13

“No Time for a Siesta”

WHEN RICHARD RUSSELL congratulated him on his victory over Leland Olds, Johnson replied: “I’m young and impressionable, so I just tried to do what the Old Master, the junior senator from Georgia, taught me to do.” And his note to the master included the most potent of code words: “Cloture is where you find it, sir, and this man Olds was an advocate of simple majority cloture on the gas producers.” Of all the spoils that Johnson reaped from his victory over Olds, perhaps the most valuable was the fact that it reinforced, and indeed heightened, Richard Russell’s favorable opinion of him, and not just of his philosophy—Communism was, of course, second only to civil rights on Russell’s list of the plagues that beset mankind—but of his potential.

In a previous engagement—the Civil Rights Battle of March 1949—and in the many small skirmishes of a Senate year, Johnson had shown Russell that he would be a loyal soldier for the Cause. Now, in the Olds engagement, Johnson had not only organized the forces against Olds, but had planned their strategy and tactics, led them on the field of battle. And the engagement had ended in victory—in the utter rout of the liberal forces. Was the South’s great general now beginning to feel that perhaps he had found not merely a soldier for the Cause, but something more: a leader for the Cause, a new general—someone who might one day be able to pick up its banner when he himself finally had to let it fall? It would not be for another year or so that Richard Russell began to hint at such a feeling, but there was, almost immediately after the 53–15 vote, impressive testimony to at least the warmth of his feelings for Johnson. The Senate adjourned for the year on October 19, six days after the Olds vote. Before he left for Texas, Johnson extended an invitation to Russell to join him there on a hunting trip in November. And Russell, who had turned down so many invitations to hunting trips, accepted this one.

Their destination was “St. Joe,” as it was known to the select few who were invited there—St. Joseph Island, the twenty-one-mile-long island in the Gulf of Mexico that had once been a fishing resort but had been purchased by Sid Richardson and turned into his own private island, on which he built a hunting lodge so luxurious that its cost embarrassed even him and he never revealed it.

Johnson had arranged a week-long stag party on St. Joe, and the stags were some of the biggest in the Texas business herd: not only Richardson but Clint Murchison, Amon Carter, Myron Blalock and, of course, Herman Brown. It was a group that held views quite similar to Russell’s on Communism and labor unions and Negroes and the importance of ending government interference with free enterprise, a group that had long considered Russell the leader of the good fight on these issues and had been looking forward to meeting him. Although none of them was noted for an interest in books, Russell found he had a lot to talk about with them, that conversation was, in fact, relaxed and easy, for they shared an interest, these hard, tough men who wanted so much from government, in politics. And with Herman Brown in particular—Herman who loved to talk not only about politics but about issues (and who didn’t want to talk about them with “some damned radical professor”), Herman who loathed Negroes and unions because Negroes were lazy and unions encouraged laziness in white men, Herman who called New Deal programs “gimmes” because they gave government handouts to lazy men who were always saying “gimme”—with Herman in particular Russell got along famously. And, of course, not only the perfectly arranged duck hunting and the strolls, in total privacy, along the beautiful beaches in the sun, but also the luxury of the accommodations, the deferential black retainers everywhere, the lavish dinners prepared by a chef flown in from New Orleans for the week, the long evenings after dinner in which a lot of Old Weller was consumed, added to the pleasantness of those days in the Gulf. For Dick Russell, who had just spent ten months in Washington with very little warmth in his life, it was a week basking in warmth, and in admiration—and the thank-you note he sent to Johnson from Winder showed how pleasant the week had been. “Dear Lyndon,” he wrote. “Ever since I reached home I have been wondering if I would wake up and find that I had just been dreaming that I had made a trip to Texas. Everything was so perfect that it is difficult to realize that it could happen in real life.”

And when, the next year, a great opportunity suddenly appeared, and Lyndon Johnson grabbed for it, Russell saw to it that Johnson got it.

THE FIRST HALF OF 1950 WAS SLOW. The desultory, now-familiar, Senate routine resumed—as did the extra-senatorial routine: the lunches and dinners at Bill White’s and Dave Botter’s to cultivate the press; the lunches and dinners to cultivate Rayburn (most notably a birthday lunch for the Speaker that Johnson, along with Representative Wright Patman, persuaded President Truman to attend as a surprise guest, and a boisterous dinner the Texas delegation threw for the Speaker at the Mayflower); the lunches and dinners to cultivate Rayburn’s nephew, FCC Chairman Robert Bartley: when the Congressional Club had a ladies’ tea, it was Ruth Bartley who was Lady Bird’s guest. (And there was the evening that Lyndon and Lady Bird, just the two of them, spent at the Speaker’s apartment, eating a dinner he had had sent in from Martin’s—a very happy evening for Mr. Sam.) Sunday brunches were still devoted to Russell, but during the first half of 1950 there was little Russell could do for him. Johnson’s main effort in the Senate, apart from routine Armed Services Committee work, ended in frustration when, in April, Truman vetoed a natural gas deregulation bill.

Making the first half of the year more difficult was the tension at the Georgetown dinner parties of his old circle caused by the Leland Olds hearing, and now aggravated by the stands he continued to take on civil rights issues—his vote, for example, against cloture when Truman tried again to make employment practices more fair. His relationship with the President, never warm, had been further chilled by the Olds fight. The White House, during the reign of Roosevelt so open to him, was now a place he visited only when the Speaker brought him along, which during the first six months of 1950 was exactly once. Otherwise, apart from a few group occasions like the Rayburn lunch, Lyndon Johnson saw Harry Truman mainly up on daises—on Capitol Hill as the President delivered his State of the Union address, at the National Guard Armory at the Jefferson-Jackson Day Dinner. He had come a long way, but he had a long, long way to go—and, it seemed, in that slow, slow Senate, as if it was going to take a very long time to get there; if there was a shortcut, he hadn’t found it. The buzzer summoning aides to his private office was sounding less often; he was starting to brood in there again; when he telephoned Tommy Corcoran or Jim Rowe, his voice was beginning again to be flat, a little listless.

FOR A FEW MEN IN WASHINGTON, the news came late Saturday night, June 24, in telephone calls like the one Assistant Secretary of State Dean Rusk received during a dinner party in Joseph Alsop’s home in Georgetown. Watching as Rusk listened to the message, Alsop saw “his face turn the color of an old-fashioned white bed sheet,” although all Rusk said, as he asked his host to make his apologies, was that there had been a rather serious “border incident” in South Korea. For the rest of Washington, including freshman Senator Lyndon Johnson, the news came, as the news of Pearl Harbor had come, on a quiet Sunday morning, in headlines and radio bulletins.

When Johnson telephoned Horace Busby’s house in suburban Chevy Chase that morning, Busby heard the difference in the Chief’s tone immediately. “He called me at ten, and we were still talking at noon,” Buzz would recall. “All of a sudden, he was energized. He came to life. Because he knew the territory. He was a creature of war. His whole life had been shaped in the buildup to World War II. He felt he knew what was necessary. He talked about China—would China come in? Would Russia come in? He knew the territory. He was back in command.”

Johnson’s involvement was not immediately requested, however. When, on Tuesday, with North Korean tanks rumbling down through South Korea, the President invited some forty congressional leaders to the White House, to inform them that he was dispatching United States air and naval forces to support the South Koreans, Johnson was not among them. He was just one of the crowd of senators and representatives who cheered the President’s statement when it was read on Capitol Hill, and he did not participate in the Senate debate on the “police action,” which took place on Wednesday.

But if you do everything, you’ll win. Johnson had already done something. The White House was concerned about adverse congressional reaction to Truman’s failure to ask congressional authorization to send in troops. In the event, despite tense moments—Robert Taft declared that the President had “usurped the power of Congress”—substantial reaction did not materialize; several senators were to write letters to the President expressing their support. Johnson did everything he could to make sure his letter would have the strongest possible impact on the President.

