Part III
15
LEADERSHIP POSITIONS in the Senate were hardly among the prizes of American politics—with good reason.
The Constitution had provided that there be a Speaker for the House of Representatives, and during the century and a half since its ratification, a succession of forceful Speakers had buttressed that office with rules and precedents that made it strong. Over the Senate, however, the Founding Fathers wanted no one to have authority, and the Constitution they wrote therefore provided only that it be presided over by the Vice President (who “shall have no Vote, unless they be equally divided”) or, in his absence, by a president pro tempore. And the Senate’s rules limited the powers of the Vice President or any other presiding officer so strictly that they were little more than figureheads. “The Senate shall chuse their other officers,” the Constitution said, but the only officers to be chused were administrative subordinates: a Secretary of the Senate, a Sergeant-at-Arms, a Chaplain. The Senate had certainly chosen no “leaders”; why would the ambassadors of sovereign states want to be led? A senator referred to as a “Leader”—Majority Leader or Minority Leader—was therefore leader not of the Senate but only of his party’s senators, elected not by the Senate but by them in a party conference, or “caucus,” to chair the caucuses and “lead” their parties on the Senate floor.
During the first 124 years of the Senate’s existence, there were no “leaders” even in this limited sense. Until 1913, when newspapers mentioned Senate “leaders,” they were referring, as one study states, to “leadership exercised through an individual’s oratorical, intellectual, or political skills, not from any party designation, formal or informal.” The chairmen of Standing Committees “were generally the ones to move that the Senate consider legislation reported by their committees”; the scheduling of legislation was coordinated—when and if it was coordinated—by party “policy committees.” As Woodrow Wilson wrote in his 1885 classic, Congressional Government, “no one is the Senator. No one may speak for his Party as well as himself; no one exercises … acknowledged leadership.” When, during the Gilded Age, the GOP instituted tight control of its senators, the control was group control; the Republican Senate bloc was run not by one senator but by the “Senate Four”—and even then only through their domination of the larger party Steering Committee. After the turn of the century, as the ascension of America to world power and of Wilson to America’s presidency necessitated increased coordination of activities within the Senate, party caucuses began to regularly designate caucus chairmen who were sometimes called “leaders,” but there was still no official designation of a floor leader. “No single senator exercised central management of the legislative process,” Walter Oleszek states. “Baronial committee chairmanships” still “provided the chamber’s … internal leadership.” In the opinion of most students of the Senate (so murky is the body’s administrative history that there is little general agreement on the subject), it was not until 1913 that one of the caucus chairmen, Democrat John Worth Kern of Indiana, was generally referred to as a “Majority Leader,” although, as Floyd M. Riddick, the longtime Senate Parliamentarian, puts it, Kern still lacked “any official party designation other than caucus chairman.” (In 1913, also, the Democratic caucus elected an Assistant Leader, called a “whip,” after the “whipper-in” of a British fox hunt who is assigned to keep the hounds from straying, whipping them back into line if necessary.”)*
Kern and the Majority Leaders who came after him—five Democrats (one of whom, Oscar Underwood of Alabama, became, in 1920, the first officially designated “Democratic Leader,” as well as the first Leader to sit at the front-row center-aisle desk) and four Republicans—had no formal powers. The Senate had given them none. In the forty rules that were designed to govern all its activities there is not a single mention of a Majority or a Minority Leader—of a leader of any type. Riddick’s 1,076-page volume, Senate Procedure, published in 1974 to expand and amplify the rules, contains exactly one reference to “leaders”—an explanation that custom had established the practice of “priority of recognition”: if more than one senator was requesting the floor, recognition should be granted first to the Majority Leader, and then to the Minority Leader.
The Democrats had decided to designate a Leader in 1913 primarily because Wilson, and progressive senators, felt that the President’s program would have a better chance of passage if the party’s senators were united under a single senator. Kern acted primarily as Wilson’s agent, following the President’s dictates in scheduling Senate business. Nor was Kern Wilson’s only agent in the Senate; indeed, at times the President seemed to be dealing more with the powerful committee chairmen than with the supposed Leader; and as the President’s power waned, so did Kern’s, since his authority as Leader was merely a function of presidential backing (Kern was in fact defeated for reelection in 1916 when Wilson failed to carry Indiana). And the same was true of the Majority Leaders who followed Kern, even though the best known of them, Joseph T. Robinson of Arkansas, would be a memorable figure on the Senate floor, pounding his desk and flailing his arms; “he roars his sneers, and shouts … and bellows until” his opponents “are drowned out by the volume of sound and the violence of enunciation,” Alsop and Catledge wrote.
