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THE JOHNSON SUBCOMMITTEE had far less impact on the defense effort than the Truman Committee had had, and not only because the police action in Korea was not the Second World War but because, unlike Truman’s work, so much of Johnson’s was based not on original research—on-the-spot inspections—but on previously compiled documents simply reworked in the interests of publicity. Dan McGillicuddy, who was to work for Preparedness for thirteen years, eventually as its assistant chief counsel, came to feel that “The whole thing was to get Johnson’s name in the papers.” And, McGillicuddy says, Johnson wasn’t any too particular about how he did it. “He was looking for the sensational,” McGillicuddy says. “Hell! Twenty-six reports in one year! These things weren’t being carefully researched. They’d get a report from somewhere, and Reedy would wrap it up in catchy phrases, and they’d put it out, and hope it caught on. He [Johnson] was fishing for a program of national interest.” The Army colonel who later became the committee’s staff director, Kenneth E. BeLieu, echoed McGillicuddy’s feelings in an interview; then, asked if the subcommittee’s impact during these two and half years had been significant, BeLieu smiled and said, “No, not really.”
Sometimes this search for the sensational led down false alleys, out of which Johnson was able to scramble only by employing considerable ingenuity. After an unexpected rush of enlistments during the Christmas holidays at the end of 1950, senators’ mailbags began to contain complaints from enlistees’ parents about conditions at overcrowded Lackland Air Force Base, near San Antonio, at which sixty-eight thousand men were receiving basic training. In the middle of the coldest winter on the Texas plains in forty years, parents wrote, their sons were sleeping in unheated tents, with inadequate blankets, clothing, and food. There were reports of suicides and deaths from a pneumonia epidemic. Summoned to a closed session of the Armed Services Committee, Air Force officials said that they had heard the rumors, had already begun investigating them, and that rumors were all they were. There was no epidemic of pneumonia, or any other illness, at Lackland, they said; every man on the base had adequate blankets, clothing, and food. The base was indeed overcrowded because of the rush of enlistments, and some men were indeed sleeping in tents, but none of the tents was unheated—and, after all, these officials noted, it would not be the first time in history that soldiers had slept in tents. Construction of twenty-five new, centrally heated barracks, and of a new airfield equipped for basic training—Sampson Air Base in Romulus, New York—was being rushed; Sampson’s completion, due within two months, would end the overcrowding. In the interim, the officials said, the Air Force had already curtailed enlistments and Lackland’s population was being reduced daily as men were shipped to other camps for their basic training. The senators were urged not to add fuel to the rumors. As Air Force Secretary Thomas K. Finletter was to say in a letter to Johnson:
We are all extremely solicitous of the welfare of our young men but with large numbers of them now in combat we feel that others should not be encouraged to make public complaint because of minor discomforts and inconveniences. During a period of emergency some very minor hardship must be considered normal. False or exaggerated reports can cause unjustified worry or apprehension on the part of parents and others when they become public issues.
On January 27, 1951, however, Johnson emerged from an Armed Services hearing to announce that the Preparedness Subcommittee was rushing a team of four investigators to Lackland, and on January 31, escalating the sense of urgency, he told reporters that the four investigators were, as the New York Times put it, “to make a personal check tonight,” to draw the same “blankets and sleeping gear issued to any recruit,” to “sleep in separate, unheated tents along with the recruits,” to eat with them—and to telephone him personally in Washington in case emergency measures were necessary. And urgency permeated his instructions to the crack team he had selected for the mission—Lyon Tyler, Colonel Mark Galusha, and his two Texas aces, John Connally and Horace Busby. He sent them into battle with an inspirational battle cry: “We’ve got to tell these mothers something!”
“Get down there right away and find out what’s going on,” he told Tyler. “He points his finger at me, and says, ‘You’re an FBI man. Find out what’s going on!’” There was no time to be lost, Johnson said. Mothers were worried about their boys. Busby, snug in a public relations berth in Austin, could hardly believe the telephone call that was sending him out into a tent on the freezing Texas plains, but Johnson had no patience with his attempt to beg off. “Listen,” he said, “this is important. We’ve got to tell these mothers something!”
The initial headlines—“INVESTIGATORS SLEEP IN LACKLAND TENTS,” the Dallas Morning News said—were as dramatic as any senator could have desired, particularly because on the day the investigators arrived, a Texas storm swept across the plains, and temperatures plummeted to fifteen degrees. And so were the initial stories from Texas reporters who rushed to the camp because of Johnson’s announcements. “An estimated 20,000 new recruits sleeping in tents at Lackland Field in subfreezing temperatures had company Tuesday night when four investigators crawled in with them,” said the Morning News. “Chairman Johnson had the four draw GI clothing, sleep outdoors in unheated tents and eat every meal at a different mess hall,” said the Austin American-Statesman. Within the stories, however, were statements of a different tone. Writing that “Lackland officials emphatically deny [the] rumors,” Jerry Banks of the Morning News added that the denials appeared accurate. He reported that as he was leaving one tent, “an older recruit—perhaps twenty-four—stepped up and said: ‘Don’t pay any attention to these kids…. I was in the Army before, and it was the same then as it is now.’” In fact, Banks found, it was. “For the most part, the gripes of the recruits are the same ones their older brothers had in World War II and their fathers in World War I.”
That was also the finding of Johnson’s own investigating team. Even on that fifteen-degree night—the coldest night of the year—on which they had slept in the tents, the four investigators had, as Busby was to write in the report summarizing their findings, experienced “no undue cold or other discomfort.” What’s more, Busby’s report stated, there had been no suicides at Lackland, absolutely none. There had been no pneumonia epidemic; in fact, there had been not a single death from pneumonia. “During the past 18 months, there have been only two deaths on the base—one from cancer, one from an automobile accident.” The average daily sick-call attendance at the base was actually lower than it had been when the Korean War began. “The enlistees at Lackland were generally well-clothed…. Food was good.” Morale problem? “No morale problem was found…. The men were generally in good spirits.” And Johnson was informed of the true situation by a telephone call from his own investigators the next day, February 1.
Reassuring though this news would have been to the recruits’ relatives, however, it was not news to which they were immediately given access. Somehow, the urgency about telling mothers “something”—giving them some form of comfort—disappeared. In fact, the Johnson Subcommittee told them nothing for almost three weeks (during which, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported, “many parents, relatives and friends of the enlistees … made special trips to [Lackland] because of rumors about conditions there”). Not a single word came from the subcommittee on the subject of the Lackland Air Force Base until February 19.
