowed into icy slits, and the next moment it could be covered with a sunny grin, the eyes crinkled up in companionable warmth. (Although there was, even in these moments, a wariness in those eyes.) He grinned a lot more often then, and he laughed a lot more often, and when he laughed, he roared, his mouth wide in a roar of laughter, the whole face a mask of mirth. And he was, when he needed to be, irresistibly charming, a storyteller with an extraordinary narrative gift, who could bring to dramatic life the drunks and hellfire preachers and lonely elderly farm wives of his native Texas Hill Country, and, because he was a remarkable mimic, the legendary figures of Washington as well: when he imitated Franklin Roosevelt, a fellow senator says, “you saw Roosevelt”; when he imitated Huey Long filibustering on the Senate floor, there was Huey in the flesh. He was a teller of tales that not only amused his listeners but convinced them, for when a point needed to be made, he often made it with a story—he had what a journalist calls “a genius for analogy”—made the point unforgettably, in dialect, in the rhythmic cadences of a great storyteller.
Still was the last thing his hands were. When, as President, he addressed the nation, they were often clasped and folded on the desk before him as if to emphasize the calmness and dignity he considered appropriately “presidential.” During his years as a senator, they were moving—always moving—in gestures as expressive as the face: extended, open and palms up, in entreaty, or closed in fists of rage, or—a long forefinger extended—jabbing out to make a point. Or they were making some gesture that brought a story vividly to life; Hubert Humphrey, recalling years later Lyndon Johnson explaining that “If you’re going to kill a snake with a hoe, you have to get it with one blow at the head,” said he would never forget “those hands that were just like a couple of great big shovels coming down.”
And, not on television but in person, he was, in the force of his personality, overwhelming. In the Senate’s cloakroom or its corridors or on the Senate floor, one thick arm would be around a fellow senator’s shoulders, pulling him close, and the other hand would be grabbing his colleague’s lapel, or straightening his tie, and then the forefinger of that hand would be poking his points forcefully into the senator’s chest. His face would be very close to the senator’s face, looming above it and forcing the other man’s head back, or, in a peculiar cocking gesture, turning sideways, and coming up under his colleague’s face. And all the time he would be talking, arguing, persuading, with emotion, belief, conviction that seemed to well up inside him and pour out of him—even if it poured out with equal conviction on opposite sides of the same issue; if Lyndon Johnson seemed even bigger than he was—“larger than life,” in the phrase so often used about him—it was not only because of the size of his huge body or his huge hands but because of his passions: burning, monumental. His magnetism drew men toward him, drew them along with him, made them follow where he led.
AND WHEN, on the floor, Lyndon Johnson was running the Senate, he put on a show so riveting that Capitol Hill had never seen anything like it during the previous century and a half of the Republic’s existence—as it has never seen anything like it since.
Tall and confident, with a gangling, awkward, but long and swinging stride, “the Western movie barging into the room,” in the words of one journalist—he would prowl the big chamber restlessly, moving up and down the aisles, back and forth along the rows of desks. Throwing himself down beside a senator who was sitting on one of the couches in the rear of the Chamber, he would talk to him out of the side of his mouth. Another colleague would enter. Jumping up, Johnson would hug him, joking with him or whispering earnestly in his ear. Moving over to a senator seated at a desk, and then to another, he would sit down beside a man or bend over him, sometimes with both his arms planted firmly on the target’s desk, so that he could not rise and get away. Taking another man by the arm, he would lead him off to one side of the Chamber, drape his arm around his shoulders, and begin whispering urgently. And when Lyndon Johnson was talking to one of his colleagues, his hands seemed never to stop moving, patting a senatorial shoulder, grasping a senatorial lapel, jabbing a senatorial chest—jabbing it harder and harder if the point was still not being taken—and then hugging the senator when it was. Or, if it wasn’t, the reporters in the Press Gallery above would see Johnson bending closer and talking in a very low voice—and they would see the other senator’s face change, as the threat was pounded in, along with Johnson’s determination to carry it out.
And then, at the climactic moments—the moments when the clerk called for the yeas and nays, and the Senate of the United States made its decision on whether to transform a bill into the law of the land—the power of Lyndon Johnson as Majority Leader was fully revealed, in a manner that veteran Senate watchers, accustomed, some of them over decades, to the body’s traditionally slow-paced, drowsy atmosphere and to the previous courtliness and decorum of its rituals, at first found all but incredible.