Elected Democratic Leader in 1925, Robinson was Minority Leader until 1933, when the Roosevelt landslide made him Majority Leader, and he ran his party with a firm hand, dividing up Senate patronage, appointing as Senate employees men loyal to him, disciplining rebellious senators. But he ran it on behalf of the President—no matter who the President happened to be. During the first ten years of his leadership, it was Coolidge and Hoover, and Robinson supported, and had Senate Democrats support, many Republican policies.*
Robinson’s leadership of the Senate coincided, moreover, with one of the most distressing periods of Senate impotence. During the Depression years of 1930, 1931 and 1932, Democrats held a de facto majority in the Senate, but when Wagner, La Follette, and Norris proposed measures, many of them backed by a majority of their party, to alleviate America’s pain, Robinson stood not with them but with President Hoover. In 1931, for example, his party, together with progressive Republicans and independents, favored a massive drought relief program for America’s desperate farmers—and, at first, so did Robinson, himself the son of an impoverished farm family. But when Hoover insisted on a more modest program—a program so meagre as to be all but useless—Robinson abruptly switched to the President’s side, calling the liberal proposal “a socialistic dole,” in an abject surrender that a fellow southern Democrat, Alben Barkley, called “the most humiliating spectacle that could be brought about in an intelligent legislative body.” In 1932, with America still begging for congressional leadership, Robinson said, “I know there is great unhappiness and dissatisfaction, but I do not think any legislation can secure correction.” “He has given more aid to Herbert Hoover than any other Democrat,” Al Smith declared. It was only after the President was Franklin Roosevelt that corrective legislation began to pass.
During the Hundred Days, journalists glorified Robinson for the speed with which he rushed bills through; the humorist Will Rogers said that “Congress doesn’t pass legislation any more; they just wave at the bills as they go by.” The bills going by, however, were not Robinson’s but Roosevelt’s, and increasingly they were bills for which Robinson, at heart a typical southern conservative, had a deep distaste.
When he tried to explain his doubts to Roosevelt, however, the President—“not interested,” as the author Donald C. Bacon writes, “in Robinson’s views on matters of policy”—barely listened. FDR expected him simply to follow orders, and Robinson followed orders, continuing to push the President’s program—in part because “his loyalty to presidents … had always been strong,” in part, perhaps, because this President kept dangling before him the Supreme Court appointment that was his heart’s desire. “Joe’s job is to keep the Senate pleasingly obedient” to the “commands” of “his beneficent master,” Alsop and Catledge wrote in 1936. And although the next year Robinson began to show signs of a new independence, that was the year he had his fatal heart attack as he was fighting for the Supreme Court-packing bill Roosevelt hadn’t even bothered to tell him about in advance. Even this Senate Leader of whom it has been written that “He did more than any predecessor to define the potential of party leadership” defined it primarily in terms of the program of the Executive Branch; “forceful” and “effective” though he may have been, he was forceful and effective only when he was doing the President’s bidding and was backed by a President’s power. In creating and developing public policy, his role was, in fact, less than minor, since the legislation he advanced was, on balance, legislation of which he deeply disapproved. And the extent to which his power was based on presidential backing was demonstrated when he tried to exert authority on internal Senate matters about which the Administration had no interest—then his vaunted authority seemed strangely diminished; Huey Long “drove Joe nearly mad,” Alsop and Catledge wrote. “He was outskirmished by Huey again and again in guerrilla warfare on the floor.” It was partly Robinson’s fear of having another Huey Long on his hands that led him to capitulate to the freshman Richard Russell’s demand about a committee assignment. With the single exception of Robinson, at the time Lyndon Johnson came to the Senate in 1949, the great names of the Senate—not only the great names before the formal post of Leader was created (Clay, Calhoun, Webster, Benton, Sumner) but the great names after the post was created (La Follette, Norris, Borah, Byrnes, Vandenberg, Taft)—had not been Leaders, which may have been why they were great names. And even Robinson’s performance in many ways confirmed that a Leader possessed power largely to the extent that he was an agent of the White House; if the vividness of his performance covered up that bleak reality, reality it was nonetheless.