And when news did come, it was presented with the Johnson touch. The facts that disproved the rumors—that “There have been no suicides at the base as alleged,” no pneumonia “epidemic,” “no morale problem,” and plenty of clothing, blankets, heat and food—were certainly all in the subcommittee report. But while these facts would have provided reassurance for parents, they would have caused embarrassment for Lyndon Johnson, who by casting doubt on the Air Force’s reassurances—reassurances which had turned out to be true—had helped make the rumors a “public issue.” And these facts were not the main purport of the February 19 newspaper stories. For Johnson’s report presented the facts from a different angle, emphasizing not the points on which the Air Force could not be criticized but rather a point on which it could: the fact that it had accepted more enlistees “than it was capable of processing” at Lackland. In its Conclusion, the report called the Air Force policy on enlistments “irresponsible” and charged, with only the scantiest documentation, that the resultant “overcrowding” had resulted in “the total breakdown of training.”
And if the report’s Conclusion was much stronger than the facts contained in the body of the report, the interviews which Johnson gave about the report—before it was issued—were much stronger than the Conclusion. These interviews were designed to influence journalists, who of course had not yet seen the report, to place on it the emphasis that Johnson wanted. Since a critical evaluation of the document might have resulted in articles embarrassing to him, he called in first—for an exclusive, nationally syndicated interview—a journalist he could be confident would not give it such an evaluation, Marshall McNeil, who during the 1948 Texas senatorial campaign had written not only articles for the Scripps Howard chain of newspapers but speeches for Lyndon Johnson. The day before its release, Scripps Howard’s millions of readers were prepared for it by McNeil’s story that predicted a “blistering report that tans the hides of high Air Force Commanders.” In other interviews Johnson said the report would be “sizzling,” and explained that “It was the greed of the Air Force for the best of the nation’s available manpower” that had led to overcrowding at Lackland. These interviews created the impression that Johnson wanted, even though it would turn out on closer examination that the “total breakdown” meant little more than that the overflow of enlistees had had to be sent to other bases for their basic training.
And the press followed the script he had written, “GREED FOR MANPOWER CHARGED TO AIR FORCE BY SENATE INQUIRIES” was the headline in the Washington Star; “LACKLAND MESS LAID TO AF ‘GREED,’” the headline in the Washington Times-Herald; “SENATORS HIT MANPOWER HOARD BY AF—Blistering Report Says Policy Brought ‘Total Breakdown in Basic Training,’” the headline in the Washington Post. Front-page articles across the country were dominated by the words “blistering,” “sizzling,” “greed,” “irresponsible,” and “total breakdown.” It was not in the headlines or the lead paragraphs but only further down in the articles that the reader would discover statements like: “Reports of epidemics, deaths, bad food, inadequate shelter and clothing … were found to be completely unwarranted.”
Coupled with the report was the promise of another report to come, a report that, Lyndon Johnson said, would be even more significant than this one. There was, as always, the guarantee that this was only the beginning, that bigger revelations were just around the corner. Shocked by the overcrowding at Lackland, Johnson announced, the Preparedness Subcommittee had already launched investigations of other induction centers. “I want the parents of our young men to know that this committee is at present conducting a first-hand investigation of indoctrination camps for all three of the services all over the nation,” he said. “We want to find out what the services are doing and not doing.”
That report would be issued on April 15. Its conclusion was that “all branches of the armed services … are doing a generally commendable job at the indoctrination and training centers.” But that report, preceded by no leaks or adjectives, received relatively little publicity.
IF THERE WERE STRIKEOUTS, however, there were also home runs. With complaints increasing that in the vast buildup of the armed forces, inadequate provision was being made for housing servicemen’s families, so that families that wanted to accompany soldiers to their military bases were being exploited by civilian landlords, in July, 1951, Johnson dispatched three two-man investigating teams to military bases across the country. And, as McGillicuddy was to recall years later, “We hit pay dirt.” In Morganfield, Kentucky, near the Army’s huge Camp Breckenridge, for example, the investigators found that servicemen’s wives and children were forced to live in unsanitary hovels, often without electricity or indoor plumbing, for which they were charged outrageous rents. Some residences had become so notorious among Breckenridge recruits that they had acquired nicknames. There was the “Doll House,” which had once been a playhouse, fourteen feet wide and nine feet deep, built for a civilian family’s children on the back lawn of their home, and which now, divided into four cubicles that the landlord called “rooms,” housed a sergeant, his wife, and three children, who cooked their meals on a two-burner hot plate since there was no room for a stove, and drank water carried by bucket from the landlady’s house. There was the “Chicken Coop,” which “had once been just that, and now housed a family of three. There was the aptly named “Rat House.”
McGillicuddy showed his photographs of these dwellings to Reedy, who said happily, “This will catch them.” And Reedy made sure that the pictures did indeed catch the attention of the press and public, writing that they were evidence of “cruel indignity, irresponsible greed and casual disdain for the self-respect of our men in uniform…. Men who have been called into the service of the country have been forced to house their dependents in places not fit for human habitation.” On the morning of Monday, July 19, the release date on the Twenty-eighth Report of the Preparedness Subcommittee—“Interim Report on Substandard Housing and Rent Gouging of Military Personnel”—those pictures “were on front pages everywhere,” McGillicuddy recalls. Legislation to provide on-base housing for the dependents of military men had already been introduced—by Senator Wherry—and the subcommittee’s findings played a major role in the passage of the Wherry Housing Act. In later years, McGillicuddy would be proud that “when you go to an Army base and see the housing with a nice playground in the middle of it—well, you can thank us for that.”
(At the time, McGillicuddy’s sense of accomplishment was tempered by Lyndon Johnson’s response. The ex-FBI man assumed, as did the five recently hired subcommittee investigators who had also gone on the inspection trips, that their boss would be pleased by the front-page headlines and when, on the morning on which the headlines appeared, the six men were summoned to Johnson’s office, “we were joking, as we walked up the hill from the SEC Building, that we were going to be decorated.” But that was only because they had never dealt much with Johnson. “I ask you to go out and do a simple investigation,” Lyndon Johnson said. “I ask you to go out and get pictures. Half of my team comes back with pictures. Half of my team comes back with promises! They’ll get pictures all right. In ten days! IN TEN DAYS!!!”