On Tuesday night, Busby recalls, “He called me at home and said I want you to draft a letter from me supporting him.” The tone of the letter had to be perfect, he said. And it had to get there first, before a letter from any other senator. He would get to the office early Wednesday morning, he told Busby, “and I want that letter on my desk when I get in. I want it on Truman’s desk when he gets there in the morning.” And, Busby says, “he called someone in Truman’s office to make sure the President would see it the minute he got in.”

Beginning “My dear Mr. President, I want to express to you my deep gratitude for and admiration of your courageous response yesterday to the challenge of this grave hour,” the letter spared no adjectives. Your leadership, Johnson told him, had been “inspired”; it would, he said, “be remembered as the finest moment of American maturity.” It “gives a new and noble meaning to freedom…. For the decisions you must face alone, you have my most sincere prayers and my total confidence. Under your leadership, I am sure peace will be restored and justice will assume new meaning for the oppressed and frightened peoples of the world.” And Truman replied in a “Dear Lyndon” letter with a tone more cordial than that in which he had responded to previous Johnson overtures. Some months later, talking with Johnson, the President would say, “I remember: you were the first Senator to support me.” “The first was very important,” Busby says. Although the relationship between Johnson and Truman would never be particularly warm (Margaret Truman says that her father “never quite trusted him”), a moderate thaw, with occasional reverses, can be dated from this exchange.

But getting closer to the President, important though that was, was not nearly as potentially significant as another opportunity Johnson saw in this moment—and for which he reached just as quickly. Still an obscure senator, he saw within hours, perhaps even more quickly, that America’s entry into the Korean War was a chance for him to assume the same role that had propelled Harry Truman into national prominence when he had been just an obscure senator.

Of course, Johnson knew the story: how Truman, just beginning his second term, still known only by the derisive title “the Senator from Prendergast,” had in January, 1941, become concerned about waste and mismanagement in America’s defense mobilization program and had persuaded the Senate to create a special committee to investigate the program, and, after Pearl Harbor, the war effort; how the “Truman Committee” had, with remarkable rapidity, become a national byword for its fairness and lack of partisan bias, as well as for the revelations it produced; so that when in 1944 Franklin Roosevelt was looking for a running mate, the chairman of “the most successful congressional investigating effort in American history” had sufficient stature to be chosen for the vice presidency that became the presidency. Everyone in Washington knew the story. Truman of the Truman Committee was the title of an inspiring political Horatio Alger saga. And, in a city in which so many men viewed great events at least partly through the lens of personal opportunity, many men—including many senators—saw very quickly how a new war, or even a “police action,” could provide the backdrop for a repeat version of the same scenario. But no one saw the opportunity as quickly as Lyndon Johnson. And no one moved as quickly—or as deftly—to take advantage of it.

Speed was necessary, for the odds against him getting the job were very long. For one thing, an investigation might well fall under the jurisdiction of the Senate’s Committee on Expenditures in Executive Departments, chaired by John McClellan. Had the powerful and prickly McClellan moved to assume jurisdiction, no senator would have opposed him. But McClellan didn’t move. Johnson did: he had an emissary, Truman’s Secretary of the Air Force, Stuart Symington, respectfully point something out to the President: Expenditures’ ranking Republican member, who would play a prominent role if that committee investigated the Administration’s war effort, was Joe McCarthy. With an election coming up and the Democrats by no means certain of retaining control of the Senate, McCarthy might, in fact, soon be the committee’s chairman. That possibility should be eliminated before anyone focused on it. Truman took the point. He was soon on the phone to Majority Leader Scott Lucas, to, in Busby’s words, “get an investigation started, and started quick, and put it in the Armed Services Committee.”

That move reduced the odds against Johnson only slightly. Grasping the potential in such an investigation, Armed Services Chairman Millard Tydings wanted to head it himself. At that very moment, however, Tydings was getting bad news from the home front—his home front, the state of Maryland, where he would be up for election in November. He had been chairman of the Senate’s Select Committee on McCarthy, which, earlier that year, had brought to light the lack of proof, and of truth, behind McCarthy’s Wheeling speech, and McCarthy, out for revenge, was planning to campaign against him. Tydings had survived a 1938 purge attempt by Franklin Roosevelt, but this threat, his advisers were telling him—more and more urgently each day—was worse; he was in a fight for his political life, and had better concentrate on his re-election campaign. Still, Tydings tried to keep his options open. Although, formally staking Armed Services’ jurisdiction over the investigation, he emerged from a committee meeting on July 17 to announce that, pursuant to a resolution introduced by Senator Lyndon Johnson, the committee had established a seven-member “Preparedness Investigating” subcommittee “similar to the one headed during World War II by President Truman,” the announcement did not name the subcommittee’s membership, much less its chairman; Tydings apparently intended either to take the chairmanship himself after he had been re-elected or to return jurisdiction to the full committee which he chaired. And if Tydings did not take the chairmanship himself, of course, the committee had several senior senators (most notably Russell, the Senate’s leading expert on military readiness) who would be more logical choices than a freshman senator.

Seeing his precious opportunity slipping away, Johnson pleaded for a chance to talk to Tydings in person—“Millard, as indicated twice today, I shall be delighted to discuss my position with you at any time … that may be convenient for you”—a chance he was apparently not given. In a letter he wrote Tydings on July 19, there was, before the requisite disclaimer, a note of desperation. “I believed that I would be named chairman of the group authorized by the resolution I introduced. Since this would only be in line with the usual practice of the Senate, I thought I had some right to expect this. I have no political ambitions to further, however, so I have no intention of objecting if you want to name yourself chairman.” In a July 25 memorandum, Johnson sought to reassure Tydings that the subcommittee would pose no threat to his authority as chairman of the full Armed Services Committee, or to his ability to take credit for the subcommittee’s findings. As chairman of the parent committee, Tydings would have full authority over the subcommittee’s expenditures, the memo said; its expenses and the salaries of its staff, which would be limited to a mere $25,000, “shall be paid … upon vouchers approved by THE CHAIRMAN OF THE COMMITTEE.” (The crucial words were capitalized.) Tydings would have full authority over the subcommittee’s staff—not that there would be much staff. “You would designate such members of our [Armed Services Committee] professional staff as you saw fit to be the nucleus around which additional investigators could be employed when, and if, they were needed,” Johnson promised. “You would be expected to designate and approve any additional investigators.” And it would be Tydings, not the subcommittee’s chairman, who, the memo promised, would have full authority over the subcommittee’s reports—and the right to release them: “The subcommittee would submit all reports, recommendations, etc., to the full committee—not to the Senate or to the public. The full committee then would decide what, if any, reports would be presented to the Senate by the chairman of the full committee.” And the memorandum closed with a note of urgency. “In view of the fact that other resolutions are now being introduced calling for similar investigations by other and special committees, I think it is important that announcement of the [membership] of our subcommittee should be made at the earliest possible date.”

Attempting during the long, frustrating week following the July 17 committee meeting to enlist Truman’s influence on his behalf, Johnson issued a number of statements designed to reassure the President that he need not fear criticism from any subcommittee headed by Lyndon Johnson. Pointedly re-emphasizing in one statement that establishment of the subcommittee would “cut off other indiscriminate investigations of the emergency [defense] effort,” he added, “I personally do not believe we have time for criticism at the present moment.”

If Truman intervened, his intervention was not sufficient: the President’s influence on Capitol Hill was on the wane. Tydings refused to budge. For a freshman senator to get this prized subcommittee chairmanship, he would need an ally—a patron—more influential within the Senate than the President.