WITH THE PASSAGE OF YEARS, in addition to “priority of recognition,” a few other prerogatives had accreted, through custom rather than formal rules, around the majority leadership: by 1949, it had, for example, become the custom for the Leader to be the only senator who made the motions that called bills off the Calendar (the list of bills eligible for consideration by the Senate) to the Senate floor, where they could be debated and voted on—a custom which in theory allowed him to determine the order of business and thus the priority in which bills were considered. If there was any moment at which the Majority Leader appeared to be truly directing the Senate’s business, it was during this “Call of the Calendar,” when, standing at the Leader’s front-row center desk, he made the motions that called bills to the floor.
The realities of Senate power, however, robbed these prerogatives of most of their significance. The Majority Leader’s control over the Calendar, for example, was exercised only as an agent of his party’s Policy Committee; that committee determined the schedule by which bills were considered on the floor, and told the Leader which bills to call off. And since that committee included some of the party’s most powerful senators, a Leader was exercising that control only as one, and not the controlling, member of that committee. And while a Majority Leader might be able to call a bill off the Calendar, he could not put it on the Calendar: in the case of virtually all significant bills, that power, like so many other real powers in the Senate, belonged to its fifteen Standing Committees; a bill could go on the Calendar only after a committee voted to report it out. And over those committees a Leader had no authority at all. He had no control over their membership, determined as it was by seniority and by his party’s Committee on Committees (called by the Democrats their “Steering Committee”), of which he was a member (on the Democratic side, the chairman) but on which the southerners and their allies had a majority, so that it was they or their Leader (“You had to see Russell on committee assignments”) who determined those assignments. (The party Leader’s inability to reward or punish senators by making or withholding assignments also meant that he had no authority in an area vital to senators.) The Leader could not set the agenda of a Standing Commitee, or intervene in any way with the committee’s workings; that was the province of its chairman, who was chosen by seniority, and only by seniority, not by a Leader. A Leader couldn’t make a chairman put a piece of proposed legislation on the committee’s agenda for hearings, and couldn’t make him have the committee vote on the bill so it could be reported out to the Calendar, which meant that the Leader did not in fact control what legislation came to the floor. And, as William S. White was to say, “woe to any Majority Leader who goes to [a chairman] to ‘demand’ anything at all. This is simply not done in the Senate.” On the rare—very rare—occasions on which it was done, the affronted chairman could count in his resistance to the demand on the support of the other fourteen chairmen, wary of the establishment of a precedent that might one day be used against their power in their committees. In 1949, the chairmen were as baronial as ever, secure in their committee strongholds; the Majority Leader was only a first among equals—and, often, not even all that first. The so-called Senate Leader was an official not of the Senate but only of his party, and even within that party he had little power to lead.
This situation was particularly frustrating for a Democratic Senate Leader. The Democratic Party was, in the public mind, the more liberal of the two parties, and the Democratic presidents—Roosevelt and Truman—who had held the presidency since 1933 had sent to the Senate, year after year, liberal legislation. Since the Democrats were the majority in the Senate for all but four of those years, and since there was a large Democratic liberal bloc there (in 1949, no fewer than nineteen or twenty Democratic senators bore a liberal label), and since this bloc was very vocal, with eloquent speakers who continually demanded the passage of that liberal legislation, the public and the press expected the Democratic Leader not only to fight for, but to achieve its passage.
The Senate Democrats were divided by a seemingly unbridgeable chasm, however, and the power in the Senate—virtually all the power—was not on the liberal side of that chasm. The committee chairmen who held that power were almost all southern and/or conservative. A Democratic Leader trying to pass Administration legislation found himself trapped on the wrong side of an angrily divided party. And the situation was similar in the Senate GOP, even if less acute because the Republicans, being in the minority, were not expected to get legislation passed. Both parties were dominated by their conservative elders; it was they, not the Majority and Minority Leaders, who held senatorial power.