Life magazine, it turned out, was contemplating a major story on the subcommittee report, but it needed additional pictures, some from other bases, and when Johnson had asked Tyler about more pictures, he had been told it might take as long as ten days for the investigators to fly to bases, locate suitably photogenic housing, take the pictures and get them back to Washington. Johnson “was snarling,” McGillicuddy says, “just snarling. ‘I want you all out of this town by tonight!! Take cameras, take film, take whatever you need—but get out of town, and get me the pictures.’ He had been shouting. His voice got low, and he just snarled: ‘By tonight!’ ”)
THE WORK OF THE SENATE PREPAREDNESS SUBCOMMITTEE, and in particular the forty-four formal reports it published before the Republican victory in 1952 removed Lyndon Johnson from its chairmanship, demonstrated another aspect of Johnson’s political ability, one that went beyond the technical—and was revealing of his personality. For each one of the reports was signed not only by him but by every one of the subcommittee’s other six members.
There were the strongest of political reasons for the subcommittee’s chairman to want seven signatures on every report. Unanimous was a word that carried a lot of weight with a Senate bitterly divided, even hamstrung, by party divisions, and with journalists, particularly when they were writing about a group whose membership was divided, 4 to 3, along party lines; unanimity would be regarded as proof that the subcommittee’s decisions, being bipartisan, were above politics, that they were based on higher, more objective considerations.
And there were the strongest of personal reasons as well—reasons that had governed, and would always govern, Lyndon Johnson’s life. Years later, in 1960, when he was running for vice president, his campaign train was backing into the New Orleans train depot. Standing beside him on the train’s rear platform was his fellow senator, George Smathers. Seeing the huge, cheering crowd in which, Smathers recalls, “there had to be at least a thousand signs, ‘Kennedy/Johnson, Kennedy/Johnson.’” Smathers thought “we were doing great”—until Johnson “jumped like he was shot,” whirled on him, and said, “‘Look at that son of a bitch! Look at that sign there!’ There was one [unfavorable] sign! It wasn’t a foot high. There were thousands of signs, and that was the one he picked out. ‘Goddammit it! Look at that sign!’ I thought, this is the damndest fellow I had ever seen in my life, here we had all this, and all he could see was [that one sign]. But that was typical Johnson…. It had to be unanimous as far as he was concerned.”
It had always had to be unanimous—starting, years before, in Johnson City’s Courthouse Square, where a gangling boy barely into his teens would refuse to stop arguing politics with older barbershop hangers-on so long as there remained one man who was not subscribing to his point of view: on that small, bare stage it had been clear that the young Lyndon Johnson was so starved for respect that he needed every last taste of it he could get; that the psyche of this son of ridiculed parents had been rubbed so raw that to him disagreement was also disrespect, so that anything less than total agreement burned like salt in his wounds. “If there was an argument, he had to win, just had to…. he just wouldn’t stop until you gave in.” And now, watching Lyndon Johnson’s unwillingness to allow even one member of his subcommittee to refuse to sign a majority report, Gerald Siegel realized the depth of the forces behind Lyndon Johnson’s insistence on seven signatures, every time. “Any kind of criticism”—even a single negative vote on a subcommittee report—was unbearable to him, Siegel says. “He really wanted one hundred percent, and anything short of that was a great blow. He was a man who, for some reason, seemed to want unanimity in acceptance of himself.” To Lyndon Johnson, those seven signatures were a sign of approval not merely of the report but of him, and not merely of approval of him but of the respect and affection for which he hungered.
Unanimity was easier to obtain on this subcommittee than it might have been on some others, for the reports’ subjects were in general such easy targets as “waste” and “mismanagement” and “gouging,” and they were being issued against a national backdrop of frustration and anger over what the public was convinced was the nation’s lack of proper readiness. Landlords exploiting servicemen were fair game for Democrats and Republicans alike. Nonetheless, the subcommittee included both the staunchly liberal Hunt and the rabidly conservative Bridges—and Morse, who was known to disagree for the sake of disagreeing, and for the publicity involved. It would be, a journalist would write, “a real challenge for any chairman to bring such a group to consensus.” But Lyndon Johnson had to have unanimity, had to. And to get it, this reader of men read his six members, and read them well, particularly their weaknesses, and used what he read.
With Kefauver and Hunt preoccupied with their own subcommittees, Johnson could concentrate on his remaining Democrat, Virgil Chapman, whose weakness for alcohol made him particularly vulnerable.
“Drinking makes you lose control,” Johnson told Bobby Baker, and control was something he never wanted to lose. In 1950 and ’51, he made a show of being a heavy drinker, in the accepted, senatorial, one-of-the-boys, manner, and indeed he was—sometimes. But usually he wasn’t. “Drinking makes you let your guard down,” he would say, and he didn’t want his guard down, ever. When, therefore, he was drinking along with another man, he had as many drinks as the other man—but his were weaker. In his own office, the instructions were strict: the other man’s drinks were to be made regular strength—two or three one-ounce jiggers of whiskey per drink—but, unknown to the other man, Johnson’s own drinks, Cutty Sark Scotch and soda, were not. Says his secretary Ashton Gonella, who mixed them for years: “His drinks could have no more than an ounce of liquor in it, and if there was more than an ounce, you were in trouble.” In public, at the cocktail receptions that were so much a part of Washington life, he would dispatch Bobby Baker, whom he had begun to bring along to receptions, to fetch him a drink, and would order him to “make it weak.” If the bartender mixed it too strong, he would grow so angry—“You trying to make an ass of me?” he snarled at the young page once; on another occasion, Baker recalls, “the Senator thundered: ‘Bobby, you tryin’ to sandbag me so I’ll make a fool of myself?’”—that Baker took to tasting each drink himself before bringing it over to Johnson.
When Johnson discussed subcommittee business with Chapman, the discussions would be held in the late afternoon or evening, in 231’s inner office, over drinks. Feet up on his desk, his body extended so fully in his chair that it seemed almost parallel with the carpet, the host was seemingly totally relaxed as he drank along with his guest, holding out a long arm to a secretary whenever his glass was empty and rattling the ice cubes for refills—frequent refills. But while the host didn’t get drunk, the guest did, and, a happy, friendly drunk, the chubby Kentuckian was soon agreeing to whatever Johnson wanted. Sometimes—not often—at the next formal subcommittee meeting, Chapman might raise a question about some part of a subcommittee report, only to be told that he had agreed to it the previous afternoon—a statement which never failed to end his objections. Chapman’s alcoholism was rapidly growing worse. His round face with its heavy double chin seemed almost invariably flushed with drink now, and, more and more often, when he waddled through the tall door of the subcommittee’s meeting room, he would be too inebriated to follow the proceedings, and would ask Busby to sit behind him and signal him when his vote was needed, by touching him on the right shoulder for an “aye” vote, on the left shoulder for a “nay.” Busby did so—always on the right shoulder; nay votes were not wanted. “I’d tap him on the shoulder; he’d jerk awake, and in this big voice boom out, ‘Vote “AAAH!”’”