And this freshman senator had that ally. “He had talked it over beforehand with Senator Russell and asked his help in convincing [Tydings] to give him the subcommittee despite his lack of seniority,” a journalist familiar with the situation was to recall. Although Russell had agreed to help, he had hitherto not thrown his full weight into the scales. Now he did so—and with Russell on his side, Lyndon Johnson didn’t need anyone else. As Symington was to put it, “Russell was for him. There were no other factors that mattered.”

While Tydings may not have been talking to Johnson, he now began talking with Russell, in the secrecy of the Marble Room. The details of those conversations are not known—because, as always with Russell, they took place in confidence—but their outcome was clear. “As was generally the case in delicate maneuvers involving Russell, there was no rancor, no controversy; but it somehow came to pass that Tydings, faced with the rigors of a difficult campaign, decided that he did not want to take on additional time-consuming duties,” John A. Goldsmith wrote. Saying privately that he would assume the subcommittee chairmanship himself when, with the re-election threat disposed of, the Senate reorganized in January, 1951, Tydings, on July 27, 1950, simply announced that Lyndon Johnson would be chairman.

The significance of the appointment to Johnson’s career was instantly apparent. “Senator Johnson of Texas today faces opportunities for fame, public service and political advancement almost without equal for a senator serving his first term,” Leslie Carpenter wrote. “Those opportunities are fundamentally the same as those that confronted Senator Truman … in 1941. And no one has to be told what happened to Truman.” And, Carpenter pointed out, Truman had been in his seventh year in the Senate when he was given his great opportunity. “Johnson is only in his second year.” As The Nation reported, “With the outbreak of the Korean War dozens of Congressmen recognized that the impact of a tremendous rearmament program would open up new fields for legislative investigation and that national reputations could be built by skillful employment of the power to probe.” Dozens had recognized it; one had gotten it—thanks largely to his third R.

AND ONCE LYNDON JOHNSON had the opportunity, he made the most of it—displaying gifts more rare than the ability to court an older man.

The Senate as a whole—and most senators individually—may not have grasped the importance of staff, of a new kind of staff suited to the new, more complicated postwar world, but Lyndon Johnson had grasped it from the day he arrived in the Senate. And now, assembling a staff for the Preparedness Investigating Subcommittee, he set out to create what he had had in mind.

He had promised Tydings that the “nucleus” of the subcommittee’s staff would be the staff of the parent Armed Services Committee, but that staff consisted of former career military officers, not at all what Johnson had in mind. So from the moment he got what he wanted from Tydings—the chairmanship—the promises he had given Tydings were moot.

Assembling part of the subcommittee’s staff was easy, for it was already on his payroll. The “best man with words” whom he knew—Horace Busby—was simply moved out of 231 and down the hall to a little cubicle in the Armed Services suite, and on the cubicle’s door was painted the title “Editor of Subcommittee Reports.” Another man of unusual abilities was on a payroll that Johnson treated as his own: that of Alvin Wirtz’s Austin law firm. John Connally had thought that he had finally found a refuge from Johnson there, but Wirtz now informed Connally that while he would remain on salary with the firm, he would also have assignments from the subcommittee.

Assembling the rest of the staff was hard, for Johnson wanted men with ability and expertise equal to that of the bright young professionals of the executive agencies “downtown.” For a committee or subcommittee to “borrow help” from “downtown” was strictly against Senate rules, for the use of executive branch personnel violated the Senate’s cherished independence and the principle of separation of powers, and also threatened the Senate’s institutional authority, since personnel not on the Senate payroll were not bound by Senate rules or subject to Senate discipline. Alarmed by the proliferation of “borrowing” under wartime necessity, the Senate had given the rigid longtime regulations prohibiting the practice the force of law by codifying them in the Legislative Reorganization Act of 1946. Since passage of the Act, an internal Rules Committee memorandum would report in 1950, the number of borrowed personnel had been sharply reduced, and “nearly all” had been merely low-level clerical or administrative employees or FBI investigators. The sole exception—the only administrator of more than low rank borrowed from an executive agency since the war—had been an assistant to an agency commissioner.

Lyndon Johnson had a different level of help in mind: was the “best man with words” on the subcommittee staff?—he wanted the “best man with numbers,” too. That man, Donald Cook, a trained accountant as well as a very sharp lawyer, was not a commissioner’s assistant but a full commissioner, vice chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, in fact—at that very moment, in fact, under consideration for the SEC’s chairmanship. Johnson wanted him instead to run the Preparedness Subcommittee’s day-to-day operation. And he got him. Cook didn’t want to leave the SEC—the chairmanship, as a stepping-stone to the wealth that was his goal, was what he had been aiming at, hitherto with Johnson’s support. But he wasn’t given a choice; Johnson had arranged his career—the positions with Tom Clark’s Justice Department; the SEC commissionership—and, it was made clear to him, Johnson could stop arranging. Cook was told—in so many words—that if he wanted Johnson’s future backing for the SEC chairmanship, he would first have to be chief counsel of Johnson’s subcommittee.

In hiring Cook, Johnson circumvented the strictures of the Legislative Reorganization Act, seemingly insurmountable to other senators, with astonishing deftness. Calling Cook’s appointment “temporary,” he said it would be only an unpaid, part-time job; Cook would continue to hold his post, and draw his salary, as SEC vice chairman. In reality, however, despite the “temporary” designation, Cook would devote most of his time to the subcommittee for almost two years (at which point he would in fact be rewarded with the SEC chairmanship). No one challenged the appointment—since he was drawing no salary from the Senate, it did not require approval from Tydings or anyone else—and at the subcommittee’s organizational meeting on July 30, Cook was named its chief counsel. Cook’s dual role—a vice chairman of an executive branch regulatory agency on the staff of a legislative subcommittee*—clearly violated both Senate custom and federal law, but Johnson had found a way to maneuver around custom and regulations, had pushed the tactic to the limit (beyond, so far as can be learned, the point to which any other senator had ever gone) and, as had so often been the case with his unprecedented maneuvers, had succeeded with it.

Drafting Cook brought other benefits besides his incisive intelligence. The subcommittee’s budget, including salaries for its staff, was of course only the modest $25,000 that the Armed Services Committee had approved. At the SEC, however, Cook had been planning to hire an “Assistant to the Vice Chairman,” and a salary line had already been created for that job. Offering it now to a young, Yale-educated SEC attorney, Gerald W. Siegel, who had caught his eye, Cook made it clear that while his salary would come from the agency, his work would be for the subcommittee.

As important as money was space, always in short supply in the Senate Office Building. It was not unusual for congressional committees to use offices in the vast regulatory agency buildings, but under federal regulations rent had to be paid for them. With the vice chairman of an agency on your staff, however, that was a problem easily solved. Six rooms on the second floor of the SEC Building on Second Street were given rent-free to the subcommittee, and filled with SEC accountants and typists whose salaries were still paid by the agency, but who were actually working for the subcommittee. To deflect objections to all these arrangements from the other SEC commissioners, Senator Russell had a quiet word with Senator Maybank, whose Appropriations subcommittee oversaw the SEC budget, and the agency’s annual appropriation was increased by some $200,000.

Johnson filled up his new space seemingly overnight. It was the Preparedness Investigating Subcommittee; he needed investigators. He wanted the best—which he considered to be investigators from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. And he wanted them to be supervised by someone experienced at supervising FBI investigators—an official who, as he put it, had been “high up” in the FBI. He got him, too. J. Edgar Hoover gave him the name of Lyon L. (Slug) Tyler, the former deputy chief of the bureau’s investigative division, who had recently resigned to enter private law practice. Although Tyler idolized Hoover, he had said no to Hoover’s attempts to retain him, and when Lyndon Johnson first telephoned him, he said no to him, too. His first thought, he was to recall, was: “I ain’t for Capitol Hill. I’m trying to get a law practice started.” When Johnson asked him to at least come in and talk, he said there was no point.