A Senate “Leader” had little power to lead even on the Senate floor. Because of the tradition of unlimited debate, even after he had brought a bill to the floor, any one of his ninety-five colleagues could halt consideration of the measure merely by talking. Since, as White wrote, “No one may tell any senator how long he may talk, or about what, or when,” a Majority Leader “cannot even control from one hour to the next the order of business on the floor.” Any attempt to do so—to limit the debate in any way—would raise in the minds of southerners and conservatives the spectre of a threat to the sacred. Any Leader contemplating an attempt to break the filibuster that was the tradition’s ultimate expression would know that he would have White’s “eternal majority” firmly against him. And even when there was no filibuster, White noted, “there remains the quicksand of rules that were made for deliberation, and even for obstruction, but never for speed and dispatch. A Senate Leader may wheedle and argue; he may thrash about and twist and turn in his frustration. But he does not successfully give ‘orders’ unless these happen to be welcome to the ostensible ‘followers.’” His “party associates may thumb their senatorial noses at him just about as they please.” The title of “Leader” brought with it no power that would have made the title meaningful; any attempt to truly lead the Senate was almost foreordained to end in failure.
WHICH LED to another unpleasant aspect of the leadership. Failing to understand the realities of Senate power, press and public thought a “Leader” was a leader, and therefore blamed the Leaders—particularly the “Majority Leader”—for the Senate’s failures. As White wrote: “A large part of the public has come to think that it is only the leaders … who somehow seem to stand, stubbornly and without reason, against that ‘action’ which the White House so often demands.” And heaped atop blame was scorn. Many Washington journalists were liberals, eager for enactment of that liberal legislation which seemed so clearly desired not only by the President but by the bulk of the American people and impatient with the Majority Leaders who, despite the fact that they were leading a majority, somehow couldn’t get the legislation passed. Not understanding the institutional realities, the journalists laid the Leaders’ failure to personal inadequacies: incompetence, perhaps, or timidity. This feeling was fed by liberal senators, some of whom seemed to comprehend the intricacies of Senate power little more than the reporters, and who continually assailed the Leaders in speeches and interviews. The journalists mocked the Senate Leaders—in print, so that the job carried with it the potential not merely for failure but for public humiliation on a national scale.
LYNDON JOHNSON HAD had a ringside seat as potential became reality. His arrival on Capitol Hill as a young congressman in 1937 had virtually coincided with Robinson’s beleaguered, and disastrous, last stand on the Senate floor, and he had seen what happened to the Majority Leaders who succeeded Robinson: Democrats Alben Barkley of Kentucky and Scott Lucas of Illinois, and Republican Wallace H. White of Maine.
Barkley had been forced on the Senate by Roosevelt, whose arm-twisting had given him the leadership by a single vote over the conservative favorite, Pat Harrison of Mississippi, and the Senate didn’t let him forget it. The southerners routinely embarrassed Barkley on the Senate floor, jeeringly calling him “Dear Alben” in mocking reference to the salutation in Roosevelt’s letters which gave him his marching orders. Hardly had he been elected Leader—leader of the largest majority in the Senate’s history—when he lost on a routine motion to adjourn; attempting the following year to round up Democratic votes to support an Administration tax bill, he managed to marshal exactly four; “a public humiliation for Senator Barkley,” one newspaper called it. Barkley felt (as Kern and Robinson had felt) that his primary responsibility was to pass the Administration’s program; that was why he often simply recited speeches written by the White House. But his first four years as Leader were four years, 1937 to 1941, during which not a single major Administration bill was passed. Some journalists called Harrison “the real leader of the Senate majority,” others said it was Jimmy Byrnes of South Carolina; on one point, however, all observers were agreed: the leader was not the man who held the title of Leader.