Republican Saltonstall, the epitome of the dignified New Englander, had both a manner that Johnson wanted to emulate, and weaknesses that Johnson could exploit. He had learned, as he told his assistants, that the lantern-jawed Boston Brahmin, “as trustworthy and straight as he looked,” had a total lack of understanding of the more sordid aspects of politics, and of life in general (“Why, you could be screwing every secretary in his office and he wouldn’t have any idea that anything was going on,” Johnson told Booth Mooney), as well as a patrician aversion to disputes or controversy that made him “shrink from quarreling.” When Saltonstall disagreed with some aspect of a subcommittee report, Johnson would call on him and discuss it. The situation was so complicated, Johnson would say; solving it was so difficult; he had tried to accommodate all the different sides; wouldn’t Saltonstall help him on this? I’d really appreciate it if you could see your way clear to helping me on this, he would say. I sure need your help. Putting the issue on such a personal basis made continued refusal to help almost a personal matter, the kind that might lead to a quarrel. Lyndon Johnson never became strident with Saltonstall; his argument would be made in a calm, courteous voice, and would be interspersed with jokes and anecdotes to prove his point. But the arguing wouldn’t stop. Johnson had correctly deconstructed the Saltonstall text: if he didn’t stop, eventually Saltonstall, to avoid what might escalate into a serious disagreement, would give in.
With Morse safely off in Oregon, the remaining GOP text was Bridges. The New Hampshire Republican was too powerful and shrewd to be gotten around, so Johnson, who had already given him two staff positions, now gave him anything else he wanted, including help with his constituents. New Hampshire manufacturers of wool blankets were demanding that their senator do something about recent increases in the price they had to pay for wool, increases that were reducing their profits. Following an inquiry by the subcommittee staff, Bridges was able to give them the good news that the Office of Price Stabilization would shortly be setting a ceiling on the price of wool. And when Bridges wanted help against some of his constituents, Johnson gave him that, too—as is made clear by the transcript of a closed subcommittee session that was held one Monday morning, July 9, 1951, in the Armed Services Committee room.
Local opposition to a proposal, dear to Bridges’ heart, to construct an Air Force base near Manchester, New Hampshire, was infuriating him—and he wanted to find out who was behind it. It was possible, he said, that the opposition came from people who simply didn’t want an airfield near their homes, but he doubted that explanation; there were, after all, Communists even in New Hampshire. Perhaps, he suggested, “some investigator from our committee” should go up and find out… whether there might be some people with rather deeper feelings who don’t believe in preparedness in our country that are behind it…. Who is behind it? People very prominent, for instance, in the American Legion tell me they think very deeply there is something beyond just ordinary opposition.”
Although Bridges didn’t push the suggestion—“I don’t think I am ready to ask that it be formally investigated yet, but I may”—Johnson leapt at the opportunity to be of service. After an “off the record” discussion (off the record even for a closed session), Cook told Bridges, “whenever you tell us that you would like that investigation made we will send somebody up there immediately and get to the bottom of it.” Who could ask for more than that? “Thank you very much,” Senator Bridges said. A rapport sprang up between Johnson and Bridges, and often in the late afternoons they would have a drink together in one of their offices.
THESE LATE-AFTERNOON SESSIONS had one aspect which Horace Busby, adoring Lyndon Johnson though he did, found disturbing—for the young speechwriter had grown fond of Virgil Chapman.
By late afternoon, he says, Johnson and Bridges could be sure Chapman would be drunk. Johnson would telephone Chapman’s office, “and a secretary would answer and say the Senator was taking a nap.”
“Johnson would say—this was a part of Johnson I didn’t like—well, ‘Wake him up!’ and when he [Chapman] would come to the phone, Johnson would have him come on up. He would come rolling in, and they [Johnson and Bridges] would keep pouring him drinks. Some people think it’s good sport.”
(On March 8, 1951, Virgil Chapman was killed when the car he was driving collided with a tractor-trailer on Connecticut Avenue at two in the morning. His replacement on the subcommittee was John Stennis of Mississippi.)
DILIGENT AS WAS THE CHAIRMAN’S CULTIVATION of his six subcommittee members, however, occasional disagreements arose—if not over some philosophical issue then over some proposed criticism of an industry or a defense contractor of which some senator felt protective—and one or more of the senators would let the chairman know that he wouldn’t be able to sign the report, or even that he wanted to issue his own, dissenting, minority report.
But the chairman would not allow disagreement. Considerable rewriting by Cook and Siegel and Reedy would already have gone into the numbered drafts which had been circulated to the six senators, and one of the principal objectives of these revisions had been to remove material to which some senator objected. Now, if a senator wanted something else rewritten, the draft would be returned to the three staff members for more work. And if problems still remained, Johnson would personally discuss them with the objecting senator. Then he would try to find a way of modifying the report yet again to meet the objections while not modifying it so much that some other subcommittee member might object. In seeking such compromises, he was notably amenable to his colleagues’ points of view, so much so that staff aides—not Cook or Siegel, perhaps, but others less closely tied to Johnson—came to feel that he cared less about the content of the report than about the fact that there be a report. Says McGillicuddy: “Sometimes, if there was something there a senator didn’t like—a sentence, a paragraph, a whole page—it would be deleted. All he [Johnson] wanted was a report to show action.” Occasionally, however, the views of two of the subcommittee’s members seemed irreconcilably opposed. Johnson would shuttle back and forth between their offices, talking first to one and then the other, editing, altering, trying to persuade them to a compromise that both could sign.
During these negotiations, he would compliment the senators, with that gift for the perfect compliment. Says Colonel BeLieu, who sat in on many such sessions: “He’d tell one of them that he knew he wanted to help his country, that he was a real patriot, so many times that the guy thought he was a patriot.” He would charm them: if one of the senators complimented him back, Lyndon Johnson would grin, with a warm grin that crinkled up his big face, and say, “Well, Ah sure do wish mah parents had been here to hear you say that, Senator. Mah father would have enjoyed it. And mah mother would have believed it.”
He used his stories, those wonderful stories, told in that persuasive Texas drawl, to make points—whatever points needed to be made. If he wanted the subcommittee to accept a recommendation made by the military, and one subcommittee member was refusing to go along, he might tell him an anecdote about Rayburn. “During the war, the Army was just determined to have Mr. Sam get on a plane and go all the way down there to some base and inspect these new tanks they were building. This whole bunch of generals comes to his office to tell him he’s just got to go, and give them his opinion. And Mr. Sam, he just looks at them and says, ‘Well, gentlemen, if you all can’t tell about those tanks better than I can, we’ve sure been wasting a lot of money at West Point.’”