But “no one said no to Lyndon Johnson.” Since his call to Tyler himself had failed to produce the desired result, he made other calls—to Tyler’s old friends at the FBI. And he gave them a potent argument to use with a man who worshiped his old boss. “I began to get calls from my friends,” Tyler would recall. “They would tell me that because I had refused to even consider Johnson’s offer, the Senator was pestering Hoover to find someone else. They would say, ‘At least go up there and talk. All you got to do is go up there, and you’ll get Hoover off the hook.’”

When he went “up there”—when Mary Rather ushered him into Johnson’s private office and shut the door behind him—Tyler found himself being offered not only good money (the same top civil service salary he had been earning at the FBI) and good staff (“He had three top people coming in that day—one from ONI [the Office of Naval Intelligence]; he was a great man for borrowing people. And he told me to bring in men from the FBI: the best men I knew”), but inspiration. “We need you! Your country needs you! Put a staff together, and get ‘em rollin’, and you can go on your way. But right now, we need you. We’re at war! This is a big world war we’re getting into, and we need some top-class help. This is gonna be the Truman Committee of the Third World War!” So deeply affected was Tyler that when he walked out of 231 he no longer had one idol but two. “Lyndon, I thought, had great, great strength,” Tyler says. “He could talk you into anything. Listen—he had to me some of the drive of J. Edgar Hoover. What more can I say?”

By August 15, two weeks after the Preparedness Subcommittee had held its first organizational meeting, the subcommittee’s staff—lawyers, accountants, researchers, stenographers, investigators—numbered twenty-five, three times as many as the staff of Tydings’ parent committee. Lyndon Johnson, still in his second year in the Senate, had assembled a staff not only larger than that of most other senators—perhaps larger than that of any other senator—but more qualified. In just two weeks, in that small-scale Senate of 1950, Lyndon Johnson had created his own little empire, and it was an empire of talent.

HAVING ACQUIRED A STAFF with remarkable speed, Johnson used it with remarkable speed.

Speed was essential. Tydings’ intention of taking over the defense mobilization investigation after his re-election in November gave Johnson less than three months to compile a record so impressive that his chairman would find it embarrassing to supplant him, and in fact he had even less time than that. A number of House committees were beginning their own mobilization investigations; at least one senior senator, Homer Ferguson, was making noises about forming a special Select Senate Committee, and the committee that produced the first newsworthy result would have the important first public identification as the investigating body. Johnson needed to have a report ready fast—and he did. Most of the subcommittee’s staff reported for work on August 15. The subcommittee’s first report was released to the press three weeks later.

Johnson was able to produce a report so quickly because much of it was simply a recycling of a report that had been all but completed—by another Armed Services subcommittee he had been chairing—before the Korean War began: a routine study analyzing the implications for America’s rubber supply should some future major war break out in the Far East, source of the world’s natural rubber. The bulk of the Preparedness Investigating Subcommittee’s report—issued on September 5—was simply a rewriting of that earlier study which had found that war in the Far East would be “an obvious threat” to America’s rubber supply and had advocated reactivating America’s World War II synthetic-rubber-producing program. There was nothing particularly new or significant in the report; in fact, by the time it appeared, the Administration had already begun reactivating the program.

The rest of the September 5 report dealt with the government’s surplus-property disposal program, under which, since World War II, it had been shutting down defense plants and selling them off to private industry. The report said that the Preparedness Subcommittee had found “a number of instances in which plans were going ahead for the ‘surplus’ sale” of plants “which appeared to be essential to our current mobilization needs,” including a synthetic rubber plant in Akron, Ohio. The day after the subcommittee was formed, Stuart Symington told Johnson that that plant, closed since the end of World War II, was in the process of being sold by the Reconstruction Finance Corporation to a private company, which was planning to reopen it. Johnson wrote RFC Chairman Harley Hise, urging him to cancel the sale, and to keep the plant closed and available for defense use. There was nothing particularly exciting in this, either; Symington had informed the White House at the same time he told Johnson, and by the time the report was issued, the sale had already been canceled, as had plans for putting three other rubber plants on the market. Nor was the case for such cancellations clear-cut. A body of expert opinion held that such plants might be better prepared to produce rubber for defense purposes if they were reopened and running, and had only to be converted from civilian to defense use, than if they remained closed and had to be reconditioned from scratch. With the public in an outcry over the country’s lack of readiness for war, Truman appears to have ordered the plants retained, and the overall synthetic-rubber program increased (by a token 80,000 tons per year) as the simplest way to avoid a controversy in which he could hardly have helped looking bad. But the cancellation of the Akron sale allowed Johnson to claim a victory in the subcommittee report, which stated: “Because of this [the subcommittee’s] intervention, fortunately, the Government still has this essential plant.”

The most significant aspect of the first report of the Senate Preparedness Subcommittee was not its contents but the way it was presented. During his entire career, Lyndon Johnson had demonstrated, again and again, a remarkable proficiency in the mechanics of politics, in the lower-level, basic techniques that are essential to political success but that some politicians never seem to learn. Lyndon Johnson had never had to learn these techniques. From the moment he entered politics—from those first Hill Country campaigns, now so many years behind him—he had seemed to know them, to know them instinctively, and to practice them with a rare ingenuity, a resourcefulness, a sureness of touch, as unerring as it was untaught. In a democracy, the bedrock of political power is public support, so one of the most basic requirements for a public official is the ability to influence public opinion, and the journalists who mold it. None of the lower arts of politics is more essential to the politician than the ability to obtain favorable publicity, and the subcommittee’s first report demonstrated that its chairman was a master of that art. Although most of what the report said was neither new nor significant, Johnson made it seem new and significant—by saying it in phrases brilliantly calculated to catch the journalistic eye.

Some of these phrases were written by Johnson’s little wordsmith— contained in the draft report Horace Busby brought into Johnson’s office. Some were Johnson’s own, written onto the draft in his bold handwriting, the phrases of a great storyteller who all his life had displayed a gift for the dramatic. Phrases like “darkest days” “business as usual” “too little and too late” leapt out of the final report. “During the darkest days of the Korean crisis, evidence was found of a ‘business as usual’ attitude in some quarters charged with responsibility in the preparedness program,” it said. “We must not have too little and be too late in our rubber program.” The report was infused with a sense of drama: the subcommittee, it said, was trying “to make certain that we are not continuing to demobilize with one hand while trying to mobilize with the other.” The subcommittee, it said, “has fought at every Government level for a maximum reactivation of our synthetic-rubber producing program. The word fought is used advisedly.” Its prose was aggressive. Noting that the subcommittee had asked the National Munitions Board to discuss the rubber program, and “to date no reply or acknowledgment has been received,” it said: “Either the Munitions Board has a program or it has not. If it has a program it could readily be described. If it has no program it should be candidly admitted.” There was urgency in the report—a shout of warning, a call to arms: “We face the distinct threat of a war of attrition…. Not only the Nation’s security but its very existence is challenged….” And Johnson had thought up one phrase that was particularly original and vivid, and Busby happily included it in the press release he handed to newspapermen along with the report: “If we find in the other fields into which we move the same siesta psychology that we found in surplus disposal and rubber, our work is certainly cut out for us.”