Each of Barkley’s defeats—and there were many defeats—was chronicled with glee by the Washington correspondents, who competed in mocking him, nicknaming him “Bumbling Barkley” and claiming that he consulted the White House even before he salted his soup. In March, 1939, Life magazine asked reporters to name the ten most able senators; the Majority Leader did not make the list. “As the unhappy Barkley has too often learned,” Joseph Alsop wrote in 1940, “the slightest misstep will allow a committee to make the wrong report, or tangled parliamentary procedure to bring the wrong business before the Senate, or a debate to go the wrong way, or an important roll call vote to be lost.”
When the Leader did attempt to assert his authority, the result was fiasco. Unable to enforce attendance by normal methods—with absenteeism so widespread that obtaining a quorum had become an almost daily problem—Barkley first appealed to his colleagues, telling them indignantly in 1942 that “the least they could do” was “remain at their desks and try to give the impression that they were doing their duty whether they were or not.” Finally Barkley ordered the sergeant-at-arms to bring absent senators to the Chamber. Asked “Do you mean Senator McKellar, too?” he replied, “I mean everyone!” Roused from his hotel room, McKellar was escorted to Capitol Hill. The enraged Tennessean, whose seat in the Chamber was next to Barkley’s, refused to speak to him for a year, and at the next Democratic caucus, to teach the Leader a lesson, nominated for caucus secretary his own candidate, who defeated Barkley’s.
In 1944, driven to desperation by yet another demonstration of Roosevelt’s contempt for the Senate, Barkley resigned as Majority Leader. The Democratic caucus quickly re-elected him, thinking, as one senator put it, that “Now he speaks for us to the President,” but Barkley shortly resumed his role as a presidential flag-carrier, even after the flag became Truman’s.
Barkley had learned his lesson, however. While he still presented Administration proposals, he no longer tried particularly hard to force his colleagues to vote for them—because he knew now that he had no power to do so. “I have nothing to promise them,” he explained plaintively. “I have nothing to threaten them with.” This attitude, together with his amiable personality, restored his popularity with his colleagues, but so completely did he relinquish the field to the conservative coalition that liberal senators and commentators routinely referred to the Senate’s “leadership vacuum.”
As the Democratic Leader of the Senate became the butt of jokes, so did Wallace White, leader of the Republican minority from 1943 to 1946 and Majority Leader in 1947 and 1948. Although White had the title, Vandenberg, and conservatives Bridges, Eugene Millikin of Colorado and Robert Taft, had the power. White’s candor about his lack of authority (he told reporters who asked about GOP plans, “Taft is the man you want to see”) didn’t save him from ridicule. Watching from the Press Gallery as he frequently looked two rows back at Taft for guidance, journalists suggested, in print, that a rearview mirror be placed on his desk, and named him “Rearview White.”
Taft’s influence led Time to call him “boss of probably the most efficiently organized GOP Senate the nation has ever seen” (a rather drastic oversimplification, since it ignored the GOP Senate of William Allison and Nelson Aldrich), but during the Forties Taft’s only formal party post was chairman of its Steering Committee. He didn’t want the job of Leader, with its scheduling and other responsibilities; he had, as one observer put it, “no desire to monitor the often dreary floor debate.” And he had no sufferance for fools. He placed many of his party colleagues in that category, but, as Leader, he would have had to plead for their votes. Vandenberg, Bridges and Millikin didn’t want the job either (although Bridges would later take it—on condition that it be only for one year; Taft finally accepted the post in January, 1953, but he died just four months later), just as the most influential figures on the Democratic side of the aisle—Walter George, Carl Hayden, and of course Richard Russell—didn’t want it. When Lyndon Johnson arrived in the Senate in 1949, it had been for some years a well-known fact that any of these men—particularly Russell and Taft—could have had the leadership job for the asking, but that they had all refused to accept it. And if Johnson needed any proof of the wisdom of that decision, all he had to do was to watch, during his first two years in the Senate, the fate of the man who had accepted it.