If, on some other matter, he wanted the subcommittee to criticize the military, he would tell a different story—to make the point that testimony from lower-ranking officers couldn’t be trusted because military protocol forbade them to disagree with their superiors. “You hear about the latest computer that the Army’s using?” he would ask. “Well, this general puts in a question. The question is this: ‘Will there be peace or war in our time?’ The wheels whir. The lights flash. The machine grinds out the answer: Yes.The general is upset. He feeds back the question: ‘Yes, what?’ The answer comes: Yes, sir!”
If the compliments and the stories didn’t work, he would cajole and plead with a senator for his signature, would work from the high ground (a unanimous report would demonstrate that the subcommittee members weren’t motivated by partisan considerations, he would say, and with a war going on, that was important; “Hell, we’ve got boys dyin out there”) and from lower ground (framing his arguments in pragmatic political terms, he would explain to a colleague precisely how a proposed report would strengthen him in his own state, displaying a remarkably detailed familiarity of that state’s political situation). He would use every variety of argument, all couched in sentences whose very rhythms infused them with a force and persuasiveness that made them hard to resist: telling one of the subcommittee members that he was the only one still refusing to sign a report, he would say, “Ah talked to Styles. He’s goin’ along. Ah talked to John. He’s goin’ along. Hell, even ol’ Wayne’s goin’ along.” Implied, if not stated, was the question: Do you want to be the only member standing in the way of the subcommittee’s work?
And most significantly, if, despite all the charm and the cajoling and the pleading, one senator still continued to refuse to go along, said he simply could not sign the report, that would not be the end of the matter.
Perhaps the senator had made clear that he didn’t want to discuss the matter any further, and had done so in terms so firm it would have been a mistake for Lyndon Johnson to try to schedule yet another meeting with him. In that case, no new meeting would be scheduled—although one would in fact occur. Alone behind the closed door of his private office, Johnson would prepare new arguments, forecast the senator’s replies to them, prepare his own responses to those replies, rehearse his delivery. Through the door his aides would hear the Chief’s voice: “Now, Styles, you’ve got a real strong point there, but here’s the thing….” He would, in Doris Kearns Goodwin’s words, fashion “a detailed mental script from which he would speak—in a manner designed to seem wholly spontaneous—when the meeting took place…. The meeting itself might seem like an accidental encounter in a Senate corridor; but Johnson was not a man who roamed through halls in aimless fashion: when he began to wander, he knew who it was he would find.”
For a recalcitrant subcommittee member, even home offered no sanctuary. The telephone would ring, and on it would be the subcommittee’s chairman, wanting to discuss the matter again. If the senator continued to disagree, Johnson would telephone him again—later in the evening or on a weekend. In these conversations, he never threatened—he had nothing to threaten with, of course—or demanded. He was respectful, deferential—humble, even. But he was also untiring. Other senators wanted to spend time with their wives and children. They had other things they wanted to do besides talk about a subcommittee report. But if he did not have agreement—the signature he needed to make the report unanimous—Lyndon Johnson would not stop talking about the report.
“Most chairmen—if some senator kept insisting on filing a minority report, they’d finally say okay,” Ken BeLieu explains. “Johnson would keep saying, ‘Let’s talk about it.’ Home, family, Lady Bird—all this was strictly secondary with him. And the thing is: he got them to change. He got them to change, even guys who had said flatly they weren’t going to change. The reason was that he was going to invest more time than they would.” No matter how much time a man was willing to spend arguing with Lyndon Johnson, Lyndon Johnson was willing to spend more. “He would just wear you down. Finally you’d agree—anything to get it over with. You’d agree just to get rid of him.” He just wouldn’t stop until you gave in. He hadn’t stopped in Courthouse Square, and he didn’t stop now, wouldn’t stop, because he couldn’t stop. He had to win, had to. “One way or another, he just refused to have a single vote against him,” BeLieu says.
And he didn’t have one. “This unanimity is especially remarkable because the group is a cross-section of Senate political opinion,” one journalist said.
ALL THROUGH 1951, Lyndon Johnson drove his subcommittee. After Congress recessed in September, the corridors of the Senate Office Building were even quieter than usual, but in the second-floor corridor outside the Armed Services Committee suite, the clatter of Reedy’s typewriter could still be heard, announcing, after President Truman signed the new defense appropriations bill, that the Preparedness Subcommittee was—as Sen. Lyndon B. Johnson (D-Tex.) said today—set to guard the new defense spending against “chiselers, spendthrifts, grafters and blue sky artists”; announcing that the subcommittee was—as Sen. Lyndon B. Johnson (D-Tex.) disclosed today—subpoenaing Biloxi’s mayor and police chief about slot machines on the wide-open Mississippi Gold Coast which were fleecing airmen at Keesler Field of their pay; that Senator Johnson was concerned about the “inexcusable failure” by the Army and the Department of Agriculture to coordinate their specifications for food purchased for the armed forces despite Preparedness Subcommittee warnings. (“Our reports are not written as literary exercises,” Senator Johnson declared. “We expect our recommendations to be implemented or we expect to be shown the reason if they are not.”)
Johnson had flown back to Texas, and was to remain there for three months, but every day, of course, his staff was telephoning him from Washington with a report on the day’s mail, and if there was a possibility in it, he grasped it in an instant. When families of servicemen in Korea wrote him wondering if there would be enough warm clothing for the frigid Korean winter ahead, Johnson telephoned Army Secretary Frank Pace, and as soon as Pace assured him that there would be, Johnson rushed to reassure the parents—in an announcement, typed by Reedy, that made front pages across the country.
It was a great show. And it got great reviews. “Congress has gone home, but… Preparedness keeps grinding out its detective stories, which are invariably the despair of guilty or sloppy operators and the delight of anybody who enjoys seeing such miscreants put to witty and delicate torture,” columnist Holmes Alexander wrote. The subcommittee’s work, he said, is “like watching a super vaudeville show with pratfalls and belly laughs coming faster than it’s easy to count….”