The next morning Johnson’s phrase was on front pages all over the country. “‘SIESTA PSYCHOLOGY’ LAID TO DEFENSE DEPT” was the headline in the New York Herald Tribune. (The New York Times felt its readers needed the term defined: “In Mexico—and in some parts of south Texas—the Spanish word ‘siesta’ defines a habit of halting all work and taking a long nap every afternoon.”) The following morning it was on editorial pages. “No Time for a Siesta” was the headline over the lead editorial in the Washington Star. On Sunday the subcommittee was the darling of the feature pages, “SENATE PREPAREDNESS UNIT GETS OFF TO ROARING START—Successor to Truman Committee Stirs Up Federal Agencies with Its Recommendations,” the Star said. And in the Washington Post on the following Sunday, accompanied by a big picture of Johnson, was an article by Robert C. Albright which told readers that “If waffle-bottomed Washington is beginning to rise out of its swivel chair, a new Congressional Committee may have something to do with it…. The Senate’s ‘Johnson Preparedness Committee’ is a new version of the old Truman Committee. It … puts quiet inquiries … ahead of headline hunting. So anonymously hush-hush had it worked that its recent preliminary report caught Washington by surprise, serving notice that the postwar ‘siesta’ is over.” Arthur Krock called the report “a model of its kind,” “an example of Congress at its best.”

•    •    •

AND THAT WAS JUST THE FIRST REPORT. During the next two years, the Preparedness Subcommittee was to issue forty-three more. Most were even shorter on substance than the first. The second, for example, released on November 20, returned to the subjects of surplus disposal and the rubber stockpile, but in two months the subcommittee had been able to find no governmental mistake even as significant as that of the Akron plant; the example most prominently cited in the new report was the sale in August of an alcohol plant in Kansas City to Schenley Distillers, Inc.—and as a Schenley spokesman pointed out when reporters contacted him, the plant, which had stood idle for five years, had been cannibalized of its equipment and was useless unless someone purchased it and re-equipped it; Schenley had agreed to do so, and had contracted to sell the government the alcohol the plant produced, should the government need it. Some of the forty-three reports, following the pattern of the reports on rubber, contended that the government had similarly failed to provide for sufficient stockpiles of strategically important materials such as nickel, tin, tungsten, and wool. Others showed that the government was continuing to sell, as surplus, equipment needed by the armed forces. Underlying the subcommittee’s emphasis on stockpiling, however, was its chairman’s belief, not shared by the Administration or, for that matter, by many defense experts, that the United States should maintain stockpiles adequate not merely for the Korean conflict and any short-term enlargement of that conflict, such as Chinese involvement, but for an all-out global war. The subcommittee’s report that stockpiling of the “critical” nickel supply was “lagging seriously”—and that the government agencies involved were guilty of “complacency” and “a very leisurely approach”—ignored the fact that the stockpile was actually larger than it had been during World War II.

Mundane in substance though the reports may have been, however, that was not the case with their prose. The second report may have been scant on specifics; it was long on phraseology that was grist for a reporter’s typewriter or for a headline writer, as was demonstrated by the lead paragraph in the story about it, on page one, in the New York Times: “Government agencies in charge of disposing of so-called military surpluses were accused today by Senate investigators of acting with ‘less prudence than they would display in operating a charity bazaar.’” And there was, from Busby’s typewriter and Johnson’s editorial pen, more to delight the journalistic eye: America’s mobilization was only a “paper preparedness”; Government bureaucrats seem to think the surplus disposal program is “a compulsory giveaway.” Cries of alarm (America was facing “a natural rubber ‘Pearl Harbor,’” the report said) were mingled with vows of vigilance: “As far as the Preparedness Subcommittee is concerned, policies that look good on paper aren’t good enough. Wars aren’t won with memoranda. We intend to see that future performances live up to present promises.” And rolling off the subcommittee’s mimeograph machines and rushed to the Senate Press Gallery by Busby were press releases about vivid individual examples that made front pages all by themselves, like the East Texas farmer who, in November, told the subcommittee that he had purchased 168 unused aircraft fire control instruments for $6.89, and then, after the Korean War broke out, sold them back to the Air Force for $63,000.

Busby’s determination to preserve what was left of his psychological independence had not abated, however, and he was planning to leave Johnson’s staff early in 1951, whether or not a replacement had been found. Then, at a party given by Dave Botter of theDallas Morning News, he noticed that the United Press reporter who had been covering the subcommittee, George Reedy, was roaring at Johnson’s jokes. “He responded to Johnson very well,” Busby was to recall. Some days later, when Reedy telephoned Johnson’s office to get information for an article he was writing, he was told that the Senator was in Walter Reed Naval Hospital in Bethesda with one of his chronic bronchial infections, but that he had left his phone number and was hoping Reedy would call him there. When Reedy did, and had finished asking his questions, Johnson said, in what Reedy recalls as “a joking way, ‘I want you to get over on my side and work for me where you belong.’” Thinking Johnson was joking, Reedy said, “Make me an offer,” and when Johnson did—$9,688 per year, almost double what he was earning at the United Press—Reedy accepted and succeeded Busby in April, 1951.

Although Reedy was as liberal as Busby was conservative, for Johnson’s purposes they were interchangeable tools, and the catchy phrases continued without abatement. One of the first reports Reedy wrote assailed the Army for assigning tens of thousands of able-bodied men to desk jobs. This was also not new; the high proportion of administrative to combat personnel in modern armies was, as one military expert commented, “inevitable,” given the complexity of modern war and the public’s insistence that America’s soldiers be given the best support possible. “A good many others have made similar discoveries before,” he said. But the subcommittee’s discovery made headlines, because never before had desk-assigned soldiers been categorized in a phrase as vivid as the one in the Johnson Subcommittee’s report: “the Chair Corps.”

“It’s all right with me that Lyndon Johnson is junior Senator from Texas instead of being a rival Washington columnist,” syndicated columnist Holmes Alexander was to say. “The guy can write. What you notice right away about these Johnson reports is that they’re low in federal gobbleygook and high on the peppy turns of phrase which make for public understanding…. This stuff Johnson puts out is written to be read.”

And it wasn’t just the writing that was getting Lyndon Johnson headlines—for he was playing the press like a master. Understanding that the most effective means of burnishing the subcommittee’s image (and that of its chairman) would be identification with the renowned Truman Committee, Johnson wanted the ultimate identification: for journalists to call his group “the new Truman Committee.” But in that desire lay a pitfall: one word of public disapproval from the man whose name was in that title would end any possibility of that identification—and Johnson almost fell into that pit with his first step, when, drawing up his subcommittee’s agenda, he made it so broad in scope that Truman felt it might impinge on his Administration’s conduct of the war. The President reacted—luckily for Johnson only in a private memo of which Johnson was made aware—with anger.

Hastily pulling back from the edge, Johnson soothed the President—in what was, even for him, a masterstroke of flattery. A “Statement of [Subcommittee] Policies and Procedures” was drafted, and it reassured the President—not surprisingly, since the key points were virtually his own words, words Truman had written ten years before to guide his committee. Truman, for example, had written, “The function of generals and admirals is to fight battles and to tell us what they need to fight battles with.” Johnson’s statement said, “We were not created to tell generals and admirals how to fight battles, but rather to make sure that they and the men fighting under them have what they need to win those battles.” Had Truman decreed that his committee would not investigate “military and naval strategy”? Johnson’s statement said that his committee would not investigate “battlefront strategy.”

Other passages were designed to allay any fears Truman might have had that the subcommittee would criticize his Administration. Pledging that “We will not hunt headlines,” the subcommittee stated, in phrases that also echoed those of the Truman Committee, that it was not concerned with past mistakes. “What’s done is done. Most important, I think this subcommittee must be extremely diligent not to establish—or attempt to establish—itself as a Monday morning quarterback club.” Having marked the passages that echoed Truman’s words, so that the President couldn’t miss them, Johnson sent him the statement and delivered further reassurances in person—Johnson’s appointment with the President on August 8 was the first time he had been in the White House since January—and the desired effect was evidently achieved. Returning to his office, Johnson recounted details of the meeting to one of his staff, who wrote that the President had read the statements “and approved them heartily as some of the finest ever to be made by a Senate committee…. He said go right ahead, on the charted course; if anything is wrong, come and tell him about it and it will be remedied. Senator said it was the ‘finest meeting’ that could possibly be had.”