When after days of maneuvering, with votes changing back and forth and back again, Johnson suddenly had enough votes in hand for victory, so long as none of the votes changed again, he wanted the vote taken—immediately. His front-row center desk at the edge of the well below the dais was a step up from the well, and he was so tall that when he stood at his desk, his eyes were almost at a level with those of the presiding senator across the well. “Call the question!” Johnson would say—and if the senator did not respond fast enough, he would snarl at him, in a voice clearly audible in the gallery, “CALL THE QUESTION!”
And when the vote was taken, it was taken at the precise pace Lyndon Johnson wanted. Sometimes he had all his men there at the moment of the vote, and his opponents didn’t; sometimes he didn’t have all his men there—stragglers were still being rounded up, sometimes they hadn’t been found—so sometimes he wanted the roll call fast, and sometimes he wanted it slow. And he set the tempo accordingly. Standing at his desk, directly in front of the clerk calling the roll, Lyndon Johnson would raise his big right hand, and with the pen in his hand, or simply with a long forefinger, would make circles in the air, “like an airport mechanic signaling a pilot to rev up the motors,” as Time magazine put it. This signal to the clerk meant, as Johnson’s aide George Reedy would say, “hurry up—he had the votes and wanted them recorded” before the situation changed. Or he would make a downward shoving motion with his open hands, meaning “slow down”—“he didn’t have the votes but would get them if only he had a little more time.” Senators would be hurrying into the Chamber, crowding into the well. Lyndon Johnson would stand at the edge of the well—looking, because he was a step above the men in it, even bigger than he was, towering over the men before him—a long arm raised over them, making big circles, “for all the world,” as Time said, like “an orchestra conductor” leading the Senate the way a conductor led an obedient orchestra.
The journalists above marveled at what they were seeing. “It was a splendid sight,” Hugh Sidey would say. “This tall man with the canvas face, his mind attuned to every sight and sound and parliamentary nuance…. He signaled the roll calls faster or slower. He’d give a signal, and the door would open, and two more guys would run in. My God—running the world!”
THIS BOOK is also an examination of the particular type of power that Lyndon Johnson wielded in the Senate.
In an America that has been focused for most of the two centuries of its existence on executive, or presidential, power, legislative power, very different, is very little understood. But the life of Lyndon Johnson is a uniquely effective prism through which to examine that kind of power. When he arrived in the Senate, that institution had for decades been almost a joke—an object of ridicule to cartoonists and comedians, of frustration and despair to historians and political scientists. Hamstrung by archaic rules and customs which it was determined to keep unchanged, it seemed hopelessly unable to adapt to the new needs of a modern, more complex world, and its rigid adherence to a seniority system thoroughly drained it of energy and vitality and initiative while keeping in some of its most influential positions men so elderly that wags called it the “senility system.”
Among the main causes of senatorial inertia and impotence was the fact that its so-called “Leaders” had had no power over their colleagues: “I have nothing to promise them,” one of Johnson’s immediate predecessors as Majority Leader complained. “I have nothing to threaten them with.” But these Leaders were not Lyndon Johnson. “I do understand power, whatever else may be said about me,” he was to tell an assistant. “I know where to look for it, and how to use it.” That self-assessment was accurate. He looked for power in places where no previous Leader had thought to look for it—and he found it. And he created new powers, employing a startling ingenuity and imagination to transform parliamentary techniques and mechanisms of party control which had existed in rudimentary form, transforming them so completely that they became in effect new techniques and mechanisms. And he used these powers without restraint—as he did powers that had been used by Leaders before him, but that had seemed inconsequential because in their hands they had been used with restraint. Lyndon Johnson used all these powers with a pragmatism and ruthlessness that made them even more effective. Scoop Jackson would say that when Jack Kennedy, as President, urgently needed a senator’s vote, he would summon him to the Oval Office and “would explain precisely why the bill was so important and how much he needed the senator’s support.” If, however, the senator said his constituency would not permit him to give that support, that if he gave Kennedy the vote he needed, the vote might cost him his seat in the Senate, “Kennedy would finally say he was sorry they couldn’t agree, but he understood.” Lyndon Johnson, Jackson would say—and Jackson worked closely with Johnson as Representative and Senator for twenty-five years—Lyndon Johnson wouldn’t understand, would refuse to understand. He would “charm you or knock your block off, or bribe you or threaten you, anything to get your vote,” Jackson would say. He would do anything he had to, to get that vote. “And he’d get it. That was the difference.” Lyndon Johnson once told a friend: “I’m just like a fox. I can see the jugular in any man and go for it, but I always keep myself in rein. I keep myself on a leash, just like you would an animal.” That self-assessment is only half true. Power corrupts—that has been said and written so often that it has become a cliché. But what is never said, but is just as true, is that power reveals. When a man is climbing, trying to persuade others to give him power, he must conceal those traits that might make others reluctant to give it to him, that might even make them refuse to give it to him. Once the man has power, it is no longer necessary for him to hide those traits. In his use of power during his Senate years, Lyndon Johnson sometimes reined himself in—and sometimes he didn’t. He used the powers he found and the powers he created with a raw, elemental brutality. Studying something in its rawest and most elemental form makes its fundamental nature come clear, so an examination of these sources of power that Johnson discovered or created, and of his use of them, should furnish insights into the true nature of legislative power, and into its potentialities.