If 1950 had been, for Lyndon Johnson, a year of bold black headlines in newspapers, 1951 was a year of color photographs, illustrating long articles about him in national magazines. They were the kind of articles about which a politician dreams. In aCollier’sarticle accompanied by a full-page picture of a smiling Johnson being fed a piece of birthday cake by Dorothy Nichols as Busby, Woodward, Stegall, and Mary Rather looked on adoringly, and by a picture of his wife in a red dress and his two little girls in matching blue pinafores sitting in their pale green living room, Leslie Carpenter reported that “Johnson has surprised many of his colleagues by emerging as a national leader for the millions of Americans who believe their government failed miserably in meeting the challenge of the Korean War.” In the New York Times Magazine, there was “JOHNSON OF THE ‘WATCHDOG COMMITTEE.’” (“He Is Interested in Results, Not Headlines,” the subhead said.) “He is tall, dark and handsome,” Eliot Janeway wrote. “He inhabits an oral universe of discourse … and from 6:30 a.m. to the small hours of the next day, he ranges across it, arguing, listening, ‘needling,’ explaining, compromising, chain-smoking and chain-telephoning. Yet out of this whirl of extroverted activity Johnson has distilled the seemingly contradictory virtues of patience and tolerance.” The subcommittee’s unanimity reflects his “placing of patriotism above party,” Janeway said.
Even the Saturday Evening Post, which, as one newspaper put it that year, “never says anything kind about a Democrat if it can avoid it,” couldn’t avoid it. While Paul Healy’s Post article mentioned Johnson’s treatment of his “underlings” (who “jump like marionettes”) and of motorists on Connecticut Avenue (whom he “continually addressed in unparliamentary language”) and, after quoting his statement that Roosevelt “was like a Daddy to me,” mentioned that “He says much the same thing” of Rayburn, Fred Vinson, Carl Vinson, and Alvin Wirtz, Healy also admitted that “In Washington, Johnson is given the major share of the credit for keeping this investigation nonpartisan and devoid of a circus atmosphere…. He succeeded in getting a unanimous vote from his committee every time.” Healy called him “dynamic,” with an “extraordinary quick and incisive mind” and “a willingness to work like a dray horse.” Johnson “is a student of human nature,” the article said. “He reads other senators like a psychologist.” And, it concluded, he was
just about the hottest young senator in the Capitol, in terms of legislative results. One senator says Johnson is the most effective freshman he has seen…. [R]eally fervent admirers, such as his good friend W. Stuart Symington … call him a “man of destiny.”
These articles created a particular image of the young senator. When, Carpenter wrote, a visitor to Johnson’s office commented, “Why, you have one of the most beautiful views in Washington from your window,” Johnson “turned his head,” looked out, and said, “I’d never noticed before.” John Connally told reporters that when he suggested they go to see a Lana Turner movie, Johnson replied, “Who is Lana Turner?” When a reporter mentioned Johnson’s golfing afternoons at Burning Tree, Johnson emphasized that he played golf only as a means of advancing some purpose with Symington or some other influential partner. “He confesses privately that he does not enjoy the game and can’t waste the time it would take to really learn it.” He had no interest in life other than his work, these interviews suggested. “Leave Lyndon Johnson alone in a room with a telephone and he will make a long-distance call,” his staff member Arthur Perry told Carpenter. And Busby, as always, had a vivid anecdote ready. Meeting his boss at an airport, he recalled, he found him pacing back and forth near a row of three telephone booths. “Watch those phones!” he yelled, as he started toward the newsstand. “I’ve got a long-distance call working in each one.”
The image was summarized in Healy’s lead paragraph, which said that “the junior United States Senator from Texas maintains the most rigidly one-track mind in Washington. Johnson is entirely preoccupied with the science of politics, which for him is an exact science and one which he has mastered superlatively. Politics is, naturally, Topic A for most social circles in the national capital. But for Johnson it is Topic A-to-Z…. He refuses to be trapped into thinking about or discussing sports, literature, the stage, the movies, or anything else in the world of recreation.”
IN NOVEMBER, the yearlong flood of publicity reached its crest. This time, when a photographer—Ed Wergeles of Newsweek magazine—arrived at Lyndon Johnson’s office to take his photograph, he wasn’t satisfied to pose him just behind his desk or against a wall. He had to have a better background, Wergeles said, for unless some breaking major news story erupted during the next two or three days, this photograph was for the cover.
Johnson had bid for the cover—the cover of a national magazine with a circulation of more than two million—with the tried and true technique of which he had, during this year, so repeatedly demonstrated his mastery: a leak of a still-secret subcommittee report. He had privately assured a Newsweek correspondent that this report, the thirty-fifth the subcommittee had issued, was its most significant; it revealed, he said, that America’s overall defense production program—deliveries of planes, tanks, ships and guns—was lagging “dangerously behind schedule.” He had given the magazine not merely a draft of the report but the final version, signed by all seven subcommittee members and already in the final printed form in which it would be released to the rest of the press on November 29. And he had given it to Newsweek well enough in advance so that the magazine could use it in its issue that would appear on newsstands on Wednesday, November 28.
Even George Reedy, author of the report’s Introduction and Conclusions, and of the accompanying press release, was to admit later that “That report was not very substantive.” But Reedy’s written words at the time—particularly a phrase designed to catch the journalistic eye—certainly made it seem substantive. The reason for the lag, he wrote, was that “We didn’t have the courage to put guns ahead of butter.” In the press release, Johnson said: “This report spells out for the American people the payoff for the wasted months that have been spent in a fruitless search for a formula that will give us both butter and guns in ample quantities. The results have been excellent in terms of butter. But unfortunately butter—even fortified butter—is not enough to stop Communist armies. That takes guns and when it comes to the production of guns, our formula has not worked out well.”
During the week before the cover story was scheduled to appear, Johnson received a letter that might have raised concerns among Newsweek’s editors had they learned about it. One of Johnson’s key contentions for some weeks had been that America’s “dangerous lag” in defense production included production not only for American troops but for those of NATO nations. To document his point, he had cited what he said was a shortfall behind various schedules. But on Wednesday, November 21, Acting Secretary of Defense William C. Foster wrote Johnson that he was confusing two schedules: that for NATO arms deliveries scheduled for 1951, and that for 1951 fiscal appropriations for NATO arms which required substantial “lead time” to design and had never been intended to be delivered that year. Furthermore, Foster said, there was no need for these arms to be delivered in 1951, since they were intended for use by NATO units which had not yet even been formed. Johnson did not release that letter, nor show it to any other member of the subcommittee. And, although Johnson was in frequent communication with Newsweek reporters during this week, he never let them know about it, either.
Wergeles’ prediction had made Johnson hopeful that he might attain the cover, but the prediction was conditional, and Johnson, who had left Washington for the ranch shortly after the photograph was taken, spent several days filled with anxiety over the possibility of some major news development. Finally, on Tuesday, unable to bear the waiting, he telephoned Walter Jenkins and told Jenkins to get an advance copy that very night, he didn’t care how; Jenkins apparently flew to New York to get one.