With the President’s support assured, there was seemingly no interview Lyndon Johnson gave in which the magic title was not invoked, and the press took the point, “A NEW ‘TRUMAN COMMITTEE’ EMERGES” was the headline in the Washington Post. After talking with Johnson, Robert Walsh of the Washington Star wrote that the two committees are “like father, like son.” The Johnson subcommittee, the article said, is the Truman Committee’s “natural heir.” It has Truman’s “paternal blessing.” Truman “has made it abundantly clear to all around him that he is ‘cooperating’ with the committee,” Walsh wrote.

FREQUENT AS WERE the comparisons between the Johnson and Truman bodies, however, there were significant contrasts between their respective chairmen’s methods of operation—contrasts which reflected the differences in their personalities, and which foreshadowed the differences between their presidencies. But these methods also helped Johnson in his playing of the press.

One was a difference in control. The genesis of the Truman Committee was very much the work of one man. Disturbed by reports of profiteering and waste in the vast military buildup begun in 1940 and by the possibility that his home state of Missouri was not receiving its fair share of defense contracts, Senator Harry Truman decided to try to find out the truth for himself—by leaving Washington, alone in his old Dodge automobile, and driving to military installations and defense plants from Florida to Michigan, covering perhaps ten thousand miles. It was his speech to the Senate on what he had found on this personal inspection that led to the creation of his committee, and even after it was formed in April, 1941—until his nomination for the vice presidency in July, 1944—Truman would make other trips, sometimes by plane, sometimes in that old car, usually not saying who he was unless he was asked, lying awake at night in hotel rooms in strange cities and little towns worrying over the course of the war. But Truman also went to great lengths to involve the committee’s six other senators in its work, encouraging their active participation, generously sharing the limelight with them. Throughout the war, committee members—sometimes all six—would accompany him and committee investigators on cross-country tours. “They would put down at a city or military base, go through their routine for a day or so, and then be off again, like a roadshow, everybody by now knowing just what to do,” David McCullough has written. “War plants were inspected, hearings held in local hotels.”

Participation was not encouraged on the Johnson subcommittee; steps were, in fact, taken to discourage it.

Cook and Busby had long since learned the inadvisability of conducting long conversations with their boss’s colleagues. Busby was very adept at turning aside senators who dropped by his cubbyhole to discuss a subcommittee report. The group’s three Democratic members were not especially eager to participate. Fellow freshmen Estes Kefauver and Lester Hunt, both ambitious, were preoccupied with their own subcommittees; without encouragement they wouldn’t give more than cursory attention to Johnson’s; Kefauver, in fact, signaled his lack of interest by giving Johnson a blanket proxy to use “whenever I am not present.” And Virgil Chapman, a big, bald Kentuckian who considered Johnson his friend because they had served in the House (and had been “Sam’s boys”) together, was sliding rapidly down a very steep alcoholic slope. One of the three Republican members, Leverett Saltonstall, so amenable that he was known as “Old Oil on Troubled Waters,” certainly wasn’t going to make trouble by poaching on another senator’s preserve. The second Republican, Styles Bridges, was known for his receptivity to the quid pro quo. A freshman senator with an infant subcommittee with a tiny budget might seem to have little to offer the ranking GOP member of Appropriations, but Johnson had recognized that Bridges was building his own empire: what one observer calls “an apparatus all over Washington; he had guys stashed away in every agency.” Johnson told Bridges that he would value his “guidance” in filling two positions on the subcommittee staff. And, he made clear, while these men would be paid by the subcommittee, they would not be required to work for it; they would take their assignments not from him but from Bridges. In return for the quo, Johnson got hisquid: Bridges’ support on subcommittee actions, and a free hand in running it. The real problem was the third Republican, Wayne Morse of Oregon, independent, intelligent, opinionated, and hungry for publicity—and to solve this problem Johnson went to considerable lengths. Morse was facing a re-election fight in Oregon, where there was considerable apprehension about Russian designs on Alaska, separated from the USSR only by the fifty miles of the Bering Strait. Telling Morse that “Alaskan defense,” and indeed the defense of the entire Pacific Northwest, should be one of the subcommittee’s central concerns, Johnson asked him to head a special one-member task force on the subject. Morse was dispatched on this mission with pomp—his “work will take priority over all our other work,” Johnson told reporters; “Senator Morse has been insistent that adequate defense be given the Northwest”—far enough away from Washington (he was soon holding publicity-rich hearings in Oregon) so that, at least until November, his interference with other subcommittee work was kept to a minimum.

ANOTHER CONTRAST between the two bodies was in the openness with which their work was conducted.

The Truman Committee had been characterized by a notable openness. Its work had centered around its hearings, meetings of the subcommittee at which witnesses testified. These hearings were remarkable not only for their number—during the just over three years that Truman was chairman the committee held 329 hearings, or about 104 per year, hearing approximately eight hundred witnesses but for the fact that even in a wartime atmosphere, Truman leaned over backward to make as few of them as possible “executive” or closed sessions, closing them only for genuine security concerns or to afford officials criticized in a draft committee report an opportunity to refute the criticism before it was made public. More than half the hearings—194 of the 329—were open to the press and public. Held in hotels, in the committee’s hearing room and, as interest grew and crowds mounted, in the great Senate Caucus Room itself, these hearings produced what McCullough calls “memorable days of testimony”: when a great steel company official was forced to admit under oath that the company had falsified test results on steel used in Navy ships, when an inspector for Curtis-Wright, who had two nephews in the Air Force, broke down at the witness table and sobbed as he confessed that the company was selling the Air Force airplane engines it knew were faulty.

A characteristic of the Johnson Subcommittee was its secrecy. On-the-spot inspection trips were not a luxury in which Johnson indulged himself; during the two and a half years in which he was chairman before the Republicans gained control of the Senate in November, 1952, he ventured no farther afield on such a trip than New York. And it was not a luxury in which other members of the subcommittee, with the exception of Morse, were encouraged to indulge, so there were few hearings in other cities.

And there were few in Washington (except on a single project for which Russell, to further a pet proposal of his own, used the subcommittee as an arm of his full committee so that it was acting more under his direction than Johnson’s*). Aside from that project, during the two and a half years of Johnson’s chairmanship, Preparedness held forty-one hearings, in contrast to the more than one hundred per year of the Truman Committee, about sixteen per year. And in even sharper contrast only nineteen of Johnson’s hearings were open, or about eight per year. (Truman had held about sixty-five open hearings per year.) The rest of the Johnson Subcommittee’s hearings were executive, or closed, sessions, held in its meeting room, SOB 212, with a uniformed Capitol policeman stationed in front of its closed doors to keep out the public.

Public hearings, with witnesses’ upraised hands as they took the oath, the rap of the gavel, the popping glare of flashbulbs, the senators and counsel hunching forward for cross-examination, the dramatic moments of testimony, the murmur and hush of the audience, the reporters’ scribbling pencils, the wire service men jumping up and hurrying toward the door to send bulletins—public hearings with their constant potential for the controversy and confrontation that makes news—were one of the surest devices for bringing recognition to a senator, the device used by most senators seeking publicity. But the public hearing is always a risky device, with ample possibilities for mishaps; it is, after all, not only the chairman to whom the committee horseshoe offers a forum: senators can disagree with each other. The witness table, too, can be a forum—a national sounding board for a witness who disagrees with the chairman. Controversy and confrontation do not always play out according to a chairman’s script.