But it is not only depths that power reveals. Throughout Lyndon Johnson’s life, there had been hints of what he might do with great power, should he ever succeed in attaining it—bright threads gleaming in a dark tapestry: hints of compassion for the downtrodden, and of a passion to raise them up; hints that he might use power not only to manipulate others but to help others—to help, moreover, those who most needed help. No teacher in the “Mexican school” on the wrong side of the tracks in the desolate South Texas town of Cotulla had ever really cared if the Mexican children learned or not. Twenty-year-old Lyndon Johnson cared—cared, and helped. And the compassion had at least once been combined with a rare capacity to make compassion meaningful, a startling ability to mobilize the forces of government to fulfill what his father, an idealistic Populist legislator, had said was government’s most important function: to help people “caught in the tentacles of circumstance,” to help them fight forces too big for them to fight alone. As a twenty-eight-year-old congressman, Lyndon Johnson had seen what his two hundred thousand constituents, scattered on lonely farms and ranches, needed most: electricity to ease the terrible drudgery that was their lot because, without electricity, they had to do all farm chores by hand. And, against seemingly impossible odds, he had used federal agencies to “bring the lights” to the Texas Hill Country. So long as he was still seeking power, however, that passion had been subordinated to the passion for power—subordinated almost totally. Now, once he had acquired power in the Senate, the compassion, and the ability to make compassion meaningful, would shine forth at last.
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THIS BOOK must try to be an examination not only of legislative power, but of legislative genius. This type of political genius is very different—indeed, in some aspects, diametrically opposite to—presidential genius, and is also, in America, little understood. But in his creation of and use of legislative power, Lyndon Johnson proved himself to be possessed of a talent that was beyond talent—a rare, instinctive gift. Part of the nature of genius is to do something new and remarkable, something unique. That is what Lyndon Johnson did. At the time he arrived in the Senate, seniority governed all its workings. New members were not supposed to speak much, or at all, on the floor during their first year or two, and during the remainder of their first six-year term to speak only infrequently, and to participate in other Senate activities in a largely apprentice role. After his first two years in the Senate, Lyndon Johnson was Assistant Leader of his party. In another two years, while he was still in his first term, he became his party’s leader, the Democratic Leader of the Senate. Since the Democrats were in the minority, he was therefore Minority Leader. When, two years later, the Democrats became the majority, he became Majority Leader, the most powerful man in the Senate after just a single term there, the youngest Leader in history—after a rise unprecedented in its rapidity.
And it was not merely the velocity of his rise within the institution that was unique. He made the Senate work. It had worked—fulfilled the functions the Founding Fathers had designed it for—during the Republic’s early days, in the decades between its founding and its Civil War, when the “Great Triumvirate”—Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, and John C. Calhoun, none of them a party leader (the institution of Senate “Leaders” had not yet been created) but all three among the most celebrated Americans of their time—had strode the Senate floor together. But that had been a century earlier. Despite a few significant leaders—most notably, perhaps, the Republican Nelson Aldrich at the turn of the century and the Democrat Joseph Robinson in the 1930s (but even their power had been in the last analysis no more than the power of a first among equals)—the Senate hadn’t really worked since, falling more and more out of step with a constantly changing world. Lyndon Johnson transformed the Senate, pulled a nineteenth-century—indeed, in many respects an eighteenth-century—body into the twentieth century. It was not only men he bent to his will but an entire institution, one that had seemed, during its previous century and three-quarters of existence, stubbornly unbendable. Johnson accomplished this transformation not by the pronouncement or fiat or order that is the method of executive initiative, but out of the very nature and fabric of the legislative process itself. He was not only the youngest but the greatest Senate Leader in America’s history. His colleagues called him Leader. “Good morning, Leader,” they would say. “Could I have a minute of your time, Leader?” they would say. “Great job there, Mr. Leader.” “Mr. Leader, I never thought you could pull that one off.” And a Leader he was. He was master of the Senate—master of an institution that had never before had a master, and that at the time, almost half a century later, when this book is being written, has not had one since.