Jenkins still had not telephoned, however, when Johnson and Lady Bird had to leave to go out to dinner with some neighbors. While they were gone, the call came—to Mary Rather in Austin. Mary typed a note to Johnson, and a car sped out of the city on the lonely road through the dark hills to the Johnson Ranch, and when the Johnsons returned, the news was waiting for them. “Walter says the cover is a beautiful picture in color,” Miss Rather wrote. “Very vivid. The background is that Scotch plaid blanket…. You are leaning forward with your hands up to your face—head resting on right arm and cigarette in left hand. Underneath the picture: ‘Watchdog in Chief.’” The next morning copies of Newsweek arrived in Johnson City, and there he was, on the newsstand in Fawcett’s Drugstore, where Sam Ealy Johnson’s credit had been cut off so that his son had had to stand by watching while his friends charged purchases to their fathers’ accounts.
The articles that accompanied the cover (under the headline “too much butter, not enough guns”) were equally satisfying. Newsweek’s editors, who, an editor’s note said, had given the “Johnson Report” a “searching examination,” accepted it without reservation, saying “When the Senate Preparedness Subcommittee calls the armament lag ‘dangerous,’ it is not just indulging a taste for rhetoric.” Noting that the subcommittee had found American air strength to be “below what the American public expects,” Newsweeksaid that “If the Korean War continues and the Chinese decide to challenge American air supremacy, the result could be a military disaster for America.”
And there was a separate article on the subcommittee, and on him. The subcommittee, the editors said, “has been likened to the Truman Committee.” Actually, the editors said, it was better than the Truman Committee.
The [Truman Committee] sought to correct mismanagement and eliminate corruption by holding open hearings, which exposed them amid explosive newspaper headlines. The resulting clamor usually brought about reforms, and drove the grafters to jail.
In contrast, the Preparedness Subcommittee holds few public hearings. And it doesn’t wait for a situation to become a public scandal before investigating.
As for its chairman, “Johnson has made a great and growing reputation,” Newsweek said. “His manner is quiet and gentle, and everything he does, he does with great deliberation and care. Yet, when he believes the facts warrant it, he can be two-fisted and tough.”
NO SOONER HAD HIS WORK on the report been completed than George Reedy, who had never before participated in the subcommittee’s in-the-field investigations, abruptly found himself dispatched on one—to one of the most isolated military installations in the United States: Goodfellow Air Force Base southeast of San Angelo in the remote prairies of West Texas.
Arriving there, Reedy quickly saw that the trip was a waste of time. “There had been some complaints about the quality of the training,” he was to recall, but “even I could see that most of the complaints were absolutely nothing except the standard sort of thing that bobs up at any military post.” He couldn’t understand why he had been sent until he saw the Newsweek cover. “He got me out of town deliberately on that one because he sensed that I would be opposed to what he did,” Reedy was to recall. “He literally got me out of town…. When I came back I discovered they had wrapped up this Newsweek deal.”
Johnson was correct in thinking that he would have been opposed, Reedy says. “You really can’t do anything much worse than that. If you’re going to give a newspaperman or a magazine … an exclusive, for the love of God don’t make it a formal committee report. It’s too obvious, among other things.” It would infuriate other journalists, he knew. While they had not subjected any of the previous thirty-four subcommittee reports to intensive scrutiny, they would scrutinize this one, he felt. And, he felt, this “not very substantive” report would not hold up under scrutiny.
Reedy’s premonitions were well founded. Even a master of an art can sometimes overreach himself, and by thus stretching the leaking technique to its limit—leaking an entire formal report for a cover story while describing the report in exaggerated terms—Lyndon Johnson had overreached. Analyzing a Preparedness report in depth for the first time, the press now found what some subcommittee staff members felt it would have found about many of the subcommittee’s previous reports had it analyzed them in depth: that the promise of the catchphrases was not fulfilled by the content.
“He got this cover of Newsweek… and in return for that he had the enmity of every economics writer in Washington,” Reedy was to explain. “And they all set out to prove the report was a phony, and they did.
Oh, Lord, I’ll never forget when that storm broke. They [Johnson’s subcommittee] were not able to come up with one single demonstration of a gun or a weapon system or anything needed by the armed forces that had been delayed in production because a higher priority had been given to any civilian need or desire. Oh, the thing was ridiculous! I can recall at one point arranging one of these off-the-record conferences where facts could be used but nobody’s name could be cited, with Don Cook and some of his hotshots. And, Lord, though, the press tore him to pieces…. It became apparent to everyone very quickly in Washington that the report did not have any substance to it and that he [Johnson] had used it as bait to get this cover on Newsweek magazine.
As outcry over the report mounted, so did embarrassment. After an official of the Office of Defense Mobilization demanded to know “one instance where materials or equipment… needed for the Korean fighting was not available,” reporters asked the subcommittee to name such an instance, and the subcommittee proved unable to do so. Releasing Acting Secretary Foster’s letter to Johnson, the Department of Defense charged that Johnson “sat on it”—delayed releasing the letter—until after the Newsweekarticle had appeared. Confronted by reporters holding copies of the letter, a flustered Jenkins disappeared into Johnson’s private office to telephone the Senator in Texas. Emerging, he said that the charge was “unfair,” and that Johnson would respond to it the next day. The response was as aggressive and headline-catching as always—characterizing Foster’s statements as “doubletalk,” Johnson made a new charge, in a new colorful phrase, saying, “It certainly does the public confidence no good to find that the Department of Defense, behind a cloak of security, keeps for all practical purposes a double set of books”—but the Defense Department refused to retreat, saying, as the Herald Tribune put it, that “the Texas legislator just didn’t know what he was talking about,” and in effect defying Johnson to provide one example of double bookkeeping—an example Johnson did not provide. For a year and a half Johnson had been claiming, as proof of his subcommittee’s fairness, that it always afforded departmental officials the opportunity in executive session to rebut any negative findings in a draft report so that the report could, if necessary, be modified in its final version. It was now clear that in preparing this report, at least, Preparedness had never spoken to a single departmental official—either to give him a chance to put the department’s side of the story on the record, or for any other reason.
More damaging still, the press now began to look beyond the specific report and to examine for the first time the subcommittee’s work as a whole—and the examination yielded decidedly mixed results. As the Herald Tribune reported: “People in Washington differ on the merits of Sen. Johnson and his committee. Undoubtedly some of his reports are extremely valuable, and have struck the Administration at vulnerable points. Others, however, while making good headlines, have apparently not stood up to later examination.”