Lyndon Johnson didn’t want any mishaps. He wanted to minimize the chance of controversy and confrontation—wanted to have publicity without, so far as possible, the danger of bad publicity. And he succeeded: by making not hearings but reports—the forty-four printed, formal reports issued by his subcommittee during his chairmanship—the basis of his subcommittee’s work.

These reports, based either on investigations by the subcommittee staff or, in not a few cases, on work previously done by other government agencies (several were simply rewritings of studies that had been carried out by the research service of the Library of Congress) were drafted (or rewritten) by Siegel and then redrafted by Cook and Walter Jenkins. Then they were rewritten again by Busby or Reedy, two experts in summarizing findings in pithy introductions and summaries. (And, of course, they were then edited by the senator-editor who was an expert himself.) Only then would the galleys printed by the Government Printing Office—generally the fourth set of galleys, so much reworking had been done—be shown to the other senators on the subcommittee, an inescapable step since their signatures were needed on it to show that the report was approved by a majority.

Around these reports was drawn a curtain of secrecy. Cook and Jenkins and Busby knew better than to talk with newspapermen, and now the new members of the subcommittee staff were informed of this in a staff meeting—informed unforgettably. “If you get any calls [from reporters],” Lyndon Johnson said, “refer them to George or to Walter. I’ll talk for Preparedness. No one else talks.” Then he paused, as if considering whether he had said enough, and then, evidently concluding he hadn’t, went on—this time in a low, quiet voice almost throbbing with threat. “Remember,” he said, “no one speaks for Lyndon Johnson except Lyndon Johnson. No one!” One of the new staff members, a big, tough former FBI agent named Daniel F. McGillicuddy, recalls: “He looked around that room at each one of us, looked into our eyes, looked into our eyes to see that we understood. We understood. That was the first time I had ever met Lyndon Johnson. I walked out of that room knowing one thing for sure: I didn’t ever want to tangle with that guy.”

Precautions were taken to guard against anyone letting a journalist see the galleys. Only a few copies—“fifteen, maybe, no more,” McGillicuddy says—of each draft were printed, and staff member Wally Engel “had to guard them with his life.” The galleys were kept in a safe in the subcommittee’s offices, and each copy was numbered in the upper right corner so that Johnson could, if necessary, trace its circulation.

It would, of course, have been possible for journalists to wait outside the room in which the subcommittee was meeting or holding a hearing and question senators or witnesses as they emerged, but that would have required the reporters to know there was a meeting or hearing going on, and often they didn’t, for Johnson didn’t announce a schedule. A reporter who asked would be told the time, of course, but Johnson would explain to him that the subcommittee would be covering classified information, and in the patriotic atmosphere of the time, that statement would generally be sufficient to dissuade a reporter from pressing for admission. “We just didn’t do anything to encourage reporters to come around,” Busby recalls, and not many did.

These measures gave Johnson an unusual degree of control over the newspaper coverage his subcommittee received. That coverage had to be based mostly on the printed reports—the final reports, from which all areas of disagreement had been removed, all controversy smoothed over. “Johnson wanted the press only after the whole thing was done,” Busby says. “You just ran the mimeograph machine, and handed it out.” Moreover, these measures helped to ensure that news about the subcommittee would have to come from Johnson, and from Johnson alone.

The secrecy which surrounded the reports gave Johnson another great advantage in dealing with the press. It infused the reports with an aura of importance, as if information so tightly guarded must be significant. A journalist lucky enough to be given advance information about a report’s contents could tell, and convince, his editors that the findings were significant because he believed they were significant. And, of course, it made the reporter look good to his editors: he was the one who had gotten the scoop; he was the one who had, his bosses back in New York now knew, that valuable Washington commodity, access. It made journalists eager to obtain advance information about the reports; grateful if they got the information, and less disposed to evaluate it with a critical eye, particularly since they would want to be given an advance look at the next report.

And advance information was available, for one of the most important of the lower arts of politics is the leak. Lyndon Johnson’s mastery of this art had been displayed so early—and long before he had substantial ammunition to work with—that his gift for it was obviously natural, instinctive, innate. At the age of twenty-five, still only an assistant to a junior congressman, he had used it to defeat a quiet attempt by the Vice President of the United States, as tough and canny a politician as Texas had ever produced, Cactus Jack Garner, to grab federal patronage from the twenty-one Texas congressmen. Awed by the Vice President’s power and legendary ruthlessness, the congressmen were resigned to the loss of the patronage—until Johnson, through his congressman, Richard Kleberg, told them they didn’t have to lose, that he had a strategy. And a key to the strategy was a leak—his secret disclosure of Garner’s maneuver—not to a Texas newspaper whose publisher, friendly to Garner, might not have printed it but to the Associated Press (through a young reporter from Texas, William S. White, with whom he was acquainted), and the resultant nationwide publicity had forced Garner into a hasty retreat. So impressed had the Vice President been that, as White was to recount, he repeatedly asked, “Who in hell is this boy Lyndon Johnson; where the hell did Kleberg get a boy with savvy like that?”*

Now, in 1950, Lyndon Johnson had ammunition to work with—real ammunition. He used it with a flair, infusing it with drama, emphasizing to favored reporters the risks he was taking in letting them see one of the still-secret reports. Handing an advance copy of one to Frances Levison of Time’s Washington bureau on a Friday afternoon, he made her understand that he was able to give it to her only because no one would be looking into the subcommittee’s safe over the weekend—and that Levison must get the copy back to him before the safe was opened again, so that the leak couldn’t be traced. “PACKETING ADVANCE COPY OF SENATOR JOHNSON’S SUBCOMMITTEE PROGRESS REPORT ON RUBBER, FOR TUESDAY RELEASE,” Levison cabled her editors in new York, “THIS PARTICULAR COPY MUST BE RETURNED AFTER WEEKEND, BECAUSE IT IS SPECIALLY SIGNED FOR COMMITTEE FILES.”

The excitement and feelings of complicity—of alliance—that journalists felt at being involved in such intrigues comes through in their memos. “NOT FOR USE, WE HAVE READ THE PRELIMINARY DRAFTS OF LYNDON JOHNSON’S COMMITTEE REPORTS ON MILITARY PROCUREMENT, WHICH WILL START ISSUING IN ANOTHER TWO WEEKS, POSSIBLY TEN DAYS. THEY SHOW UP GLARING DELAYS IN PROCURING 3.5 BAZOOKAS,” Frank McNaughton of Time’s Washington bureau cabled New York. And evident also is the extent to which this leaking influenced journalists who might otherwise have been skeptical to accept the evaluation Johnson put on the leaked information. Giving a journalist a look at a report in private provided Johnson with an opportunity to “explain” its significance, and the fact that the report would remain secret until the journalist printed it meant that an evaluation of the explanation could not be obtained from anybody else. The “glaringness” of the delays the preliminary draft “showed up” was, it would later turn out, a matter of debate, but the debate would not take place until the report had already been published in a prominent position in Time. And by the time doubts as to the true significance of a subcommittee report surfaced, the subcommittee would be on the verge of issuing a new report—and no one was better than Johnson at making a reporter believe that the report to come would be BIG! Even when a promised Johnson “bombshell” fell far short of expectations (as was the case with the procurement report), he was adept at explaining away the shortfall—and in a way that redounded still more to his credit. He had been privately promising James L. McConaughy major revelations about lagging defense deliveries; when the revelations proved less than major, he told McConaughy, as McConaughy reported in his weekly memo to his editors: “Trouble is, the committee can’t figure out a way to tell the public just how bad the situation is without revealing information damaging to security.”