WHEN HE HAD INTRODUCED JOHNSON as “Landslide Lyndon” at the Democratic caucus in January, 1949, Scott Lucas was the newly elected Majority Leader, a well-tailored, self-confident man whose classic Roman profile and taste for the spotlight had earned him the sobriquet “the John Barrymore of the Senate.” Eager for the job, which he thought would bring him the national attention he openly craved, he seemed well qualified for it, being both popular with his colleagues and tough. “Formidable in debate,” he had “a quality of playing for keeps,” William White said. “Nobody goes out of the way to take him on.” His political philosophy qualified him for the job, too: Russell approved him for it not only because his ancestors came from the South but because, as Rowland Evans and Robert Novak put it, while his “postures were liberal, his visceral instincts often tended to be conservative—particularly on matters concerning civil rights.” And he was smilingly certain that he could handle it. He presided at his first caucus with an air of satisfaction, which seemed to increase perceptibly as he strode from it to the Majority Leader’s long black limousine that stood waiting for him in the portico beneath the steps in front of the Capitol’s north wing.
But his confidence didn’t last long. Every Monday morning, the limousine brought him to the White House, where he, along with Assistant Leader Francis Myers of Pennsylvania and House Democratic leaders, received from Truman a list of legislation that the President wanted passed. Then the car returned him to Capitol Hill, where the southerners, who chaired the committees that would handle the legislation, let him know—quietly, courteously but firmly—that it would not be passed.
As the Democratic President pressed insistently for civil rights, compulsory health insurance, and other Fair Deal legislation (and for a bill repealing Taft’s Taft-Hartley Act), the Democratic Leader tried to at least bring this legislation to the floor—and found himself caught between the southern senators, who had begun viewing him with anger, and liberal senators, who assailed him on the floor for not pushing the bills with sufficient enthusiasm. And as the liberal legislation remained stalled, the press kept demanding that he pass it by exercising the “powers” of the leadership—powers that did not exist. Within three months, Lucas had become an object of scorn in liberal journals like The New Republic, which referred to him as the “ever more futile Majority Leader.” Reporting in April that “there are rumors that [Lucas] has already had enough” and would resign, the magazine added “Such a move could only be for the best.” By July, the more sympathetic White was writing about Lucas’ “worn and haggard” look. By the end of his first year as Leader, Lucas had national attention, all right, but not the kind of which he had dreamed. While “it now seems certain history is going to remember his name, what history is going to say about him is” much more debatable, Collier’ssaid. Trollope’s Plantagenet Palliser did not dread the morning newspapers more than this once-confident man who had been so proud of what he had thought was a thick skin. “The hostile estimates of his leadership were so incredible to him that he knew no way even to begin to cope with them,” White wrote. He had developed, in the words of another reporter, a “perennial look of a man whose finger is caught in a mousetrap,” a new habit of writing little poems to remind himself of the inadvisability of losing his temper (“Senators who preside / Shouldn’t rhyme, shouldn’t chide”)—and a bleeding stomach ulcer that required hospitalization.
The second year was worse. Goaded by President and press into gingerly trying to bring up the FEPC, Lucas confronted a southern bloc so completely in control of the Senate that it defeated the bill without even bothering to filibuster. His efforts to liberalize an anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic displaced-persons bill antagonized conservatives of both parties. Once, when he stepped off the floor for a few minutes, the arch-conservative William Langer of North Dakota made a motion to adjourn, and the Senate did so—without the Majority Leader even being aware of that fact. Rushing back to the floor in a rage, Lucas called Langer a “snake.” Chaos erupted, with liberals and conservatives shouting epithets at each other, and for the rest of the year, a year in which Lucas was often in pain from his ulcer, the floor was the scene of repeated angry outbursts. The New Republic appealed to Taft for help because “the Democratic Majority Leader is completely out of control of the situation.”
And two years was as much time as Lucas was to have, for his senatorial term expired in 1950. All that year, the formidable former congressman Everett Dirksen had been campaigning against him back in Illinois, dramatizing his absence from the state by “debating” an empty chair on which sat a big placard: “Reserved for Scott Lucas.” As early as January, reporters were writing that Lucas was in “a serious fight for his political future.” All that year, he was warned that he had better get back home and campaign. He was, however, trapped by his leadership responsibilities. He felt—correctly—that he would be criticized if he left Washington before the Senate had completed the minimum business necessary to keep the government in operation, but he could not persuade the Senate to complete that business. The Senate did not adjourn until September, two months before the election, which Lucas lost. Years later, just another lobbyist in Washington, he would confide that his two years as Majority Leader of the United States Senate had been the most unhappy years of his life.