In addition, the subcommittee’s work as a whole amounted in effect to a demand for greatly expanded mobilization, a placing of the nation on an all-out war footing almost as if it were engaged in a global conflict. There began to be, for the first time, an examination of this premise also, and even such a staunch Johnson redoubt as the Washington Post editorial page said that “if rearmament is directed at the long pull,” the balance between civilian and military goods “makes sense. It is of course important to correct bottlenecks. But before the country is pressured into what would be tantamount to full mobilization, it needs to assess both the external danger and the probability that despite the bottlenecks it will soon have military equipment running out of its ears.”
The Post now assigned one of its most respected reporters, Alfred Friendly, to look thoroughly into the current defense effort, and Friendly’s study, a seven-part series that was perhaps the most searching contemporaneous journalistic examination of the mobilization situation, would find that “with respect to the charge, could we have had more guns if we had less butter?, despite loud and general cries in the affirmative no compelling proof has yet been adduced, Sen. Johnson to the contrary notwithstanding…. It is a fact, and has not been denied, that no military production schedule fell short of accomplishment because an insufficient allocation, out of the total available supply, was made to the military use.”
The Truman Administration had decided against full immediate mobilization, Friendly wrote, not because of any lack of toughness or of concern about the Russian threat but partly because such a mobilization “cannot be maintained over a long period in the absence of war itself.” Furthermore, Friendly said, immediate massive mobilization would have meant producing weapons that would shortly be outmoded instead of creating new production facilities to produce “a new generation of weapons,” so that, as he summarized, “if war did not come until three or four years later, the nation would be less, rather than better, able to win it.” While Johnson and other critics had conveyed the impression that the Administration had decided not to go all-out in military production, the fact, Friendly said, was that the Administration had decided not “to go all-out in the production of models it believed were rapidly being rendered obsolescent.”
As to Johnson’s specific contention that the United States was losing air supremacy in Korea—that contention, Friendly found, was false. “Although the critics seem to be conveying the impression that it was otherwise, the fact is that we, not the Communists, have the superiority in Korea…. It is our planes, and not the Reds’, which bomb the supply lines. The MiGs do not come over our lines and bomb our troops.” And Friendly’s overall conclusion was harsh. “From the cries of the calamity-howlers it might be concluded that the national defense program has fallen flat on its face and that, as a consequence, the Kremlin is giving us a military trouncing,” Friendly wrote. Of course, the Russian forces greatly exceed our own in terms of men and planes alone. “But it is not true that we are suffering military defeats. Nor is there evidence to suggest that we have been going so slowly and taking it so easy that we are losing our chance to achieve our supreme goal, the prevention of war.”
ONCE THE PRESS had taken its first hard look behind the catchphrases, it would never again view Lyndon Johnson’s Defense Preparedness Subcommittee in quite the same way. Coverage of the subcommittee reports that followed the “Guns and Butter” embarrassment was notably less enthusiastic than had previously been the case. So dramatically was the perception of the subcommittee altered that by 1953, Time’s James McConaughy would report confidentially to his editors that while he himself considered the criticism unjust, the subcommittee was in fact “often criticized as too publicity seeking.” Another Time reporter, Clay Blair, summed up its work as “much ado about nothing.”
Not that there was, after “Guns and Butter,” all that much ado. From the moment the subcommittee received its first widespread criticism, Lyndon Johnson showed little enthusiasm for its work. Its production declined: in 1951, it had issued twenty-six reports; in 1952, it would issue nine, one of which was merely a summary of the year’s activity. The clearest sign of Johnson’s declining interest was the fact that in May, 1952, he allowed Don Cook to leave for the SEC chairmanship.
If the changed perception had a crippling effect on the subcommittee, however, it had no such effect on Lyndon Johnson’s career.
He had, after all, already gotten out of the subcommittee a great deal of publicity—a favorable national image, even a cover story in a national magazine. He had gotten it because of the rare political gifts he possessed. To obtain the chairmanship, he had not merely grasped the potential in the post and reached for it faster than any other senator, he had maneuvered for it more sure-handedly, had won it against very long odds (what odds longer than a desire by his committee’s chairman, Tydings, to head the subcommittee himself?). Although the success of his maneuvers had been made possible by the backing of a single powerful older man, that fact did not diminish the impressiveness of the speed and the sureness of touch. Once he had the chairmanship, he used it with the matchless talent for the practical aspects of politics he had displayed during his entire life, assembling, seemingly overnight, a staff of a caliber unique on Capitol Hill, and then wielding that staff with brilliant ingenuity, demonstrating an instinct for publicity, and a skill in obtaining it, possessed by very few even in a city filled with men avid for publicity. If—because a police action was not, after all, a war—his image was not as strongly imprinted on the national consciousness as Senator Harry Truman’s had been, it was imprinted there nonetheless. And Truman had been fifty-seven years old when he created his Preparedness Committee. Johnson was forty-two. Twenty years earlier, when, fresh out of college, he had displayed the skills and sureness of a master politician, he had been called “the wonder kid” of Texas politics. No one now called him the wonder kid of the Senate. But that was what he was. In less than a year and half—if one dates the golden era of his Preparedness chairmanship from July, 1950, when he was named to it, to November, 1951, the month of the Newsweek cover—he, a senator hitherto all but unknown to the general public, had been on the front pages of newspapers not just in Texas but in every state in the country—over and over again. His life—or, to be more precise, the life he portrayed—had been described at length in Collier’s, in the Saturday Evening Post, in Time, in Business Week, and in Labor. The man who could not stand—“just could not stand”—to be merely “one of a crowd” had been one of a crowd so long. Now he would never be one of a crowd again. He was “Johnson of the Watchdog Committee,” the “Watchdog in Chief.” In a single great leap—with a single issue, preparedness; with a single instrument, a brand-new subcommittee—he had thrust himself up out of the mass of senators.
THE SIGNIFICANCE of the damage to the subcommittee’s image was also diminished by another factor, moreover. Even in the midst of that great leap, even as Lyndon Johnson had still been directing the subcommittee, issuing the reports, holding the press conferences, his eyes had been focusing on something else.
Lyndon Johnson’s political genius was creative not merely in the lower, technical aspects of politics but on much higher levels. And if there was a single aspect of his creativity that had been, throughout his career, most impressive, it was a capacity to look at an institution that possessed only limited political power—an institution that no one else thought of as having the potential for any more than limited political power—and to see in that institution the potential for substantial political power; to transform that institution so that it possessed such power; and, in the process of transforming it, to reap from the transformation substantial personal power for himself. Lyndon Johnson had done that with the White Stars. He had done it with the Little Congress. He had done it with the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. And now the eyes of Lyndon Johnson were focused on another institution: the Senate of the United States.