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PERHAPS THE CLEAREST illustration of this mastery was the struggle in which this entwining of personality and power was most vividly played out: the collision in 1957 between the seemingly irresistible political force that was Lyndon Baines Johnson and the seemingly immovable political object that was the United States Senate—the struggle in which Johnson used all his cunning, and all the power he had amassed, to accomplish what had seemed impossible to accomplish, the passage by the Senate of a civil rights bill.
For decade after decade, the Senate had been not only a joke, but a cruel joke. For almost a century, it had not merely embodied but had empowered, with an immense power, the forces of conservatism and reaction in America, had stood as an impregnable stronghold against which, decade after decade, successive waves of demand for social change, for governmental action to promote justice and to ease the burdens of impoverished and disadvantaged Americans, had dashed themselves in vain. At the beginning of 1957, the Senate still stood—as it had stood, with rare exceptions, since the founding of the Republic—as a defiant fortress barring the road to social justice. It stood, more particularly, as the stronghold of the South, of the cause that had been lost in the Civil War—and then, over the intervening decades since the war, had been won in the Senate. The Senate, William S. White, the body’s most prominent chronicler, wrote in 1956, is “the South’s unending revenge upon the North for Gettysburg.” Not just revenge,unendingrevenge. When the Senate convened in 1957, the gavels of its great standing committees were still overwhelmingly in the hands of the South, and no end to that revenge seemed in sight. And after the crushing of the 1956 civil rights bill by the largest margin in Senate history—a result in which Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson played a leading role—southern control of the Senate seemed firmer than ever; the 1956 defeat seemed to foreclose any chance of meaningful progress for black Americans for years to come. Never had the hope that blacks like Margaret Frost would be able to vote seemed further from any possibility of realization. In the Summer of 1957, however, Lyndon Johnson, in an abrupt and total reversal of his twenty-year record on civil rights, would push a civil rights bill, primarily a voting rights bill, through the Senate—would create the bill, really, so completely did he transform a confused and contradictory Administration measure that had no realistic chance of passage; would create it and then, in one of the most notable legislative feats in American history, would cajole and plead and threaten and lie, would use all his power and all his guile, all the awe in which his colleagues held him, and all the fear, to ram the bill through the Senate. It was, thanks to him, a bill that the House could also pass, and that the President could sign—the first civil rights legislation to be added to the statute books of the United States since 1870. The Civil Rights Act of 1957 made only a meagre advance toward social justice, and it is all but forgotten today, partly because it was dwarfed by the advances made under President Lyndon Johnson’s Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965. But it paved the way—its passage was necessary—for all that was to come. As its Leader, he made the Senate not only work, but work toward a noble end.
Icons of the fight for social justice—the Humphreys and Douglases and Lehmans and the generations of liberal senators before them, eloquent, courageous senators, men of principles and ideals—had been trying for decades to pass a civil rights bill, with absolutely no success. It was not until Lyndon Johnson, who had never before fought in their cause, picked up the banner of civil rights that it was carried at last nearer to its goal. It took a Lyndon Johnson, with his threats and deceits, with the relentlessness with which he insisted on victory and the savagery with which he fought for it, to ram that legislation through. As I wrote in the second volume of this work, “Abraham Lincoln struck off the chains of black Americans, but it was Lyndon Johnson who led them into voting booths, closed democracy’s sacred curtain behind them, placed their hands upon the lever that gave them a hold on their own destiny, made them, at last and forever, a true part of American political life.” His great voting rights legislation, the supreme accomplishment of his life and his career, would be passed during his presidency, of course; it was then that he most firmly took the hands of black Americans. But he first reached for their hands not as President, but in the Senate.
SO, FINALLY, this book is a study of—the story of—America’s Senate itself. For of all the remarkable aspects of the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1957, none is more remarkable than the fact that it was in the Senate that it was hammered into shape and passed.