There was even a small footnote to this demonstration of the risks involved in becoming a member of the Senate’s Democratic leadership. Lucas was not the only member of the leadership who had run for re-election in November, 1950. Assistant Leader Francis Myers had also been running. And he had also lost.
LYNDON JOHNSON, who so dreaded failure and humiliation, had thus seen with his own eyes, in close-up, the probability of failure and humiliation for anyone who took a Senate leadership position. He was under no illusions about those positions; knowing—this son of Sam Johnson—the cost of illusions, as always he wanted facts, and he asked the Legislative Reference Service of the Library of Congress to list the powers of party floor leaders; when he received the list it contained exactly one item: “priority in recognition” by the chair. He then directed George Reedy, as Reedy recalls, to conduct his own search “of the records, the precedents and the memories of old-timers,” but priority of recognition was “the only thing I could find.” Other than that, Reedy concluded, party leaders possessed no authority whatsoever; senatorial power was held by the same forces—the Southern Caucus, the conservative coalition, most of all by the committee chairmen—that had held power for so long. And there seemed no realistic possibility that the situation would change. The leadership was weak because the committee chairmen wanted it weak—and the chairmen had the power to keep it weak.
But what alternatives did Lyndon Johnson have? The road to a chairmanship for himself was seniority, and it was a long road—too long.*Leadership positions were the only positions in the Senate for which length of tenure was not an inflexible requirement. During the last months of 1950, Johnson’s life was filled with the activity of his Preparedness Subcommittee, but, increasingly, the activity wasn’t satisfying him. More and more often now, in the late afternoons, the staff in the front room of 231 would again hear the click as the corridor door to the private office opened and shut, and the creak as the big chair took the weight of the big body, and then, for a long time, the silence. And now, again, when the buzzer finally sounded on Walter Jenkins’ desk, often he would open the door to find no lights on, and his Chief slouched deep in his chair in the gathering gloom, his face hidden behind his hand. Looking back on this period in his life, Lyndon Johnson would tell Doris Kearns Goodwin that he had felt an “increasing restlessness.” He simply couldn’t stand, Jim Rowe was to recall him saying, to “just wait around again” as he had done in the House—as he had done in the House for so many years. Becoming a part of the Democratic floor leadership would be a risk, a gamble—to this man who feared humiliation as well as defeat, a great risk, a great gamble—but he had taken great risks before; he had gotten to the Senate on the greatest gamble of all, running against the unbeatable Coke Stevenson. And the alternative was to wait, and keep “taking orders.” He couldn’t bear to do that. Sometime in November or December, 1950, as Goodwin was to put it, “He told Russell that a leadership position was one of the most urgently desired goals of his life.”
RUSSELL, OF COURSE, could have had the now-vacant Democratic leadership—the majority leadership, since the Democrats would have a two-vote majority in the incoming Eighty-second Congress—had he wanted it, but he didn’t, for the same reasons that had kept him from taking the job in the past. As his aide William Darden puts it, “With him, the scheduling problem would have been the big [problem]. Senator Russell was a person who just didn’t want to be bothered with details. He didn’t want people saying to him, ‘Please don’t vote this afternoon—my wife is sick, etc’” And there were political considerations. Russell felt, his aides say, that a Majority Leader had an obligation to give at least a modicum of support to a President of his own party, “and there were a lot of things in the Truman program that he didn’t want to have to support.” In addition, the attacks from the liberals were louder than ever. When, that November, a letter from Alabama’s John Sparkman urged him to accept the leadership because “You could bring [it] into a new position of prestige and power,” Russell wrote back: “You and I both know that as a general rule the South is blamed for everything which does not meet with the approval of our critics,” and to have a southerner as Majority Leader “would cause criticism of his acts to fall upon the South as a whole.” To forestall such criticism, Russell felt, the new Leader should not be a southerner but a friend of the South, someone who would keep the Senate on its present, southern course, without rocking the boat.