And if the quid pro quo was unstated, it was nonetheless implicit. If Johnson liked a publication’s treatment of his subcommittee, and of him, there would be other tidbits—juicier tidbits. For a publication as influential as Time, in fact, it was not only copies of reports that were available; so were the transcripts of the subcommittee’s tightly closed executive sessions. And no conversation, not even one in the Oval Office, was off limits, as was made clear by a telex from John Beal, a member of Time’s Washington bureau, to his editors in New York.

Had a long bull session with Lyndon Johnson this afternoon in which he told of some recent off record conversations with Truman. Johnson was pleased with Time story this week and wanted us to know about Friday’s committee sessions. He supplied me with a transcript which I have sent by packet to NA [Time’s National Affairs section].

Please return the transcript to Washington Bureau for return to Johnson.

NOTHING WAS TOO GOOD FOR THE PRESS. Lyndon Johnson rationed out his news, soothed reporters who had not been the beneficiary of his latest leak by telling them he had no idea how the information had gotten out, someone else on the subcommittee must have done it, and promising that he would try to make it up to them. “He worked at keeping the press on his side,” comments Marshall McNeil of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. “He made a point of seeing all newspapermen, and everyone left thinking that he was Lyndon’s best friend.”

And he kept it on his side. Time, preparing an article on the first subcommittee report, sent John Beal to get the story of the chairman’s life for a brief biography, and Johnson spent hours telling a story, and while much of it wasn’t true, all of it was charming. “I think that everything considered he deserves a good sendoff in this introduction to Time readers,” Beal cabled his editors. The editors, several of whom had themselves been charmed by Johnson at dinner parties, agreed. The magazine sent him off with a nickname, embodied in the headline “TEXAS WATCHDOG”; with a paragraph of Timespeak (“The Senate’s new watchdog committee on U.S. preparedness uttered its first warning growl. After just a month’s sniffing through the U.S. mobilization effort, Texas’ sharp-nosed Lyndon Johnson had caught the strong scent of ‘business as usual’”); and with the observation that “The work that [he] had cut out for himself was just the kind that lifted Missouri’s Senator Harry S Truman out of obscurity.” (Time also said he “had set himself a commendable set of rules: don’t spend time looking for headlines.”) The other object of his special attentions, the New York Times, had him on its front page three times before the end of 1950, and all across the country newspapers and magazines followed theTimes’ lead. “Mild-mannered but determined” Lyndon Johnson “is beginning to get considerable national publicity,” The Nation said. By the end of the 1950 session, Collier’s was reporting that Johnson’s “prominence is the undisguised envy of many a member who was his senior in service. Numerous senators are pounding their temples in fury because they did not think of reviving the committee first.”

THEN HE GOT A BREAK.

His temporary lease on the subcommittee chairmanship was running out, and, as Horace Busby recalls, “It was expected that when Tydings won reelection, he would take back the subcommittee.” Even if Johnson’s triumphs made it too embarrassing for the arrogant Marylander to supplant him directly, his chairmanship of the subcommittee’s parent committee, his unchallengeable authority over the subcommittee’s funding and staff, his right (which was, in a way, only logical, given the centrality of the subject to the committee’s work) to make preparedness the business of the full committee and not just of a subcommittee would have assured that Johnson would no longer have the preparedness spotlight to himself.

But, suddenly, Tydings wasn’t going to be returning to the Senate. It was in the 1950 elections that the ferocity and efficacy of Joe McCarthy’s tactics were demonstrated for the first time, and nowhere were they demonstrated more vividly than in Maryland, where Tydings’ opponent was a political nonentity. Raising big money (much of it from Texas ultra-conservatives like the men who had walked the beach on “St. Joe” with Lyndon Johnson; Clint Murchison alone gave ten thousand dollars), the Wisconsin senator assailed Tydings in bitterly vindictive speeches, and arranged for the creation of an effective anti-Tydings tabloid that was distributed across the state; it featured a “composite”—in reality, a totally fake—photograph in which Tydings was shown apparently listening attentively to Earl Browder. (It was the second time that Browder had been of use to Johnson.) When the campaign was over, so was Tydings’ career. The new chairman of the Armed Services Committee was Richard Russell, who reappointed Lyndon Johnson chairman of Armed Services’ Preparedness Subcommittee, and increased its annual budget to $190,000. “When Tydings lost,” Horace Busby recalls, “that’s when people began to say that Lyndon had a charmed life, or was a genius—mostly, that he was a genius.”

*When, years later, Cook’s appointment was mentioned to an expert on Senate hiring practice—Donald A. Ritchie, associate historian in the Senate Historical Office—he refused at first to believe it had occurred.

*The proposal was for the establishment of a system of Universal Military Training, a cause for which Russell was the longtime champion on Capitol Hill and for which Russell had introduced legislation (Senate Bill S.I) in 1948, 1949, and 1950. It had been carried forward in those years by the Armed Services Committee because he wasn’t yet chairman, and could therefore adhere to his lifelong practice of avoiding the spotlight on legislation in which he was interested. Not being the “point man” on this legislation was particularly important to Russell because he was simultaneously proposing a bill that would have fostered segregation in the armed forces by allowing draftees to elect to serve in racially segregated units; knowing that this bill would be defeated, he didn’t want UMT entangled with it. After Tydings’ defeat in 1950, however, Russell became Armed Services’ chairman, so he “delegated” the UMT hearings in January, 1951, to its Preparedness Investigating Subcommittee, and extensive hearings were held on S.I. But this delegation was in name only; as Richard T. McCulley, Historian of the National Archives’ Center for Legislative Archives and author of A History of the Senate Committee on Armed Services, writes, “On S. 1 the Preparedness Subcommittee was functioning as an arm of the full Committee … rather than as an [independent] investigative entity.” Russell, McCulley says, was using the subcommittee “to facilitate the work of the full Committee and to meet his own political needs.” In contrast to all its other work, in this lone instance the “Investigating” subcommittee wasn’t even investigating; in what Russell’s aide William Darden calls an “unusual” step, Russell had given “an investigative subcommittee a legislative job”: analyzing the merits of a specific bill. The hearings were in all but name hearings by the full committee, even down to the fact that the key staffers involved were not the ones Johnson had hired but two regular Army officers, General Verne Mudge and Colonel Mark Galusha, whom Johnson had not wanted for Preparedness, and who had been working on UMT for Russell for years. In other aspects, too, the subcommittee was acting less under Johnson’s direction than Russell’s, and its procedures in this instance were in sharp contrast to the rest of its work. Not only the subcommittee’s members but other members of the full committee sat in on the hearings: Russell, Ralph Flanders of Vermont and John Stennis of Mississippi, for instance, sat on the dais, questioned witnesses and made statements. The hearings were not even funded under the Senate resolution providing funding for the subcommittee but rather under the resolution providing funding for the full Armed Services Committee. And when the bill came to the floor, although Johnson was called its floor manager, it was actually Russell who, as his biographer Gilbert Fite says, “skillfully guided the bill through the Senate. He granted interruptions and time to key supporters….” When a conference committee met to reconcile Senate and House versions of the bill, Russell was its chairman. (The bill eventually provided that it would become effective only if Congress approved an implementation procedure to be proposed by a special commission; since Congress never did so, the bill never went into effect.) “The UMT thing—that was a Russell operation, not Johnson’s,” Horace Busby said. A similar situation existed with four “task forces” established by the Armed Services Committee during the Eighty-second Congress. Although they were called “task forces” of Preparedness, “Chairman Johnson chaired no Task Force and attended no Task Force meeting,” McCulley writes. Some of them included senators who were not even members of Preparedness, and not Johnson’s men but Mudge and Galusha handled the bulk of the staff work.

*For a fuller account of this incident, see Volume 1, The Path to Power, pp. 266–68.