Ernest W. (Bob) McFarland of Arizona fit that bill. A chubby, ruddy-faced, easygoing man of fifty-six with a habit of running both hands through his mop of gray hair when he was puzzled (a gesture he made rather frequently), he was shy but genial and friendly and not at all a boat-rocker. He was a middle-of-the-roader—except on the issue that mattered most: his record against cloture and civil rights was rock solid. And, “perhaps yearning for a few moments in the political sun,” as Evans and Novak speculated, McFarland accepted the job, although his Senate term expired in two years, and he would have to run for re-election then.
The choice of McFarland dismayed liberals. He is “an amiable, inoffensive, genuinely likeable ex-judge,” said columnist Lowell Mellett. “He is my friend and everybody’s friend.” But he is “no leader”; during his ten years in the Senate, “he had just gone along … content to be led.”
The country is crying out for leadership…. [This is] a time of crisis in our country’s and the world’s history. How well our country meets this crisis will depend greatly on the United States Senate, and that will depend on how well the Senate is led. So it is proposed that it shall not be led at all.
But although liberal senators decided to unite behind Joseph O’Mahoney of Wyoming, there was no chance that they would have the votes when, in January, 1951, the forty-nine Democratic senators convened in caucus. The southerners and their allies would have the votes—and votes to spare. During the two months between Election Day and the caucus, Russell didn’t have to devote much time to the question of the majority leadership.
Nor did he have to devote much time to the question of Assistant Majority Leader, or “whip,” which was after all a job of even less significance. To Johnson’s request for a “leadership position,” he replied that the whip’s job was his if he wanted it.
As a Senate historian was to summarize, “Johnson had no claim to the position, except that he had the backing of Dick Russell.” But that backing was all he needed. “Once he had Russell he had the whole South,” recalls Neil Mac-Neil, who was covering the Senate for Time magazine. “The [Democratic] caucus [was] simply a formality to ratify those privately selected with Dick Russell’s assent,” Evans and Novak were to write. When Johnson telephoned Senator William Fulbright of Arkansas to ask for his support, MacNeil, who had been talking with Fulbright, recalls that the Senator’s “eyebrows went flashing up, he was so startled that Johnson wanted the job. It wasn’t a job that people wanted. And he [Fulbright] was startled that someone would campaign for it. You didn’t campaign for it; you were drafted.” But Fulbright said he would go along with whatever Russell wanted. When Johnson telephoned John Stennis in Mississippi, Stennis told him that, as he was to put it, “Lyndon, you might have known that I wasn’t just going to promise a whole lot out of the clear sky…. Senator Russell and I are very close and … I would naturally consult with him before I would give a final answer to anyone.” “You must think that I am foolish,” Johnson replied. “I wouldn’t have been calling you or anyone else about … this position unless I already had a firm position from Dick Russell that I am the man.”
On January 2, 1951, an article in the Washington Star on the Democratic caucus, which was to be held that morning, said that “The Democrats also must elect a whip, or assistant leader, but there has been little interest in the post.” As Evans and Novak wrote: “The world outside … had little interest in the Senate Democrats’ tribal ritual…. The official Senate leadership was an unwanted burden, stripped of power and devoid of honor.” Walking down a Senate Office Building corridor to Room 201, the big corner conference room in which the caucus would be held, Russell told Johnson that he had decided to nominate him himself, and after McFarland had been elected Leader by a 30–19 vote, Russell did so. Liberal Paul Douglas tried to nominate Sparkman, but Spark-man could hardly withdraw fast enough, and when no other names were proposed, Russell said that in that case, he supposed that Lyndon was the whip, and there was no dissent.
No detailed analysis of Johnson’s selection as Assistant Democratic Leader—at the age of forty-two and after just two years in the Senate—is necessary. He had gotten the job for the same reason he had gotten the chairmanship of the Preparedness Subcommittee: because of the support of one man. But he had gotten it.
*He was J. Hamilton Lewis of Illinois, known as “the biggest dude in America” because of the stylishness of his clothes.
*For example, he helped Coolidge kill government operation of Muscle Shoals, supplied enough Democratic votes to pass the Hoover tariff, and cut off a proposed Senate investigation of the Power Trust.
*Johnson was correct in this assessment. Had he remained on the two committees, Armed Services and Interstate and Foreign Commerce, on which he was serving in 1950, he would not have become chairman of either committee until 1969.